CNN is reporting that Ron Paul has pulled ahead of John McCain in the New Hampshire primaries, and is expected to win the state’s 1.5 delegates in a landslide: “Returns are in from Gibbler’s Gob – New Hampshire’s most populous city with over 100 residents – and it looks as though Paul will finish the day with 85% of the vote.” Analysts say the turnout can largely be attributed to the recent endorsement of tech maven Kevin Rose, who is very influential in a state so small and cold there is little else to do but browse Digg all day.
John McCain won a key endorsement from the Association American Families Struggling With Bipolar Disorder, after “it became clear Senator McCain also suffers from extreme mood swings that diminish his ability to make rational judgments or maintain a consistent personality over a period of several days.” However, Fox News questions whether the association’s members can be counted on to feel well enough to vote in November.
Hillary Clinton, reeling from a perception that her teary moment at a campaign stop on Monday was fabricated, broke down at coffee shop in New Hampshire Tuesday, where she reportedly “beat her breast, tore her hair, and wept sweet tears of sorrow and fear” at the thought of Barack Obama winning the Democratic nomination. Observers say this latest stunt proves that the recent hiring of a lead Google engineer has indeed improved the perception that Clinton is in fact human, although one analyst suggested her handlers use less Shakespeare in the Hillary 3.1 software in the future.
Shares of Apple fell in mid-morning trading after a computer glitch caused the apple.com website to release the specs of Apple’s next-generation hardware ahead of the MacWorld Expo keynote by CEO Steve Jobs on January 15.
“Obviously, we’re very upset about the mistake and are working hard ensure it never happens again,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior VP of worldwide product marketing and political assassinations. “It’s really embarrassing for me, personally, because I usually take this last week to think of some genius marketing-speak to put in the press release, but on such short notice all I can think of is: ‘The new Mac Pro is the fastest Mac we’ve ever made’, which is utter crap since we obviously wouldn’t release something slower than the previous rev, would we? I need a scotch. Who’s up for some breakfast drinks while I try and think of something better?”
Sources inside Apple tell PTTBT that the announcements for the new Mac Pro and Xserve computers were supposed to be wrapped in Steve Jobs’ powerful Reality Distortion Field to make them more palatable to the masses, but the early announcement has left them exposed for scrutiny and ridicule. Apple engineers have been flooding message boards all morning trying to play up the new machines’ capabilities, but face an uphill battle promoting things like 4TB of internal storage and 32GB of RAM amid a torrent of jeers about single-button mice.
“Someone really dropped the ball on this one,” said tech analyst Germaine Lowenstein, “I expect they’ll be trying to polish off some half-baked products in the next six days so they have something to show at MacWorld, like they did with the Apple TV. I would hate to be in the Apple web department today, when Steve hears about this. Ballmer throws chairs, but Steve throws people. With his mind.”
Indeed, eyewitnesses report seeing four ambulances leaving Apple headquarters Tuesday, though it was not clear if the incident was related to the information leak or simply another culling of employees found to be reading Dan Lyons’ book Option$ at work.
An Apple spokesman said Jobs was unavailable for comment, as he was busy personally re-tiling the walls in the Moscone Center for “maximum karmic energy transference” ahead of “the ritual”.
Growing tensions between owners and staff at PTTBT exploded three weeks ago into a flurry of legal challenges and a website-wide work stoppage order, culminating with an eight day office sit-in by staff writers. In a series of events that go beyond even Bill O’Reilly’s worst nightmares, staff writers responded to what they called their management’s “War on Christmas”.
The troubles began December 7th, when Assistant Manager Jeff Blunt lodged a complaint with the PTTBT offices’ decorating committee, regarding the nature and extent of the Christmas decorations in the staff offices.
“It was getting to where some of us couldn’t get work done. Between the strings of flashing lights criss-crossing the office walls, the shiny silver trimming hanging off most ceiling areas, the bells attached to every door and phone, the Christmas music blasting through the office PA system on an endless loop, and the mechanical Santa Claus in the lobby that bellows loudly every time its motion sensor is set off, it was becoming somewhat challenging to clear my thoughts and meet my work deadlines.”
Writers disputed Blunt’s claim that former entertainment editor Dylan Hope was strangled by garlands while trying to send a fax, suggesting they only put the tinsel and popcorn strings around him afterwards because the corpse was “a real downer”.
“Obviously, Blunt is just one of those politically correct, godless heathen types. I mean, really, why else would anyone oppose any Christmas decorations whatsoever?”, says intern Jennifer Biggs. “Nobody was making him pay any attention to the office surroundings. If he really wanted to, he could have just closed his eyes, covered his ears, and gone about his desk work as usual.”
Matters took a turn for the worse when, on December 10th, the decorating committee petitioned to have the entire PTTBT website likewise decorated in their vision of Christmas spirit.
“We had to deny the website request,” says Blunt. “We did not feel that it was in the interest of retaining readership to have site content entirely replaced for a month with only large-font Christmas greetings on red-green flashing backgrounds. And we didn’t think site visitors would appreciate having a couple dozen pop-up windows appear, comprising each of the Twelve Days of Christmas and individual detailed bios of Santa’s reindeer”.
