I loved it, when I was permitted to have it. My parents were responsible enough not to permit me to feed my soda monkey at will. I could not drink it at dinner, unless the meal was pizza; my mandated beverage at meal times was milk. I could get away with it in the evening, or with an afternoon snack. Gradually, as I came within sight of adulthood, I drank milk less and less, and Pepsi more and more. I went away to college, where no one was around to tell me what I should be drinking with dinner, or lunch, or in between meals.

I have easily drank 10,000 Pepsis in my life; the real number could be half again as high. I drank it out of cans, glass bottles and, when neither of those were available, plastic bottles, and could taste the difference in each container. I figured out just how much ice to put in a glass to chill the liquid without diluting it too much; if it got flat, I threw it away. If I were looking for a place to grab lunch and had no particular taste for anything, I would pick a franchise that served Pepsi over one that didn’t. I didn’t drink it at breakfast, but I drank it pretty much any other time, with every food short of chocolate cake.

And now, to quote Henry Hill, it’s all over. I have been diagnosed with seriously high blood sugar and a severe (and surely not coincidental) sensitivity to cane and corn sugar. I drank my last Pepsi this past Tuesday, May 8, at lunch.

It’s not that I ever had any illusions that Pepsi, or any soda, was good for me. One reason why I refused to drink soda that had gone flat was because I knew there was no sense in drinking something so unhealthy if you didn’t even enjoy how it tasted. I knew that the steadily growing spare tire around my midriff was at least partially the result of my Pepsi habit. I knew I was so dependent on the daily caffeine jolt that kicking it would be murder. And I rationalized that it wasn’t as though I were a man of many vices: I don’t smoke, I don’t drink coffee, I rarely drink alcohol; I don’t gamble or use hard drugs. So if my worst habit was drinking a lot of soda pop, was it such a big deal?

Turns out it kind of was. It turns out I had no idea how bad this stuff was making me feel until I stopped drinking it.

See, I thought it was normal to feel run down most of the time, and to hit that post-lunch period and want to lay your head down at your desk and sleep the afternoon away. Doesn’t everyone feel that way? Isn’t that why they sell those five-hour energy shots and all the other products designed to save us from our own fatigue? Maybe everyone does feel that way, but if they do, they don’t have to. Within a day of quitting Pepsi, I noticed something odd and wonderful: I no longer got tired. I no longer felt bloated with ounces and ounces of carbonation struggling to escape. I felt normal, give or take.

It hasn’t been all sunshine. About two or three days after quitting, the caffeine withdrawal symptoms hit. I drove home last Friday all but holding my eyelids apart to keep from dozing off on the road. I am, as I type this, trying to ignore a spiteful, stinging headache. I don’t drink coffee, but I know there are other ways to get caffeine if I want it. Screw it, though. As long as I’m starving the monkey, I might as well go all the way.

There’s much more I found out about myself from this allergy specialist, and possibly one day soon I’ll write an encomium for cheese, or popcorn, or some other food I’m newly forbidden to have. (In addition to cane sugar, dairy and corn are out as well.) But for now, I’m celebrating the slaying of my biggest vice. It’s been more than a week as I write this, and I have not been seriously tempted to backslide; in fact there’s most of a twelve-pack of Pepsi Throwback still sitting in my fridge, waiting to be donated to someone who wants it. If I drank it, all it would do is make me sick again. I might say I wish I had done this much sooner, but that’s the simplicity of hindsight. The truth is I’m just glad I’m finally doing it now.

Many diehard music listeners today continue to curate a substantial collection of vinyl LPs, or else went back to vinyl after it began to resurge a few years ago. Not me. I am firmly of the digital age — in fact, the primary reason I became so finicky and exacting about my music was the sense of empowerment digital music grants you. It’s not that I can carry nearly my entire collection in a device the size of my wallet; I’m so used to that I expect nothing less. It’s that all this wonderful stuff is lying supine and exposed in iTunes, where I can manipulate it at will. A vinyl record is fixed, a physical artifact; a digital song is an assemblage of bits, malleable and subject to whim. Most people who buy songs from iTunes or Amazon probably don’t even stop to consider the awesome power literally at their fingertips. You can name anything anything you want, sequence it in any way you want. You can put Sergeant Pepper in its original running order, so that side 1 ends with “She’s Leaving Home,” or reconstruct Infidels to include “Blind Willie McTell” instead of “Neighborhood Bully.” Whether you’re the type to take such liberties or not, programs like iTunes allow you to get your music right — to tend it with as much care and respect for detail as you like. As I suggested above, how far you take this practice depends on, and reveals a lot about, who you are. To illustrate, let me show you a few of my common MP3 hoarding practices.

1. Always set Sort Artist to “Lastname, Firstname”It amazes me that more people don’t do this. Well, actually it doesn’t amaze me because it’s kind of a pain in the ass to alter nearly every single thing that goes in your music library. I guess what amazes me is that not doing it doesn’t bug everyone else as much as it bugs me. Johnny Cash should not appear under J, he should appear under C. That’s so fundamental that to flout it feels like spitting in the face of logic itself.

2. Add cover art to my imported tracks

This is pretty obvious, and a lot of people probably do this. I believe iTunes will even do it for you, though I would never entrust iTunes with so exacting a task. But here’s something not everybody does:

3. Add separate cover art to mono and stereo releases

Well, because they’re different, goddamn it.

4. Add individual years to every track in a multi-year compilation

To be honest, I’ve only done this with a few such compilations in my library so far, because as pains in the asses go, this one is on a par with re-grouting your bathroom, which I have never done and which sounds only slightly less bothersome than simply replacing the entire bathroom. Even if I know the artist’s work pretty well already, I usually don’t know it enough to reel off the year each song was released with perfect accuracy, necessitating many, many visits to Wikipedia to fill these little tags in. What makes it worthwhile? The fact that I can generate a smart playlist of songs from a given year and know with certainty that each of those songs came out in that year, regardless of when some record company decided to slap them together and reissue them for a quick buck. Don’t you wish you were me right now?

5. Maintain consistent spellings of artists’ names

Anyone with even a few, er, alternatively acquired music tracks understands that people who share music files don’t spell any better than anyone else who uses the Internet. Fixing them sounds like a no-brainer, but I’m constantly surprised when I look at friends’ iPods and see that in addition to, say, the Rolling Stones, they’ll have tracks by Rolling Stones (no definite article), Roling Stones, Rolling Stone, Stones, or the subtle but ever-popular “Rolling Stones ,” wherein an unobtrusive extra space at the end registers in iTunes’ primitive cerebrum as a distinct artist. This kind of stuff can make an iPod damn near unusable to my mind. How do people stand it?

6. Distinguish between albums by Paul McCartney, Wings, and Paul McCartney and Wings.

Goddamn it, they’re different.

(At this point, our hypothetical FBI profiler is jotting in his notebook: Low anxiety threshold. Feelings of lack of control, helplessness.)

Now, lest you think I’ve gone completely off the cliff, there are some organizational behaviors that are too nit-picky and anal retentive even for me. These include:

1. Filing Ram under “Paul and Linda McCartney”

The only reason Macca gave his wife label credit on this one is that he was being sued by Allen Klein and his assets were frozen; giving Linda half the album was the only way to bring any money into the McCartney household. As fun and quirky a bit of trivia as this is, I don’t see the need to enshrine it in my album collection. (Side note: at the last Paul McCartney concert I attended, he dedicated “Too Many People,” the lead track from this album, “to all the Wings fans.” Does McCartney really not remember, or care, which of his albums were Wings and which weren’t?)

