And hey, why not return after a seven-month Viewer Mail hiatus to lead off with a complaint? Faithful viewer Zoltan DeWitt takes issue with the sarcasm content of one of our recent scenes ("We Never Saw It Coming" from 10/2/02), implying that it may be somehow excessive:

In response to your latest scene "We Never Saw it Coming" about Steve Jobs' keynote at MWSF, I am shocked that you would serve something like this without the proper warnings.

While I am generally accustomed to a fairly high level of sarcasm, this is by far over the top and sent the little needle in my sarcometer shooting across the room before lancing my prized Apple/Evian water bottle and draining genius water all over brand new leather Gucci bag. Luckily I still had half of a prescription of sarcasicillin left over from when I was hospitalized after Microsoft announced their education antitrust deal, otherwise I don't think I would've made it. I don't even want to think about the hundreds of poor souls sitting dead in their comfy padded office chairs with their faces still locked in that painful wince that only a lethal dose of satire can bring. Oh, the horror....

If you have a shred of decency then you will be more careful about what you print for the sake of your fellow man.

If you have no decency then I can assure you that killing your readers is no way to get ratings.

I hope you're proud of yourself.

-Zoltan

Now lookee here, Zoltan... leaving aside the whole "if we have a shred of decency" question (because, well, you know), our legal department was disgustingly thorough about researching potential liability issues regarding sarcasm content and labeling requirements-- or, at least, they would have been if we actually had a legal department. But we assume that's good enough.

As such, we know (or strongly suspect) we're well within our legal rights to broadcast up to 600 millivenkmans of grade-A sarcasm per episode sans warning label, and if you submit our 10/2 episode to the rigors of laboratory analysis at any reputable irony testing facility, you'll find that we're comfortably within the legal limit.

Furthermore, while our disclaimer doesn't explicitly mention the presence of sarcasm (nor does it specifically state our lack of accountability for non-liquids-based damage), our nonexistent lawyers assure us that it's a general enough warning to cover our collective ass all the way up to at least 800 millivenkmans should a case ever go to trial. So bring it on, mister.

On the other hand, you may indeed have a point about the alleged corpses having a negative impact on the ratings; our daily viewership actually decreased by 50% this week. As it turns out, we get higher ratings when we're not actually broadcasting. Go figure.

Faithful viewer Matthew Duhan has got a theory that it's a demon: a dancing demon-- nyehh, something isn't right there:

I've figured it out! You haven't been busy with Anya, Goddess-in-training, you've been writing for Buffy! Why else would Xander have mentioned "Contract-y goodness" in yesterday's season premiere?

Hope you come back soon, and hope things are well.

Dang, you caught us. Okay, we admit it: we've been moonlighting to pay the bills, because frankly, AtAT rakes in just about enough dough to form the world's second-teeniest pizza crust. (New York style, not deep-dish). In fact, Matthew, you're spot-on perfect with your theory. 100% correct. No inaccuracies whatsoever.

Well, except that we're not writing for Buffy. Would that we were, since then we could inflict all sorts of our own personal brand of weirdness on the Buffyverse, such as a horde of Feiss devils eviscerating everyone in Redmond, Willow falling in love with the writer for an online soap opera, an elite force of saboteur ninjas (finally!), and a season villain that's a reality-distorting, viciously mood-swinging maniac that inspires legions of fawning worshipers who live only to serve. Which, upon further reflection, would basically be Glory from season 5, only in a black turtleneck. Plus we could influence the casting directors to hire Ben Curtis (he of "Dell Dude" infamy) to play a random vamp and blow big bucks on CGI effects just so we could watch the little bastard distintegrate in a cloud of dust.

The only way we can explain the... distinctive style of Xander's line in the season opener is this: Rays. Me and the missus figure it's rays.

In short, we're not writing for Buffy (although if anyone from Mutant Enemy wants to talk, have your people do lunch with our people), and, come to think of it, in fact we have been pretty astonishingly busy with (our) Anya. But seriously, Matthew-- other than that, you're dead-on correct.

Faithful viewer Benj does his part to ensure that we never get anything of substance done around here ever again:

Hey,

I really don't have much to contribute, though I am an Apple Kind of Guy. So my latest fetish is Dock Messages. You know how you can line up icons like scrabble tiles? Mozilla, Explorer, OmniWeb, and Word scream MEOW at me. It's just a matter of time before "Marry Me, Mulva" is spelled out on some young lovebird's dock...

Personally, the RULES are-- No ICON SWITCHING... and an aside to designers working on fancy icons-- hey, use a font!

I hope this opens up a can of insanity.

Oh, good-- just when we thought we'd have to get some actual work done! Well, we took a quick spin through our Applications folder and poked around the 'net a little, and we came up with this initial and woefully incomplete list of apps and the letters/numbers/punctuation marks they can represent:

• A: Address Book
• B: BBEdit
• E: Internet Explorer
• J: JPEGDeux
• M: Mozilla
• O: OmniWeb (or even better, Oni)
• P: PowerPoint
• Q: QuickTime Player
• U: Unreal Tournament
• V: Virex
• W: Word
• X: Excel
• Z: Z-Write
• 1: RealOne Player
• ?: Help Viewer
• !: iChat

There are undoubtedly plenty more apps out there to fill in the gaps, but we were actually kind of surprised to be able to amass half the alphabet in just a few minutes' worth of looking. If you're seriously bored and/or desperately looking for a way to avoid real work, feel free to use this as a springboard to hours of timewasting bliss.

