Tyler Cowen, over at Marginal Revolution, divides radio listeners into two camps: A – those who only want to hear music from their large stock of familiar/favorite songs and B – those who only want to hear music from their small stock of familiar/favorite songs.

If this is a true generalization, it explains to me fully why I have absolutely no interest in satellite radio. In Ohio, growing up, we had a Top-40 station, and then a Top-40 station for people who didn’t like music by black people. Their slogan was “All of today’s best music, with none of the rap”. Satellite radio is this impulse taken to the extreme — how else could you explain a station on XM that is “all about the most important and well known songs in the history of Alternative Music.” Clearly, that’s a sack of horseshit, right?

For me, there are only two reasons to listen to music on the radio, of any type. First, to be exposed to something new, different, or interesting. Second, and an orthogonal point, is to be exposed to something unpleasant, jarring, ugly, or disheartening. What is the point of listening to a classic rock station if they’re never going to play any Eagles? You need to be punished every now and again, when you listen to the radio. For every Whole Lotta Love, there has to be a D’yer Mak’er.

Listening to the radio in the car — if everything that came on was something you wanted to hear, you’d never get to yell “CHRIST!” and almost crash the car trying to avoid the latest band from a British isle that someone, somewhere, thinks is the new Radiohead. And, you’d never get to change channels and catch the last 30 seconds of whatever mischief Pharrell Williams has cooked up for you this month, leaving you with an unreachable itch you’ll spend the next several hours channel-hopping trying to scratch.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go slip some Mariah Carey onto my girlfriend’s iPod.

The ladyfriend is in the other room watching Alias, and I’m hearing the melodic strains of “Fade into You” by Mazzy Star wafting out of the spy thriller. Let’s say you’re a music coordinator for a major network drama, and you need something “romantic” and “bittersweet” to play while your main characters look at each other and silently smolder while also defusing a bomb or something. Let’s also say that it’s the year 2005, and that Mazzy Star song is now 11 years old. You, music coordinator, need to think of a different song. I know, it’s your go-to song, your playmaker, but you are a hack if you can’t come up with something else. Yeah, you heard me. If your first thought was either “Portishead” or “Postal Service” you should seriously start thinking about retirement.

Besides, everyone knows that use of “Fade into You” is tacky and sad, ever since Paul Verhoeven staged a SPACE FIST-FIGHT to it in 1997’s Starship Troopers. You can’t top that, Alias music coordinator, with your pouty-yet-horsey faced heroine and her perfectly coiffed man-boy teenbeat Baldwinesque co-star. Just give it up.

1. Stay With Me The Small Faces

   So, in the mornin’, please don’t say you love me
   ‘Cause you know I’ll only kick you out the door
   Yeah, I’ll pay your cab fare home, you can even use my best cologne,
   Just don’t be here in the mornin’ when I wake up.

2. So Ghetto Jay-Z

   You’ll be wearing a black suit a long time
   I put your crew in hard bottoms
   The priest is like, “God’s got him
   He never did nuttin to nobody but them boys shot him”

   Read more »

J. Sanchez waxes rhapsodic about his new Grado SR-60 headphones, and I have to agree with him — I bought a set in the fall, and they’re just amazing.

And they’re stylish! (Picture of me wearing said headphones available upon demand)

Last week, I installed a modchip in my XBox.

The process itself was pretty simple. I went with the Xecuter-3 chip, which I guess is the latest-and-greatest, but really, they all seem to do the same thing. The hardest part of the whole deal was finding a Torx-20 and a Torx-10 screwdriver with which to open up the box. While I was in there, I also installed a quieter, larger fan and a quieter, larger hard drive.

One of the nice features of the new modchips is that you can upgrade their firmware over the web. The modchip arrived with a stub BIOS that allowed me to load a real one via my web browser (I ended up having to use Safari, as Firefox and IE both crapped out in different, maddening ways).

What can I do with my new, modified XBox? Well, I can copy games to the hard drive and play them directly from there, instead of the (slower, noisy) disc. Using the XBox Media Center, I can watch movies and listen to music stored on my home network’s server. In theory, I’m also able to download ripped games from the internet and play them, but this seems to only be possible if you’re 13 and wear saggy jeans.