Meet my jPod

It's been a long time since I posted a story about a new gadget. That's what this blog was all about in the beginning so we're overdue.

Anymore, I'm the last person to get popular technologies that everybody else seems to find indispensable. We didn't have a telephone answering machine until friends who were tired of not being able to get in touch with us got us one. We didn't get cell phones till years after everyone else in the family had one.

I hadn't felt the need to have music with me at work. I thought it would be distracting to have music playing while I was trying to work. I figured that I'd spend too much time trying to listen to the music and forget to do my job.

But lately there have been more and more distracting noises around me that I felt it was time to try to block them out. So I went to Costco and picked up an iPod.

Here it is all dressed up in it silicone sleeve.


I have been filling it up with short-attention-span music that we have on CDs. Most of this stuff can be interrupted and not make me grumpy. I haven't added many Classical albums. They don't really work well where you frequently have to talk with colleagues. But Rock and Roll and showtunes are doing the job. The annoying background noises are being masked and my productivity hasn't suffered. And I get to make use of the many CDs I bought before getting satellite radio.

Some of you have done the Facebook exercise of putting your iPod into shuffle mode and reporting the first five songs that it plays. Let's do that now and see if you can discover anything interesting about me.

Pressing Play...

1. "Our Time" from Stephen Sondheim's "Merrily We Roll Along." Sondheim is one of my favorite Broadway composers. Well, not just composer. He writes the lyrics. This tune is essentially the heart stirring finale to the show. I like this show a lot.
   
2. "Silver Springs" from "The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac." There are a fair number of Fleetwood Mac's songs that I like so I got their greatest hits collection. This song is OK.
3. "The Wild West is Where I Want to Be" from "The Remains of Tom Lehrer." Here's a song about living in the west where folks from the A.E.C. blow up nuclear bombs. I love his songs. They make me laugh. He did research in Los Alamos, you know. (The next song up is another Tom Lehrer song, "Werner von Braun." It's great, too, but I'm not counting it as another song in this lineup.)
4. "Let X=X" from Laurie Anderson's "Big Science." I love the songs on "Big Science" but I don't really understand what much of it is supposed to mean. Maybe it's just that the words sound good.
5. "Don't Worry, Be Happy" by Bobby McFerrin from the Rhino collection "Like, Omigod! The '80s Pop Culture Box (totally)." This collection and Rhino's "Have a Nice Decade The '70s Pop Culture Box" are essential parts of music collections of people interested in popular music. They have a lot of the good stuff from those decades and a lot of the dreck (well, the '70s is mostly dreck). "Don't Worry, Be Happy" isn't great. It's light an fluffy and we need fluff every now and then.
   
6. "Hey Now" from "True Stories" by the Talking Heads. I saw their music video for "Once in a Lifetime" on MTV (when music videos were the point of MTV) and got hooked. They're a fun band. Ask Karen.
   
7. "Jazz Legato" by Leroy Anderson. I used to think Leroy Anderson's music was simple and not worth listening to. I was wrong.
   
8. "Whip It" by Devo. I love Devo. I went to a couple of their concerts. I didn't buy any of their souvenirs.
   
9. "Richard Cory" by Simon and Garfunkel. I don't know what to say. Simon and Garfunkel made great music somewhere between Rock and Folk.
10. "Hard Headed Woman" from the Elvis Presley collection "The Artist of the Century." Elvis was important to Rock and Roll and I needed to get something of his so this three-CD collection works well.

Well, that's more than the five tunes that the Facebook quiz wanted to hear about but with 4,598 songs to choose from I couldn't stop. I've loaded it with 32 GB (11.3 days) of tunes. It can hold 79 GB more. I've got a way to go...my CD drive is going to wear out.

(Goodness! Babs didn't show up in the first 10 tunes. Neither did Barbara Cook. Nor Michael Feinstein. Those three make up a very large portion of the music I've loaded.)