Poking the anthill

Not to sound like an Apple sycophant or starry-eyed MP3-revolution convert, but I'm not sure precisely what Andrew Orlowski is complaining about here:

1. The asocial quality (and potential for ear damage) of music listened to on headphones, as opposed to the music-filled world of the colorful and vibrant Third World masses who are happier than us deracinated First Worlders? If so, then despite Orlowski's claim, this evil has little to do with digital music or Apple; a product first sold in large numbers by Sony in the early 1980s comes to mind. Personally, I wouldn't wander around outside listening to a personal stereo with headphones; when I'm out there, I prefer to hear the world around me; but if he wants to fill the world with social music, his real target, I suppose, ought to be every heartless crank who complains about somebody's blaring boom box or music-blasting car.
2. DRM and crappy corporate pop music? I can see a large part of his point there, but there's no law that says you have to fill your iPod with DRMed corporate pop music. Apple would, perhaps, like you to, being a corporation out for money that has cut deals with entertainment moguls, but they wouldn't sell any of these things if they made you do it. (Based on daily experience, I am also pretty much 100% certain that if Americans, Europeans, etc. went out of our way to fill our social world with music, this would, by and large, be crappy music.)
3. He seems to be specifically upset about Apple's tightening of restrictions on iTunes library sharing, induced by the aforementioned music-industry deals. I can understand this frustration, but, again, it isn't as if other methods don't exist.

I think this is most likely another iteration of the time-tested Register formula: find some pop-technology fad with cult-like overtones and an easily provoked fan base (be it iPods, blogs, Extropians or Wikipedia), heap a poorly-focused combination of nerd-taunting ridicule and high-sounding moral contempt on it, and watch the irate and misspelled e-mail roll in so you can repeat the cycle with added hilarity. I don't know, maybe I've just soured on it because it's a young man's game.

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

A New Yorker article profiles the author of the goofy book "Popstrology", which purports to analyze your life and personality based on what song was #1 when you were born.

The Popstrology web site allows you to look up your popstrological sign, and I am delighted to say that I am a child of Simon and Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" (this is much better than explaining that I was born between the assassinations of RFK and Martin Luther King). I looked up my sister Megan (it's her birthday) and discovered the baffling datum that her sign is America's "A Horse With No Name". She is not sure what this might mean, either, unless it is a propensity for passing through deserts. I guess we'd have to read the book to find out.

(Found via the musical Alex Ross's blog, where I find that he's only a few months older than I am, having been born under the Beatles' "Hello Goodbye".)

springtime

Well, the snow's all gone, but one of my tires blew today and I had to put on the spare while it was raining buckets.

Fortunately I was close to home, and Sam has a telescoping lug wrench that is much better than those nasty little ones that come with the car. I still got completely soaked.

The good news is that the tire guys claim to have fixed the rim leak that kept deflating my left rear tire. I was amazed that it wasn't that one that blew.