MP3 Supermarket Sweep

I've always liked sharing songs with friends, so when my buddy Helmut came into town last week I figured I'd make up a collection of recent favorites. A year ago that would have meant a couple of CDs with 25 or so songs each. Before that it had been a Maxell CD-90 with 35 or 40. Now I figure, Helmut's an iPod sort of guy. I'll just throw some MP3s on a disk. Because September was "Beatles Month®" I figured I'd give him a bunch of Beatles covers, and because I was reading Charlie Gillett's wonderful The Sound of the City I'd put together some early birth-of-rock-n-roll R&B and rockabilly stuff. A Music to Read The Sound of the City By comp. So that'd be 177 Beatles covers – 9.2 hours per iTunes – and 221 greasy rock tunes. I figure Helmut'll be thrilled.

I show up at the party and he's got his portable hard drive with him. 79,748 songs in 3,831 folders. My 398 tunes didn't seem like such a big deal now.

So here's the plan: I can borrow the hard drive Saturday night if I can get it back to him by 5:00 pm on Sunday. Deal. I get home from the party about midnight. Now I have some existential decisions to make. Do I go to bed, go to MicroCenter on Sunday for another hard drive, and copy everything? Do I drag only the folders I'm interested in to my music hard drive, duplicating a lot that I already had? Or do I sift through this morass – did I say "morass?" I meant to say "bounty" – looking for the individual songs? I go with plan three.

It's 5:00 am and I'm up to M, Mariah Carey, so about half way through, and my critical faculties are beginning to fail me. And here's the problem: I own no Mariah Carey. In the pantheon of female vocalists I rank her below Yoko Ono in terms of my needing her in my iTunes directory. But this may be my only chance to grab a couple of Carey tunes, should I ever need one. I'd recently read Sasha Frere-Jones's great article in The New Yorker about Carey, and vaguely remembered his interesting comments about a few songs, but which ones? And this wasn't just a problem with Miss Glitter. Did I need any (or in some cases, more) AC-DC? Black Eyed Peas? Cracker? Dave Mason? Everything But The Girl? Fiona Apple? Garbage? Hall & Oats? Iron Maiden? Jack Johnson? Kraftwerk? The Lovin' Spoonfull? I went to bed.

Up at the crack of noon and I've got less than five hours to get to ZZ Top. I hadn't realized the large number of groups alphabetized under T because their name started with "The" so it got a little frantic there, close to the wire, and I grabbed an entire Whiskeytown album that I probably own, but I managed to get to the craft fair (Helmut's one of them artist-guys) by 5:00. Only grabbed 885 songs. And yes, something by each of the bands mentioned above. Allow me to make you a mix.

Lee Marvin Computer Arm at DIY, Ferndale

Dream Cruise Refuse

The Infinite Monkey team is still sifting through the data for this year's study, but it's been slow going, and I know everyone's getting anxious. The decision to break out energy drinks into their own catagory has necessitated the reworking of our data for the last eight years. And the selfish enemies of science were out in force, as usual, screwing up our data.

For now you'll have to be satisfied with the raw data. We'll tell you what it all means in a future post, if anyone is interested.

Water: 79 total

Nestlé Pure Life 13

Dasani 12

Ice Mountain 10

Aquafina 8

Kirkland 7

Kroger 4

Meijer 4

Trader Joe’s 3

Absopure 2

Camelot 2

Aquarius Spring 1

Crystal Ridge 1

CVS 1

Deja Blue 1

Ethos 1

Evian 1

Fiji 1

Motor City Casino Water 1

Poland Spring 1

Real Canadian 1

Spartan 1

Spring 1

Tim Horton’s 1

Westborn Market 1

Juice: 25 total

Arnold Palmer Half & Half Lite 4

Arizona Watermelon 3

Arizona Grapeade 2

Arizona Green Tea with Ginseng 2

Arizona Kiwi Strawberry 2

Arizona Original Iced Tea 2

Country Time Lemonade 2

Lipton Ice Tea 2

Arizona Black & White Iced Tea 1

Arizona Original Iced Tea with Lemon 1

Arizona Sweet Tea 1

Everfresh Tropical Fruit Punch 1

Ohana Lemonade & Iced tea 1

Sobe Sunami 1

Energy Drinks: 28 total

Nos 6

Gatorade Lemon Lime 3

Gatorade Fierce Grape 2

Joose Flavored Malt Beverage 2

Powerade Fruit Punch 2

Powerade Mountain Berry Blast 2

Red Bull 2

All Sport Blue Raz Ice 1

Gatorade Cool Blue 1

Gatorade Fierce Berry 1

Gatorade Fierce Melon 1

Gatorade Fruit Punch 1

Gatorade Tiger Red Drive 1

Gatorade X-Factor Fruit Punch 1

Mona-Vie Açai Blend 1

Starbucks Double Shot 1

Carbonated Soda: 16 total

Pepsi Cola 4

Sunkist Orange 3

Coca Cola 2

Cherry Coke 1

Coke Zero 1

Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda 1

Orange Crush 1

Mountain Dew 1

Sprite 1

Vernor’s Ginger Ale 1

Beer: 25 total

Bud Light 10

Budweiser 4

Corona Light 2

Labatt Blue 2

Stroh’s 2

Bush 1

Corona 1

Labatt Blue Light 1

Miller Lite 1

Sam Adam’s Light 1

Assorted: 19 total

Arrow Vodka 2

Smirnoff Raspberry Vodka 2

Smirnoff Vodka 2

Sutter Home 2007 Chardonnay 2

Admiral Nelson’s Spiced Rum 1

Absolut Vodka 1

Bareman’s Chocolare Milk 1

Crown Royal Canadian Whisky 1

Five Star Blended Whiskey 1

Jim Beam Bourbon 1

Lindeman’s 2007 Merlot 1

Milky Wave Chocolate 1

Mohawk Peppermint Schnapps 1

Pure Protein Vanilla Shake 1

Seagram’s Gin 1

Old photos

We turned up a bunch of old negatives. Most of these I've never seen prints of. That's Mrs. Infinite Monkey's mother third from the left, my mother in law. I'm obsessed in the detail. It's a time machine, a way to go back and look at stuff forgotten. I even love scanning negatives from the 70s and 80s just to see what magazines we had on the table. Whatever happened to that lamp?

Please do not tap on glass.

We went to the zoo Sunday for the first time since 2006. There seemed to be more dinosaurs this time, and I'm not sure there's supposed to be any dinosaurs at a zoo. What does a DinoSimulator do anyway? What about The Wild Adventure Ride?

I don't understand why anyone would opt for virtual reality at Dinosauria when there are live monkeys roaming around outside.

We are begun.

Now all I have to do is think of something to write about.