Whoa, psychic much? Because maybe we are. Not in any traditional sense, apparently, since we've never scored any better than random guesswork in those "which card am I holding up?" tests ("Figure eight?"), and not only do we never know what people are going to say before they say it, half the time we don't even know what people said after they said it, a symptom we chalk up to extreme social ineptitude coupled with a fundamental loathing of all people and an attention span measurable in microns. But there's a chance-- just a chance-- that we have the uncanny ability to see glimpses of what web sites will post hours before the posting actually goes live. There's never a Theremin around when you need one.

See, in our last episode we made a throwaway comment about how "Apple and Hewlett-Packard will have moved a combined total of over three million iPods in the fourth calendar quarter," and then about seven hours later, AppleInsider posted a quick piece with the eerily synchronicitous title "Apple, HP plan to ship 1 million iPods a month." The months to which they referred were the ones beginning this October to kick off the upcoming holiday shopping season, which just happens to correspond to the fourth calendar quarter. And a million iPods a month for three months comes to... well, lookee here, Calculator says it's three million iPods! Don't that just beat all?

According to AI, these figures originate in a report which was released earlier this week by some outfit called the Susquehanna Financial Group, which is clearly bullish on iPod shipments, since Apple "only" sold 860,000 last quarter. Of course, last quarter didn't have a Christmas in it (at least, not that we noticed), and seasonal demand is clearly playing into Susquehanna's estimate. Plus, analysts apparently expect that when the dust settles after the end of the current quarter, which ends any day now, Apple will be able to report that it sold "anywhere from 900,000 to 1.4 million iPods," so if the company hits near the top of that range, Susquehanna's projection isn't much more than a twofold increase. Surely that's feasible given how rabid consumers get in the weeks leading up to Santa's sleigh ride.

But who cares about feasibility, anyway? The real news here is that we psychically channeled a web page over seven hours before it went live. Now, we know exactly what you're thinking (ooooo!): since this Susquehanna report presumably went public long before AppleInsider reported on its figures, there's a very good chance we stumbled past the estimate somewhere else on the 'net and the number wedged in our subconscious like a fish bone coated in pine tar, popping back out later on in a completely different context.

But that's patently ridiculous. How could we see something like that and not remember? We can tell you right here and now that not having gone to bed for the past three nights has had no effect whatsoever on our... um... whatchamacallit storage brain-part thingy. MEMORY. That's it.

Besides, we knew you were going to say that. Or we would have, if you'd planned to post it to a web page. So there.