As you are no doubt aware, we at AtAT are a deep, pensive lot. We spend untold hours pondering life's great mysteries and trying to coax meaning from the seemingly senseless-- like, if the Professor could build a fully-functional cuisinart out of coconuts in a matter of hours, how come he couldn't build a frickin' boat? Actually, in the time the castaways were marooned on that island, a man of his obvious genius should have been able to construct a fully-functional time distortion gate out of reeds and palm leaves so he could have gone back in time and never gotten on the ill-fated three-hour tour in the first place.

See? We're deep, no doubt about it. And these days, when we're not deconstructing the cunningly-veiled representation of the Holy Trinity on "Three's Company" or contemplating our navels, we're trying to figure out why Apple has apparently decided not to webcast the keynote address from next week's Worldwide Developers Conference. After all, one of the company's own crown jewels is that versatile multimedia architecture known as QuickTime, now with Advanced Streaming Goodness™. Recent numbers show that QuickTime's getting hammered in the ratings by both of its competitors, RealVideo and Windows Media, so one would expect that Apple would jump at any chance to keep QuickTime's streaming capabilities in the public eye. Plus, the company has been advertising WWDC like mad, heralding it as a massive turning point for the Macintosh platform; why not share at least the keynote with the rest of the world? Even the "vanilla" online news outlets would likely provide some free publicity.

For those of you who think the key to this mystery lies in the realm of developers-only nondisclosure agreements, we say nay-- Apple has broadcast the keynote from every WWDC in the past, to the best of our knowledge. Even in the those dark days before the first webcasts crawled forth from the primordial soup, we're pretty sure that at least a satellite broadcast was available. No, there's some other reason that Apple's decided to keep a lid on the festivities this year. That's either discouraging or slightly portentous, depending on your point of view; you can either assume that Apple's got nothing interesting to show the world, or that even the keynote will be so chock-full of super-secret plans for world domination that all attendees will be blindfolded on the way into the conference hall. As far as mystery is concerned, the Missing WWDC Webcast is right up there with Regis Philbin's unfathomable appeal.