Forgive us if we seem even more befuddled than usual today, but we're still recovering from our St. Patrick's Day debauchery. Not that we're hung over, or nursing head wounds, or anything like that; we've never really gone in for the traditional U.S. St. Paddy's Day activities of guzzling green beer, getting into bar brawls, and barring people from parades. No, we like to celebrate our Irish heritage in a slightly more oblique fashion-- namely, we go out for Indian food. Nothing says "Erin Go Bragh" like a big, steaming dish of Kabuli Chana. The thing is, we overdid it a bit with the laugh-at-the-white-guy-hot Baingan Bhartha ("We can see through time!"), and we're still coming down from the Guatemalan Insanity Pepper-style hallucinations. So bear with us, because it took us a really long time to convince ourselves that we really did see that Nike shoe thing on Apple's Retail page.

"What Nike shoe thing," you ask? Well, earlier today, there was a teensy little blurb there about NIKE iD, the build-to-order shoe service through which you can pick a style, choose the materials, specify all the colors, and even get custom lettering printed right on those puppies. What it was doing on Apple's retail page we have no idea, and we're even more puzzled that it instructed people to ask Apple store staff for more information. You can imagine why we thought it might be a curry-induced hallucination, especially since the info is now missing from the page-- but MacMinute confirms it was there, and that's good enough for us. (Well, unless they ate the same stuff we did, we suppose.)

We're not sure which is weirder: that the Nike stuff appeared on Apple's retail page in the first place, or that it quietly vanished just hours later. We're trying to piece together what an Apple-Nike cross-promotion might be like, but we're having a tough time making a connection. Luckily, MacRumors has at least a little more info, in the form of a report that "Apple Store employees will be wearing the NIKE iD shoes in stores along with Nike tie-ins (Nike web site as default in Safari) in a cross-promotion effort lasting until May 18th." One forum member reports that a call to his local Apple store reveals that "the significance/hope of the promotion is that consumers will order their shoes to match their new iPod mini."

Well, um... okay. We still haven't a clue as to what the "cross" in the "cross-promotion" might be. Will every pair of Nike shoes come with an iTunes Music Store gift certificate or something? Will all the employees at Niketown be wearing iPods and directing interested parties to the Apple store? Will Nike's sweatshop workers all get free copies of iLife '04? Only time will tell. Or maybe not, what with the information vanishing from Apple's site so quickly-- but that phone call to the store implies that the promotion is a go, no matter what the web site says. Maybe we'll have to go in, compliment a Mac Specialist on his or her snazzy shoes, and "ask for more details about NIKE iD" as directed. That's sure to be a mind trip at least as freaky as our Bhartha experience.