Psssst! Hey, buddy... wanna buy a letter "R"? No? Well, then how about a hot stock tip that's 110 percent guaranteed to come true? Because our team of genetically-enhanced atomic psychics is surer than sure that two weeks from Monday, Apple's stock price (which has been on a rampage of late, more than tripling over the course of the past year) will have cratered by 50 percent overnight. And if you don't believe the atomic psychics, faithful viewer Simone Bianconcini was the first to inform us that an official Apple press release confirms the imminent price drop. That's right, folks, AAPL's price is going to be halved before March. Oh no!! Run away!!

Okay, fine, it's not actually as bad as all that, since the number of shares is going to be doubling at the same time. Yes, boys and girls, we're talking about that rarest of rare AAPL activities, the stock split. Apple's board has apparently approved a two-for-one split of the company's 900 million shares, and anyone with some AAPL kicking around in their portfolios as of the close of the markets on February 18th will discover that each of those shares will have automagically split into two, with each post-split share being half as valuable as before. In other words, you get twice as many shares, but each share is half as good. Seeing as AtAT is all about quantity over quality, we wholeheartedly approve.

For those keeping score, this is AAPL's first stock split since the tulipbulb.com heyday of mid-2000-- when the NASDAQ was trading at over 4000 and venture capitalists routinely threw rose-scented wads of thousand-dollar bills at anyone who scrawled the phrase "I'M A-GONNA SELL STUFF ON THAT THERE INTERNET" on the back of an envelope with a crayon, so we're not entirely sure it counts. And that was only the second split in the company's history, with the first having taken place way back in June of 1987. So you bet your boots that this is a pretty momentous occasion, and you should definitely start making plans for a Split Party to celebrate; sure, since the number of shares doubles while the value per share halves, a split is theoretically a financial non-event. In reality, though, companies doing poorly never split their stock, so people take it to be a sign of growth and stability. (And well they should; just for giggles, compare AAPL's relative growth from five years ago compared to the stocks of Dell, Microsoft, Intel, and Gateway.) Meanwhile, smaller investors tend to climb on board when the per-share price looks more "affordable"-- and the likelihood of smaller investors buying in when the price goes down makes everyone buy more in advance of the split, anticipating the ensuing price spike, which is why AAPL rose another $3 after the split announcement.

So what does all this mean to you? Well, if you own AAPL like we do (and if you don't, aren't you kicking yourself yet?), it means that pretty soon you'll own more. And whether you own AAPL or not, it also means that now might be a fine time to buy some, since you're looking at a two-for-one sale from now until split-adjusted trading on the 28th. Okay, sure, it's only a "sale" in the same sense that a department store doubling its jewelry prices immediately before taking 50 percent off is a "sale"; you don't actually save any money, but you sure feel like you did, don't you?

It's finally official: we're stupid! Not that we haven't long suspected that fact, mind you, but it's nice to get some objective confirmation from an impartial third-party source, because we can hardly trust our own estimation of our potential stupidity, right? (We mean, what with being stupid and all.) All that's left is for us to receive our official certificates in the mail, spend two or three hours trying to figure out how to put them into frames, and then settle in for a nice, resigned life of incessant stupid behavior. We suppose that means we should really start watching a lot more UPN or something.

Although, before we do anything quite that drastic, we should probably consider the authority of the body proclaiming our stupidity: it's Napster. See, faithful viewer Paul Detzler dished us a New Media Age article outlining Napster's "aggressive marketing campaign against Apple's iPod," which kicked off-- er, touched down-- er, launched in a completely pun-free manner with the company's $2.4 million commercial during the Super Bowl. You remember-- the commercial that ranked dead last for effectiveness out of all 55 ads shown during the big game, largely because it 1) forced football fans to read something and 2) commanded them to "do the math," both of which are probably just about the last activities anyone watching a football game-- on TV-- on a Sunday-- are going to want to do... whether they're stupid like we are or not.

