You've all been there, so you know: one up side to slipping and falling off the face of the earth for a couple of months is that, when you finally manage to reverse your vector of travel in the vacuum of space by shedding enough skin cells in the appropriate direction (in accordance with Newton's Third Law of Motion), and then you recover from that pesky windburn you experience upon atmospheric reentry, and then you finally fire up a browser and visit some Mac-centric web sites for the first time in eightish weeks, you get to experience a few surprises. Surprise number one for us: holy yikes, Apple's fourth quarter results are going to be announced later today.

Needless to say, due to gravitational mishaps leading to a rather drastic shortage of countdown time, we'll be skipping our traditional Beat The Analysts contest again this quarter. (We'll probably just pick some random shmoe who writes to us and toss him or her a prize pack, maybe with some AtAT shirts and a couple of chunks of space debris that were surgically removed from various spaceborne extremities.) But that doesn't mean we can't get excited about this whole quarterly results thing, because at the end of the day it's not about free promotional apparel (much), but rather about Apple kicking serious financial tail and making the naysayers chew their own faces off in sheer jealous rage.

Sorry, was that an inappropriately violent mental image? Forgive us. We've been floating in space. Holding your breath that long does things to you.

Anyway, so what can we expect when the numbers surface shortly before the webcast begins? Well, we're scoping out the analyst estimates now, and if those guys know their stuff (simmer down-- we said "if"), Apple ought to be announcing quarterly earnings of something like 37 cents per share. Given that the company has almost 830 million shares of AAPL floating around out there, we're looking at a quarterly profit somewhere in the neighborhood of $307 million. Which means that, as far as neighborhoods go, we're talking big mansions, exquisitely sculpted topiary of figures from Greek mythology, and a well-paid security force, a pack of vicious dogs, and a big, black, spiky fence with 40,000 volts running through it keeping both the country club and the gene pool nice and bland. In short, money. Lots of it.

Now sure, Apple earned 37 cents per share last quarter, so if they do it again it's not exactly breaking new ground. But let's not forget that Apple has a history of beating those analyst estimates with a stick until they bleed. It doesn't happen every quarter, but it happens often enough that Apple may well do it again. And since last quarter's results represented the highest earnings and revenue in the company's entire history, that means we might be looking at a second record-breaking quarter in a row. No wonder AAPL's the only stock in our portfolio that's actually trading higher today.

So stay tuned-- if not to us (totally understandable, given our startling lack of reliability lately; in fact, why are you even here now?), than to something somewhere that'll dish you the goods when they become available. If Apple breaks a third of a billion dollars in actual recurring profit, drinks are on us. At least, until we wash them off and pour ourselves some new ones.