Ha! Publishing justice! As you all know, Apple bailed on the creative community at Seybold this year, preferring instead, of all things, to rub elbows with enterprise shmoes at OracleWorld. Yes, Apple snubbed the very publishing professionals who kept it alive over the years through thick and thin to go hobnob with suits who never gave it the time of day-- and now karma has come right back to bite it in the kiester. Faithful viewer Jonathan Claydon notes that, according to eWEEK, Apple and every other OracleWorld exhibitor and attendee had to evacuate the Moscone Center yesterday after some dorkus malorkus phoned in a bomb threat. See? That's what the universe does to people who turn their backs on their friends. Apple could have been cozied up all warm and unevacuaty at a booth at Seybold, but noooooo, it just had to try to play with the enterprise crowd. Serves 'em right.

Wait, what's that? Seybold was taking place in Moscone at the same time? Oh, yeah. Um... okay, never mind about all that "karma" stuff; both shows got cleared out, so apparently Apple would have been sent out into the street either way. Granted, since Seybold was in the west wing, at least Apple could have stayed put a half-hour longer, but we're not convinced that's a very strong hint from the cosmic wheel of divine justice that the company should have stuck with Seybold over OracleWorld. If anything, the universe was telling Apple that it shouldn't have been at either show yesterday. Maybe the company was cosmically meant to be at the International Council of Shopping Centers instead.

As usual with these things, there was no bomb, but the evacuation cancelled both Seybold and OracleWorld events for the rest of the day-- including the keynote address of Ken Jacobs, Oracle's veep of product strategy for server technologies, who was, coincidentally enough, just about to go on when the evacuation order came down. Are we overly suspicious to wonder whether Ken might have needed another night to write his speech, and whether he had an assistant willing to "buy him some more time"? Well, yeah, probably. But it's not like we're going to change now.

And by the way, a bomb scare? Seriously, in addition to being in awfully bad taste (on the eve of 9/11, to boot), those things are so played out; we used to have one a week in grade school, fer cryin' out loud. You'd think by now someone looking to disrupt a couple of tech trade shows would have come up with something slightly less offensive and a whole lot less dull. Why don't we ever hear about, say, pudding scares? As in, "You'd better evacuate the building, because in one hour's time, this entire convention center will be completely pumped full of rich, creamy JELL-O pudding"? The threat could even be delivered in a Bill Cosby voice for added believability. Just a little creativity, people; that's all we're asking for, here. Keep that in mind the next time you're planning to disrupt people's lives with irresponsibly alarmist anonymous phone calls, okay?