Oops, this is the part where our occasional dips into the unfamiliar waters of Lake Optimism wind up leaving us afflicted with some sort of malignant fungal infection, metaphorically speaking. Remember yesterday's extended rant about how BBC NEWS (and about a bazillion other news outlets, it turns out-- we even just saw it crawling the bottom of the screen on TechTV) falsely reported that Apple's 50 million songs sold at the iTunes Music Store was waaaaaay short of the company's 100 million song goal? Our two points were that the 50 million songs didn't include free downloads from the Pepsi promo (while the 100 million song goal does) and that the "deadline" for the 100 million song target is still six weeks away. Assuming zero growth and with Apple selling 2.5 million songs per week, that would put the sold total at about 65 million, meaning that Apple would hit its numbers if just 35 million songs were redeemed from the Pepsi campaign. Since there are 100 million winning Pepsi caps floating around out there, a redemption rate of roughly 1 in 3 isn't too much to hope for, right?

Except that, apparently, it is. The Wall Street Journal now reports that no less an insider than Big Steve himself has admitted that Apple "expects to fall short" of the magic one-and-eight-zeros-and-maybe-a-couple-of-commas. Says Steve, "We're not going to make that number. At the rate we're at right now, we'll probably have sold 70 to 75 million songs" by the April 28th deadline. So the media was right in the sense that Apple most likely will miss its goal, although not by quite as much as the 50% margin that the doomsayer reports had implied.

Now, here's the thing: we can't see any reason why Apple would expect a slowdown in actual song purchases, since the songs-per-week rate has increased pretty solidly over the past several months (half a million in September, 1.5 million in December, and now 2.5 million in March). With six weeks to go until April 28th, the company ought to have sold at least 65 million songs by then. And that means that if Steve is projecting a "70 million to 75 million" total once the Pepsi song redemptions are counted, that means that Pepsi's megahuge 100 million song giveaway is actually only expected to generate (and this is the part where you just marvel at our astounding mastery of arithmetic, here) 5 to 10 million free song downloads. In other words, forget about our pie-in-the-sky 1-in-3 redemption ratio; Steve seems to think it's going to be more like 1 in 10, or maybe even 1 in 20.

Steve's official and diplomatic evaluation of the skimpy number of redemptions is that "they aren't what we thought they might be" and he blames the lousy ratio in part on Pepsi getting the caps out so late. (Related note: with only two weeks left in the promotion, we still haven't spotted a single yellow-capped Sierra Mist bottle out here in the Boston area.) Presumably Pepsi, having already disclosed the odds of winning, is required to ship all 300 million eligible bottles before the contest ends in two weeks; what this would mean, of course, is that there are (or will be) a lot of winning yellow caps still sitting on the shelves out there, so warm up your tiltin' hand, break open the piggy bank, and prepare to get all sugared up. Free music always sounds better when you're hovering on the edge of hyperglycemic shock.

And aside from the whole lateness issue, there's also the other possibility: that 19 out of 20 winners may simply be tossing their free songs in the trash. We've heard from several viewers who have been scoring their ten free songs a day without paying a penny on fizzy beverages; they're just hanging around outside of convenience stores and retrieving yellow caps from the trash cans. One viewer who wishes to remain anonymous (gee, we wonder why?) admits to swiping bags of garbage from the Dumpster behind a local Pepsi-selling deli in the middle of the night, tossing them in the trunk of his car, and then combing through the contents later in his garage. Classy? Well, no. But he claims to be close to hitting the promo's 200-song limit after only five nights, and all without spending a dime. And that, friends, will score him all sorts of points with the ladies. ("Sure, he may smell like garbage and be carrying the plague, but what a music collection! And just look at all that disposable income he has that the other boys would have blown on soda!")

So whether it be Dumpster-diving or blowing the rent on Pepsi products, do what you need to, people; a 1-in-20 redemption rate is just pathetic. And we don't want Apple reporting an embarrassing outcome on April 28th, do we?

Well, folks, it's official: we've now been doing this show for so gosh-darned long that we can no longer keep track of what made it into the plot and what didn't. We could have sworn that we did a scene on Apple looking to hire programmers to work on a Mac OS X screen reader, but we're digging around through the Reruns and not finding anything, so apparently that was just one of those scenes we only wrote in our heads. Clearly the medication isn't helping.

Which means we have to do the setup, here. For the uninitiated, a screen reader is software that turns onscreen computer data into spoken text or some other form of nonvisual information that can be understood by the visually impaired. The Mac's Text-To-Speech technology alone doesn't cut it, since it can't read menu items, let you navigate tabs in Safari, tell you which icons do what in Mail, etc. Imagine what you'd need to operate your Mac successfully with your eyes closed (no, "holes in your eyelids" don't count), and you'll get the general idea.

