From this morning’s Observer column…

Meanwhile, on the West Coast of the US, Microsoft’s hilarious pursuit of Yahoo! has already yielded a dizzying sequence of counter-moves, feints, bluffs and evasions to the point where it’s looking like an episode of Friends. So why not cast it as a soap-opera, with some minor gender changes? The synopsis goes …

Steve (Ballmer, Microsoft CEO) is having a mid-life crisis. Once irresistible to women, he now finds he’s regarded as passé. Just down the road, Jerri (Yang, CEO of Yahoo!) has also been having a bad time. She once had star quality, but is looking a bit faded. And she’s running out of dough. Deep down, though, she’s still alluring….

Later: I’m a bit miffed about the way the column was sub-edited (‘subbed’ in newspaper lingo). The last para, as filed by me, read:

In the latest episode, as ‘Good Morning Silicon Valley’ imagines it, Jerri and Eric ‘are in the bedroom next to Steve’s, both fully dressed but banging the headboard against the wall and dramatically moaning, “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!”‘

But in the paper, this appeared as:

In the latest episode, Jerri and Eric ‘are in the bedroom next to Steve’s, both fully dressed but banging the headboard against the wall and dramatically moaning, ‘Don’t stop! Don’t stop!’

In other words, the attribution to Good Morning Silicon Valley (one of my favourite blogs) has been dropped, making it seem as though I was lifting their joke without attribution. Bah!