BuggBlog

iTunes now and forever, god help us all

Given Apple’s skeumorphism fetish of late, making onscreen calendars into leather-trimmed nonsense and a game-center home screen taken from a Las Vegas backwater casino and so on, I suppose we should all just be glad that the new iTunes 11 isn’t built around a visual metaphor of a 1970s high-end turntable. Count your blessings, etc.

But all the other problems with the new iTunes aside -- and even some of the pleasant things -- I simply do not understand why, in 2012, when I’ve purchased a book on iTunes for use in iBooks I can’t read the damn thing on my computer. I buy an e-book on Kindle and its almost guaranteed I can read it on my Kitchen-Aid stand mixer if that’s the nearest appliance in a pinch. I try to read an iBooks e-book and I’m immediately told to go find another device, sucker.

This is why I don’t buy iBooks anymore, even if I can’t buy Kindle books directly from my iPad Kindle reader. I’d jump through flaming e-hoops to purchase the Kindle version of a book rather than the Apple version, since Amazon (for all its faults) will at least let me read the book on more than on or two damn devices.

I still loooooove Apple hardware and OS X, but the software increasingly makes me wonder why I stick around for this. Just try and use Pages or Numbers in an actual professional capacity. It's even worse than trying to play movies on a program perplexingly still named "tunes."

Dear naked older gentleman in the gym locker room

Look, I get that you have no problem being naked while you go about your obsessively intricate pre- and post-workout routine. Whereas most of us consider nudity to be a transitional state between clothed and unclothed, for you it is obviously something a bit more, a relaxing part of your day when you can let everything swing free and that you look forward the way I do to grabbing a beer and firing up the Xbox. 

But please, for the love of all that’s holy, stop doing your convoluted naked stretching routines and workouts in the steam room. When you’re in a room about the size of a hatbox filled with a) three other people and b) hot, vaporized water through which we all can still see, it is impossible for you to grab your toes and show your ass like a cat in heat without getting your junk all up in someone else’s business. This tiny little room is not the appropriate place for you to plop down on your back with your head three inches from my thigh and start doing Village People hip thrusts at the tiled ceiling.

Hell, the place could be the size of a Versailles ballroom and it still wouldn’t be the appropriate place. 

Please, enjoy your god-given nakedness, but remember that there is a time and a place -- neither of which is in the confines of a steamy room where some of us with serious personal-space issues are trying to relax for a few minutes in peace.

Also, if it’s not too much trouble, would you mind not standing completely starkers with your foot up on the sink counter clipping your toenails? Thanks much.