Attention, aspiring celebrity stalkers! Do you dream of the ignominy of being hauled bodily out of a star's house by local law enforcement officials while you tearfully beg said star to marry you and fulfill the destiny of a thousand past lifetimes? Of course you do-- who doesn't? But you probably aren't sure where to start, and unfortunately very few institutions of higher learning or Internet-based correspondence schools offer classes in stalking, so most are left to fend for themselves, progressing in fits and starts through the inefficient method of brute force trial and error. In terms of stalker education, we're still in the Dark Ages here.

Sadly, we can't really change that, what with the judge's decree never to seek accreditation again or assemble more than three people in a single physical location (and even then only under the watchful eye of our parole officer), but we can at least give you a handy little tip that may save you a lot of time in your efforts: when you're scoping out a celebrity to stalk, skip those loser "maps to the star's homes" and just hang out at a major metropolitan "flagship" Apple retail store until somebody famous stops in; apparently you won't have to wait very long. Faithful viewer Nick tipped us off to a WIRED article about celebrity Apple retail store sightings, and the guest list reads like a Golden Globes after-party or something.

Check it out-- the list of celebs who have been spotted shopping at Apple stores includes: Val Kilmer (who reportedly shops stoned), Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst (who always demands a discount), Melanie Griffith (who threw a hissy fit when the store she visited was out of pink iPod minis), Pink (who "shops with a posse of handlers"), Jerry O'Connell (who's about as tech-savvy as a steaming bowl of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup), LeVar Burton (who's more of a prima donna than you'd expect of a guy best known for wearing a chick's headband over his eyes), Robin Williams (who goes out of his way to expose himself), Kevin "Silent Bob" Smith (who's the grump who just wants his wife's PowerBook working again), and more more MORE.

Needless to say, if you hang out at one of the big city stores long enough (and Apple practically encourages you to loiter), eventually you're going to spot someone famous enough to follow home. Then it's just a quick sneak through an open window, and you're mere seconds from being Maced and beaten senseless by bodyguards while you attempt to shout out a marriage proposal through a mouth full of broken teeth. What could be easier? (But no, we won't post your bail.)

Meanwhile, this is probably an opportune moment to mention that AtAT broadcasts may get even spottier soon, since an employee of one particular Apple store informs us that no less a beacon in these dark times than ex-Buffy goddess Alyson Hannigan herself dropped in recently. While we're more than a little miffed that said employee didn't see fit to administer knockout drops and immediately ship Ms. Hannigan to the AtAT compound by express delivery (or even stall her long enough so we could catch the next flight in), we do appreciate the info, because now we plan to stake out that particular store 24-7 just in case the Vessel of Willowhood returns. After all, what choice do we have?

So ever since Steve shared his keynote stage with Sony prez Kunitake Ando to celebrate the "Year of HD," there's been a fair amount of speculation about some sort of major Apple-Sony alliance in the works, with suggested possibilities ranging from cobranded iPods to Sony movies for sale through an Apple digital download service to an out-and-out buyout of Apple by Sony. Personally, we don't even know if Steve and Kuni would share so much as a hummus platter when they aren't onstage in front of millions of potential customers, but we will say one thing: at least those guys are getting sued together.

And lookee here, it's by the French! A CNET article notes that both Sony and Apple have been slapped with a lawsuit by a French consumer watchdog group because each company sells its digital music downloads in a format that works only on its own portable players, which the association claims is "limiting consumer choice." Sound familiar? That's because Apple, at least, has been down this road before, and more than once; the same goofy claim was recently made by a California nutjob who complained that the iTunes Music Store "forced him to buy an iPod," and Virgin Mega (again, in France) also sued Apple for "wrongfully refusing to license FairPlay." This time around, UFC-Que Choisir wants both Apple and Sony to cough up €30,000 in fines and let other portables play their songs.

But, of course, the whole "limiting consumer choice" argument is more or less bull hockey, since Apple's usage terms clearly state that a song download is playable on an unlimited number of iPods, not other players. If a given consumer is deranged enough to want to buy a non-iPod player, there's nothing stopping him from getting one and then going to one of the myriad Windows Media-based stores out there and loading it up with the exact same songs offered by the iTMS or Sony Connect; an article in The Register pointed out by faithful viewer John Blackburne reminds us all that a French court already dismissed Virgin Mega's case for that very reason. In fact, Sony getting sued over this is especially ludicrous, since its store is perhaps the best proof available that consumer choice is alive and kicking: its Sony Connect service, which sells ATRAC3 songs that only play on Sony portable devices, is getting stomped into a fine powder in the marketplace precisely because consumers have chosen not to buy either its lackluster, high-priced players or the ATRAC3 songs that'll play on them.

