Okay, so lots of customers who ordered a G4 iMac within, say, the first eight seconds that they were available at the Apple Store are now happily clicking away at their shiny new systems. However, most of those systems arrived a little bit later than anticipated; we've heard complaints from folks who forked out the extra dough for overnight shipping, only to discover that their iMacs wound up getting stuck in customs in Anchorage, Alaska pending inspection by the United States Food and Drug Administration. And no, it's not just insane and delusional AtAT viewers reporting this surreal development; the presumably sober readers of MacMinute and MacInTouch confirm that the FDA was grounding iMacs in Alaska. Go figure.

Now, longtime viewers may find something eerily familiar about this whole scenario-- probably because the exact same thing happened almost precisely a year ago when the first titanium PowerBook G4s started to ship. At the time, Federal Express was explaining to antsy TiBook customers that the FDA was involved because it had "jurisdiction over electronic products using lasers," which sounds plausible, if not still a little goofy. And so just as vast quantities of TiBooks were sitting idle in Anchorage a year ago, being nibbled at by moose as the FDA took its own sweet time inking up its "These Lasers Aren't Powerful Enough To Be Used In An Orbiting Doomsday Satellite" rubber stamp, this time around it was scads of iMacs feeding the local fauna.

Ah, but was it really concerns about the lasers that had the FDA gumming up the works, or was that just a convenient excuse? Faithful viewer Chris Merkling was distressed to discover that his local CompUSA still doesn't have any new iMacs, and one of the employees imparted an interesting reason why: "They're having trouble getting them through customs because everyone wants to stop and see it."

Normally we'd rate the reliability of this sort of information pretty low on the Universal Scale of Truth-- particularly coming from the average CompUSA employee, who would probably have no more reason to know why iMacs are moving so slowly through customs than he or she would know why Alaskan moose find titanium and shiny white plastic so gosh-darn tasty. But we have to admit, shipments delayed while throngs of bureaucracy rubberneckers play with the cool new equipment actually sounds more plausible than some FDA guy inspecting the Macs to make sure no Death Rays come shooting out of the optical drive when the system is poked at with a stick. Heck, we once almost missed a flight because the airport security guys started playing "Beavis & Butthead" on our Sega Game Gear.

So there you have it: if your iMac was late, blame it on the FDA and the irrepressible urges of its employees. And if anyone happens to notice that their new iMac's browser cache mysteriously includes code and graphics from sites like "Bureaucratic Vixens" and "Randy Regulatory Romps," well, we'll take that as confirmation.