2. Filling in the Composer tag

This is no less geeky a thing as a lot of other things I actually do, but I’ve just never gone here. Maybe one day I’ll think to myself, “I wish I could make a smart playlist of all the Holland-Dozier-Holland songs that begin with a hard consonant.” Until that day, this field can stay blank.

3. Filing Elvis Costello’s King of America under “The Costello Show”

What am I, crazy?

4. Filling in the Beats per Minute tag

I guess this is a big thing for people who exercise. I wouldn’t know anything about that. I think I might get around to something like this if the day somehow became four or five hours longer.

So there you have it. Don’t be afraid to stick your head down the music-nerd rabbit hole for a while. Take control of your music. Sort it, catalog it, clean it up and fiddle with it. Just remember: Band on the Run is by “Paul McCartney & Wings.” That’s very important. Don’t ask me why — it just is.

So I was talking to my boss the other day and I was like, “Does anyone know what they’re doing on this project?” And he was like, “I wish.”

Now, what did I just say there?

People have been lamenting the decline of the verb to say for a surprisingly long time — at least as long as I’ve been around, which is enough. When I was growing up, the culprit was goes:

“So he goes, ‘What are you doing this weekend,’ and I go, ‘Going to a stupid family reunion’.”

I never liked goes very much. As a writerly type, I always felt an obligation to speak properly, whatever that meant, and to not give in to imprecision, trends, laziness or other bad linguistic habits. (That doesn’t mean I correct other people when they do it, but that’s for another post.) In college I took some linguistics courses — well, all of two, but it didn’t take much to change the way I think about language. The thing that struck me most was the distinction linguists make between being descriptive and prescriptive. As far as I had always known, as far as I had ever been taught, the only relevant issues concerning writing, speaking and language related to what you should do. Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. (Actually, it’s OK to do that.) Avoid double negatives. Make positive statements rather than negative ones (“I forgot” versus “I didn’t remember”). It hadn’t really occurred to me that it was possible to take a different stance: that of the impartial observer, dissecting the ways in which people bend and shape the language to suit their needs, just as they’ve been doing ever since they started talking.

That’s the other thing that a few linguistics courses will do for you (well, that and some Old English courses): give you an appreciation for how old this language of ours is, how many competing influences it has absorbed and how its speakers have worried about and denounced what their fellow speakers have been doing to it since long before people started replacing said with like. I’m not suggesting that because linguistic standards are always in flux that there’s no reason to enforce them; I’m no anarchist. On the other hand, it’s difficult to get too worked up over a process that is not only inevitable but healthy: without people using English however they damn well pleased, we wouldn’t have the rich, endlessly adaptable tongue that has become the closest thing on the planet right now to a universal language. It’s a good thing that English is changing right under your feet, because that means it’s still alive, and it’s not going to wait for you to get on board as it grows and evolves.

If you start noticing a widespread trend, it usually indicates some aspect of the language that had become inadequate and needed shoring up. Here’s a simple example: the phrase “beg the question” refers to a logical fallacy in which the speaker assumes his own conclusion or uses a restatement of his conclusion as evidence. “We’ve always done it this way because that is our established procedure” is begging the question. Chances are good that you use it differently. “He went out every night this week without calling her, which begs the question of who he was out with.” It doesn’t beg the question — it prompts the question, or suggests the question or leads to the question. But those phrases lack a certain oomph, and “begs the question” was there, minted and ready to be picked up and adopted by those who needed it. To say that they’re using it incorrectly at this point is futile. If a great many people use a word or phrase in a way that makes sense and is mutually intelligible, how can it be wrong?

Which brings us back to like. Linguistically I’m still too much a of a tight-ass to use like very much. But I like like. I like it because to me it can fill a very specific function. Let’s consider two examples:

My boss told me he wasn’t happy with my work, and I was like, “The feeling’s mutual.”

My boss told me he wasn’t happy with my work, and I said, “The feeling’s mutual.”

You can see the distinction right away. To say that you were “like” something means “my initial reaction to this was.” To say that you said it means, obviously, that you spoke it aloud. Like encapsulates a spontaneous emotion or a thought that isn’t quite articulated — possibly the most memorable moment of an interaction. The word is also something of a double-edged sword, because you can be “like” something you never spoke aloud. To elaborate on our example above:

My boss told me he wasn’t happy with my work, and I was like, “The feeling’s mutual,” but I just told him I’d try to do better.

Most people would find that a perfectly comprehensible sentence: you thought one thing, but spoke another.

My preferred way of using like, when I do, is a bit different. Convinced as I often am that I’m being boring, I tend to be concise when I talk, and if I’m reporting a conversation I usually try to impart the essence of it without getting into the nitty-gritty details, which in all likelihood I don’t remember anyway. So I might say something like this:

Bob came over to me and was like, “You agreed to pay me fifty bucks,” and I was like, “No I didn’t; I told you I can’t afford to pay you that.”

This conversation was probably longer, involving several supplementary exchanges as well as some profanity, which I might be eliding in deference to the sensibilities of my audience. By attributing the utterances with like, I am (at least in my own mind) saying, “This is the essence of what was said, but you should not quote me verbatim or think this sums up the entire exchange.” I do this because I am enough of a linguistic tight-ass (see above) that when I use the word said, I take it literally: if I don’t relate as precisely as possible the words that someone used, then it means I’m sort of lying. “OK, so first you said Bob called you a ‘festering wad of day-old horse offal,’ and now you’re saying he actually called you a ‘steaming pile of day-old horse offal’. Can you let me know when you get your story straight?”

Obviously not many people share my little tics when it comes to like and said. But it’s worth the effort to come to some sort of accommodation with this. Like may go away; people don’t say goes as much as they used to, and it’s possible that said will make a comeback. It’s even more likely that some new euphemism will take its place. What about straight-up to be? That one’s happening already: “So then she’s all, ‘Get out of my face!’” Whatever it proves to be, we have evidently decided as a culture that to say doesn’t get the job done. I’m pretty confident this clever language of ours will adapt to help us out.

The giant birds’ nest was created “as a prototype for new and inspiring socializing space, which can be seen as a morph of furniture and playground … Ready to to be used, to be played in, and be worked in.” I think it’s a marvelous idea, and one I am certain to have in my house, once I win the lottery and begin establishing my network of seasonal homes across the globe. But a work space? The thought of clambering into this thing with my colleagues to discuss our latest projects gives me the heebies. It would feel way too much like climbing into bed and I really want to stop thinking about it. Besides, I sometimes have a terrible time staying awake in meetings, and nestling into this, well, nest would be like mainlining an Ambien drip straight into my cerebellum, or whatever part of the brain gives me that happy tired feeling at the end of the day.

So I won’t be pushing to have the giant birds’ nest installed in our office anytime soon. But it did remind me of an idea I had a long time ago that I can’t seem to let go of. It concerns hamsters.

