Everybody duck! Ousted CEO (and 1997's "Doughy Suit of the Year") Gilbert Amelio is writing a tell-all memoir of his struggle in Cupertino. The tome will be co-written by Amelio's previous collaborator William Simon, which we've got to assume is a good thing; ever seen Amelio speak? "Not much of a raconteur" is a polite description (and "personality-starved boredom-machine" is one considerably less so). Wired News has the story.

Reportedly the book is 288 pages of tearful reminiscences over how the Apple culture made fun of his suits, with a little bit of hurt analysis concerning Jobs' role in getting Amelio fired. Well, maybe it's not quite that dramatic. But while Gil was probably the last person to realize that Jobs had gotten him booted, he's perhaps the first to write a book about the subject.

Apple watchers like yours truly will probably read On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple Computer for completeness' sake. We hope to be pleasantly surprised by its content, but we're not holding our breath. If you consider Amelio a charity case, though, even after his multimillion-dollar severance package, buy his book to kick him a few bucks. ;-)

According to Webintosh, Larry Ellison's woes are just beginning. Following Oracle's 30% stock-slide a couple of weeks ago, now the stockholders are suing Oracle for stock manipulation. (It's lawsuits-a-plenty on AtAT these days!)

The two misfortunes are related, of course-- the lawsuit charges that Oracle's CFO and COO artificially inflated the stock by misrepresenting how well the company was doing. Two less-than-stellar quarters and the resulting stock-slide later, the stockholders are crying foul. They say that there's no way Oracle could have misforecasted its financial standing so inaccurately. And then there's the matter of five Oracle "insiders" having dumped over 800,000 shares of Oracle stock just before the announcements that led to the 30% tumble...

We hope Larry survives these recent hardships. After all, if he goes away, where will we get all of our info about Apple's CEO search and NC project?

The next episode of the stellar new courtroom drama "Redmond Justice" is set to air on January 13th. In that installment, following the DoJ's request, the grumpy but loveable Judge Jackson will preside over a hearing to determine whether or not Microsoft should be held in contempt of court for violating the order he handed down in last week's show. Reuters keeps us posted here.

Seriously, we'd recommend that the whole thing be moved to the People's Court if Judge Wapner were still on. Yeah, Ed Koch is cool and everything, but we really miss Wapner.