Smoot

So apparently, in 1958, as a fraternity pledge, the brilliantly twisted minds of the Lamda Chi Alpha house of MIT decided to use Oliver Smoot to "re-measure" the Harvard bridge, an endeavor that finally ascertained the bridge to be 364.4 Smoots and one ear long. This article provides the interesting details.

I bring this up not to highlight the already well-documented eccentricities of people with over-developed mendulla oblongatas (our one friend from MIT will forgive my impudence no? *wink*), but as a reflection of my own new-found unit of measurement. As the not-so-proud owner of a new iPod (whose questionable origins have apparently gained infamous reknown in some circles), I've realized that it is ostensibly possible to approximate the time I take to go places by the number of songs I hear as I get there (unless of course I'm listening to Jude's Deep Dish Essential Mix which goes on for an hour and fifty-seven minutes, in which case I could drive to the border of Canada and back and it'd still be playing...) So today, it took me the first stanza and chorus of Letter for Elise by The Cure to get from our doorstep to the bus-stop, two and a little bit more of Pete Yorn's songs for the bus-ride, and Etta James' At Last! took me to a couple of steps just before my office door (I would have listened to that twice actually- it was our wedding song; but another time...). So maybe 20- 22 minutes?... It took an extra song and a half yesterday when I stopped to get coffee, but that's about right.

The trip home is a little trickier to calculate because I chatted with a friend on the way without switching the iPod off, so maybe Aztec Camera's Oblivious and Frou Frou's Let Go from class to the bus-stop (including the delay), the nihilistic Motorcycle Emptiness (Manic Street Preachers) and Transatlanticism (Death Cab for Cutie) for the ride, and Outkast's Hey Ya buoyantly accompanied me to the post-box and home.

I've stopped counting how many people have told me that getting the iPod was a life-changing moment in their lives- equivalent to say, turning 21 and having a baby... For me, it just makes going to school and home a lot more fun.