Hands up, who's jonesing for a Stevenote? Well, if you don't think you can keep it together without a Reality Distortion fix all the way until the Worldwide Developers Conference on the 28th, we've got some good news: as faithful viewer Benjamin informs us, Apple has posted a QuickTime stream of last Tuesday's European launch of the iTunes Music Store, at which Steve addressed members of the media at Old Billingsgate Market in London. Finally, not only a timely dose of Steveness, but the chance to see the man strut his stuff in the UK for the first time in... well, geez, practically ever, as far as we know. (Which is none too surprising, actually, given the man's thinly-veiled and unexplained vendetta against the nation in years past.)

But don't get your hopes up too high for a near-lethal blast of RDF-y goodness, because this hour-long event comes off as somehow lacking in the oomph department. Maybe it's because we found ourselves a little too preoccupied with worries about Steve's health to get into it; faithful viewer Shaun Woods was the first to comment on how much weight Steve appears to have lost, and he's right-- while Fearless Leader was never particularly chunky, in the London footage he looks positively gaunt. And before anybody says "Atkins," let us remind you that Steve is vegan, and the intersection between Atkins-friendly foods and vegan ones is darn close to the empty set-- although if Steve's been eating nothing but peanuts and Styrofoam for the past few weeks, that would certainly explain his vaguely undernourished appearance.

It gets worse, though. These keynotesque presentations are Steve's bread 'n' soy margarine, and while performing he's always seemed fully at ease and in his natural element. For the life of us, we can't recall the man ever having totally lost his train of thought while onstage-- but if you tune in to the stream, at right about 27:25 you'll witness His Steveness absolutely and completely at sea for at least fifteen solid seconds. He says, and we quote, "And, uh, you know I've got a, uh... I've got a, uh... umm... ... ...let's see... ... ...I've got, um... a way to... ... What was I going to show you? Oh, yes! Sorry." And then he's off and running again, but boy howdy did that throw us for a loop and a half.

We'd like to attribute all the weirdness to jetlag, but Steve's a seasoned world traveler who never seems this disoriented during his Paris keynotes, or even his Tokyo ones-- and jetlag wouldn't explain the weight loss. From our perspective, there are two possibilities, here. The first is that Steve was fighting an extended and unprecedented bout of nerves; he was entering the belly of the beast, after all, and there was a decent chance that some Brit still traumatized by the loss of the British-localized Mac OS has been waiting for just such an occasion to try out his new sniper rifle. The second scenario is that that wasn't Steve; the real Steve sent a slightly thinner and less keynote-savvy double in his stead so he wouldn't have to risk personal injury by visiting the UK himself.

We suppose you could also chalk it all up to a recent spring cold he's just getting over, if you wanted to be all pedestrian and obvious about it.

But if Steve was under the weather, the audience was on a frickin' slab. We realize that this was a press event and not a Gathering of the Faithful, but geez, at least at the U.S. press shindigs the assembled masses still respond to certain stimuli. If you're going to tune in, be warned: it's a little painful to hear Steve pause for the usual laughter and/or applause and be greeted with dead silence. No wonder he was off his game. Maybe he should have had Alicia Keys warm up the crowd before his spiel, not after-- although even she was taken aback by the silence at first: "Are you okay out there? You sure?" She eventually did manage to get a response from them, though, at one point remarking, "They're alive! They are alive, Steve, they're out there!" Ah, the exuberance of youth.

In any case, while this event isn't likely to win an award for Bestest Steve Appearance any time soon, it's still worth checking out-- especially if you're in dire need of a pre-WWDC dose of Steve. (Or a reasonable facsimile thereof.) Oh, and Steve-- if you are ill, let us know. We'll send you some Ginger-Carrot Soup. Mmmmm...

If you're now harboring an honest-to-goshness concern about Steve's health based solely on a couple of throwaway comments about his weight loss and memory lapses, congratulations-- you're officially a worrywart, and you qualify to receive an attractive certificate suitable for framing that identifies you as such a creature. Be careful, though; the local union can revoke your certification if you're not also sufficiently clenched over Apple's future as a consumer electronics company and the uncertain fate of the Macintosh platform. Not feeling quite spooked enough about Apple's recent music-over-Macs priority to conform to worrywart union regulations? Fret not (or, rather, fret more)-- perhaps we can help.

See, when someone is a true worrywart at heart (like you so obviously are), the teensiest hint of impending doom is all it takes to get those stomachs ulcerating at championship speeds. So take a gander at what faithful viewer Steve Merrylees forwarded to us-- it's a Guardian Unlimited interview with Steve Jobs (or rather, a collection of unused excerpts from one) in which His Steveness sings a number of familiar refrains: if you're not selling iPods, there's no money to be made in the download business; every player that isn't an iPod sucks; nobody wants subscription-based streaming music; Sony is way cool.

