Mele Kalikimaka, everybody! (That means "fish food"!) Say, faithful viewer Darcy asked us to remind you all that tomorrow is a Momentous Occasion™: May 17th will forever go down in history as the Day That The Apple Store Ala Moana Opened. We understand that Hallmark is working on a line of "Happy Day That The Apple Store Ala Moana Opened" greeting cards; some of them feature Garfield, while others depict Steve Jobs in a grass skirt and coconut bra.

Why is this such a grand affair? Because since the Apple Store Ala Moana is in Honolulu, Hawaii, this marks Apple's first retail store on foreign soil. Oh, that Steve and his wacky surprises! The last we'd heard from Apple was that it was going to wait until the U.S. retail stores turned a profit before it would even consider expanding the project overseas. But, of course, just when we'd swallowed that story hook, line, and sinker, His Steveness pulls one of his trademark rabbits out of his hat and gives us the first international Apple retail store in Hawaii. Things are never dull with Steve at the helm, nosirree!

What do you mean, Hawaii isn't another country? Pull the other one. They only use, like, thirteen letters of the alphabet or something.

It's a state? When the heck did that happen?

1959? You're sure?

Huh. Well, whatever; it's still a big event, since it's the first Apple store in the, um, state of Hawaii. It's at least a more notable occurrence than Apple's other scheduled grand opening tomorrow-- the Apple Store Arden Fair-- which turns out to be the eleventh store in the state of California. Nothing against Sacramento, of course, whose denizens will no doubt be thrilled to have their own local slice of Mac retail heaven, but to the rest of us, yet another new Apple store opening in California ranks right up there on the Momentous Occasion™ list with "Trash Pickup Thursday" and "I Just Put Gas in My Car." (On the plus side, if you're a fan of drinking games, playing "chug whenever Apple opens a retail store in the states of California or New York" will get you smashed even quicker than the Buffy drinking game when FX hosts a marathon.)

And in the "Who Were The Ad Wizards Who Came Up With THIS One?" department, faithful viewer Michael McKinney informs us that Microsoft has just unleashed MSN for Mac OS X. Yes, folks, if you prefer the Mac to Windows but you've still got a hankerin' to tether yourself to Redmond's warmed-over clone of AOL, life just doesn't get any better than this. Because, you see, MSN is miles ahead of any other online service out there because it's "built on advanced Microsoft technology." Shiver me timbers!

Just how incredibly stupendous is this "advanced Microsoft technology," you ask? Well, MSN for Mac OS X lets you "communicate better"! How, you ask? By boasting an incredible email component that includes advanced features like the ability to send rich-text email (oooooh), a preview pane (aaaaah), multiple folders in which to store mail (just pretend you keep hearing gasps of awe, okay?), a spell-checker, junk mail filtering, and an address book that "can contain multiple email addresses, phone numbers, street addresses, personal data, and even pictures." Even pictures? Heavens to Murgatroyd, sign us up! Unless, of course, someone can think of any way we can do all that incredible stuff with software already on our Macs and any freakin' ISP on the planet...

Ahhh... good times. Actually, though, we may kid, but it really is nice to have MSN available for our operating system of choice, because it might represent one fewer obstacle preventing certain Windows users from switching to the Mac. We imagine there might be some potential switchers out there who really want to make the jump to our platform, but don't want to give up their existing stellar MSN service. There's probably at least a couple of people like that out there, right? Somewhere?...

It's Fluff Friday here at AtAT! Let's face it: the last thing you want to do is leave the work week with weighty thoughts and complex emotions crashing around in your head. So what better way to kick off the weekend than with a quick little angst-free nugget of pure consumer opportunity? And you know what that means: eBay.

Yes, people, we here at the AtAT compound do indeed worship at the altar of the Online Auction. Heck, the very words you're reading right this second ("Wow, how'd they know that? It's like they can see us or something!") came speeding to you across the ether from a Mac we got off of eBay a few years back. From our perspective, there's no better place to go if you want to spend a whole lot of money on a bunch of crap you probably don't need-- and hey, isn't that the duty of every good consumer?

Well, folks, if you've got a few simoleons burning a hole in your pocket, faithful viewer Mark found just the thing for you: check out this Happy Mac made out of Legos. Some brilliant, brilliant person took the motherboard out of an ailing old PowerBook 5300 and transplanted it into a Happy Mac enclosure made from everyone's favorite plastic construction blocks. And it works! Plug in a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse, fire it up, and you're happily computing away on a unique piece of Macdom. Heck, it's even been upgraded with Ethernet!

If you're interested, bid early and often; at broadcast time, we were looking at a high bid of about £88. (It's in the UK.) Granted, the specs are a little weak (100 MHz 603e, 32 MB of RAM, 750 MB hard disk), but you wouldn't be buying this thing for performance: this is art. Plus, since the battery's been removed from the equation, you wouldn't have to worry about this reworked 5300 bursting into flame; it's stylish and safe. What more could you possibly want?