See, what'd we tell you? The mysteries of the stock market and its behavior may be far beyond our mortal ken, but evidently Wall Street lapped up Apple's Q3 earnings news like a big bowl of Liquid Enthusiasm. AAPL jumped a massive $3.35 today, marking an 11.33% gain that puts the stock back up near its highest levels in four years (from which it had tumbled after that whole "whoops, we kinda ran out of iMacs" thing). Since this puts Apple up more than 40% from its share price six months ago (while the NASDAQ as a whole is down 10%), we think the company's got plenty of reasons to be feeling good these days... and most of them make a sound commonly onomatopoeized as "ka-ching."

Of course, as a general rule, the buyers themselves are sheep, and today's stock spike wouldn't have been nearly so pronounced if the investors hadn't had a little nudge from the suits. CBS MarketWatch reports that AAPL racked up two, count 'em, two analyst upgrades today. First Albany upped its rating on Apple from "Neutral" to "Buy," setting a price target of $35 and stating that the firm has "greater confidence in Apple's ability to sustain revenue growth and capitalize on operating leverage in its model." And Bear Stearns bumped AAPL from "Peer Perform" to "Outperform" (which we're assured is a step up-- darn newfangled WallStreetSpeak), citing "more consistent growth and execution"; Bear Stearns's new year-end price target for AAPL shares is $36.50. All good stuff, especially since Joel Wagonfeld and Andrew Neff (the analysts who track Apple for First Albany and Bear Stearns, respectively) are the only two analysts with five-star ratings for accuracy according to StarMine when it comes to predicting AAPL's behavior.

Oh, but wait-- apparently there's more! According to Yahoo! Finance, Apple scored a third upgrade today: some firm called Fulcrum which provides research analysis to "a wide range of institutional investors" ("We do not do business with the general public"-- well, aren't you special) upgraded its rating on AAPL from "Neutral" to "Buy." We have no idea how much influence, if any, Fulcrum may have, but obviously every little bit counts.

As of today, analysts covering Apple have changed their ratings eight times this year-- and every single one of those changes was an upgrade, not a downgrade. Dare we suggest that Apple might be entering a new period of maximum Reality Distortion Field penetration on Wall Street? Fingers crossed, people, because the last time that happened in 1999, AAPL's value had more than quadrupled in value before it finally drove off a cliff the following year. And if history is repeating, maybe this time around we'll even be smart enough to jump from the vehicle before it goes plummeting into the sea.

Whether you think the show has a future or not, we've discovered one significant drawback to Macworld Expo Boston being such a small affair: when nothing particularly dramatic happens during the Steveless show in the first place, the inevitable post-Expo lull that settles in afterwards is like a freakin' vacuum. Seriously, now that everyone's done their obligatory two cents on "Expo was small, but a success nonetheless" and/or "Expo was an unmitigated disaster of a magnitude not seen since the advent of Oscar Mayer's 'Sack o' Sauce in a Can o' Meat'," we can't remember the Apple world ever having this little to talk about.

Then again, we have really short memories. In fact, we've completely forgotten the point we were trying to make.

So in the absence of anything exciting or, indeed, present in our short-term memory, we suppose now would be a good time to double back a little and cover a development that was eclipsed by the only husky-size Apple news of the week (i.e. those fabulous Q3 results). Do you remember when we mentioned that Apple has projected that "40 per cent of Xserve sales are destined for use in" supercomputing clusters? At the time we noted that the only two announced G5 clusters had been the groundbreaking Virginia Tech project and the Army's even larger "MACH 5" cluster announced just a couple of weeks earlier, but that the two had apparently already been breeding like bunnies given reports of a new "baby cluster" of 256 Xserves newly under construction at UCLA.

Well, evidently the spawning didn't stop there, because MacRumors recently noted the arrival of another baby cluster, also comprised of 256 Xserves-- apparently that's a common cluster birth weight-- that's being stapled together on the opposite coast at the University of Maine. But the lineage gets tricky, because a university press release reveals that the "new 256 node Apple Xserve G5 system" (dubbed "a baby MACH 5") is "funded by the Army under contract with UMaine"-- yet at the same time, the school insists that MACH 5 itself is "based in part on UMaine research funded by the Army to develop more powerful and less expensive computing technology for military research." So the question of which cluster begat which gets a little murky, and right now we're favoring a chicken-and-egg theory that involves time travel and Fry becoming his own grandfather.

