I celebrated a birthday recently, for which my lovely bride presented me with a new eighty gigabyte iPod. I have been using a four-gig iPod for the past three years during my morning workouts but it is filled to capacity and I need more space. Hence my request for the eighty-gigger, for which I am much obliged.
That's the only time I use the iPod, to help me through my workouts. You will not see me walking down the street with the plugs in my ears. For that matter you won't see my walking down the street talking on a cell phone, or with my nose buried in it, checking messages or text messaging someone. Nor will you see me talking on a cell phone while I am driving (which, by law I assume, must be done in the left-hand lane, going five miles an hour under the speed limit, while remaining utterly oblivious to everyone else being forced to pass on the right.) The main reason for this is because I don't own a cell phone; I've never felt the need. I don't feel the need to always be in touch with the world. In fact, when I am out on my own I want to be unreachable. If I'm on the golf course, for instance. That's another thing that you'll never see me do - pull out a cell phone on the golf course. My golf buddy Jim and I used to agree that anyone who does so should be flogged. If they actually keep talking while they are away, thereby keeping the rest of the group waiting, they should be put out of their misery with a single bullet to the head, and left to lie there with a sign around their neck as a lesson to others.
The other reason you'll never see me do these things is philosophical, though I'm not sure I can explain it well to someone who's not equally as ornery as I am. I just don't want to be one of those guys. You know the type? I was flipping channels a few weeks ago and came upon a Ben Stiller movie called Night at the Museum. It was fluff, but entertaining fluff, so I hung around. Paul Rudd, who's a very funny guy, has a bit part in the movie as Stiller's ex-wife's new husband. And he plays one of those guys, the guy who walks around - even at home - with a bluetooth headset permanently attached to him. The scene where Rudd's character is introduced as the prototypical one of those guys guy gave me my only belly-laugh of the movie. He's meant to be ridiculous here, and he is. So at least I'm not alone in finding this technology-geek character somewhat comical. Some people in real life combine this type with the another type; the I'm-on-the-phone-while-walking-down-the-street-and-I'm-talking-really-loud-so-I-must-be-important type. That guy is really funny.
Anyhow, I think cell phones are a plague. But that's not where I was going with this post. I digress, as usual. My original intent was to mention that with the eighty-gig iPod, I can now add music to my heart's delight. My four-gigger had 722 "songs". I put "songs" in quotes because that's how the iPod itemizes any musical entry. This is fine for modern music but I would hardly call the first movement of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto a "song". Now that I think of it, Benny Goodman or Count Basie probably wouldn't have referred to their music as "songs". They called them "numbers." My dad used this terminology - "that's a great number, huh, bud?" But that's a different way of speaking and for an age and by a type that has now completely disappeared. That would be a good subject for a future blog post - the way the old-timers talked, their language peppered with slang and idioms, a certain street patois, that now exists only in memory. My dad was the last of the breed that talked this way. Anyhow, where was I? Oh yes, now we have songs. For lack of a better term, I had 722 musical entries on my four-gig iPod. Some simple math now tells me that, all else being equal, I can now have approximately 14,000 entries on the new device. I don't think even I can fill that.
I've already added a bunch of music this week, mostly Mozart, who had been sadly neglected on the previous device. Most of what I added were his chamber works so yesterday I listened to third movement of the "Kegelstatt" trio, K.498, for piano, clarinet, and viola, and the whole of the Clarinet Quintet, K.581, both of which I adore. I am looking forward to getting reacquainted with Wolfgang, and with others. Since most of my music listening time now occurs during my morning workouts, the new iPod device will allow me to add a lot of old stuff I haven't listened to in awhile, and probably spur me to search out some new stuff. I'll keep you posted.
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