Hamsters, you may have observed, tend to live in little plastic or wire enclosures with everything they need: food, water bottle, exercise wheel, toilet paper tube (not sure what that’s about, I think they like to climb in it, and besides, it’s not like you don’t have a million of them lying around) and, on the floor, some kind of bedding or nesting material, usually wood shavings. I bet that the simplicity of the hamster existence — eat, drink, run around a bit, sleep and pee and crap in the shavings — can exert a primal, healing influence on stressed-out humans. My idea then was to adapt the hamster habitat into a unique retreat: the hamster hotel.

The hamster hotel room is large, about 500 square feet. It has no furniture. It has a ceiling-mounted flatscreen TV, which you watch while lying on your back. A slot in the wall dispenses your food and drink on demand, whatever you want whenever you want. There is no fancy table service. There is, for a modest upgrade charge and if you really feel you need it, a piece of exercise equipment such as a treadmill or stationary bike. You can have a giant cardboard roll if you want; it might be fun to climb in it. There are no toilets, no baths or showers. The temperature is a steady 85 degrees. And you’re naked. Did I forget to mention that? No clothes allowed in the hamster hotel. But you know what you do have?

Shavings. Atop the industrial-grade rubber floor is a comforting, aromatic bed of wood shavings a foot and a half thick. You can lie on it. Roll around on it. Burrow into it. Make shavings angels in it. Throw great handfuls of it into the air and watch it flutter back down. Turn onto your side and spin Curly-style. And when you’re done, breathe a contented sigh and lie back in the shavings … the soft, feathery embrace of the shavings.

Wait a minute, you’re saying — what about my bed? And I ask, do I have to draw you a diagram? You are living the hamster life. Do what hamsters do: build up a nice mound of shavings and nestle into it. The temperature is high enough to lull you into a state of warm, animal-like contentment. Have you ever stepped into a bath so perfectly aligned with your body temperature that you almost can’t feel the water at all? That is what it’s like to snuggle naked into the shavings for a night’s sleep. And if for some reason you feel the primal fear of being preyed upon or feel especially vulnerable sleeping nude, you can always crawl into the giant cardboard tube for a nap away from threatening eyes.

You noticed above that there is no toilet in the room. Well, you don’t see hamsters futzing around with toilets, do you? Just pick a corner and do whatever you need to do right on the spot, kicking over some fresh shavings to cover it. Our premium-quality shavings naturally absorb odor and moisture. Or better yet, just lie there, staring up at your big-screen ceiling TV, and let it come. That’s right. When you’re done, roll over to a new spot or stay there and let it dry. Seriously, you have no idea how liberating this is — it’s enough to make you question the entire premise of civilization itself.

Most clients find a single day’s accommodation at the Hamster Hotel sufficient, and they return to their lives with a renewed vigor and sense of purpose. A few hardy or needful souls stay for days, even weeks, gradually shedding the burdens of their humanity and embracing the hamster within. We like to think of it as “going native,” the act of leaving behind such confining constructs as career, parenthood, family, even speech and bipedal locomotion. Can living in a pile of wood refuse, nude and crawling and rooting like an animal really be worth those things? Wouldn’t you love to find out?

Well, sometimes the marketer in me takes over and I get a little carried away. This is my vision, such as it is. Perhaps it can come true once I’ve won the lottery, after I’m set up with a few giant birds’ nests.

Mastered for iTunes means these albums have been specially tuned for higher fidelity sound on your computer, stereo, and all Apple devices. Browse a range of music across all genres below, and keep checking back as we add more music that is mastered specifically for iTunes.

What this means is anyone’s guess, at least until people prod Apple for details and if Apple deigns to respond. Most likely they’re just compressing the tracks to make them sound louder and punchier. This would make them sound worse rather than better, especially on an iMac or a pair of pack-in iPod earbuds, but that does seem to be where modern tastes have landed us. I don’t suppose I will ever know, as I’m not going to re-buy any of my (relative few) iTunes purchases to compare old and new versions.

What caught my eye was the categories of music available in this new format. You have your Jazz, your Classical and whatnot. And then you have this:

Tastes come and go, but any format meant to appeal to serious audiophiles has to have the Floyd catalog. One day, music players may be able to stream music directly into our brains, leveraging the mind’s extraordinary sensory powers to make you feel as though you are within and surrounded by the music, inhabiting it in every fiber of your being, every nerve ending ablaze with it. And no one will buy it until you can play Dark Side of the Moon in it.

Edited the title to improve the Floyd reference. I can’t believe I got that wrong.

Check out the piece here.

For instance, there was a great deal of attention given recently to a study that tried to persuade people to reduce their energy usage at home. Notices were sent to the highest-consuming households with gentle suggestions that the household in question could do better in conserving energy. The study found that Democratic households were likely to reduce their usage in response; Republican ones, by contrast, were likely to increase it. As noted in the linked article, Rush Limbaugh even encouraged his listeners to turn on all of their lights during Earth Hour, a gesture that certainly cost his audience many thousands of dollars in wasted utility spending. Glenn Beck told his audience not merely to refrain from using their own grocery bags, but to use as much plastic as possible. That’ll show us tree huggers!

It is a commonplace among conservatives that liberals are bereft of humor and joy, hate individual liberty and derive their sole pleasure from curtailing other people’s happiness. A popular conservative slogan goes “Annoy a Liberal: Work Hard and Be Happy.” As a liberal myself, I think it’s only fair to confess that this supposition is true. At our secret monthly meetings (which we totally have, usually in mosques or Whole Foods stores), my fellow liberals and I like to swap stories about the various successes we have had in jealously undermining the successful and the hard-working, persuading women to have abortions and redistributing as much of America’s material wealth to undeserving poor and minority households as possible. We like to strategize about which decadent cultural practice we ought to demonize next: how about off-roading, or fishing? And we speak of the true ache in our hearts when we contemplate those who are prosperous and happy, and who bear the lowest tax burden of nearly anyone in the First World. It is our mission to destroy such comforts, and we will get there one day, Dawkins willing.

At any rate, in the spirit of free discussion, I would like to confess on behalf of my fellow liberals several other activities we liberals hate, and which our conservative countrymen may feel compelled to adopt.

1. Punching Yourself in the Face
As a liberal, my reflexive compassion compels me to help people whether they want it or not. Were I to see a successful American savagely pummel his own mug into swollen, eggplant-like mush in defiance of my touchy-feely values, I would want to see him restrained, evaluated and possibly commited for his own protection. You’re not going to just let me get away with that, are you?

2. Setting Fire to $100 Bills
Little-known fact: the smoke from burning American currency is actually deadly to liberals, and the higher the denomination, the more toxic the fumes. If you were to bring a $5,000 bill to a David Sedaris reading and set it on fire, you would kill most of the audience in the space of a few seconds. You probably don’t have a $5,000 bill, so an equivalent amount of Benjamins would probably do the trick (I haven’t actually tried it).

3. Giving Away All of Your Possessions to a Poor Family
Hey, it’s the government’s job to confiscate your wealth and redistribute it! Stop that!

I offer these suggestions in the hope that my conservative countrymen will make reasoned decisions based on what is actually good for them, rather than what they imagine to be bad for someone else. If that doesn’t work, well, maybe someone will actually punch himself in the face, which would be kind of funny. Glenn Beck, care to take this one up?

