Well of course our return following a four-day food coma is late; what did you expect? As it must be painfully obvious to anyone with a pulse by now, after seven years on the air and having long expended all supplies of youthful enthusiasm and anything vaguely resembling a work ethic, this show now relies almost entirely on inertia to keep going. See, as long as it's already in motion, it can pretty much coast from one day to the next with minimal creative input from us-- heck, if we had the time, we're pretty sure we could slap together a little code and turn over the day-to-day production to a complex AppleScript.

But once it grinds to a halt for any substantial length of time, getting it moving again is like dragging a side of beef through a tar pit using only our lips and eyelids. Remember that time we were gone for eleven weeks? We actually only took two off, and then spent the next two months squeezing out a return episode. (If we recall correctly, we lost about ten days trying to come up with a better word for "lugubrious," and then lost another three trying to remember why we wanted it in the first place.)

These days, though, we're pretty lucky; Apple seems to be in a holding pattern of sorts, as the company focuses on feeding the left side of the equation "More iPods = Happier Wall Street" until that particular bubble finally pops. Today we awakened from our digestive slumbers to find that both Mac OS Rumors and Think Secret are reporting heavy holiday sales for Apple, so the rest we can practically fill in like a Mad Lib: faithful viewer mrmgraphics (who else?) tells us that, according to CBS MarketWatch, [INSERT ANALYST HERE] (in this particular case it's UBS) raised its price target for AAPL from $66 to $77, citing "a survey of U.S. retailers" showing crazy holiday shoppers snapping up iPods and iMacs like they were boxes of pizza, heroin, and open-minded but attractive naked people. Higher-than-expected holiday sales implies earnings per share for the quarter will come in closer to 46 cents per share, not 43, so party on Wayne and party on Garth.

Don't believe things are quite so cookie-cutter yet? C'mon, it's more predictable than the tides. Check it out, Merrill Lynch also upped its target-- from $61 to $78 per share, because of (you guessed it) stronger-than-anticipated holiday sales so far. Oh, and that flash-based iPod coming in January, of course. Honestly, we should have stayed in the coma and hired a bunch of monkeys with typewriters to take care of the daily "investors says good things, stock gets happier" scenes. We bet we wouldn't even need an infinite number-- just, like, seven or eight. After all, this stuff practically writes itself, and monkeys can be a lot more sarcastic than most people think.

And so we come to the inevitable "hey, look, the stock went up" part: following the price target upgrades from USB and Merrill Lynch, AAPL tippy-toed up another $3.89 today. That's 6 percent-- not too shabby. Put another way, anyone who owns a hundred shares of AAPL made just about enough on paper today to buy a 40 GB iPod; sweeeeet. In after-hours trading, AAPL was flirting ever-so-closely with Apple's highest stock price ever. So keep on grinning, investors; the stock's got nowhere to go but up!

Or down. Technically, we think it can go down, too. But keep grinning anyway-- it looks good on you.

Okay, if you weren't born in the early-to-mid-'70s, just pretend like you were while we ask you this question: can you believe it's the 20th anniversary of Band Aid's first release? Man. We've still got a copy of "Do They Know It's Christmas?"-- the original, baby!-- on vinyl in a box somewhere several hundred miles west of here. Now it's two decades later, and they've put out a (vastly less-popular, apparently) redone version in the UK-- but what's this? It's not available at the iTunes Music Store in any country. Panic! Consternation! Uproar!

Somebody out there really, really cares about this. We can feel it.

Honestly, there is some drama here; indeed, the media's trying to make it sound like some epic battle between the forces of good and evil, stirring tales of which will one day be passed down from generation to generation in the sacred songs of the tribal elders. Interestingly enough, though, it's Apple that seems to be getting cast in the "force of evil" role, as it plays the unfeeling monopolistic market leader preventing zillions of sales of this song that would wipe out all disease, famine, and human suffering if only The Man weren't keeping it down. Faithful viewer Bradley Bishop clued us in to the way in which several news outlets (for instance, The Times) are reporting that Apple has "refused to sell" the new song "because it would damage the company's dominance of the download market." Boo hiss and all that, right?