Nothing especially worrisome there, right? But nestled among the standard press soundbites is a single admission that ought to get your stomach churning; when asked whether he still believes that the iPod might bring some admirers over to the Mac from their Wintel roots, as Apple had originally predicted, Steve says "No. We brought the iPod to Windows. That was a big decision. That was basically a decision not to use the iPod to drive people to Macs... the majority of iPods we sell are used on Windows." Wow, not a lot of wiggle room in that statement, huh?

Now, apart from the cringeworthy notion that most of the people you see out there walking around with iPods are occasionally plugging the poor things into Wintels ("Unclean! Unclean!"), if you think about this whole "not using the iPod to sell Macs" factor for a minute, you'll soon start to obsess over the fact that Apple has made a conscious decision that selling more iPods is preferable to selling more Macs-- in other words, Apple would much rather have over 50% of the portable music player market than perhaps an extra half-a-percentage point when the next Mac market share numbers get published. Sensible? Sure. But when you drop that whole thing into context alongside Apple's recent statement that music is its number one priority, Steve's "big decision" starts to take on slightly sinister undertones.

So. Is it working? Has your gifted worrywart brain already converted all of this info into a nagging anxiety that Apple's just going to let the Mac stagnate, crumble, and wallow in the dust of what might have been? Good! Now just remember to keep that furrowed brow and those lost-looking eyes the next time your union rep comes around, and you'll be all set.

Oh, and the sky is falling, too.

Ha! Made you look!

We'll be honest-- life's awful busy these days 'round the AtAT compound, and we're starting to get stretched pretty thin. Truth be told, we were tempted to take today off, what with it being Bunker Hill Day and all. Bunker Hill Day. No, honestly, it's a real holiday out here in these parts, commemorating a pivotal battle in the U.S. War for Independence; government workers get the day off and everything. Personally, we just dig that people celebrate the occasion even though a) the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought on, strangely enough, Breed's Hill, and b) technically, we lost. But that's no reason not to party down.

But we're not taking the day off, Bunker Hill notwithstanding, just like we didn't take yesterday off for Bloomsday, or even broadcast the last scene sans punctuation or anything Yes. Why? Well, we're not actually sure, but it sure ain't a work ethic, believe us. Must be some sort of viral infection or something. Whatever the reason, don't complain, because we're passing the savings right on to you!

Of course, that doesn't mean we aren't still going to slack off something fierce. For instance, instead of coming up with something witty and original with which to entertain and delight you, we're just planning to milk this whole Clash of the Downloadable Music Stores topic so dry it'll need four gallons of Jergens just to make it back to "dessicated." And why not? After all, when you've got Coke's downloadable music service (no matter how many times we say that, it still sounds stupid) claiming in the wake of the Euro iTMS launch that it's "still Europe's biggest online store," how could we possibly pass that up?

Now, MyCokeMusic.com may technically be correct, because we have no clue by what criterion it's judging itself to be "biggest"; it might conceivably offer more songs (we doubt it), and it's certainly sold more tracks (considering that, at the time, Euro iTMS has been running for all of two days), but we get the distinct feeling that it's making the claim now just because in about five days it may no longer be able to. Euro iTMS undercuts Coke's per-song price by a full 20 pence, and the UK's been a huge market for iPods-- which can't play Coke's tracks at all. In other words, the iTMS is, more likely than not, preparing to deliver MyCokeMusic an arse-kicking of biblical proportions. Mind you, that's just a guess-- although, since MyCokeMusic is crowing about having sold 500,000 songs in the past two months while the U.S. iTMS sells that many in a day, it's not without basis in fact.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Napster has just launched a U.S. promotion whereby new subscribers who shackle themselves to a year's worth of monthly fees get a free 128 MB MP3 player-- because, as everyone knows, the way to get a fundamentally money-losing business to turn a profit is to give away free electronics equipment. Also of note, Napster reports that it's sold "over 10 million tracks" in the 233 days since it went live. Gee, Apple sold the same number in just 128 days-- and that was only to Mac users. And the icing on the coffin (final nail in the cake?) is that one analyst estimates that Napster will have to post annual revenues "close to $300 million to break even," while Napster's official forecast this year is for revenues of (cough) $40 million. Whoops.

So there you have it: yet another cheap scene of all-too-easy iTMS superiority. It's kind of like eating tuna casserole for dinner every night for two weeks, isn't it? Never let it be said that we aren't mind-numbingly consistent...