The more choices we have, the more likely we are to make a sub-optimal choice, and therefore the more likely we are to be unhappy with our lot.

According to this fashionable theory...

If I have to choose between, say, black and white, I am very likely to make the right choice.

If I have to choose between black, white, red, yellow, blue, green, orange, purple, grey, cream and magenta, I am less likely to make the right choice. (Not brown. No one would choose brown).

And if I have the choose between every single colour anywhere, then the chances of getting the choice exactly right are tiny.

The more colours, the greater the likelihood of picking the wrong one.

Knowing I haven't got the best is depressing. Therefore, the more choice I have the more likely it is that a depressing outcome will result (although 'greater likelihood of depressing' is not the same as 'more depressing').

Thus, voila, this will only make me sad.

Though one would not have thought so.

Microsoft's new iPod killer, the Zune, is about to be released.

It's even getting reasonable reviews.

And, y'know, maybe it's a piece. But I can't help noticing the Zune is, umm, brown.

Brown?

HAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA.

Is the whole of Microsoft on crack? Brown!

Check out these. The opposite of brown.

This week is the fifth anniversary of the iPod.

Other than my first Apple laptop, it is without peer as the coolest gadget I've ever owned. It brought music back for me - all the CDs stacked in dark drawers where we never bothered to play them. We hauled them out, loaded them and spent hours that would otherwise have been swamped in the ennui of kids at the park. Every room in the house is ready for whatever mood we feel like.

I remember buying a Walkman in Fiji when I was about 17. I thrashed about six cassettes on it and then made - by taping off the radio! - another half a dozen. You would have one cassette all day: 12 songs. My iPod has over 4000 loaded on it.

When Maria was born, no one had ever heard of an iPod. Now it is the iconic device of the new century. The Internet seems full of theories about its success. It's simple really - it is just an almost perfect toy. It brings exactly the emotional tone you want, wherever you are, in a package so small you can take it anywhere, in a format that is easier than peas to operate. It takes about ten seconds to learn, feels good...and it just works.

The Slate commentary linked to above argues the iPod changed nothing. This from a magazine that has argued salmon is just too declasse and Marlborough sauvignon blanc too bland. The highest acclaim of success is the sneer of the would-be cultural arbiter scambling for a snobbish high ground from where the tastes of the uninformed masses can be mocked and derided. Nothing reveals cultural irrelevance so much as cultural commentary unable to explain the pleasures consumers find without first seeking permission. Cultural snobbery is how modern class pretension conceals its classically fashioned bigotry (see also The Middle Classes Declaiming On Childhood Obesity; Middle Class Derision Towards MacDonalds; and Salman Rushdie).

Anyway, five observations on the fifth birthday of my perfect toy:

We're all rocking crooners in our heads.

You never quite get used to a shuffle playlist that jumps from the Dead Kennedys to Mozart's Requiem.

As they say about mobile phones, electronic gadgets are the one thing where men think smaller is better.

There is a good reason we stopped listening to some of those songs.

Motown r-o-c-k-s. Still.

Singing out loud when you're the only one who can hear the tune?

We started this blog when we arrived in Paris in January 2005. We're still going.

Compare that to other blogs in this survey:

Two thirds were not updated in the last two months, meaning 2.72 million blogs have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned.

1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days.

The average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days (almost four months).

132,000 blogs were abandoned after being maintained a year or more.

So don't be saying we never call, we never write, not even a card, just because I might take an afternoon off now and then in the hot sun.

Since I bought my beautiful ibook on 1 April 2003 it has been my constant companion. I love it. It is easily the best toy I have ever owned. I have never ever got excited about a computer before. But this one did everything, so stylishly, so easily, it was just gorgeous. It gave me music and photos, connected me to the world, stored all my notes about everything, organised me. I got a burst of joy every time I used it. Can a machine actually be a friend and a colleague? No, but it sometimes felt like it. I used it every day for three years, always for hours a day - sometimes for most of the day. It has had thousands of hours of use. It has a got a bit battered over the year.

A month or so ago, I bought a very funky new desktop machine to be my main machine. I connected it up to the laptop and it sucked everything off the laptop then reorganised it, so when I switched on the new one it was configured with everything and in the way I was used to (that's a cool Apple thing, by the way. Migrating to a new computer could not be easier). And then I tooled about with my groovy new machine for a few days and the next time I went to switch on the ibook it threw a jealous sulk. Broken. Now the repair shop has quoted me more than it's worth to repair it. So its time is up. I am grieving for it, sadly.

