Judging by the interminable lists of product update releases to be found at various Mac-centric news sites around the 'net, it looks like we're facing yet another drama lull. What, no more high-profile testosterone-drenched posturing between IDG World Expo and Uncle Steve's Boston-bashing minions? Well, we should've known it was too good to last. So until someone slips some steroids into Charlie Greco's morning Wheaties and he publicly announces that if Steve Jobs sets foot within a hundred feet of the Moscone Center this January he'll personally turn the Mercurial One's liver into a stylish winter hat complete with ear flaps, well, we're going to have to resort to telling you about SuperDrive kryptonite.

Don't get too excited; it's not nearly as thrilling as it sounds. It's just that, some time ago, Pioneer Electronics announced that several models of its DVD-recording drives (including the DVR-A03 and DVR-A04 that were used as SuperDrives in Apple iMacs and Power Macs) contain a firmware bug that has a few "issues" with the new high-speed 4x DVD-R and 2x DVD-RW media that are supposed to ship later this year-- to wit, if you try to use said high-speed media in an affected SuperDrive, you "may cause damage to both the loaded disc and to the drive/recorder." Zoinks! Imagine burning your iMovie magnum opus of little Johnny's sixth birthday party to a 4x disc to send to Grandma and watching sticky black smoke issue forth from the frosty white domed base of your iMac. (Okay, so maybe it is a little thrilling.)

So if you're looking to slap 4x DVD-R media into your SuperDrive, put simply, don't. At least, not until you've read what Apple has to say on the subject, checked via System Profiler whether your SuperDrive may be one of the buggy batch, and then applied the firmware update that makes your drive impervious to the nastier effects of the Evil Media™. And even after you've done all that, still don't; while the firmware update will prevent 4x DVD-R discs from reducing your beloved SuperDrive to a twisted lump of smoking plastic, it will make your 2x drive burn to 4x media at... 1x. In other words, post-firmware update, SuperDrive kryptonite won't kill, but it'll still weaken. (Think Krimson instead of green.) Stick to 2x media for the best results.

Oh, and about that magical firmware update: so far, it seems that Apple has only posted one for the iMac and Mac OS X. If you're still using Mac OS 9 on your iMac, or if you've got an affected SuperDrive-equipped Power Mac instead (like us), you're going to have to wait; Apple promises that other updates will be "posted shortly." In the meantime, we recommend stationing armed guards in front of your SuperDrive twenty-four hours a day just to make absolutely sure that Lex Luthor doesn't sneak in and expose your system to 4x media. (On second thought, that's just silly. As if mere armed guards could stop an evil genius like Lex...)

Hey, snarky comments wouldn't be real snarky comments if they didn't occasionally come back to bite us in the ass. Does anyone remember last month when we mentioned that, at the height of our last Anya-induced marathon hiatus, AtAT's broadcasts had become even less frequent than updates by the Naked Mole Rat and Mac OS Rumors? Well, faithful viewer Ryan Mongold sure does-- and he also remembers this quote: "...all we need now is for the classic rumors format AppleInsider to rise phoenix-like from its only-a-forum-now grave and commence updating more often than us, at which point we'll just have to toss our sorry mortal coils under the wheels of a speeding laundry truck or something..." Gee, care to take a wild flailing stab at the newfound relevance of that statement?

That's right, kiddies, AppleInsider is back-- sort of. Loading the site's home page no longer redirects immediately to the Forums, and there's a whole slew of new(ish) articles that hadn't been there previously. Apparently AI has been bought out by SlapTech, a fledgling Mac news 'n' rumors site that just started dishing its dirt back in May, and all of the SlapTech articles have now been transferred into AI's content databases. (We linked to SlapTech once in July, when they were reporting the imminent arrival of iTunes for Windows-- which wasn't quite correct, but hey, they were right about .Mac, so they've already got a higher accuracy ratio than mandated by the International Mac Rumors Veracity Act of 1996.)

Still, our laundry-truck suicide pact was predicated not just on AppleInsider's return, but also on it being updated more often than we broadcast new episodes-- so we're not exactly doing deep knee bends at the curb just yet. We've actually been doing quite well with maintaining broadcast regularity, having missed just three non-holiday weekdays in the past four weeks. Granted, in order to maintain this schedule we've pretty much had to forgo sleep entirely and eventually our heads are going to catch fire from the inside, but until that happens, we'll just be drinking coffee from really big mugs and looking forward to mining plot twists from what we're sure will be AI's imminent flood of insidery goodness. Welcome back, fellas.

So yet another minor drawback we've discovered about producing AtAT at completely absurd hours of the day-- hours that we formerly considered to be fictional, such as "five o'clock in the morning"-- is this: things that, when viewed by daylight and processed by a well-rested mind, would normally just be mildly disturbing take on a depth of horror so profound we find ourselves paralyzed by a cold and cosmic Lovecraftian dread that chills our very souls to the fragile foundations of our sanity. (On the other hand, we get to have near-real-time email conversations with faithful AtAT viewers in places with ridiculously inconvenient time zones, like Australia and the Netherlands, so it's a wash. G'day, Chris Menz! Goedendag, Gerben Wierda!)

But oh yeah, back to the horror. Funny we should mention the Netherlands, because that's where this latest bone-chilling development originated. You are, of course, aware of the lovely and talented Ms. Feiss, arguably the most famous of Apple's "Switchers," and certainly the most influential? Well, now you can look at a whole slew of Dutch people dressing up like her. We know that it's madness to stare, yet we cannot look away.

The twenty-eight photos are presented as an alleged "Ellen/Alan Feiss Look-a-Like Contest" thrown by a Dutch site called MacFreak, but considering that Samuel L. Jackson suffering from a severe allergic reaction to shellfish would look more like Ellen than two-thirds of these "contestants" do, we're not buying that for a second.

We see instead hard evidence that pockets of real, scary, honest-to-goodness Ellen cultists are amassing all over the globe, adopting the garb of their spiritual leader and biding their time until the day when Her Feissness gives the word to attack. On that fateful day, legions of green-shirted, grey-hooded, red-eyed fanatics will swarm the streets, striking down all who might dare to oppose the fated supremacy and blinding destiny of The Inarticulate One. And thus will begin the Feiss Dynasty, with one world united under the rule of She Who Beeps.

Of course, there's just one thing standing in the way of that whole scenario: Steve Jobs is also walking the path of his foretold destiny as the single ruler of the planet. We sense that we are hurtling toward an inevitable epic battle between The Mercurial One and The Mistress of Bummer, and the titan left standing will rule atop a pile of broken bodies taller than the tallest mountain.

Then again, that's not the scary part. This is the scary part. You know, we almost welcome this apocalypse...