You are fogging up the iPhone

I've been listening to a lot of audiobooks via the iPhone and my Shuffle. It's the ultimate in multi-tasking when you have someone reading to you while you do dishes or fold laundry or mow the lawn or walk to work.

I've begun listening to whatever title is next in the database rather than trying to figure out what kind of mood I'm in and matching a book or author to the mood. That takes way too much time. And it's not easy if the book I've just finished was exceptional—positively (Rasputin's Daughter) or negatively (The Harmony Silk Factory). disclaimer: don't choose your next book on my opinion of it. If the booked is critiqued as an adventure in creative use of the language or character development, I won't have much patience for it mainly because I never learned these discriminating skills as a reader and I get bored with the text. Whereas I eat mainly to fill the void and pay little attention to presentation (and sometimes flavor), I read to be entertained.

Anyway, Black Fly Season, a peppy little police procedural, just wrapped up in my ear and it was pretty good. Moved along, good characters who didn't talk like fake people and the author didn't treat me like an imbecile and point every little thing out, for example: "... he picked up the tv remote control from the table, pointed it at the tv and pressed the red button near the top. The tv clicked off." Oh, shoot me now. Anyway, the author Giles Blunt will be on a playlist again in the future. The narrator, however, may be banished from my ear canals forever because I could hear him breathing between sentences. Last night I was listening to the iPhone in bed through the speakers and not the earbuds. The iPhone was on the pillow next to me and—I kid you not—I kept looking over to see if a cat had joined me at the head of the bed because I could hear the breathing. This has never happened before and it was creeping me out.

Besides the obvious questions regarding just what the sound engineer was doing while Senor Inhale was reading aloud, I have another inquiry: Since I couldn't hear the sucking of air through the earbuds, does this mean that they suck or does this mean that they are magnificent little audio marvels? Well, I'm off to mow the lawn and give the light comedy A Tale Etched in Blood a go. If that doesn't work out, I have a pile of This American Life to plow through. Ira Glass, now there's a guy who knows how to breathe.