Finally, we leave you with a quickie to send you reeling into a weekend filled with dark and feverish conspiracy theories. You all know, of course, that Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs are the Bobbsey Twins of the high-tech CEO set; at least according to Larry (who, not so coincidentally, just happens to be a member of Apple's board of directors), the two are bestest buddies and lifelong pals. Given that fact, then, doesn't it seem a mite odd that Larry's company Oracle has had Mac support that we'd describe as spotty, at best? Let's ignore for a moment that Intuit CEO Bill Campbell is an Apple board member as well, and getting Mac software out of his company is sometimes like pulling teeth from an alert mountain lion with a pair of pliers-- and what that mountain lion is doing with a pair of pliers we'll never know.

But we digress (surprise, surprise). Back to Oracle. Well, apparently ol' Larry just unveiled a new version of his company's enterprise database software: Oracle 9i. And eagle-eyed faithful viewer Echo Sounder Smythe noticed something very interesting in the background of a Reuters photo of the introduction: doesn't that big orange "9" look awfully familiar, somehow? As if you may have seen it somewhere before? Yes, Larry's big orange "9" is quite similar to Steve's big orange "9"-- if by "quite similar" you mean "virtually indistinguishable." It's not just the unusual shade of orange that's the same; the typestyle used for the "9" (with the single swooping curve and unclosed loop) is so similar, you'd think Larry photographed a Mac OS 9 box to make his 9i backdrop.

So what does this mean? We honestly couldn't tell you. And not in the "we could tell you but we'd have to kill you" sense, but in the "we haven't the foggiest clue why Larry and Steve are both using the same exact '9'" sense. Maybe if Larry were using a big blue "X" we could come up with something good, but circumstances being what they are, we've got nothing. Just chalk this up as another one of those spooky coincidences that keeps people awake at night when they don't have more important things to worry about. Enjoy the weekend!