Why, it's déjà vu all over again! No doubt you recognize this recurring scenario from your own tortured past: rumors fly that a Power Mac G5 speed bump will ship in, say, a week; a week passes; new rumors insist that the speed bumps will now ship in two weeks; two weeks fly by; still more rumors now figure the speed bumps for a month later; a month elapses and the only bumps you see are the ones on your head from banging it against a conveniently located wall. Sounds all too familiar, right? After all, we all lived through it for the first six months of the year, before the rumor mill finally decided that new Power Macs wouldn't surface until the Worldwide Developers Conference at the end of this month, thus ending the constant cycle of disappointment.

Or so we thought. Because guess what? It's baaaa-aaaaaack...

Yes, as you have certainly noticed by now, it's Tuesday, and despite yesterday's last-minute rumors of imminent speed bumps, as of broadcast time Apple's Power Macs hadn't changed one iota. Of course, if you got your hopes up after being burned this way multiple times in the past half-year, you have only yourself to blame. Well, and your parents, obviously. (You know the old saying: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me 87 times in rapid succession, shame on natural selection for allowing my parents to spawn offspring this gullible in the first place.) But don't feel bad-- most of us probably felt at least some subconscious part of our minds embrace the Tuesday rumor, either because Think Secret usually has such a good track record with this stuff, or because MacRumors had claimed that "some Apple stores reportedly already have boxes of new products labeled for the 8th." Or simply because deep down inside we just want to believe, dagnabbit.

To be fair, of course, Think Secret wasn't technically wrong, since alongside its original prediction of a Tuesday intro it clearly stated that "dates for speed bumps can be subject to change." But here's where the Cycle o' Disappointment may be rearing its ugly head once again: now the site claims that the intro of these new systems has merely been "shifted to a later date in the week." Unfortunately, that's just plausible enough that a bunch of us are going to get our hopes up again-- and if new Power Macs don't surface by the weekend, we're just going to have to resign ourselves to believing the next rumor about when these systems will finally see the light of day. We're keeping our fingers crossed for something to do with a delay until next week because raucous monkeys have taken over the manufacturing plant. You know, just for a change of pace.

But what are we saying? They'll be here tomorrow, or maybe Thursday. Friday at the latest. And while we're familiar with the old saying "fool me 88 times, stick a rabid weasel down my pants," we're willing to risk it.