When I was growing up, 40 was the official over-the-hill birthday. A 40th birthday party involved novelty canes, ear trumpets, black armbands, walkers and other unfunny, made-to-be-thrown-away crap that occupied a dedicated shelf at Spencer’s Gifts. It still does, somewhat, but as I’ve aged I’ve noticed that culturally, we have tacitly agreed to move back the point beyond which “it’s all downhill from here.” As more Baby Boomers edge closer to the abyss, we have grown less willing to draw the line at which we must admit to ourselves that we are, finally, old.

I am a bit unsure of what to make of it all. Statistically, the odds are that my life is more than half over. When I think of all the things I would like to have done by this age – mostly involving writing and traveling, neither of which I’ve done to anything like the extent I once hoped – I am torn between two competing realizations: that youthful dreams rarely come true and mostly aren’t even meant to, and that I have squandered too much of the only existence I will ever have.

How badly should I feel that I have never lived abroad (well, apart from that semester in college), written a novel or been to Italy? That I work in the corporate world and have often substituted workplace ambition for personal or artistic goals? Is there any point in regretting the many mistakes I’ve made — situations where I sacrificed my happiness for someone else, gave into fear and laziness or knowingly made a bad decision to spare someone’s feelings?

I tell myself that any mistake is worth making as long as I learn from it. I tell myself that it is never too late to do the things that matter to me: to live in a place I don’t know, to use my talents for my own ambitions rather than for my bosses’, to live a life I will be grateful for once it’s over. I think these are valid views — but I would, wouldn’t I?

Shortly before he died, Christopher Hitchens said, “You have to choose your future regrets.” We can never fulfill all our dreams — not if our dreams are worth the name. I haven’t fulfilled all that many of mine. But I do have a beautiful, intelligent and fantastically talented woman to share my life with; reasonably good health; and that persistent, nagging urge to do something more than show up to a job every day — to make something lasting that reflects who I am.

Yes, I wish I had more time ahead of me. But do I wish I were younger? Not a chance. What wisdom I have has been very dearly bought. I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else than where I am today.

Happy birthday? Why, yes it is, thank you.

If you want to buy an iPod shuffle or iPod classic from Apple, you should do it sooner rather than later. We’ve heard those two iPods are getting the axe this year. (Courtesy TUAW)

Assuming this is true, is it likely that Apple is going to release a 128-gigabyte iPod touch this Christmas, so that die-hard music lovers might find something in their stockings that comes close to suiting their needs? I’m guessing not. The mp3 player market is dead. They are to this young decade what digital watches were in the ’80s: formerly sleek emblems of progress reduced in price and stature until they ended up being sold out of gumball machines.

Time was that Apple needed to offer a high-capacity iPod model to stand out from the competition. Now that race is run, and music playing is just one more function on a smart phone, or a handheld gaming and Internet device (to describe the iPod touch accurately). If the rumor is true and the shuffle is in line for the axe along with the classic, that means that the iPod nano will be the only remaining device Apple makes whose primary function is to store and play music — and i think it’s reasonable to assume that the nano will itself continue to exist only until Apple can price an iPod touch below $199. (Side bet: if the above rumor comes to pass, watch the nano drop to $99.)

So why is this a big enough deal that I keep harping on it? Because there is no smartphone or iPod touch that can do what an iPod classic does: hold a library of songs numbering in the tens of thousands, all stored locally and accessible without a network connection. And it does not offer a hardware interface optimized for playing music.

Don’t mistake this for sentimentality or Ludditism. (Ludditery?) I recently started using Rdio and was sufficiently taken with it that I thought it might obviate the need for my iPod classic. It offers a sizable library to choose from, the mobile app is pretty slick and it has some nice music discovery tools. But it doesn’t offer the granularity of iTunes: the ability to rate songs, tag songs, construct dynamic playlists or change metadata. In short, it doesn’t afford the kind of advantages that come from owning and curating your own music files. So Rdio on my iPhone is like having two different, mutually incompatible music libraries, one of which has everything by the Beatles (in mono, even) and not much else, the other of which is so ungainly it has 12 different songs called “Learning to Fly,” just because I wanted to see how many there are. (There are more than 12, but it was starting to get ridiculous.) And if I want to, say, make a playlist with “Flying” and Kate Earl’s “Learning to Fly”? Well, that ain’t happening. I can put Kate Earl on my iPod, but I can’t put the Beatles on Rdio.

If the classic is going away, then I and thousands of others like me are marooned. Our choices are to either keep our devices operating until Apple offers a new product that can serve our needs (mine is already three years old and on its second battery), or jump ship for something else. Such a change, for all I know, may not be possible, or if it’s possible, it may not be worth the trouble. Leaving the iPod will also mean leaving iTunes, and the information that app has stored about my music — my ratings, my playlists, which songs I’ve played or skipped in a given time — is, given the nerd-tastic way I listen to music, almost as valuable as the music itself.

So while I am chagrined to arrive at the end of the road with my iPod, I am hopeful that some competitor out there will finally seize the opportunity to build a music player that offers us what Apple will not. People are still buying vinyl records, for god’s sake. You mean to tell me there is really no return on catering to rabid music listeners — people who have already demonstrated their willingness to devote a lot more of their income to music than the average person?

Anyone want to sell me an mp3 player?

Yah wah
Torment
Eee chop yah wah
Today brings torment
Toe meet toe pee chee keene
We lick the blood from our paws
G’noop dock fling oh ah
And taste our victory

Coat ee chah tu yub nub
All the world is slaughter
Coat ee chah tu yah wah
All the world is torment
Coat ee chah tu glo wah
All the world is ruin
Allay loo ta nuv
Until we end in fire

Glo wah
Ruin
Eee chop glo wah
Today brings ruin
Ya glo wah pee chu nee foam
Let ruin fall from the trees
Ah toot dee awe goon goon daa
And rain down on our foes

Coat ee cha tu goo (Yub nub!)
All the world is war (Slaughter!)
Coat ee cha tu doo (Yah wah!)
All the world is blood (Torment!)
Coat ee cha tu too (Ya chaa!)
All the world is tears (Glory!)
Allay loo tu nuv
Until we end in fire
Allay loo tu nuv
Until we end in fire
Allay loo tu nuv
Until we end in fire

Glo wah
Ruin
Eee chop glo wah
Today brings ruin
Ya glo wah pee chu nee foam
Let ruin fall from the trees
Ah toot dee awe goon goon daa
And rain down on our foes
Allay loo tu nuv
Until we end in fire

To our beloved Cassie [for example] — you would have been 16 years old today. Daddy and I miss you so much and we carry you in our hearts every day. We love you!

Hmm. I take it something happened.

I am not making light of anyone’s tragedy. Truly — the thought of losing a child is horrifying to me and I don’t even have any children. But being a person who suffers from a degree of social awkwardness, I have a masochistic fascination with this kind of social cul-de-sac. The person who posted about this loss obviously did so in the knowledge that those close to her would know what she was talking about. I have not spoken to her in person in twenty years, and barely even pass the time with her on Facebook, and so I have no idea what she’s talking about, apart from what I can infer. The dilemma, obviously, is this:

Is it appropriate to ask for more details when a distant Facebook friend refers to a personal tragedy you know nothing about?

