Five Years of The iPod, And When Does The Honeymoon End?

Well ... it's hard to say. So far as this lonely consumer is concerned, though, it ended a few days ago. And not a moment too soon.

DV's words of caution were timely. Listening to 800 of your favourite songs in MP3 format is a treat -- so long as you're using those tiny little eardrum blasters that come with the iPod. If you graduate to a pair of Sennheisers, things are still okay. But try bumping this up to speaker-quality, and you will quickly find yourself disappointed.

I haven't yet tried playing the iPod through our home stereo, and I don't think I'll bother (I'm certainly not dropping another $100 on Apple's docking bay). I have, however, hooked the iPod up to a pair of computer speakers. The quality is not-bad, but it is definitely a distant, tinny echo of what the artists were hoping you'd hear. I am not by nature a stereophile, but listening to MP3s is the aural equivalent of grabbing orange rind in hopes of squeezing out a glass of orange juice. The soundfile is so tightly compressed that any manual attempt you make to broaden it (i.e., fiddling with the "bass" and "treble" knobs, or messing with your multi-channel equalizer) will only highlight the extremes and eliminate the middle. No thanks.

If you want the convenience of 1000-plus songs shuffled at random, or carved into playlists, you're better off hooking your PC up to your home stereo and playing OGG files ripped from your CD collection. As for car stereos, I'm guessing we're still a few years away from a satisfactory digital revolution.

Still, when it comes to digital music, iPod is indisputably its present, and quite likely its future as well. Here is PC World's Five Lessons For the iPod's Fifth Anniversary. The video link at the bottom -- Apple Introduces the iPod -- is nine minutes long, and quite instructive. Steve Jobs pretty much had the iPod's across-the-board appeal nailed down (even though his praise for the speed of Apple's file-transfer, and the iPod's "impressive" battery-life is a shade wide of the mark).

"Five years"? That's just the beginning!

"Western" Novels Recommended by George Pelecanos

"I got my sense of story from watching old movies on television with my father and grandfather on Sunday afternoons. Westerns were my favorites and remain so to this day."

So says crime writer George Pelecanos, on this list of 10 Westerns To Read. This got me thinking of the Sunday afternoon movies of my youth. Most of them would bore a kid to tears, but Pelecanos is right on the money re: westerns I can easily recall the thrill of seeing Vera Cruz the Sunday I was hanging out with a bunch of my mates in someone's family basement. "Anyone else side with Curly?", quoth Burt Lancaster after he draws and shoots two armed men -- with his gun-hand behind his back. (Needless to say, the film doesn't have quite the same effect on an adult re-viewing it in '06 as it did on an 11-year-old in '76.)

Pelecanos has some interesting picks, including a few I'd never heard of. I'd read Shane by Jack Schaefer -- but Monte Walsh? News to me. Looks like I'll be paying a visit to the local library this afternoon, perhaps to compile a list of my own. Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove would, of course, be included. Any others?

Not this, in other words.

The School Portrait

How is it that the School Portrait carpet-baggers are still in business? I would have thought with the advent of digital photography that these travelling portrait-mills would have dried up and blown away. These days everyone pulls out a camera the size of a deck of cards and takes endless pictures of their progeny. If you've loaded up your memory card with 300 pictures of your kid blowing bubbles, odds are at least one of them is a winner. Otherwise, it's best to pay real money for a real pro (like my friend here).

Now cut to the bleary-eyed technicians who set up shop in the school gymnasium. They've honed a half-dozen tricks to keep their subjects from bursting into tears. Beyond that, there's little they do that your nine-year-old couldn't master in the course of an afternoon. It's a simple, uncluttered frame. The subject chooses the background colour. Three or four shots are taken. So long as two of them don't look completely hideous, the procedure ends in three minutes. Two weeks later the parent is looking at proofs and the corresponding package prices, ranging from $10 for two 3X5s to over $100 for key-chains and wall-paper.

Part of their success is due to the agressive marketing these people do. Back when we first got home with our newborn, the hospital gave us a coupon-book which included a "free portrait" of our daughter in her first month of life. My wife went ahead and booked the shoot. The photographer drove up, spent 20 minutes with our baby, then disappeared from our lives.

A couple of weeks later, I saw a car parked in front of our house. The driver was anxiously finishing a cigarette. He splashed on some cologne, then exited the car carrying a leather briefcase. Our Salesman of the Baby Photos.

I would have preferred the smoker's fug to the "woodsy" scent he hoped would cover it. With my hand over my nose and mouth, I surveyed the shots he took of my daughter. Most babies don't smile until they're at least a few months old, but here was mine with the corners of her mouth turned up. She looked like a freak.

He went through the complete run of packages available for purchase. We heard him out, then I said, "I think we'll just stick with the free shot, thanks." I kept eye-contact with my wife; there was no doubt we were on the same page.

Now it was time to play hardball. These are professional quality shots, you could typically expect to pay blah blah blah. Sorry. We still weren't interested. Well, we came out here in good faith...

"Good faith"?!?

I presented the coupon and pointed out the "No purchase required" caveat, and said this was exactly the scenario he was facing.

"So you don't want quality pictures of your baby?" said he.

"Not of this quality," said I.

"Well, they're just going into the garbage, then."

"There's a can by the front door," I said. "You can drop 'em there if you like."

"Oh no," he snarled. "We're shredding these."

My daughter has framed this contentious shot. She has it up on her dresser. She thinks it is "darling".

And that's why I just signed a cheque for $14 (two 3X5s and 8 wallet-size). These outfits stay in business because they have currency with the kids. What's a parent to do?

