Okay, time out. We know that most of you know the drill, and there's a disclaimer right at the end of each day's episode, but we've got to remind you all: AtAT is an entertainment site, not a news site. As such, we frequently engage in bizarre conspiracy threories that have no shred of substance to them. Heck, that's pretty much our whole charm right there. If you're actually looking for real news, there are literally dozens of fine Mac news sites out there in Netland. If you're looking for a slightly twisted and melodramatic reaction to the news, you've come to the right place.

We are referring, of course, to the can of worms known as "Ninja Attack II" from yesterday's episode. We thought that the combination of an explicit disclaimer and an over-the-top writing style would be sufficient to alert all comers that our tongues are planted so deeply in our cheeks that they are, in fact, extending four inches through our faces. (Now that's a classy image, hmm?) Unfortunately, not everyone picked up on this, so we've got to set the record straight: Mac OS Rumors and Reality are, in fact, not down due to the malicious influence of an international consortium dedicated to the obfuscation of Macintosh information. There, we said it. They are, as each site plainly states, on hiatus for personal reasons only. Please do NOT email either site asking them if the conspiracy is true, because it obviously isn't. (And if it were, would they really tell you?) We feel really bad about the email that both sites have been receiving about this-- yes, they both complained to us, and rightly so-- because if they don't have time to update their sites, they certainly don't have time to mess with email generated by our "unfortunate" sense of humor. Please leave them alone so that they can attend to their personal business and get back to providing us all the juicy Apple rumors we need and crave.

Sadly, it appears that just one of the many risks of producing AtAT is the risk of being taken too seriously. Please don't suggest smileys as a remedy, since we'd have to use so many of them that AtAT's daily content would start to resemble an "Up With People" rally. Or, more accurately, a rally for "Up With People" at which, for some reason, everyone holds their head sideways and winks. Perhaps a future HTML spec can introduce the <SATIRE> tag?

That said, let's get back to business. Isn't it interesting that thessaSOURCE, a solid Mac news site for the past couple of years, suddenly closed up shop the other day? The posted reason was lack of time following a relocation to North Carolina. Literally dozens of you pointed out the timing coinciding with the Rumors and Reality sabbaticals. What if... Nah, forget it. ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-)

Several of you are no doubt aware of the theory that there's a sort of karmic balance in the universe-- that for every bad thing that happens, a good thing pops up somewhere else. While this concept is usually applied to individual action and behavior (as in, "someday you'll pay for that extra newspaper you took from the machine when an anvil falls on your head and makes you go all accordion-like"), we like to think it holds up just as well on a macrocosmic scale. That is, just as energy can be neither created nor destroyed but only transferred from place to place and from form to form, there is also a "Conservation of Coolness" law that just sort of takes care of itself.

So, first the bad news: according to NoBeige, at least some sources are claiming that Formac has (hopefully temporarily) halted development of the iPowerRaid. The iPowerRaid, for those of you who missed it, is an expansion card for the iMac's hidden Perch slot that would add a SCSI interface to Apple's new consumer machine for only $150 or less. Originally expected in November, now it appears that the iPowerRaid may never surface at all, as Formac is waiting for Apple's position on future support of the Perch slot. That brings up a possibililty that for some reason never occurred to us: perhaps Apple has been telling third party developers not to work on Perch expansion cards simply because they plan to omit the slot in future iMacs. We consider that possibility unlikely, but it's there nonetheless. Anyway, it's possible that the very cool iPowerRaid may never see the light of day. Only time will tell.

On the other hand, the good news is that Judge "Grouchy" Wapner, formerly of "People's Court" fame until he was displaced by former New York mayor Ed Koch, is back in business. Now he's working his grumpy magic on "Judge Wapner's Animal Court," a new show on the Animal Planet network. It's exactly like "People's Court," except that Doug Llewelyn is nowhere to be found (not at all a bad thing) and all of the cases involve animals in some way. (Honestly. We couldn't make up anything this goofy if we tried all night.) Even Rusty the Bailiff is back! Of course, you may not care about any of this, and it has literally nothing to do with the world of Apple, but do you see how it all works out for us?

Hoo boy... Looks like the party's over. After enjoying a Golden Age of the Virus-Free Macintosh, viral activity has picked up in a big way. The first real outbreak consisted of those darn cross-platform Microsoft Word macro viruses, which are annoying but not particularly destructive. We still run across those all the time, though not on our systems, as we don't use Word anymore. Plus, they weren't actual Mac viruses, though they certainly irritated the bejeezus out of plenty of Mac users. Anyway, the next big problem was the Autostart Worm, which continues to infect systems on a wide scale since its surfacing last May. This thing is a real problem, and too many years of easy living seems to have given Mac users a false sense of security, because the Autostart Worm seems to pop up everywhere we look.

But that's not all! Now there's a new virus screwing with the natural order of things, posing as a Graphics Accelerator. MacInTouch has lots of important details on this nasty new bug, which at first seemed "only" to destroy applications by messing with their menu resources, but now appears also to include a fun little time bomb that can delete all of your files if your infected system is on at certain dates and times. Get educated and get protected-- this is not one to mess with.

Incidentally, if you see an extension called "Graphics Accelerator" in your Extensions folder, don't panic-- there's a perfectly legit extension by that name installed as part of the Mac OS on some systems (perhaps just the 9500 with ATI XClaim GA card?). The virus extension has a special hex 01 character at the beginning of the filename. Apparently, you can be infected simply by running an infected application, so please don't just go blithely downloading and running random applications willy-nilly. Take care of yourself-- and your Mac.