For some unspeakable reason, I've never added a link to über-mensch Joe Gross's blog. Until now. You can even see his smiling visage there!

Here's what my iPod has to say about this, in five songs:

1. Manduka - "Entra Y Sale" (Manduka). The title means "it enters and it leaves" in Spanish. Why the title is in Spanish and not Portuguese (given that the artist known as "Manduka" is Brazilian) is anyone's guess. Presumably my iPod is telling me that all life is transitory and my shame over adding a link to my friend's page only now - yes, this, too - shall pass.
2. Curtis Mayfield - "Get Down" (People Get Ready: The Curtis Mayfield Story). Orgasmic panting, conga beats, fuzz bass: aw, yeah! "We're all children of the world/a hungry man in search of a hungry girl": these are profound truths, but they unfortunately have little bearing on the situation at hand. Joe's cool, but he gets no special love privileges (well, from me, at least) for this. As with all attempts to decodify the iPod's mysterious pronouncements, again I fail to be an adequate emissary of the oracle.
3. Os Mutantes - "Magica" (Mutantes). More Brazilian psychedelia! You'd think I had half the damn thing filled up with this, but I swear that it's no more than 48%. This song has trippy tempo changes, odd and heavily reverbed percussive noises, wah guitar, descending motifs that are probably played on a harp, and a very abstract bridge that suddenly shifts to double-time before turning into the riff from "Satisfaction". Dude! Maybe the iPod is telling me that only time, love, and drugs can heal this rift. Which doesn't exist anywhere but in my head. Whoa!
4. Doctor Mix and The Remix - "Out of the Question" (Acute eMusic Sampler). These guys (plural? I'm not sure) are a Metal Urbain side-project, I think. The sound is a wall of keyboards-meets-an infinite number of monkeys playing heavily distorted guitars in the bottom of a well. A very funky well with black lights and a disco ball. And a very hot French chick looking bored by all this over by the bar. Which is manned by a robot. A monkey robot in short pants and a black turtleneck. Sorta like that, y'know.
5. Tortoise and Bonnie "Prince" Billy - "That's Pep!" (The Brave and the Bold). Devo cover played by the original abstract post-rockers and indie/faux-countryboy Will Oldham. Yeah, it's alright, really.

So, what does this tell us? Nothing! My iPod is not really omniscient. It only pretends to be, especially when I keep telling it that I want to hear the Stooges and it gives me experimental psychedelic foreigners, funk, and a Devo cover, as if to say, "I know what you really want, chump." Perhaps this is a dysfunctional relationship I have with this iPod. Wait, it's playing The Fall now! It's like it's reading my mind.