life’s a beach and then you die
One minute I’m kidding myself that I’m still too young to listen to Radio 2. The next minute I’m finding Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’s phone calls to Andrew Sachs a bit puerile (and unlike most of the 10,000 people who complained to the BBC, I have heard them).
So that means that I’m now too old for Radio 2. What the hell happened there?!
It’s like a piece of time travel… my first generation 5GB iPod is getting hard to charge and put new music on, as its Firewire connector is dodgy - and the Firewire port on my PowerBook is broken which doesn’t help.
When 
the new 16GB iPod Nanos came out, I knew I had to have one: no moving parts and more than 3 times as much storage as my original brick. I know the Classic is better value per GB but I only have about 9GB of MP3s, so I figured the Nano would do.
I had feared that it wouldn’t work with my PowerBook - but hell it even works with my G4 iMac. V e r y s l o w l y. How I miss Firewire… an album would zip across that thick cable in seconds. It’s like missing Concorde - in the good old days it was all so much quicker.
All my music is on the big fat G4 iMac - which only has USB 1.0 - and so I ended up having to leave it running all night to transfer some 3000 songs. So imagine my amusement today when I started putting some videos on the Nano (MPEG Streamclip is the tool you need for making iPod-friendly videos, by the way), I pressed ‘Sync movies’ - I said movies - and it deleted all my music in a second. All gone. Hours of transfer work zapped. So I’m transferring it all again, and I can’t even play the addictive tilt-operated Maze game while it does it…
After a strangely satisfying day at work I feel like I’m on a roll. I’m reading a great book (thank you Sarah) - a Douglas Coupland that eluded me - Eleanor Rigby. Pretty much every page has a beautiful idea or joke - like the idea that the reason that the FBI witness relocation program is so successful is because anyone who goes on it gets shot. Genius!
And I’ve rediscovered a lost gem in my CD collection (thank you Smilja wherever you are) - Are You Okay? by Was (Not Was). It’s from 1990! It still sounds great! It has an up-tempo song that’s actually about domestic murder! It has Leonard Cohen singing about Elvis’s Rolls Royce! It has a song - oddly not heard on the radio much since 9/11 - called ‘I Blew Up The United States’! And I feel better than James Brown! I feel better now. How do you feel?
I think I’m the only person I know who likes Los Angeles.
And this cheered me up just now: quotes from the Steve Martin film LA Story.
For example:
Harris: Hello, this is Harris. I’m in right now, so you can talk to me personally. Please start talking at the sound of the beep.
[BEEP]
Sara: Hello?
Harris: Hello.
Sara: Hello?
Harris: Hello.
Sara: Is this a person?
Harris: Yes, it is a person.
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