You know, we fully planned to throw together a scene about how, as faithful viewer loa bacon pointed out, Hewlett-Packard overtook Dell to become the number one seller of Wintel systems last quarter. We had the CNET article lined up, and the topic's all relevant and timely and stuff because, when coupled with last week's team-up, this news means that iTunes for Windows is going to ship on a ton of consumer-bound Wintels pretty soon. But then we saw how many numbers and percentages we'd have to slog through, and since we just went through that with Apple's quarterly results, we've decided to pull a Teen Talk Barbie, declare that math is hard, and instead discuss a computer full of potatoes.

Yes, potatoes. As in, spuds. Faithful viewer Ian Harris informed us of an article in The Guardian which reports that a guy in Germany bought a computer at a department store and then brought it back a few hours later, complaining that it didn't work. Store personnel opened the system's case to have a look, and "discovered it was not functioning because its working parts had been replaced with small potatoes." And this is how you know this happened in another country: "The bemused shop assistants gave the man a new computer free of charge." Here in the states, if you try to return a computer whose guts had been replaced with tubers, you'd probably get shot. In Germany, "hey, have another computer, potato-free-- it's on us!"

So now you know; in Germany, you can, indeed, exchange a potato-filled computer for a brand new functioning model for free. Just don't try it twice; potato-guy reportedly "returned a short time later with another computer-- again potato-filled" and claimed that "he didn't need a computer any more and asked for his money back in cash." Talk about pushing your luck, right? Well, this time the staff called the cops and the guy was arrested. You gotta know when to fold 'em, buddy.

Now, originally we couldn't figure out why the store personnel gave the guy a second computer in the first place, given that the returned model's innards had been replaced with potatoes. After thinking about it for a while, though, we arrived at the conclusion that the computer was most likely an ultra-cheap Wintel piece of junk, and the parts that the thief had pilfered and replaced with spuds were probably worth less than the potatoes themselves-- so, in effect, the store was coming out ahead on the deal. They only called the cops when he demanded cash.

Relevance? None at all; we just like that there was no math involved. But if anyone wants to buy a G5, pack it full of some sort of root vegetable, and then try to return it, you didn't get the idea from us.