Columnist and blogger James Lileks writes some lovely stuff, and his account of setting out to buy a copy of Panther is no different. It's well worth reading the original, but here's a sample:

"How many people did you have last night?" I asked the clerk the next day as he rang up my purchase.

'Eight hundred.'

[...]

My wife could not understand what I was talking about. Eight hundred people, lined up at 8 PM on Friday in a shopping mall, for what did you say, a game?

No. An operating system.

'These people need lives,' she said.

They have them, I explained. They just revolve around operating systems.

'They need real lives. They need children.'

They have them, I explained, and they're - but I stopped there. Leave it be."