Now — one thing I like to do when Mom gives me this kind of god-like control is change her desktop image to a picture of Hillary Clinton, who she loathes with the heat of a billion suns. Sometimes I use Nancy Pelosi, but for maximum impact you’ve got to go with Hillary.

So that was naturally my first order of business, after Mom granted me access and went off to do some paperwork. I also did a little gleeful cackling, and a lot of detailed, Bond-villanesque explaining of my evil plans — to my wife, in this case, who happened to be nearby, ignoring me (as is right and proper when I get into cackling exposition mode).

Anyway — there I was, chortling maniacally, searching Google for just the right Hillary portrait, when the phone rings. It’s Mom. I say: “Hi Mom!” She says: “I can hear you.”

Because I’d forgotten about the “chat” portion of the screensharing-and-chat thing, of course. I’d muted my end of it, but Mom hadn’t. She’d been listening the whole time.

My first impulse was to lie, but that wouldn’t have done me much good — because my cacklings had also drawn her back to her desk, where she’d been watching me look for Hillary pictures. On her computer.

My second impulse was to collapse into more or less uncontrollable laughter, which is what I did. I’m laughing still.

Teller and I have been brutal to Christians, and their response shows that they’re good fucking Americans who believe in freedom of speech. We attack them all the time, and we still get letters that say, “We appreciate your passion. Sincerely yours, in Christ.” Christians come to our show at the Rio and give us Bibles all the time. They’re incredibly kind to us. Sure, there are a couple of them who live in garages, give themselves titles and send out death threats to me and Bill Maher and Trey Parker. But the vast majority are polite, open-minded people, and I respect them for that.

I spend my fair share of time saying things about Christianity that would have gotten me killed, in interesting and horrific ways, back in the 18th century. I don’t say this enough, but I’m profoundly grateful to live in a place and a time where I don’t have to die for stating my opinion.

Taken together, the operating system and BASIC gave you everything you needed to write and run your own little programs. But the computer contained no word processor, no bells and whistles, no array of applications waiting for you to play with them, no instant pleasurable pay-off for buying a new computer. When you turned on the Atom or the BBC Micro, the ROM chip booted up its two pieces of cargo and on your television screen appeared this:

BASIC >

and nothing else. The machine did nothing else, unless you made it.

My first computer, an Atari 800XL, was a more powerful machine than the Acorn, but not much more powerful. And it greeted you with exactly the same spartan prompt when you turned it on — although it said Ready, instead of BASIC, which was just as cryptic but maybe a little friendlier.

But it didn’t matter. At all. That computer was the most amazing thing I’d ever owned, and I spend hours exploring the simultaneously narrow and infinite possibilities it offered. At one point, before I got an actual word processor (the First XLEnt Word Processor, to be precise) I just typed out documents on that empty white-on-blue prompt screen, laboriously formatting everything so that it fit. There was no way of saving what I’d written, or printing it, or doing anything at all with it except watching it all disappear when I turned the computer off.

It didn’t matter. It was — and is — one of the most thrilling things I’d ever done. My long career with computers has been, in some sense, an effort to recapture that breathless sense of wonder and possibility.

This wasn’t a new revelation, of course. My body and and I have had several conversations along these lines over the past couple of months. They usually go something like this:

Anyway. I think I’m finally realizing that something has to change, because I went to the supermarket on Saturday, and, instead of blowing by produce on my way to starch & sugar, stopped and picked up several severely unappetizing-looking items — spinach and pears and carrots and the like. And, more than that, I went home and made a good-faith effort to actually eat them. This may not sound like progress to normal people, but it’s a minor revolution for me.

But we’ll see. I’m already experiencing taquito withdrawal.

But the column is really about Steve Jobs, of course, his mind and his methods, as all such columns must be:

Steve Jobs believes the key to his success is in finding, hiring, retaining, then firing the best talent in the world. He would maintain in the very moment he’s firing Fadell that Tony is better at his job than anyone else on Earth. Yet still Fadell must go and that’s because – ego issues aside – Jobs had to make room in his inner circle for Papermaster.

Everyone close to Jobs is under continual analysis: is this person really (or still) the best in the world? If they aren’t, or if someone else is just as good but more important for some additional reason, then the incumbent has to go. Steve Jobs ultimately betrays all of his direct reports in this manner. It’s just the way he is. And if it costs Apple a few million to remove one extra head from the room, well that’s okay with a board that KNOWS (as we all do, to put it fairly) that Jobs really is the secret of Apple’s success. His system may be brutal, but it works.

