ZuneZune

In my recent Mac chronicles, I stumbled upon the Microsoft offering to compete with the iPod, the Zune. Perhaps I am in a black hole, but I'd honestly never heard of this thing until yesterday. In typical Mac user fashion, a fairly choice spoof has been created of the Zune and the iPod touch. The thing is, for all my love of music and, at present, 7380 songs on my iTunes playlist, I have never felt the need to invest in an iPod. In general I dislike the use of headphones. I think it separates you too much from whatever environment you're in. Sometimes this can be a good thing. I realize that iPods don't have to be used with headphones, but I'm still not buying it (pun unintentional, editing unimaginable). I really still love the idea of mix cds - I've managed to move beyond mix tape - and a podmix just isn't going to cut it for me right now. I am now down to 7367 songs after deleting an entire Borah Jones album. I listen to a pretty wide variety of music but I have to say I don't know why anyone would subject themselves to Norah. Were italics really necessary? To each his own.

On the topic of music, I really haven't been exposing myself to new artists for a while it seems. In light of this, I did a little googling of a handful of my favorite bands to see what bands were suggested that I hadn't already heard of. From there I thought I might read some reviews, opting against customer reviews because, while some of these folks aim to be helpful, a whole hell of a lot of them just like the sound of their own voice (see also: people who write blogs). That left me with reviews written by industry professionals. If I ever want to feel like I know nothing about music (and I probably don't) and that I am from an entirely different planet - say Klaxon, which may actually be a band I'm not familiar with - I know where to go. These folks speak another language. Many of them are witty, many of them are self-indulgent, and many of them are simply hiding behind what is sometimes called "flowery bullshit language." How do I know this you say? "Well," I'd tell you, "I use it myself sometimes." Painstaking effort is taken to reference as many bands as possible, intermingled with as much technical and highfalutin (a seemingly contradictory and highfalutin word in its own right) language as absolutely possible. Congratulations, you've successfully proven that either a) you are smarter than me, b) you think are, or c) both. The only problem is I'm not any closer to knowing if I'd actually enjoy the album or not. Good thing there are sample clips online these days.

Any music reviewer reading this will undoubtedly label my denunciations a weak and sophomoric effort. If we met in real life, though, I'd just kick them in the nuts. Maybe you're thinking they could always kick me first? This is true but, more importantly, in this era of equal opportunity employment, some of them could be women. In that case I take the tube sock from my kerchief pocket and it's a hot carl upside the domepiece.