Blame what you will: the devastating loss of Bungie to the Dark Side of the Force, rumors that Apple's new full-size keyboard has gained forward-delete and "end" keys but lacks a space bar and the letter "e," massive and sudden backlash from investors who don't like The Cure... All we know is, on Tuesday night Apple's stock was up over 100, and by Wednesday morning it had dropped to about 50. That's a 50% decline in a single day! Why, we can't recall AAPL shedding so much value in one trading day since, oh, about June 16th of 1987, on which AAPL dropped from 79 to about 41. We've currently got all our financial experts (read: a copy editor wearing a Quicken t-shirt) working the phones, trying to shake loose some inside info that might explain these two fascinating and frightening price plunges.

So far, all we've managed to scare up is a couple of intriguing coincidences. Get this: on both dates, not only did AAPL's price plummet to approximately 50% of its day-before value, but the number of outstanding shares seemingly doubled. Mysterious indeed. Even stranger, reports from the field would appear to indicate that these doubled shares are appropriately distributed among all the shareholders; people who went to bed with a five hundred shares woke up with a thousand. We're starting to think that some evildoer with a bone to pick with the Cupertino crowd once hatched a nefarious scheme to drive Apple's stock price down by printing up a ton of counterfeit shares and flooding the market with them-- but was clever enough to spread them out perfectly among the entire shareholder community so as to allay suspicion. This shady character (who, for narrative purposes, we'll just randomly call "Bill G.") then laid low for thirteen years, waiting for the heat to die down-- but now, as Apple enjoys its new Wall Street success, he appears to be up to his old tricks again.

The only other reasonable explanation we've come up with involves the thirteen-year spawning cycle of AAPL shares, which are actually sentient paper-based life forms from the planet Daytraydr. Once every 156 months, they reproduce by a division process akin to a whole-organism version of cellular mitosis. It's a slightly less likely scenario, but we're investigating it thoroughly nonetheless-- one stockholder thought he heard the sweet, soulful sounds of Barry White and Marvin Gaye coming from inside his vault the night before he discovered that his shares had doubled, so maybe there's something to it after all.

Incidentally, the other slightly odd thing about those two dates is that, on both, AAPL underwent something called a "2:1 Stock Split," but we assume that's just a random and meaningless coincidence. Or perhaps it's not a coincidence, but a sort of "stock price harbinger of doom." Perhaps if we could predict one of these mysterious "stock splits" ahead of time, we could all make preparations for the halving of Apple's stock price that it heralds. Actually, no, forget it-- that's just goofy. The answer obviously lies with either a grudge-bearing counterfeiter or alien reproduction. Don't let those Wall Street snake-oil salesmen convince you otherwise.