Well, this is an annoyance arising from our recent hiatus that we hadn't anticipated: Phantom Scene Syndrome. Trust us, it's not the title of the next Star Wars movie-- although, come to think of it, it beats the pants off of "Attack of the Clones"; we're campaigning for the third one to be named "Night of the Brain-Sucking Space Lampreys" to lend it an air of class. George still isn't returning our calls, but we're pretty sure we're wearing him down. But we digress. Phantom Scene Syndrome is an honest-to-goodness thingy we're experiencing now that we've thrown ourselves back into daily production after eleven weeks in limbo. Wanna know just what the furry heck we're talking about? Here's an example to smooth your furrowed brow.

So we're trolling for plot material and we notice (thanks to MacMinute) that Forbes has updated its list of CEO Approval Ratings with final numbers for May-- and Steve Jobs is apparently doing pretty well. 83% of the respondents last month gave Steve a thumbs-up, which beat out the ratings for every other CEO in the list: Cisco's John Chambers, Oracle's Larry Ellison, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, and HP's Carly Fiorina. "Great," we think, "we can do a followup to that scene we did about how Steve's approval rating completely tanked between March and April."

Except when we went back through the Reruns to find that scene so we could link to it in the holy name of Context, we kept coming up blank. Eventually we wound up paging through every single scene we produced since we returned from our eleven-week snooze, and we still came up blank. "Ah," we finally realized, "this must be one of those scenes we only wrote in our heads." Because, you know, there are plenty of times that we get far enough into the production process to plan out an entire scene, but then we never get a chance to actually write it-- and finding out later that it was never produced is akin to trying to scratch one's left arm with one's right and suddenly discovering that both arms were surgically removed. Only, um, to perhaps a slightly lesser degree.

So, unfortunately now we have to provide context after the fact, which is about as dramatic as C-SPAN with the TV off-- meaning, slightly more dramatic than C-SPAN with the TV on. Nonetheless, here it is. Ahem: "Steve's approval rating is on the rebound, up to 83% in May after it fell from 91% to 75% between March and April." Yeah, just thrilling. But hey, at least when the June numbers come out, we'll be able to point you to this scene. Wait... we did write this one, right?...