Friday, November 2, 2012

If Microsoft didn't exist...


The writers who left us the Old Testament were way ahead of their time. This is a screenplay with drama and special effects requirements that Spielberg or Kubrick could never even aspire to produce.

To dream up those wild anecdotes and strange metaphors, the chancers who wrote the Old Testament must have known all about the Big Bang and Evolution and all that. They just knew the audience in those days would never stay glued to their seats munching popcorn long enough for the earth to cool let alone for life to begin.

The only shame really is that the sequel got more attention at the box office. I mean, if the Darwins and the Einsteins of their day wrote the Old Testament, then The Beatles must have written the New one. They were very popular and all but look what happened to them. Now, Jesus might have been equally as popular, and might have sold more records, if he’d had a four-track, but he wouldn’t have won any prizes.

But you can see why they say that had The Beatles not existed there would be a need to invent them (at least the Americans knew this and so they invented the Monkeys…). But what about all the other characters from the Bible? Not many people these days can relate to that spiel about Adam & Eve and their tragic banishment from paradise by god. Not because it’s not a good story or nothing – Genesis on its own could be re-written as a Hollywood screenplay and it would sell millions. If not for the special effects then for the brief nudity scenes. But to bring it up to date, there would have to be some changes to the script. For a start, with modern property laws and a half-decent solicitor on his case, Adam could easily sneak Eve back into the Garden.

But what if the story wasn’t the evolution of knowledgeable man, shedding his once reptilian form and learning how it all happens down below, what if it was the evolution of information from the confinement of the printed page to the liberation of networked hard drives. The story would be different then, wouldn’t it? It might also regain some of its magic and mystery too.

You can be sure that when Bill Gates slides out of the tree the second time round to tempt Eve, he’ll be armed with more than just an Apple. He won’t even try tempting Adam …not with so much as a Gateway or a Hewlett Packard…. You see, he knows Eve will be there, nagging at Adam,

Doesn’t he have a 3COM, or an NEC to offer us, for god’s sake?”

“No, but look at the label honey, it’s got Intel inside”

And Eve going, “Look, Adam, unless it’s designed specifically and unconditionally for use with Windows, has broadband global network connectivity, and you can play one player monopoly on it, I’m just not interested.”

Nah, before consultation with the poor unfortunate and innocent young ones, all powerful Bill would have promptly grown limbs, learned how to use a typewriter, got himself legal advice, and then presented Adam with the Microsoft End-User License Agreement, or EULA for short. Do you reckon Bill took Irish at high school?

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