Seriously, I will miss it. I will replace it because life is no longer bearable without a laptop. But I will never forget my first Apple.

I know exactly how this guy feels.

I know you don't care. But I'm fascinated and it's my blog. (Managing this stuff on a micro scale is partly how I make my living anyway).

Anyway, I posted last month about the new Apple ads. The focus of them was the huge number of songs you get on an iPod. That missed the point - the iPod works because of the enjoyment of the songs, not the number of them. It's the enjoyment you want to buy.

So I see Apple has changed out the ad. This one is groovy. Possibly it's perfect.

If you surf the Interwebs on a PC, view this and weep.

Did I mention Mac's don't get viruses?

It's possible, of course. It's just that it has never happened.

Oh what the hell, check them all out.

So I got hold of this groovalicious and completely useless little app that analyses my itunes library and provides statistics on my listening habits.

Statistics are fun.

In a nutshell it tells me I like Moby. It tells me I like whitebread. Mainly. (Also some new stuff is too up to date - we started listening to Fat Freddy's Drop an d Carla Bruni at Christmas and they ain't here).



I know there is nothing more boring than other people's iTunes stats, but I just know I'm gonna look back at this one day and see how much my listening habits have changed.

Anyway, here are the top 25:

Top 25 Artists
-----------------------------
1. Moby - 773
2. Madonna - 244
3. Fatboy Slim - 165
4. Fleetwood Mac - 158
5. Celia Bartoli - 157
6. Cat Stevens - 145
7. Norah Jones - 142
8. Sheryl Crow - 92
9. James Blunt - 74
10. Toots & The Maytals - 71
11. Robbie Williams - 67
12. Trinity Roots - 65
13. The Clash - 56
14. Bruce Springsteen - 52
15. Hootie & The Blowfish - 51
16. Dionne Warwick - 47
17. Macy Gray - 47
18. Van Morrison - 43
19. Talking Heads - 41
20. Black Eyed Peas - 39
21. Dead Kennedys - 39
22. Eminem - 37
23. U2 - 37
24. Linda Ronstadt - 35
25. Cyndi Lauper - 33


Top 25 Songs
-----------------------------
1. Another Woman (Moby) - 35
2. Sunday (The Day Before My Birthday) (Moby) - 30
3. In This World (Moby) - 28
4. Extreme Ways (Moby) - 27
5. One Of These Mornings (Moby) - 26
6. 18 (Moby) - 26
7. In My Heart (Moby) - 25
8. The Joker (featuring Bootsy Collins) (Fatboy Slim) - 24
9. Rafters (Moby) - 24
10. Fireworks (Moby) - 24
11. At Least We Tried (Moby) - 24
12. Sleep Alone (Moby) - 23
13. I Deserve It (Madonna) - 23
14. Down To The River To Pray (Alison Krauss) - 23
15. Didn't Leave Nobody But The Baby (Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss & Emmylou Harris) - 23
16. Great Escape (Moby) - 22
17. Morning Has Broken (Cat Stevens) - 22
18. Signs Of Love (Moby) - 21
19. Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad? (Moby) - 21
20. Look Back In (Moby) - 21
21. Jam For The Ladies (Moby Feat. MC Lyte & Angie Stone) - 20
22. American Pie (Madonna) - 20
23. Harbour (Moby Feat. Sinead O'Connor) - 19
24. Ray Of Light (Madonna) - 18
25. Don't Stop (Fleetwood Mac) - 18

I love my iMac.

Apple has launched a new ad for the iPod, which would be pretty small bananas were the iPod not (a) the most interesting cultural phenomenon on the planet; (b) a central component of our family's cultural life in Paris, and (c) promoted by what has been, until now, one of the best thought out campaigns you are likely to see.

You can tell Apple thinks the new ad is the shez, because it has a link to it on the front page of its website. Anyway, good for them. There is a reason for boring you with all this.

The old campaign was designed around silhouettes of people daggy-dancing to the songs. There were the white cords to the ear piece, but nothing more. By now you know the idea:



This campaign has been round for a few years and it needed updating.

The new ad is funky, but it betrays the heart of the what has made the iPod cool: The old ads told you what you do with an iPod and gave you a thrilling reason for having one. The new campaign just sells tech specs.