On the one hand, the simple answer appears to be, why not? If they posted it to Facebook of their own accord, it would seem they are capable of engaging with the subject on at least a limited basis. Imagine the corollary real-world experience: you are making the rounds at your high school reunion. Having already met and greeted this friend earlier in the evening, you find yourself near her in a quiet corner where you can exchange words. And she says to you, My daughter would have been 16 years old today. I still think about her all the time. In this situation, it is obviously completely appropriate to ask for more information — indeed, it would be rude not to, and your friend certainly wants to be able to share with you the pain and loss that she has carried with her.

But Facebook is not real life, and it is really not even close to real life. There is nothing in the real world that maps to Facebook’s strange social stew of acquaintances, ex-boyfriends, bosses, grade-school friends, parents and that really nice gal you met at Subway all bobbing around in the same virtual medium. Unless you take the time to stratify these people into castes and direct certain posts only at certain groups — which, judging by my personal experience, virtually no Facebook user knows how to do — your tragic outpouring is hitting every pair of eyeballs with the same force. It seems crazy to think that someone would compose a reflection on the death of her own child that is equally suitable for both her mother and for a schoolmate she hasn’t seen since Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em came out. Therefore, I think she can’t be doing it on purpose: the Facebook settings that would allow her to target her post to a select group of readers must either be too opaque to figure out or she just doesn’t know about them. Which leaves me thinking, again, that I really ought to not say anything.

I don’t know. I really have no clue what is the appropriate thing to do. But I can tell you this: if you came to this post through a link on my Facebook wall, it’s because I wanted you, and you specifically, to see it. I think I’ve had all the social ambiguity I can take for a while.

“That’s All Right,” Elvis Presely

Originally recorded by Arthur Crudup
My ranking: #7

One of the challenges the self-styled critic faces in compiling a list like this is the temptation to nominate songs because they’re “classics”: songs that mark a pivotal movement or moment without necessarily meaning anything to the critic on a personal level — precisely the level at which music should matter to us most. (This was the reason that the eventual Popdose winner, Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” placed a relatively low 21 on my list: I recognize it as a great song, but I rarely stop to listen to it.) Bearing that in mind, I think I was on firm ground in naming this primal Elvis number to such a high place on the list. Say what you will about “Blue Suede Shoes;” for my money, this is where it begins, both for Elvis and for rock n’ roll in general. Its recording is one of rock’s great legendary origin stories. Having pestered local record producer Sam Phillips for ages for a chance to record, Elvis found himself struggling to get a passable performance of “I Love You Because,” the kind of schmaltzy ballad his mother loved. Between increasingly futile takes, Elvis and the hired musicians began messing around with this old Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup number, and Sam Phillips heard his young singer suddenly come to life. The rest we all more or less know, but you don’t need to know the rest to hear greatness here: the originality is palpable, the spontaneity of a kind almost completely vanished from modern music.

“Way Down in the Hole,” the Blind Boys of Alabama

Originally recorded by Tom Waits
My ranking: #13

OK, so a lot of people know this one as “The Theme to Season One of The Wire.” I get that. And I accept that my affection for this song is probably colored by my admiration for its use on that show. But it’s not hard to look past that association to an already great song become even greater. Tom Waits’ take on the song is laced with his customary and distinctive irony, a subtle flavoring of the material that, rather than undercutting the song’s spiritual content, seems to afford it a range of plausible interpretations. The Blind Boys of Alabama by contrast serve it up straight, opening a window directly onto a rich musical and spiritual tradition that Waits views through a funhouse mirror. I’m an atheist, but I still know a great spiritual when I hear one.

“Mr. Moonlight,” the Beatles

Originally recorded by Dr. Feelgood and the Interns
My ranking: #79

This may well be the most underappreciated and misunderstood track in the Fabs’ canon. Ian MacDonald in Revolution in the Head called it “excruciating.” Jonathan Gould in Can’t Buy Me Love thought it “falls completely flat.” I happen to love John Lennon’s unhinged vocal, the comically straight backing vocals by Paul and George, and of course that organ solo, as though a member of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra popped into the Cavern on a bet and decided to briefly sit in with the house band. In fact, far from being an aberration, this is exactly the kind of song the Beatles loved to do — a vital and often-forgotten element of their greatness. For one thing, it was obscure; it actually came out as a B-side, a favorite tactic of theirs to ensure no competing act would be playing their material. For another, it was goofy — the Beatles relished taking oddities like this and turning them into raving rock n’ roll songs. And finally, it helped to fill out what were often extremely long sets: the Beatles played for as long as eight hours some nights, forcing them not only to become tight, accomplished musicians but also to assimilate nearly any raw material into their act and make it their own. If you had happened to stumble into the Star Club in Hamburg in 1961, or the Cavern in Liverpool, this song or something like it is probably what you would have heard: an R&B relic given an unlikely second life by the greatest cover band in rock history.

This is not to say he is leaving Apple. He is continuing on as Chairman of the Board, so it seems reasonable to assume he will still exert considerable direct influence on Apple’s products and overall direction. That face-saving news probably helped insulate Apple’s stock from the bad news. As of this writing, it has taken a five-percent hit, much less than the cataclysm many predicted would befall Apple should Jobs have died, quit or otherwise left the company abruptly.

Apart from sadness and a vague sense of unease or disquiet, I have these thoughts on hearing this news.

Whatever health issues Jobs has been dealing with, he has not been able to overcome them. Jobs must have reached a point where he and his doctors realized his recovery would make no more significant progress. It is possible (and I certainly hope) that Jobs has many years ahead of him in which to contribute to Apple and to enjoy life with his family and friends. However, it is just as possible — and knowing Jobs’ concern for his privacy, not at all unlikely — that there may be more bad news about Steve Jobs ahead, and that it will come sooner than anyone wants to accept. I take no pleasure in thinking that. But I do think it.

In a sense, we are about to see the ultimate test of Jobs as a businessman and leader. How well has he inculcated his values and expectations into Apple’s culture? How well, in other words, has he enabled it to continue as though he were still there? The answer to this question will not be apparent for some time; Jobs will, as noted, continue to be involved with Apple, and it will take months or even years for the efforts he has overseen to come to fruition. That will not, alas, stop the tech pundits from clucking over Apple’s “loss of vision” at the first post-Jobs bump in the road to come along. For example, if the iPhone 4′s “Antenna-gate” issue had happened at a post-Jobs Apple, no one would skip a beat before denouncing the scandal as the inevitable result of Apple adrift in the leadership vacuum left by its departed visionary: “This would never have happened if Steve had been there.” There’s going to be a lot of bullshit like this in the months ahead, I’m afraid.

But it is true that, at some distant point, people will look at Apple and have to decide, as well as they can, whether the company they see is truly living up to its founder’s standards, or whether it shows the first signs of an inevitable decline. Apple could easily remain unassailable with no input at all from Jobs for at least three years, and probably closer to five. By then, the tech landscape may have shifted sufficiently to allow a smaller, faster competitor to undermine Apple’s dominance or to establish a new computing paradigm ahead of it. This is going to happen eventually; it’s just a matter of when. The only real question is: will it happen sufficiently far in the future that no one can reasonably blame it on Jobs’ absence? Indeed, could Apple remain dominant for so long that Jobs himself one day becomes a hazily remembered, almost mythic figure like Henry Ford, with no direct associations with any of Apple’s then-current products?

