Everybody fasten your seatbelts and return your tray tables to their full and upright positions, 'cause Sweeps Month is finally coming in for a big AtAT landing! Yesterday's improbably high yield of tabloid-worthy dirt by and about various tech-oriented captains of industry is precisely the traditionally sordid ratings-boosting stuff we love to trot out four times a year ("what, only four times a year?") to prove we're just as sleazy as network TV. What's that Oscar Wilde quote? "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." To which we say, "Wow, look at this nifty gutter!"

Let's start out with a good ol' CEO catfight, the likes of which we haven't seen since the infamous Dell Tussle of 1997. Faithful viewer John A. notes that no less august a publication than the venerable New York Times is covering the latest trash talk between Microsoft and Apple. You may recall that during the iMac's rainbow-hued heyday, Bill Gates brushed off Apple's accomplishments by saying, "the one thing Apple's providing now is leadership in colors. It won't take long for us to catch up with that, I don't think."

(Checks watch) Hey, Bill. Still wai-ting... What's particularly galling about Bill's comment is that Microsoft and Intel teamed up to announce the "Easy PC Initiative" a few months after the multicolored iMacs shipped, based on their "vision" of "making PCs easier to set up, expand, and use." How, you ask? Why, by eliminating legacy ports and sticking to USB and FireWire while "experimenting with new PC shapes, sizes, and colors." Gee, where on earth do you suppose they got that idea? Not that anything even reasonably close to an iMac's superior design and ease of use ever actually shipped, of course...

Anyway, Apple finally got the chance to bite back last week after Billy-boy showed off the "Athens" prototype PC at WinHEC. We referred to this thing briefly once already, but we probably didn't spend nearly enough time detailing how much this thing owes to Apple. Picture a 17-inch LCD iMac that's been smacked around a few times with the Ugly Stick and then had various "things" hung off it, and, well, that's pretty much Athens. Even the Desktop Picture is suspiciously Mac OS Xish.

And yet, does Apple smack-talk Athens's obvious borrowings from One Infinite Loop? Surprisingly, no-- His Steveness maintained a dignified silence, and marketing czar and bona fide mensch Phil Schiller (honestly, Phil-- we kid because we love! Don't ever change, Bubbelah!) appears to have ignored the hardware completely, simply noting that the graphics architecture that's supposed to ship in the 2005 version of Windows "is almost a direct copy of Quartz." Hmmm. Taking the high road? That's not much of a ratings-getter, guys. But hey, it's early yet, and the important thing is that there's some back-and-forth with the potential to heat up and get good. Any chance we can get Steve to ridicule the Athens during his WWDC keynote next month?

Attention, long-time fans of the ever-popular and completely baseless "Disney To Buy Apple" rumor! Prepare to be sucked into an alternate universe-- a topsy-turvy world where up is down, black is white, they wear hats on their feet, and hamburgers eat people. Faithful viewer Marker pointed us to another New York Times article; this one's about Pixar's continuing search for a better distribution deal than the 50/50 one they've long had with Disney.

"So what does that have to do with Apple?" you scoff. (Scoff. Scoff. What a great word! "Scoff." Try to use it twice today.) Well, it's like this: four paragraphs in, the article mentions that Steve Jobs-- who heads up Pixar in his voluminous spare time, you know-- made an interesting comment during the Q&A portion of last week's Pixar earnings conference call. It seems that one analyst suggested that Steve "scrap negotiations with Disney" altogether and just try to buy out the company's animation division instead. And then what do you suppose Steve suggested in response? Buying Disney outright. AAAIIIEEEEEEEE!!!

Okay, so he then laughed it off as little more than a joke by saying "I'll just leave that alone," and the prospect of Pixar buying Disney isn't quite the same as Apple buying Disney, but it's close enough for government work. Man, who knew that we'd have to start listening to Pixar's conference calls to avoid missing all the best dirt? Apparently the drama just follows Steve wherever he goes. We're starting to think we're going to have to hire a cheap intern to tail the guy all day with a camcorder so we don't miss the next melodramatic altercation down at the local Jiffy Lube.

Here you go, folks-- in honor of Sweeps Month, a triptych of melodrama and scandal to round out the episode:

• Remember the MSN iLoo? Well, faithful viewer Enrique Gomez tipped us off to an Associated Press article in which Microsoft claims that the whole project was just a hoax, despite the fact that the company's own PR people have repeatedly confirmed that it's real. The thing is, if it was a hoax, it still originated from Microsoft-- there's the official press release, after all, which at broadcast time had yet to be yanked from microsoft.com. Maybe faithful viewer Pat Chekal was right last week when he surmised that it was just an April Fools joke that didn't make it out the door until May; "only five weeks late-- that's way ahead of the usual Microsoft delivery lag." That's certainly possible, we suppose, but to us this whole "it was a hoax" thing smells like classic Microsoft revisionism, à la "those faked tapes we entered into evidence were actually just meant to be an 'illustration.'" After all, if you announced a product that spawned a solid week of ridicule from every sentient being on the planet, wouldn't you like to pretend it was all a joke?

• Meanwhile, Microsoft's Fearless Leader is allegedly a master of the ol' Dine 'n' Dash. Faithful viewer David Poves notes that The Register claims that when Bill Gates was in a coffee shop in South Dakota last week, he actually stiffed the waitress the six bucks he owed for coffee. So, what-- just because he lives in Seattle, Bill figures that all coffee is gratis? We've been to Seattle, and while that particular fluid is pretty ubiquitous there (no joke-- we saw gas stations with the price of espresso right under the price of fuel), it doesn't exactly come out of the faucets for free. You'd think the world's richest man could afford a measly six dollars for coffee. Then again, maybe this is how he became the world's richest man in the first place...

• One more from the Office of the Completely Unsubstantiated: trouble in paradise? Faithful viewer Rod Lopez notes a bit of gossip in the New York Post claiming that Steve's wife Laurene threw a hissy fit when she saw her hubby on the cover of Fortune with the lovely and talented Sheryl Crow. It seems that Steve kindasorta forgot to mention that he'd posed for a photo shoot with Crow, and Mrs. Jobs reportedly "considers the cover to be some sort of indication of Steve's less-than-devoted attitude toward their marriage." So why, exactly, is the missus so jealous? Well, don't forget, Steve once dated Joan Baez, so it's possible he's got a thing for singer-songwriters. Which raises a disturbing question: did Apple create the iTunes Music Store just so Steve could pick up chicks? Hey, if it makes him happy, it can't be that bad.

Oooh, we feel so dirty. But it's a good kind of dirty.