There are only forty-eight or so shopping days left until Christmas, and depending on your holiday buying habits, your reaction to that fact falls somewhere on the spectrum between "I finished buying and wrapping my gifts in August" and "wake me in forty-seven days." As for your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff, we generally like to get an early start on the annual consumer frenzy, so we're actually starting to sweat a little-- Christmas seems to be bearing down upon us like a runaway freight train and we're hard-pressed for gift ideas for many of our friends and relatives. And then there's Steve; he's been such a great member of our cast for the past three years, so we really feel we should send him a token of our esteem. But what do you get the iCEO who has everything?

The good news: faithful viewer Michael sent us a link to a fascinating San Francisco Chronicle article that's just chock-full of fantastic gift ideas. The bad news: you have to be a super-rich Option Baby to afford any of it. Yes, it's an article about excess in its purest form-- relatively useless consumer gadgets that cost more than the gross national products of several smaller countries, yet sell like hotcakes in and around San Francisco to the latest wave of Dotcom Riche. We're talking stuff like personal submarines for $20 million apiece. Too pricey? How about some jewelry? Earrings for $300,000, a ring for $500,000, or cheap gold necklaces for $33,500. If that's still too rich for your blood, $25,000 will get you an eight-foot-tall recreation of Robby the Robot from "Forbidden Planet"-- slap a bow on it and you're stylin' for Christmas morn. And at $7,900, the life-size, anatomically correct (!) model of Batman's butler Alfred is a steal.

Somehow, though, none of that seems quite right for Steve-- even if we did have money spilling out of every orifice. (Eeeyeeww.) Luckily, the article refers to Steve explicitly: "Apple Computer's Steve Jobs turns up regularly at the Union Square Armani outlet to replenish his closet... Jobs is especially fond of the $1,000 cashmere T-shirts." Now, this is clearly some new definition of the word "T-shirt" with which we aren't currently familiar. To us, a "T-shirt" is a garment bearing garish corporate logos and product advertising that is obtained for free at trade shows either by enduring humiliating audience-participation rituals or by beating the living bejeezus out of those standing near you and being the only one left standing when the garment is tossed in your general direction. It can also be a similar garment with or without product logos purchased for an amount ranging from fifty cents (at a yard sale or resale shop) up to $30 (at an arena concert of an overrated pop star, provided the "T-shirt" in question bears the image of said pop star). Like the fabled $5 shake, our sources tell us that the $1000 "T-shirt" is a similar garment, only much more expensive. We'll take their word for it.

However, we still won't be buying any cashmere T-shirts for Steve this Christmas. For one thing, spending a thousand dollars on a T-shirt seems as unnatural an act to us as cancelling a cable TV subscription. For another, since cashmere comes from goats (expensive and classy goats, we imagine, but goats nonetheless), it's not vegan. If Steve is really buying these T-shirts on a regular basis, then he's evidently not the kind of vegan who avoids wearing animal products and presumably he's got no problem with the potential exploitation of classy goats. However, given that he has to buy them to "replenish his closet," we strongly suspect that he's eating the T-shirts, and we don't want to be a party to such an expensive and unhealthy habit. Maybe we'll just send him a card instead.