I think it could happen. If it does, that will be the true confirmation of Steve Jobs’ genius. He would not have merely started Apple. He would not have merely rebuilt it from a teetering computer company into the world’s most valuable technology company, capable of redefining entire markets at a stroke. He would have given it a soul, and not just a soul but his soul — the one thing even some of his greatest admirers were convinced he could not do. He would have achieved a kind of immortality: a cluster of dedicated people who absorbed his ways of thinking and distilled them into an essence that can be taught and passed on after he was gone. If he succeeds in this, then there is no telling how long Apple could remain in its present dominant position. Jobs came back to Apple 15 years ago. What could Apple be in another 15 years? It could come back down to earth, become just another successful purveyor of computers, gadgets and lifestyle accessories. Or it could be something that no one today can see, an integral part of industries we haven’t yet imagined. We might even one day call it the most powerful and innovative company that has ever been — greater than U.S. Steel, greater than Ford, greater than AT&T or Microsoft — a company so ingrained in our lives that it literally has no precedent.

Knowing what little I do about Steve Jobs, I am guessing that is the legacy he strives for. Will he succeed? I wouldn’t bet against him. How amazing it is to think that for all Jobs has accomplished, today really only marks a new beginning.

There is a complicated flood of emotions that arises in this moment. The first was blind fear: was the cat all right? (She was.) There is helplessness, a kind of grief, and in my case at least, a deep, sour rage. I couldn’t keep still, pacing relentlessly back and forth waiting for the police to arrive, and after them, the evidence technician. I prowled our rooms again and again, spotting what was missing, trying to notice everything that had changed. The DVD player was definitely gone. My wife’s laptop bag was rifled, the computer missing. The jewelry dish on the dresser was empty; what was in it again? Her sapphire engagement ring. Maybe her antique watch. Was that bag sitting on the bed when we left? Did I leave that drawer open? “What about your camera?” my wife asked. Checked the windowsill in the office where the camera bag was. Gone.

The initial shock wore off, after a night or two. Our broken door was replaced and fortified with a piercing battery-powered alarm. I called my insurance company and put the wheels in motion to have our stuff replaced, inasmuch as it can be. (If you rent and don’t have insurance, stop reading this and call your agent now.) What remains is the sense of violation — I try not to imagine the burglar actually walking through our apartment, sizing up our possessions for their pawn value, perhaps glancing at the cat regarding him quizzically from her carpeted perch — and the knowledge that we are not safe, at least not from anyone determined to do whatever necessary to steal from us and invade our lives. The worst injustice is not that our stuff was taken; it’s that someone can rob you of your sense of control over your own life, and that they can do it so easily and with so few consequences.

I suppose there is a chance that some of our items will be recovered. The police have told us, that our best bet for finding our things is to check the pawn shops ourselves, on the principle that we are best suited to recognize our possessions when we see them — and a tacit admission that, absent a really lucky break, there’s not much they can do. I am not holding out hope. The things are gone. We’ll get new ones. The sense of security and control is another matter. I’ve been burglarized once before, and I can attest that you do get over it; at any rate, you forget to be afraid. You could argue that we shouldn’t, that illusions of security are ultimately dangerous. But we all know that’s bunk. Living in fear is no life at all, and it’s easy to forget in a time like this that most people actually are decent. I think that setting my alarm when I leave the apartment is a sensible precaution. And I hope I won’t lapse back into the lassitude that had me believing that locking my door was my only responsibility in maintaining my safety. I won’t live in fear, but I really ought not to live in ignorance either.

As for the experience of singing or watching karaoke, I realized this: karaoke is like jet-skiing, in that it is an enjoyable pastime for those actually doing it and a grating annoyance for everyone else. I have jet-skied and thought it was a blast. Yet watching jet-skiers roar across the placid surface of a lake, frightening wildlife and disturbing everyone’s peace, makes me angrily denounce the steady decline of civilization itself.

I have never sang karaoke. It’s bad enough I like jet-skiing.

Arrived at office. Changed shoes, stopped at coffee machine and chatted with copywriter about her sons, one of whom is returning to live with her.

9:07

Entered office of Ran Bao-tu, Senior Creative Director and kung-fu master of unmatched skill, nobility and judgment, for morning conference only to find room in shambles and Master Ran lying sprawled on floor, severely beaten and on the brink of death. Cradled master’s head on my knees, imploring: “Who did this?”. Marshaling last ounce of strength, master weakly named Bai Tiao-man, leader of rival kung fu school Cobra Whisper, as his assailant. Master then croaked final breath, dying.

9:08

Swore revenge in the name of my ancestors on Cobra Whisper and its contemptible, craven master, Bai Tiao-man.

9:09

Began catching up on email.

9:19

Sent Outlook meeting request challenging Bai Tiao-man to combat to the death at 5:00 pm. Request was promptly accepted.

9:30

Met with members of Media, Production and PR teams to coordinate efforts on new brand rollout scheduled for next month. Received numerous condolences and expressions of sympathy on death of Master Ran.

10:18

On way to water fountain, chanced upon my counterpart in Marketing at Cobra Whisper, who disgraced Master Ran’s good name with vile falsehoods and insults. Confrontation quickly escalated into combat. Fight ranged throughout Accounting and Human Resources, ending in front of vice president’s office, where I finally bested my opponent with rapid combination of Crane Plucks Eggs from Nest and Swift Tiger Pounce.

10:22

Stood out in lobby alone, silently mourning Master Ran, a single stoic tear streaming down cheek.

10:30

Met with Associate Vice President to discuss upcoming product launches. Before adjourning meeting, AVP warned me that my skills were not sufficient to defeat rival kung fu master in battle. Referred me to Chief Creative Officer, rumored keeper of Sword of Hands, the deadliest of all kung fu styles.

11:10

Sent Outlook meeting request for appointment with CCO at only time available: 4:45. No reply forthcoming; received an email from secretary saying that CCO was in meetings all day and 4:45 appointment could not be guaranteed.

11:30

Impromptu memorial service for Master Ran in break room. Bai Tiao-man, accompanied by several direct reports, brazenly attended service, laughing derisively and promising to swiftly bring death to me and to our school. Melee promptly broke out. In rash fit of anger, rushed Bai Tiao-man intending to strike him down. Rival master quickly parried my enraged and wild kicks and blows. Though a fiend with neither honor nor courage, he nevertheless easily knocked me to the ground, laughed and confirmed our meeting for 5:00 p.m.

12:15

Lunch with members of Public Relations and Media Development. Discussed strategies for facing Bai Tiao-man and split large platter of nachos.

1:20

Met with members of Marketing, IT and Web to discuss ongoing rollout of new CMS. General agreement that initial schedule was too aggressive and so several milestone deadlines were revised.

1:45

Worked at desk on drafts for several upcoming marketing pieces. Thoughts invariably went back to earlier years, when I chose to pledge my loyalty to Ran Bao-tu over mother’s objections. Remembered leaving home for last time, watching through window of bus as mother wept to see me go, father standing behind her, gruff and implacable, his emotion visible only in the sorrowful cast of his jaw.

3:20

Googled “Sword of Hands.” Found links to several demonstration videos on YouTube but was blocked from viewing them by company firewall. Also surreptitiously followed several BuzzFeed links and checked fantasy baseball team standings.

