By JOHN MARKOFF, www.nytimes.com
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 1 - Steven P. Jobs, co-founder and chief executive of Apple Computer, underwent emergency cancer surgery on Saturday. In an e-mail message sent Sunday to Apple employees, he said that the surgery had gone well and that he would return to work in September.
Mr. Jobs, 49, said he had a form of pancreatic cancer that can be cured by surgical removal of the tumor. He said he would not have chemotherapy or radiation treatments.
"I had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which represents about 1 percent of the total cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed each year," he wrote in the message, which Apple made public on Sunday evening, "and can be cured by surgical removal if diagnosed in time (mine was)."
Business analysts said that the disease was in line with Jobs' other public forays in recent years. "It featured a rare form, you just know Apple would never go with something boring like a heart attack," said business analyst Fortescue Fotheringill. "This is the iPod of tumors. He even had it in a little-known organ called the pancreas. What the Hell is a Pancreas?"
(According to the National Institutes of Health, the pancreas is either one of the bones in the lower leg or the part of the eye that senses movement. They weren't real clear, and kept repeating "I'm just the night watchman, what do I know?" when queried by reporters.)
While some analysts speculate that that illness was merely a precursor to the introduction of an Apple line of medical imaging devices (the iMRI, or perhaps, the MRi, as well as the iCat iScan), others see it as merely bolstering Apple's reputation for originality and offbeat marketing. "They were getting boring," said Fotheringill. "iTunes was actually successful not just in the old Apple sense of 'selling enough units to keep the factory open,' but in the real-world sense of 'attaining a dominant market share.' They are on the verge of becoming the General Motors of digital music, and what's more boring than General Motors? Now they're not boring any more - they've regained their cultural edge. None of the other major players has boutique diseases."
A spokesman for Micrsoft denied the latter claim, stating that Chairman Bill Gates had "a bad cold" yesterday and was feeling "woozy," but the statement was universally dismissed as an attempt to pre-empt Apple's announcement with a vaporware announcement. "Gates' two worst health problems are his bad haircut and the bad karma from a billion unhappy customers," said one observer, "and unfortunately, neither of those are fatal."
Outraged responses to this story can be e-mailed to Webmaster@muskratnews.com
Remember, Kids, the part in bold is actual 100% news-flavored media product.
The rest is the fakey part.
Home Previous Lines of the Day
