Say, remember when we noted about a week ago that if Apple still wants to meet its retail expansion goals this year, it'll have to open no fewer than ten stores in just five weeks? Well, by virtue of the inexorable march of time (i.e. thanks to your trusty Gerund-A-Day desk calendar, your vocabulary is now seven words richer), now that deadline's dropped to ten stores in four weeks. Do the integer math (assuming that even Apple's not goofy enough to throw a grand opening celebration for half a store) and you'll notice that Apple now needs to open at least three stores in a single weekend.

Sweet Georgia Brown in a rowboat full of angry weasels, can it truly be so? (It can.) Must Apple really push its store-opening skills to their very limits and open three separate stores at once? (It must.) Could Apple really be so daring as to attempt such a feat with little or no regard to the devastating and permanent effects three simultaneous retail openings might have on the very fabric of the space-time continuum itself-- not to mention the sort of psychic and emotional stress this puts on unofficial grand opening shutterbug Tadd Torborg? (It could-- and it is.)

No kidding, folks; take a quick peek at Apple's retail page and you'll notice that Apple has three, count 'em, three stores listed under the scary green "Grand openings" heading: Fashion Show in Las Vegas, Keystone in Indianapolis, and Southdale in Edina, Minnesota. What's more, all three are slated to throw open their doors this coming Saturday, November 2nd. What with three grand openings covering such a wide chunk of this great land, why, we can't imagine that any Mac fan on the North American continent this Saturday can legitimately gripe about not having anything to do.

So good luck to Apple in its unprecedented store-juggling endeavor; here's hoping it doesn't bring all of reality crashing down around us in the attempt. And, once the dust settles, if any of you can provide satisfactory proof that you managed to attend all three grand openings on Saturday despite those niggling little laws of time, space, and dimension, we'll kiss you full on the mouth.

Boy howdy, buckaroos, if you've been sitting around waiting for Apple to revamp its line of displays, you've been waiting a very long time indeed. Oh, sure, we got the 23-inch Apple Cinema HD Display waaaay back in March, but unless you're the type of person who had a hankering for a 1920x1200 screen and $3499 sitting around in convenient cartoony bundles of cash, the odds are pretty good that that particular announcement didn't mean a whole lot to you personally. And if you were waiting for price drops on the smaller displays, or the introduction of the long-rumored Slightly Less Immense™ Cinema Display that you might actually be able to purchase without knocking over a liquor store or six, well, geez, you've been out of luck for the longest time.

Maybe not for much longer, though. There are definitely rumors buzzing around that Apple plans to introduce a new display come Guy Fawkes Day, one week from Tuesday. Whether these rumors are even remotely true we can't say, but they appear to originate from the French site MacPlus, which reports (as far as we can make out from an automatic Google translation) that come the 5th of November, Apple will be taking the wraps off of a new 19-inch Cinema Display and retiring the original 22-inch model. No word on what the price of this shrimpy new Cinema Display might be, should the thing materialize as expected, but if we had to guess, we'd say... what, maybe $1699? Who knows?

What we do know is that, while the entry-level 15-inch Apple Studio Display is still listed on Apple's web site, it disappeared from the Apple Store a while ago, meaning that Apple's cheapest available display-- the 17-incher-- currently runs a staggering $999. Here's hoping that if Apple moves to a 17-19-23 display line-up, as MacPlus suggests, the 17-inch model's price drops at least a few hundred clams. And it'd be nice if the Cinema HD Display shed a grand and settled at the allegedly-retiring 22-inch Cinema Display's price point, but we're certainly not holding our breath.

Meanwhile, what about that saucy little note at the end of the article that November 5th will also mark the debut of a new line of PowerBooks? If there's anything folks have been waiting for longer than an affordable mini-Cinema Display, it's a PowerBook with a SuperDrive somehow shoehorned into its svelte little enclosure. Will it finally come to pass? Between the new display and a new PowerBook, Apple may yet give us a reason to remember, remember the fifth of November-- aside from that whole "blowing up Parliament" thing, of course.

Oh my oh my oh dinosaurs, it seems like Microsoft just can't stay out of trouble for even a minute, can it? As first noted by faithful viewer Steve Bickerton, last week the company ran afoul of New York City authorities when it apparently chose to advertise the release of MSN 8 by slapping giant rainbow lepidoptera all over town. Say what now? According to the New York Times, these "large adhesive butterflies" had wingspans of "12 to 20 inches" and wound up stuck to everything from subway signs to handicapped access ramps.

When informed that sticking big plastic butterflies all over public property was illegal (go figure!), Microsoft's PR firm first claimed that it had "permits for everything," but refused to provide any details about what agency had granted those alleged permits. According to The Register, Microsoft eventually apologized for the butterfly invasion, and was fined-- get this-- $50 for its infraction.

Fifty bucks?! Ooooo, yeah, that's a fine that's got Bill Gates worriedly checking his bank balance to see if he needs to transfer any funds. Will Microsoft bounce back from this monumental financial setback? Geez, for fifty bucks we should ship a crate of AtAT stickers out to our Big Apple viewers and tell them to plaster the town with 'em. Seriously, even we can afford that, which means to Microsoft, a fifty-dollar fine isn't so much a "slap on the wrist" as it is a sort of "gentle caress on the hiney." The least the city could have done was fine Microsoft $50 per decal, as apparently it had every right to do.

On the other hand, NYC's fine is fifty bucks more than the Department of Justice has been able to squeeze out of Microsoft for considerably more heinous transgressions-- and extracting an apology from the Redmond Beast was nothing short of miraculous, so maybe we should be happy with what we got. Clearly this is the beginning of the end for Microsoft. What's next in its saga of crime and punishment, do you suppose? We're guessing twenty hours of community service for blowing up a bus full of nuns...