"Mommy, Scotland called us a liar!" Man, like we haven't heard that a gazillion times before-- but amazingly enough, never in this context. You know that Power Mac G5 commercial, the one with the guy getting smacked through three or four walls and into a tree by the sheer oomph of his G5? Well, faithful viewer Darcy forwarded us an article at Scotsman.com which reports that the guy-through-walls-into-tree ad has been flat-out banned in Scotland for being "misleading."

This just in: Steve Jobs's pants are on fire. Film at 11.

Oh, but get this: apparently the eight Scottish wonks with no lives who complained about the ad to the Independent Television Commission had no trouble at all with the idea that using a G5 can propel you through the side of a house and into a stout instance of local flora-- which is at least mildly surprising, since Apple might have had a tough time proving such a claim. Instead, the bit to which they objected was Jeff Goldblum's voiceover. And again, amazingly enough, they didn't object to Jeff Goldblum's voice as such, but merely that it characterized the G5 as "the world's fastest, most powerful personal computer." Go figure.

Now, normally we wouldn't even have all that much of a problem with such a move, but the basis upon which the ad was banned was the accusation that Apple's claim was drawn from "the results of limited tests in which the specification of the computers used was configured to give Apple the best results." Oh, for cryin' out-- this again? Hasn't it been shown time and time again that the SPEC tests configured the G5 and the Xeon with the closest thing possible to a cross-platform compiler, that the Xeon had Hyperthreading turned off because it had slower scores with it on, etc. etc. etc.? Oy.

We want to make something clear: if a Scottish TV commission wants to ban a Power Mac ad because "there was insufficient evidence to support the claim 'world's fastest, most powerful personal computer,'" fine. If they furthermore want to ban it because they "doubt that the claim could be substantiated at all" and that there's never a way to prove that any one computer is definitely faster than all others, dandy. We're all for it. But that recurring allegation that Apple cheated on those initial benchmarks just really sticks in our collective craw. And there's nothing worse than a sticky craw.

Meanwhile, Apple's official response to Scotland is still being drafted, but sources report that a "rubber and glue" metaphor figures strongly.