Help! Help! We're trapped in a time vortex! This is a Friday episode, but due to some strange wrinkle in the space-time continuum, it feels like... like Tuesday or something. Weird. Actually, though, it's not so bad; we're possessed by an odd sense of calm and an innate knowledge of which TV episodes to avoid well in advance of their air dates. So at least we've got that going for us.

Anyway, while we're in this time bubble, we may as well take a break from the action to catch up on Apple's retail plans for 2005. Though the Apple Store Nagoya Sakae launched just last month, we're pretty sure that, so far this year, Apple hasn't opened a single new store on U.S. soil. Don't worry, though-- that'll change, and probably not too far in the distant future. (Of course, we'll probably still be stuck here in the recent past, but don't worry about us-- we've got plenty of sandwiches on hand.) The ifo Apple Store reports that, in addition to whatever known locations just haven't gotten around to throwing a grand opening yet, five new sites have been confirmed on Apple's roster: The Florida Mall® in Orlando, Penn Square Mall in Oklahoma City (Apple's first store in OK); Garden State Plaza in Paramus, NJ; Northbrook Court in the swanky northwest suburbs of Chicago; and The Fashion Centre at Pentagon City in Arlington, VA.

Yes, Pentagon City. As in, practically across the street from the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense. We know; steps in Apple's master plan to seize power from all major ruling governments, enslave the human race, and sell us all as tasty livestock to whichever intergalactic lizard species bids highest on eBay are usually a lot more subtle than this one. We can only assume that the end time is rapidly approaching, and we take some solace in the knowledge that, due to our current time vortex issues, we'll be eaten four or five days later than everyone else. Woo-hoo!!

The Northbrook Court mall, on the other hand, plays a far less pivotal role in Apple's plans for world domination, but is mildly significant to the AtAT staff in a personal sense primarily because Jack's stepfather Trucker Ed used to make deliveries there. The manager of the Disney Store repeatedly insisted (seriously, without a trace of irony) that all delivery personnel adopt the perky House o' Mouse attitude when dropping off merchandise there, and she practically had an aneurysm every time the recalcitrant Ed identified himself with the name of another random well-known serial killer.

Why is this significant, you ask? Well, it's not, really, except that we can't help noticing that the Disney Store is conspicuously absent from Northbrook Court's current store directory. For all we know, that location closed years ago, but it's interesting in light of the fact that Apple's retail expansion into the South Shore Plaza in Braintree, MA (where you, too, can drive by the houses where the New Kids on the Block grew up!) has reportedly been on hold until the adjacent Disney Store there finally shut down so Apple could swoop in, perform the necessary purifying rituals to cleanse the site of Michael Eisner's soul-sucking karmic influence, knock through a wall or two, and set about the massive construction necessary to incorporate the space into yet another Apple retail paradise on earth. So if the Disney Store in Northbrook Court recently shut its doors, you might now have a pretty good idea of where the new Apple store will go.

Anyway, so that's the latest on Apple's upcoming stores-- or, rather, it was the latest as of four days ago, but who's counting? Meanwhile, we don't suppose any of you could commandeer a tachyon field and send a few stock quotes and lottery numbers back here to us in the recent past, hmmmm? And maybe some mustard. We're out of mustard.

Speaking of the whole Eisner-Jobs mutual resentment and personal dislike for one another (and you can't buy segues that cool), did you happen to notice that Steve apparently really does ascribe to the notion that the best revenge is living well? As you all know, in addition to being the CEO of Apple, Steve also just happens to be CEO of some company called Pixar, which has apparently had some moderate success with a string of computer-animated movies distributed under the Disney name-- and by "moderate success," we mean, of course, "enough box office cash to form a small planet." But animosity between Steve and Mr. Eisner has left the contract between the companies set to expire at the end of this year, at which point Disney will no longer be able to sponge off of the vast sums of filthy lucre that Pixar's new movies will continue to bring in-- which is just one more reason why some shareholders have been screaming for Eisner's head on a pike for years, now.

