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This is a transcript of our live coverage of the MacWorld 2008 keynote address by Steve Jobs. For continuing coverage of the show itself, stay with PTTBT. We’re very trustworthy.
Early morning: PTTBT’s Erin Barkley has paid a homeless person $5 to keep her place in line outside the Moscone Center overnight and will be providing live coverage of Steve Jobs’ keynote at MacWorld 2008 starting at 8:30PST (11:30EST) when she has finished her morning routine at Starbucks. Check back here for the web’s most insightful liveblogging analysis of the Stevenote, as it happens.
8:05: We’re in line outside Moscone West. There are several hundred people here, all with iPhones and at least half the crowd is wearing mock turtlenecks. One guy with a Dell was just lynched and strung up to a lamp post.
8:08: Someone just hung a “there’s something in the air” poster from the Dell guy’s foot. Ha! Good times!
8:19: Jason Chen from Gizmodo is here. Apparently Richard Blakeley was supposed to cover MacWorld this year, but he’s in jail after discovering TV-B-Gone remotes also shut off pacemakers at a WWII Vets conference over the weekend.
8:24: A bunch of Googlers at the start of the line just announced they’d trade spots with anyone that could solve some stupid-long equation that takes up like seven sheets of paper. They’ve all got stupid grins on their faces.
8:26: A kid back about 200 people in line just called out “42!” and the Googlers all started swearing and picking up their things.
8:36: Jason Calacanis was just singled out by a bomb-sniffing dog and is being dragged from the line by two large men with kevlar vests. I checked Mahalo for an explanation but it was useless.
8:42: We’re about to be let into the hall. Everyone’s being given a little blue pill along with a pair of 3D glasses. Not sure why.
8:49: A trio of Mac fanboys just swooned next to me. Anywhere else, they’d get their asses kicked for that.
8:55: Camera crews are going in. The rest of us are pounding at the doors like Uruk-hai at Helm’s Deep. Some of us look like Uruk-hai, too ([cough]Scoble![/cough])
8:59: I felt a pleasant tingling and a sudden rush of irrational euphoria. Steve must be nearby!
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As in past years, PTTBT will provide live coverage of Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote, next Tuesday Janauary 15. Unlike other pansy-ass outfits, we will provide live, on-the-floor updates without resorting to a low-bandwidth version of our site, because our server is run by ironclad warrior Apache dwarves with magic gloves and an inhuman knowledge of load balancing.
Learn all about the new Mac Tablets in the kind of detail nobody else can match, because they’re too concerned with the facts! We will also have exclusive backstage and post-show coverage thanks to our mole, Jeremy Watson, who is Jobs’ personal grapefruit squeezer.
Be sure to tune in… it’s sure to be the most exciting and informative coverage anywhere on the web!
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.”
To our faithful readers:
We are pleased to announce that, after intense negotiations, the lawyers and mediators representing the management and staff of PTTBT have successfully resolved all litigation and legal challenges surrounding the 2007 official website winter holiday message.
Effective immediately, all work stoppage orders have been rescinded, and all related lawsuits and charges filed by both parties are considered to have been settled out of court or withdrawn. The sit-in in our executive offices has likewise been peacefully disbanded, and no further criminal charges will be laid against any parties involved.
We would like to thank the following people for their services and assistance to staff members on both sides of our recent dispute, in no particular order of importance:
- The Law Offices of Shirley Grille
- Harvey, Cole, Wong, and Associates, Lawyers
- “Dunn-It-Right” 24-Hour Catering Ltd.
- Sheriff Jim Albright
- A & B Locksmith and Chain Removal Services
- Sam Wick, Professional Mediator
- King County Emergency Paramedics
- Lee & Son Furniture and Upholstery Repairs
With this trying period now behind us, we look forward to quickly returning to what we pride ourselves on, which is regularly delivering to you the highest quality of cutting edge ‘news’. Thank you once again for your patience.
And so, we would like to present to you our holiday message for 2007:
A Belated Message Of Suitable Intentions
The owners and staff of PTTBT would hereby like to extend to you and your loved ones a message, hereforthwith referred to as “the message”, that is suitability festive, reflective, melancholy, consoling, or benign in its intentions, as best suits your particular characteristics, beliefs, philosoph(ies), or absence of characteristic(s), belief(s), or philosoph(ies),
(i) whereby “the message” incorporates only well-meaning intentions for you to seek and foster only lifestyle choices that are deemed safe and suitable to your concrete financial, health, religious, cultural, and social circumstances,
(ii) notwithstanding that “the message” does not intend for you to willfully or negligently obstruct, encroach on, or interfere with the personal space, belief(s), philosoph(ies), characteristic(s), or absence of belief(s), philosoph(ies), characteristic(s) of any other parties or their own “message(s)”,
(iii) notwithstanding that “the message” does not intend to encourage, persuade, or otherwise lead you to engage in any actions that are illegal or perjurous in your given state(s) or jurisdiction of residence,
(iv) notwithstanding that “the message” carries no promises on behalf any any owners, staff, or associates of PTTBT and is not otherwise intended to be a legal contract or evidence of any future or past services or exchanges of products between owners, staff, investors, and associates of PTTBT and its readers,
(v) whereas “the message” is intended to concern the period of December 1st, 2007 to January 1st, 2008 inclusive,
(vi) whereas the owners, staff, and associates of PTTBT cannot be held responsible for any direct or indirect consequences of “the message” or its intentions,
(vii) whereas “the message” carries no guarantees, warranties, or redeemable cash value,
(viii) whereas PTTBT may chose at any time to nullify and revoke the intentions of “the message” as it may see fit,
(ix) whereas “the message” is intended to include, but is not limited to, members of the following faiths, religions, philosophies, and/or belief systems, and all sects and branches thereof: Mormonism, Judaism, Christianity, Pastafarianism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Atheism, Jainism, Sikhism, Scientology, Ayyavazhi, Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto, Chondogyo, Tenrikyo, I-Kuan Tao, Caodaism, Jeung San Do , and all Quranic religions.
Dated this 7th of January, 2008.
First co-signee: Harry Kawaguchi (Union steward for PTTBT employees, North American Web ‘News’ Writers Union, Local 42)
Second co-signee: Jeff Blunt (PTTBT Assistant Manager)
Witnessed by (1st): Shirley Grille (The Law Offices of Shirley Grille)
Witnessed by (2nd): Stansworth Cole (Harvey, Cole, Wong, and Associates, Lawyers)
