iTunes is. . .

incredibly creepy, with a sort of Big Brother vibe. I am pretty sure that it can read my mind. It's either that, or, as Rockwell so astutely put it, somebody's watching me. I guess technically that part was sung by Michael Jackson, but let's not split hairs here.

There are two parts to this theory. Have you ever been listening to iTunes or your iPod, and the next song that comes on is one that you had mentioned earlier in a conversation? That happens to me all the time. Now, it could be a coincidence, but at last count, my iTunes/iPod had 7,345 songs, so that's a pretty huge coincidence. I don't think that I mention the vast majority my songs in daily conversation, so the fact that iTunes knows what I'm talking about scares me. If "Somebody's Watching Me" comes on while I am writing this, I may completely freak out. It may be hard to distinguish between completely freaked-out Jon and regular Jon, as I imagine many of their behaviours will overlap.

The second part of the theory comes from the other day. We were doing various cleaning activities, and Kathryn was listening to some radio station on her iPhone (which I am pretty sure she likes more than she likes me, but that is a story for another day). However, the battery life on those things is not that spectacular, so we figured you could probably listen to the same stations via iTunes. Except that for some reason, there was no "Radio" option on my version of iTunes. I thought that I probably just hid it like I hid some of the tabs, but then when I went to. . . unhide (?) it, it was all grayed out and not allowed. "Podcasts" was also blocked, so if you have a podcast, that's why I wasn't listening to it. My sincerest apologies.

After my 3 seconds of trying to figure it out, I gave up and went back to destroying cardboard boxes with the box cutter I found in a drawer. Kathryn discovered that, for whatever reason, iTunes had decided to enable various parental control settings, which just happened to include blocking the radio stations and podcast downloads. That is weird.

Look, iTunes: I have 37 songs in the library containing the word "Fuck" in the title (3 of which are named "Fuck You." Rappers are creative. . .), 41 with the word "Shit," and a whole slew of album covers featuring the words "Parental Advisory" and "Explicit Content." Clearly I've been exposed to anything that could possibly come through the airwaves of the Radiolo Acoustic Cafe station. Maybe you should work on a way that the album art for all my songs could be acquired from the internet while they are playing instead of trying to protect me from curse words.

Sadly, this misguided effort by iTunes still amounts to more "parenting" than a lot of my students get from their actual parents. It turns out that making kids is way more fun than raising them.

-Jon

PS - Rockwell's 1984 masterpiece was not one of the 7 songs that played during this writing. Perhaps my paranoia is misplaced. Or, and this is more likely, perhaps iTunes is trying to lure me into a false sense of security. Or, and this is even more likely, I think this is the kind of ridiculousness that results from me not eating dinner and letting my blood sugar drop.