April 1, 2026 is the 50th anniversary of the founding of Apple, Inc. That’s a golden jubilee! I’m not quite that old, but for my birthday in 2001 ago my mother gave me a gold Apple logo pendant that she’d had a manufacturing jeweler make for me. My oldest brother, a staunch Windows user, gave me a copy of Mac OS X (back in those days, Apple still charged for operating systems.) A year earlier, my sister had got Steve Wozniak to call me on my birthday, and not long after that, Woz had bought me an iBook to replace a laptop that was stolen. So you can see how these were perfectly appropriate gifts — I did, thanks to Woz, have a Mac capable of running Mac OS X. This was a few years before that time Steve Wozniak taught me to Segway and then played Tetris and pranks through a concert, but that’s not quite relevant to this story — it’s just to help set the scene for yet another ridiculous Apple story.

Here’s what that Apple pendant looked like in 2015, pictured with a Space Shuttle orbiter pendant I’d just bought at Kennedy Space Center:

It was still in pretty good nick at that point.

Over the years, the leaf got bent backwards a little, and the chain broke and was replaced or fixed a few times, but I never lost the pendant.

On December 10, 2025, I arrived at work to discover the chain hanging open on my neck, snapped. The pendant was gone. I checked everywhere I’d walked in the building, and later checked Joey’s car, the work (non-space) shuttle, and various places around the house where it might have fallen off, but it was nowhere to be found. I could only hope that my golden Apple had ended up being inanimate happily every after near an Apple building.

The lovely Joey Marianer (to whom, in a ridiculous stroke of luck which can only foreshadow the end of this story, I am married!) bought me a smaller Apple logo pendant for Christmas! How sweet! So I got the chain repaired and all was right with the world.

On 28 January, 2026, Joey and I pulled up at the Park & Ride whence I take a (non-space) shuttle to work. As I opened the door to get out, I saw my original Apple pendant right there on the ground next to the car. I made excited noises, passed it to Joey, and hurried to get on the (still not space) shuttle.

Later I was able to inspect the pendant’s shiny new battle scars. Here’s what it looked like after 49 days (that’s a generous count of Liz Truss’s time as Prime Minister of the UK!) in a parking lot being run over:

Isn’t it pretty? The loop at the back which the chain goes through is bent, but still open enough that the chain can fit through it. I could probably get it ‘fixed’ but I don’t want to erase a story like this.

Here are both the pendants together, with some cheap spacer beads between them, shown over the 50th anniversary T-shirt I wore today:

I don’t have an Apple 50th Anniversary T-shirt, so I made do with a CERN one. On the subject of CERN, check out their April Fools joke today.

And on the subject of space (not shuttles), check out the Artemis II mission which launched today!

And finally, on the subject of Apple’s 50th anniversary, check out this video of an event at the Computer History Museum a few weeks ago. I haven’t watched it yet (I was going to watch it today but barely have time to write this blog post) but I’m sure it’s interesting.

In unrelated news, Joey and I sang some Dumb Parody Ideas at MarsCon last month (one about rubber duck debugging, one about garbanzo beans, and one which we’ll need to make a better recording of) but I’ll make a separate post about them later. I also went on JoCo Cruise 2026 and will be uploading many hours of video of that to YouTube in the coming months.