Attention: if you live in the general vicinity of Cupertino and you've got a little free time on your hands, would you mind perhaps donning a rainbow wig, wandering over to Apple headquarters, staking out Steve's car in the parking lot (you can't miss it-- it's the flashy number with no license plates parked across three handicapped spaces and on top of the torso of an elderly woman), and when he shows up to drive home, offering him a stick of Juicy Fruit? Actually, it doesn't even have to be Juicy Fruit-- Doublemint, Big Red, heck, even a non-Wrigley brand if you must. Because really, absolutely nothing of interest is happening in the Apple world at this particular point in time, and we could really use a "Rainbow-Wigged Stalker Offers Steve Jobs A Stick of Gum" plot point right about now. Thanks in advance.

Until that comes to pass, of course, we suppose we should try to make a really big thing about the issue raised in the latest Naked Mole Rat report: it seems that Apple's IT department has issued a memo warning company employees against using iCal for any official internal scheduling purposes, instead pushing MeetingMaker as Apple's "preferred option for business calendaring." So bear with us for a moment, here, as we studiously ignore the fact that iCal is a 1.0 release of a consumer-targeted application and therefore understandably lacks certain useful corporate groupware functions (like a centrally-maintained list of all users, an integrated means by which to invite multiple users to a given function beyond simple email, a way to schedule rooms and equipment, an automatic system to determine when to schedule a meeting based on the published availability of specified required attendees and resources, etc.) and instead just go all melodramatic about Apple using someone else's product instead of its own.

Ahem. Ready?

Quick, sell your stock, set your Macs on fire, and erect a shrine to Bill Gates in your living room, because Apple as a company will no longer exist this time next week. How could it, when it doesn't even have enough faith in its own products to hinge its day-to-day operation and corporate effectiveness on software it designed for tracking and sharing family birthdays and the kids' soccer games? This policy is a zillion times worse than when Motorola ditched all its Macs and moved to Wintels running its competitor's processors, and clearly indicates a profound lack of confidence in iCal as a viable product-- meaning that Apple might only realize a tenth of the revenue it originally planned to generate based on iCal sales. What's next, news that Apple is archiving all of its terabytes of crucial corporate data on its thousands of Macs and file servers with something other than .Mac Backup? That's it, game over-- it was nice while it lasted, folks. And who ever suspected that Apple's demise would come not at Microsoft's hands, but at MeetingMaker's? Oh, the irony.

Okay, we're done. Never let it be said that we can't squeeze blood from a stone. But seriously, if anyone can help us out with the clown wig and gum thing, we'd be really grateful.