iTunes sparks a long, winding trip down memory lane

Jeeze, I didn’t realize just how much money I’ve spent in iTunes (and on CDs) over the years until I decided to make a “smart playlist” and put every alternative, rock, punk, pop, etc genre I have into it. The thing came out with 3348 songs, and a playing time of 9.3 days.

So, what did I do about it? I put the whole thing on shuffle, and hit play. Its like a radio station with music from the past three decades, a mix of heavy metal, and slower stuff, explicit stuff that couldn’t be played on the radio, and a handful of those old “guilty pleasure” songs you’d never admit you listened to in a million years.

And what else am I doing about it? Using iTunes printing feature to post the whole song list in PDF format right here for the world to see. Yeah, I know, some of the songs on there are inviting ridicule, so sue me, it was a different time when I bought those.

I think it’s pretty fitting that the first song on the list after I hit the shuffle button was the most famous phone number in the world since I…

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Goosebumps

There are certain events that each of us bears witness to in our lives that we always turn around and say “wow, I never thought I’d see that”. Tonight was one of those nights. For me I’ve had two of those events in just a few years. Neither was impossible, but yet, neither seemed “likely” if thought about long in advance.  The first was the 2004 World Series, where, I got to witness an event that my father and countless others like him never got to see in their lifetimes. When the RedSox won that last game a new reality came over me as I realized that thousands of people had been born, lived their entire lives, and died since the last time anyone had seen what I was seeing. New technologies had been invented, gone obsolete and faded into the past, political movements had come and gone, hell, entire countries had come into being, and been removed from the map in the years between 1918 and 2004. It was one of the most profound, amazing things I had ever experienced.

Now, again, tonight we see another new reality forming. Barack Obama is the nominee of the Democratic party in…

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