Whoa, hold the phone, there, Mabel, 'cause the portly woman isn't belting out any arias just yet. Last week we covered the Appletastic drama simmering right here in our own backyard (figuratively speaking, of course; the only thing simmering in our actual backyard is that sludgy stuff that's collected in the Birdbath of a Thousand Screams™) concerning Macworld Expo's planned move to Boston and the evidence that IDG has already decided to back out on the deal. That, however, is not the unresolved situation to which we referred earlier when we mentioned the stout songstress and her continued state of clam-uppedness; despite IDG post-Greco bigwig David Korse's claim that he's "launched an in-depth study on the merits of New York vs. Boston" and will report his decision on September 1st, as far as we're concerned, the fact that IDG has already cancelled its block of rooms at Boston's Seaport Hotel means that the decision's been made and Korse is just trying to buy time to build a drawbridge and a moat around IDG's Boston-area headquarters so that the locals have a tougher time lynching him when he finally admits to the decision.

No, what we're talking about is our earlier pronouncement that, in all likelihood, the show would remain in New York, and that we were wrong about the summer Expo instead kicking its little legs in the air and dying a painful death altogether. Since we said that, further buzz has emerged which hints that we may have been wrong about, well, being wrong; the Boston Globe has all sorts of juicy tidbits about the scandal, not the least of which is that Massachusetts Convention Center Authority executive director Jim Rooney "expressed doubt that IDG would hold any expo for Macintosh computer users on the East Coast next year." Says Jim, "it was great in its time, but now the career is over."

Obviously there's some bitterness from the Beantown crew over losing the show to New York in 1998, winning it back, and then losing it again, so Rooney might not be the most objective source when speculating about the end of the summer Macworld Expo. (The man also worked in the requisite Bostonian snipe at NYC: "The show we sent away was a great show, and then it spent 5 years in New York and deteriorated." Personally, we weren't born in either place, we don't follow baseball, and we love both cities, so the whole Boston-vs.-New York thing never really clicked for us.) However, IDG's Korse confirms at least that the whole "Macworld CreativePro" refocusing goofiness is here to stay, and that even if the show does happen, either in Boston or in New York, next year it'll just be called "CreativePro": "Macworld is only going to happen once a year, in January, in California."

Hmmmm... this is starting to unfold pretty darn exactly how our conspiracy-obsessed brains predicted way back when this whole fracas started: Apple doesn't want to blow the cash on two domestic Expos a year, and used the summer show's move back to Boston as a convenient means to kill it altogether. (Apparently just because we're paranoid doesn't mean that everyone isn't out to get us. Or prove us right. Or something.) Nothing's carved in stone yet, of course, and if you're the betting type, AppleInsider claims that its sources put the chance of the 2004 summer show not happening at all in any way, shape, form, or location at about 40%. But no matter what, Korse himself has confirmed that if it does happen, it still won't be Macworld, which presumably means (judging by last month's significantly reduced gig) no Stevenote and no big Apple product announcements.

So here's the latest conspiracy theory we're kicking around: suppose this is all a way for Apple to pump up its own Worldwide Developers Conference as the new big mid-year event for the Mac faithful? Consider the following:

• Apple moved this year's show from May to late June, supposedly to get more time to cobble together a Panther developer release. Is this a permanent move, in part to reposition the show as a summer Expo replacement for Stevenote/product intro purposes?

• Think Secret has alluded to "unconfirmed reports" that this year's WWDC "was managed by Apple 'corporate'" instead of the company's Worldwide Developer Relations group, which has always run WWDC in the past. "The 2003 WWDC was a significantly larger event, taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco rather than the smaller San Jose venue it's taken in past years." Just a happy indication of increased developer interest in the Mac platform, or a sign of the MacworldExpoification of the show?

• Unlike Macworld Expo, WWDC is run by Apple and Apple maintains total control-- for example, security to protect those precious Stevenote secrets is a zillion times easier without IDG holding the keys to the castle and hundreds of third party companies setting up booths.

• Macworld Expo costs a couple hundred bucks (for any pass that includes keynote access), of which Apple presumably gets nil. WWDC, being a developers' conference, costs about $1300-- assuming you sign up early. Apple gets to pocket it all.

So whaddaya think? Just the ravings of a deranged mind, or is Apple hoping to see a healthy new revenue stream as non-programmers sell their cars for WWDC tickets next year in hopes of witnessing a Stevenote as spectacular as last June's? Is it furthermore hoping that some of those non-programmers get sucked into Mac development while they're there and wind up creating the killer app that eventually causes 80% of the Wintel-using world to jump ship for the Light Side of the Force? We'll see come next year...