And good morning to you, Overthinkers. Is that a new sweater? You’ve definitely lost some weight, at least. No? Well, enough of these pleasantries.

In happy news, Steve Jobs announced the iPad in a demonstration earlier this week, Apple’s entry into the undercrowded tablet computer market. The demonstration promised slick graphics, fast loading and 3G access. Everyone’s already made all the “tampon” jokes? The “like an iPhone, but bigger, and it can’t make calls” observations? Okay, good; just making sure the low-hanging fruit was plucked.

Question: what would the iPad need for you to buy one (taking as read “a $100 drop in price”)?

The Apple is always a low-hanging fruit.

In less happy news, the world of academia lost two original Overthinkers this week. First, Howard Zinn, the fiery revisionist historian whose People’s History of the United States remains one of the most accessible counter-cultural texts on American history. Then, in short order, J.D. Salinger, reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey and other school reading assignments. Both took the same sort of hypercritical look at established institutions that Overthinking It plays at – Zinn, with his populist interpretations of history; Salinger, infusing suburban family dynamics with Buddhism. They were tremendous influences on our time.

Question: when a prominent author dies, do you go out and read their famous texts immediately? Or do you wait for the furor to die down? Or does it not make much difference on your reading habits?

I got namechecked in Good Will Hunting. How do you like DEM apples?

And finally, today marks the series finale of Dollhouse, bringing Joss Whedon’s latest attempt at a prime-time series to a close. Fans will doubtless have unanswered questions and bitter recriminations against the Fox network. I just hope people don’t lose respect for Eliza Dushku as a serious actor.

(Note: download our podcast on Monday for Overthinking It’s final thoughts on the series)

Question: what’s the biggest unanswered question about Dollhouse burning in your mind?

I'm trying so hard to avoid a joke about the mannequins upstaging her. So, so hard.

Not a fan of Apple products, academic literature or Dollhouse? Then as far as marketers are concerned, you don’t exist – but you’re still real to us! Tell us what you’d like to talk about, since this is your … Open Thread.

The “Family Guy” Windows 7 promo episode has undergone a strange journey. First, on October 13th, Fox announced that they were going to devote an entire “Family Guy”/Seth McFarlane variety show to promoting Windows 7 and released this underwhelming promo clip (which was actually just a redub of a previous episode):

The reaction from the idiot savants on the internet was almost universally negative. Then came the October 16th debut of the “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show.” According to media reports, it wasn’t until the airing of this episode that someone at Microsoft realized that their new flagship product was going to share air time with fart jokes and racial stereotypes and subsequently pulled the plug on the special episode. “Not a fit with the Windows brand” was the official line from corporate.

There’s so much fail going on here, but neither should have been particularly surprising. Both “Family Guy” and Microsoft’s respective fails were in fact years in the making.

I am a medium-rabid Apple fanboy, having started out on the Apple IIc (excuse me, //c) when I was a sperm. And, yes, I spent this morning reloading several liveblogs of Steve Jobs’s WWDC Keynote Address like a rat hitting the lever marked cocaine.

For those of you with, you know, lives, today saw the anouncement of the iPhone 3g as well as the very cool looking (though awfully named) Mobile Me sync and cloud-computing service. If you’re talking about the “Making Tech Things That Are Cooler Than Anyone Else’s Tech Things”, then Apple is winning.

But it strikes me that they’re losing the expectations game. If you read the Apple fanboy blogs (and, boy, do I read the Apple fanboy blogs) the fevered pitch of speculation leading up to the announcements managed to build a mountain so big God himself couldn’t lift it. In fact, I think nothing could have lived up to the process story.

(Much of the speculation happened to be inspired. My favorite was the so-called iTablet, a handheld computer about four times as big as the iPhone, with about the same feature set. I still think they should do that.)

And it further strikes me, since this is a pop culture blog, that this is the same problem that some summer movie blockbusters have been facing. The plots, the running times, the box office performance, the star salaries, the concession prices having to do with summer action tentpoles have become so bloated, that the actual content of the experience of going to the movies can’t compete with the hype.