Well, the contract is still in effect until January, but Disney must be taking a long, painful look at the cash it'll be giving up starting next year, because Pixar recently announced its quarterly earnings, and according to an official press release, the company's annual results for 2004 were its best ever. (Gee, sound familiar? Must be a Steve thing.)

What's interesting is that Steve attributes Pixar's record earnings in part to "the continuing success of Finding Nemo on home video"-- a movie that Eisner reportedly slammed to Disney's board of directors before it was released in 2003 as he predicted that it would be a relative flop. The New York Post reports that in DisneyWar, James B. Stewart reveals that Eisner penned a memo shortly after seeing Nemo that read, "this will be a reality check for those guys. It's OK, but nowhere near as good as their previous films. Of course, they think it's great. Trust me, it's not, but it will open."

Wow. Now that shows a man with a discerning eye, right? Nemo, of course, went on to net well over half a billion dollars at the box office alone and accounted for almost a quarter of Disney's entire 2003 revenue-- not even counting Nemo DVD sales, which were astronomical in their own right, what with 8 million copies having been sold on the very first day of availability. Now, Disney claims that Eisner "wrote the memo based on an earlier version of the film before it was completed," and sure, we've got the benefit of hindsight, here, but it really just seems unfathomable to us that anyone could see even a rough cut of Nemo and conclude that it'd wind up being Pixar's slice of humble pie. The fact that the guy in charge of Disney could make that mistake, well, that explains a lot about the quality of Disney's non-Pixar animated releases in recent years. No wonder Steve has no desire to work with this guy; having the personality of a grizzly bear with raging hemorrhoids can be overlooked, but not knowing what's good? That's unforgivable.

Hey, look-- it's Virtual Friday, and you all know what that means: it's Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day! We know, you've had to do without your weekly dose for a while, what with our recent production outages and all... which is why, instead of just skipping a show like we did last week, we're bringing you Friday on a Tuesday, just so you can get your anti-Redmond mojo workin'! Blatant disregard for the days of the week, all for the sake of getting in a jab or two at the Gates Brigade and thus restoring meaning to your otherwise empty little lives? Clearly we deserve some sort of humanitarian award or something.

But we'll worry about commendations later, because this is too good to leave alone for another minute: faithful viewer Glen Carpenter dished up a CNET article which reveals that Tablet PC users-- yes, all six of them-- are currently tussling with "significant performance problems" after having upgraded to Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005. Apparently there's a memory leak or something, and the onscreen panel that handles stylus input (as in, the thing that makes a Tablet PC a Tablet PC in the first place) hogs more and more of the system's resources as time goes on, eventually starving other processes and grinding things to a near-halt. Bummer.

But is it really fair to bag on Microsoft just because of this one bug, glaring though it may be? After all, every software release has its glitches. True, Microsoft's products do seem to have way more than their fair share; remember Microsoft's own list of 63,000 known and documented bugs in Windows 2000 when it shipped? But even so, we're thinking that it's not really the bug that's bash-worthy, so much as the remedy: "Until a fix is ready, Microsoft is advising those running the OS to reboot their machines daily." Which is sort of the tech support equivalent of the classic patient/doctor exchange, "Doc, it hurts when I do this"/"Stop doing that."

Actually, come to think of it, even the remedy isn't worthy of much ridicule, since Microsoft is perfectly forthright in saying that the daily reboot is just a workaround until a permanent fix in the form of a software patch is ready. So is Microsoft actually bashproof in this whole scenario? Ha! Right. No, if you want the real bash-worthy stuff, look no further than the company's rationalization of the performance-drag workaround: "The Microsoft representative said that most users already reboot daily and said those who do so are unlikely to notice any performance problems."

Daily reboots as a matter of course? What, do these people figure that since Microsoft was kind enough to give them a one-finger salute, they're somehow obligated to use it at least once a day? Or are Tablet PCs just so unstable in the first place that crashing daily is business as usual? Because neither is exactly flattering to Microsoft and its customers. Why, we can just see the billboards now: "Tablet PCs-- Generally Useless and Widely Unpopular, But At Least You Get To Restart Them Every Day, Whether They're Saddled With Performance Bugs Or Not!" We sense a Clio in the offing.