From today's Cheryl Waters (of KEXP) email playlist/concert/music news update:

Am I the only one who takes 20 effin' minutes to untangle the earphone cord on my iPOD? I'm practically done with my run by the time I get the damn earpieces untangled and into my ears. GRRRR! I was ready to throw the damn thing in the lake tonight.

Rest assured Cheryl that you're not the only one. Apple coats their earphone cords with a special "tangling solution", so that no matter how carefully you wrap the cord, it will always be big gnarly mess when you go to use it again. This coincides with Apple's overall product strategy of creating products that are so sexy that no matter how un-useful they are, you will still pay exorbitant amounts of monies for them.

Song of the Day - Walter Reed by Michael Penn. Michael (who is the big brother of Sean Penn and husband of Aimee Mann) has some solidly folky material out right now on his latest release Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947. From the samples I've heard so far, this lead track is by far the strongest one on the album, but I'm going to stop short of calling it my favorite until I've heard all the tracks in their entirety.

This is a great song to really lengthen that stride during a run and is freely downloadable on the internet on a number of sites. The video is stylistically interesting and is worth checking out as well.