As most of you know, Bill Gates is poised to foist the new Vista operating system on us at the end of this year. — Probably — Like all preceding Microsoft OS releases, this one has been delayed several times, and may well be again. But it will ship eventually. And then we’ll wait and wait for the suckers, ummm… “early adopters”, to debug the thing. Then Microsoft will release Service Pack 1 to fix all the really scary bugs. Then the rest of us can upgrade. So we’re pretty safe until deep into 2008.

In the meantime, we can chuckle along with the Latvians. Apparently, “Vista” means “fowl” in Latvia. And while Bill Gates does vaguely resemble a chicken, he’s no Frank Purdue. More importantly, “Vista” is also slang for “frumpy woman”, which isn’t an entirely disingenuous description of most of Microsoft’s products. And it would seem that not a lot of funny things happen in Latvia, so they are really yukking it up over this one.

Personally, I’m pushing for adopting the slang term in English. Wouldn’t you really like to say, “Oh yeah, she’s a real vista.” Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. It has a nice ring to it. Unless it’s ringing for you I suppose.