Speaking of Motorola, now that we've blown a good eighty percent of today's episode rambling on incessantly about mouse buttons like some twisted Disney rodent apparel fetishist, why not use our last few remaining breaths to spit out something about the Motorola Conspiracy Theory of the Week? Paranoid scenarios involving Apple's oh-so-cuddly G4 supplier are usually limited to the obvious, i.e. "Nobody's that incompetent; they're screwing up G4 production on purpose as payback for when Steve Jobs killed Mac OS licensing and thusly torpedoed the Motorola StarMax, sticking the company with millions in losses on the failed product." This week, though, there's a little twist on the classic: Motorola wasn't a lone nut in the book depository; there was a second shooter out behind the grassy knoll. Da da da dummmmmm!

Earlier this week, faithful viewer Tom Kilbourne tipped us off to an Associated Press article about a Legion of Doom-style hookup that just makes us go "hmmmm"; it seems that Motorola has joined forces with Microsoft-- ostensibly to work together on so-called "smart phones" with Moto hardware and Micro software, but who are they kidding, right? You know, we always suspected that Motorola was Solomon Grundy, a little too dim to be planning this subtle (well, relatively subtle) revenge against Apple on its own, but if Microsoft was pulling strings behind the scenes like the Lex Luthor we know it to be, well, that just makes a whole lot more sense.

The cover story is that Microsoft's new smartphone embedded operating system will drive next-generation Motorola phones that will allow users to "manage personal information and synchronize their email, calendar, and contacts; browse the Web; download and listen to digital music; and view video clips." You know, pretty much all the stuff that the Handspring Treos did a year ago, so it shouldn't be too hard to pull off. But that's only to be expected, since presumably in order to keep the alliance going without arousing suspicion, the companies will actually need to produce these things, but they would want to spend as little time on them as possible so they can devote their energies to making Apple miserable. The real question is, when they hit store shelves, will Apple support these phones in iSync? Oooh, the irony.

Then again, if this isn't an anti-Apple conspiracy team-up and Microsoft and Motorola really are just working together on mobile phones, there's a decent chance that when the fourth quarter rolls around, Microsoft will be tapping its foot and wondering why that big 'ol shipment of MPx200 Motorola smartphones hasn't shown up yet...