Okay, so just how the heck is it that we have never heard about this until now? There's a foot-high Steve Jobs action figure that's been flown all over the world for well over a year, and none of you bothered to tell us? C'mon, people, we rely on you for this sort of thing; we can't dish the drama without the raw materials, and a miniature Steve Jobs winging its way to every corner of the globe constitutes unmined drama ore of the highest caliber-- yet it's been sitting untouched all this time. There's no doubt about it; this here's an intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. No wonder the current Terror Alert Level is Bert.

Faithful viewer Jonathan is off the hook for alerting us soon as he found out about it from a new WIRED article, but we're having a really tough time believing that nobody out there in the studio audience knew about this before today. A guy in the dealmac forums transforms a GI Joe doll into a blue-jeaned, turtlenecked Steve Jobs with an itty-bitty bottle of water, sends this "mini iLeader" from forum member to forum member with a digital camera, collects photos of the miniSteve all over the planet (and in the company of Duran Duran), and no one gets around to telling us? Honestly, what are we paying you for?

Well, okay, technically we're not paying you. But you're not paying us, either (apart from the Karmically InvisiShirted™ among you), and we tell you about all kinds of stuff. It's a take-a-penny / leave-a-penny sort of arrangement, people. Don't make us come up there.

Anyway, yeah-- the mini iLeader's been all over the place, and we strongly suggest you check out some of the photo galleries at work while you're looking to waste a huge chunk of your employer's time; you can kill an hour or two without even trying. (In particular, don't miss him being chased off of Microsoft's campus by security guards in the middle of the night.) Best of all, if the unthinkable happens, now we know where Apple can get a new CEO, albeit a slightly smaller one. In some ways, he's even better; while the real Steve wouldn't set foot anywhere near Boston these days, mini iLeader seems perfectly at home in Beantown, even in front of the convention center where last July's Stevenote didn't happen. If mini's Reality Distortion Field is up to snuff, we'd say we have nothing to worry about.

By the way, if one of you did tell us about this ages ago and it either fell right through one of the more gaping holes in our touch-and-go mental colander-- an increasingly likely scenario these days, we're afraid-- or it's still sitting there in one of those 5,376 unread email messages in our inbox, our apologies. But if you knew and didn't tell us, oooooo, shame. But don't worry, we'll forgive you somehow.