I got the idea when I noticed the refrigerator was cold

For those of you who haven't bothered to add it up yourself, Nemo is the winner of the Bowl Challenge. Final standings:

1. Nemo (18-10)
2. Stan (17-11)
3. Dad (15-13, 66)
4. Craig (15-13, 63)
5. Flax (15-13, 58)
6. Drew (14-14, 77)
7. Tyler (14-14, 86)
8. Jan (13-15)
9. Rudnik (11-17)

Randomly, Drew was closest on tiebreaker points for the second year in a row, with 77 next to the actual Rose total of 79. In other not-really-interesting-unless-you're-me stats, this is the first time in six Bowl Challenges that the winner was not someone from my freshman year suite in Hinman (Marc won it twice, followed by Ric, then me, and then Drew). These website pools are like the World Cup - it seems like the same few people keep winning. Of eleven total pools to this point - five basketball and six football - four different people have been repeat winners (Tyler's won twice in basketball, Marc won twice in football, and Nemo and I have now won one each), with only Drew, Ric, and Craig holding a mere one title each. Strange.

So I've been enjoying the iPod quite a bit, which anyone who gets their Flax news from anywhere besides this site will doubtlessly already know. I now have 2,235 tracks in my iTunes, and of those, I think a mere 71 - that's just 3% - don't have an album art picture, and that's because they didn't come from an album (movie dialogues, TV show theme songs, and a few random things whose origins I don't know). Yes, I went through and added all the pictures myself; iTunes does some of them automatically, but (a) when you burn tracks yourself, it doesn't show up right away, and I'm impatient, and (b) there's very little way of knowing which ones it will do for you and which it won't. This meant looking up album names and art for all the random MP3s I have that I didn't just burn off my own CDs (though my CDs account for the majority of the tracks). This took me all week, though of course I was only doing it at night. Anyway, it's done now, and I get to see the little pictures (which I absolutely love seeing, like a total dork, which is why I spent so much time on the artwork) on the iPod screen for just about everything.

I also love the "last played" feature, and the fact that it syncs to include both iTunes and iPod plays. I'm using this to keep my eyes out for the "Last Guy to Get a Hit" award (fans of Jayson Stark's columns on ESPN.com should get that one) - i.e., the last track that gets played on shuffle mode. It's interesting to note that while the majority of songs have still not been played at all, five tracks have already been played three times each - "The Battle for Straight Time" by A.C. Newman, the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows," "Dave Passes Out" from James Newton Howard's score for Dave, "Doctor Worm" by They Might Be Giants, and Concerto No. 1 BWV 1046 in F Major, I. Allegro from my dual CD set of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. Random! I'll be sure to keep you updated on the "Last Guy to Get a Hit" award, as though you care. But of course with 5.7 days worth of music in the iTunes and only about ten hours' worth ever likely to be played in a consecutive shuffle run, it's quite possible that it will be months before we have a winner, or even a few finalists.

One more quick story. So the iPod comes with these ear-bud headphones. I wore them on Tuesday (the first use of the iPod) and wasn't a fan; they hurt my ears a little, I felt like I was constantly adjusting them, they would come loose too easily. So on Wednesday I used my Target gift card from Aunt Joan and bought some headphones that hang over the back of the ear instead of jamming into the canal. But soon I found that my ears were really hurting. The headphones were cutting into the back of the ears like crazy. I would try to adjust them, but it didn't seem to help much.

Then yesterday I noticed that the headphones were, well, sort of shaped like ears - the plastic piece that holds them onto the ear, that is. And I also noticed that I had been wearing them completely wrong. Picture an ear, and now rotate it 90 degrees until it's horizontal. That's how I was trying to wear the things, hanging them off the top or something, when in fact you are, of course, supposed to wear them vertically so that the plastic actually fits around the ear in the way it's shaped to do.

So yes, I'm an idiot. Naturally, they feel much better now - once the parts of my ears that were rubbed raw by the old way heal up, there probably won't be any pain to speak of. Although does it tell you I'm a little iPod-addicted when I won't stop listening to it even when doing so is causing me (granted, relatively mild) physical pain?