Whoa, hold the phone, Clem! We know you were probably planning to skip next month's Macworld Expo because you made the perfectly reasonable assumption that the keynote address was going to be delivered by someone on the slightly blah side of the bell curve, like maybe senior finance veep Pete Oppenheimer, or an inanimate carbon rod-- or worse yet, Jon Rubinstein with an extended remix of last year's infamous Megahertz Myth presentation. We still have flashbacks. Pity us.

But screw on that travelin' hat and point it towards the Big Apple, because IDG Expos dropped a major bombshell yesterday: according to an official press release, the keynote is actually going to be delivered by none other than-- brace yourselves, here-- Steve Jobs himself! (Ideally we would have passed this mindblowing news along to you as soon as we heard it yesterday, but frankly, we were completely overwhelmed by the sheer wonder of it all and needed time to recover from the shock. Plus, there were a whole slew of The Adventures of Pete and Pete episodes on the TiVo.)

We know this whole "Steve's doing the keynote" scenario sounds highly unlikely, and you're right to be a tad suspicious-- but if you're thinking that the press release is just someone's idea of an elaborate joke, the prankster is one thorough guy, since he's also apparently hacked the official Macworld Expo web site to list Steve as the headliner on the Keynote & Feature Presentation page. Assuming it's legit, the Stevester will "deliver another groundbreaking keynote presentation" (in technical terms, he will "do his thang") on Wednesday, July 17th at 9 AM. And that's not all! It's not enough that His Steveness will deign to grace us with his physical presence; reportedly he's also going to wow us, too. Quoth the CEO of IDG World Expo, "Steve's keynote is likely to have a few surprises for us all."

Wait, so Steve's going to deliver the keynote-- and there are going to be surprises, too?! Holy Hannah, this is totally unprecedented; we need to lie down and breathe into a paper bag.

So get out there and Steve it up; for what it's worth, it's already too late for us here at AtAT Headquarters. We already passed on heading out for the keynote, and we've since made alternate and unchangeable plans to wash our hair that day. It's sad, we know, but there simply wasn't any way we could have known that we'd be missing what promises to be a positively mesmerizing performance by the Big Steve himself. Okay, sure, it's true that Mr. Jobs has delivered the keynote at every single New York Macworld Expo thus far (including the one he wasn't even supposed to attend), but hey, it just so happens that we've got the pattern recognition skills of a narcoleptic whippet on crack-- so without an official announcement, there was simply no way we could possibly have predicted Steve's scheduled presence at the event. We blame society. Thank heaven for streaming QuickTime, hmmmm?