Mad World Mix Tape

Photo: Kainet, Flickr (CC by-SA 2.0) As I referenced in our earlier "The Truth About Heaven" post , I’ve always had this thing for death. Musically, that is. (I’m not perving on the Grim Reaper or anything freaky like that). And it goes way back.  My favorite childhood song was that one about that clock that “stopped short, never to run again, when the old man died.” I mean how cool is that? Talk about loyalty. I can only hope that when I go someday, my Vitamix will say “Screw this, I’m done too.” By the way, back in 1878, Henry Work caved to the commercial pressures and penned a sequel to "My Grandfather’s Clock" (thus foreshadowing Queensryche’s Operation Mindcrime II).  In the sequel, G-pa’s clock gets sacked for “that vain stuck-up thing on the wall” and then unceremoniously cremated by the junk dealer’s wife. That sound you just heard was my V-Mix hightailing it the hell out of my kitchen. So much for loyalty. One of my earliest favorite “adult” so...

In a previous post , we argued for the music identification service, Shazam , being the second most important invention (behind the washing machine) of the modern era.  In retrospect, we may have been a bit dismissive of other inventions (invoking the ire of penicillin backers in particular) and a bit rash in our pronouncements.  For certainly there are strong arguments to be made for Pandora . For the uninitiated, here’s the scoop on Pandora. You enter a song or artist that you like.  Then, leveraging something called the Music Genome Project, Pandora classifies your selection on the basis of up to 400 different characteristic or “genes” and starts serving up tunes.  By “upthumbing” (or downthumbing) the songs you hear, your station becomes increasingly personalized over time.  It’s like an infinitely more musically enlightened version of yourself, DJing your own station. Photo:  Harry_Nl, Flickr  (CC by-NC-SA 2.0) We at MWMT ...