Geez, we pass along one single little rumor that hovers deliciously on the edge of complete incredibility, and suddenly our inbox explodes. Great. Now who's going to clean up this mess? Thanks to you guys, there's spam in our hair. Do you have any idea how much Herbal Essences it's going to take to wash out the smell of ham and pork shoulder?

Yup, it seems like the "screenless flashPod" rumor is the controversy of choice this week, because as far as we can tell from reading a selection of the kajillion-and-a-half messages now peppering the walls and strewn a foot deep all over the floor (don't even ask about the paper cuts on our faces; who knew email had such sharp edges?), people have some strong opinions one way or the other, with roughly 60 percent insisting that the very notion that Apple would ship an iPod without the celebrated iPod user interface is pure hokum. Several people figure that if it exists at all, the feature-reduced, screenless, nonscrollable iPod that looks and functions like a remote control may in fact be-- dun dun dun DUNNNNNNN!-- a remote control (funny how we never saw that coming), most likely for AirPort Express, which desperately needs one before AirTunes will really take off.

The rest of the naysayers go so far as to deny any possibility of an Apple-branded flash-based player at all, citing as evidence Steve Jobs's incessant derision of the whole class of products every time he opens his mouth. (Seriously, every time. We actually have him on tape ordering at Jamba Juice saying "Yeah, I'll have a PowerBoost, double up on the strawberries, hold the raspberries, and flash players suck.") But if that's really the situation, then what's up with that analyst at Thomas Weisel who swore up and down that Apple had signed on with SigmaTel for a whole mess o' flash-player controller chips? Well, considering he was also "pretty confident" that the flashPod would ship in time for the Christmas buying season, maybe it's not so hard to write him off after all.

But wait! Now's there's another report of flashPod parts set to come streaming into Apple's manufacturing facilities, and this time it's the flash RAM itself: according to an article in China Daily pointed out by faithful viewer Bob Martinez, Toshiba is set to start selling flash memory to Apple "early next year," and the info comes not from "sources close to the company," but instead straight from the lips of a senior executive veep at Toshiba itself-- one with an actual name and everything. Of course, just because Apple's buying a boatload of flash memory from Toshiba doesn't necessarily mean that said memory is going to be used in flash-based iPods; it could instead, for example, be used in new Newtons. You can decide for yourself which is more likely.

Now, refresh our memories, here: is this the part where we put a damper on the whole "the Toshiba deal clearly means flashPods are coming!" party by reminding everyone that every iPod in existence has 32ish MB of flash RAM inside for use in battery-saving song buffering and skip protection, and that Toshiba may simply be a new vendor supplying parts for the very same iPods we already know and love? Because we can't find our script under all this mail...