As a proud iMac user, I feel like picking a fight today so here it goes:

Wired News on the particular phenemon that is Apple: 'What makes Mac users so loyal? The answer, of course, depends on who is asked: Marketers say it's the brand, psychologists say it's a social relationship, and Apple loyalists say it's the merits of the machine, its friendliness, its simplicity. But some common themes emerge: community, the alternative to Microsoft, and the brand, which connotes nonconformity, liberty and creativity. Mac users are not merely an ad hoc group of people who happen to use the same kind of computer. They represent a distinct subculture, with its own rituals, traditions and mindset.'
Says one Apple devotee: ’If you see somebody in an airport in London, or someplace down in Peru or something, and you see an Apple tag on their bag, or an Apple T-shirt, it's like the Deadheads … you have an instant friend... Most likely, you share something very core to your being with this person, which is a life outlook, a special vision.’
Hear, Hear, Hear ... Only those who consume an apple a day will reach the long distance marathon! And as we all know at the end only the paranoid like Andy Grove will survive.
As Kold Krusty, the Klown, would say: ‘Have a Kooky iMac, a Happy Mac, a Crazy iBook, and a...very respectful Apple Links.’

Erica Jong once wrote about people who think they can live without poetry. And they can. At least until they survive the Iron Curtain, fall in love, lose a friend, lose a sister, or a parent, or lose their way in the dark woods of life in the Sunshine State. Apple of A Poem

Powereless? The Stand

When religious institutions fail to provide moral leadership, when governmental institutions become dangerous to the nation they are tasked to serve, when politicians do not work for the people, or when they tremble at the possibility that standing alone in righteousness might cost them votes, when journalism becomes one long commercial, when votes are brokered against the party affiliation of a majority of powerful judges, it becomes necessary for the singular multitude that is the American people to stand and be counted.
· To Be Counted [Smirking Chimp]

How a small Bohemian town saved a troubled Nobel Prize laureate

There is no gift in the world which can repay a man who has risked his life for you.
· Thomas Mann, (Not the former Rene Rivkin’s Butler) [Prague Post]