There’s a reason why I call Lord Jobs Lord Jobs. It’s not just my helpless, quasi-spiritual devotion to the stuff he makes, and to the aesthetic that informs it; it’s also because, in many ways, he’s as temperamental, maddening, inspiring, contradictory, bullheaded, and ultimately indomitable as any god you’re likely to encounter.

Mostly when people go to temples to worship their gods, they focus — to their great credit — on the positive: all the reanimated corpses and entreaties for the poor and wine/water transmogrifications and drowned centurions. But, really, the holy books they’re reading from are mostly about power, and the horrible things that will happen to you if you fuck with that power. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, and — if you’ve really pissed Him off — He planteth a foot in your ass and sends you tumbling down to your eternal punishment.

I’m sure Lord Jobs is a very nice person when he’s not plotting world domination from his seat in Cupertino. And I’m equally sure he’d balk at actually sending people to hell. But he will crush you utterly if you get in his way, and not really think twice about it. There is Lord Jobs, there is the goal of Lord Jobs, and there is the straight line of scorched earth between the two. Nothing else.

I mailed my iPhone out to a company in Kansas for repair yesterday, because it won’t sync with my computer anymore. What I should have done is take it to the Apple Store and get a free replacement, but I can’t do that because my phone is unlocked. My phone is unlocked for very good reasons. Nevertheless: Lord Jobs has decreed that filth like me, who stray from the Divine Path, will not share in any of its blessings. Even if I paid full price for those blessings. Even if those blessings aren’t blessings at all, actually, but contractual obligations. No matter. I am a heretic, and as a heretic my presence in an Apple Store is frowned upon, and my entreaties mocked and reviled.

And so I’ve been shaking my tiny fist in the general direction of Cupertino ever since my lovely phone gave up the ghost. But it’s a lackluster, good-natured fist shaking — and when, Jobs-willing, I exchange many hard-earned dollars for a working iPhone, I will go back to using it — and loving it — slavishly. And worshiping dyspeptically, reluctantly, tiny-fist-shakingly, at the feet of its creator.

Such is the power of the Lord.

All hail Lord Jobs. Damn it.

Update: Gruber corroborates Cringley’s basic point, but cast aspersions on most of his interpretations.

Which is a sort of roundabout way of saying that I got a package from her last week, and the package contained this:

It looks even better in person. I keep opening it and closing it and turning it over and marveling that something so lovely and one-of-a-kind is actually in my house, much less my possession. I can’t even imagine defiling it with actual writing.

Kater put together a diary about its construction, here. You can see more of her stuff here.

Although “row” turned out to be kind a misnomer. The river was in a shallow mood, and the flow of water often petered out into tiny ponds surrounded by narrow shores of gravel. When this happened, our guide would use his oar as a lever, dragging us over drifts and sandbars with a lovely combination of finesse and brute strength. Sometimes he asked us to get out and help him push. Other times we disembarked and walked along the gravelbed, while he dragged the boat along whatever circuitous route the anemic waterway was wandering.

After we got past the shallows, we floated down the river in the traditional way: athwart the current, our boat perpendicular to the shore, Victor using his oar as a rudder rather than a propellant, navigating us around deadfalls and through rapids and down narrow corridors of silt and rock. We’d come to see eagles, and they were everywhere — walking along the dry surface of the lake and perched in the naked branches of dying trees and flying overhead. So many, in fact, that they sort of became a commonplace, and my attention turned to the landscape: the scale of it, the quiet, boundless power. Long flat planes of water hemmed in by green walls of trees. Eagles soaring overhead. It takes your breath away, and makes you feel insignificant and exalted at the same time.

Now: I am, above all things, a soft and foppish creature of the suburbs. My basic attitude toward the natural world is fairly straightforward: it must be avoided, at all costs, because everything in it wants to kill me, as quickly and savagely as possible. I distrust the strange realm on the other side of my office window, with its bugs and its strange unpredictable temperatures and its ugly tendency to spit water from the sky.

Nevertheless — this trip was a complete and utter blast. I’m not at one with nature or anything, but for those two hours on the river me and nature were more or less on speaking terms, for the first time in a long time. I understand now, a little, what makes people fall in love with this murderous, ubiquitous, beautiful everywhere.

