Oh, the wonders and perils of this thing you mortals call "sleep"! After four consecutive days of having our minds caressed by its lethean wiles, our first night of withdrawal after its subsequently forced absence sent our brains into throes of creative anarchy. (By the way, why isn't this stuff regulated by some government agency? It's far more addictive than heroin. Not that we'd, uh, know or anything.) The result? The first scene we produced in our newly sleep-deprived state prompted several "best scene ever" plaudits from the peanut gallery, but at what cost? Was it worth our very souls?

See, a faithful viewer who shall remain nameless-- the person works at Apple, you understand, and "Communication with AtAT" is apparently one of the Seven Deadly Apple Sins right alongside "Tackiness" and "Halitosis"-- took us to task for blithely swinging our chainsaw wit in the general direction of Steve Ballmer's children by "implying that they are hideous abominations." This came as something as a shock to us in the harsh light of day, because we certainly never intended to do any such thing; voicing astonishment that Ballmer had successfully reproduced-- twice-- was merely the natural expression of our fundamental disbelief that any woman would let the guy near her without acting under the influence of strong narcotics and also suffering the long-term effects of a major head injury. But hey, the heart wants what it wants, and we're sure that Mrs. Ballmer is a wonderful woman.

Meanwhile, making a reference to Ballmer's kids behaving in a simian manner was intended solely as a comment on Ballmer's own obvious genetic divergence from our own species; in other words, we meant to imply only that his offspring had to be monkeys, not ugly monkeys. Clearly our aim was a little off. Attacking a 12-year-old by hinting that he's a "hideous abomination"? We swear, the thought never crossed our minds. But then, we did mention that he was the offspring of Steve Ballmer, so what else could people have assumed we meant? So we're sorry, because after reviewing the scene in question we see that we clearly went way over the line, and we fully agree that we never should have let a couple of innocent kids get so close to the spatter. After all, do we want our own kid judged by the world at large just because her dad happens to be a drooling, obsessive freak scribbling a seven-year manifesto in the corner? Of course not.

So Ballmerkids, on the off-off-off chance that you're tuning in right now, you have our sincere apologies. No one gets to choose who his dad is, and indeed, most kids wind up rebelling so completely against the ideologies and actions of their parents that you both clearly have the potential to wind up being two of the coolest people ever to walk the face of this here earth. So again, sorry, guys, and don't let the 3 AM rantings of a dork who actually spends untold hours every freakin' day cranking out this tripe get you down. Honestly, we're not worth it.

So. When we say something stupid, we can offer a public apology and blame the booze and the voices in our heads. Can Steve Ballmer do the same?

Well, sort of, but we wouldn't exactly call it an "apology." Our scene that inadvertently caught the Ballmer offspring in the crossfire was only produced in the first place because Ballmer had painted every iPod owner as a thief via his very public comment to the press that "the most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen.'" A day after that assertion brought flaming retribution down on his head (and, sadly, the heads of his family) from every corner of the law-abiding iPod-using globe, faithful viewer David Poves informs us that, according to a Silicon.com followup, Ballmer's only comment on the whole sordid affair was this: "I don't know what I said exactly, but it was baaaaad!" So, if nothing else, we finally know what the non-ape genetic makeup in Ballmer's DNA is: apparently he's two parts ape, one part sheep. (Insert obligatory predictable reference to "following the herd" here. Flock. Whatever.)

He doesn't remember what he said? Yeesh, given that a) he'd only said it at most two days before and b) he's been quoted incessantly by every publication on this planet (and several on Mars and Venus) ever since, you'd think it wouldn't take much to jog his memory, but maybe the narcotics-and-head-injury thing is more widespread than we thought. If he honestly doesn't remember, we hope he seeks medical attention before Microsoft's investors find out, and if he's just trying to weasel out of owning up to a monumentally dumb comment to the press, well, we bet at least his kids would have the backbone to accept the consequences...

It's weird how schizo these mega-huge companies can act, isn't it? They're so sprawling and heterogeneous following multiple corporate buyouts and reorgs that different departments act like different companies, and sometimes there even are whole different companies simply operating under the same corporate parent-company brand. Case in point: yesterday we pointed out how AT&T Wireless took a potentially interesting concept-- a downloadable music store for mobile phones-- and implemented it as something lamer than an octopus with eight bad ankles and nine bad knees: while you can indeed use supported cell phones to browse and buy songs, you still have to go back to your Wintel PC to download and play them after you've bought them. And even once you do that, you can't install the songs on your phone and take your music with you. Duh.

