Wow, it's pretty quiet out there in Macville right about now, hmmmm? Peaceful, like. Oh, sure, there are faint rustlings about imminent G5age in January, and Steve delivered a quick two cents on the Microsoft antitrust settlement proposal, but otherwise everyone's apparently too busy playing with their iPods to make much noise. Everything's so calm and tranquil... serene, even. Why, it's enough to make us want to scream at the top of our lungs and maybe set fire to our own heads out of sheer unadulterated boredom.

See, being drama addicts, we don't handle these news lulls terribly well; we get all twitchy and distracted and nothing short of a major scandal (or, presumably, a massive dose of prescription medication) will calm us down. Thank heaven for Apple, then, who did its very best to help keep us occupied, bless its big, lovable corporate heart. Despite the utter news vacuum, according to faithful viewer Robert Westmoreland, the company saw fit to issue a press release anyway-- about QuickTime 5's runaway success. Apparently Apple's eminently versatile multimedia software is being downloaded at the astonishing rate of "one million copies... every three days." That is, indeed, an impressive enough statistic to warrant a low whistle of surprised approval. (Insert low whistle of surprised approval here.)

However, this press release really seems to have come from out of the blue; perhaps our ridiculously short attention spans just missed it, but we can't see a shred of context into which this announcement might fit. As far as we can tell, there's no QuickTime-centric trade show going on, or a new product release that might somehow mesh with this nifty statistic-- just a standalone and rather offhand notice that, "Hey, we sure are doling out a whole lot of QuickTime installers these days." It almost feels like Apple has adopted a strict "No More Than Fifteen Days Between Press Releases" policy and was grasping at straws to make the deadline.

Not that we're complaining, of course; we're thankful for every scrap of semi-surreal Apple-related plot material we can lay our hands on. Still, we can't help but think that there must be some sort of underlying reason why Apple chose now to hit us with the news that QuickTime 5 is on its way to reaching 100 million downloads in its first year on Apple's servers. Does the press release contain some sort of hypnotic trigger phrase that will prompt everyone who's ever used QuickTime to enter a trance, grab a blunt instrument, and advance on Washington, D.C. and Redmond to assist Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller in an elaborately orchestrated grab for those seats of power? Given the recent drama drought, we can but hope...