Who says we never take requests? Faithful viewer Lucas Roebuck wrote in with this plea: "You guys should pay a tribute to the officially-deceased Mac the Knife." Say no more, Lucas-- a Knife scene was already on our to-do list. It's been obvious for ages that the Knife has vacated his former digs at MacWEEK, what with his last update there having been posted sometime around the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. The reference to everyone's favorite drug-addled utensil as now being officially deceased presumably refers to Stephen Beale's latest MacWEEK editorial, which discusses the Knife's fate.

In case you hadn't noticed, the Knife's column stopped appearing right about at the time that Beale took over the reins as editor. Coincidence? Only for those of you who buy the Magic Bullet Theory. And Beale now makes it clear; he attests that he "retired" Mac the Knife because MacWEEK is heading in a new direction. "We must choose: Do we spend our time chasing rumors, diving into corporate dumpsters and providing reports about unreleased products that may or may not be true? Or do we focus our efforts on providing accurate, insightful news and analysis about important Mac products and industry trends that have already seen the light of day?" Well, duh. Could the answer be any more obvious to anyone with the teeniest sense of drama? Except Beale apparently isn't operating on the same plane of existence as the AtAT staff: "We have chosen the latter route," he writes (that's the boring one, for those of you who lost track), and thus the Knife, formerly just toasted, is now toast. The column, according to Beale, was also axed because it had become merely "an entertaining soap opera with links to strange Web sites that had nothing to do with the Mac." (Hey! We resemble that remark!)

But was the Knife really canned, as Beale implies? Not so, says the buzz from the fans. One anonymous viewer writes, "[Beale's editorial] is more full of bull hockey than a bran-fed rodeo. The writer of Mac the Knife left in disgust months and months ago." Left in disgust? We shudder to think of what could disgust the likes of the Knife, but we're guessing it was something along the lines of an increasingly corporate atmosphere and soul-stifling bureaucracy. That's just a guess, though, based on MacWEEK's "new direction."

But fear not, Knifelings; we admit we were once skeptical that MacEdition's Naked Mole Rat was in fact our newly-transplanted Gay Blade and not just a skillful imposter, but we've since been convinced by three factors. First of all, there's the inimitable voice-- if that isn't the Knife, then whoever this Mole Rat is should be forging lost Hemingway manuscripts for fun and profit. Secondly, there's the ton of mail we've gotten from various faithful viewers attesting that NMR is definitely the One True Knife, citing numerous shadowy sources and inside info. Who are we to argue? And thirdly, there's the clincher: the Mole Rat only posts updates about once a month, with today's column about multiprocessor Macs being the first to see the light of day since June 8th. Twenty-seven days between columns? Yup, that's our Knife alright. Oh, how we missed him so!