Well, it's official: The Powers That Be are punishing us for not being fans of "The West Wing," a transgression that apparently constitutes a mortal televisual sin these days. What can we say, folks? We're sure it's an excellent show and all (indeed, we're slavering cultish devotees of Aaron Sorkin's previous short-lived series "Sports Night"), but the simple fact of the matter is that our TV-watching time is sadly limited these days, and our schedule is all full up as far as programs to follow each week. Plus, we find the subject matter a mite heavy-handed-- and, you know, Martin Sheen as President? Maybe if we didn't have this indelible mental image of him running from intestinal-snake-conjuring voodoo cultists in The Believers we'd be more receptive.

But don't worry; like we said, the universe has taken note and now we're suffering for our sins. As you may have surmised, in addition to being drooling addicts of All Things Apple, members of the AtAT staff are also television junkies of a degree not typically seen outside of the wildest dreams of A. C. Nielsen. Because of this, we're particularly sensitive to Apple TV commercials, and when we know that there's one we haven't seen floating across the airwaves, it's enough to give us throbbing migraines and a distinct coppery taste in the backs of our mouths.

And thus, the punishment: faithful viewer Matt Pruett was the first to inform us that Apple debuted a brand spankin' new Switch ad last night-- during, as by now you've no doubt guessed, "The West Wing," which means that your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff hasn't yet seen it. Moreover, said ad reportedly features none other than cello-totin' bad boy Yo-Yo Ma, which means that it was a celebrity Switch ad we missed. Even as the Ma-man was presumably extolling the virtues of the Mac to millions of viewers with better taste than ours, we're pretty sure we had-- ready for this?-- "Birds of Prey" on as background noise as we puttered about with the daily chores. How's that for some karmically head-kicking irony?

To make matters worse, of course, as of broadcast time, the Yo-Yo Ma ad is still conspicuously absent from Apple's web site. While repeated viewings of Janie Porche's Christmas-saving grin help dull the pain, we're clearly not going to be right in the head until the new commercial gets posted, probably later today. In the meantime, we'll be right here saying a couple hundred "Hail Emmys" as penance and thinking about what wicked, wicked people we've been. Or maybe we'll just bag on the sleep entirely and spin our "Sports Night" DVDs instead.

If you're the sort of Mac classicist who still goes to bed each night sobbing over the loss of the rainbow Apple logo, the dismantling of the Icon Garden, the retirement of the Happy Mac boot icon, and the de-emphasis of Clarus the Dogcow, you probably cried yourself a river a couple of months back when Apple officially announced the death of Mac OS 9-- by indicating that starting this January all new Macs will boot only into Mac OS X. Oh, sure, Mac OS 9 will live on in the Classic environment, but it's just not the same, you know? Sometimes you just want to boot into an operating system designed for mid-eighties-era hardware and paradigms, and not just run it as a protected process for access to ancient outdated applications like MacPaint, the original Dark Castle, and QuarkXPress 5.

Well, dry those tears, Buckaroo, because faithful viewer Daniel Dreibelbis tipped us off to an interesting reader comment over at MacInTouch. It seems one Kevin Cecil was on the horn with Apple tech support trying to iron out a problem he was having with Remote Desktop when the tech let slip that, despite Uncle Steve's seemingly ironclad "Mac OS X Only" edict, Apple does still plan to allow post-January Macs to boot into Mac OS 9 "for the foreseeable future"-- but only from a CD-ROM. This will allow the use of bootable Mac OS 9-based CDs for troubleshooting and repair purposes, while still forcing the Mac community to X-ify or die for all other purposes.

What this implies, of course, is that there's no massive architectural hardware shift planned for January that renders Mac OS 9 booting impossible to support; the Mac OS X-only transition is entirely an artificially-imposed measure on Apple's part intended to push its user base (and developers) into migrating to its new operating system instead of clinging to the old. For day-to-day use, of course, the upshot is the same; boot into Mac OS X or don't boot at all. But retaining Mac OS 9-booting compatibility only for CDs provides some nice options for utility developers while also giving Mac classicists the ability to boot back into the old neighborhood on occasion for the heady joy of experiencing cooperative multitasking and a truly medieval memory management system.

What this also means is that Apple's new Macs will inherently have the capability of booting from any volume into Mac OS 9, but Apple will cripple them via some sort of firmware goofiness. And as we've all seen with the iBook Extended Desktop hack, firmware-based cripplecode can occasionally be worked around. We won't be surprised if someone discovers a way to restore unrestricted Mac OS 9 booting on post-January Macs, thus attaining sainthood among that subset of the classic Mac-using community which refuses to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Who's up to the challenge?

Boy, as the state of Maine continues to discover, the benefits of buying 36,000 iBooks just keep piling up. A few days ago we noted how Maine's decision to outfit every one of its middle school students with an iBook led to the state receiving $400 million worth of free software. A week before that we told you about how Maine was being eyed by the Canadians, who seemed intent on sweeping across the border and snagging those iBooks for its own kids-- and while the prospect of an imminent invasion would give any state pause, it still must be nice to be the envy of the free world. Indeed, a Bangor Daily News article pointed out by faithful viewer Brian Freeman notes that in addition to the Canadian tour, apparently delegations from Scotland and France have visited Maine to scope out how the program's shaping up.

But the latest fringe benefit of its middle school iBook program doesn't involve gratis software or worldwide envy, but free tutelage-- and not just any free tutelage. Apparently Maine-born Rock-Bottom Remainders guitarist (and massively prolific bestselling author) Stephen King recently visited Freeport Middle School near his hometown of Durham and told the iBook-slinging seventh-graders that he'd "like to set up an interactive, Internet-based system through which he could teach writing to students." What, no Stephen King Virtual Guitar Lessons?

Apparently King's plan involves using the 'net as a virtual classroom for "establishing a dialogue with students, giving them assignments, and posting good writing examples online for others to see." Sure, it's not the most original idea in the world, and it might crank out an entire state's worth of junior high school students writing about shipwrecked drug-smugglers eating their own extremities, but it's yet another gushing endorsement of Maine's iBook program, and this one comes from one of the state's most famous native sons. That's particularly important because the state legislature is still talking about cutting funding for the program, so vocal support, press coverage, and some good PR from a celebrity sure can't hurt. Even a creepy-looking one.