3:39

Spoke by telephone to CCO’s secretary. Was assured I was “pencilled in” for 4:45 conference.

3:41

Delegation of several direct reports visited me in office to ask me not to fight Bai Tiao-man. Though a worthy pupil of Ran Bao-tu and a winner of several regional awards for excellence in advertising copywriting, I was assured my kung fu was no match for that of Bai Tiao-man, and that I could not hope to master the Sword of Hands in time to defeat him. Calmly assured my colleagues that if my only remaining service to Ran Bao-tu was to die in the defense of his honor, I would consider such a death eminently worthwhile.

3:56

Team designer and student of kung fu Ma Xia-hui came to office to flatly inform me she could not allow me to face Bai Tiao-man and bring even greater ruin and disgrace to our school. To my astonishment, she presented the Crane at Eventide stance, a clear invitation to combat. At first I offered no defense, refusing to raise a hand in anger at a fellow pupil and colleague of several years’ standing. It became clear that though Ma Xia-hui fought reluctantly, she was nevertheless in deadly earnest, striking swiftly and with great power. After twice enduring blows strong enough to knock me to the ground, as well as the destruction of a new iMac and several items of office furniture, I rose and counterattacked with a combination of Drunken Beggar and Tiger’s Shadow on the Leaves. With the fight with Bai Tiao-man heavy in my thoughts, I resolved to bring the duel to a swift conclusion and felled Xia-hui with Executioner’s Hood, tempered to leave her unconscious but alive.

4:15

Called into impromptu meeting to discuss revisions to a campaign slated to start several weeks hence. Even with client’s repeated objections that our approach was “too sophisticated — we’re not selling BMWs here,” my thoughts strayed to my imminent confrontation with Bai Tiao-man. Though I knew I would bring honor to the duel, I could find no way in which I might prevail against Bai or restore our school’s shattered reputation. Teammates appeared reluctant to look me in the eye, and client admitted she hadn’t read most of the draft copy I had supplied her, saying it simply hadn’t “felt right.”

4:26

Received request for meeting tomorrow regarding upcoming healthcare campaign. Responded with “Accept Tentatively.”

4:31

Returned to cubicle and began preparing status report for all ongoing projects, to assist my colleagues following my inevitable death at the hands of Bai Tiao-man. Ma Xia-hui, recovered from our battle, appeared and promptly fell to her knees, begging my forgiveness. I assured her she was not at fault and hoped that, as the leader of our school following my demise, she would continue to uphold the integrity and values of Master Ran. Choking back tears, she hoarsely thanked me for the honor of fighting and creating award-winning direct-mail and point-of-sale advertising at my side. My own emotions nearly overwhelming me, I replied that the honor had been mine, and turned back to my screen, lest my tears betray me.

4:45

Entered team shrine for solitary meditation prior to fighting Bai Tiao-man. Lit incense cones in tribute to my ancestors and to Ran Bao-tu, asking all those who watched over me for the strength to fight with honor and courage. A shadow darkened the altar; it was the team secretary, informing me that the Chief Creative Officer, Wu Xuan-ke, would see me. I looked at my iPhone and saw that it was 4:53.

4:54

With no time to spare and fear getting the best of me, I pleaded with Venerable Master Wu to teach me anything he could of the Sword of Hands, surely my only hope of escaping death at the hands of Bai Tiao-man. He smiled. “Master Bai’s weakness is not in his arm or his fist, but in his thoughts. Your late master, the honorable Ran Bao-tu, has already given you all the skills you need to defeat Bai Tiao-man and the blackguard arts of Cobra Whisper.” When I related my earlier disgrace at his hands, he raised a finger. I fell silent. “He who cannot recall the lesson when it is needed most is a poor student. And according to your annual performance reviews, you are an excellent student indeed.” A soft chime emanated from his MacBook Pro on the desk in front of him. He folded his arms and looked kindly upon me. “And now I believe you have a meeting to attend.”

5:00

Arrived at the Executive Board Room to find Bai Tiao-man waiting for me. He was alone. He expressed frank surprise that I would have the courage to face him in the end. Like all of Bai’s utterances, it only further revealed him as a man to whom honor and respect were alien. The time for words had passed and I did not dignify his craven taunt. I assumed Crane at Eventide. He laughed and took a further opportunity to slander our school’s good name and to promise that it would die with me this afternoon. He went so far as to take no defensive stance at all, simply waiting for the first blow which, as the challenger, it was my duty to strike.

Enraged at the panoply of insults I had endured at his hands, I lashed out with Crane Catching Pebbles, and was easily turned aside; I responded with Spider at Compass Points, and he struck me a blow that sent me sprawling across the hard oak conference table. He laughed, still having assumed no posture of defense. I rose and we circled, a sneer playing across his thin lips. There was no hesitancy in his movements, no telltale wavering of concentration; he was like a solid wall, impervious to my arts. Determined to break his mocking demeanor, I struck with Firefly Dagger and landed a stinging blow to his sternum. His anger flared and he howled and came at me with arms like pistons, brushing aside my defenses and striking me hard in the chest. Again, I lost my footing, and my head struck the floor and rang with the blow.

I rose, my feet unsteady beneath me. Bai now stood in the Venom Brood stance, his fingers bent like fangs of oak ready to strike me down. My attack was clumsy and obvious. He struck my side and my throat, then haughtily kicked my weakened legs out from under me and I fell yet again.

Fear overtook me as I lay on the blue and gray carpeting, and I struggled to remember some words of my master, anything that would bestow the clarity I needed to prevail. Bai circled near me, fully alert and ready for me to engage him again. I hauled myself to my hands and knees. I saw blood ooze from my mouth onto the carpet. My wounds throbbed with a pain that rippled throughout my body. In an instant the scene around me dissolved and I was in Master Ran’s office, in precisely this posture, having just failed a combat trial in one of my annual performance reviews. He had knocked me to the ground again and again, and this time ordered me to remain on my knees.

“Do not get up,” he said, “until you know why you get up — until you can engage the opponent with thoughtfulness and purpose. Let the enemy come on like the black storm, his heart knowing only rancor and destruction. It is a fool who fights the rain storm. Fight not on the enemy’s terms, but on your own. Face your enemy with honor where he is dishonorable, courage where he is cowardly, mercy where he is cruel. Where he rushes headlong, looking only for the quick path to victory, you must see the blow that is yet to be struck. Look not to the lightning strike, but to the dark clouds that are its portent.”

In an instant the vision had passed and I was back in the conference room, bleeding and stiff with pain. I had not fully understood the lesson that day. But now, facing my own black storm of an enemy, I knew what I must do.

I rose to my feet but assumed no stance. I looked at Bai Tiao-man and for the first time I pitied him — pitied his shrunken heart and his coldness, his pleasure in the weakness and failure of others. I saw how his own lost honor haunted him and drove him to destroy the good and noble wherever he met them. Bai unleashed another taunt, but his words had lost their force. I raised one hand in a parrying stance, a posture one would adopt in facing a novice. In fury he lunged and I stepped beyond his reach. Again he lunged, and again, each time coming within a hair’s breadth. He saw cowardice, for that was what he looked for; and I saw the simple crudity of his attacks, their single-minded dullness. He struck out with great power at that which most easily presented itself. I knew then I could defeat him, and my pity for him grew.

