. . . benchmark our lives by the cats with which we shared our lives.

Cleo was an Abyssinian whose owners were going to 'take her to the pound because she kept having kittens'.

She was the runt of her original litter, never grew larger than a six month old kitten, and lived with me for five years through moves back and forth between two different Caribbean islands.

When I landed in Northern California after a particularly bad year of hurricanes, she went with me and thrived.

When I returned to the islands five months later, I left her with my roommate David, a tortured genius who loved very little in life. He did love Cleo, and she was ok with staying.

I visited a year later and tried to take her back, but David said, "I don't think I can do that".

He was abusing crystal meth. I returned to the islands. He died four months later of a drug induced heart attack, and Cleo went to live with his mother.

That was 1997, I never caught up with her again, she could still be alive somewhere in Santa Rosa.

She was a great cat. I'm sure yours was, too, Carol. My condolences.

that would be George Allen? We know he didn't give up pork, at least the legislative variety!

I thought it was damn funny!

i liked it!

for cat people!

loved it

in all fairness, this one:

http://www.smokingrobot.com/images/coup-cover.jpg

came out before september 11th . . .

how soon we forget that he was also a member of the Warren Commission which whitewashed and covered up matters in the Kennedy assassination . . .

In all seriousness, yesterday was the beginning of the 21st century.

The entire industry devoted to those crummy mini-browsers in current cellphones? Gone. Erased.

Who wants to develop customized content for that platform now? Who wants to use standards designed for matchbook displays and tincan/wire technology?

Indeed, the entire Windows CE / Palm / Blackberry / Symbian ecosystem will wither under the onslaught of demand for future OS X embedded devices.

This is only the beginning. Cingular has the exclusive for the initial iPhone, but which carrier will snag the iPhone Nano?

Imagine an iPhone that is NOT an internet device or e-mail platform. Imagine an iPhone that is just an iPod and cellular phone.

Indeed, imagine the next iPod that is NOT a phone! Imagine the next Mac Book!

The weight and momentum of what was left unsaid yesterday has the kinetic energy of a bullet.

The iPhone we saw yesterday is the Mac Pro quad Xeon processor of cellphones. I am looking forward to the Mac Mini version.

There will be endless variations of consumer gadgets using the rock solid OS X platform. Guess what the hot devlopment environment / platform of the 21st century is going to be? Hint: It's NOT brown.

Make no mistake, Apple has vaulted far ahead of Microsoft and the others with their implementation of 'embedded' OS X.

Microsoft will try to shoehorn a bloated Vista into the new market for super intelligent devices that was created singlehandedly yesterday by Apple.

Vista Media Server for the home? More like Zune on steroids - and everyone knows that steroids make you swollen and stupid.

Apple has become the next Google. Pundits and skeptics will look askance, but the smart money will ride OS X all the way to the megayacht marina.