Yes the new campaign is funky. But the message is geeky. It's golly! look at the number of songs. The old one was emotional. WOW! I want to do that! Showing some album covers and playing a hit song is something anyone can do - radio stations do it every survey. Going off to the music on your iPod - that's something only iPod can do. And the ads have missed it.

* Favourite song on the iPod at the moment? The White Stripes Fell In Love With A Girl. Turn it up.

My poor little iBook has served me superbly for three years. I love it, but for the number of things I do it's a little underpowered.

So yesterday I headed down to the local apple shop and picked up this:



Yeah, baby, 20 flat screen inches of super-fast, ultra-chic, mega-cool goodness, with built in video camera, bluetooth, wifi, dvd writer, 250 gigs of harddrive and screaming speed. It fires up my programmes in a flash, snip snap claps everything I want into place before I know I want it and just hangs around being beautiful.

As machines go? This one's a keeper.

Turns out, if you get cold there is an increased chance you could ... catch a cold!

Who knew?

In the US, where the electricity is too wussy to boil water, consumers are suddenly learning of a brilliant new consumer appliance.

The electric jug.

Wow, whatever next.

Apropos of nothing at all...

Palestine needs more of this wisdom:

The parents of a Palestinian boy killed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank have donated his organs for use in Israel, in the hope of promoting peace.

So call me a wishy-washy hand-wringer. The only way Palestine will ever win genuine peace and nationhood is through the wisdom of a Ghandi, King or Mandela.

John Fowles has died, aged 79.

There's an obituary here.

Predictably everyone angles on the French Lieutenant's Woman, though I think only because it was a successful movie. Personally I couldn't get into that book, alone of all his output.

I loved John Fowles' writing.



I felt I grew up when I read The Magus.

It is the single best novel ever, a transcendent, brilliant novel like no other, where he toys with the reader, creates with ease and control. His sentences flow into paragraphs and into chapters and the plot spins like layers being added to an onion, at once appearing to be stripped away and forever becoming mistier. You can't but be humble at the author's skill, that anyone can reach those heights of control over their narrative. The way magic and reality moved seamlessly is genius.

Well, the sentiment is shared by the obituary writer on his website, here, who says it was Fowles' favourite book too.

The Magus' closing quote, 'cras amet qui numquam quique amavit cras amet' translates as,

"Tomorrow let him love who has never loved; he who has loved, let him love tomorrow."

Well I exchanged a couple of smart-alecky messages with Rod, through an intermediary, just before the election. I asked facetiously if he was disappointed he would never get into Cabinet. He sent back something suitably derisive.

As we sat outside the campaign party in Christchurch the night he got elected in 1996 I told him I was pleased he was going to parliament, unlike some of the others we put into parliament that night. I came to retract my delight later when we differed on a few decisions he made, though I always thought he had MP quality.

I never saw Rod get truly angry or, alternatively, sulk at anyone. I can't think of another MP I could say that about so I suppose that testifies to uniqueness, cheerfulness and professionalism.

The only decent MPs are those who go there to further ideas; poor MPs go simply because they have an inflated idea of themselves, though you need to have belief in yourself to be successful. Well Rod had belief in himself, and he had a commitment to ideas and he was consistent and persistent in promoting them.

He arrived at parliament wearing braces, put a flower pot on his desk in the chamber, made a noise about his possum seat cover and moved to re-name the whip 'Parliamentary Co-ordinator' (For Crying Out Loud!). Then he tried to have rules changed so that he didn't have to wear a tie in the debating chamber. It all seemed a bit marginal when there was real work to be done.

He grew more effective, especially after 2000. He could have accomplished a lot more. He could have been a Cabinet Minister if he'd done things differently. By this year there was a long list of things I did not agree with him about - though, equally, a long list I approved of. It's hard to follow politics from this distance. He handled himself very well this year from what I saw. He locked on message and maintained a sober reassuring composure even after he got shafted on Cabinet.

I'm shocked he has died so young and with so much still to do.

We talked that night, 12 October 1996, about the costs to his family of his parliamentary job. He was aware of the load he was imposing through the time away and through the stresses, changes and emotional strains public figures drag back home. How his family must wish back some of those hours and days now. His parliamentary super was diverted into the Greens' special fund that bought a house and helped the party raise cash. I hope it's been arranged to ensure his family are secure.

We visited a thousand year old Gothic cathedral in Chartres today just after we heard the news. Inside the ancient stone walls Josie lit a candle for Rod. I'm not sure - but I suspect - Rod was no more Catholic than I am... but there is a small corner of France where he is remembered.