Slouching to Aztlan
March 26, 2001
Sweet extract of Castaneda in a roiling Tequila Sunrise! Why’s The Gay Blade sharing a paddock with this zebra-striped donkey, and what in the name of Macuilxochitl has become of his toreador pants?
While most details of his itinerary have dissolved in an electric fog of high-octane fuel, 80-proof mezcal and low-cost diet pills, this buzzing implement vaguely recalls snapping the first tripwire on the Rube Goldberg machinery of his long lost weekend: Whipped into firm peaks of resolve by the imminent arrival of Mac OS X, the Blade headed south from San Francisco on a wobbly victory lap around the Apple campus; through a party-colored smorgasbord of California computer outlets; and over the Mexican border, where he would toast the new Mac millennium at Emilio’s Cafeteria Musical, the venerable nelly-as-a-three-peso-bill Tijuana nightspot that redefined “eating the worm” for an entire Blank Generation of Southern California youth.
Urgent appeal to MacEdition’s San Ysidro, Calif., bureau: In the name of Cantinflas, please send money, trousers and Niacin (not necessarily in that order) to 1810 Calle Tercera! Female impersonators are standing by.
El pueblo unido
Speaking of an enforced regimen of cultural convergence: In the wake of last weekend’s Mac OS X coming-out party, Apple has finally dropped the other huarache on its OS engineers with a reorganization effort aimed at uniting the erstwhile Mac OS 9 and X teams.
And despite the dyspeptic predictions of Apple campesinos jaded by years working under a corrupt one-party system controlled by NeXT apparatchiks, this week’s bloodless coup offers some encouraging signs that the long disenfranchisement of Cupertino’s indigenous peoples may finally be drawing to a close.
According to the Blade’s guerilla army of Nahuatl-speaking C++ programmers, the OS shuffle has produced two new (if publicly unsung) comandantes: Steven Glass, who has served with distinction as Mac OS 9’s top dog, will now assume responsibility for all OS-related QA and engineering (as well as Mac OS 9 research); meanwhile, Bertrand Cirlet, whose Richard Simmons-caliber cheerleading helped melt mountains of unsightly cellulite off the nascent Mac OS X, will shepherd OS X research in the new world order.
Who knows? If máximo jefe Steve Jobs has really renounced the Apple II-vs.-Mac class warfare of his youth for a truly mestizo society, Apple may have a fighting chance of joining the First World before the decade is out.
Mac maquiladores of the world: You have nothing to lose but your bondage gear! Toss a bone to The NMR Report, and a souvenir mole rat could be yours!