"It just couldn't be / And only a fool would say that..."

The 2000 Steely Dan album Two Against Nature might constitute a bit of a misnomer. After a scandalous and health-related in-your-face brouhaha today that saw the jazz-rock group all-too-publicly proclaiming they are “more popular than the Beatles” — this incident quick on the heels of recent allegations made on Steely Dan's website against a new, perceived 'Dan-centric' movie — perhaps a more suitable album title would have been Two Against Human Nature.

With the onset of medical complications following surgery that separated each of their congenitally conjoined cheeks and tongues — a lifelong tongue-in-cheek affliction that nonetheless helped shape and infuse their perverse personalities and archly ironic songs — Steely Dan main men Walter Becker and Donald Fagen showed the world they still had some surprises in store.

But to their fans and anyone familiar with their reclusive and standoffish ways, the writers of such hits as “Peg” and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” and the core musicians responsible for the albums Pretzel Logic and Aja, the last thing anyone expected from Becker and Fagen was a lot of stentorian lung power and unexpected athletic prowess. Which was about the nicest things to be said when the two uncharacteristically — and seemingly in astounding earnestness — sprinted through Boston's crowded Logan Airport, blissfully and, to many, blasphemously proclaiming again and again, "We’re more popular than the Beatles! We’re more popular than the Beatles!"

Chaos at the airport ensued as people scrambled for cover, parents shielded their children, security personnel took early lunches, and shoe-bombers boarded planes.

Word quickly spread more publicly, with heated reaction close behind, about the new and not-quite-improved -- and definitely delusional — change in the hitherto cynical and malcontented mainstays who comprise the Grammy-winning jazz rock group. A firestorm of controversy ensued as radio station programmers refused to play any Steely Dan songs, more Beatles songs taking up the sonic slack. One popular disc jockey broke all copies of Steely Dan’s records and CDs live on the air, saying, "This Steely Dan must be banned!"

TV personalities organized "Bonfires of Vanity" and “Vinyl Resolutions” inviting the community to “pack up all your cares and woe” — all Steely Dan music, books, videos, DVDs — and “perish all thoughts” by casting “the has-beens from the cut-out bin to the ashbin.” There seemed to be special interest in watching the incineration of Steely Dan's most recent album, 2003's Everything Must Go. "You mean 'everything must go…up in smoke!'" was heard more than a few times.

In addition, a local elementary school principal called on parents and teachers to collect from their children and students all Steely Dan records "so we can fan the flames of Fab Four-dom forever by fouling the air with the a Steely stench"; in an unprecedented move, the Environmental Protection Agency authorized a pollution waiver, issuing a statement contending that “A variance in the name of Beatle-hood is no vice, and compliance in the name of Steely-Danism is no virtue.”