Wholly Schmidt!

Apple has announced the new iPod lineup, and I think it’s time to stop kidding myself: the coolest iPod will never again be the one with the storage I need.

It’s been this way since the nanos arrived on the scene; the “big” iPods got the video, but the nano was the one people were raving about for the slick form factor (and more accessible pricing).

It’s getting close to two years since I dropped my 3rd generation iPod (twice) in the parking lot, and with every new revision since then I’ve held off; rumors of a wide screen or touch screen iPod circulated before every new keynote or announcement for at least that long. The first really new iPod to come along and deliver on those expectations was the iPhone, and it was certainly impressive, but if all I wanted was impressive, I would’ve caved long ago for a cute little nano or something (I did get a Shuffle, but that’s so cheap and different it’s almost not worth bringing up in comparison; I justified it very specifically as a workout music device). I want my entire music collection with me wherever I take my iPod. Once you’ve enjoyed that luxury (my 3rd gen was 20 GB, which wouldn’t hold all my music now, but it did at the time), you can’t go back without feeling like you’re compromising.

Now we have a genuinely new iPod, incorporating everything from the iPhone except the phone itself, but 16 GB of storage isn’t any closer to satisfying me than the one gigabyte Shuffle. There aren’t degrees of convenience, it’s binary: I can fit all my music onto an iPod, or I can’t. It doesn’t matter how much of my collection fits on an iPod, as long as it’s not all of it, I’ve got to think about what I want when I sync, and I don’t have access to everything once I’m away from the house. That’s the utility I want from my “real” iPod, and the only way to get that is the iPod Classic, which still isn’t truly different from the video iPod that debuted in October of 2005. That sounds ancient, and comparing it to the iPhone or the iPod Touch, it looks ancient too.

So here we are, and I guess I’m going to break down and buy an iPod Classic sometime this winter. Not only is it not nearly as cool a gadget as the iPhone or the Touch, it will make both of them nearly impossible to justify as additional purchases. In fact, the iPod Touch is kind of silly for anyone; you’re getting a sorta iPod, with some sorta PDA capabilities, and a sorta web device. On the iPhone, these features make more sense: you’re replacing your cell phone with a gadget that does everything your cell phone did better, plus all those sorta-features as a bonus. All those sorta-features by themselves just make a really cool device that doesn’t quite do anything the way you’d like.

The only way I could justify the iPod Touch is if I really wanted a device specifically for video. That’s a really slick screen any way you look at it; if video is your priority I can’t imagine being content with the smaller, non-wide screen iPod Classic format. Even so, you may end up hamstrung by storage limitations.

Forza Motorsport 2 is a racing game for the Xbox 360 that allows for some very detailed custom paint jobs. You assemble your designs from an assortment of shapes; these aren’t just single images downloaded and slapped onto the cars.

Go With The Flow is a great Queens of the Stone Age song with an even greater music video (you can find it on their site, or probably easily on YouTube), and it was the inspiration for my most ambitious paint job so far. I’m working on a few other cars, with only one other car in my Picasa gallery right now, but take a look now and check back as I upload more designs.

I don’t know beans about music, but iTunes tells me I bought fourteen albums released in 2006. What follows is a end-of-year list for your amusement, but my rank and opinion (or my rank opinions, if that’s the way you feel) for a given album say more about me than they do about the quality of music.

#1 Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere

If I’d started this website last year, picks 1 and 2 could’ve very well been Gorillaz - Demon Days, and Dangerdoom - The Mouse and the Mask. What do those have in common with Gnarls Barkley? DJ Dangermouse! Gaining widespread popularity with his Grey Album (vocals from Jay-Z’s Black album mixed over music from The Beatles White Album. Think about it.), he teamed up with rapper Cee-Lo to form Gnarls Barkley, the most awesome band in, well, in at least a year. I dare you to not love this album. It’s the catchiest thing you’ll ever listen to; you’ve probably been tapping your feet to the single Crazy and not known it. I can’t wait to see what Dangermouse does in 2007.

#2 TIE: The Raconteurs - Broken Boy Soldiers / The Decemberists - The Crane Wife

It seemed fitting that these two should tie. I wanted to like the Raconteurs more than I did, and I didn’t want to like The Decemberists.

The Raconteurs is Jack White, one half of The White Stripes, with some other guys, who I’m not familiar with. I went in with the wrong expectations, hoping for more White Stripes. Now one of the biggest complaints from all the “real” reviews I’ve read is that Broken Boy Soldiers doesn’t have its own sound, that it just sounds like White Stripes songs and that other guy’s songs got mixed up and put on the same album, with only a couple songs where they actually work together to create something new. That might be true, but it still wasn’t White Stripey enough for me. At least, not in the begining. By the end of the year I’d come to really love the whole thing, and I’m actually going to seek out some of that other guy’s music. As soon as I remember his name.

Meanwhile, The Decemberists were one of those bands that I’d never actually listened too, but I was pretty sure they were more like a cause people took up than a band people actually enjoyed. Notoriously indie*, they were one of those bands that all the kids who were too cool to use words like cool loved to listen to. I lumped them together with bands like Belle & Sebastian and that Surfer Stephen guy and filed them away in the “I don’t know anything about them but they’re probably pretentious and lame” part of my brain. Let me say plainly: My bad! The Decemberists are pretty awesome, and I’m sad that it took me this long to check them out. I’m still not listening to that Surfer guy though. (more…)