You know the syndrome well: like a chemical burn, a bad rash, or that drunken college roommate who showed up in the middle of the night three weeks ago to crash on your couch "for a day or two," some rumors just refuse to go away. Some of them-- say, the Disney buyout, the Apple PDA, and a Mac OS X release for Intel-- stick around in the absence of any real evidence because they offer possibilities too intriguing to let slip off into the realm of pure fiction, but others hang in there because sooner or later they're going to turn out to be 100% true. So guess which one's quickly digging out a nice little trench for itself in the latter category? Yup, the rumorological Flavor o' the Month: lower-cost iPods that sacrifice the roomy goodness of bite-size hard drives for the relatively cramped solid-state cheaposity of flash memory.

The possibility's been a natural topic of speculation ever since the first iPod made eyeballs bulge with its $399 price tag three years ago, as foolish mortals the world over asked, "who really needs a thousand songs in his or her pocket?" Lots of people loved the iPod's style, its interface, and its seamless iTunes integration, but just couldn't swallow the sticker price and claimed they'd be perfectly happy spending maybe $149 to be able to tote five or six albums at once. Personally, having owned a 64 MB player and lived through the endless impossible hassle of trying to pick fifteen songs to sustain us through an entire day, we thought those guys were nuts, but hey, to each his own. Still, we thought Apple's original answer to the flash-based player-- namely, the $249 4 GB iPod mini-- made a whole lot more sense.

But a few weeks back, a Wall Street analyst started flapping his gums about well-placed sources in Asia who insisted that Apple had just signed a contract with the world's biggest manufacturer of controller chips used in flash-based players, and ever since then the talk of a flashPod has gone into overdrive-- despite Steve Jobs's continuing derision of that entire class of device at practically every public appearance he's made since 2001. Soon other analysts joined in, predicting the advent of a $199-or-less flashPod sometime early in 2005. And now, as faithful viewer Frozen Tundra points out, AppleInsider is "confirming" that it's all true.

According to AI's "extremely reliable sources," production of the flashPod will start next month, with Apple intending to stockpile "approximately 2 million" units before it puts the product on store shelves in order to avoid the supply problems that frustrated would-be customers for months after the iPod mini was introduced. Worldwide shipments are reportedly slated for "late January or early February" following a traditional Stevenote intro at January's Macworld Expo.

So with a storage capacity "in the range of 256 MB to 1 GB," will people buy these things? Well, yeah, of course they will; they already buy other flash-based players, so the public at large will most likely claw each other to bloody tatters in the mad dash to buy the iPod version. That said, we'll stick to the hard drive models, thanks; to anyone used to more space, even with up to 1 GB of storage, the flashPod will feel like a straitjacket accidentally washed in hot water and tumble-dried on high. Case in point: we just got a 1 GB Secure Digital card for one of our Treos, and wowed as we are by the ability to cram a whole gigabyte of data onto something roughly the size, weight, and thickness of eight or ten postage stamps stuck together, the act of having to choose just twenty or so albums practically sent us into convulsions of claustrophobic terror.

Of course, that's why we have "real" iPods, and so will anyone else with a deep psychological need for sprawl; everyone else will snap up flashPods like those little pizza rolls at a Superbowl party. So all that remains, we suppose, is endless speculation about how Steve Jobs is going to weasel out of his previous anti-flash comments when he does a 180 in eight or nine weeks' time and starts gushing about the latest addition to the iPod family. Our money's on the "flash players do suck-- so we made one that doesn't" approach. Who'll give us odds?

Ah, Friday: the one day of the week when we can let what we laughingly refer to as our "focus" drift from Apple-flavored drama to anything bad about the Evil Empire that makes us feel superior in petty little ways. Yes, folks, it's time once again for Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day, and as always, it's a little tough to pick a topic. For a while we were sure we'd discuss this week's launch of MSN Search, Microsoft's belated but heavily-hyped attempt to out-Google Google; while we're hearing grudging admissions that bits of it are pretty good, we've gotten a hefty chunk of mail from viewers who have tried basic searches with Microsoft's new engine and gotten completely baffling results. Indeed, The Register states that MSN Search is "better in almost every way than Google, except for one: its search results are terrible." Gee, minor problem there.

