From: spencer_katt@ziffdavis.com
Sent: Monday, December 19, 2005 12:42 AM
To: eWEEK readers
Subject: Written analysis; High Noone; from Carly to gnarly
“Ah, 2005,” sighed El Gato. “If you werent acquired by Larry Ellison, blogging, spouting Bubble 2.0 speak or desperately trying to call 911 from your VOIP service, you werent part of the zeitgeist,” Spence continued as he rang in the new year from a suite at the Mohegan Sun casino. Exfoliating in an exotic mistletoe and seaweed wrap and sipping a box of Bandit cabernet, the Katt reflected on the humorous moments of the past year. Spence loved it when 2005 started off with the British tabloids assuming that a page of doodles found at the World Economic Forum Summit belonged to U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. The tabs hired handwriting experts who assessed that the writer was “an unstable man who is feeling under enormous pressure.” Imagine their collective surprise when reps for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that the doodles actually belonged to Bill Gates.
In February, Spence passed along a morbid joke that had supposedly been circulating at HP facilities after CEO Carly Fiorinas exit. In the joke, Carly finds herself at the gates of heaven, and an angel tells her to go down the corridor and enter the first door on the right. Upon opening the door, Fiorina sees tormented souls writhing in flames and runs back to the angel to complain. “Oh, yeah,” says the angel, “I forgot to tell you … we merged.”
As the sartorial Snitch primped to attend a Hermans Hermits concert at the resort, he remembered Red Sox IT director Steve Conley telling the crowd at an Avaya roundtable that in attempting to set up a Wi-Fi network at spring training he ran into some mysterious glitches. Conley laughingly revealed that he finally traced the problem to interference from the plethora of camera equipment being used by the “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” TV crew.
Suns September Rhymes with Hell ad for its new server seemed a bit extreme until it posted faux rejected ads online featuring headlines such as “100% More Bitchin than Dell” and “Benchmark Studies Prove That Dell Sucks.”
Autumn in New York found Spence collecting neoblogisms at the BlogOn event, such as “chief conversation officer” (an executive managing a corporate blog) and the “reluctant blogger” (an employee whose blogging apathy could ruin your business blog). As the famished Furball chowed at a preconcert buffet, he recalled a pre-Thanksgiving memo from Salesforce.com head honcho Marc Benioff to his minions. The memo mocked Microsofts recent announcement of Internet-based services, which Benioff noted just appended the word “Live” to Redmonds products. Benioff wrote that the product line should really be called Windows Dead, Microsoft Office Dead and Windows Live Messenger Dead. Later, at the concert, Spence thought optimistically about the challenges of the new year as Peter Noone chanted the lyric, “Something tells me Im into something good.”