This has been one of the slowest news weeks we've ever endured, folks, so if it's okay with you, we're just going to finish it out with a weirdo quickie food-for-thought kinda thing. You know how Amazon can suggest products you might be interested in based upon which products you've bought or rated in the past? Generally speaking, we've found it to be remarkably good at suggesting stuff to us that we may not have realized existed, but that we're all too happy to spend gobs of cash so Amazon will send it merrily winging its way to our front door. Sometimes, though, the connections the artificial intelligence makes can be slightly baffling.

Try this: visit Amazon's product page for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, and then add the product to your Wish List. (If you don't have a Wish List yet, that's even better; one will be created for you.) Once Panther is happily purring away in your Wish List, faithful viewer BassMan says that you'll want to take a look at the list of DVDs that Amazon recommends based on your product interests. Odds are you'll find Pee Wee's Playhouse Christmas Special at or near the top of the list, and if you click the "Why was I recommended this?" link, Amazon will casually inform you that it thought you might enjoy a yuletide dose of Pee Wee Herman "because you were interested in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther."

No, we wouldn't have believed it either, but we tried it, and that's exactly what happened: the Pee Wee disc was right at the top of our recommended DVDs list. Go figure.

So what, do you suppose, is the connection between the latest major release of Mac OS X and enduring cult '80s icon Pee Wee Herman? Well, that's exactly the question we suggest you fry your noodle with during quiet times this weekend, because we have no answers for you. About all we can say is that when we tried the same experiment with Mac OS X Tiger, the top DVD that Amazon recommended because of our interest in that product was The Triplets of Belleville. Not much help there. And over in the magazines category, whereas having Panther in our Wish List makes Amazon recommend a subscription to The New Yorker, switching to Tiger instead prompts Amazon to suggest a subscription to Playboy.

So, apparently Mac users interested in the latest and greatest version of Mac OS X are sophisticated urban literati with a soft spot for nostalgic '80s kitsch, whereas Mac users looking forward to future Mac operating systems enjoy quirky feature-length animation and magazines they have to hide when their parents come over. You know what? We're just going to stop thinking about it before our heads explode. If you solve any mysteries, let us know.