I stepped within his reach and parried his attacks with the Bending Reed form — a form useless for counterattack, but my enemy’s frustration mounted, as I had known it would. His blows grew wilder, and I could now read them in his face before he threw them: now was the subtle flicker of eye and mouth that betrayed the opponent at war with himself. I struck with Fist of Hummingbird and he staggered. There was fear in his eyes now as the specter of defeat entered his mind for the first time, fed on itself and grew larger. Now would he be at his most dangerous — and his most vulnerable. I closed on him with the Hundred Eels Fists, giving him no room to counter, and his will broke. He gave ground and I advanced, diverting his desperate blows and choosing my attacks for maximum effect on my opponent’s mind and body. He cursed me helplessly, unable to see how he himself had given me the key to his defeat. He was now mine to finish. I struck with Hungry Oak and sent him to the floor.

“Why continue?” I asked, with what I sincerely hoped was a note of kindness in my voice. “Has there not been enough death today?”

I watched the struggle of emotions play across his face, his fear and rage and pride combating for dominance. I had little doubt which would be the victor, but honor demanded I offer him a final choice.

“No,” he spat at me between heaving breaths. “There is not quite yet enough death today, little pupil.” He lurched to his feet and came at me one last time.

He was still fast, still powerful, but his will had already surrendered. I was ready with Executioner’s Hood, and I felled him.

5:18

Returned to my desk to find Ma Xia-hui waiting for me. Her demeanor was dignified but I read the joy in her eyes. We embraced without embarrassment. She asked if Bai Tiao-man still lived.

I laughed. “Our school still lives. Our honor still lives. Whether Bai Tiao-man still lives is for him to decide.”

5:19

Changed response to tomorrow’s meeting to “Accepted.” Shut down computer and left for the day.

But the fact that OS X 10.7 is being released to the public for the measly price of $29.99 (side note: what’s with the double-decimal pricing?) is a huge deal, and not merely because it will likely be the most successful — that is, the most immediately widespread — OS release Apple has ever had. It symbolically closes an era that began 16 years ago with Windows 95: the era of the retail software event. Back then, the country went crazy for Windows 95 in a way that hasn’t been seen since, well, the iPhone came out. People lined up for it, bought it in droves, gossiped and kibitzed and complained about it. A lot of people liked it, a lot didn’t (at least at first), but everybody had an opinion. Windows 95 was more than the tech story of the year: it was the heart of the tech universe, a symbol of how much more than mere technology computer software was becoming. And it was Microsoft’s baby.

I’ve written before about Microsoft’s nostalgia for that era. Each Windows release since then has tried to capture some of that ol’ time OS religion, to steadily diminishing returns. Apple is finally and definitively saying goodbye to all that — and revealing these twentieth-century theatrics for the relic they are. Oh, they’ll make a big deal out of OS X Lion; there will be marketing, commercials, gargantuan enlargements in the windows of Apple retail stores. But there will be no more lines snaking out of those stores, no more giveaway t-shirts and bottles of water handed out to the waiting faithful. Lion is simply a conspicuous stage in an ongoing, iterative process, an inflection point in the otherwise smooth and steady evolution of the Macintosh computing experience. The software itself is a big deal, but acquiring it will not be — in fact, even the time-honored process of installing from physical media seems now a distasteful relic of an earlier age, like handcranking your car to start it.

So what does this mean for the future of the Mac OS? I don’t mean to be one of those discontented types always looking ahead to the next upgrade. I frankly can’t imagine how the operating system will evolve from here. But I do wonder about OS X’s future as both technology and product. When Mac OS X came out ten tumultuous years ago, Apple touted it as the platform that would grow with the Mac for the next decade or more. That decade is up. Could Mac OS X become obsolete? Short of a revolution in computing that obviated the microchip itself, I’m hard pressed to imagine a scenario in which OS X is not the foundation for every platform Apple ships. I’m no developer, but I think the technological underpinnings are sufficiently abstracted that even a kernel rewrite could be brought off relatively smoothly.

So assume that OS X will be with us, in form if not precisely in name, for the foreseeable future. What of Mac OS X the product? When Windows ruled the computing landscape, operating system upgrades were infrequent, ponderous events, accompanied with massive fanfare, scores of helpful books and magazine articles — an entire ecosystem of media and symbiotic technology. Apple changed that model by releasing OS X upgrades, for a time, every year. Eventually Microsoft got the message: you can’t spend seven years fiddling with your software anymore. Now that Apple has ended the era of the retail software release, what else might it dispense with? Does Mac OS X even need milestone updates? I feel quite certain that Steve Jobs finds it distasteful to even bother his users with something so esoteric as software upgrades. Why should you have to know, or care about, the version of the system software you are running? With an electronic app store, it is a simple matter to tag a potential purchase: “The application you have chosen will not run on your computer as it is presently configured. Click here to upgrade your system software and return to this purchase.”

Apple’s WWDC keynote represented a bold step into a new era of computing: one more decoupled, constantly in flux, yet potentially more liberating than anything we’ve yet seen. It’s impossible to say yet what it all means. But the rules have changed, and the future will become ever trickier to predict.

Not that it will stop any of us from trying.

AppleInsider

This source, who has an unproven track record, claims that Apple higher-ups were pushing for an aggressive price point on Lion — an approach the company already employed with great success when Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard launched in late 2009. Snow Leopard debuted with a $29 price tag, and that strategy resulted in sales that doubled the previous record-setting launch of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

The article goes on to note that Apple software released through the Mac App Store is often significantly cheaper than the same software’s boxed retail version, so there is a further precedent should Apple decide to go this route.

I plan to upgrade to Lion no matter what it costs, so I’d be delighted to get it for $20 rather than the customary $129. However, there are a couple of reasons why I won’t think this will happen:

1. Cheap now, cheap forever

It’s easy to make a product expensive and then gradually reduce the price. It’s much harder to start cheap and then get more expensive. Apple may not be forever inclined to effectively give away major releases of their operating system. It’s generally a bad idea to “train” the market to expect high value at cheap prices. Which leads me to the next reason:

2. Perceived value

Have you ever shopped for wine and found yourself selecting the second-least-expensive bottle? We like things to be cheap, but not too cheap, especially when it’s something to be enjoyed; we don’t like to feel as though we’re skimping on our own pleasure. Apple, of course, is all about perceived value, and their computers are marketed not just as powerful tools but as fun to use in themselves. Along with industrial design and a certain aspirational, clever-but-not-hip advertising approach, price has been one of the chief means by which Apple sets its products apart in the market. It’s not that the products are overpriced, for they usually compare quite favorably, even aggressively, with products of similar calibre. It’s that Apple doesn’t make cheap stuff. Even the entry-level Apple products, like the iPod shuffle, have a certain robustness and elegance that communicates that they were made with care — and not cheaply. (Apple got away with underpricing Snow Leopard by explicitly managing expectations. It was clear from the get-go that there was not a lot of user-directed innovation in that release.)

So I am guessing that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion will appear on Apple retail shelves for the customary $129, with the App Store version (it seems increasingly certain there will be one) offered at a modestly reduced price, say $79. If you’re selling “the world’s most advanced operating system,” after all, you ought to charge what it’s actually worth.