You know, in a funny way (albeit not "ha ha" funny) these past five weeks have been a blessing of sorts; sure, it's been a painfully Steveless interval while Fearless Leader is laid up nursing his post-op pancreas back to health, but as it turns out, things haven't been nearly as unbearable as we initially expected. In fact, we're starting to think we could potentially survive a Steveless Apple indefinitely if the man ever leaves the company for whatever reason.

See, we were flipping back through the past five weeks' worth of reruns, and we're pretty sure we were able to squeeze just enough drama from events occurring during the Great Steve Hiatus to keep the show from collapsing in upon itself and vanishing in a puff of cosmic irrelevance. Yeah, we'd have loved for Apple Expo to have hosted an honest-to-goshness Stevenote (no offense, Phil). Sure, interim go-to guy Tim Cook decided to run the company without kicking up any of that ruckus to which we're so hopelessly addicted. And just knowing that Steve isn't rattling around inside One Infinite Loop casts an icy pall on everything we behold. But hey, we've seen worse.

Don't get us wrong, here-- we still feel like we want to throw ourselves under a speeding bus. But we no longer think we need that bus to be on fire and full of anvils at the time.

The point is moot for now anyway, though, because you can apparently call off the bus completely, regardless of what's inside or whether it's belching flames from its windows. Faithful viewer EWM dished us a CNET article which reports that The Stevester is practically back in action even now, albeit part-time; according to Apple spokesperson Katie Cotton, he's already "attending some company meetings" and is still on track "to return to full-time work later this month," as he had originally projected. Which is good, because if he were to decide to take another month or two off to recuperate more fully before leaping back into the fray, we'd of course totally understand and support that decision-- even as we'd be scanning the horizon for Greyhounds that might obligingly put us out of our Jobsless misery. No Steve until, say, November would be one Apple delay that we wouldn't weather gracefully.

Of course, even once he's back full-time, it remains to be seen whether he'll be operating at 100% capacity-- either work-wise or from a purely dramatic perspective. We've heard tell that other mercurial, two-job-having, black-turtleneck-wearing, Reality-Distortion-Field-emitting extraterrestrial CEOs who have survived cancer surgery (as you well know, this industry is full of 'em) wound up losing a little of that killer instinct that made them so much fun to stalk in the first place. Instead of parking across three handicapped parking spaces and firing people in elevators, they wind up smiling serenely, listening to a lot of John Tesh, and contemplating their navels. It's our fervent hope that Steve manages to avoid that fate by emerging from this whole ordeal without one of those awful "senses of perspective" that are all too often the death of quality drama.

Oh, wait, this just in: AtAT sources report that Steve has just been sighted at a Circle K in San Jose, where he encountered another shopper wearing an unlicensed Apple-logo wristwatch. Reportedly Steve loudly demanded that the man surrender the contraband timepiece; the man refused, and Steve then beat him senseless with a frozen Don Miguel burrito and then pelted his crumpled form with Hostess snack cakes. Mostly pink Sno Balls.

He's back, baby! Here's to a full recovery!

What with all the hubbub over the down 'n' dirty warfare being waged in this country by competing digital music download services all scrambling for a bigger chunk of the market, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the iTunes Music Store is still mostly a U.S. phenomenon. At least, it's easy for us, since we've been able to buy songs and albums with a few deft clicks for well over a year, now, so we're way past taking it for granted. And Germany, France, and the UK may just now be settling into the same sort of "we got ours" complacency now that they've had access to the service for a few months. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is still struggling in that most inconceivable and horrifying of states: iTMSlessness. Maybe Sally Struthers should do a fundraising commercial.

On a strictly emotional level, we probably feel most sorry for Canada, since it's right up north, there, watching us all across the border merrily One-Clicking our way into the poorhouse while racking up a healthy collection of embarrassing hits from the '70s and '80s. (A note to fellow geographically disinclined U.S. denizens: Canada is, in fact, not a state, but is instead a whole other country, like Alaska.)

From a business perspective, though, we have a feeling that Apple is hurting more by not having an iTMS available in Japan. The Japanese are, of course, extremely tech-savvy as a culture, and would likely consider the act of purchasing and downloading legally licensed digital songs as natural as jabbing an arcade game butt with a big plastic finger. And don't forget, the iPod is huge over there-- not in the sense that it seems physically huge because of their smaller hands, but in the sense that it's stomping all competing portable players into the dust, Sony's included, on Sony's home turf.