Anyway, Napster CEO Chris Gorog (gee, any relation to Gorog the Destructor, Eater of Planets and Emperor-for-Life of Rigel 3?) recently yammered to the press that the portable subscription model of Napster To Go, which requires customers to pay $15 per month to rent as much music as they can download and carry, is "exactly what consumers want to do." See, apparently extensive market research has proved conclusively that consumers are practically aching to shell out $180 each and every year for the rest of their lives for the privilege of not having their entire digital music collections evaporate overnight. We never would have guessed, which is probably because we're so stupid. It all just slots in perfectly with Gorog's (the Napster guy, not the thousand-foot-tall Rigellian Space Minotaur with eyes like red fire and a necklace of freshly-decapitated heads of the gods themselves) insistence that "it's stupid to buy an iPod," which is, of course, how we know we're so face-smackingly dumb. Because we bought two.

At least we're in good company, because there were ten million of us iPod-buying stupid-heads as of the end of December, and we wouldn't be surprised if our numbers have swelled to at least twelve million by now. And we're willing to bet that hardly any of us are smart enough to understand how Gorog's (again, that Napster weenie, not the horned cosmic beast to whom the bloody destruction of the entire human race would be but a facile swipe of his mighty claws as his very pores drink in the death and mayhem and exult in the steaming spillage of an ocean of blood-- but there is a family resemblance around the eyes) strategy of flat-out insulting the single largest demographic of potential Napster customers could possibly be a good idea. Clearly it takes someone of non-iPod-buying intellect to grasp the intricacies of his subtle and cunning plan.

Of course, there's the slimmest of chances that Gorog (again, the Napster one, not the-- you know what? Even people as stupid as we are know which one we're talking about by now) is the one with the severe mental deficiency if he really thinks that people are going to fall all over themselves to rent music that's DRMed to the gills and can't be played unless the downloader's subscription is paid in full each and every month. Suppose it's a possibility? Maybe we should all hold off on the UPN thing until a few months' worth of sales figures are in and we know once and for all who the stupid ones are. (But don't worry, you can still TiVo Alyson Hannigan's guest-starring role on Veronica Mars a week from Tuesday. Ain't nothin' stupid 'bout that.)

Man, they just don't make price wars the way they used to-- at least, not in Korea they don't. You probably recall that Apple is, strangely enough, getting stomped something fierce in the portable digital music player market in that particular country, with the iPod reportedly capturing less than 1 percent of total unit sales. Well, as we recently pointed out, Apple Korea got desperate enough to do something drastic, and so iPod prices in Korea were slashed mercilessly to such a degree that Apple Korea even begged the press to keep quiet about the whole thing, lest surrounding countries get all up in arms over Korea getting far cheaper iPods than the rest of them.

So just how well is that strategy working so far, we wonder? It's faithful viewer Tivor X-09137 to the rescue, with a status update from Chosun.com-- and its the infallible miracle of modern technology to the rescue, too, by providing a Babelfish auto-translation for the benefit of us non-Korean-speakers. And here's the skinny: "Apple computer Korea the hard disk (HDD) stealthily is confirmed that the original broad way it will reduce a price the complaint of the consumers and at only Ji several days which announces the decrease in cost of the elder brother MP3 player child Ford and it buys."

Rrrrrriiiight.

Moreover, "Home page of 11th Apple computer Korea (www.apple.co.kr) Apple su to toe U Ford, child Ford mini child and the child Ford gun toe back are rising with a heretofore price but and Samsung eastern nose X it will drive even from the Apple experience center shop which is they sell the product at original price."

Um...

Okay, well, there aren't enough drugs in the world to make that auto-translation intelligible, or even less funny. Luckily Tivor also passed along an actual English article from the JoongAng Daily which clarifies matters just a smidgen: reportedly "Apple Korea raised the prices of its iPod MP3 players yesterday, after having lowered them last week." Original Korean pricing has been restored, disappointing and alienating Korean customers who weren't fast enough to snag an iPod during what must have been the shortest price war in history. It seems that Apple Korea made the price cuts "without fully informing the head office," so Cupertino was just a trifle peeved, and made Apple Korea reverse the price cuts-- which, in turn, angered the locals, which is exactly the right way to increase a less-than-1 percent market share.

But hey, at least the war was over before anyone got hurt. (Heck, it was over before most people could even blink.) So let's all just move on, and see what other strategies Apple Korea comes up with to sell those suckers-- or, more accurately, to irritate potential customers until they all buy other players instead. 0 percent market share, here we come. Child Ford mini child and the child Ford gun toe back are rising!!