Man oh man. Well this is a terrible story. Some 60-year-old teacher in Philadelphia (which I believe is on the East Coast) was attacked after he took an iPod away from a kid in class. See here. Two kids jumped him and they broke his friggin neck. One of them was a ninth grader, if you can believe that, though I’ve heard he’s twenty-three years old. Well although this is a tragic incident I think there’s also a silver lining — which is just that incidents like these show the power of our brand and how attached people become to their iPods. Especially juvenile delinquents, which honestly is a potentially huge but so far untapped market for us. I’ve put our marketing people on this to see if there’s some way we could use it in an ad or something. Maybe show some inner city kids in snorkel coats carrying a gun in one hand and an iPod in the other, and the slogan: “I’d kill for my iPod, yo.” Or maybe get K-Fed to do some kind of TV ad. Something like that. Meanwhile I told our people to send this teacher a free iPod of his own (since he seems to want one so bad) and maybe an iMac or a MacBook or something. My guys say maybe an iPod isn’t exactly the gift that’s gonna cheer this guy up right now. Not sure I agree but I defer to them for now. Namaste.