So why no iTMS Japan? Well, apparently it all comes down to different cultural expectations regarding the consumption of music. According to The Asahi Shimbun (which, no matter how many times we hear its name, sounds like some sort of steamed pastry filled with a sweet red bean paste), Japanese record execs refuse to license their catalogs to Apple both because of pricing, and because they "deem its copy protection measures to be inadequate." It seems that their biggest objection is that customers are allowed to-- gasp!-- burn songs onto CDs! And that's a big no-no over there.

The reason this strikes us as a fundamentally different cultural attitude toward music consumption is because CDs in Japan reportedly cost on the order of $30 apiece, so yeah, buying an album from the iTMS for the equivalent of ten or even twenty clams and then burning it onto a blank CD-R yields a decent legal copy that's scads cheaper, and that spells trouble for the industry. Also, $30 per CD is expensive enough that apparently the Japanese have CD rental shops just like video stores where you can take home the hottest new releases for a buck or two, listen to them for a few days, and then take them back. (Be kind; rewind.)

So apparently the Japanese are okay with renting music instead of owning it, but it's into this culture that Apple wants to sell 99-cent downloads, when reportedly renting a CD single is less than a dime cheaper. So would anybody take the trouble to go out and rent a single instead of buying the song online for a few cents more? The CD rental shops would go out of business, CD sales would plummet, the whole economy would tank overnight, and the entire nation would sink into the ocean to be devoured by an enormous radioactive sea creature that would then go on to be defeated by Godzilla, because he's the man.

For its part, Apple Japan remains upbeat; the company's marketing veep says that the continuing success of the iPod will eventually force the labels to relent, and that they "won't be able to swim against the tide forever." But how long will it take before Apple can bring the iTMS to the Land of the Rising Sun? A year? Two? Yeesh, we bet even the Canadians won't have to wait that long.

Just a quick note on this, folks, because we have a low tolerance for inscrutable technojargony acronyms and this article in The Register boasts no fewer than eight such beasties in its first four sentences-- including one in which one letter stands for another acronym. (No, honestly; MBOA reportedly stands for "Multiband OFDM Alliance." No indication what OFDM stands for, however.) But as far as we can make out, a wireless version of FireWire is one step closer to becoming a commercial reality, and that's the important thing.

See, apparently the 1394 TA ("Trade Association") has voiced its approval of a newly proposed technology "to allow FireWire devices to communicate wirelessly across UWB links." UWB is "Ultra Wide Band," in case you were wondering. And the technology in question was proposed by the WMA, aka the "WiMedia Alliance." Clear so far? Good. Because you can skip all the stuff about the slowness of the IEEE to set a standard and the MBOA taking matters into its own hands by "defining the basic MAC and PHY specifications" necessary to form a wireless FireWire PAL. (Whew.) All you need to know-- we think-- is that a bunch of bigwigs have agreed on a technical approach to transfer FireWire data wirelessly at a rate of "up to 480 Mbps," which is even faster than plain vanilla wired FireWire. Sure, there's no mention of range, and we're guessing that in practice it may not be quite as quick as the numbers imply, but this is still some very cool stuff nonetheless.

Now, we could go on and on about the applications of such a technology, such as DV camcorders that can play back video on the living room TV at full, uncompressed quality without needing to be plugged in, or maybe one of those long-rumored Mac tablets with enough bandwidth to act as a remote screen and input device for a base Mac and with a screen refresh rate fast enough that it might even work with a few modest action games. Instead, though, we have to tackle the name; "Wireless FireWire" ain't gonna cut it in the marketplace unless the whole world decides to get drunk and stay that way. "FireWireless" seems to have a growing following among the tech set, but something about it bugs us a little. Besides, isn't wireless FireWire just... well... Fire?

That might be hard to trademark, though. Hmmm.

Say, even though wireless FireWire will most likely be used more as a peripheral interconnect architecture than for all-purpose high-speed networking (IP over FireWire notwithstanding), maybe Apple should just stick with its AirPort series of product names. Let's see, now... if 11 Mbps was "AirPort" and 54 Mbps is "AirPort Extreme," what would wireless 480 Mbps be? May we suggest either "AirPort Absurd," "AirPort Insane," or "AirPort YourFaceWillMeltOff"? Our vote's for the last one... because it yields yet another acronym, and hey, who doesn't need more of those? AYFWMO forever!