Can't Live Without iTunes

I never thought I would listen to music on the computer. It offended the purist in me: compressed files by definition lose part of the music, and after spending money on a decent stereo why on earth would I then throw all that aside to listen to music on cheap computer speakers?

Turns out convenience is everything. And being able to turn on iTunes, set it to Shuffle, and have it play for the next three weeks without repeating a track is so appealing that all other questions became irrelevant. Then I found music blogs that offered free legal downloads, to help keep me current with new music, and I even became a downloader. Another thing I never thought I'd be. Life is long, and full of surprises.

Here, apropos of nothing at all, are the last ten songs, picked by iTunes entirely at random from the 7,598 tracks I own, that have played this morning:

Beatles, "Please Please Me"
Steve Miller Band, "True Fine Love"
The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"
Janis Joplin, "Tell Mamma"
Lou Reed, "Wild Child"
Arctic Monkeys, "Knock a Door Run"
Diane Cluck, "Hover Not"
Peter Gabriel, "The Promise of Shadows"
Paul Simon, "Can't Run But"
U2, "Surrender"

And Billie Holiday is playing right now, singing "I Wished on the Moon," a song composed partly by Dorothy Parker, of all people. The thing that fascinates is me is trying to find patterns in the supposedly-random Shuffling of my music, but I suspect that has more to do with how I look for patterns in everything, and not with the algorithms that randomize my music files.

Okay. Things to do, so off I go.