For many of us Mac fanatics, the one great joy in our lives is clicking the "Update Now" button in Software Update and finding one or two new updaters kicking around on Apple's servers, just begging to be downloaded. Sad? Well, no; we're just highly appreciative of fine craftsmanship in all its forms, including well-wrought updaters that further strengthen an already stellar Mac-using experience.

Okay, you're right; it is sad. But it's not like we're going to change now, so deal with it.

Besides, there's a possibility that you might gain a newfound sense of respect and awe for those updaters when you learn where they come from. Here's a little-known fact about Apple's software updates: they aren't so much written and tested by a skilled team of in-house developers as they are periodically disgorged from the belly of a strange and wondrous creature known as "the Great Update Beast." It's true! The knowledge of whence the GUB came has long been lost in the swirling mists of time, but the fact of the matter is that Apple keeps feeding it CD-Rs of all of the company's current software, and every so often it coughs up a disc containing a point-release update for one of Apple's products. It's one of those perfect symbiotic relationships that would actually be quite touching if it weren't also kinda gross.

And speaking of gross, apparently the GUB recently got hold of some bad fish or something, because it's been horking up updates almost nonstop for the past couple of days. Projectile updating, you might say. Yuck.

See, it was one thing to get both a Battery Update and Mac OS X 10.3.2 in the course of a single day, but for those to be immediately followed by QuickTime 6.5 and iTunes 4.2 smacked of tummy trouble for the GUB. And then for Apple also to have shipped, as MacRumors notes, Final Cut Pro 4.1.1, LiveType 1.1.1, Xcode 1.1, and DVD Studio Pro 2.0.3 right after that, well, apparently we should have gotten ol' Gubbie a flu shot when we had the chance, because it clearly can't keep anything down. Indeed, aside from the massive spew of updaters (at last count there have been 6,434 in the past three days), there are other signs that the Beast just isn't itself right now; for example, that Xcode update has already been pulled for unspecified reasons. (Apparently it just wasn't his best work.)

While the spate of updates is a welcome change from Apple's typical steady trickle ("It's like Christmas in December!"), we're finding it hard to enjoy the downpour while the health of the Great Update Beast is so clearly at issue right now. We'd send him some soup, but if it is the stomach flu, that might just make things worse, and before you know it we'll be knee-deep in updates for long-dead products like MacPaint and eWorld. It's probably best just to let this thing run its course. And who knows? Maybe by the time the GUB is feeling like his old self again, we'll all have a Mac OS X-native OpenGL update of the original "Gerbils!" to play with.