I’m new to the whole ipod thing. I think it’s just on two weeks since I bought it, and in the meantime I’ve put something like 5,700 tracks on it (about 17 days worth of music). Some of it’s stuff I listen to all the time, but there’s a lot of stuff that I’ve put on for the heck of it.

I love having the ipod. It is the best. In honor of the first two weeks, I thought I’d do a couple of those dumb lists. For the first, I put the ipod on shuffle and listed the first ten tracks it played:

1. Is She Weird? Frank Black Francis
2. The Night Has A Thousand Faces, John Coltrane
3. Corazon, Carole King
4. Animal Farm, The Kinks
5. Smut, Skyhooks
6. Trampled Under Foot, Led Zeppelin
7. Young and Foolish, Brad Mehldau
8. Bring Back That Leroy Brown, Queen
9. The Everlasting Gaze, The Smashing Pumpkins
10. Fall from Grace, Paddy McAloon

I then flipped over to the most recently played list. As you might imagine, given the comparatively short time the ipod’s been running, I haven’t played the same stuff over and over too much. Still, a disturbingly MOR trend emerged which bothered me until I remembered two days of headaches (and noticed that the most played track had still only been played six times).

1. Just a Song Before I Go, Crosby, Stills & Nash
2. Southern Cross, Crosby, Stills & Nash
3. Alice in Wonderland, Bill Evans
4. Thursday Afternoon, Brian Eno
5. Marrakesh Express, Crosby, Stills & Nash
6. Suicide Life, The Eels
7. Seeing Angels, The Jon Butler Trio
8. Mornings Eleven, The Magic Numbers
9. Forever Lost, The Magic Numbers
10. The Mule, The Magic Numbers

I was also going to list my top rated tracks, but honestly, it’s one of the things I don’t like. You only have a range of five stars. Far too coarse a measure to be useful. Still, what you see above is some of what I’ve been listening to of late.

sob! two completed, unpublished james blaylock novels. it’s been six years. will this drought never end? i have no idea whether zeuglodon, or its sequel, are any good. but it’s been so long. what to read? i doubt there’ll be a new powers novel for a year or two, and i don’t like the last three or four jonathan carroll books much. sigh. patience is a pain. i guess at least we’re not talking i, john mandeville or the moon world.

I hate book descriptions. They either tell you too much about the book, or they talk about some other book altogether. Over at the Penguin Australia website there is a description of Justine’s Magic or Madness. It uses some salesfolk talk like ‘thrilling’ and such, and I guess it sort of describes the plot, but it doesn’t really convey how good the book is. I’m just barely smart enough, having written what I just have, to not try to describe it, but suffice to say that it’s really cool, and a lot of fun. Now, allowing that it’s Justine’s first novel, and it’s only published today, most readers in Australia won’t know her name (Larbalestier, Justine), but if you love good YA fiction you should give it a go. Head off to the local Dymocks or A&Rs and remember: is Jazza, is good.

Another chance to hope that experts and predictions are well-informed, but not infallible. Hurricane Katrinia is about four or five hours out from the US coast. Poppy Brite has, sensibly if very reluctantly,, left New Orleans. A CNN reporter is there, and blogging what happens. Let’s hope the predictions are wrong, we all get to wake up to the same New Orleans in the morning.

woke this morning, for the second morning running, with a terrible head-ache. pfeh. australia lost the cricket. i don’t mind – england played well – but i’d feel better if australia weren’t making so many dumb mistakes. i hate it when australia loses, but it’s sort of ok if you go down playing well. that’s what competition is about. when you contribute to your own defeat, well, pfeh. anyway, i promised over at justine’s blog that i’d not make anymore eeyore comments about the cricket, so i’ll try.

there’s talk all over the place about australian sf, small press publishing and so on. it’s the annual self-examination, which is cool. i contributed some comments over at deb’s blog, but find myself writing and dumping responses for shane, ben and others. their observations are cool, i just feel like i’ve danced this dance before, so i think i’ll sit out the rest of this round with the observation that a) it takes time, b) excellence is the key, and c) fandom is wonderful, but it’s not the solution.

what else? beginning to brace myself for the coming weeks. father’s day coming up, then m’s birthday (which should be swell), robin & toula’s wedding, sophie’s birthday (yay!), and then off to the states. somewhere in there i need to finish up a lot of reading and a book. fifty four days till i get on plane. i am so going to sleep in oakland.

i did read some cool stories on the weekend. i’ve got a post half-written on tim’s collaborations from realms of fantasy and polyphony 5, and read terrific stories by chriz barzak and liz williams. also had the weird situation of talking to someone who has read a story for a project i’m doing that i haven’t seen yet. soon.

sunday was interesting. jess (aged 5) went dress shopping with her nan, so marianne and i took sophie out for the afternoon. went to a favorite dim sum place which sophie really liked, then tai chi in king’s park, before heading into the city for shopping. picked up cd’s by ry cooder and the magic numbers, both safely ripped and on the ipod now. tired, though.