In terms of raw technical compatibility, Sony may have a tougher fight ahead of it, but Apple can always point out that, hey, it licensed FairPlay to Motorola and now iTMS songs can be played on some mobile phones. Plus, iTMS customers can burn their music to CDs and play them in any portable CD player; Apple doesn't even make those. If customers really want to play iTMS songs on one of those Nomads or whatever, they can always take their burned CDs and re-encode the music as plain vanilla MP3. And at least the iTMS works with Windows; nearly all of the other stores sell music in the Windows Media format, which is "limiting consumer choice" at least as much as Apple's store, because none of those other stores work on a Mac-- so how come UFC-Que Choisir hasn't sued Microsoft for tying protected WMA playback to its own operating system?

So it's all a crock, and we expect the French courts to treat this case largely the same as it treated the last one, i.e. by tossing it out like last week's trash. But who knows? Maybe Sony and Apple will bond over this little legal annoyance and it'll be the catalyst that spawns a thousand years of iron-fisted Sony-Apple world domination. Or something.

What, did you think the infamous Eisner-Jobs animosity was over now that Pixar and Disney are parting ways? Hardly-- and it's not limited to years-old clueless memos revealed in tell-all books, either. It seems that nary a quarterly earnings conference call can pass in which one of those guys isn't sticking it to the other, and last week's Pixar shindig was no exception. Not that we're complaining, mind you; sometimes these little potshots between Steve and Mike represent the most vaguely on-topic drama we can dig up all month. So when Steve made some snarky comments last week about the cratering level of quality in Disney's recent flicks, we did a little jig and filed them away for future incorporation into the plot.

In Steve's defense, though, if Mom asks, Eisner started it; he kicked off this round of public snippiness with comments he made during an investor conference last week at Disney World. Faithful viewer Jef Van der Voort dished up an LA Times article which reports that when Eisner was asked about Disney's current efforts to produce non-Pixar computer-generated animation, he had the gall to describe Pixar's own CGI human characters as "pretty pathetic."

My, what a difference a year can make! Because, see, Eisner calling Pixar's animation "pretty pathetic" isn't exactly consistent with his company's own moral-high-road response to Steve having called the quality of Disney's sequels "embarrassing" last February, which was to say that it was "sad and unfortunate" that Steve had "resorted to insults and name-calling." (Then again, since Eisner had already called Steve a Shiite Muslim in an apparent-- though largely incomprehensible-- derogatory fashion, the whole moral-high-road thing was hypocritical anyway.)

So in light of the "pathetic" comment, when asked during Pixar's conference call what would possess the guy to say such a thing, Steve Jobs can hardly be blamed for referring to Eisner as a "loose cannon." Of course, sarcastically adding that Pixar's films "don't stack up to Atlantis, Emperor's New Groove, or Treasure Planet" may have gone a bit far; invoking a holy trinity of animated Disney box office flops pushes the boundaries of good taste, but hey, that's what we pay the guy for. To be perfectly fair, though, as faithful viewer Kees van Reeuwijk reminds us, "good" and "successful" don't always go hand in hand. Despite the fact that it lost money, we found Atlantis to be pretty fun in a disposable sort of way, and we've heard some really nice things about The Emperor's New Groove (although not from sources we'd necessarily bet any money on).

But regardless, both Disney and Pixar are in the business of making money, and as for Eisner's focus on creating more realistic-looking computer-generated human characters than Pixar's goes, well, that's exactly what we'd expect from him: a profound Missing of the Point™. Eisner always puts such an emphasis on surface gloss that he never seems to have grasped that what made Pixar's movies so successful weren't their polygon counts, but the stories they told. So we won't be at all surprised if Disney's own CGI offerings wind up looking fantastic-- and falling flat anyway. That's nothing but idle speculation, of course, and Disney may well wind up smacking one out of the park; we're just saying that if it strikes out, instead, we won't exactly be scraping our jaws up off the pavement.

And whatever the outcome, we can be sure there'll be a zinger or two from Eisner and/or Steve when the analysts ask them what's what. Bring it on!