thousands of apple cats blogging

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Everyone in this family insists there are only three, but you can't go give a pan of gray water to a wilting dahlia or sweep redwood offal off a corner of the deck or get to the bathroom or make a cup of coffee or struggle with the rapidly replicating newspaper sections without six or seven of them leaping and rolling or yowling for they know not what. I know I spend way too much time in the purity of my own atmosphere, but, sheesh, this could be dangerous!

At least they are barred from my basement hangout, here, where I fiddle with you at my beloved iMac. So I was just browsing around and found on that stultifying agglomeration of hard news and tabloid squalor something about Steve Jobs' health and followed it over to the New York Times. Goddammittalltoheck! These people irk the snot out of me!

From Apple’s Culture of Secrecy, by Joe Nocera, the last grafs:

He also, though, needs to treat his shareholders with at least a modicum of respect. And telling them whether or not he is sick would be a good place to start.

On Thursday afternoon, several hours after I’d gotten my final “Steve’s health is a private matter” — and much to my amazement — Mr. Jobs called me. “This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.” After that rather arresting opening, he went on to say that he would give me some details about his recent health problems, but only if I would agree to keep them off the record. I tried to argue him out of it, but he said he wouldn’t talk if I insisted on an on-the-record conversation. So I agreed.

Because the conversation was off the record, I cannot disclose what Mr. Jobs told me. Suffice it to say that I didn’t hear anything that contradicted the reporting that John Markoff and I did this week. While his health problems amounted to a good deal more than “a common bug,” they weren’t life-threatening and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer. After he hung up the phone, it occurred to me that I had just been handed, by Mr. Jobs himself, the very information he was refusing to share with the shareholders who have entrusted him with their money.

You would think he’d want them to know before me. But apparently not.

I agree with Steve! Joe's a slime bucket. He makes you read for two pages, worried sick, before he gets around to admitting, without admitting it, that he's a sensationalizing slime bucket!

Jobs might be the only CEO I actively want to keep functioning for as long as possible... and that damn Nocera person KNOWS that!

Immediately upon indulging myself in this moment of hot-faced fright, I filled with sympathy for the multifarious aggravations of the prominent person. What a drag.