The best purchase I've made all year was the video iPod, hands-down. OK, the iPod--I haven't actually used the video functionality, and mostly went with it for the larger storage capacity. But still, it's been great.

I use it primarily in two places, the gym and the car. For some reason the gyms here have no music and no TV; wearing the iPod has thus improved the gym (especially cardio machine) experience tenfold. It's great in the car as well because my CD player is still the original one that came with the (1998) car, and it's seen better days. It works ok but only grudgingly on burned CDs, and sees scratches the way Haley Joel Osment sees dead people--or maybe the way he sees oncoming cars after a few too many beers, which is to say 3 for every 1 that's actually there. Also, Ann Arbor is just far enough away from both Detroit and Toledo to make reception of their radio stations a frustrating experience filled with fades in and out every couple hundred yards.

Being a Pod person now does create its moments of strangeness as well. Today on the treadmill I realized that most of the other exercisers (read: undergrads) wouldn't even understand most of the reference points as I listened to Frank Zappa's "Be In My Video." A few songs later I decided with great certainty, in succession that I was (a) undoubtedly the only person in the building at that moment listening to Jan & Dean's "Anaheim, Azusa & Cucamonga Sewing Circle, Book Review & Timing Association"; (b) probably the only person in the gym with that particular song loaded onto his/her iPod; and (c) quite possibly the only person in the world currently listening to that song on an iPod, and maybe at all.

Just in the last couple of days I've taken the podcast plunge at the gym, and I think I like it. So I beg of you, dear readers, to suggest some podcasts that I might want to consider downloading or even subscribing to. My preference would be to stick to audio, but by all means go ahead and make the case for a particularly compelling video podcast if one exists; I have the technology, after all. Beyond that, I'm open to any and all suggestions--with the other caveat being that I need things that will not make me fall off a cardio machine with laughter, anger, or any other potentially hazardous emotion.

Oh, and for the 99.99% of people unfamiliar with the aforementioned unique song, if you haven't already guessed by now which one of Jan & Dean's own songs they were trying to replicate the success of, it may be a strong hint to tell you that the line repeated ad nauseum at the end of the song is "Go, grannies, go grannies, go grannies go." See what they did there? It's the power of the plural.