So how is it that AT&T Wireless could come up with such a ludicrous "competitor" to the iTunes Music Store, and yet AT&T as a whole could do something as fundamentally cool as considering ditching Windows completely and replacing each and every one of "tens of thousands" of desktop PCs in the entire corporation with Macs running Mac OS X? Faithful viewer N Gray tipped us off to a CNET article reporting that the company's info czar has tasked a team of researchers to "assess the appropriateness of desktop operating systems for the company" by "testing how Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X stack up on security, reliability, and total cost of ownership." This is a curious move, because IT types are notorious for avoiding total cost of ownership figures like the plague, since one of the ways that Macs wind up with lower TCO numbers than Wintels is because they require less IT manpower to maintain. It's a self-preservation thing; kinda slimy, really, but can you blame them?

Anyway, for whatever reason, the IT top dog at AT&T is testing the waters. But don't get your hopes up too high, since an AT&T spokesperson is clear that "most likely, AT&T will stick with Windows, because Microsoft is addressing many of [the] problems associated with its desktop software, including security flaws." And if the company did choose to ditch Windows, we'd think that initial costs would, as usual, outweigh TCO and Linux would win out because the OS itself is free and it would run on AT&T's existing "tens of thousands" of computers. The Mac is clearly the Nader in this race. Still, the very notion that Mac OS X is even on the ballot speaks volumes about the Mac platform's increasing street cred among corporate enterprise types these days. It'll probably be a good long while before giganto-huge corporations seriously consider buying fleets of Macs, but half a decade ago the idea that it could ever happen at all was two steps beyond laughable, so with some hard work, Apple may win one of these big enterprise contracts yet.

By the way, even if you are enough of a grinning optimist to think that AT&T will see the light and blow $10 million or more to replace all of its Wintels with Macs, the company doesn't expect to make its decision until "the end of next year or early 2006." Ah, business at the speed of treacle. Come to think of it, maybe that's why AT&T's CIO is "evaluating options" even though Windows is apparently the foregone conclusion: he gets to keep buying "test machines" on the company dime that will never be used as actual corporate desktops. We can hear the CIO now: "Is the 17-inch PowerBook in yet? Because I need to 'test' it for a year or so. How about the 20-inch iMac G5? My daughter's going to 'test' that one at home." Pretty sneaky, sis.

And for your dose of legal drama this week, there's a little more action in that Beatles vs. Apple lawsuit that's been kind of quiet for the past few weeks. You may recall that the last real dirt we heard on the matter was that some "unnamed source" was quoted by everyone from Variety to Bass & Walleye Boats Magazine as saying that a settlement was right around the corner and it would be the biggest non-class action settlement in history. Actual named legal experts later claimed that was about as likely as Ringo shaving his head, painting it purple, and spending a year clinging to a vine "to see how grapes live," but hey, it made for some fun speculation.

So now the question is, was the original report so far off the mark? Because faithful viewer Frank Davis informs us that Apple has apparently just fired the entire legal team that had been handling the case; according to "reports on the Web" cited by PC Pro, the company told Linklaters to take a hike because the law firm had "suggested a record-breaking settlement of around $36 million." Apple evidently thinks it has a stronger case than that (and based on our ignorant layperson analysis of the terms of the original agreement, so do we), so it's retained the services of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer to keep fighting the good fight. If nothing else, the new firm's got a much cooler name.

Granted, "reports on the Web" aren't inherently any more trustworthy than "unnamed sources," but we take what we can get. Anyway, we'll know soon enough, because a change of lawyers surely must be a matter of public record, as will be the delay in the start of the trial now that Apple has hired new representation. Here's hoping that the new lawyers show less of a propensity to roll over and spend its clients' money instead of slugging it out in court and giving us all the trial drama entertainment to which we're so obviously entitled.

As for that $36 million figure getting tossed around, does anyone else look at that and think, "not too shabby"? Especially if it includes Apple getting temporary exclusive rights to putting the Beatles catalog on the iTunes Music Store, and especially especially if the agreement makes this recurring hassle go away forever, e.g. Apple gains the right to use its trade mark on any flippin' product it wants, up to and including music downloads, music players, music media, musical instruments, Broadway musicals (including but not limited to The Music Man), musical fruit, and musical chairs. After all, Apple's got five or six billion in cash sitting around, so what's $36 mil for carte blanche to do what it wants in one of its fastest growing markets? But that's why you're the judge and we're the law-talkin' guys.