So, uh, speaking of Steve Jobs's recovery, how many registered Apple Expo attendees do you suppose are considering trying to get their Euros back? Because The Question None Had Dared to Ask has nonetheless been answered: no, Steve will not be delivering his scheduled keynote address in Paris come the 31st, at least according to a report at MacMinute first pointed out to us by faithful viewer Daniel Blanken. Instead, Steve Lite™ (also known as "T-Bone," "Clamps," "Bootsy," and "Phil Schiller") will be handling the gig while Steve soaks up the very last bit of his month off-duty. And nothing against ol' Phil, of course, because he's a real mensch and he's proven his chops at the whole keynote thing with his years of handling the duties at QuickTime Live, but some people just crave the Reality Distortion Field that only a bona fide Stevenote can provide.

But, of course, the concern surrounding Steve's no-show status at Apple Expo runs a lot deeper than people simply jonesing for another Steve fix. Indeed, this quiet announcement of Steve giving up a keynote address (and probably an important one, since the iMac G5 may well be on the agenda) has several viewers writing in expressing concern that if Steve can't even deliver a simple keynote one day before the month in which he's supposed to get back to work, maybe his recovery isn't going quite as well as we've all been led to believe. Or maybe he's taken a good, long look at his life, weighed his priorities, and decided that he needs to spend a lot more of his time with his family. Or, worst of all (and believe us when we say we hate even mentioning the remote possibility), maybe his illness has recurred to some degree and he needs further treatment. This is all some pretty scary stuff, on several levels, so we understand the angst crackling around out there.

Until we hear more, though, all we can do is remind you that Steve always said he'd be off until September, which, unless you do some fancy twiddling with the contours of the space-time continuum, August 31st is not. Indeed, Steve never even specified when in September he planned to return, so to expect him to jet ten or eleven hours to Paris less than a month after abdominal surgery and then get up on stage and be charming for an hour or two seems overly optimistic, if not a little bit cruel. (Post-surgery tissue can really hurt with the pressure changes in-flight; we speak from experience on this.) So unless we hear otherwise, we're just chalking this up to unfortunate timing and a guy who wants to take a well-deserved break to recover before he returns to take Apple to dizzying new heights of greatness.

That said, if you're of an even more optimistic bent, we should mention that it's not exactly carved in stone that Steve won't show up in Phil's place anyway. And we're not just saying that in a "hey, it could happen" sort of way; it has happened. AtAT fans who've been tuning in for a few years (say, six or seven) might recall that Steve initially bailed out of doing the 1998 Macworld Expo keynote in New York, and then showed up anyway. Granted, that last time Steve was still planning to appear alongside Phil live via satellite, and he was going to be away for the birth of his child and not because he'd had a tumor hacked out of his pancreas, so the circumstances aren't quite the same, but we're just saying that a precedent exists. And if the G5 iMac is going to debut onstage in Paris, as most people assume, what if Phil's "one more thing" were Steve live via iChat AV on an iMac G5's screen? Or even an iMac-bearing Steve himself?

We prefer to focus on the positive possibilities of this scenario, and Steve is a consummate showman; what better way to announce his full recovery to the world (and the stock market) than to show up for a keynote address on another continent looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed-- and at a conference at which his appearance had been canceled? Imagine the headlines... not to mention the stock price. Just don't count on it, okay?