Hollering and high fives at store openings in Queensland, Montpellier and New York City

Running the gauntlet in Queensland, Australia. Image: Nodeblue

Someday Apple (AAPL) will open a store and no one will notice.

But we're not quite there yet.

The company held grand openings for new retail outlets on three continents Saturday — in Chermside, Australia; Montpellier, France; and New York City — and each was accompanied by huge crowds and predictably over-the-top staffers.

As the videos below the fold demonstrate, these events follow what is by now a well-rehearsed script. The customers queue up — true believers camping out overnight. When the lines reach critical mass (in the case of New York's Upper West Side store, stretching around several city blocks), someone gives a signal and the employees go nuts, running wild through the crowd, whooping and hollering and giving high fives. Then the final seconds are counted down, and the faithful enter sacred ground, greeted by a gauntlet of blue, black, orange, teal or fire-engine red.

All this for a free t-shirt.

Below: The videos.

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The Big Apple's newest Mac store is opening on the Upper West Side next Saturday

Source: Apple Inc.

Media invitations went out Friday for a press preview of the new Apple Store in Manhattan — the city's fourth — scheduled to be unveiled Saturday, Nov. 14.

The store, located on a nearly triangular site at Broadway and 67th Street, is well-positioned to get attention from the crowds and TV cameras heading for Central Park West to catch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade less than two weeks later.

New York City has been good to Apple (AAPL). The glass cube of its flagship store is believed to be the highest-grossing retail outlet on Fifth Avenue, bringing in an estimated $35,000 per square foot, nearly double the gross of Tiffany's sales floor and triple Harry Winston's, according to a New York real estate expert interviewed by Bloomberg reporters last summer.

Below the fold: Photographs showing the plastic faux curtain that's covering the building site and the curve of the store's unusual glass roof, courtesy of ifoAppleStore.com.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

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Live from New York, it's Sam Palmisano.

Palmisano is spending almost two days talking about smart stuff. Photo: IBM

The business strategy made possible by $50 billion in acquisitions, hundreds of millions on marketing, and various forms of ecological disaster, is taking the show on the road–to Manhattan's Lincoln Center.

For the next day and a half, IBM's (IBM) Smarter Planet initiative will occupy New York City's Lincoln Center in the form of a conference on developing smarter cities. IBM CEO Sam Palmisano and Mayor Michael Bloomberg will kick off the event this afternoon with a discussion about the steps New York City has taken to employ a combination of data-gathering and analytics software to reduce crime, minimize risk for firefighters, and monitor water conditions.

The remainder of the sweeping agenda will cover everything form education, healthcare, energy, and transportation, to government services. Weighing in on such heady topics will be political heavyweights–including the governors of Vermont and Georgia as well as the mayors of Atlanta, Charlotte, Phoenix, and San Jose.  Business leaders, including the chairs and CEOs of ABB, Mayo Clinic, National Football League, and Verizon Communications (VZ), among many others, will offer their perspectives. More

Heyward, Casey, Dane, Daniel and Kaitlin

Who's crazy enough to camp out for a week on the streets of New York City for a chance to be first to buy an iPhone 3G?

TheWhoFarm, that's who, a newly minted publicity-seeking environmental collective with an agrico-political mission: to persuade the 44th President of the U.S. — whoever that turns out to be — to transform the White House's 17-acre lawn into an organic farm.

"We're here to restore the edible landscape," says Daniel Bowman Simon, 28, the group's organizer and spokesperson and a young man given to making grand pronouncements. "We want to bring seeds of change back to the White House."

Daniel and his supporters — there are 10 in town this week, but only five braved the rain that soaked the city overnight Friday –  want to set a new Guinness World Record for "longest time waiting in line to buy something."

But that's just a vehicle to get attention for their broader concerns — sustainability, affordable housing, energy security, locally-grown food (New York State apples are a big theme this week), and "eating right," says Simon, "especially our leaders."

In an open letter to several of those leaders — including Steve Jobs, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Mayor Michael Bloomburg — entitled "Waiting for Apples in the Big Apple," the group lists the tasks it hopes to accomplish in the week they will spend camping out in front of the big glass cube of Apple's (AAPL) New York City flagship store:

• We will spend a lot of time in a great public space, around the clock.
• We will use mobile solar power from Solar1.
• We will drink NYC's renowned tap water.
• We will have local healthy food (especially Apples) delivered by our community gardener friends, Greenmarket farmers, and locavore restauranteurs via bicycles and pedicabs.
• We will compost our foodscraps, to help sustain our fragile soil.
• And most importantly, we will talk to whoever happens to stop by about local organic farming as a critical element to sustainable healthy living, food security, youth education, and climate change mitigation. (link)

And, oh yes, they hope to pick up some iPhones when they go on sale next Friday, July 11. Simon plans to buy three: one for Barack Obama, one for John McCain, and one for himself. "We see it as a technology that can liberate us from our desks," he says.

UPDATE: Having stuck it out for seven days and seven nights, as promised, Simon was No. 1 in line at 8:00 a.m. Friday morning when the doors of the Apple Store opened. As he headed into the glass cube — carrying an American flag and a box of apples — he was intercepted by one of Apple's security guards and frogmarched away from the entrance, toward 58th Street. You can see a video of the incident at Applauded — and roughed up — in the iPhone 3G line. He was eventually allowed to enter the store, escorted by a pair of uniformed cops.

Below the fold: meet the iPhone Five.

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The cold Manhattan drizzle didn't faze the faithful.

An estimated 400 to 500 sodden die-hard Apple (AAPL) loyalists waited under umbrellas up to three and a half hours outside the company's flagship Fifth Avenue store for a chance to buy OS X Leopard on its first day of sale.

By the time the doors opened at 6:01 p.m. the line stretched — in places four or five deep — down Fifth Avenue, across 58th Street and all the way to Madison Avenue.

The rain-soaked customers were greeted in full pep-rally style by black-shirted employees who shouted and clapped as the crowd tramped down the glass-enclosed spiral staircase — and then gave them high-fives as they emerged a few minutes later brandishing their shrink-wrapped packages.

First in line was Bob Greenlees, 23, a student at the Cardozo School of Law. He had been waiting since 2:30 in the afternoon and was still as cheerful and excited as a child on Christmas morning.

"I missed the iPhone line because I was in Paris on my honeymoon," he said, minutes before the doors opened. "But I watched the webcast."

"That's my crazy husband," said Laura Greenlees, who waited outside with Bob's computer backpack while he completed the purchase. He came out 15 minutes later with a free T-shirt and a $199 Leopard family pack that he said he would share with his wife and his parents.

The store, which is open 24 hours a day, was expected to have sufficient copies of Leopard to supply all comers — but not necessarily T-shirts. Apple had only stockpiled enough for the first 500 customers.

See also The Day of the Leopard and Leopard: The Reviews Are In