I interpert Palo alto to be a song of extreme apathy and a taste for cold comfort.  Tom puts us in a city of the future were everyone is "happy and made for life".  Yet there is a desperate happiness since he has no time to talk to anyone except his boss.  He's to busy to see anyone and no one has the time to wait to see him.  The last verse really centers on the tragic yet comedic part of the story when a nuclear war occurs and he is living in his "beautiful bomb shelter" with no one to talk to except himself.  When there was life he communicated with no one and now in nuclear armegedeon he communicates with no one.  Still sitting in his fall out shelter he wonders I'm o.k., how are you?.

By Abhishek Joshi

I read a book called "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland, beacause it had a cool cover. In it, some Microsoft programmers leave Microsoft and move to Palo Alto (in "Silicon Valley") where they set up their own softwar company. The whole book is really about how modern people relate to each other and themselves, but PAlo Alto is portrayed as being full of compuer programmers and businessmen. This song seems to refer to the way the town is described ny Coupland. It sounds weird, but there's loads of Yorke/Coupland parallels. In "Girlfriend in a Coma" Coupland talks about "Airbags" a bit (they occur in a premonition in the 1970's) and there's a page in "Microserfs" where the main character's "subconscious" writes "Airbag" on his computer. In "Generation X" there's a chanpter called "I am not a target market" or something to that effect, a variation of which is written on the front of one of the videos (Meeting People is Easy?). Also, in "Shampoo Planet" by Coupland, the main characters' mother says something like, [we all get old and tired] "No surprises." I might just be oversensitised to this kind of thing, but I encourage people to read Coupland (he's pretty famous apparantly) and make their own minds up. Any info on whether Thom is a Coupland fan?

By Jess

The general idea of the song seems to be this- Palo Alto, of course, is in Silicon Valley, CA. Otherwise known as the birthplace of computer technology. It is obvious that there is a reference to the album entitled "ok computer" with the lyrics, "I'm OK, how are you, thanks for asking...", as in, the speaker is addressing his computer. While the song relates the bleakness of some apocalyptic world, the speaker is ironically asked such things by his computer (ie, a screensaver, or some other such thing) "how are you?". This song demonstrates the coldness and indifference to human suffering that is a consequence of so-called "progress".