Silly iTunes! I really am listening to these podcasts, it's just that I'm doing it on my iPod and haven't synced recently.

I discovered that this item is available for viewing on the Internet.

(My grandparents, who lived north of Iowa City, got home delivery of what was by the 1980s just The Des Moines Register, no "Tribune," so I'd read it when I was visiting them. No comic strip characters ever fell out of it in those days.)

Hmm, what could the magazine industry possibly do to ruin my day? Ah, yes, announce the forthcoming end of TV Guide as we know it. (I'm going to give them one issue in the new format, and if it's not the most spectacular thing I've ever seen, my subscription is getting canceled -- and the fact that they're cutting their circulation guarantee to advertisers means they're expecting that.)

Written on the panel behind the bus driver's seat, where an advertisement might normally be placed, in large capital letters in two different colors of marker:

ENJOY LIFE...
EXIT AT
REAR

(P.S.: Comments are now in working order.)

Luke passed this along to me, and now that I finally have DSL installed at my new apartment, it's time to rise to the challenge.

Total volume of music on my computer: 38.71 GB (18,028 songs)

Total volume of music on my computer excluding radio station/TV station/commercial jingles: 35.81 GB (9,703 songs)

The last CD I bought: Coldplay, "X&Y" (this may be the first time I ever contributed to putting a #1 album in the #1 position)

Song playing right now: The Dukes of Stratosphear, "You're a Good Man Albert Brown (Curse You Red Barrel)"

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me: Heck, I'll give you 10 songs that I have both highly rated in iTunes and frequently listened to (in alphabetical order by artist), with the caveat that the "most frequently played" stats only date back to December 2002, when I semi-successfully recovered from hard disk problems...

1. Frank Black & the Catholics, "His Kingly Cave" -- I downloaded an edited version of this song from somewhere, and I like it better than the version on the CD ("Devil's Workshop," probably my favorite Frank Black CD, just slightly ahead of "Black Letter Days," which was released the same day).

2. The Byrds, "Why" -- My father had an original copy of the "Fifth Dimension" album, which was one of my favorite albums from his collection (along with the Beatles' "Abbey Road"). This is a single that's included as a bonus track on the modern-day "Fifth Dimension" CD, where it managed to become one of my favorite songs.

3. Nick Heyward, "Kite" -- I hadn't heard of Nick Heyward until I saw him perform this song on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" during its first few months on the air; I went out and bought the CD it's included on ("From Monday to Sunday") at the earliest opportunity.

4. Joni Mitchell, "River" -- I was looking for a few more tracks for a mix CD of "winter" songs, and I'm not sure how I discovered this one (it doesn't even have "winter" in the title), but it's great.

5. Jedediah Parish, "Rotary Phone" -- Jeremy gave me a couple of Jedediah Parish's CDs, and it's probably saying something that there were a couple of train-themed songs there, but I like this song better.

6. The Sleepy Jackson, "Good Dancers" -- For the last couple of years, when I visit stores that sell used CDs, I bring along a list I've made of "CDs I'm looking for used copies of," compiled from various places, including reviews in Entertainment Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, and visits to the iTunes Music Store. This is the best song on my favorite CD that I purchased a used copy of as a result of that list. (As with most CDs on that list, though, I don't remember what prompted me to add it to the list in the first place.)

7. Bruce Springsteen, "Downbound Train" -- My second-favorite train song; my favorite is "At Night You Hear the Trains" by a little-known band called Little Jack Melody and His Young Turks (for years, I've ended my e-mails with a quote from "At Night You Hear the Trains" at the bottom of my e-mails), but that one hasn't been frequently played enough to make this list.

8. They Might Be Giants, "Thunderbird" -- This is a live performance of this song that I downloaded from somewhere; I think it's better than the version that was recorded for the "The Spine" CD (it's definitely more hard rocking). As I may have revealed in an entry here not too long ago, TMBG is my favorite band; my overall favorite song of their is "Sleeping in the Flowers," but again, that one hasn't been frequently played enough to make this list. (I also have two versions of "Sleeping in the Flowers" -- the one I like better is the "radio edit" version, which starts with the chorus; I recorded it off WXRT in Chicago, which played it during an in-studio interview with TMBG in 1994.)

9. Tom Tom Club, "Genius of Love" -- Someday, someone will refer to me as a genius of love.

10. Toy Matinee, "The Ballad of Jenny Ledge" -- In my sophomore year of high school, this song was in heavy rotation on long-gone Tampa rock station WYNF, and nowhere else in the country, as I later discovered, because no one else has ever heard of this song. (Another 95YNF favorite from my high school years that almost made this Top 10 list was "Church of Logic, Sin, & Love" by a group called The Men, which is even more obscure.)

And while I'm at it, this is my favorite jingle -- or, rather, that audio file is but one example of my favorite jingle (it's one of many jingles that were part of PAMS Productions' Series 34, released in 1967); I also have examples from stations in locales such as Amarillo, Texas ("Big 'Kicks' makes it happen/KIXZ, with the power of love"), Cocoa, Florida ("KO makes it happen/WKKO, with the power of music"), and Fargo, North Dakota, where they went in a completely different direction with the lyrics ("Wa-arm sounds of winter/KQWB, winter wonderland").

Five people to whom I'm passing the baton:
No one, unless John A. Seafisk wants to do this.