Apple Inc.

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[AAPL  Loading...      ()   ] has sold well over 100 million iPods but it's a single one, more than a year a half old, that reportedly caught fire in an Atlanta airport recently that's grabbing the headlines.

It's a quirky story, fraught with questions and a lack of detail, but it's making the rounds nonetheless. Seems Danny Williams, from Douglasville, Georgia suffered the scare of his life when, he says, his 18-month-old iPod suddenly caught fire while it was sitting in his pants pocket.

"So I look down and I see flames coming up to my chest," he tells a news wire service, which cutely refers to the story as Williams and his "15 minutes of flame." Great turn of phrase.

Apple isn't commenting about any of this, even though Williams says he's been in contact with the company and Apple would like to examine his iPod. But that isn't stopping a rash of coverage of the incident all over the net.

Of course, all this harkens back to the big lithium ion battery recall from last summer that began with Dell laptops, and quickly spread through the rest of the laptop computer industry since just about everyone uses the same batteries supplied by Sony

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[SNE  Loading...      ()   ] . Six million batteries were ultimately recalled, all beginning with the colorful "victim-zero" Thomas Forqueron who appeared on the air all over the country, standing beside his burnt out pick-up truck.

"Flames were coming out of it, and I had three boxes of ammo in the glove box, so I immediately turned around and ducked behind the quad, ammo started going off, both gas tanks blew up, flames were shooting 15 to 20 feet in the air for about five minutes," he told us during a live interview.

I spoke with the Consumer Products Safety Commission spokesperson at the time, Julie Vallese who told me that "consumers need to understand that lithium ion batteries are small but pack a powerful punch so consumers should take this very seriously."

Scary stuff, and ultimately recalls from Sony, HP, Apple, all the major players, would be announced. It was earlier this year that Dell issued a statement regarding that infamous first instance after an internal investigation: "Our notebooks battery played no role in this incident and was not one involved in the battery recall." Yikes. Last month, even Toyota  delayed the roll-out of its new Prius hybrid because of lithium ion battery worries.

All of this concern and reaction to a handful of incidents that I'm sure were very scary for those involved, but are so statistically insignificant that they're just not worth the time and bother.

Which leads me to the iPod fire that allegedly occurred in Atlanta. Scary yes, but one uninvestigated incident does not a news story make. Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster might have said it best this morning when he told me: " There's a one in 700,000 chance you'll be struck by lightning, and there's a one in 100 million chance that your iPod will catch fire. So you have a more than a hundred times likelihood of getting struck by lightning than your iPod catching fire."

Which might have been exactly the statement Apple would have issued had the company cared to make one. Meantime, Apple again trades today at an all-time high.

Questions?  Comments?