What with a steady stream of anticompetitive behavior, bug-ridden software, security compromises, virus epidemics, etc., there's always plenty of perfectly valid reasons to criticize the Redmond Beast on Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day. For instance, we could tackle the Internet Explorer patch that faithful viewer Andy Mushynski brought to our attention, which was so critical it made Microsoft break its once-a-month Patch Day schedule. Or we could raise the topic of how, as faithful viewer Gerben Wierda pointed out last week, Microsoft more or less personally bribed the president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association with a 10 million dollar "bonus" to get him to settle a European antritrust suit, against the wishes of several members of the association itself. Always plenty of grist for the mill, as they say.

But somehow none of that stuff is ever as satisfying as making vaguely unjustified personal attacks on Steve "Ape With a Body Wax" Ballmer. Go figure.

So away we go! You may recall that a couple of weeks ago, Ballmer told a convention crowd that Microsoft Ubermeister Bill Gates receives roughly 4 million spam messages a day. At the time we were only the slightest bit incredulous, since sometimes it feels like we get at least half that many ourselves. Had we actually sat and thought about it for a while, though, it might have occurred to us that an average of 46 spams a second of every minute of every hour of every godforsaken spam-soaked day does, in fact, sound a little high, even for someone who reportedly has a whole department at Microsoft filtering his mail for him.

But here's the thing: faithful viewer insaneTroll (hey, it takes all kinds of fruit to make fruit cup) dished us a Detroit Free Press article which reports that "Ballmer said he misspoke a few days back when he was quoted as saying Gates gets 4 million e-mails a day." What Ballmer insists he meant to say was that Gates gets 4 million messages a year, "most of it junk." Which is just a slight difference.

We're not saying that isn't still a lot of spam, mind you; 4 million messages a year breaks down to seven or eight messages a minute, which is still a lot to sift through, and we don't envy the poor Microsoftians who have to separate the wheat from the spam before it gets served up to Billy-Boy. But the fact is, if Ballmer was off by a factor of 365 when talking about Bill's spam rate, that casts a pall of potential inaccuracy over a lot of his other public statements, too-- and not just the ones involving math.

Perhaps sensing this with some sort of primitive animal intuition that functions as an evolutionary precursor to intelligence, Ballmer took the opportunity to review some of his recent statements and issued a few more corrections, just for the record. When he was quoted earlier this year as saying that "there has never been a platform more open" than Windows," what he'd actually meant to say was "Windows comes in a box that you can open." "The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'" was actually supposed to have come out of his mouth as "I commonly listen to music on stolen iPods." And when he said that "Linux violates more than 228 patents," he really intended to say "ook ook, fire bad, give me a banana."

Lord help him, he's trying. Given the evolutionary state of his brain, you really have to give him credit-- and also, if you don't want him to lunge snarling at your neck, some sort of fruit.