(Incidentally, the press release also repeats the same mistake about MACH 5 being "expected to be second in speed only to the $350 million Earth Simulator computer in Japan"; as we've pointed out in the past, MACH 5 almost certainly wouldn't have ranked second even in the current TOP500 listings, but apparently some people will never understand the difference between theoretical peak performance and real-life measured results. Kinda like that whole "immaculate conception" concept that people always get wrong. It makes us lose our patience.)

So let's see, now-- that makes four G5-based supercomputers at least partially constructed in the year since the chip was first unveiled. Even more impressive, it's four Xserve G5-based supercomputers since Apple first started shipping the product less than four months ago. Suppose this trend has legs? Could it be, dare we say, a bona fide phenomenon? Just how many more "large clusters" does Apple "anticipate"? Will all these new clusters suck up all the G5s, leaving Mac users high and dry-- uh, higher and drier? And who took our Pop-Tart that was sitting here on the desk?

Seriously, has anyone seen it?

Aw, man. Now we gotta make toast or something.

During yesterday's conference call, Apple confirmed that the iTunes Music Store still has "over 70% market share of legal downloads in the U.S." and is therefore so far ahead of the competition that Napster, Sony, and the rest aren't so much eating Apple's dust as they are eating the fossilized remains of that dust when they finally catch up to where it once floated free in Apple's wake hundreds of millions of years earlier. And yet you have to admire these competitors, because they're always on the lookout for new ways to try to wrest the crown from Apple's grasp. After all, if we didn't appreciate the quixotic attempt to unseat an established rival with a seemingly insurmountable market share lead, would we be Mac users in the first place?

On that note, look what faithful viewer gbois dug up from BBC News: it seems that OD2, the pre-iTMS digital download leader in Europe for something like four years running, is hoping to attract a little attention with its claims of soon having the largest catalog of any downloadable music vendor. OD2, you no doubt recall, recently sold itself to Loudeye when it saw the writing on the wall (and that writing said "iTMS IS KICKING YOUR HINDER SO HARD YOU'RE FEELING IT THREE FEET IN FRONT OF YOU"), but that evidently hasn't made it stop fighting; reportedly the service plans to add "nearly one million new tracks" to boost its song list to about 1,350,000 and "become the biggest Internet music service in the world."

Well, biggest in terms of catalog size, anyway, because it sure won't be the biggest with regard to sales. Still, if the company can deliver on its promise (and we don't see why it couldn't, since it's apparently just talking about merging in Loudeye's songs), OD2's catalog will indeed be almost twice as big as Apple's is right now. And since spillover from the iTMS and Napster hype actually pushed OD2's sales up by 22-28% during those rival services' launch weeks, even if it may be futile to try to push Apple out of first place, OD2 can at least increase its sales with respect to what they are now and maybe carve out a nice comfortable niche for itself. After all, Apple doesn't need to topple Dell or Microsoft to turn a tidy profit; the music download business is far less forgiving, no doubt, but we have to think there's at least a slim chance of happy survival.

See? We have a heart; we wouldn't wish a humiliating slide into oblivion on anybody. (Well, except for maybe BuyMusic.com, but that's already happened, so we're in the clear, karmically speaking). As for when OD2's planned catalog expansion might take place, no time frame is given other than "later this year," so it'll be interesting to see how (or if) Apple reacts to the news. Reports of an imminent contract between Apple and Europe's independent labels imply that a fresh infusion of indie music into Euro iTMS isn't too far off, but somehow we doubt that'll account for the 650,000 songs Apple needs to add if it wants to stay ahead of OD2.

Say, wasn't the Grateful Dead supposed to be adding every song from every single show it ever played to the iTMS? Because, you know, that'd probably take care of it right there...