Geez, we pass along one single little rumor that hovers deliciously on the edge of complete incredibility, and suddenly our inbox explodes. Great. Now who's going to clean up this mess? Thanks to you guys, there's spam in our hair. Do you have any idea how much Herbal Essences it's going to take to wash out the smell of ham and pork shoulder?

Yup, it seems like the "screenless flashPod" rumor is the controversy of choice this week, because as far as we can tell from reading a selection of the kajillion-and-a-half messages now peppering the walls and strewn a foot deep all over the floor (don't even ask about the paper cuts on our faces; who knew email had such sharp edges?), people have some strong opinions one way or the other, with roughly 60 percent insisting that the very notion that Apple would ship an iPod without the celebrated iPod user interface is pure hokum. Several people figure that if it exists at all, the feature-reduced, screenless, nonscrollable iPod that looks and functions like a remote control may in fact be-- dun dun dun DUNNNNNNN!-- a remote control (funny how we never saw that coming), most likely for AirPort Express, which desperately needs one before AirTunes will really take off.

The rest of the naysayers go so far as to deny any possibility of an Apple-branded flash-based player at all, citing as evidence Steve Jobs's incessant derision of the whole class of products every time he opens his mouth. (Seriously, every time. We actually have him on tape ordering at Jamba Juice saying "Yeah, I'll have a PowerBoost, double up on the strawberries, hold the raspberries, and flash players suck.") But if that's really the situation, then what's up with that analyst at Thomas Weisel who swore up and down that Apple had signed on with SigmaTel for a whole mess o' flash-player controller chips? Well, considering he was also "pretty confident" that the flashPod would ship in time for the Christmas buying season, maybe it's not so hard to write him off after all.

But wait! Now's there's another report of flashPod parts set to come streaming into Apple's manufacturing facilities, and this time it's the flash RAM itself: according to an article in China Daily pointed out by faithful viewer Bob Martinez, Toshiba is set to start selling flash memory to Apple "early next year," and the info comes not from "sources close to the company," but instead straight from the lips of a senior executive veep at Toshiba itself-- one with an actual name and everything. Of course, just because Apple's buying a boatload of flash memory from Toshiba doesn't necessarily mean that said memory is going to be used in flash-based iPods; it could instead, for example, be used in new Newtons. You can decide for yourself which is more likely.

Now, refresh our memories, here: is this the part where we put a damper on the whole "the Toshiba deal clearly means flashPods are coming!" party by reminding everyone that every iPod in existence has 32ish MB of flash RAM inside for use in battery-saving song buffering and skip protection, and that Toshiba may simply be a new vendor supplying parts for the very same iPods we already know and love? Because we can't find our script under all this mail...

Speaking of wild 'n' wacky 'n' possibly totally baseless rumors (and c'mon, you know you love 'em), Apple might conceivably be buying a ton of flash RAM from Toshiba for something other than a new iPod-- and no, we're not going to raise the specter of the Newton again. (Well, other than just then, we mean.) Remember a few years back when somebody at an investor's meeting or something questioned Steve Jobs about when Apple would finally release a new PDA and get back into the handheld market? Steve's response was more or less a polite "never"; his reasoning was that people don't actually use PDAs much, and the market was stumbling because everyone was finally starting to realize that. Plus, he figured that whatever people were doing on PDAs would eventually be done on mobile phones instead.

Given the current popularity of PDA hybrid smartphones like the Treo, it looks like he was pretty much right-- but Steve's been asked about the possibility of Apple making mobile phones, too, and if we recall correctly, he said something about leaving the phone-making to the pros. Of course, that hasn't stopped plenty of people from engaging in quiet speculation over the years about the eventual release of an Apple-branded (if not necessarily Apple-manufactured) iPhone. For a while we recall there was a lot of talk about a cobranded handset made by Nokia; in recent months that's given way to a heavier focus on Motorola, especially in light of its recent agreement with Apple to stick a slimmed-down version of iTunes on selected Moto phones.