With the committee’s demands for the website not met, PTTBT owners were served with a lawsuit on December 11th by staff writers, seeking damages for religious discrimination, decorative harassment, and obstruction of gaity. The site owners promptly responded that same afternoon with a court-ordered work stoppage at the website offices, meaning no subsequent work could be done and no new stories could be posted until all was resolved late last week.
On December 24th, locked-out PTTBT staff writers dressed up in Santa Claus costumes and gained forced entry into the website offices, proceeding to chain and lock themselves to various office implements in the executive wing, and vowing not to leave the premises until management met their demands. A counter-offensive on the war on Christmas had begun. Much like most other wars, this war also appeared to have elements of spying and deception. To their credit, however, the writers stood their ground, even when tested by the innermost bowels of dirty warfare.
“Okay, so one one of the writers was a turncoat, and secretly spiked our catered Christmas Day food with large amounts of Ex-Lax. Since we were chained up to furniture in protest, there wasn’t much we could do about the laxative’s resulting effects.”
Although the shocking allegations by the writers have not been proven, records show that emergency paramedics were called to the scene early Christmas morning to treat several writers for prolonged acute incontinance. And since the opening up of the offices again this week, staff have confirmed the presence of a permeating odour from the executive offices, not unlike that of broken sewer pipes.
On December 28th, the fourth day of the protest sit-in, in what he claims was a good-faith action hoping to inspire a return to the bargaining table, PTTBT Assistant Manager Jeff Blunt approached the sit-ins with a ‘Peace Offering’ of a small bust of infant Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, the peace offering was mistaken by staff writers for a miniature statue of ‘baby Buddha’, and promptly thrown out the fifth floor window by an as-yet unidentified staff writer, shattering on the street below.
“How were any of us supposed to know it was a baby Jesus? That was the last thing we would have been expecting to see. Naturally, at the time we thought that Jeff was just continuing his display of blatant hatred for Christianity, obviously rubbing salt on our wounds by bringing in to us a Buddhist statue”.
However, the shattered baby Jesus captured the attention of local authorities, who for the next four days surrounded the building in a tense standoff reminiscent just about any scene from any ‘Lethal Weapon’ ever filmed.
On January 7th, with the help of a professional mediator, exhausted writers, management, and authorities struck a deal ending all legal actions and withdrawing charges on all sides.
Staff writers say they were inspired to fight for their Christmas by popular network journalist Bill O’Reilly. “Now there is a man of valour and dignity, who has for years used Christmastime to selflessly push aside news on all those other far less important international wars and report on that scourge of our nation, the ongoing ‘War On Christmas‘”.
“I think PTTBT management know they’ve learned a lesson about messing with our deeply spiritual religious customs. After all, in the end we forced them to submit to our demands and post a Christmas message on the site. God, Bill O’Reilly, PTTBT staff writers, and Christmas have prevailed.”
Music label Sony BMG has unveiled their new “No DRM” initiative, aimed at making access to music as difficult and painful as possible. Rather than wrapping digital files with copy protection as they have in the past, future Sony acts will have their songs released in unencumbered MP3 format from MusicPass.com. However, to ensure their customers maintain “a consistent level of dissatisfaction with the Sony brand”, access to the MP3s will require music lovers to visit brick-and-mortar retail outlets to purchase a “Platinum Music Pass” card, which they will need to snatch out of a barrel of agitated piranhas with their bare hands. Retail giant Best Buy was spared the man-eating fish requirement after Sony lawyers pointed out “you can only subject a person to so many unspeakable horrors before they call it a Geneva Convention violation.”
Consumer electronics giant Toshiba used the CES tradeshow to unveil a new version of its HD-DVD standard on Monday, leapfrogging the competing Blu-Ray format’s capabilities, in a move sure to send shockwaves through the industry.
“Today we are pleased to present HD-DVD-CX+,” said Toshiba America CEO Grant Morginson to a packed crowd of onlookers hoping to see a grown man cry. “Our engineers have managed to cram over two hundred times the capacity into a tiny plastic cube, and still make it backwards-compatible with the dozens of players we’ve already sold. I think it’s pretty clear who’s won the format war. And it don’t rhyme with ‘pony’.”
The HD-DVD-CX+ “discs”, which are small black cubes approximately 1.6cm x 1.6cm x 1.6cm in size, reportedly have such a high capacity that they are able to hold all 25 versions of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Blade Runner at a resolution beyond human comprehension. Also, due to a breakthrough in the wireless HDMI standard, the cubes don’t even need to be placed into the player to be viewed.
Sony reps were predictably angry about the news.
“It’s a load of crap is what it is,” said Peter Moon, Sony VP of Blu-Ray Propaganda at CES, “Did you see what he had in his hand? It was a pair of dice coloured over with permanent marker. He just made it up over the weekend after we snagged Warner Bros from his rag-tag band of loser studios.”
Toshiba reps were confident that creative talent would flock to the HD-DVD-CX+ standard once its capabilities were demonstrated, including “5400p resolution” and “Dolby 99.5 3D++ Surround Sound”.
“Consumers are going to be blown away by the revolution we’re introducing here today,” pleaded Morginson to a group of skeptical reporters, “Or at least they will be, once we start shipping TVs that can handle all the quality we’ve… uh… packed in these cubes. It should only take about ten years. And a miracle. Please buy our players! Please!”
