You know, we aren't the type who usually reads too much into omens and the like, but every once in a while one comes along that's pretty tough to ignore-- a two-headed black calf born under a new moon, the seas frothing with blood beneath a sky blazing with fire, finding a bonus thirteenth shell in an Old El Paso Taco Dinner Kit, that sort of thing. So you can understand if we're a little freaked out by recent events taking place in the general vicinity of Apple headquarters, because if we are talking about omens, here, believe us when we say this isn't likely to be a good one.

See, faithful viewer Sorry Nothistime (warning: there's a slim chance that's a pseudonym) slid us a San Francisco Chronicle article about a mountain lion that met with a sorry fate in Palo Alto, a stone's throw away from Apple's headquarters in Cupertino. Apparently this cougar had wandered down into a "highly populated area" from its home in the foothills, wandered around a bit, got chased up a tree by a labrador, and eventually fell asleep-- which is when local police shot and killed it.

Now, read the signs here, people: the saga began in the wee hours of the morning when a delivery guy first spotted the puma "in the city's most exclusive neighborhood-- Old Palo Alto, which is home to former 49ers great Steve Young and Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs." A big cat skulking around in Steve's neighborhood, mere miles from where Apple worked on Mac OS X releases Puma, Cheetah, Jaguar, Panther, and now Tiger? And just in case you still didn't catch it, the cosmic forces of the universe (which appear to be getting less and less inscrutable with age) saw fit to make sure that the police officer interviewed by the Chronicle was "Palo Alto police Detective Kara Apple." Subtle.

So we've got Detective Apple telling the press that the mountain lion (a big cat, get it?), despite having been asleep in a tree at the time, "was a huge threat" to the local population and needed to be killed-- not merely tranquilized-- before anyone got hurt. That may or may not have been the case (certainly a fair number of local residents seem to be upset by the decision), but when cops named Apple start talking about the necessity of killing a big cat in Steve Jobs's back yard, we can't help but wonder if maybe Mac OS X's future isn't so rosy after all. Does Bob Cringely really know something the rest of us don't?

Whatever. All we know is that we aren't going to feel comfortable until a longhorn steer undergoes some form of misfortune in the general vicinity of Redmond, Washington. Not death, mind you, or even physical pain-- that'd just be a bummer on top of a bummer. Maybe bankruptcy, or identity theft or something. You know, just to even up the omens a bit-- hopefully without anything getting shot this time...