Strangeness is afoot! Remember late last Thursday when some poor web lackey over at Apple accidentally posted a wrong image file to the Apple Store and thusly spilled the beans on the Power Mac G5 four days early? Specifically, what happened was that the header graphic said "Choose your Power Mac G4", but the list of specs underneath described the G5. About twenty seconds after this happened, screenshots of the revealing error were posted on fully three-quarters of all web pages on the 'net. Thirty seconds after it happened, Steve Jobs calmly pointed out the error to the culpable employee and then tore off his right arm and bludgeoned him to death with it.

But now the Stevenote is over, the G5 is no longer a secret, and we can all put this fascinating series of events behind us, right? Nuh-uh. Because faithful viewer Blondie-Wan sent us this screenshot last night, showing the Apple Store once again displaying the wrong graphics-- only this time it's reversed: the header says G5 like it should, and the specs say G4. (Note: the linked graphic may well be fixed by the time you see this.)

Now, we're not exactly suspicious people, mind you, but it did seem a little odd to us that Apple's web crew could have made exactly the same image-swapping mistake that one of them made last Thursday (only in reverse), especially following the loud and messy demise of one of their ilk mere days earlier. Just four days later, and they're making the same slip-up as their fallen comrade? What, are they heavy with the death wishes over there? So just to confirm Blondie-Wan's story, we went over to try to buy a G5 ourselves. We went to the main Apple Store page, clicked the big G5 graphic, and got... this. Yes, folks, that there is a bona fide (though heavily compressed) screenshot of the Apple Store correctly showing the G5 specs graphic-- under a header graphic that reads "Step 1: Select Your Power Macintosh G3."

Let us just say this: yes, we frequently make stuff up for entertainment purposes, but what we're telling you here is the unvarnished truth. This capture is totally legit and was taken on Tuesday, June 24th at 12:05 AM EDT. It was cropped and JPEG-compressed to save bandwidth, but it wasn't altered in any other way. When we tried visiting the Apple Store again just a couple of minutes later, the graphics were correct once more. If it weren't for the screenshot we took, we'd think we had been seeing things. (The independent reports and screenshots from faithful viewers Yoshiki-san and Don Modro which rolled in while we were working on this scene helped a lot, too.) And since then we've also gotten corroborating eyewitness reports on the first mix-up from faithful viewers Matt Selchow and Jona Gold-- and encountered it ourselves.

So yeah, apparently files are flying every which way in Apple's server room and it's only a matter of time before the Apple Store illustrates the new G5 with a picture of a horsey. At this point we see several interesting possible explanations for why Apple can't seem to keep the names and descriptions of its various Power Macs straight in its own online store:

• These latest graphic-switching hijinks are the work of the ghost of the dismembered and skull-crushed web lackey, now a poltergeist who haunts Apple's servers and mischievously renames image files from beyond the grave.

• Those grief-stricken Apple web lackeys left alive are moving images around in a defiant act of solidarity with their fallen coworker, and will soon be dealt a similar fate.

• The web lackey who made the Thursday Night Error was in fact not killed, but actually granted mercy and given a second chance-- but flubbed it badly last night and is even now being fed head-first into an industrial-size meat grinder.

• It's all Akamai's fault. We mention this as a distinct possibility because we just wound up with the "G5 header/G4 specs" bug ourselves, and while the Akamai-cached graphic is the incorrect G4 version, the Apple original correctly describes the G5.

• Steve's just screwing with our heads.

We're kinda leaning towards the last one, ourselves. Hi, Steve!