I'm off for a week and look what happens

I went on a little vacation last week. For reasons I won't get into, it did not leave me in the mood to generate new material for this blog.

But I had to acknowledge the passing of Bert Jansch. As with many other important and influential musicians, I can't claim to understand exactly how important or how influential he was. I know people who do understand, though, and he was big in their books, so let's tip our collective hat to him.

And then there was a death that flattened any hope of Jansch's passing being given more than the smallest amount of attention by anyone not personally acquainted with Jansch.

Hundreds if not thousands have weighed in with kind words for Steve Jobs. I can add nothing to their paeans. I merely find it curious that Jobs' death got more attention than anyone else's in recent memory except Ronald Reagan's.

What's even more fascinating is that perfect strangers, people who never met the man, people who aren't even Apple customers, have expressed their shock and sadness. Now, shock I can understand: while a true cynic would have seen his resignation as CEO for what it was (essentially a deathbed act), most of us, I think, have enough empathy for our fellow human beings to have hoped he'd be able to rally and to recover.

But sadness for a corporate executive? I mean, that's what he was, the chief executive officer of a for-profit organization. He wasn't a great humanitarian, he didn't risk his life to save others in burning buildings, he didn't cure cancer -- he sold gadgets. Granted, they're fine gadgets, but they're just gadgets.

I'll admit, I was downcast about his death, too. I just can't put my finger on why. Maybe it was all the news coverage, including Wolf Blitzer's hourlong coverage that managed only to mischaracterize Jobs' contribution to Apple and the company's future without him. It's astonishing that someone as inept as Blitzer is at delivering news still has a job -- and it doesn't reflect well on CNN.

Speaking of coverage, I'm glad the L.A. Times fixed its article on Jobs' "hits and misses" (though in the headline it misleadingly characterized them as "Apple's") to reflect that it was the World Wide Web that had been created on a NeXT computer. The original text of the article claimed, of course, that it had been "the Internet" that had been birthed there. Though it would have been nice for the paper to have acknowledged the error rather than silently correcting it, let's hear it for editors all the same.

On a happier note, felicitations to Dr. Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who shared this year's Nobel Prize in Physics for his observational work demonstrating that the universe will expand forever. I single him out because I once worked at LBNL and would dearly have loved to have worked for him if I had been in the least qualified. Cosmology is a wonderful, if humbling, avocation: there's nothing like looking at the fate of the universe to put things in perspective.