Some Twitter nonsense
Friday, August 23, 2013
Umberto Eco once wrote a lovely little article on how Mac vs PC is, essentially, the equivalent of the age-old dichotomy of Catholicism vs Protestantism.
At the time, I was working at a posh Anglican school, and I chose to email Eco's quote to all the staff - who reacted with defeaning silence. The only other Rock Chopper on the staff - who happened to have gone to my old school (a Catholic private school whose reputation for academia and discipline I never questioned until employed by said posh Anglican school, where I realised that in comparison, we got away with murder and learnt little) - assured me I was wasting breath, effort and intellect sharing that sort of learnéd observation. In other words, I'd probably offended everyone else on the staff.
As it happened, they would have been more offended by my zealous embrace of Apple Macintosh dogma rather than Catholic dogma; just as the IT department was poised to stock computer labs with a multitude of iMac G3s (remember them?) someone in the senior staff did a deal that saw every student receive a PC laptop and all us followers of false prophets and questionable computers seemed to be given a bit of a wider berth.
I do remember, around that time, realising that 'goodies' used MacBooks while 'baddies' used PCs. Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example; Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City. (I said they were good; I never said they were great. But then again, there's Stephen Fry, who is better than all of them put together.) Bond villains, on the other hand, always use PCs.
The other day, Judah Friedlander suggested a totally different take via Twitter (perhaps both Catholicism and Protestantism are a little less relevant to him). For Judah, the Mac/PC divide applied to Star Wars. But it's not what you think; the Death Star Droid isn't powered by Windows.
Rather, this happened, which made my day:
Best Twitter interaction since the day Fry RT'd and LOL'd my foolish comment...