Admit it: when Apple announced that the iTunes Music Store had sold five times as many songs as Napster did during that embattled brand's first week back from the wasteland of bankruptcy, you did a little jig. Not a foxtrot, not a two-step, but an actual jig. You were clicking your heels together and everything. Well, hold the phone, there, Mabel-- looks like Apple's "We Outsold Napster 5 to 1, We Are So Smart, S-M-R-T" press release might have been a little misleading, if not downright wrong, and new information about where Apple gets its numbers may well force us to reassess our entire perspective on the iTMS's alleged market-leading position. (Sheesh, next you'll be telling us there's no Santa Claus.)

See, according to TechNewsWorld, Napster bigwig Chris Gorog isn't denying that his new service sold 300,000 songs in its first week (since that number comes straight from Napster's own PR lackeys), but he voices a little distrust in Apple's claim that the iTMS sold 1.5 million in the same period. Citing the same Nielsen SoundScan numbers that Apple quoted, Gorog points out that the figures only account for "827,000 single downloads" from all services total, so he "does not know where Apple got the 1.5 million figure." He's got a point. SoundScan's figures should have covered the previous Monday-through-Sunday period, which overlapped Napster's first week by five of its seven days-- so unless Apple sold most of those 1.5 million songs in the last forty-eight hours of the week, well, clearly someone's numbers are goofy.

But if there is goofiness, it's almost certainly at SoundScan. Get this: referring to Apple's "over 80 percent of the market" claims, Gorog notes that "those numbers did not include Napster's results" because Napster "hadn't reported them yet"; add in Napster's numbers and Apple's "80 percent market share is reduced to 62 percent." Well, okay, you think-- 62 percent is still nothing to sneeze at. True. Except that Napster isn't the only non-iTMS download service that SoundScan left out of the equation: in a Reuters article, a SoundScan spokesperson admits that the weekly report has so far omitted Napster sales, but also reveals that it "doesn't yet include songs sold from MusicMatch or BuyMusic," either. As such, its figures "did not represent the entire, currently available market for legally purchased digital music."

Geez, no duh. A lack of Napster results is understandable, given certain pesky laws of time, space, and dimension. But no BuyMusic or MusicMatch either? Who else is there? This is troubling, because Apple's "over 80 percent" market share suddenly takes on a far darker tone when you consider that SoundScan's results apparently only include songs sold by Apple and Akbar 'n' Jeff's Downloadable Music Hut. So maybe you should tone that jig down a notch or two. Or at least stop grinning like a maniac while you do it.

Wildly questionable market share numbers notwithstanding, there's no denying that the iTunes Music Store is pretty darn cool. How cool, you ask? Cool enough that Fonzie calls it "Sir." Chillier than the reception a porcupine would get at a Down With Pointy Things rally. So unbefreakinglievably cool that if you pour orange juice into an ice cube tray, cover it with plastic wrap, poke toothpicks into each little cubelet, and stick it in the iTMS for a few hours, presto-- Sunshine on a Stick!

Still not clear enough for you? Then let's put it this way: the iTMS isn't just cool, nor is it merely cooler-- it's coolest, as decreed by no less an authority than TIME Magazine itself. Yes, faithful viewer Bill Brown casually informed us that the iTMS is TIME's Coolest Invention of the Year, beating out such notable contenders as camera-concealing cell phones, the Kamikaze Robo-Lobster, and Mr. Segway's Amazing Third-World Water Purifier. In fact, TIME even goes so far as to say that the iTMS is cooler than a device that finally gives a satisfying answer to the age-old question of what to do with all those AOL CD-ROMs. High praise indeed.

Now, winning awards is nothing new for Apple, and in fact even the company's flops at the cash register can rack up some crazy-butt kudos before getting axed for slow sales. (Yeah, we're looking at you, Cube.) But it's one thing to score awards for impeccable design, and something else altogether to have to carry the mantle of "coolest invention" for a year. Seriously, is the iTMS up to the pressure of staying cooler than a car that parallel parks itself? We're just hoping that the crushing burden of Ultimate Coolth doesn't drive it to drink. Or worse, New Jersey.

Ha ha! Just kidding, Jersey-dwellers! See, we picked you for that gag because we know you have a sense of humor, what with Kevin Smith and all. C'mon, you've got more Apple retail stores than Texas-- surely you're secure enough to laugh at yourselves, right? Right. Moving on.

Word has it that the white-coated madmen in the secret underground labs of One Infinite Loop are so drunk with pride over the "Coolest Invention" win that they've vowed never to let the title slip from their grasp; consequently they're all hard at work on a selection of devices rather far afield from Apple's typical product line-up, designed with one goal and one goal only: Maximum Coolness Density. Our usual sources had any and all knowledge of what those products might be selectively vacuumed right out of their skulls before they had a chance to contact us, but one of them theorizes that the supercool device closest to completion might be some sort of gadget that can selectively vacuum knowledge right out of people's skulls.

We have no idea where he got this idea. We figure he's just guessing. But in any event, congratulations to everyone at Apple; no matter how dorky you might have been yesterday, as of today your mom and TIME Magazine say you're cool!

"Mommy, Scotland called us a liar!" Man, like we haven't heard that a gazillion times before-- but amazingly enough, never in this context. You know that Power Mac G5 commercial, the one with the guy getting smacked through three or four walls and into a tree by the sheer oomph of his G5? Well, faithful viewer Darcy forwarded us an article at Scotsman.com which reports that the guy-through-walls-into-tree ad has been flat-out banned in Scotland for being "misleading."

This just in: Steve Jobs's pants are on fire. Film at 11.

Oh, but get this: apparently the eight Scottish wonks with no lives who complained about the ad to the Independent Television Commission had no trouble at all with the idea that using a G5 can propel you through the side of a house and into a stout instance of local flora-- which is at least mildly surprising, since Apple might have had a tough time proving such a claim. Instead, the bit to which they objected was Jeff Goldblum's voiceover. And again, amazingly enough, they didn't object to Jeff Goldblum's voice as such, but merely that it characterized the G5 as "the world's fastest, most powerful personal computer." Go figure.

Now, normally we wouldn't even have all that much of a problem with such a move, but the basis upon which the ad was banned was the accusation that Apple's claim was drawn from "the results of limited tests in which the specification of the computers used was configured to give Apple the best results." Oh, for cryin' out-- this again? Hasn't it been shown time and time again that the SPEC tests configured the G5 and the Xeon with the closest thing possible to a cross-platform compiler, that the Xeon had Hyperthreading turned off because it had slower scores with it on, etc. etc. etc.? Oy.

We want to make something clear: if a Scottish TV commission wants to ban a Power Mac ad because "there was insufficient evidence to support the claim 'world's fastest, most powerful personal computer,'" fine. If they furthermore want to ban it because they "doubt that the claim could be substantiated at all" and that there's never a way to prove that any one computer is definitely faster than all others, dandy. We're all for it. But that recurring allegation that Apple cheated on those initial benchmarks just really sticks in our collective craw. And there's nothing worse than a sticky craw.

Meanwhile, Apple's official response to Scotland is still being drafted, but sources report that a "rubber and glue" metaphor figures strongly.