Well, the latest in the iPhone buzz comes courtesy of one of our favorite bit players, the "mysterious stranger on a train." Faithful viewer Dan informs us that the site admin over at TreoMac.com got drawn into a conversation with a random Motorola employee who had noticed him watching an episode of The Simpsons on his Treo 600 while riding the rails. According to this Mysterious Stranger, he'd personally witnessed an Apple-branded phone "circulating around the office at Motorola"; while he hadn't gotten to handle it himself, he notes that those lucky enough to have done so described it as "sleek and sexy" and said that "iTunes and iPhoto would factor into this device somehow." Other than the apparent presence of some sort of media slot in the top and a USB 2.0 port in the bottom, further details are sadly lacking.

So whaddaya think: true tales of covert Apple phone-dabbling, or just the invention of some guy who passes the time on long train rides by testing the gullibility of whoever happens to be sitting across from him? If we assume the former, it sounds like whatever this Apple-branded phone-thingy might be, it's far enough along in development to be near the production phase... necessitating, say, a whole of extra flash RAM from Toshiba? Just a thought.

Personally, we've been pretty skeptical about Apple ever entering the mobile phone market-- unless it's with a phone that also serves as an iPod photo, which, based on the alleged comments about iTunes and iPhoto integration, we suppose this mysterious Apple-branded prototype just might be. Given the iPod's frankly ridiculous level of mind share right now, Apple may have decided that it can't ignore this opportunity to use the iPod's success as a toehold to establish a presence in the telecom market. After all, a lot more people have mobile phones than iPods-- at least, until this iPhone thing hits the shelves...

As partial fulfillment of court-ordered community service hours we got stuck with following an unfortunate incident involving a Dell mall kiosk last March (yes, it was us holding the flamethrower, but we swear we thought the safety was on), we close this episode with a public service announcement to all the virile young men out there: keep those PowerBooks off your laps, fellas, because the latest medical research implies a connection between laptop use and infertility in males. Faithful viewer Jonathan Baldwin tipped us off to a Guardian Unlimited article which cites a recent study titled "Increase in scrotal temperature in laptop computer users." So you know this is going to be fun.

The theory is that since higher scrotal temps can damage sperm, prolonged laptop exposure to the heat coming off of today's blast furnace notebook computers "may cause irreversible or partially reversible changes in male reproductive function." The researchers in question measured the scrotal temperatures of 29 volunteers-- kudos, by the way, to whoever managed to scrounge up 29 guys willing to check the box that said "please measure the temperature of my scrotum"-- with and without laptops, and apparently scrotal temperatures had "risen by 1° C in 15 minutes of computer use." By extrapolation, we take that to mean that if you use a laptop for, say, two days straight, your pants might burst into flame. So watch it.

If you're wondering what kind of laptops were used in the study, WebMD reports that "the researchers used two brands of Pentium 4 laptop computers" in the test. So if we wanted to, we suppose we could play up the whole "Intel chips are sterilizing the population" angle, but we'll give it a miss, because as anyone who uses one can attest, Apple's late-model PowerBooks aren't exactly paragons of iciness themselves; they may be cool, but they sure aren't cool, and we wouldn't be surprised if the heat coming off of Apple's products is already responsible for lowering sperm counts in thousands-- if not millions-- of men worldwide.

In other words, it's not an Intel thing, but rather an industry-wide problem. Or is it an industry-wide conspiracy instead? Everyone knows that once you have kids, your available disposable income-- say, the income you'd ordinarily use to buy a new computer every year or two-- all vanishes in a swirling cloud of diapers 'n' formula. Consider the AtAT staff's own Mac-buying history: new desktops and laptops at least once a year from 1994 through 2001... and nothing since the coming of Anya except for a single 2003 12-inch PowerBook that only exists because Katie (AtAT's resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae) won a chunk of change on Jeopardy!

So we can only assume that laptop heat output has soared in recent years because the personal computer industry has conspired to lower sperm counts in an effort to keep its customers child-free and buying. Shocked? You shouldn't be, because it works both ways: the big diaper conglomerates all work to lower scrotal temperatures by secretly funding boxer shorts manufacturers and supposedly "independent" militant kilt advocacy groups. Such is the way of the world.

By the way, guys, if you laugh and shrug off the warnings about possible infertility due to laptop use, you should still think twice about allowing modern notebook computers near Junior, there; the Guardian reminds us of a far more... immediate hazard of reckless laptop use when it refers to "an anecdotal report of genital burns" that were caused by an overly-toasty Dell notebook. Man, wouldja believe we'd actually managed to forget about that?