More Proof I'm Insane

Amongst my Twitter travels I encountered someone working on an #iTunesZero project.  The point being to listen to all the songs on your iPod at least once.   My eyes grew large.  YES!  I should do this.  I often feel guilty seeing the play count for my music as blank, 0 doesn't display in iTunes, blank.. null.  Music should be loved, not sitting on a hard drive with 0 plays. 

Here where this idea intersects with crazy:  my iTunes library includes 4,853 items for a total run time of 13 days and 52 minutes.   Due to catastrophic hard drive failure last year, I couldn't (or didn't know how to) import play counts from prior to that time.  Result:  there are 3,881 songs that iTunes considers unplayed.   Obviously, this is way.   I listened to many, many of these songs on various iPods and even in other formats in the (gasp) pre-iPod era (yes, youngsters, the iPod did not always exist).

But yet, I still think this is an idea worth pursuing, though it may take me the rest of my life (do you know how long it's going to take me to get through the Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones trifecta?  Do you know how much I am going to enjoy doing so?).   So for a couple of days I've been plugging in the iPod to my Bose iPod dock (just a plug because I love this toy so much, well worth the money) and start playing my smart playlist (where plays = 0).   So far I'm loving this project because it's an amazing walk down memory lane, but I'm also learning a few things: 

- I own music I had no idea I owned
- Stevie Nicks had a really bad, cocaine fueled, not reigned by Lindsay Buckingham, period
- I'm not sure the Wallflowers were ever really necessary
- Faith Hill holds up remarkably well
- I had forgotten how brilliant Aimee Mann is
- I should spend more time listening to Billie Holiday
- Tori Amos has an entire record of cover songs that I apparently bought, but have no memory of
- Counting Crows:  all that 90's angst.  Cheer up already.   Yet, it's still fantastic stuff
- There are some songs I really don't ever need to hear again and I'm getting them off my iPod
- I could listen to Buffalo Tom every day. 


Because I've been using shuffle play so far, it's a crap shoot what I've heard so far, so this is all I've got for you, but I'm fascinated to see how this goes.

Survival of the Fittest?

Today I finally got around to reading the latest issue of The Atlantic (one of my favorites despite changing it's name from the Atlantic Monthly and moving from Boston to DC - why?!).   The cover story's hysteria of course jumps out:  The End of Men (How Women are Taking Control of Everything) by Hanna Rosin.   A tad dramatic, The Atlantic.  But after all, this is the magazine that prints Caitlin Flanagan diatribes fairly regularly.   Perhaps they feel the need to balance out her desire to stay home and allow a man to take care of her with someone who feels that the patriarchal society may be coming to and end.

As a female in a male dominated industry who just today discussed survival of the fittest with her male colleagues one of whom was of the opinion that in other species, the male must be the colorful one to attract the females and wasn't he glad in the human species it's the women who must attract the males, I was intrigued by this article. 

It turns out society's been changing:  from industrial based to information based (newsflash!), and men are not adapting.   More women are going to college and graduate school (to the point where schools may be starting to skew admissions decisions in order to keep the male to female ratio at least 40/60).   And

The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true. Women in poor parts of India are learning English faster than men to meet the demands of new global call centers. Women own more than 40 percent of private businesses in China, where a red Ferrari is the new status symbol for female entrepreneurs. Last year, Iceland elected Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, the world’s first openly lesbian head of state, who campaigned explicitly against the male elite she claimed had destroyed the nation’s banking system, and who vowed to end the “age of testosterone.”

And then there was what may be my favorite paragraph I've read this year:

Up in the Air, a movie set against the backdrop of recession-era layoffs, hammers home its point about the shattered ego of the American man. A character played by George Clooney is called too old to be attractive by his younger female colleague and is later rejected by an older woman whom he falls in love with after she sleeps with him—and who turns out to be married. George Clooney! If the sexiest man alive can get twice rejected (and sexually played) in a movie, what hope is there for anyone else?

Shouldn't the hope be that he grows up or at least grows as a person and learns to live in his new world?  

The article's hypothesis seems to be that women are looking at the men and thinking:  if the men can't provide for them and their children, who needs them?  I'll call my own shots and be very happy doing it, thank you very much.   The article doesn't seem to draw any conclusions about what all this means or where we go from here, but I say Men:  the gauntlet has been thrown down.  Man up.