iPad Book Burning Launch Pulled in Favour of Powerpoint Presentation

Apple insiders are now reporting that the plans to launch the new iPad with a giant book-burning were pulled at the last minute in favour of a simpler Powerpoint presentation.

To make up for the fact that people would just look at the iPad as a giant iPhone, and that there's only so much excitement you can get from standing up on a stage and saying 'look, you can surf the Internet, and look at photos, and do mail and stuff...', Jobs was quoted as saying

“I want a giant book burning. Every freakin' book you can get hold of. Even that Brit guy, Shakespeare, and all that literature 'n shit. Now that would be a launch.”

“And I'll personally toss a couple of Kindles onto the pile for good measure.”

Close advisors are reported to have counselled Jobs to wait and see that the iPad actually worked first, before they started burning stuff, and anyway, they had this Powerpoint presentation all worked out already and, look, you could put the screens out onto the Internet in real time, whereas live video of books burning would take up too much bandwidth, and have to be broadcast later, when the whole idea might have turned to ashes by then, so like, don't overdo it.

Cabin Baggage - the Third Law

Imagine wearing pyjamas made from the business section of the Mail on Sunday, soaked in cold urine, while trying to sleep under a duvet made of quilted kippers. Or having your face pushed into mouldy porridge while a failed first-year arts student, drunk, tries to tattoo a Google map of Ballymena's historic quarter onto your left buttock. Or, worse, being forced at gunpoint to skip using the entrails of your recently slaughtered pet dog, while your assailant hums the entire Nolan Sisters back catalogue, before blasting your genitalia with both barrels of a sawn-off shotgun. An almost priceless Purdey shotgun that, ten minutes previously, was a family heirloom and its original length.

If you can hold those three images in your head simultaneously, then you have an approximation of how unpleasant flying has now become.

But I'm not here to whinge, dear reader.

I will let others complain about the fact that the cost of flying has been stable for some years now, so that the term 'low-cost' is now a marketing lie, or that a ticket advertised at £1 becomes £50 by the time you get to the end of the process, or that you can't sleep on a flight now because you are being 'marketed-to' for the entire duration, or that airline staff are getting thinner on the ground and hate you, that you have to pay the airport just to pick someone up in your car, that parking charges are extortionate, that airport concessions charge you double the normal rate ('as a concession') and the smile on the face of airport management is as sincere as a Bernie Madoff IOU.

I am simply here to state Mitchell's 3^rd Law of Cabin Baggage Size Restriction Recommendations (laws 1 and 2 being debunked in a peer-reviewed journal owing to statistical anomalies in my Hertz-Lugwiggenstein canonical redundancy regression algorithm).

And that law is, “Don't take anything on board the plane that you can't have shoved comfortably up your ass by a member of airline or airport staff”.

So the next time someone tells you the airline just 'lost their luggage', just nod and smile because you know, and they know you know, where it really went......