There was a bit of a hubbub last year when ALVA, the makers of the only screen reader software for the Mac, announced that it was discontinuing its product-- effectively removing the Mac platform completely from the list of computing options for the blind. Now let's say, just for the moment, that you're going to be completely mercenary and un-PC by saying "no big loss; how many blind computer users can there be?" Well, here's the thing, see... the lack of screen reader software doesn't just cost Apple sales to blind individuals. It could well have cost Apple big-ticket sales in the education and government markets, because if Macs aren't viable computers for use by the visually impaired, that could get customers in trouble for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. So trust us-- this is a big deal. (And by the way, you're an insensitive clod. Ha! Just kidding.)

So with a couple of screen readers available for Windows and none for the Mac, and possibly thousands upon thousands of sales at stake, Apple decided to pull a Safari: it'd just write its own. As faithful viewer Mike Scherer informs us, today the company finally introduced the first public peek at what it's got so far: a coming-soon technology it's calling Spoken Interface, which "reads aloud the contents of documents like Web pages, Mail messages, and word processing files; provides a comprehensive audible description of your workspace and all the activities taking place on your computer; and includes a rich set of keyboard commands that allow you to navigate the Mac OS X interface and interact with application and system controls." And are you ready for the cool part? It's going to be a native part of Mac OS X 10.4.

The fact that Spoken Interface will just be yet another addition to Mac OS X's Universal Access technologies is a huge plus; screen readers for Windows apparently cost on the order of a cool thou, which pretty much makes the Mac lots cheaper than any comparable Wintel once the cost of a screen reader gets thrown in. Also, since it's going to be built right into Mac OS X's foundation, developers barely need to lift a finger to make their Cocoa apps work with Spoken Interface. BusinessWeek reports that MacJournal (by the way, we love that app) already "worked pretty well" with Spoken Interface "right off the bat" with no code tweaks at all.

Pretty cool stuff-- and isn't it neat how Apple turned an obscure but real crisis into a valid marketing opportunity? In fact, the only real down side to Spoken Interface so far is that it isn't available right now, but given the frenetic pace at which Apple has been cranking out major cat-themed operating system upgrades over the past few years, we have to think that Spoken Interface (and the rest of 10.4, whatever it turns out to be) can't be more than a year off. With luck maybe Apple can keep any potential customers with ADA concerns simply by promising free 10.4 upgrades, or something like that. And here's hoping that the software is as good as most of Apple's efforts, because with the insane amount of TV we watch irradiating our optic nerves, we're going to need to use it ourselves within a decade or so.

Steve Jobs is a man known by many titles. He's CEO and Cofounder of Apple. He's CEO of Pixar. He's Reality Distortion Field Guy. He's Mr. Insanely Great. He's Treasurer-for-Life of the Homestead High School Chess Club. He's Black Turtleneck, Jeans, and Sneakers Dude. He's a Lover, Not a Fighter. He's The Man Who Once Ate Forty Blueberry Pop-Tarts on a Dare, Even Though He's More of an Unfrosted Strawberry Kind of Guy.

Indeed, he's the Man of a Thousand Titles-- and, therefore, Man of a Thousand and One Titles. We're stopping there, though, because that's where the recursion kicks in, and, well, we'd be here all night.

But now there's one more title to toss on the pile: WIRED magazine has announced the winners of its annual Rave Awards ("Celebrating the People Changing Your Mind"), and El Steve-O has officially been crowned "Renegade of the Year." Does this mean he has to trade in his turtlenecks for muscle shirts, hock the jet for a chopper, and start "prowling the badlands" as "an outlaw hunting outlaws"? Only Lorenzo Lamas knows for sure.

What we can say, however, is that Steve didn't win the title by testifying against "other cops gone bad." According to WIRED's press release, Steve took the throne for "setting the agenda in digital entertainment with Apple's iTunes Music Store and with Pixar's animated hit Finding Nemo." That only makes sense, although of course we're sure there are going to be some Mac traditionalists who'll balk a little at the thought of Steve being honored-- in the Mac's 20th anniversary year, no less-- for the iTMS instead of anything having to do with the Macintosh. All we can say to them is: breathe. It's really okay. Apple still makes Macs, we promise.

For now, anyway. Mwaahahahahahahaaaaaa!

That was, uh, supposed to be spooky and foreboding. Never mind.

Anyway, kudos to Steve for the honor; it must be nice to be, in WIRED's words, a "maverick, dreamer, and innovator inventing the future"-- especially since some of the other winners this year include Meet the Feebles director Peter Jackson ("lauded for his achievements in film") and "The Simpsons" guest star David Byrne (honored "for his creations with PowerPoint"), both of whom will share with Steve the special three-page cover of next week's issue of WIRED magazine. Make sure you run out and buy a copy so you can treasure the Stevetacular cover forever.

And while you're at the newsstand, consider picking up a copy of the April issue of MacAddict, too; the April Fools article was written by Jack of your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff, and though he may not be Renegade of the Year, he is a Frequent Finagler down at Finagle A Bagel. That has to count for something.