Two Weeks Before Macworld

'Twas a fortnight 'fore Macworld, and all of the geeks
Were beside themselves, waiting another two weeks
The tickets were purchased, the hotels all booked
And the six-color cookies were thoroughly cooked.

The bloggers had worked themselves into a stew
Over who'd gotten heisted by Phillip Ryu.
And I and the wife, having downed our eggnog,
Were settling down for a midwinter snog snuggle.

When up in the crawlspace there rose such a din
I feared that our leaky old roof would cave in.
I ran to my laptop to figure out why
Via full-motion vid and SecuritySpy.

With compression artifacts clouding my view
I knew there was somebody up there -- but who?
I saw someone slender, lurking in the back
Dressed up in... what looked like a turtleneck -- black.

"Why, dear," I said suddenly, "would you believe,
That our midnight marauder is really Fake Steve?"
And that faux chief executive gave us a smile
And proceeded to polish his glasses awhile.

I shook my head once just to clear out the fog
Was I hallucinating? Perhaps from the 'nog?
Fake Steve gave a yell, "Don't sit there like a lump!
Just tell them all they can read more past the jump."

"Boom! Listen up, frigtard," said faux CEO
"There's a couple of things that I think you should know.
I'm not gonna fool you or feed you a scam
Like that Gizmodo guy. What's his name? Brian Lam."

"First of all, I had John Chambers over for scones
So that I could yell at him about the iPhone.
He admitted the Linksys one really just stunk
And that he had greenlit it while he was drunk."

"But Fake Steve," I inquired, "how can it be true
That another phone got the same naming as you?
How was it that someone else got you to yield?
Did you turn off the Reality Distortion Field?"

"Not at all," said Fake Steve, "it's all part of the scheme
Right now, I have got my whole marketing team
All strung out on Jolt Cola and Red Bulls galore
While they polish the best way to even the score."

"Since the start, we had worked out an alternate plan
To enhance and re-extend our iPod line brand.
Imagine the way that Steve Ballmer will moan
When I demo the shiny new 'iPod with Phone.'

Don't forget, I'm the master, I cannot be stopped
Just check out the software that recently dropped.
With VMware and Parallels you can run XP
And Photoshop's gone beta for CS3.

Don't you worry yourself about what's coming soon
Or I'll hit you upside of your head with a Zune.
You tell Gruber, and Hesseldahl, and Munster too
That you just can't predict what The SJ will do!"

Then Steve faded away from my VLC stream
And I started to wonder if this was a dream.
But I heard his voice call out "Tell me, who's the king?
And oh, I forgot to say, just One More Thing..."

[with apologies to... gosh, just about everyone... but specifically:
every single Mac journalist or blogger who had the same idea
and of course Mr. Clement Clark Moore.]
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