But somehow yet another screed dissecting Microsoft Google 2004 just seems too predictable, so instead we thought we'd ramble on about how crappy Windows software is eventually going to get a cop killed. Faithful viewer Kevlar directed us to a CNET article a couple of days ago about the San Jose police department's transition to a "new mobile dispatch system that includes a Windows-based touch-screen computer in every patrol car"-- a fitting piece of techno-bling for cops in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, it seems that the interface was so poorly designed that the officers who have been forced to use it "have said they wish the department had retained and upgraded the old system"; considering that the old system was text-based software written in 1990, that speaks volumes about the new system's shortcomings.

Dispatchers complain that the new system leaves them "unable to perform several tasks at one time," while inaccurate maps, screens "cluttered with unnecessary information," and even the use of a barely-legible font rendered the system borderline dangerous to patrol officers in the field. Reportedly performing even the most basic and common tasks requires overly complex sequences of steps to accomplish. As the president of the local cops' union puts it, "do you think if you're hunkered down and someone's shooting at you in your car, you're going to be able to sit there and look for Control or Alt or Function?"

But can we realistically blame Microsoft and Windows for the interface of a third party application? Of course we can! For one thing, we're not journalists (or even "journalists"), so we have absolutely no professional standard of accuracy or fairness to live up to. More importantly, though, we honestly believe that the ridiculously user-hostile-- well, okay, maybe it's more "user-oblivious"-- interface philosophy that's been a cornerstone of the Windows experience since the dawn of time engenders similarly crappy design in the platform's developer community. If you know that over 90 percent of the market opts for an operating system with as half-assed an attitude toward user interface as Windows's happens to be, why bother trying to do better? And in Intergraph's case, when it slapped together the interface for its police software, why would it have bothered to talk to the actual police officers who would rely on the system to get their jobs done? After all, Microsoft wouldn't.

And so we arrive at the obvious conclusion: Bill Gates is a cop-killer. Ta-daaa!

This has been one of the slowest news weeks we've ever endured, folks, so if it's okay with you, we're just going to finish it out with a weirdo quickie food-for-thought kinda thing. You know how Amazon can suggest products you might be interested in based upon which products you've bought or rated in the past? Generally speaking, we've found it to be remarkably good at suggesting stuff to us that we may not have realized existed, but that we're all too happy to spend gobs of cash so Amazon will send it merrily winging its way to our front door. Sometimes, though, the connections the artificial intelligence makes can be slightly baffling.

Try this: visit Amazon's product page for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, and then add the product to your Wish List. (If you don't have a Wish List yet, that's even better; one will be created for you.) Once Panther is happily purring away in your Wish List, faithful viewer BassMan says that you'll want to take a look at the list of DVDs that Amazon recommends based on your product interests. Odds are you'll find Pee Wee's Playhouse Christmas Special at or near the top of the list, and if you click the "Why was I recommended this?" link, Amazon will casually inform you that it thought you might enjoy a yuletide dose of Pee Wee Herman "because you were interested in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther."

No, we wouldn't have believed it either, but we tried it, and that's exactly what happened: the Pee Wee disc was right at the top of our recommended DVDs list. Go figure.

So what, do you suppose, is the connection between the latest major release of Mac OS X and enduring cult '80s icon Pee Wee Herman? Well, that's exactly the question we suggest you fry your noodle with during quiet times this weekend, because we have no answers for you. About all we can say is that when we tried the same experiment with Mac OS X Tiger, the top DVD that Amazon recommended because of our interest in that product was The Triplets of Belleville. Not much help there. And over in the magazines category, whereas having Panther in our Wish List makes Amazon recommend a subscription to The New Yorker, switching to Tiger instead prompts Amazon to suggest a subscription to Playboy.

So, apparently Mac users interested in the latest and greatest version of Mac OS X are sophisticated urban literati with a soft spot for nostalgic '80s kitsch, whereas Mac users looking forward to future Mac operating systems enjoy quirky feature-length animation and magazines they have to hide when their parents come over. You know what? We're just going to stop thinking about it before our heads explode. If you solve any mysteries, let us know.