Quotes of note from 2008

So many notable quotes, so little space to recount them -- that's the annual conundrum as we think back on the year and recall comments that stuck with us long after they were uttered. We've assembled some of those notable comments from stories we wrote and stories we read and offer them here in not-quite chronological order because we wanted to let Oracle CEO Larry Ellison have the last word.

So much for holiday spirit
"It seems Ellis got fed up with Danny being obsessed with the Wii and refusing to play with him. He was told it was his turn on the Wii next, but he took it a bit too literally and used his secret weapon to sabotage the machine." -- Kerry Emsley, the mother of Danny Emsley and his 4-year-old brother Ellis, who ruined Danny's Wii by, well, weeing on it after his brother refused to share.

"It must surely be counted as a leak." -- Darren Emsley, the boys' father, who spent months trying to find the Wii for Danny, commenting that he hoped the "accident" would be covered by home-owner's insurance.

Lights! Cameras! Action!
"In a funny sort of way, I now know why Britney Spears is so screwed up. I'd never been to this kind of a photo shoot before. So I flew down to La Guardia and was driven to Soho Studios, which has this cool post-industrial look, which is very good for this kind of thing. I went into this studio and immediately had a makeup person, a wardrobe person and a person who was offering me vegetarian smoothies. And I thought, if you lived in a world where people were doing your hair, your face, dressing you and bringing you smoothies, you might really believe that you are somebody more than an average human." -- John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School and the CareGroup, in a January interview with CIO, talking about his appearance in a BlackBerry advertising campaign.

Who cares?
"Let a marketing person loose for 10 minutes and they'll come up with a category. You can say UMPC or MID, what the hell's the difference?" -- Phil McKinney, then-CTO at Hewlett-Packard, expressing exasperation at the Consumer Electronics Show regarding various terminology used to describe ultramobile PCs.

Feeling Blu

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