Day: February 25, 2006

I’m in love with the Rhapsody music service.  A friend was having a birthday party and wanted “old-style lounge music” by Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin, and a couple of other crooners.  We typed these names into Rhapsody and it made us a custom radio station playing songs by these folks.  With one username/password it is possible to run Rhapsody on multiple computers, so I plugged my laptop into a stereo and we had the desired music for the entire party.  So painless that you’d wonder why anyone would want to collect, inventory, and manage a music collection from iTunes or on physical media (unless you are a sound quality snob, in which case SACDs are nice).

Rhapsody is also good for serendipitous discovery of new music.  Today, for example, I stumbled upon a track by “Nitty”.  Rhapsody describes him as follows:

Nitty makes family-friendly rap music that can be enjoyed by little kids and older listeners alike.

The first sentence of his song (for little kids) contained the words “nigga” and “fuck”.

This from the February 27, 2006 New Yorker Magazine, an article on happiness research:

Layard cites a study, by the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, reporting that people’s top four favorite parts of the day feature sex, socializing after work, dinner, and relaxing. Their bottom four involve commuting, work, child care, and housework.

The article opens by explaining many folks’ predisposition to unhappiness.  The happy-go-lucky cavemen all died from eating poisonous plants and attacks from which they did not bother to take precautions.  We inherit our genes from the timid fearful cavemen.

Now to write a Nobel-prize winning article finding that people are happier when eating chocolate and walking Golden Retrievers than when using Microsoft products…