All right, who snuck into Merrill Lynch's offices one night and spiked all their water coolers with mind-altering chemicals? C'mon, fess up; obviously someone's been getting creative with drugs that boost the biological effects of exposure to Reality Distortion Field energy, because the amount of love that Apple's been getting lately from the Lynch has been almost completely fair and reasonable given the company's excellent prospects-- in other words, way too high for your typical Wall Street analyst. Not that we're complaining, mind you, seeing as we're AAPL shareholders who certainly aren't above looking the other way while someone slips an analyst a mickey, as long as it scores us a paper gain.

Oh, come on, don't give us that look. Morals, shmorals-- these are Wall Street analysts, folks; it's like drugging a Brooks Brothers mannequin or something.

What we haven't figured out is if the entire firm was drugged, or just analyst Steven Milunovich, seeing as all the good press seems to come from him. In just the past month we've seen the guy raise his price target on AAPL based on predictions of strong iMac G5 sales, raise his estimate for this quarter's profit based on predictions of strong iPod sales, dish some seriously stock-boosting buzz by predicting a flash-based $149 iPod to arrive "early next year," and publicly estimate that Apple would sell 2.68 million iPods this holiday season, sending still more traders stumbling for the "Buy" button. And now CBS MarketWatch reports that Milunovich is at it once more, raising his revenue projections and target price again (this time to $3.2 billion and $61, respectively). Why? Because now he thinks that Apple will sell at least 3.5 million iPods this quarter, and he also believes that "the younger generation may consider Apple a core brand for their digital lifestyle," which "would allow the company to introduce successful new consumer products over time."

But wait, there's more! There must have been a double dose of Happy Juice in Milunovich's Poland Spring last night, because MacMinute reports that he's also upping his estimates on iMac G5 shipments for the quarter by another 10,000 units, in part because Best Buy is now selling them online. And as an added bonus, he also opines that "the major risk in the retail store strategy is past," meaning that all those naysayers who figured that within a few years Apple would be frantically shutting down all its stores à la Gateway are going to have to pretend that they never made such dire predictions in the first place. (No worries, though; Apple's naysayers are really good at doing that, since they've had so much practice.)

At broadcast time, Milunovich's latest comments hadn't had much of an effect on Apple's stock price, but overall they're clearly done wonders. Here's hoping that whoever's doping Milunovich et al at Merrill Lynch is doing so as a controlled test of the drug's effectiveness in boosting pro-Apple sentiment, because with results like these, we can only imagine that the next logical step is to introduce the agent into the water supplies of the world's larger metropolitan areas, thus propelling Apple headlong into a Golden Age of Market Saturation and Ensuing World Domination. Man, it's so much better than something like anthrax, isn't it? If we're really lucky, maybe it even tastes like cherry.