Any way you slice it, Chicken Little never had to eat his words in quite the way that Bob Metcalfe had to a couple of weeks ago. The inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, Metcalfe has in recent years become an industry columnist. One fateful column he wrote in the December 1995 edition of InfoWorld Magazine predicted the aforementioned catastrophic collapse in the Net, leaving millions of us stranded in what would undoubtedly be the biggest traffic jam in history on the Information Superhighway (self-LART for buzzword abuse.) Later, at a confrence of Web developers, he vowed that if the catastrophic collapse predicted didn't happen in 1996, he'd litterally eat his column. Except for maybe a few weirdoes out there who have no life beyond AOL (and even that doesn't leave much,) we all know that the "gigalapse" never happened.
At the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference in Santa Clara, CA, he was called on the carpet. After a fruitless attempt to plead that ingesting the column might kill him (the ink used to print it was non-toxic) he tried to get away with eating a cake decorated to look like his column. This, of course, was met by the boos of a thousand geeks. He then put it to a voice vote, with the crowd chanting "Eat, baby, eat!" loudly. No longer having much choice, he tore the column from the issue of Infoworld, stuffed it in a blender filled with an unidentified clear liquid, then proceeded to gulp down the pureed wood pulp containing what was left of his unfulfilled prophecy.
It is entirely plausible that such occurrences of one having to eat their words in paper form have happened before. I can just imagine some old geezer speaking to his grandkids about this topic... "Why in my day, when we ate our words, we didn't have any of these sissy blenders! Why, we had to eat the entire tree used to make the paper those words were written on. And if we never wrote 'em down they made us eat a boulder! And we had to walk fifty mines in the snow, uphill both ways just to eat our words!" Of course, none of us will believe a word they're saying. Next time some really old guy starts ranting like this, Suggest that he go take a long walk and find a suitably edible tree, preferably a redwood or other tree commonly used in paper production.
Here at the Sledgehammer, we don't ever anticipate any situation where we'd have to eat our words here (and don't even try this one David), but just in case, appropriate precautions have been taken. For one thing, this column is pretty much restricted to electronic form (except for a few copies here and there that may have been printed out somewhere along the line.) This leaves no paper trail in it's wake, and more importantly, no mass-printed version of the column that I could be digested. Of course, the best way to avoid having to eat this column would be to never say that if so-and-so does/doesn't happen, I'll eat my column. Of course, I do have a contingency plan in the rare event that this does happen (I tend to write these things late at night, when a portion of the usual faculties of mind are off in La-La Land). I have ensured that this coulumn uses only recycled, non-toxic electrons and all-natural bytes. I have also done the proper testing to ensure that each one is a nutritionally balanced piece of writing, and in fact provides 12 essential vitamins and minerals. In fact it has been shon to lower cholestorol levels significantly and prevent unsightly wrinkles and other signs of aging. In fact, if this column didn't taste so bad, I'd be eating them by the dozen every day!
Of course, as this whole paper-munching incident would never have happened if it weren't for the ludicrous prediction that the entire Internet would go down. For the net to collapse like that, several million computers would have to crash at once. Of course, the chances of this happening are almost nil, unless enough people read this column that they all decided to bash the motherboards in on their computers...) Of course, this doesn't mean that the place isn't getting any less congested. Eventually, it should all work out (by then, we'll all have t1s right into our laundry rooms, however. The rest of the house will be wired by FDDI.)