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Not a column about music downloads
From all outward appearances, Apple's new iTunes Music Store is pulling 'em in like free burgers at the local casino. And "casino" seems to be appropriate, with at least one article popping up comparing searching for (and buying) favorite tunes to compulsive gambling. People are falling all over themselves in self-congratulatory frothing for finding that certain tune they've always wanted, which only proves to me that the service is bound to grow and grow to be a monster hit. Well done, Apple. Too bad I'm such a schlump. I dunno, it just doesn't grab me, all music, all the time.

Don't misunderstand, I totally love music, but there isn't any playing as I write this. I love it too much, you see. I even make my own music. The thing is, when I hear a song I like, I can't concentrate on anything else. Believe me, I've tried. I worked for years that way, with bone-crunching rock & roll shaking the foundations. I found that this kind of environment is very good for any kind of non-verbal creativity, like painting or making sculpture, but it just plays hell with writing. The kicker is that I didn't think so at the time and cranked out tons o' crap thinking it was Moby Dick. Wasn't! Isn't! Won't be! In a way this just isn't fair. Given my extensive background in multi-tasked unmentionable practices of various epochs, I should be the Synesthetic Kid. (Heck, maybe I am. Maybe that's what it is about the music.)

My artist sister in Austin, Texas was one of the first people I ever knew to "need" a portable tape player to accompany her exercising. I thought this was a great idea at first and tried my own version of musical exercise using a tiny FM radio -- once! Simply put, I hated it. I hated having something between me and the natural sounds all around: birds, cows, bugs, wind, airplanes, tractors, cars and bikes coming up behind me (yikes), those sorts of things. I also found that the music interfered with the meditation I naturally engaged in while walking along peaceful country roads. What all of this means is that while I'd enjoy loading songs on an iPod for playing on a music system in another location or for pumping through a car stereo, I've never wanted to walk around with headphones on. Sitting with headphones on (or those execrable "earbuds") is another matter entirely, of course.

Oh, why not? :-)
This in no way relates to the subject of Macintosh, but on a weekend when a Texas president's administration has just decreed that hundreds of millions of acres of Western land will never be protected wilderness -- and let's not even begin to talk about those anthrax-laden Iraqi zeppelins struggling against the prevailing winds on their impossibly long journey to euthanize Milwaukee -- a word or two about the latest patron saint of hypocrisy seems very much in order.

I'd like to direct your attention to self-proclaimed morality czar William Bennett, who for years has been darkly pontificating against drugs, booze, liberals, abortion, aid for the poor, teevee, movies, books, and the kind of entertainment someone just emailed me about. The national scold has been making millions of dollars doing this, MILLIONS! But at least he hasn't been greedy. No, he's been sharing all this loot with the mob by losing $8 million in Las Vegas and Atlantic City casinos over the last ten years. What I'm saying is, he didn't leave it sitting in his hotel room for the maids to pocket. Our boy Bill, advisor to countless conservative causes and author of the best-selling Book of Virtues and the more recent The Death of Outrage (an anti-Clinton diatribe), is a "whale" -- in gambling lingo, well, one of these:

"Bennett likes to be discreet. 'He'll usually call a host and let us know when he's coming,' said one source. 'We can limo him in. He prefers the high-limit room, where he's less likely to be seen and where he can play the $500-a-pull slot machines. He usually plays very late at night or early in the morning - usually between midnight and 6am.'

In one two-month period, Bennett wired more than $1.4m to cover losses. At the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas, he won a $25,000 jackpot but left the casino down $625,000. 'There's a term in the trade for this kind of gambler,' says a casino source. 'We call them losers.' "

And what's the saving grace, the can't-catch-me rationale behind this activity that only he can use? "I don't put my family at risk, and I don't owe anyone anything." Talk about understanding heirs and a tolerant state of domestic bliss: whether or not I could pay the bill, if I walked out of a casino "down $625,000" my significant other would have my you-know-whats in a vise (or a vase). And now on to something even funnier than that!

I still don't believe it
Just because it's on CNET doesn't make it so. I'm referring to the alleged MSN.UK Internet-compatible portable toilet, otherwise known as the "iLoo." Supposedly this marvel of cybernetic indulgence is a wireless-equipped version of the ubiquitous plastic outhouses you find stacked in rows at otherwise respectable public events or discreetly tucked behind trailers in northern New Mexico. If the various reports are true, which I most fervently hope they are not, bathroom-needy celebrants at UK venues like big outdoor music festivals will be able to pass (sorry) the time inside checking their email or reading GRACK! instead of doing their business and getting the hell out so the next one in line can have a go, hohoho.

I doubt this would work anywhere, but I have been to the green ancestral isle and know exactly what people would do if they thought the idler inside was making them wait while he tried out the Wi-Fi. If that doesn't suggest to you that this is a hoax, maybe the line about the toilet paper with printed URLs to "tell you where to go" will do it. A great gag in any case. The other thing that occurs to me is that cleaning these toilets is probably not a computer-friendly process. Most such conveniences I've visited would best be sanitized by pressure washers and bleach ...

Whether or not the following observation is relevant is immaterial at this stage of terminally advanced digression, but know that on a long-ago trip to the U.K., I was brought up short by a sign at a rest area on a busy English motorway that said, "NO FOOTBALL COACHES ALLOWED!" At the time I thought this was fundamentally unfair and possibly illegal in Texas, Oklahoma, or Iowa at least, where football coaches are venerated beyond all imagining. Only after returning to the States did I figure out that "coaches" meant buses. Football meant football, of course, only that meant soccer over there. What was really verboten, in other words, were busloads of maniacal, drunken soccer fans bent on mayhem and mass urination, who were quite understandably kindly instructed to take their business elsewhere. (Where exactly, one wonders?)

So picture this: you're a ruddy-faced, ale-enhanced, Mac-using UK music fan who's finally made it to the head of the line. When the last bloke exits the porta-loo and you gratefully clamber inside to be greeted by the sight of an LCD screen and a detachable keyboard next to the throne that says "MSN" on it, what do you do?

'Nuff said!

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr knows what day May 5th is and hopes you do too.

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