Gee, for some unfathomable reason, the topic of "sleep" seems to be hovering prominently in our brains a lot these days. What do you suppose that's all about? Seriously, we could use some input; we'd ponder it ourselves, except we seem to keep blacking out for some reason, completely without warning.

We're not getting enough rest, you say? Hogwash! Unless someone can demonstrate a clear and incontestable causal link between lack of sleep and, well, sleep, clearly our preoccupation with Snoozeville and our occasional uncontrollable lapses into inky oblivion are an empathic response to whatever weirdness is afflicting a bunch of Apple's portables these days. According to MacFixIt, after they described a certain "unexpected sleep phenomenon" last week, they've gotten a "tremendous" response from "hundreds of afflicted readers" who are suffering the same symptoms. Or, rather, their PowerBooks and iBooks are suffering the symptoms; the users are merely suffering their portables' suffering the symptoms.

It makes perfect sense if you think about it. We promise.

Anyway, it seems that "virtually all Apple portables" running Mac OS X 10.3 (known in zoological circles as "Panther") can be hit by whatever this bizarre form of technonarcolepsy may be; what happens is that their owners are merrily Mac-ing away, when suddenly the 'Books simply "fall asleep without warning." Since that behavior sounds remarkably similar to our own sudden involuntary plunges into a near-comatose state, we have to assume there's a connection. MacFixIt doesn't mention any other symptoms, and our own Panther-running 'Books are fine with the whole continued wakefulness thing, so in case any of you folks have portables suffering this problem, we have to ask-- are they yawning a lot? Because if they are, that would be another link right there.

Oh, wait-- we're just digging through the minutiae of the report now, and it looks like the problem is tied to Panther's lousy granularity at determining remaining battery life; what seems to be happening is that Panther thinks there's 20 or 30 minutes' worth of juice left, but then the estimated life remaining drops off a cliff (even if the actual life remaining is still good) right past the "your battery is low on power, so find a wall socket, Sparky" warnings and clear into let's-sleep-this-puppy-immediately territory. We can't be sure, of course, but we don't think that's what's happening to us; as far as we can tell, our brains aren't even running Panther, and while we've checked about as thoroughly as we'd like, we haven't actually located our own battery compartments yet-- which leads us to consider the alarming possibility that we may not even have any. If that's the case, it's going to be pretty inconvenient having to stay plugged into a wall all the time.

Regardless, like we said, our own sudden blackouts must be some sort of psychosomatic empathic response to the 'Book epidemic. Here's hoping that Apple issues a fix in 10.3.4 sometime soon, so that we can go 37 hours without sleep sans the uncontrollable blackouts. You know-- like normal people.