Well of course our return following a four-day food coma is late; what did you expect? As it must be painfully obvious to anyone with a pulse by now, after seven years on the air and having long expended all supplies of youthful enthusiasm and anything vaguely resembling a work ethic, this show now relies almost entirely on inertia to keep going. See, as long as it's already in motion, it can pretty much coast from one day to the next with minimal creative input from us-- heck, if we had the time, we're pretty sure we could slap together a little code and turn over the day-to-day production to a complex AppleScript.

But once it grinds to a halt for any substantial length of time, getting it moving again is like dragging a side of beef through a tar pit using only our lips and eyelids. Remember that time we were gone for eleven weeks? We actually only took two off, and then spent the next two months squeezing out a return episode. (If we recall correctly, we lost about ten days trying to come up with a better word for "lugubrious," and then lost another three trying to remember why we wanted it in the first place.)

These days, though, we're pretty lucky; Apple seems to be in a holding pattern of sorts, as the company focuses on feeding the left side of the equation "More iPods = Happier Wall Street" until that particular bubble finally pops. Today we awakened from our digestive slumbers to find that both Mac OS Rumors and Think Secret are reporting heavy holiday sales for Apple, so the rest we can practically fill in like a Mad Lib: faithful viewer mrmgraphics (who else?) tells us that, according to CBS MarketWatch, [INSERT ANALYST HERE] (in this particular case it's UBS) raised its price target for AAPL from $66 to $77, citing "a survey of U.S. retailers" showing crazy holiday shoppers snapping up iPods and iMacs like they were boxes of pizza, heroin, and open-minded but attractive naked people. Higher-than-expected holiday sales implies earnings per share for the quarter will come in closer to 46 cents per share, not 43, so party on Wayne and party on Garth.

Don't believe things are quite so cookie-cutter yet? C'mon, it's more predictable than the tides. Check it out, Merrill Lynch also upped its target-- from $61 to $78 per share, because of (you guessed it) stronger-than-anticipated holiday sales so far. Oh, and that flash-based iPod coming in January, of course. Honestly, we should have stayed in the coma and hired a bunch of monkeys with typewriters to take care of the daily "investors says good things, stock gets happier" scenes. We bet we wouldn't even need an infinite number-- just, like, seven or eight. After all, this stuff practically writes itself, and monkeys can be a lot more sarcastic than most people think.

And so we come to the inevitable "hey, look, the stock went up" part: following the price target upgrades from USB and Merrill Lynch, AAPL tippy-toed up another $3.89 today. That's 6 percent-- not too shabby. Put another way, anyone who owns a hundred shares of AAPL made just about enough on paper today to buy a 40 GB iPod; sweeeeet. In after-hours trading, AAPL was flirting ever-so-closely with Apple's highest stock price ever. So keep on grinning, investors; the stock's got nowhere to go but up!

Or down. Technically, we think it can go down, too. But keep grinning anyway-- it looks good on you.