Speaking of song downloads tied to brown fizzy sugar water, if you scope out a calendar you'll notice that February is less than two weeks away-- which means that the Pepsi-iTunes giveaway is gearing up to take over the planet. You remember this deal, right? Back in October Apple announced that Pepsi would give away 100 million free songs via the iTunes Music Store, which is, if you think about it, a whole lotta music-- possibly more than the entire ABBA discography. Come February 1st, Pepsi will disgorge 300 million specially-marked bottles of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, and Sierra Mist (sorry, folks, no Mountain Dew; faithful viewer Terry Dunham plans to lead the protest), and one in three bottles will contain a winning claim code under the cap. Oooh, it's like Vegas, only with a far greater risk of diabetes!

Well, Apple has put up a teaser page which reveals what's likely to be the promotion's tag line ("more than pop") and includes a signup form so you can receive a reminder by email when the giveaway begins. Now, being Apple freaks, none of us really needs an email reminder to know when the sugar shock commences, but we signed up anyway just so we'd be absolutely sure to stock up on insulin before we start chugging our way to iTunes heaven-- and we're glad we did, because there's a little extra info on the "Thank You" page. The first lil' nugget-o'-fun is a reminder to "watch for our ads during the Superbowl," which isn't news, since we all knew that Pepsi was going to advertise the promotion during the Big Game, but we find the use of the word "our" interesting. The second is that winning prize codes must be redeemed "by 4/30/04," so make sure you don't sit on those caps for too long.

The third is the jackpot: a link to the official rules of the promotion, which faithful viewer Mitchell Elliott was bored enough to read. He notes that the "maximum number of valid Codes per email address/person that can be entered at the Web Site is 10 per day and 200 total throughout the Promotion Period." Now this, you'll surely agree, is somewhat disappointing; here we were all geared up to gulp down obscene amounts of sugar water and now we discover that we're limited to ten songs per day. With one-in-three odds, that amounts to only 30 bottles daily at 20 ounces apiece, or 4.7 gallons of soda a day and 94 gallons total. It's almost like Apple's trying to prevent clogging the country's emergency rooms with teens in hyperglycemic shock or something.

Well, whatever; even though we can only claim 200 free songs ourselves, we suppose we could always give extras to friends and family, or even auction them off on eBay. (You just know someone's going to, despite the "no transfer of prize to a third party permitted" clause.) Hey, it beats drinkin' water.