1,000 songs flushed away

	Robert J. Pavuchak, Post-Gazette There are rules. Click photo for larger image.

A tip for iPod owners: Never flush your iPod down the toilet. It could clog a university's septic system for an entire semester. Coincidentally, that's exactly what happened after a student at Santa Clara University in California accidentally consigned the four-inch-long music player to a ripe and watery grave. But the iPod didn't give up without a fight. Maintenance crews first tried to break it into pieces, but, as one worker told TV station NBC11 in San Jose, the iPod was "indestructible." Eventually, a contractor got the iPod to move 20 feet, only to get it stuck again beneath the office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences -- not the sort of person whose toilet should be messed with. So crews simultaneously flushed as many toilets as they could and turned on every sink. That pushed the iPod into a larger more accessible pipe. Next, (stop me if I'm giving too much detail) they blasted water into the pipe and got the iPod out, but not without turning the second floor toilets into geysers. It cost the university $1,000 a week to fix the problem -- just in time for graduation a week or so ago. The iPod-flusher was not be punished, although a letter of recommendation might be out of the question. And no, despite being indestructible, the iPod was not still ticking after taking a slicking like that Timex of yore.

More popular than beer

Stop the presses: The iPod surpassed beer-drinking as the most "in" thing among college students, according to a survey by Student Monitor. Of 1,200 students interviewed, 73 percent put iPods ahead of beer-drinking, using the social networking Web site Facebook.com, text-messaging and music-downloading. Last year, the iPod was well below drinking. The only other time beer was dethroned in the 18 years of the survey: 1997 -- by the Internet, which is now so much a part of daily life that college students likely don't think to single it out.

Tip number 2:

Don't use your iPod during a thunderstorm. You could get hit by lightning and get dead. Ditto for your cell phone. The metallic components of phones and portable music players could act as a conductor, three doctors wrote in the BMJ, the British Medical Journal. A 15-year-old girl was struck by lightning while using her mobile phone in a London park last year, and barely survived. Three other cases have been reported in China, Korea and Malaysia.

Unplug and listen

Found on Poet Babies (www.poetbabies.com), an advocacy group "milking old truths for a new world," which launched an Unplug, Hear the World campaign on iPod-maker Apple Computer's 30th anniversary April 1:

"I was plugged into my iPod 24/7: going to work, at work, at the store, hiking, everywhere. I'd weave around people while I rocked out. Even when the battery died, I'd stay plugged in so people wouldn't bug me. At home for the holidays, I'd keep the headphones in until we sat down for dinner, but I'd leave them hanging around my neck for easy access when it got boring.

"But I wonder now what I missed by always being in my own pod. Sure it's obvious that I should have talked to and really gotten to know my own family, or felt the quiet and peace of a nature trail. But it's the lost things that aren't obvious that haunt me, those unexpected moments that could have opened up a new world to me, that could have introduced me to a person or place I never saw in my routine. I wonder if some stranger walking next to me fell down and I kept walking away because I didn't hear. I'm not saying trash your iPod but you can't keep plugging up your ears. You need to expose yourself to the random stuff of life so that you can grow beyond who you are. You need to listen for when others need help so you can help them. You need to unplug and hear the world."

Try a vending machine

If you've stuck in San Francisco without an iPod, you can get one in a vending machine. Just slip in your credit or debit card, and you're in business. San Francisco's Zoom Systems makes and operates machines that offer expensive electronic gear, and they're spreading to malls, hotels and airports across the country. Wouldn't the iPods, in crashing from the top shelf, get smashed at the delivery door? See the first item above.

Listen to sounds of silence

From "The Human Voice," by Anne Karpf, excerpted in the Guardian (England):

"My teenager urged me to get an iPod. No, I shrieked, that way lies people walking around sealed against the world, swathed only in sounds of their own choosing. With so little experience of silence, kids are losing the ability to tolerate it. Silence today is often regarded negatively, identified with secrecy and concealment. But we need a more sophisticated understanding of the language of silence, like the Japanese have, seeing it as not just the absence of sound, but a presence with a large and varied lexicon. There's the silence of rage (the unreturned phone call), the silence of distance (couple dining together without anything to say), but also the peaceful silence (couple dining together without the need to speak). Naturally, we want our kids to be articulate and exuberant, to feel free and able to express themselves. We hope that people of all ages with something to say find listeners. But we also need to find a balance between talk and silence."