Speaking of Apple retail stores, more and more sources are climbing on board with reports that Apple's own outlets and third party resellers alike have received Big, Mysterious Boxes labeled "Do Not Open Until Monday Or We'll Wear Your Entrails As A Grisly Feather Boa-Like Thingy (Only Without The Feathers)." And we admit that we here at AtAT were mildly concerned about the fact that, with all these Big, Mysterious Boxes all over the place, as far as we could tell, absolutely zero photos of said boxes had materialized-- but that was before an AtAT source in the reseller business informed us that the boxes also bear a label which reads, "Distribute Photos Of These Big, Mysterious Boxes And We'll Still Do The Entrail Thing, Plus We'll Also Lick Our Fingers And Stick Them In Your Ears, Which Is A Very Unpleasant Experience." Immediately under those labels are other labels which read, "Someone Just Told Us It's Called A 'Wet Willie.' The Ear Thing, We Mean, Not The Entrails Thing. We Don't Think The Entrails Thing Has A Name."

Anyway, Apple's vigorous labelling practices aside, Think Secret appears to be the latest to confirm the presence of Big, Mysterious Boxes in the back rooms of Apple retail stores all across the land, allegedly surrounded by security so thick and hearty, it's the soup you can eat with a fork. And the security (or possibly just the graphic descriptions of mayhem on the labels themselves) is apparently pretty darn effective, because to date, not a single reliable report of just what's in those cartons has surfaced. Given the curious nature of the human animal, we find it hard to believe that not a single person has succumbed to the urge and risked the Wrath of Steve for a peek inside.

Then again, given the tenacity with which Steve protects his keynote secrets, we have since come to the conclusion that several resellers have peeked-- but before they could get to a keyboard to tell anyone, they were immediately vaporized by the highly radioactive dead Repo Man aliens that Apple cleverly used as packing material. (The half-life on those puppies will render them harmless on Monday afternoon.) If we start to get an abnormally high number of reports about resellers gone missing, we'll know we're right.

Incidentally, it's not entirely true that the 'net is totally devoid of reports from intrepid box-peekers; MacRumors lists a Page 2 rumor (i.e. one of "uncertain reliability," aka, "dubious veracity," aka "probably a big steaming load of brown stuff") which points to an alleged account by a German reseller who claims to have opened the verbotene Kästen to discover the "PowerMacintosh 970." Uh, yyyyyeah. Meanwhile, we ourselves have gotten our share of third-hand reports from friends of cousins of resellers claiming that they, too, have compromised Apple's security; the most believable of these reports claims that they do, indeed, contain the Power Macintosh G5, while the least convincing says they're full of human kidneys on ice. And yet, we still think the kidneys thing is more credible than the "PowerMacintosh 970" report. We suppose we'll know the truth in four days.

This just in: our reseller source reports having received another shipment of Big, Mysterious Boxes; these bear all the labels described above, plus a new one which reportedly reads, "We're Thinking Of Calling It The 'Cupertino Tripe Scarf.'" Intriguing!