Holy paper gain, Batman-- what the heck was going on with Apple's stock price today? Faithful viewer Dana Sutton pointed out that it clawed its way nearly a buck and a quarter higher-- over five percent-- to close at $25.16, which MacMinute notes is the stock's highest closing price since May of 2002. And it even inched a teensy bit higher than that in after-hours trading, to $25.23; for the first time in ages, our stock portfolio isn't sitting slumped in a dark corner eating wet cigarettes like a dog, and it's nice that AAPL investors can finally smile a bit again. (Well, except for the ones who bought in pre-split at $140 a share; those guys aren't going to be smiling again until the advent of the time machine.)

Now, not that we're complaining-- it's nice to see our portfolio off the Zoloft for a change ("even the Intel Inside logo gets depressed sometimes")-- but seriously, what's with the sudden spike today? Did we miss a product announcement or something? Did Power Macs just hit dual 4.5 GHz and nobody told us? Did the Pope finally endorse the iPod as the official portable music player of the Vatican? What?

A CNN/Money article does little to solve the mystery, merely noting that "technology stocks finished mostly higher" today because "investors anticipated good news from Intel." But most tech stocks didn't fare nearly so well as AAPL did, and even Intel's stock price only climbed 61 cents-- and then dropped 54 cents right back down again after hours once the "good news" turned out to be "instead of making $7.9 billion to $8.5 billion this quarter, we're actually going to make $8.0 billion to $8.2 billion." (Okay, sure, that's a sizeable chunk more than Apple collects in a whole year, but still: Woooooo.) So if Intel only gained 2% on anticipation of this "great news," why did Apple go up so much more?

Well, after putting a ton of thought into it, we think we may have stumbled upon the answer. You know, of course, that the iPod is what got Apple back into the headlines and got investors to take notice again; however, the single perceived black mark against the iPod's reputation is its battery life, both long-term and short-term. Long-term, some older iPods had stopped holding a charge after a year and a half of use, and a couple of people figured that was grounds for a libelous vandalism campaign that actually managed to spread unfounded iPod battery panic as far as the British House of Commons. Short-term, current iPods only boast about eight hours of use per charge, while Dell's bulkier knockoff claims to serve up about twice that. So what if someone had found a way to make the battery issue moot?

Voilà: presenting the Deck o' Cards iPod Battery Pack. Faithful viewer markintosh tossed this link our way, which details how one ingenious individual stuffed two nine-volts and a couple of AAs into a Bicycle playing cards box, soldered in a FireWire port, and bickety-bam, Genius-Boy can plug it into his iPod via a FireWire cable to get up to "an extra 10 hours iPodding time." And, okay, sure, Belkin's had a battery pack commercially available for months, now, but it only works with 3G iPods, and worse yet, it doesn't look like a deck of cards. That's key to market success.

Now, granted, the Deck o' Cards solution's actually been up there for at least a week, but seeing as we've been sent the link half a dozen times in the past two days, clearly it's just now making the rounds. And apparently Wall Street just got the news, because, hey-- how else can you explain AAPL's sudden $1.24 gain?

You can't, can you? Ha! We win.