Trust us, you do not want to hear the litany of obstacles that kept us off the air for the past month and a half, but suffice it to say that the biggest of them, Jack's (literally) month-long headache, has finally abated a good 93 percent or so and therefore Migraine Boy is once more back at the helm. You know those people who claim that the human body can't subsist indefinitely on two or three hours of sleep per night? Well, judging by our recent struggle with a sampler-pack assortment of intriguing medical unpleasantness, apparently they were right. Who knew?

(Also, we got hooked on Veronica Mars. But that's largely beside the point.)

But while some of us have been feeling a smidge under the weather (a handy euphemism that's rather more concise, if less evocative, than "the blunt point of an eight-inch icepick is placed just to the right of the base of the skull and angled slightly upward, then driven all the way through with a sledgehammer, exiting just above the right eye, at which point the icepick is withdrawn with a protracted nails-on-chalkboard screech as cold metal scrapes against the edges of punctured bone and then the whole thing starts all over again and continues almost incessantly for oh, say, five weeks or so"), Apple's stock price currently seems decidedly less so. At production time it was up nearly two whole dollars-- and that's on top of a $2.10 increase last Friday. [Post-production addendum: the closing price Monday was up $1.58, which is still nothing to sneeze at.]

According the TheStreet.com, last week's boost came courtesy of rumors of an imminent Apple-Google Marvel Team-Up; apparently shadowy whispering types are kicking around claims that Google is somehow going to link directly to the iTunes Music Store in some way or another, which would punch a few more heavy-duty staples into the digital music sales crown already so firmly attached to the anthropomorphized Apple's big regal head. And then there was Dell's lousy earnings report: somehow the company actually reported lower-than-expected-- as in, $300 million lower-than-expected-- revenue for last quarter ("Us? Laughing? Why, no, these are tears of sorrow, we swear!"), and what with Dell dropping the third-of-a-billion-dollar ball and Apple's share of the personal computer market growing recently, well, investors seem to have put two and two together, and for once they've gotten an answer at least vaguely approximating four. See? There's a first time for everything!

So what's pushing Apple even further into all-time-high territory today? Well, aside from the continuing effects of the Google-'n'-Dell wackiness from last week, even analysts seem to be going gaga over AAPL once again. Caris & Company issued an upgrade this morning, bumping Apple from "Average" (as if) to "Above Average," and that sort of thing never fails to give a stock a bit of a lift. But probably even more influential was Piper Jaffray declaring AAPL to be its "top recommended large capitalization stock for the rest of 2005," as reported by MarketWatch. PJ analyst Gene Munster (who is, to be fair, usually pretty Apple-friendly) expects Great Things™ moving forward, including "several new product introductions" and ever-rising market share. His current price target is $52-- which Apple will surpass if it has just a couple more trading days like the last two.

Ahhhh... nothin's good for what ails ya like some big green numbers in your Ameritrade portfolio. Morphine, shmorphine. Nurse! More upgrades!