the shrewdness of apes

sail away on the airwaves

been meaning to get into this for a while. during our recent trip to O-hi-a the rental car the wife and i were driving came equipped with XM Satellite Radio. and not since the advent of On Demand television have i been this excited about some piece of new technology. it may have even made me utter the phrase "bomb diggity" upon returning to the house after my first 10 minute excursion into the land of continuous signals. so much good stuff: individual stations devoted to each decade from the 40s to the 90s; instant traffic for large cities nationwide; regional weather that changes as you drive; two comedy stations (i almost immediately heard Richard Pryor dropping f-bombs...on the radio!); multiple sports channels; a station just for live performances (Wilco was the first thing I heard here); and the best part, a college radio-style station (XMU) and a station devoted to the history of punk and indie music called "Fred" for some reason. Fred treated us to a full live Housemartins show circa '87 and then gave us some live Violent Femmes. Elvis Costello, the Clash, the Pixies, etc. were also featured prominently. XMU was even better, playing plenty of bands we knew and liked (Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, Beulah, New Pornographers), some we had heard of but not heard (Denali, Franz Ferdinand) and lots that we had never heard of that we ended up liking (LaGuardia, the Wannadies [who have apparently been around for a while], Eleven Eleven, Edria). it wasn't all great, but it was fun listening and even when they repeated bands, they rarely repeated songs. the only problem came with the display, which was obviously not their top of the line model. long band names and song titles got cut off leaving us to wonder who exactly "The Jessica Flet...." was. i figured the surname must be "Fletcher" only to be inundated by Murder, She Wrote websites when i typed it into Google. damn you, Lansbury! still, when you can go from a Jerry Seinfeld monologue to baseball scores to the Minders in the span of 3 minutes you've got something good on your hands. if i had a car, i would definitely have XM and i'm now seriously contemplating getting the service for our house. it's only $9.99 a month or less if you go multi-year and the radios themselves are reasonably priced. and did i mention how there's almost no commercials and you never lose the signal? the dropouts we had never lasted more than a few seconds and were few and far between. fantastic.