Look, we're all reasonable people here and I think we should be able to talk about these things openly so here goes: Get yourself a good set of headphones. If you enjoy listening to music at all, you owe it to your ears. I'm a huge fan of the Bose SoundLink headphones. They're over the ear. Also, the Parrot Zik 2.0 are pretty sweet. They have an app that lets you select different preset sound profiles (created by artists like La Roux and DJ Jazzy Jeff) and it's crazy. I listen to songs I've known for years and suddenly a preset brings out subtle things I've never noticed before.

And the Parrot has noise-canceling that will be very handy when everything goes to hell.


I stayed up way too late last night listening to music through my Zik's. All those presets. My preference seems to be for pop settings. I'd call it more of a wide-spectrum of sound, vocals usually towards the top, punchy, low and high. When I tune it for indie rock it gets higher, and sounds kind of tinny to me. I have yet to try that setting on any Iron and Wine. I'm looking forward to it. Maybe some Lisa Hannigan; she recorded her album Sea Sew in a barn. Maybe I'll hear a rat dodging a barn owl.

Countdown to Surgery: 7 Days. I haven't gotten an audio sample yet. I have plenty of audio of my voice, but I want to specifically try to read a page of something, like "Moby Dick", and then read the same page afterwards.

Also, if perhaps they accidentally slice through my vocal cords, I'll want a voice sample so I can get one of those sign-language-to-voice devices like Amy the gorilla in the movie version of "Congo."

Hell I want something like that now.