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Pressing, grave problem: I spend about a minute disentangling my iPod earphones every time I take them out to use them.

I used to wrap them around the iPod, but the plastic of the phone casings would scrape against the housing, and the cord right at the plug would bend quite sharply (causing me some concern that I was fatiguing the wire inside). So I started just making a small loop out of the earphone wire (wrapping it around my hand, usually), and this is what leads inevitably to deep and inextricable tangulation. The iPod’s earphone wire is so pliable that it tends to get knotted much more easily than any headphones or earphones I’ve ever owned (including a pair of Philips ear-wrapping phones which have the skinniest wire I’ve ever seen on good-sounding audio equipment).

I’ve seen ads for the Sumajin Smartwrap (pictured at right). Anyone have one of these, or some other clever cord-coiling creation? Or is there some crazy new wrapping technique out there, requiring no additional hardware, that I’m not familiar with?

McSweeney’s: The Riddler Makes an Announcement.
“I’ll be dividing my time between the condo here in Gotham and a summer place in Provence that Terrence and I acquired recently. As for your future, it’s a little murky, I’m afraid. I’ve had an offer from a Lex Luthor, guy from out of town, who may be looking to expand. Presumably, he’d need help, but I’m not sure you’d be interested. He’s awfully dour, to be quite honest. I’ve also phoned Joker and Penguin and raved about all of you. Jennifer has a sign-up sheet to meet with recruiters from their organizations.”

The editors of u2log.com offer their song-by-song review of the new U2 disc.

Sorry about that. Don’t know what the deal was.

James Cameron in Wired: The Drive to Discover. “Those high school touchdowns scored by Neil and Buzz and the others are trophies that have been gathering dust, but we still fantasize that we are the same team we were then.”

Matt (“Señor WordPress”) on Stop Worrying: “Only thing is the URIs are a little verbose.” Yeah, I’m still getting accustomed to the named URLs (a feature I was most excited about in WP). I keep forgetting to explicitly specify a concise URL slug.

It doesn’t help that I can’t figure out how to do it in MarsEdit without shortening the actual title (and thereby the slug as well). And I love my absurdly verbose titles!

Chris offers a neologism:

sh&-f&l shäk (n) The act, process or experience of stumbling across a song in a long iTunes shuffle play that you were not aware you owned, are embarrassed to realize you own, or both.