Everybody fasten your seatbelts and return your tray tables to their full and upright positions, 'cause Sweeps Month is finally coming in for a big AtAT landing! Yesterday's improbably high yield of tabloid-worthy dirt by and about various tech-oriented captains of industry is precisely the traditionally sordid ratings-boosting stuff we love to trot out four times a year ("what, only four times a year?") to prove we're just as sleazy as network TV. What's that Oscar Wilde quote? "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." To which we say, "Wow, look at this nifty gutter!"

Let's start out with a good ol' CEO catfight, the likes of which we haven't seen since the infamous Dell Tussle of 1997. Faithful viewer John A. notes that no less august a publication than the venerable New York Times is covering the latest trash talk between Microsoft and Apple. You may recall that during the iMac's rainbow-hued heyday, Bill Gates brushed off Apple's accomplishments by saying, "the one thing Apple's providing now is leadership in colors. It won't take long for us to catch up with that, I don't think."

(Checks watch) Hey, Bill. Still wai-ting... What's particularly galling about Bill's comment is that Microsoft and Intel teamed up to announce the "Easy PC Initiative" a few months after the multicolored iMacs shipped, based on their "vision" of "making PCs easier to set up, expand, and use." How, you ask? Why, by eliminating legacy ports and sticking to USB and FireWire while "experimenting with new PC shapes, sizes, and colors." Gee, where on earth do you suppose they got that idea? Not that anything even reasonably close to an iMac's superior design and ease of use ever actually shipped, of course...

Anyway, Apple finally got the chance to bite back last week after Billy-boy showed off the "Athens" prototype PC at WinHEC. We referred to this thing briefly once already, but we probably didn't spend nearly enough time detailing how much this thing owes to Apple. Picture a 17-inch LCD iMac that's been smacked around a few times with the Ugly Stick and then had various "things" hung off it, and, well, that's pretty much Athens. Even the Desktop Picture is suspiciously Mac OS Xish.

And yet, does Apple smack-talk Athens's obvious borrowings from One Infinite Loop? Surprisingly, no-- His Steveness maintained a dignified silence, and marketing czar and bona fide mensch Phil Schiller (honestly, Phil-- we kid because we love! Don't ever change, Bubbelah!) appears to have ignored the hardware completely, simply noting that the graphics architecture that's supposed to ship in the 2005 version of Windows "is almost a direct copy of Quartz." Hmmm. Taking the high road? That's not much of a ratings-getter, guys. But hey, it's early yet, and the important thing is that there's some back-and-forth with the potential to heat up and get good. Any chance we can get Steve to ridicule the Athens during his WWDC keynote next month?