Are you the type of person who slows down to gaze at car wrecks, in the morbid hope of seeing twisted metal and general mayhem? Hey, who isn't? That's why, despite all the lurid reports of the phenomenal disaster known as the Macworld Expo Tokyo 1999 keynote, we would just love to have gotten to see it ourselves. Between the hard crash of Internet Explorer which required a restart during Ben Waldman's demo and the glorious failure of fifty (yes, count 'em-- fifty!) iMacs trying to stream video from a single G3 server, it sounds like there was plenty of material for Fox's upcoming special, "The World's Most Disastrous Keynotes." Add to that the reports that Steve Jobs was "visibly angry" and left the stage after a hurried "thank you" to the crowd, and it sounds like you could slip a videotape of the keynote in between a couple of Faces of Death movies at the local video store and no one would bat an eye.

Imagine our delight, then, when someone pointed out Yasuyuki Higuchi's QuickTime movies of the keynote, available for downloading. And imagine our further excitement when we saw one clip titled "IE45crash.mov" and another called "QTStrouble.mov." Finally, imagine our profound disappointment to find that, metaphorically speaking, there were no vehicles on fire and sundered limbs scattered across the highway; what we saw was more of a fender-bender than anything else. Judge for yourself, but we really think all of those reports about the Tokyo Nightmare were a little over the top. Sure, IE crashed, but generally, we at AtAT expect nothing less (or, more accurately, nothing more) from Microsoft; we really didn't get the sense that the hardware was at fault. The streaming QuickTime demo didn't fail nearly as spectacularly as we had been led to believe, and Jobs actually seemed pretty good-natured (though jet-lagged) about the whole thing. And far from "storming off the stage," he seemed to wrap things up in a fairly calm and natural manner, bowed to the audience, and departed. Nothing too special there.

There's nothing worse than slowing down for a car wreck only to find that it's just a flat tire. Still, we suppose it's good for Apple's sake that things weren't nearly as nasty as early reports described. Originally we agreed with faithful viewer Anton that Apple was karmically blessed since the keynote wasn't webcast due to satellite troubles, which meant that the damage was constrained to the Tokyo audience instead of watchers world-wide. But now we find ourselves wondering how big a deal people would have made of the keynote glitches if they had seen them happen, instead of reading about how terrible they were. Oh, well; regardless, it's water under the bridge. Here's hoping that the next Expo keynote goes flawlessly-- but, since your AtAT staff will likely be in the audience, we can't help but feel that if we have to witness a road accident firsthand, it might as well be a twenty-car pileup...