Seriously, sometimes the Borg is just so obvious and heavy-handed that it’s not even funny. No, let me correct that. The Borg is almost always so heavy-handed. I mean at least when we pay actors to stand in line for products, we keep our fingerprints off it. But this one just takes the cake. Some TV station in Seattle spent months and months and millions of dollars trying to pry documents out of some consumer protection agency and produce some big “investigative report” saying that iPods are catching on fire all over the place. And no matter how many lawyers we threw at it, they just kept coming. Strange, right? I mean, who’s funding this? Hmmm. Let me think about it. Well, here is the story that KBORG put out earlier this week, complete with video. Money quote:

Gordon Damant is a fire scientist and a 30-year California state regulator. He believes, when it comes to iPods, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and the potential for great harm. “Whenever you have a fire event of any kind, it can be potentially very serious,” he told Clancy recently while Damant was visiting Redmond, Washington (!!!!!), for the annual National Association of State Fire Marshalls conference.

And now it’s getting picked up elsewhere, like here, in the San Francisco Going-Down-The-Drain-icle. No doubt the Borg is selling this one hard, sending it around, trying to get someone at the Times to pick up on it. Good luck with that, Borg. Sad fact is, however, that our customers don’t care if they maybe get a little tiny burn on their body that leaves a scar that is almost barely noticeable. They’d still rather use an iPod than a Zune, even if the Zune won’t burn them at all. Hell, you can come out with a Zune with a battery that lasts a week and an attachment that gives blowjobs, and you still won’t beat us.

One last thing: I urge you to watch the video and note that the woman they interview didn’t even realize she’d been burnt. It’s that insignificant. We’re not talking Michael Jackson Pepsi commercial kind of stuff here. Okay? Nobody’s gelled hair is bursting into flames. It’s just a tiny little welt. “Like a bee sting,” the woman says. That’s a picture of it there, on the right. So, like, please, lady. Grow up. You can’t even prove that we did it. Can you? No, you can’t. You could have just done that to yourself with a cigarette.