Faithful viewer jmerk has something to say about a certain novelty food item to which we alluded in a recent Vote Early, Vote Often poll:

I can't believe that you mentioned Crazy Bread! Since I know that your resident Goddess of Minutiae is from Wauwatosa, I have to point out that the Little Caesars on 92nd and Greenfield in West Allis had THE best Crazy Bread circa 1988-90. My best friend and I lived on this while we were in high school! We talk about it all the time!

How I long for the cheapest, least healthy, most satisfying meal on the planet... [channeling Homer Simpson] "Mmmmm, semi-raw pizza dough laden with garlic-salt-butter dipped in tomato sauce..."

Now hang on just a durn second, there, fella-- if the best Crazy Bread was available at the West Allis branch in '88-'90, then that's only because Katie (AtAT's resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae) had moved to Boston by then. For you see, Katie worked at the Wauwatosa Little Caesars prior to that, and if you're dissing her Crazy Bread, well, then we're just going to have to ask you to step outside.

Oh, it's drizzling out there? Never mind. Man, this weather lately, huh? Sheesh.

Besides, Katie didn't make the Crazy Bread during her Caesars tour of duty anyway, so it wouldn't necessarily have been much of an insult even if the times had overlapped. But she did wear the Little Caesar full-body shell costume (à la the giant-headed cartoon characters walking around at Disney World, etc.) to play the lovable little Roman at parades and other local festivities. Yes, there are pictures. No, we don't have them available. Pizza pizza!

Faithful viewer Joel Emerson notes an interesting item up for auction:

Make your own G4!

http://www.dovebid.com/Auctions/AuctionDetail.asp?auctionID=1465

Motorola is dumping its SPS equipment to anyone willing to shell out the bucks. Now anyone can try to make their own G4 processor, so don't let little Johnny be disappointed this Christmas and go ahead and splurge on a Disco Backginder and Wafer saw!

Aw, man-- the auction ended last week! If only we had noticed sooner, we could have put in a bid alongside the Anya-in-Bunny-Costume action figure we were eyeing. We could easily go as high as, say, $15.50 for a high-quality Applied Materials Sputtering & Etch Tool these days. And really, who couldn't use another couple of SVG Wafer Tracks?

Seriously, imagine how neat it would have been if the Mac community had banded together and pooled their resources to purchase what amounts to an entire Motorola chip manufacturing plant, just to secure a consistent and controlled source of G4 processors. Just think of it, we could have been cranking out 1.25 GHz G4s to give away to trick-or-treaters! G4s as stocking stuffers! Bingo chips! Costume jewelry! Why, the sky would have been the limit!

Actually, this is Motorola equipment we're talking about, here, so the yields might not have been quite that high. But we bet we could have had six or eight chips churned out by Christmas, easy. Maybe.

Still, since the auction closed last Wednesday, we missed the opportunity, so we'll never know. But that's okay. That means we have extra funds available to bid on that walk-on role on Charmed, so we could get close enough to the Halliwell sisters to tell them that if push ever came to shove, Willow could totally kick their collective ass.

Faithful viewer kakeeman has a valid (albeit completely overoptimistic) question, which he asked via the AtAT Forums:

Jack, I'm sure all would forgive if you took a day or two off to sleep. :-D

Any chance of the return of Viewer Mail?

Well, kakeeman, let us put it to you this way...

No, none whatsoever.

Honestly, we're way too sleep-deprived to spend another four hours minimum this weekend digging through our massive stack of email messages, culling a few that pose interesting possibilities, correcting their spelling and punctuation, reformatting them, and then writing witty responses for the passing amusement of our six remaining viewers. It's just not on our priority list right now.

Honestly, did you notice the time stamps of our episodes this past week? 4:39, 3:23, 3:39, 4:02, and 4:29 AM. Here's a hint: we're not obscenely early risers who happen to go to bed at 5 PM every night. Those times represent a lot of lost sleep, and if we don't make some of it up, then there's no way we're going to be able to keep up this newfound daily broadcast schedule. So no, we're afraid that Viewer Mail won't be returning for a good long time.

On a related note, faithful viewer Alex had this to say about that:

Jack, you've done it four days in a row. If there's a new Viewer Mail this weekend, I'm going to crap my pants.

Um... Cleanup on Aisle 3...

What disappoints you most about the video iPod 1.0?
	It doesn't get Cinemax
	It requires far too much physical effort to cram a DVD into the Dock connector
	You can't stick your face in the screen like with the TV in Videodrome
	Showing home movies on the iPod makes it too easy for viewers to escape
	I can fit 140 hours of TV in my pocket, but it sure is a hassle lugging this couch everywhere I go
(63175 votes)