Okay, that allusion is rather obscure, so four points (instead of the usual two) to the person who can supply the two consonants needed to complete the allusion, as well as identifying its source. (Tim J has a shot at this, I happen to know.)
That said, not only may “Hail the iPod!” be obscure, the concept of an iPod itself may be obscure for some folks.
Despite all the buzz about them on the ‘Net, an awful lot of folks aren’t sufficiently addicted to modern media trends (despite Madison Avenue’s best efforts in that regard) to have become iPod-obsessed yet.
Recently, in fact, someone asked me the very sensible question: “What is an iPod?”
I explained it by saying: “It’s like a digital Walkman.”
For anyone remotely tuned in to consumer electronics after 1980, that would do the trick, and it did.
For those even more immune to the blandishments of Madison Avenue, I’ll offer a slightly elaborated elaboration: An iPod is a hand-held device designed to do basically one thing—play audio files like a tape recorder, only without the tape.
Most of the time people play music on their iPods, but they also play spoken-word files, like audiobooks. A favorite format for these files (though not the only one) is the much-touted “.mp3” format that you may have heard of.
How it works is this:
- You pay for sound files that you download off the Internet and onto your computer, or your copy sound files from your CD collection (which you paid for) onto your computer. Or you make your own sound files (which you don’t need to pay for since you’re the copyright holder).
- Then you transfer these sound files to your iPod and then you go out in public and listen to them like a blissed out zombie through
tiny electrodes attached to your braintiny earpieces.This is a process known as “capping.” - You steal music and put it on the iPod and work it off in purgatory and (possibly) jail.
The thing is: iPods are really cool. Almost as cool as digital watches used to be. And they’re all the rage.
One can see why!
I bought an iPod a while back and have been using it constantly. It came in particularly useful on my recent trip. I’ve only filled up my (40 gig) iPod by 10%, but that 10% gives me 12.4 days of continuous listening without having to hear the same song twice (if I don’t want to). At this rate, I could fit four months (124 days) of solid listening onto my iPod.
As you can see, you can fit a huge amount of sound onto an iPod, and it makes packing for a long trip much easier (for me, anyway).
Of late I’ve been taking along all kinds of music CDs on trips, as well as a bunch of abridged audiobooks (since unabridged audiobooks take up too many CDs and are hard to get and expensive), as well as a lot of dead tree books that I’d rather have in electronic format.
Not anymore! (Mostly.)
This time I didn’t take any music CDs or any audiobooks on CD. I just too my iPod, which contained more music and more (unabridged!) audiobooks and downloaded radio shows than I could possibly listen to on the trip. All of the bulky audio stuff I would normally have taken to keep myself aurally entertained and informed was replaced by one tiny device not much bigger than a pack of cards.
My suitcase loved me.
The iPod even replaced dead tree books that I would have previously taken. As I mentioned, the morning I left, I downloaded Cardinal Ratzinger’s interview audiobook Salt of the Earth (from Audible.Com).
But that’s not all!
I’d also converted tons of public-domain writings by fiction authors like H. P. Lovecraft and others to .mp3 format, and these also whacked down on the number of dead tree books I would ordinarily have taken, consuming valuable space and putting additional weight load on my suitcase.
I still succumbed to the temptation of taking a few of books not yet available in electronic form (such as Cardinal Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity and Truth and Tolerance), but my suitcase loved me anyway. For a bibliophile such as myself, this was a real change!
To bend the old TV Land slogan, it was “Better Living—Through Technology!”