Radio Nowhere

I was driving home from class today,* and I noticed that I still had the radio off. That is, I haven't turned the radio on in my car for about a week now. Since I don't drive anywhere that often, the feat may not be that impressive, but I have noticed an increased amount of thoughts that occur while driving**.

Today, I began thinking about how it was nice to have a little silence occasionally. I have always wondered why so many people are incessantly wearing iPod headphones. I can understand it a bit more in people traveling long distances on subways, trains, planes, etc. But I want to a small liberal arts university where the longest distance between two buildings was roughly equivalent to the distance between your thumb and forefinger. I am not sure you can even listen to a full song in that time***. Unless of course, they are listening to the Ramones, in which case their attention span is less than the iPod generation. And of course, since the Ramones haven't made a song in the last five years, it is not on anyones iPod#.

Seriously, I would literally see people put in earphones, follow them for twenty, thirty yards and then watch them remove the earphones at their next destination. An hour later, they would do the same thing. It was as if some neural pathway required auditory input for their legs to move. I promise, if you try hard, you can walk without listening to the first twenty seconds of fifteen songs by the Fray.

However, there is a time and place for music. For example, I have recently evolved via internet radio from random stations, to yahoo's launchast, to the pinnacle of online radion, Pandora##. The amazing thing about Pandora, is I can pick a song, any song, and while they won't play that song, they'll play something roughly equivalent which both satisfies my jonesing and introduces me to a new musical arena. The iPod generation may have difficulty with this because they limit your skips to five an hour (so within the first two-minutes, most will likely have exhausted their quota).

Anyways, all that to say, it's nice to hear myself think for a change (in brief doses), and also nice to give my brain something else pleasant to listen to when trying to learn about the corpora quadrigemina and/or using ubiquitous footnotes.

*Notice first the fact that I went to class, and second the fact that I drove the mile to class instead of walking. Also notice, that I am making a concerted effort to reduce the number of parentheticals in my writing (yeah, that's going to work) and implementing footnotes instead (which, as you can see may be more inefficient).


**Which may be coincidental with the increased number of blog posts recently.


***Not that it matters because people with iPods for 10 feet likely are the kind of people who can't listen to full songs, and incessantly skip to the next best song. I would love to go with these people to a concert because a) the last two minutes of every song would be new to them and b) I bet you can visually see them get uncomfortable after the thirty second mark of each song (this is when they travel to the concession stand and buy $20 nachos that look delicious and completely detract from the concert experience.

#If I were a music mogul, I would clearly sue apple. They may be the biggest beneficiary of the napster generation. However, didn't apple (I don't think its the same) produce the Beatles' albums, one of the landmark moments in musical history. Coincidence, I think not.

## If you don't listen to radion at pandora.com, for your own sake, please don't start. It's incredible, I am completely undermining the sanctity of silence by even bringing up the subject.