Wham, bam, thank you Steve-- and suddenly the official business of Thursday's annual shareholders' meeting was over. According to MacWEEK, the formal part of the meeting "lasted less than 10 minutes," which may well be viewed as a little on the short side, seeing as this blessed event only rolls around once a year. Ten minutes, once a year? Sounds like a "Married... With Children" joke or something.

Nevertheless, quite a lot of Big Important Things™ happened in that measly ten minutes. First of all, the entire board of directors was re-elected. For those of you keeping score at home, we're down to six members now: Jobs himself; his almost-richer-than-Bill-Gates bestest buddy Larry Ellison; the lovely and talented Gareth Chang; Bill "Who Uses Macs For Accounting, Anyway?" Campbell; the inimitable Jerry York; and Mickey "When You're A Khaki" Drexler. (Last-of-the-old-guard director Ed Woolard announced last month that he was stepping down, remember?) Secondly, the shareholders approved the board's plan to split Apple's stock and increase the number of outstanding shares to 900 million, while adding a couple million shares to Apple's pool for "executive compensation." And lastly, shareholders voted to keep KPMG LLP as Apple's external financial auditor for another year. Could you ask for a more eventful ten minutes? We think not. Could you yearn for the event to have taken just a little bit longer? Yeah, probably.

But it doesn't matter, because the best part of the shareholders' meeting isn't the formal business anyway; it's what comes after. Once the voting's out of the way, Steve does what Steve does best-- he plays to the audience, this time in the form of a question-and-answer session. Pore through MacWEEK's extensive coverage if you want the skinny on all manner of subjects, ranging from six-slot Macs (no way) to a choice of video accelerators (maybe) to employee retention ("we have the most exciting sandbox in the world"). Personally, we homed in on just one thing in particular: a shareholder's suggestion that Apple's board hire a woman to replace Ed Woolard-- specifically, Christy Hefner of Playboy. We can see the Apple logo sprouting bunny ears already. Say, maybe Christy can put Steve in touch with Hef; perhaps he's got some advice about the whole "ten minutes" thing.