“I heard the bells ring. I watched as the clouds circled the church steeple. The lone gray pigeon, perched on the keystone, seemed to search for its mate–in vain. It gave up after a few rounds of the church. The crisp April air washed my face and I was hit with the full enormity of the event as the words from the pastor’s mouth came out crisply, ‘The pope has died.’ This had been a moment in history, and I felt that I was a part of it,” Kartik Subramanian writes for The Chicago Tribune.
“This surreal moment was rudely interrupted by the roar of a garbage truck belonging to the City of Chicago. Chicago? Yes, indeed. Chicago, not Rome. I was standing in front of Holy Name Cathedral at State and Superior Streets listening to a ‘podcast’ from the CatholicInsider on my iPod. Rome and the Vatican were 3,000 miles away–yet this small, white, diminutive device had transported me to the Sistine Chapel. I had felt for a fleeting moment that I was part of the huge congregation of people who had assembled for days on end to pay homage to their spiritual leader. All thanks to the marvel of technology,” Subramanian writes.
“Audio blogs worldwide can be downloaded onto the iPod by harnessing the power of the Internet. These transmissions, which are referred to as podcasts by the geek community, cover a very diverse range of topics. From the CatholicInsider broadcasts by Rev. Roderick Vonhogen, detailing the melancholy mood at the Vatican, to the venom-spewing Al Franken on Air America Radio, podcasts are the next big application for the iPod,” Subramanian writes. “The iPod does not know any barriers–it is universally known and accepted. The iPod represents the next great step in technology for consumers, after the Internet and the cellular phone. As I mull the future of iPods, the opening bars of ‘My Sharona’ start streaming into my ears. A wry smile creeps across my face as I realize that President Bush and I have at least one song in common on our iPods!”
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Podcasting grows to 6 million listeners – April 04, 2005
PlayPod 1.0b RSS podcast client released – March 03, 2005
BBC tests Podcast feed – November 22, 2004
‘Podcasting’ brings personalized audio programs to your iPod – September 30, 2004
“Rome and the Vatican were 3,000 miles away–yet this small, white, diminutive device had transported me to the Sistine Chapel.”
I’m glad the guy likes his iPod so much, but he might want to download some geography podcasts. Rome is 4800 miles from Chicago.
And he was “transported” to St. Peter’s basilica, where the crowds gathered in the square, not the Sistine Chapel, which is hidden away around the corner and doesn’t have a public square.
Whatever. Where’s my dual 3.0Ghz G5? Podcasts. Give me a break.
Perhaps he was actually in NY, and he was fabricating the story. Sort of like what Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass did during their tenures at the NYT and the New Republic, respectively…
“3,000 miles”, from Chicago to Rome???
Kartik Subramanian???
WTF? I thought foreigners were supposed to be smarter than us native-born Americans.
3,000 miles my ass.
By 3000 miles he was probably thinking about that sort cut through the earth’s core.
heh, you guys crack me up, you’re really being that anal over how accurate his mileage is? it’s not even important to the article!
3000mi is correct, not only does the iPod take you figuratively closer, it tunnels through solid ground and gives you the distance as an spirit creature could fly… right through the earth’s core… whoa… talk about far out.
It always sucks when people start political arguments in the MDN comments, so please don’t take this as such: but I wanted to observe that I find it kind of crazy how many Apple-lovers are right-wingers. Apple strikes me as cool, classy, intelligent, and using one means breaking away from the hegemonic status quo. Those are qualities that I tend to associate with liberals, so it’s always a bit jarring to see a MacHead letting fly with anti-liberal rhetoric. Conversely, I tend to assume that MS’s business model (use their monopolistic position to manipulate markets so that the rich can get richer, the market-dominant can lock down entrepeneurial upstarts, and minorities can be excluded by way of environmental incompatibilities) is something conservatives would approve of.
Just goes to show that you never can tell – our initial assumptions tend not to hold much water. There’s probably a lesson in here: if facts are presented in the right way we can come together and all appreciate the goodness of the Mac platform; but we all have friends who don’t, who choose Windows or Linux and think we’re stark raving mad for using Macs. We may bicker about the choice, but at the end of the day the best thing for all is to promote as much inter-platform compatibility as possible.
Magic word = remember, as in “remember this isn’t supposed to be flamebait.”