We hope you've been carbo-loading for the big event, people, because less than twenty-four hours remain until the Jobs 'n' Bono dog and pony show. (We assume Steve is the pony in this scenario, but these zoomorphic role-assignation exercises are always tricky.) As far as special Apple media events are concerned, this one could be a biggie, as speculation is all over the map right now, with rumors on the iPod front ranging from a black U2 special edition model to a color-screen video-out 60 GB high-end unit to a flash-based low-cost teensyPod. And on the topic of the iTunes Music Store, Beatles settlement and/or merger aside, conservative prognosticators figure on an all-Europe store expansion, while others have been projecting further-flung store openings, such as one in Australia. Add to that the possibility (no matter how remote) that we might get to hear Steve Jobs sing lead vocals for a live performance of "Beautiful Day," and heck, we've got the makings of a classic, here.

"But AtAT," we hear you whine, "that isn't nearly enough music-related speculation to feed my insatiable appetite for the ludicrously improbable!" (Okay, so you're not saying that, because you'd rather hear about something vaguely substantial instead of more pointless guesswork about what tomorrow may bring, but he is. That guy right over there. No, the one behind the guy with the hat. Yeah, him. Blame him.) Well, good news for those jonesing for ever-wackier music event predictions: faithful viewer David Triska tipped us off to a very intriguing report at MacRumors about a clue as to which countries may be getting their very own shiny new iTMSeses come tomorrow. Apparently readers from various non-iTMSed countries around the globe have discovered that they're no longer able to browse the existing four iTMS catalogs anymore; they could do it just fine yesterday, but now when they try they're greeted with the message "iTMS is not available in your country yet."

Now, the announcement of additional European iTMSeseses tomorrow is practically a given, since Apple remarked not even two weeks ago that the pan-European store would launch by the end of the month, and November's less than a week away. That means it's not all that surprising that iTunes users in European Union countries like Austria, Spain, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Ireland, and Denmark have all reported the new "not available yet" error, similar to that "the Apple Store is currently down" message that appears for a few hours before Apple releases new hardware. What's slightly more surprising is that users in non-EU "European" nations like Iceland, Switzerland, and Norway are reporting seeing the error too-- and even more intriguing is that the same error has also been spotted by readers in New Zealand, Japan, Canada, and Mexico.

So does this mean that Apple fans in all these countries-- yes, even Canada-- might suddenly know the joy-slash-pain of blowing an entire paycheck on forgotten hits of the '70s and '80s 99ish cents at a time? Well, that's certainly one way to interpret it. Another explanation might be that Apple's imminent launch of a pan-EU store has required that it mess with the iTMS central infrastructure in tortuous and goofy enough ways to warrant turning off access from countries that can't use it anyway. But hey, it's all open to interpretation, so if you're looking for evidence of the looming advent of, say, iTMS Mexico, more power to you. And we'll know the truth soon enough, so don't sprain anything trying to figure it all out.