At 8:52 PM +1300 12/21/06, Peter Gutmann wrote:
The "kool-aid" reference may be slightly unfamiliar to non-US readers, it's a reference to the 1978 Jonestown mass-suicide
Actually, it's a slightly older reference. It comes from Ken Kesey's "Acid Test" LSD parties in the Bay area, Stanford included, in the late 1960's, as in, "Have you have the Kool-Aid yet?", which was, of course, a reference to the garbage can full of Kool-Aid (tm) drink mix slowly being shoved into the middle of the dance floor. See, not coincidentally, Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", for details. Handed down through Deadheads, et at., to Silicon Valley, to mean, roughly, "do you believe the company 'vision'", um, thing... Not only more charitable and less gruesome, but much more in keeping with actual facts, like "the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field", and so on. I blame the MBA/IBM/Novell/Wintel crowd for the disparaging Jim Jones reference, myself. :-). Cheers, RAH "All those dayglow freaks who used to paint the face They've joined the human race Some things will never change" -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'