But is it really Apple that's refusing to play ball? The deal-killer here is apparently that Universal, the label handling the song, is insisting that Apple sell the song for £1.49, almost double the iTMS UK's standard 79p price, because it "must maximize the cash raised from each sale." Now, as we've already seen, Apple certainly isn't averse to bending some iTMS rules in order to help out a worthy charity, provided that it doesn't have to mess with its customers to do it. Apple sacrificing its cut of all sales of ASAP, for example, doesn't affect the customer experience one iota; selling a popular song at a different price, though, would disrupt the uniformity of the iTMS price structure and undermine one of the service's most attractive features.

According to The Times, "because of iTunes's dominance of the online market, Apple's refusal to sell the track could reduce the revenues raised through online sales by 70 percent." That casts Apple as the genetic hybrid of Scrooge and the Grinch, but anyone with a passing acquaintance with the concept of "math" will probably agree that if Apple were allowed to sell the song at its normal 79p rate, the increased sales to the iPod crowd would more than offset the lower price. Why should Universal worry about "maximizing the cash raised from each sale" instead of maximizing the cash taken in overall? Especially since Universal has nothing to lose, since its per-sale cost of song download sales is practically nonexistent. Not letting Apple sell the song for its regular 79p price is effectively depriving the charity of tens of thousands of pounds, so who's really "refusing" to lend the Africans a hand, here?

Now, we may be the poster children for unchecked corporate paranoia, but let's not forget that the major labels (Universal included) have been trying to strongarm Apple into pricing popular songs higher than others for ages now. What better way to force the issue than to hide behind a charity song and make Apple look like the bad guy? Allowing the "fastest selling single of the year" to be priced higher than others is the first step down a slippery slope, after all. Not that we're saying that Apple's a saint or anything, but in light of the company's contribution to the ASAP project (without so much as a press release to shine its halo), we're far more inclined to believe in the sincerity of Apple's charitable efforts than Universal's. C'mon, who'd you rather have marrying your sister: Steve Jobs or an RIAA lawyer?

It's always a shame when one special occasion interferes with another, isn't it? Just ask anyone whose birthday happens to be within three days of Christmas how many "combined" presents they get and you'll see what we mean. So we have to apologize to fans of Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day for our lack of celebration last Friday, but what with Thanksgiving and everything we were comatose at the time, and it's really tough to celebrate anything with a pulse rate of 40. But had we been conscious, we surely would have tackled the juicy topic of a UK governmental Windows XP upgrade gone horribly awry. In fact, you know what? There's no way we can force ourselves to sit on this for another week, so let's have last week's WO-TM-BD right now. Better late than never, right?

So here's the skinny: faithful viewer N Gray tipped us off to an article in The Register which reports that the UK's Department for Work and Pensions was doing a trial network upgrade of "about seven" desktop PCs from Windows 2000 to Windows XP last Monday. Unfortunately, something went slightly wrong: instead of seven PCs getting upgraded, every PC connected to the network "received a partial, but fatal, 'upgrade,'" and when the dust had settled, "75-80 percent of the DWP's 80,000 PCs" had been blue-screened and rendered unbootable. Whoops! That's sort of the IT equivalent of trying to make pancakes and accidentally blowing up Oregon.

Reportedly even while Microsoft consultants "flown in from the U.S." were feverishly working to restore the 60,000 casualties of a seven-machine upgrade, the DWP was putting a happy spin on the whole mess, insisting that the department's computers were actually working just fine, with the tiny exception of "80 percent of desktop computers" that were "not connecting through to the mainframe systems." (Oh, is that all.) But the emergency payments system was "working perfectly" (once it finally came online two days later, that is), and we're sure that by now things are largely back to normal, except for what we imagine must be a massive hole in the department's IT budget following the disappearance of the sort of cash that was likely charged by those imported consultants. Still, live and learn.

So there you have it: use Windows, kill most of your desktops. In the end, though, can we really blame a botched upgrade of biblical proportions on Microsoft? Well, no, not really, except perhaps in two limited ways. The first is that if the upgrade process had been more straightforward and bulletproof in the first place, even the dimmest bulb on the tree might have been able to upgrade seven desktops without nuking 60,000 more. The second is that if Windows weren't as mediocre as it is, maybe it wouldn't be the official operating system choice of the terminally feeble-minded. Ya think?