You'll have to forgive us if we seem a little "off" today; things got seriously weird this weekend. It seemed like a perfectly ordinary Friday afternoon, but then all of a sudden this white powdery stuff started falling out of the sky and it didn't stop until Sunday night. By the time the bizarre event had passed, there was two feet of the mysterious white substance piled on top of every horizontal surface outside. When we finally ventured out in our biohazard suits to obtain a sample, we discovered that the material was cold-- and it appears to possess occult qualities, because by the time we'd brought the sample into the AtAT compound for analysis in a controlled environment, we found to our astonishment that it had vanished completely and been replaced with a small quantity of ordinary water. Clearly this is the result of some sort of top secret bio-alchemical weapons testing gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Or it just snowed a lot. We're told that's possible, too.

Anyway, whatever happened, it messed with us both mentally and physically. On top of the brain-addling reality of cold white stuff falling from the heavens, it turned out that piling it all with crude shovel-like implements in such a manner as to allow pedestrian and vehicular access to the compound took about... well, probably about thirty-seven hours, after which the toxins that were magically woven into the substance's molecular structure had penetrated our protective bodysuits and infected the musculature of our arms, legs, backs, and shoulders. We've been unable to locate a local shaman who can exorcise whatever technomystical poison has us prone and largely immobile (did you know you can use a PowerBook trackpad with your tongue? Until now, neither did we), but even without an antidote, the effects do seem to be wearing off. Slowly.

The upshot of all this, of course, is that we're seriously off our game, so if you're expecting this extended whinefest to turn into a brilliant segue into on-topic material right about now, prepare to be bitterly disappointed, because all we can manage at the moment is a clumsy jump-cut that'll leave you wondering whether you just accidentally sat on the remote control and changed the channel. Ready?

Hey, how about that Steve Jobs interview about digital music in Rolling Stone? Faithful viewer David Triska pointed it out to us, and boy howdy, ain't it a gasser? Hoo, boy! For one thing, we get a new Stevism about stealing music that we can finally use in place of the overdone "bad karma" one: "It is corrosive to one's character to steal." Somebody put that on a t-shirt. Oh, and then for the funny jar, there's this swipe at the foundering subscription-based music services: "I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model, and it might not be successful." That's gold, baby! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!! Heh heh.

Aheh.

Ow. It hurts to laugh.

We'll be better tomorrow, we promise.