Hold the phone, there, Beryl-- remember that iTunes Music Store sales update last week? Sure you do; that was the one where people were reporting that the tally stood at 20 million songs sold as of a week ago, December 8th. And while that sounded like a whole lotta tunes at first, doing the math seemed to indicate a massive slowdown in iTMS sales-- down to weekly levels even lower than they had been prior to the advent of iTunes for Windows. This startling revelation led to much gnashing of teeth among the Mac faithful, and almost as much looking up what exactly the word "gnashing" means. (We're too lazy to bother, but we're pretty sure it's a small village in England.)

But no worries, folks, because whenever Apple sold its 20 millionth song, it wasn't last Monday-- at least, not unless the company had a four-day sales spike so steep it's got sherpas setting up camp at its base. A new press release shouts to the heavens that the iTMS sold its 25 millionth song this past Friday ("Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" by Ol' Blue Eyes), which definitely skews the math a bit. Apple reported a running count of 17 million songs sold as of November 6th, and 7 million songs in five weeks comes out to, as Steve himself says, "almost 1.5 million songs per week." That's not going to put Sam Goody out of business anytime soon, but it's still a plenty respectable rate, in our book.

In fact, it's especially nifty given what's happening with the competition. As faithful viewer Adam J. Bezark points out, doltmeister Scott Blum-- you know, that guy who swore that his BuyMusic.com venture would sell a million songs per day just because he spent $20 million to slap a naked picture of ex-Mötley Crüe jailbird Tommy Lee up in Times Square-- told USA Today that his service (and we use the term loosely, here) was "not achieving that at all." He wouldn't give figures, but Scott had the unexpected grace to admit that he had "spoken with [his] competitors," and BuyMusic and the other services are "nowhere near [Apple's] numbers." Feel free to be all smug about it.

Heck, if you're looking to get insufferably smug today, you should take note that the USA Today article all about the superiority of the iTMS was penned by none other than Jefferson Graham, that same guy who slammed iTunes so badly after having spent about 90 minutes with the Windows version when it first came out. Funny how he's gone from calling iTunes "not worth it in comparison to its competitors" to saying it's the "digital hit of the year" and the "easiest to use." Sounds like his doctor put him on clue pills.

Oh, one last thing to put your smug machine into overdrive: apparently those 25 million songs purchased don't include the "over $1 million of iTunes online gift certificates and allowances" that Apple has sold in the past two months-- and we wouldn't be surprised if Apple sells a lot more as Christmas approaches and people get desperate. There you go; enough smug to last you clean through Arbor Day. Enjoy.

Say, has anyone noticed that AppleWorks hasn't been updated in any serious way since there were two popes running around? Maybe that's because Apple's working on something else. You may have heard rumors that Apple has been slapping together an "AppleWorks Pro" suite that'll be beefier and better-suited for business use, and certainly there are no end of clues that such a thing is in the cards; AppleWorks has its own anemic presentation mode, for example, and yet Apple now sells a serious PowerPoint competitor in Keynote which could well be destined for a suite. And what's Safari if not Apple proving that when Microsoft cancels an important Mac product, Apple can fill the void with something even better? So yeah, with all the buzz about Microsoft possibly wanting out of the whole Mac Office thing, we'd be pretty surprised if Apple didn't have a replacement waiting in the wings and ready to make Mac users say "good riddance." (Seriously, does anyone miss Internet Explorer? Exactly.)

Well, now there's yet another clue that something Officey might be in the works at One Infinite Loop. MacRumors cites a brief blurb at Think Secret and notes that Apple recently applied for a new trademark which has distinctly word-processorial overtones: "iWrite" is now a pending Apple trademark here in the states, as well as in Europe and Australia. (You never took those rumors of Apple calling its new word processor "Document" seriously, did you? Can you imagine how awkward it would be to have to refer to a "Document document"?) Granted, there isn't a whole lot you can tell about a potential product from a trademark application; we know that its category is "computer hardware; computer software," but that doesn't exactly narrow the field much. But while at first glance "iWrite" sure sounds like a word processor, it could be any number of things. Like a... well, like a word processor. Or a word processor. Or even, dare we say it, a processor of words. Still, only time will tell.

And then again, maybe it won't. Apple has a long history of registering trademarks and then never using them, so this might well turn out to be (literally) nothing, but if your Inner Conspiracy Theorist is screaming for more, more, more, bite down on this tasty bite-size morsel of speculatory chewiness: in the U.S., at least, the trademark application is filed under "Appple Computer, Inc."-- the extra "p" is for "pachyderm"-- and yet the Attorney of Record is one that has filed these applications for Apple in the past, so this is the real deal. The upshot, however, is that Mac-obsessed freaks like ourselves who routinely comb through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's servers for new applications by "Apple" wouldn't have found this particular one.

Innocent typo, or a clever attempt to keep "iWrite" under the public radar? That depends on whether or not you've been taking your meds.

Speaking of PowerPoint (yes, we were-- honest!), despite the fact that there's certainly no shortage of actual on-topic stuff that would fit nicely into AtAT's plot right now, sometimes the siren song of Microsoft-bashing fodder is far too strong to resist. Okay, usually it's too strong to resist. And when it is resistible, we wind up resisting our resistance and taking the easy bash anyway. What can we say? It's one of our subtle charms.

So away we go! Faithful viewer Ribalrous Cabaret tipped us off to the fact that the New York Times actually went with this for an article headline: PowerPoint Makes You Dumb. Pretty much says it all right there, doesn't it? Except that the evidence backing that assertion is quite grim: it seems that when NASA's Columbia Accident Investigation Board issued its report on why things went south, in addition to problems with the shuttle's insulation, the committee also blamed PowerPoint. Had NASA engineers presented their assessment of possible wing damage in the form of "traditional ink-and-paper technical reports" instead of a PowerPoint slide "so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle," someone in charge might have actually realized that things were serious.

Now, far be it from us to do something as rash as blaming PowerPoint for the Columbia crash (that's NASA's job, apparently), but it seems that NASA's not alone in accusing Microsoft's slideshow software of encouraging poor presentation of important info. Information presentation theorist Edward Tufte recently blasted PowerPoint because its low resolution limits slides to about 40 words each and charts to a mere 12 elements, and thus "forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension" by relying on crappy bullet lists and letting PowerPoint appear to take up the slack by wrapping it all in "an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch." Yeah! Go get 'em, Eddie baby! Give 'em two fists of what-for!

"But AtAT," you ask, "doesn't everything that this guy is saying about PowerPoint apply equally to Keynote?" What are you, nuts? Keep that kind of talk to yourself before people think you're a commie. Or worse, a Microsoft sympathizer. Geez. Kids today...