Man, what better way to kick off a weekend than with a goofy rumor of an imminent Apple buyout hanging over our heads? Okay, granted, maybe it'd be a little bit niftier if the alleged buyee was none other than Disney; after all, we've got a weakness for the classics. But even though Uncle Walt and the mouse with the freaky ears are, sadly, nowhere to be seen this time around, we're still grateful to whatever twisted mind decided to concoct a scenario in which the mothership gets bought out by-- are you ready for this, kids?-- IBM. Ouch! How's that for a dose of rumorological whimsy?

Don't get too excited, though, since the only basis we've yet seen for this fleshcrawling merger madness is a single rumor posted by Northern Light and pointed out by faithful viewer googe; all it says is that some outfit calling itself JAGNotes.com has reported a rumor that "a $45 a share bid" will soon have Big Blue looking to turn our Cupertino crusaders into-- well, the Big Apple. No other info is given, other than the fact that "neither company was available for comment."

Now, we don't pretend to know Thing One about JAGNotes.com, other than it helpfully identifies itself as "your source for ahead of the market information" (uh-huh) and can't seem to decide on a standard way to capitalize its own name, since we count no fewer than four variations on its homepage alone. That doesn't exactly constitute a scathing indictment of the site's credibility, but neither does it have us eager to check our skepticism at the door and embrace the inevitable coming of International Business Macs. And the complete and utter lack of any evidence to support the rumor doesn't help us much, either. (By the way, no, the official "Jobs at IBM" page isn't referring to Steve in a suit.)

Still, it's a nice rumor for a quick kick in the gut, as it were; Macophiles whose allegiance to the platform predates the once-unholy partnership of Apple and IBM with Motorola as the PowerPC AIM alliance may be receiving the largest adrenal bursts, since in the '80s IBM was "the" enemy, long before Microsoft took over the role. However, despite our usual willingness to embrace unfounded whispers with little or no foundation in our common plane of existence, we think we're going to choose to appreciate this rumor entirely on its merits as a Dadaist conceptual travesty-- at least until we hear some scrap of evidence that the whole thing didn't just originate from Lou Gerstner describing his preference in pie types.