Apple Issues Second Apology

Squat lobster! Plus: an adventurous open thread.

Author

Rusty Foster
May 10th, 2024

I’ve just received the following exclusive statement from Tim Apple:

Yesterday, Apple’s vice president of marketing Tor Myhren apologized for the “Crush!” ad promoting our new, thinnest and most powerful ever iPad Pro. While we’re very proud of both the new iPad and our entire line of best-in-class computing devices, as Mr. Myhren said:

“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world. Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.”

But we’re not just visual artists. What Mr. Myhren said begged the question: at Apple, aren’t we writers too? And writers, we hear you. Irregardless of how proud we are of the technology products we make, there’s no excuse for ever saying “the myriad of ways.”

We understand now that “myriad” is an antiquated term meaning “ten thousand,” and the phrase “the ten thousand of ways” just sounds stupid.

We messed up again, and we’re truly sorry.

At Apple we’re so excited to see what you use our products to create, and we hope that this apology will put a line under this unfortunate misstep, and for all intensive purposes be our last statement on the matter.

Today in Crabs:

When Anna Sagatov, an underwater cinematographer, goes on her usual night dives off La Jolla Shores in San Diego, she’s used to spotting the “occasional octopus, nudibranch and horn shark.” But what she witnessed on a late April plunge was shocking: a seafloor turned red by what she described as an “overlapping carpet of crabs.” Swirling and shifting in the current, the creatures stretched “as far as my dive lights could illuminate,” she said.

The swarming red crustaceans she and other observers have been spotting on San Diego’s coast are called tuna crabs, but they are actually squat lobsters. And the shallows around Southern California are not their usual home…

A “squat lobster” is just a hermit crab that doesn’t pay rent.

A picture of a swarm of tuna crabs, and superimposed here and there are little captions, that read: “lmao,” “good joke man,” “lol,” “that was funny,” “we have our own shells though,” “yeah it doesn’t make that much sense,” and “if you really think about it.”

Image via Jules Jacobs / NYT

Open Thread: Onward to Adventure!

In preparing for my own adventure, I’ve been drawn to classic adventure books. I’m finally reading Bernard Moitessier’s memoir of his 1968 Golden Globe race, “The Long Way.” Moitessier has been a problematic fave of mine for a long time. On the brink of winning the world’s first single-handed round the world sailing race, after months at sea alone, he simply decided not to finish and kept going, sailing two thirds of the way around the world again. After staying at sea for a total of ten months, he eventually made landfall in Tahiti.

On one hand, what an idol for the quitters! Deciding not to win when you definitely would have, because winning is beneath you? Iconic. On the other hand, he simply abandoned his family, which I have a hard time respecting. His wife Françoise was also a sailor, and previously they had deposited her children in boarding schools to sail around the world for two years. Françoise spoke about Bernard and the race in the 2006 documentary “Deep Water,” and she didn’t seem bitter about it, so maybe it’s not for me to judge.

I always wanted to know what Bernard had to say for himself, so I’m finally reading his book. “One has to be careful though,” he wrote, “not to go further than necessary to the depths of the game. And that is the hard part… not going too far.” Hmm.

Moitessier’s boat was named Joshua after Joshua Slocum, the first person to circumnavigate the globe alone by sail. Slocum wrote his own book about that adventure in 1900, “Sailing Alone Around the World.” You might expect a book written at the turn of the 20th century by a yachtsman in his fifties to be fusty or boring, but here’s a passage picked more or less at random—Slocum’s description of his father:

My father was the sort of man who, if wrecked on a desolate island, would find his way home, if he had a jack-knife and could find a tree. He was a good judge of a boat, but the old clay farm which some calamity made his was an anchor to him. He was not afraid of a capful of wind, and he never took a back seat at a camp-meeting or a good, old-fashioned revival.

Every page is this good, I can’t recommend it enough.

So what’s your favorite tale of adventure? True, fictional, I don’t care. Drop those titles. Everyone is welcome to read, but please be subscribed to post.

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