I received a replacement iPod classic for my birthday for my stalwart and constant iPod companion. It had been my companion for 3 years but the hard drive was starting to make some suspicious clicking noises once in a while and it was having a hard time syncing for podcasts in the morning. With a heavy heart I put it in a box as a backup iPod* and replaced it with a cooler and thinner and younger model.

The new iPod classic has Genius lists. I have 60G of music for it to search, sort, and mess with. Being who I am, I was instantly curious and made it cough up a few playlists. What spit out of it is essentially my core playlist from 1995.

I’m a little disturbed and freaked out.

Let’s see… I tell it to give me a Genius List based on Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box” and I get Pearl Jam, STP, Offspring, Alice in Chains, Led Zeppelin, Soundgarden, Metallica, a little bit of Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath. All excellent — how does one go wrong with Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused?” But I feel like this thing is reading the inside of my brainmeats.

I did get newer and stranger songs when I fed it Radiohead.

These genius list searches are weird and will keep me entertained for weeks but still, man. I feel old. Old old old.

* I have been asked why I did not replace it with an iPod Touch from several avenues.

A. The iPod Classic holds 160G of music (!), where I cannot get all my music on an iPod Touch.
B. The iPod Classic is basically the perfect gizmo for carrying music libraries. Anything else is over-engineering.
C. I have an iPad, the world’s most expensive dispenser of Puzzle Quest.