In The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness, Steven Levy ruminates on the iPod's cool factor. Undoubtedly iPods are cool, but what we mean by cool is not always clear, or the same from case to case. I grant you, for example, that my two iPod minis (one green, one silver) are cool. But the kid on the corner with the nose rings, tattoos, split tongue, and holey jeans, screaming to whatever sounds he's downloaded from the Web and uploaded onto his iPod, is he cool? Some girls no doubt think so. To me he seems like a pathetic nincompoop.

As Levy tells the tale, when Sony debuted the Walkman, the company sent out free samples to musicians in the New York Philharmonic. When Jobs debuted the original iPod, he got copies to rap artists and pop stars.

That's been a limiting feature of the iPod from Day One: pop music. The thing is marketed towards people utterly besot by pop music.

Perhaps that's why some of my friends who now lean away from the pop music they'd drenched their lives with in the past, have purchased non-iPod digital music devices.

But here's what I've noticed: yes, the iPod and iTunes regards all cuts of recorded music as songs. And that is annoying when you are listening to a symphony or concerto.

But hey: most movements of symphonies or sonatas or string quartets or concerti are longer than your average pop song. So, by restricting a cut of recorded music on iTunes to 99¢, classical music listeners get more for their money than do pop music listeners.

Of course, in a sense, that's always been the case. We get more for our time and money. The music is better.

Is that cool?

Wearing an expensive watch strikes me as about as big a waste as can be imagined. And, for what it's worth, I judge the Rolex watch to be rather gaudy. My Timex is good enough for me.

So I'm not the target market for the many spam emails I get, touting Genuine Swiss made Rolex replicas!

Who buys these things from spam ads? Do only morons go for oxymoronic ads?

Fungible. Days, even weeks (though not months), go by and I don't think of the word, much less use it. And yet it just popped into mind.

A few weeks ago America's first Terror-Free Oil filling station opened up. The station buys its gas from Sinclair Oil, which gets most of its petroleum from countries outside the Mid-East. Why? So the station can tell its customers that they wouldn't be supporting terrorism when they buy their gas.

My first reaction? Not my business. Of course businessmen strive for a USP, that is, a Unique Selling Proposition. If customers really want to buy their fuel from non-Mid-East sources, that's great.

Trouble is, though, gas is fungible. Interchangeable. One gallon of gas is the same as the next, and even the station's supplier can't guarantee that all of its supply is Mid-East Oil-Free.

Further, it's a stretch to call all Mid-East oil somehow tied to terrorism. A barrel may hail from Kuwait, or Iran, or Iraq, or Saudi Arabia; Some of these oil producers — even fine, upstanding U.S. allies — have supported terrorists. Others haven't. And others (I bet most) don't now.

But, hey, in value-heavy matters like this, as in marketing, making clear distinctions ain't easy.

I've a prediction: if this catches on, we'll be seeing a lot of fungible Mid-East Oil being snuck into the allegedly Terror-Free gasoline supply. The temptation would be too great.

After all, it's a world market, and one gallon is pretty much the same as another.

Years and years ago, when I rode the bus, I had no trouble. But I moved the from the big city for just a few months, and when I came back to visit the city, the buses had changed. Routes and schedules had changed. I was a bit at sea.

And the number of the bus I thought I needed, and which I thought stopped where I needed to go proved to be illusory. There was some sort of split routing on that busline, and the first number of the bus of the seemingly correct number turned out not to go where I needed to go. So I got off and waited for the next bus of the same number.

It finally got there, opened its doors. And so I asked the driver, does this bus go to Gresham? (Or wherever I wanted to go; it's been quite some time.) He burst into utter disgust: What does the sign say on the bus? and then began cursing at me as I wandered on.

Nowadays I'd have the gumption to respond back, in kind. The man deserved more than a good tongue lashing; he deserved a little physical abuse, like, say, a stink bomb or a rotten egg. But who has rotten eggs at the ready?

My late aunt once told me a similar story. She asked the bus driver if the bus were going to . . . wherever. And he, too, burst out: What are you, blind?

She burst out into tears and sniffed Yes, walking away. She was legally blind. Oh, she could walk about. But she couldn't read bus signs.

What a contemptiple example of swine that bus driver was. And so many are. Not most, surely; but far too many.

Oddly, now that I think of it, in my episode, it may have been an improperly displayed bus signage that confused me originally. Bus drivers should remember that the cause of many questions are, indeed, the result not of inattention or stupidity of bus riders, but problems arising from other bus drivers' mistakes . . . or from bad planning, or simple natural problems, like poor eyesight.

Regular riders sometimes wonder aloud why most people don't like riding the bus. The answers are many, including the usual: that buses rarely go where we want them to, when.

Often, though, it's because other bus riders are stinky, dangerous, and rude. And this, too often, applies also to the professionals who drive the buses.

A half hour's walk from the Brandenbug Gates is an apartment named after Bohuslav Martinu!

I wonder why Americans don't name their apartments after great composers?

Oh, yes: Almost no American would care.

I've been a trackball fan for some time, and just installed the best I've ever used on my computer today. It's the Logitech TrackMan Wheel, which comes, also, in a cordless version:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004VUGJ/wirkman-20/

I like it because it uses the thumb to navigate around, in an easy-to-use config. If you have any trouble with your hand, especially the wrist or the fingers, this is one to try.

Since falling down the steps last summer, I've had horrible trouble with my hand, and some distress caused by my need to type and scroll through pages for hour after hour. This device allows this work to be a mostly painless enterprise. (Though the real test will be extended use, I confess.)