(c) 1998 Andrew C. Stone. All Rights Reserved.

    At WWDC this year, Mac developers were fortunate to be entertained by one of the world's foremost neologicians and author of the increasingly inaccurately named "HitchHiker's Trilogy" and interactive 3D game "Spaceship Titanic", Douglas Adams. The main point Doug brought home, was, yes, Apple only has 5% of the market, but it's the cream of the crop, creative types who make up that 5%. He finished his Apple Master's spiel with a simple, yet truthful, quip:
"Apple Computer, right down there with Mercedes Benz."
    
    Which brings me, as a neologistic wannabe, to offer a new word for "those masses of people who do and buy whatever the Media and Madison Avenue tells them to do or buy, because everyone else seems to be doing or buying it", to wit, "sheeple". Sheeple are not the misfits, the crazy ones or the rebels. Sheeple make no trouble and uphold status quo whenever possible. They bore me to death and their time is almost up.
    
    Luckily, the overlap between Sheeple & Mac fanatics is tiny. The Macintosh community, although small, creates the majority of the content on the World Wide Web. These are the people I enjoy knowing and working with. This community feeds on serendipity and improbability, the warp and weft of the Macintosh tapestry. A belief that diversity is not only not bad but actually fundamental to survival, an understanding that Magick is afoot and we are all interconnected in some
ineffable yet benign network.
    
    Each one of us has stories which resonate with these tenets, and I was reminded of this phenomena this weekend when my daughter's friend's dad came over to pick her up. It wasn't too many sentences into our conversation before the word "Macintosh" came up, then ZAP, electricity. It turns out that this dad had the first Mac in Albuqueruque, uses Macs in his fascinating scale-model
skulls business, and was responsible for introducing his fellow dentist associate to the Macintosh in '84. That friend is a friend of mine and has been working for Apple Computer on the medical software side of things for the last several years. These are people worth knowing.
    
    It's pedal to the metal in this final stretch before Rhapsody 1.0 ships - I hope to see many of you in NYC at MacWorld this July, where we can spin more myth and weave more mystery into the Macintosh fabric.