Anyhow, here's a shot I took this summer. I call it, "Guess Who's Fate It Is To Play The Straightman?"

Say It Ain't So!

Via seratoninrain:

Your Hidden Talent

You are a great communicator. You have a real way with words. You're never at a loss to explain what you mean or how you feel. People find it easy to empathize with you, no matter what your situation. When you're up, you make everyone happy. But when you're down, everyone suffers.

What's Your Hidden Talent?

Blogger Beta: If I Knew Then What I Know Now

Blogger Beta -- the pros: it is unbelievably fast. The pictures, video clips, etc. that were taking so darn long to upload now zip in and take their place at the table. Much appreciated.

The cons: I can't post "WP" comments on non-beta blogs!! Cobbers, if it feels like I've been shunning you the last week or so, let me just say no, no, no -- anything but. Blogger claims it is working to amend this, but until then, I may have to start commenting "anonymously".

The Week That Was

My wife flies back from San Francisco today. My anxiety levels should return to their regular low boil in the next day or two. And who knows? I might just find myself back in a blogging mood.

The girls and I managed quite well during her week of absence -- this has been the year of travel for her, and we've figured out our routine for dealing with it -- but there was one night where everything came to a head. A local friend with older daughters came by and asked if we'd be interested in some stylin' hand-me-downs. I said sure, so a couple of bags were handed over. Some mechanical "barking" could be heard coming from one of the bags. "Oh," said my friend, "those are just some MicroPets my kids wanted to give away."

Note to self: do not wait until the bedtime hour to settle the issue of who gets which toy.

Tears were flowing, and there seemed to be no immediate way to staunch them. The younger daughter was in a white hot fury over the injustice of the paper-scissors-stone outcome; the older was feeling badly for her sister's misery; and I was having none of it, because it's all too common for the younger to pull this stunt in an effort to steer things her way.

I hope escalation is a tactic that works better for the nations of this beleaguered planet than it did for the three of us that night.

When exhaustion finally took its toll and the urchins were asleep, I retreated to the office and opened my e-mail. Let's see what we have here... It seems my wife and her co-worker are slumming it in Haight-Ashbury. Music pouring out of a theatre; they walk, and notice a back exit door is open, so they step in to see what's going on. Security stops them before they get anywhere.

"Who's playing?" they ask.

"Bob Dylan and The Kings of Leon," they're told. "Show's just about over."

"Oh," says my beautiful wife. "We'd love to see them. Any chance we could just slip in and watch from the wings?"

"Hmm," says security. "I'll have to check." He disappears. A few minutes later he's back. "Sorry," he says. "Can't do that. But go to the front door. Sometimes they just let people walk in for the end of the show."

They walk to the front. No dice.

And now I can thank Dylan's security team for keeping our marriage on an even keel, and more or less free from the weeds of envy. More or less.

Awake In The Dark: The Best Of Roger Ebert

I'm happy to hear Roger Ebert is on the mend. I've been perusing Awake In The Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert and wondering if this was to be his last will and testament, critically speaking. It's an entertaining collection of pieces worth the price of admission. But it does as much to highlight the inadequacies of film criticism under a newspaper deadline as it does Ebert's method of fusing a beer-drinker's sense of mischief with a particular aesthetic insight.

Consider The Best -- a section in the book devoted to that annual moment when his editors insist he name The Best Film Of The Year. Right at the outset Ebert acknowledges that this sort of all-or-nothing deadline has the effect of nudging him to put his critical weight behind a perceived underdog. One such "Year Of The Underdog" was 1980, when Ebert allocated Raging Bull to status of second banana. Ebert's "best" film of that year? The Black Stallion -- and we duly get the full review.

So, no, this does not quite qualify as "The Best of Roger Ebert" (it could qualify, though, as Roger Ebert's "best of"). Readers on the hunt of such are better off dipping into The Great Movies and The Great Movies II, and seeking used copies of A Kiss Is Still A Kiss. Or, better yet (because Ebert is an unfailingly generous interlocutor with others in his trade), throw a few bucks down for Roger Ebert's Book of Film -- essentially The Norton Anthology of Film Writing.

Ebert is also, of course, a public personality. We've seen him in tightly formatted exchanges with the late Gene Siskel or the recent Richard Roeper. The formula has been reduced to fast-food basics, so we don't catch too many glimpses behind the curtain anymore. But I do recall the show when Ebert reversed his thumb, admitting his originally dismissive review of Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven was the result of too many extraneous pressures being brought to bear (getting married the day of his viewing and review submission figured prominently as one such pressure).

Now, I happen to think Eastwood's Unforgiven is slightly-better-than-mediocre (as are most of Eastwood's films). But viewing and reviewing a film the day you're getting married?! How charming is that? Any film that gets a thumbs-up on the day of your wedding is going to be one hell of a film -- and let's face facts: this oater simply did not qualify!

I would like to see a lot more of that. I don't want film reviews to turn into, well, blogs exactly. But some injection of the personal -- as opposed to this superior "objective" or "scholarly" tone we're accustomed to -- would, I think, go a long way to reviving film criticism as something the reading public actually cares about.

On that note, my all-time favourite piece by Roger Ebert is noticeably absent from this book. Some years back he attended the Calcutta Film Festival for the first time. He saw, first hand, droves of India's "untouchables". He experienced that continent's frightening and hilarious road etiquette. He commented with conviction on the fragility of human happiness. And he spoke of the ineffable deliciousness of a slice of pizza he'd been given in a Calcutta Dream Palace.

That is the best of Roger Ebert, and I truly hope to someday see it preserved between hardcovers.