Guess what? It's Annual Apple Shareholders' Meeting Day™! And we'd actually be there, too, if only we'd remembered more than six hours before the thing's supposed to start, and round-trip plane fare had materialized on the dining room table as if from nowhere, and we actually cared enough about the whole thing to skip The Price Is Right. Personally, we take a very passive approach to AAPL ownership; we buy shares, never sell 'em, and diligently recycle the annual reports as soon as they hit our mailbox. No, it's not the most responsible pattern of shareholder behavior, but we wear it well.

Actually, though, this year we wouldn't mind attending-- or at least hanging around outside to watch the fireworks. Faithful viewer neopod informs us that, as reported by MacMinute, a trio of Apple resellers plans to picket outside the meeting: representatives of Elite Computers, MACadam, and MacTech Systems are probably out there right now, trying to anger up the blood of shareholders as they file in. Says Elite's CEO, "It's time that Apple's conduct is made known to Apple shareholders... we look forward to sharing what we have uncovered." And if you're wondering what these guys are all steamed about, you clearly haven't been paying attention to this whole retail pricing scandal and the reseller lawsuits with the sign-swiping and whatnot.

So yeah, there are apparently Apple resellers out there doing the whole civil disobedience-type shtick; The Mac Observer reports that the picketers will be holding up signs emblazoned with such catchy slogans as "Something is Rotten in Cupertino" and "Steve, You're Fired!" (In our book, any public reference to The Apprentice constitutes instant credibility collapse, but hey, that's just us.) The picketers are hoping to persuade attendees to question Apple about the alleged massive discrepancy between reseller wholesale prices and the prices paid by Apple's own retail stores, and if the issue does indeed get raised during the meeting, whoa Nelly there's potential for some crazy-butt drama going down. We'll be sorry to miss that.

But, you know, this lady on TV just won a brand new car. And that was pretty exciting, too.

Regardless, tune in tomorrow to see how this whole picketing thing turns out. The jury's still out on whether the resellers will be or less effective than those consumer watchdog zombies who protested at the Macworld Expo a few months back-- and, in fact, we're hard-pressed to decide whether picketing resellers or protesting undead corpses would be scarier. But if the resellers join hands and start singing Kumbaya, run like hell.