Okay, by now, anyone who actually cares has seen last week's Jeopardy! episodes featuring Katie, AtAT's own resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae, so we shouldn't be spoiling anything by mentioning that she scored twelve grand and change in her first game, which she won by a single dollar thanks to some judicious wagering in a harrowing round of Final Jeopardy. (See, kiddies? Math is important!) In her second game she led heading into Final Jeopardy, but then fell into third place when she failed to identify Houston as the largest U.S. city named after a person. This is perfectly understandable, however, since it's really, really easy to forget that Texas is indeed a state and not a whole other country (as many Texans have repeatedly tried to convince us). Congratulations to Katie for accomplishing something that relatively few people ever manage: reigning as a Jeopardy "returning champion," however briefly. Oh, and winning fistfuls of cash in the process.

While she still hasn't actually been paid yet (they take their own sweet time, trust us), she did engage in a little anticipatory splurging at the Apple Store Cambridgeside upon our return from the taping in Culver City last February; she plunked down $1799 plus tax and waltzed out with a brand spankin' new combo drive 12-inch PowerBook, which has inspired envy and grabbiness in the other denizens of the AtAT compound, who are saddled with portables over three years old. Anya, in particular, seems to take umbrage at the fact that her Blueberry iBook is over three times as old as she is. Still, even though it's not ours to play with and/or eat, the rest of us are still pleased to have a current PowerBook sitting around and prettying up the joint.

Better still, we got to enjoy it a whopping three and a half months before Apple finally shafted us with a price drop! Yes, according to MacNN and easily confirmed at the Apple Store, Katie's combo drive model just dropped $200 to $1599, while the SuperDrive model dropped $200 to $1799. (Incidentally, the 15-inchers also dropped a few hundred bucks, but Big Daddy 17-Inches is still selling for the same $3299-- except in Canada, where apparently prices dropped even further.) Our immediate response to this news, of course, was a mild twinge of buyer's remorse; if we had only waited, Katie could've saved a couple hundred clams or gotten a SuperDrive for the same price.

But like we said, it's mild; not so much a "D'OH!!!" as a "d'oh." After all, three and a half months is a perfectly acceptable price drop grace period for new Mac ownership. Six months is exceptional, and two weeks, well, those poor saps can always call the Samaritans if the depression gets too overwhelming. Or drown their sorrows in Pez. Meanwhile, if you were considering picking up a 12- or 15-inch PowerBook sometime soon, now's as good a time as any. Except, of course, that this quietish (i.e. no press release) price drop hints strongly at a channel clearance and revised models just around the corner-- at the very least, those updated 15-inch TiBooks that have been rattling the cages of the rumor hounds for so long now. So what's your priority? Features or price? Ooooh, decisions...

Okay, so the possibility of AOL using the iTunes Music Store for its official online digital music sales appears to have been ground into a fine paste by last week's AOL-Microsoft settlement, but hey, what's 26 million potential customers, right? No big loss. Besides, there are other fish in the sea. We think. There are more than 26 million fish in the sea, aren't there? We're not exactly Aquaman, here, but it seems to us there should be more fish than that.

Well, here's hoping. And if there are more fish down there in the Briny Deep, Apple's going after 'em instead of letting 'em wind up in Microsoft's Big Honkin' Net like all 26 million specimens of AOLus Subscribicus. The New York Post reports that "Apple Computer and Amazon.com are working on a deal that will make Apple's popular new online music store available on Amazon." To prove it, the Post has a photo of that guy who sells tacos. Hey, nifty! Fish of the Amazon-shopping type are actually pretty plentiful, if we're not mistaken, so landing this catch might well make up for the sting of the one-- er, 26 million-- that got away.

Of course, the Post doesn't have anything solid to back up this claim, but it's not exactly way-out sci-fi head-trippy stuff, here. About the only stumbling block we can see is, how exactly does this tie in with iTunes? AOL could have easily built iTunes functionality into its proprietary client software, but Amazon doesn't have proprietary client software-- customers just use a web browser. Apple certainly won't sell unprotected AACs through Amazon (even if it wanted to, the labels would storm the castle with torches and pitchforks), so if Amazon's digital music customers need iTunes anyway, why wouldn't they just shop through that?

Assuming that this whole Apple-Amazon thing is true in the first place, we figure it might go a little something like this. Yes, you do need iTunes, and you can still shop directly through the iTunes Music Store. But if you happen to be at Amazon anyway and you stumble across a CD you like, Amazon provides an option to buy the downloadable iTMS version instead. You pay the same way you pay for any other Amazon merchandise, and the purchase info is tied to your Apple ID. Then the next time you launch iTunes registered to that ID, it asks if you want to download the music you purchased. Okay, so it's a tad cumbersome, but it does allow for those ever-popular Amazon impulse buys.

What we're hoping to see is an option at Amazon whereby, when you order a physical CD, you can also download the iTMS version for an extra buck or so. Ta-daa-- instant gratification plus the knowledge that the "real thing" is on its way. How can it miss?

Well, this is an annoyance arising from our recent hiatus that we hadn't anticipated: Phantom Scene Syndrome. Trust us, it's not the title of the next Star Wars movie-- although, come to think of it, it beats the pants off of "Attack of the Clones"; we're campaigning for the third one to be named "Night of the Brain-Sucking Space Lampreys" to lend it an air of class. George still isn't returning our calls, but we're pretty sure we're wearing him down. But we digress. Phantom Scene Syndrome is an honest-to-goodness thingy we're experiencing now that we've thrown ourselves back into daily production after eleven weeks in limbo. Wanna know just what the furry heck we're talking about? Here's an example to smooth your furrowed brow.

So we're trolling for plot material and we notice (thanks to MacMinute) that Forbes has updated its list of CEO Approval Ratings with final numbers for May-- and Steve Jobs is apparently doing pretty well. 83% of the respondents last month gave Steve a thumbs-up, which beat out the ratings for every other CEO in the list: Cisco's John Chambers, Oracle's Larry Ellison, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, and HP's Carly Fiorina. "Great," we think, "we can do a followup to that scene we did about how Steve's approval rating completely tanked between March and April."

Except when we went back through the Reruns to find that scene so we could link to it in the holy name of Context, we kept coming up blank. Eventually we wound up paging through every single scene we produced since we returned from our eleven-week snooze, and we still came up blank. "Ah," we finally realized, "this must be one of those scenes we only wrote in our heads." Because, you know, there are plenty of times that we get far enough into the production process to plan out an entire scene, but then we never get a chance to actually write it-- and finding out later that it was never produced is akin to trying to scratch one's left arm with one's right and suddenly discovering that both arms were surgically removed. Only, um, to perhaps a slightly lesser degree.

So, unfortunately now we have to provide context after the fact, which is about as dramatic as C-SPAN with the TV off-- meaning, slightly more dramatic than C-SPAN with the TV on. Nonetheless, here it is. Ahem: "Steve's approval rating is on the rebound, up to 83% in May after it fell from 91% to 75% between March and April." Yeah, just thrilling. But hey, at least when the June numbers come out, we'll be able to point you to this scene. Wait... we did write this one, right?...