Dear Apple Computers:

I really enjoy your products. I have several Macs that I use for work, an iPad and an iPhone for my business, and a couple little tiny iPods. I’ve used Macs on a daily basis since like 1992. Yay!

The only fly in the ointment is iTunes.

Here are the things I want in a music player: The ability to play music, and the ability to buy new music. While I’m sure both of those things can, indeed, be done with iTunes, I’ll be blessed if I can figure out how…

It used to be simple. I’d click on iTunes, click “Play” and music would play. But now I have to choose between Music, Movies, TV Shows, podcasts, Audiobooks, Books, or Apps. Seriously – it’s iTUNES – I want music. If I wanna watch TV I’ll, you know, turn on my TV. Put that other stuff in a different program and give me my Monkees.

It’s worse yet on my iPhone. Every now and then I’ll get all ambitious, find my headphones, and will plug ’em into my earholes to listen to some happy happy music… Yay! But, but… where’s my songs? I gotta push this button, then I have to choose… Wait, that’s not right. Okay, I’ll push… no… Crap, where’s my playlist of cool crap? No, that’s not it.

To be fair, one thing I really DO like is your “Radio” option. It’s like Pandora, only you can go back and see what songs you listened to half an hour ago. There’s an option to buy them, too, which I would really, really, really enjoy – except you make my put my password in every time I wanna buy my song. And you don’t let me have a simple password; it’s gotta have twelve characters, at least one capital letter, a number, and a symbol. Please, I dare you, enter GoatScrotumSo0p92!! [not my real password mind you] when you’re barreling through the pasture on your four-wheeler with a load of wood in January with thick-@ss gloves on… And if you try it three times and misspell something, you reset the password. Please, I just wanna click on “Buy Me” and, you know, buy the song! I’d have bought about twenty bucks worth of music today if I didn’t have to try to puzzle out the whole password thing…

Years ago, for no apparent reason, I downloaded a version of the Blue Danube Waltz, with a twist. Get the song in your head… Here, this will help.

Okay, now imagine it was being sung by cats. “Meow meow meow meow meow… Mew mew, mew mew.”

It was a silly thing to download, but I was in a silly mood, lo those many years ago when things such as singing cats were still deemed kinda funny.

Anyway… So today it popped up on my computer’s random iTunes rotation and started playing. Superpup Buttercup was sleeping in the other room, but as soon as she heard the cats she woke up and ran into my office. She looked at my computer’s speakers, she looked at me, back to the speakers, she walked under the desk and looked around, and was generally perplexed the whole time. “Papa, I SWEAR I hear cats! Where are they?” I was smiling indulgently, laughing a bit at what simple creatures dogs are. How silly that Buttercup thought there may be a real cat in my office! Ha!

About then the next song started. The kick drum started the song, “thump thump thump thump.” Without thought I got up to go answer the door…

I swear Buttercup laughed out loud at me.

I used to read widely and profusely. These days I don’t have as much time for literature as I’d like, and mostly read fluff speculative fiction. I’ve been having fun with Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series lately – it’s mostly comedic fantasy (Pratchett has a wondrous sense of humor), but buried in the humor are some deep thoughts. I found this to be an interesting, and disturbing, quote:

“The Patrician took a sip of his beer. ‘I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”

Excerpt From: Pratchett, Terry. “Unseen Academicals.” HarperCollins, 2009. iBooks.
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