Golden Apple
Yeah, I know Thursdays are supposed to be when we go ga ga over Apple. But yesterday the Packawhallopites gathered round the tube and watched an episode of Scottish comedian Bill Connolly's good Journey to the Edge of the World where Billy meets with a bloke in the Klondike who's gone slightly bonkers running what we would deem to be a rather elaborate one man gold mining operation with his only company for unimaginably long stretches of time being some pretty formidable-looking heavy gold mining machinery.
By "bonkers" we mean in the sense that the bloke's social skills – and, yes, no one's social graces or utter crash-and-burn clumsiness should be judged while being on-camera and being addressed, even extremely good naturedly, by a comedian talking thick Scottish – are kind of gone. Billy jokes and wants to touch the little flecks of gold collecting in the washer. The gold bits looked spectacular on TV. If we were there, in the Klondike, surrounded by the huge rusting machinery of what realistically should be a 10-man gold mining operation, seeing these bits of sunlight we'd really want to touch the gold too.
So, Billy makes, or jokes, like he's going to touch the gold and that wouldn't it be sensational if one or two crumbs stuck to his fingers the way batter from fried Mars Bars breaks off and sticks to the fingers when you're trying to eat that weird confection. The gold miner, who'd been joking up to this point too but who we suspect was not really quite able to follow all of the rapid fire Glaswegian, immediately gets defensive. Bam! Change! Jeckyll and Hyde, night and day, Lennon and McCartney. No, Billy. It's pretty clear you shouldn't even joke about touching the bloke's gold dust. After doubtless tough calls in the editing room to make the scene look a little less awkward and to show the gold miner in a more sympathetic manner, the bloke's on-camera change still makes Billy look like he's just been tossed into the cold Yukon.
And today we see that Apple has sailed past Google as the world's most valuable brand. Good for Apple. But our dreams, like the dreams of a lot of other people, of buying into the Apple gold rush (buying stock, that as) are kind of gone. We'll throw ourselves in to the cold river and enjoy it.
