You know, the AtAT staff has logged a lot of hours living in this crazy world, and between us, we'd have to have been pretty darned unobservant if we hadn't picked up some serious life lessons along the way. We've laughed, we've cried, we've accidentally set Tater Tots on fire in the oven (now let's never speak of that again), and now we feel we should pass the most important life knowledge we've yet amassed along to you, our faithful viewers, so that you may in turn educate your friends and loved ones. Ready? Here it is: the answer to each of life's questions can be found somewhere in one of the 227 episodes of The Simpsons.

Let's take, for example, last night's season finale, "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo." We know there are still those of you out there who continue to be perplexed and befuddled about Apple's continued insistence on shipping computers without floppy drives; it all started just over a year ago, when the iMac specifications were made public and the once-ubiquitous floppy drive was conspicuously absent from the list of features. (Actually, maybe not so conspicuously-- floppy drives have been standard on the Mac for so long, it was easy to overlook the omission.) Since then, Apple has systematically relegated the floppy disk to the dustbin of Mac history, shipping PowerBooks and Power Mac G3s floppyless and fancy-free. If you want backwards compatibility with floppies, you've got to shell out some cash for a third-party external drive. So why would Apple do this to its user base? Is it just because floppies are slow, noisy, error-prone, and relatively low-capacity?

Well, we're sure that's part of it, but if you watched The Simpsons, you'd know the real reason. For those of you who missed it, America's favorite family takes a trip down to the local cybercafé, where the public computers look suspiciously iMac-like; they're rounded, single-piece units in several colors (we're pretty sure we saw orange, green, and blue) with stereo speakers on the front panel and a one-button mouse. There's little question what computer those terminals were meant to evoke, right? Except that the machines in the Simpsons universe have a floppy drive right where the CD-ROM drive should be. Well, as Homer's pseudo-iMac is displaying the family fortune of $1200 through the miracle of online banking, Snake walks in and transfers those funds to a floppy disk, leaving the Simpsons penniless. So there you have it; Apple is leaving out floppy drives to protect cybercafé patrons everywhere from a rash of floppy-related holdups. Always thinking of their civic duty, they are... Say, just how much cash would fit on a 1.44 MB formatted floppy, anyway?