Ben Stein Watch: Quiet, Too Quiet

Gone (for now at least) from the limelight, yet Ben Stein is unforgotten.

I am sure, dear reader, that you are familiar with the Apple ads for their Macs that contrast the Macs with "PCs" (actually, with Windows software and the hardware that is generally used for it).

The Mac is played by a hip young fellow, who is always getting the last word in his exchanges with the stuffy and dim older fellow, the PC.

There have been a variety of parodies of these adds, and the use of them as a template for parodies with other targets entirely. Consider the Marvel/DC YouTube face-offs when Batman and Ironman were in theatres simultaneously, a situation that was made for such treatment. Here is just one example of the results.

Anyway, another line of parodies brings open-source software into the Mac/PC dispute as here.

The term "open source" can mean many things, among them BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) open source. And all of that brings us back at last to Ben Stein, who plays the PC in one author's three-way fantasia about how such commercials might work. Yoko Ono would play the Mac, and Vin Diesel would get to be the hero of the piece, BSD Open Source.

Read about it because nobody has made it so you can't actually watch it: here. And with luck, the Ben Stein Watch will be able to get back to real Ben Stein shenanigans in the near future.