Wham, bam, thank you Steve-- and suddenly the official business of Thursday's annual shareholders' meeting was over. According to MacWEEK, the formal part of the meeting "lasted less than 10 minutes," which may well be viewed as a little on the short side, seeing as this blessed event only rolls around once a year. Ten minutes, once a year? Sounds like a "Married... With Children" joke or something.

Nevertheless, quite a lot of Big Important Things™ happened in that measly ten minutes. First of all, the entire board of directors was re-elected. For those of you keeping score at home, we're down to six members now: Jobs himself; his almost-richer-than-Bill-Gates bestest buddy Larry Ellison; the lovely and talented Gareth Chang; Bill "Who Uses Macs For Accounting, Anyway?" Campbell; the inimitable Jerry York; and Mickey "When You're A Khaki" Drexler. (Last-of-the-old-guard director Ed Woolard announced last month that he was stepping down, remember?) Secondly, the shareholders approved the board's plan to split Apple's stock and increase the number of outstanding shares to 900 million, while adding a couple million shares to Apple's pool for "executive compensation." And lastly, shareholders voted to keep KPMG LLP as Apple's external financial auditor for another year. Could you ask for a more eventful ten minutes? We think not. Could you yearn for the event to have taken just a little bit longer? Yeah, probably.

But it doesn't matter, because the best part of the shareholders' meeting isn't the formal business anyway; it's what comes after. Once the voting's out of the way, Steve does what Steve does best-- he plays to the audience, this time in the form of a question-and-answer session. Pore through MacWEEK's extensive coverage if you want the skinny on all manner of subjects, ranging from six-slot Macs (no way) to a choice of video accelerators (maybe) to employee retention ("we have the most exciting sandbox in the world"). Personally, we homed in on just one thing in particular: a shareholder's suggestion that Apple's board hire a woman to replace Ed Woolard-- specifically, Christy Hefner of Playboy. We can see the Apple logo sprouting bunny ears already. Say, maybe Christy can put Steve in touch with Hef; perhaps he's got some advice about the whole "ten minutes" thing.

All over the world, Mac fans' eyes are rolling in a collective gesture of disbelief. Wouldja believe that another company has decided to copy the iMac, this late in the game? 'Strue, we swear! According to MacCentral, the perp is none other than Fish PC, an Australian outfit jumping on the translucent, brightly-colored bandwagon nearly two full years after the iMac made its big media debut. More to the point, we have to assume that Fish PC is aware of the numerous other companies that tried to pull this crap and got swatted down by Apple's formidable legal team-- but what the heck, they're doing it anyway. You've just got to admire the nerve.

Now, if you really want to retch, check out Fish PC's marketing spiel: "No longer do you have to be like everyone else." This from a company who's copying the iMac's overall style; the irony's so thick in here we can taste it. "Fish PC changes all the rules. It's a statement. It's hip, it's groovy. It's a PC. It's sweeping the world by storm!" Pardon us as we gag on our own bile. Well, since "you've got to have it," we suppose you'd better pick a color. Guess what? This thing's available in five colors. Surprise! You get to choose between blue, navy, purple, red, and orange. What, no Li-- er, green?

What we find particularly amusing is that Fish PC is touting its system as "compact," and yet it consists of more bits and pieces than most PCs; there's the base unit itself, the monitor, the two external speakers, the external floppy drive, and of course the keyboard and mouse. Sounds like you damn near need two desks to run one of these babies. And therein lies Fish PC's best legal defense: this thing's no iMac copycat, because whereas the iMac is a tightly-integrated computing wonder, the Fish PC is a sprawling mess, both inside and out. "Your Honor, we submit that the Fish PC does not violate Apple's trade dress rights, since it's got more components than a Lego set and is startlingly ugly. We rest our case."

Strange and coincidental anomaly, or an unexpected glimpse into Apple's master plan for global domination? That's what we're wondering after reading about a "Pismo" PowerBook's bizarre behavior over at Go2Mac. When he's not actively using it, the owner of this seemingly possessed PowerBook keeps it in sleep mode on a slide-out shelf under his TV set. Fair enough. But what he's noticed is that when he turns his TV on or off with his remote control, sometimes his PowerBook wakes up.

Now, even the incurable skeptics among you can probably accept this as a true story, right? After all, the PowerBook has an infrared port, so it's not inconceivable that the signal from this gentleman's remote control just happens to be capable of triggering enough of a response from the PowerBook to wake it from sleep-- chalk it up to a bug in Apple's IR routines, or something. But what if this behavior isn't just a freak occurrence? We've all had the term "convergence" shoved down our throats for the past several years; is this proof that Apple's got something special up its sleeve?

Or maybe the PowerBook's waking up has nothing to do with the infrared signal itself. Perhaps the latest PowerBooks are secretly conscious, and wake up when something good comes on TV. The report notes that turning the TV on with the remote doesn't always wake up the PowerBook, so we propose the following experiment. First try turning the TV on when Buffy or The X-Files is on. Then try it when the TV's tuned to a rerun of The Facts of Life or anything on the Lifetime channel. Being a machine of taste, we bet we know what the PowerBook will do.

Okay, so a sentient PowerBook's a long shot, we admit. Most likely of all, the Pismo engineers just got a little too literal when they heard Uncle Steve say that he wanted to make Apple the "Sony" of the computer industry. Any bets on what kind of TV and remote were causing the PowerBook to wake up?