Maybe it's something in the water these days, but it seems like people who have a spotlight have been acting pretty wacky lately. Michael Richards, John McCain, and Mel Gibson with racial slurs, for instance. But I was pretty shocked (and I also got a hearty laugh) when I heard Bill Gates' recent CNN interview on "CNN On Demand." For those of you who don't know what On Demand is, it's a service offered by Time Warner Cable that allows you to watch select programming whenever you feel like it; on your own time. There's a bunch of these channels, and CNN is one of them. The great thing about On Demand is that you can rewind things and play them over again.
Gates was doing an interview with CNN's Renay San Miguel at CES in Las Vegas. It starts off somewhat mundane: Gates shows off a Sony media center, a Toshiba Laptop, and talks about mobile stuff. Then they start talking about Zune, and this is where it got interesting. Renay San Miguel asks Gates what he thinks about DRM (digital rights management), and Gates replies with this:
"Well, balancing the needs of the creators to be paid with the need for some ***** to move things around..."
Right there, I was forced to pause and rewind. I don't want to say the word Gates used, but I'll say... hmm, how to word this... that perhaps he means you'd need a really large cat to move things around? Maybe that word has some alternate meaning that I'm unaware of, perhaps it isn't merely a bit of foul language that is sometimes used in reference of felines (and a really good Bond movie). But the interview definitely doesn't stop there, and I haven't heard anyone else say "omg, what did he just say?"
Has anyone else seen this interview? Am I looking too deeply into what he said? Or is this just another in a long line of recent slip-ups from celebrities who mis-phrase things?
"In an interstellar burst, I'm back to save the universe"
