Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs by Daniel Lyons

he’s a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize, while I’m getting savaged by the European Union for being some big ugly American cultural imperialist shitbag capitalist. But give Bono credit. He figured something out that I didn’t. One word: Africa. The place is like a miracle worker shrine, a whole continent filled with absolution. Touch it, and you’re healed. No matter who you are, no matter how greedy or rotten, if you invoke the cause of helping Africans you get a free pass on everything else. Sure, Bono didn’t think this up himself. He stole it from Princess Diana. Now Bill Gates has jumped on the Africa bandwagon too. And Madonna.
    But whatever. I like Bono. He’s the only person I know who’s more self-absorbed than I am. Which, when you’re not feeling good about your life, can be a really great thing. With Bono you can hang out all night and never once get to talk about your problems. You just listen to Bono blather on about AIDS and Africa and poverty and debt relief and how The Edge still can’t tune his friggin guitar by ear, even after all these years, and he still needs to use one of those electronic tuners instead. Oh, believe me, Bono is the black hole of Calcutta when it comes to conversation. A real barrel of laughs. If you ever start thinking your life sucks, spend some time listening to Bono and his sob stories.
    So we started out in this bar in Palo Alto, and he gets hammered, of course. Next thing I know he’s sobbing. Says he’s seen this stupid Al Gore movie about global warming and he’s freaking out.
    “Oh, Steve,” he says, “you should see the poor polar bears. Drownin! We gotta do sumfin, like have a concert or whatever.”
    So I tell him, hey, first of all, a real polar bear would bite your friggin head clean off and eat you alive. “They’re not exactly these cuddly little animal friends that Al Gore probably told you they are.”
    Second, I told him, “You know, not to sound condescending or whatever, because definitely I’d like to go plan a little charity concert with you, but I’m pretty busy these days, because in case you haven’t been reading the papers lately, the feds are trying to put me in jail. Meanwhile I’m trying to develop a new phone, and a new TV device, and I’m working on a presentation for our big developers conference which is only a month away, and I’m also putting the finishing touches on a new video iPod that holds four and a half hours of full motion video, which means one day soon we are going to wake up in a world where you can carry two full-length movies in your pocket. Think about that. Boom. Game over.”
    Mr. Bono the Rock Star says, “Jaysus! Another fookin iPod? You’re like Willy fookin Wonka in his fookin chocolate factory, out there baking up your fookin iPods, and meanwhile the fookin planet is fookin meltin, ya fooktard.”
    I tell him, “Bono, look, we all gotta do what we do, right? You wouldn’t call up Picasso and ask him to stop painting so he could work on global warming, would you? You wouldn’t call up Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela and say, ‘Hey, put aside that human rights stuff and come save some penguins on the Greenland ice cap,’ right?”
    Bono says there are no penguins on the Greenland ice cap, they’re all down on the South Pole or whatever, like he’s Mr. Ecology Expert now that he snoozed through some movie. As far as I know the guy didn’t even finish high school. Then he starts calling me an eejit and telling me I should be putting all of Apple’s profits into some fund to save the planet.
    I do what I always do when I want to drive someone nuts: I go Zen on him. I get all calm, and I say, “Riiiight, grasshopper, let me run that one past the board of directors. Give away all of our profits. We’ll put that on the top of the agenda for our next meeting.” Then I go, “Hey man, I’m going into a tunnel, man, oh shit, can you hear me? Zzzzzzh. Zzzzzzzzh.”
    Apparently he’s