Or so I thought until we steamed into Skagway, which appears to have entirely jettisoned the tiresome bother of actually being a town in order to focus all of its efforts on being a tourist trap. It’s a strategy that, to my considerable surprise, works brilliantly.

The “town” is a ten-minute walk from the ship, and it’s arranged in a sort of old-west-movie configuration: wide dusty streets flanked by raised boardwalks, laid out in an easy-to-navigate grid. It has the usual compliment of shops: assloads of jewelers aggressively hawking their duty-free shinies; purveyors of worthless trinkets cynically splashed with a glaze of local color; a store called Del Sol that traffics in sun-based products, which was doing a brisk business despite the fact that most of the places we visited got about five days of sun a year. And so on. Skagway gets away with it by investing a great deal of effort in making these places look untrashy, and in embracing their existence as a central tenet rather than an ugly necessity. Of being unapologetic about it. So tramping from store to store here wasn’t the soul-killing exercise in dread and tedium that it had been in Kitchikin and Juneau. It felt right, somehow — like I was fulfilling my assigned role in a world exquisitely tuned to the imperatives of base materialism.

But you can tell the city isn’t really trying — walk one block over and it settles, with an almost audible sigh, into the haphazard quirkiness that marked everything else we saw: houses hanging gamely off the side of the mountain, pressed tightly together, no two alike. Narrow winding streets that forked in odd and unexpected ways and rose suddenly in steep, knee-shattering inclines. An subterranean internet cafe (rows upon rows of illuminated rectangles glimpsed throw a window flush with the sidewalk) next to a tattoo shop. A pinkish house suspended over a sharp drop into the valley, at the bend of a street that suddenly, and unceremoniously, becomes a mountain trail. This is a place with the largest number of motorcycle riders in the United States, per-capita, whose weather only allows you to actually ride motorcycles three months out of the year. That’s pretty awesome.

It’s not a pretty place¹, but it’s absolutely fascinating, even at the scratch-the-surface level. An isolated city rising improbably out of the wilderness, charmingly failing to reconcile its outback inclinations with its metropolitan aspirations. I wish we’d had more time here.

Late Alaskan governor Mad Sparky McJuddnick instituted this slogan during his brief, manic reign in the year 1932, despite the fact that, at the time, Alaska (a) was not yet a state; and (b) had only six cities — one of which, Snartifartiburg, existed entirely in McJuddnick’s addled, intermittently functional mind.

In order to make the state match its slogan, McJuddnick pushed through the Tiny, Tiny City Act, which reclassified every Alaskan man, woman, and child as a city, each with his own tiny city council, tiny borders, and tiny zoning ordinances².

This had the predictable effect on the establishment on actual cities, and on the survival of existing ones. But Ketchikanian mayor Alberto “Punchbowl” Spacklehousen managed to save his own city from the worst of the catastrophe: he took advantage of Ketchikan’s isolation to keep his people unaware of their new status as sovereign municipalities, and to impose strict border regulations forbidding other cityzens from moving to Ketchican until they completed a rigorous course of extreme mockery. And so the city flourished, and became a thriving center of salmon production, and tourism.

The highlight of our stay in Ketchikan was a visit, by seaplane, to Misty Fjords — which is not, it turns out, a Norwegian porn star, but an actual fjord, with mist. And it’s absolutely beautiful. An azure river unfolded beneath us, forking and widening and narrowing through twisting, forested canyons. Thin waterfalls ran down the sides of the canyons, and flocks of seagulls, flecks of white flitting across the eddied blue, wheeled and waned beneath us. Taffeta wisps of cloud floated by, lending the scene a kind of gauzy ethereality. It was, in a word, absolutelyfreakingbreathtaking.

Eventually, we took a sharp turn and descended into a lake, surrounded by rising walls of trees, hemmed in by a low ceiling of brilliant white mist. The pilot cut the engine and we all got out onto the plane’s pontoons and looked out on a world defined entirely by its peace, and its pristine, meticulous beauty.

If the day had been sunnier, the whole scene would have been washed in light, and we would have seen the true height of the walls that surrounded us. But, in a way, I’m glad it wasn’t. This constrained, eerie, quiet world had a kind of holiness about it: a temple made out of the world, for gods that vanished long ago.