Before we depart to prepare for the various and sundry solemn rituals of the hallowed Labor Day Weekend, we thought we'd leave you with an ultra-concentrated infusion of surrealism to help you cope with your AtATless existence for the next three days. (Because it's not like any of you have ever had to live without us for eleven weeks before or anything.) This is actually something we've been sitting on for a week, because we figured it was the perfect thing to throw at you on our way out the door today; now that it's got a solid week's worth of AtAT butt-groove, it's finally ready to unleash.

So here's the scoop: faithful viewer JL! informed us that last Friday there was a "man in a giant turtle outfit" hanging around outside Apple headquarters in Cupertino. Reportedly he was waving at passing cars and holding a sign that read "BREAK 10% MARKET SHARE - BEAT DELL - BEAT HP."

Weird.

Of course, what may have been weirder is that said Turtle-Man was not just some overzealous Mac fan who ate the wrong kind of mushrooms and decided it'd be a hoot to dress up as a shelled reptile, hold a sign, and accost traffic to further the cause of increasing the Mac's market share-- we expect that sort of thing happens every day. No, this was different; this Turtle-Man was a marketing ploy. See, his sign pointed people to www.deltabeta.com/switch/, which replicates the text of the flyers he was also handing out; it seems he was trying to land Apple as an account for Delta Beta In-Flight, Inc., who proposes turning "bored passengers" on commercial airline flights into "switchers" by providing "a Mac experience during their flight."

So it sounds like they're proposing renting or loaning out PowerBooks during flights as a way of exposing as many people as possible to the Apple way of life; Delta Beta claims that "United, American, and Delta go face-to-face with over 100,000 passengers per day. Compare that to the number of people who shop at Apple Stores." Overall, it doesn't sound like a bad idea; sort of like that old thing where Mac resellers would actually let a prospective customer take a loaner Mac home overnight to give it a whirl. We've actually heard people suggest programs like this before. Just not, you know, while dressed as a big turtle.

What we want to know is whether the turtle thing worked, and Delta Beta ever got a call from someone at Apple-- to discuss the in-flight loaner idea, not to complain about the psychotic guy in a turtle suit loitering in front of their campus. We wouldn't be a bit surprised if they did. After all, every great success story has a turtle suit in it somewhere.