This was a fun one. My friend Ken's six months younger than me, and we've been friends since junior high (shoutouts to Carnegie Middle Skool!), so making this made me a bit nostalgic, which naturally made me think of Rip Van Winkle (?). Yes, themes -- however arbitrary -- are useful when making stuff.

So, in making this CD and its components there was a lot of cutting, and distressing and generally making it look like some late sixties silk-screen project gone horribly awry. Hobo signs were employed, in addition to forms used by the police to identify suspicious persons (forms are cool).

This is a little template I've been employing of late, to break me out of the rut of using regular jewel cases. In the end, it's like a mini-LP, which makes me wish I had a mini-turntable to display it beside, and a mini-record-store-snob to be holding it and showing off how little wear there is on its silvery surface, and how if you'd buy it for his excellently low price, he can score an excellently small bag of weed which he could enjoy in his miniature patchouli-smelling apartment. Ahem.

Musically, it's a 78-minute trip through lots of the noisier end of prog-rockishness, with a couple pop tunes for respite. Best of all, I have some great Maria Bamford bits bookending the whole thing, so it's almost like a concept album. That is, if the "concept" is "I'm creating a schizophrenic/ delusional journey through the music that Ken might like from the last two years, which doesn't seem that long ago, because yeah, I am really at the age where time does fly alarmingly, and yes, it is a little like waking up under a tree 100 years later and having an impressively long and white beard." Or something like that.

The fearless and/or aged and/or musically adventurous can download it here.

My fourth iPod, the venerable Atlas Folderol IV, has passed. Technically, he's not dead, he's just doing this incredibly annoying stopping-for-a-second-or- so-five-or-six-times-a-day thing. And, as luck would have it (oh, blogspot namedrop so intended), my extended warranty ran out July 30.

So I took him in to the Apple store, thinking there might be some cure they could offer. "So it makes a noise when it stops? Like a clicking? Hm. Not good." The Genius tech then explained to me about the "Restore Settings" feature in iTunes, whereby it reinstalls the iPod's software, which, in some cases, can fix the stopping problem. The only thing: it erases the iPod in the process. No, no, no. Not okay. Firstly, there's 23,967 songs on there, and yes, they're backed up, but have you ever copied 23,967 songs to an iPod? It takes some time.

Plus, there's the issue with the playlists. And as it stands, there's no easy way to export them out of iTunes. In fact, the last time around with iPod numero 3, I took screen captures of a bunch of them, which is not always effective, because there's no way a 6-hour party playlist is fitting on one screen. So while the tunes issue is solved by just refilling the new iPod, the playlist issue is something else. This is what I told Genius dude, who kind of yeah-yeahed with his head. Then he asked to hook it up for some diagnostics. That's when he looked. And said, "Oh, wow. Yeah, you've got a lot of playlists. A lot of playlists… I've never seen so many playlists…"

Because there's over 200. Yeah, I know, but hey, they're well organized. There's basically three categories: Nighttime (denoted by the symbol "*"); Gym ("#"); and finally, General Use ("%"). And each one is followed by the time, i.e. "54.14", meaning 54 minutes, 14 seconds. Handy when you're setting the time on the elliptical.

The titles? Yes, they're pretty absurd, via the Internet Anagram Servant. Because to me, "Monday Sux" is not really a title. Well, that I'd want to use, anyway. But, if you type "Monday Sux" into the Anagram Servant, you get cool stuff, like "As Dun My Ox," because yeah, an ox could totally be dun, and really, doesn't a dun ox make a fitting metaphor for a Monday? Unexpected poetry from a completely banal sentiment. Then you've got a map: what kind of songs would a dun ox want to hear on a Monday? Oh, the possibilities.

So, in conclusion. What did I name my fifth iPod? Jersey Codswallup V, naturally. And no, it's not an anagram.

Back to copying...