My God, I've become one of those Mac people.

You know the type. The gesticulating Mac-olytes, ever so smug and fashionable, serving up an endless volley of glossy ten-cent words and touchy-feely promulgations coaxing you to cross over and join them in their glimmering tomorrowland of self-satisfying pretention.

And as if all of that wasn't appealing enough in and of itself, the damn machines actually are superior.

So I'm schlepping extended warranty coverage down at 'Pusa again to slowly put my studio back together after about $3,000 in equipment theft and managed to get a screaming deal on the very last floor-model PowerMac G5 we had. A dual 2.3GHz monster that I went ahead and upgraded to four gigs of RAM. Original list price; $2499. I got it for $1079 and even with the memory and service coverage still wound up around $1600. In short, just the thing for finishing up "Catch This Fox". I've even hired my old pal Casey to do most of the editing, which is especially handy because he's got all the pre-universal binary versions of Final Cut, Motion, etc. that we'll need to do it up proper.

So, I'm thinking, I've got this swell new box and I'ma do the whole Mac thing and give my one-year-old Dell 9100 to Mom, since she's still plugging away at a five-year-old box without even the dignity of a DVD reader and wants something to start digitizing the thousands of photos of us kids growing up.

And that was the plan, until I finally got it together to buy her an iPod for Christmas a month late, and after playing around with them so much at the store decided to just go on and get her a 20" iMac to go with it.

And the iMac, my friends, is a slick little piece of engineering, yo. A genuine pleasure to behold.

I'm a sucker for excellent industrial design and this is a core element of the whole Mac thang. That and everything just works. I mean, for as long as Mom's had a computer she's done nothing but Word, Excel, and Hearts because everything else was dauntingly complicated. Now she's talking about making DVD multimedia Christmas cards.

Welcome to the future.

We've been selling boatloads of iMacs at CompUSA lately, not least of which because we're virtually dry on PC systems until Vista officially launches Jan. 30th. Until then we've got a raft of cheapass low-end HP's and that's about it. So we're steering people from all social strata to the Macs. Hell, a woman who drives a red Pontiac Aztek bought one. The iMac is penetrating the hollow soul of Middle America, folks, and you heard it here first.