Lastly, we close with a quick little brain-teaser to occupy your thoughts this weekend. You are, of course, familiar with Robert X. Cringely, the pundit who expounds upon any number of technicalish topics in his weekly column for PBS? He was one of Apple's earliest employees and created the appallingly famous and excellent Triumph of the Nerds, which is basically the PBS nonfiction version of Pirates of Silicon Valley, only, you know, without Farmer Ted as Bill Gates. And despite having predicted a Mac OS X tablet computer "as early as January" (last January, that is), there are probably few people bouncing around out there in a better position to toss out pithy snap judgments of the biggest players in the high tech biz.

And that's just what he did: faithful viewer neopod came across an email interview with Cringely in the Sydney Morning Herald in which he's asked whether Steve Jobs ever gave him "something less than a kindly look" (we think that's Australian for "smack upside the head with a blunt instrument") for having publicly referred to the man as "a sociopath." Now, here's where the brain teaser comes in: Cringely replies that, no, Steve has never gone medieval on his nether regions for the sociopath comment because Steve is "proud of being an a***hole."

So our question is: what the heck is an a***hole?

At first, given Cringely's thorough knowledge of Steve's origins, we figured that perhaps it's a word in the native language of Steve's home planet, and the asterisks represent alien letters not appropriately represented in the Roman alphabet. You know, like the first asterisk could be a letter whose sound is a guttural wheezing sort of noise, the second might represent one that requires whistling loudly across three outstretched tentacles, etc.

Then we got to thinking that maybe, just maybe, those asterisks are sort of like wildcards, in that they each represent a plain vanilla Roman letter which was replaced to obfuscate the actual word for some reason-- possibly for purposes of national security. (We know that, technically speaking, an asterisk is typically a "zero or more characters" wildcard, while a question mark is "one character exactly," but since the former definition would make three consecutive asterisks redundant, we're assuming a slightly less traditional usage here.) So then the question becomes, what three letters are those asterisks hiding, and why?

We've been at it for the better part of a day, now, and we feel we're no closer to the truth. Is Steve proud to be an adzehole? If so, what does that mean, and why is someone trying to suppress the info from appearing in the press? Or was Cringely trying to express that Steve's real name is Anathole? Is Steve's home planet Gallic in nature? We can at least understand why that information might need to be kept under wraps.

What about Alu Chole? Is Steve proud of being a northern Indian chickpeas-and-potatoes entree? And just like Steve, it's vegan-- could this be a clue?

Well, we'll never figure it all out in one night. Ammo hole? Army hole? Atom hole? It's a mystery, all right, and likely one that will never be solved. Chew on that one over the weekend. Suckers.