So why'd we miss a Monday broadcast this time, you ask? Well, as it turns out, we didn't actually have to, but we hate to waste a good excuse when the opportunity presents itself. So when the Patriots won that Super Bowl thingy on Sunday night and the rest of Boston's population exploded into an impromptu orgy of alcohol poisoning and testosterone overdose that sapped Monday-morning productivity to near-zero levels, what choice did we have but to nix our own output? After all, we certainly don't want to make everyone else look bad. And besides, how often does anyone get to use the excuse of "our team just won the Super Bowl"? It can't be more than two or three times a year, tops.

Why, no-- we aren't really football fans. Why do you ask?

Truth be told, we didn't even bother to watch the Big Game, since we missed buying a square in the office pool, so we had almost zero interest in the outcome. In fact, we didn't even tune in for the ads, since we knew there wouldn't be an Apple commercial, and we'd already seen the Pepsi spots flogging the resurrection of last year's iTunes promo. We almost TiVo'd the evening to check out the launch of Napster's big go-for-the-throat assault on the iTunes Music Store, seeing as the company saw fit to blow something like $2.4 million of its $30 million ad budget (because, you know, they're just swimming in cash over there at Napster headquarters) by telling however kajillion many people who tuned in for the game that it costs $10,000 to load an iPod up with music. Given all the speculation of late that the advent of portable music-rental services like Napster To Go may signal the beginning of the end for the iTMS, we figured we should probably bear witness to the coming of the apocalypse.

In the end, though, we didn't go in for the Chicken Little routine-- and we're glad we didn't, because as faithful viewer James Hedrick points out, a CNN/Money article on the Super Bowl ads not only says that most of the commercials were yawners (having been tamed down and lamed up thanks to the skittishness following last year's halftime hijinks), but also points out that USA Today's Ad Meter ranks Napster's big "iPods cost 10 grand to fill" commercial dead last among this year's batch of 55 ads. Yes, Napster's big gamble-- in which the Napster cat in the crowd at a football game holds up a sign comparing Napster's prices to those of the iTMS-- scored a dismal 4.37 with USA Today's focus groups-- roughly half the score of the number one pick, and placing it behind every other ad of the evening. Yes, even the commercial in which "people float in bubbles for O2OPTIX silicone hydrogen contact lenses." Ouch.

Now, a flop commercial doesn't necessarily indicate that predictions of the iTMS's imminent doom at the hands of Napster To Go are six or eight realities to the left of the one the rest of us are living in (and it's not like the Pepsi ads ranked much higher, 172 percent increase in traffic to iTunes.com notwithstanding), but hey, it's a great start. In any event, it's always nice to see that Napster remains the king of flushing investor capital down the toilet at speeds previously thought unattainable given the limitations of modern plumbing and the physical laws of the universe. Is anyone running a pool on when Napster itself goes swirling down the bowl to the Great Sewer of the Beyond?