0 0 8B - The Michigan Daily - Thursday, September 23, 2004 i . . a 0 0 0 0 The Michigan Daily I Gaily Arts Mix Tape DATE/TIME ENOISE REDUCTION, DATE/TIME NOISE REDUCTION theI rant iPods: Little white devils DAN MULLKOFF - WORD. Election time, school, stress lev- els running high, and while Green Day finally caught onto that politics thing, not everyone is in the mood for school and election-year antics. Hence, "Silly Rabbit, Mix Tapes Are For Kids." It is simply music to have when hanging out with some friends and procrastinating. /- Chris Gaerig 1. "brums of Death" - DJ Shadow 2. "Sodom, South Georgia" -Iron and Wine 3. "4" - Aphex Twin 4. "Web in Front" - Ar- chers of Loaf 5. "Get By" - bizzee Rascal feat. Vanya 6. "TerriblyWrong" - Ev- ery Time I Iie 7. "II B.S." -Charles Mingus 8. "Saint Elmo's Fire" - Brian Eno 9. "The Ruler's Back" -J'ay-Z 10. "First Breath After Coma" - Explosion in the Sky 1. "Get Em High" - Kanye West 2. "Pussy Foot the ,uke" Comets on Fire 3. "I Slept with the Bon- homme at the CBC" - Bro- ken Social Scene 4. "RE: DEFinition" - Black Star 5. "Who is it fCarry My Toy on the Left Cry My Pain on the Right) - Bjork 6. "Sometimes" - My Bloody Valentine By Emily ieu Daily Arts Writer S UFFIXGATE At first there were only a few, and then they exploded across campus. You know. You've seen them everywhere. They're small, white and annoying as hell. No, not the little frilly butt-cheek-exposing mini- skirts (although those are pretty damn annoying too). I'm talking about iPods. Every day when I walk to class, I can't go a minute without seeing several people pass by with their elitist white earphones lodged tightly in their ears, all isolating themselves from the rest of the University community. Basically, iPod owners do a very good job of fulfilling the usually con- tradictory slogan of the U.S. Army, "An Army of One," uniting themselves with their white earphones and aura of general snobbishness, and yet ignoring everyone, including each other. Once upon a time, iPod owners were part of a select few, with better taste in music and therefore impressive song col- lections on their iPods. When we saw someone walking along the Diag with white earphones, we hated these people. We were envious of them, and we spoke of iPods as expensive, unattainable things. However, due to aggressive marketing and the introduction of the iPod mini, these little devices quickly grew to iconic stature, particularly among college stu- dents. People snap up the machines in droves, caving in to outrageous prices simply because iPods are the thing to own. Instead of serving as storage for comprehensive music archives of audio- philes, iPods have suddenly become a fad. It nauseates me to know that there are students out there who excitedly show off their cute little iPods to their friends, sharing the white earphones to listen to inane pop songs by Avril Lavigne and Hoobastank. But now, a sad confession: I own an iPod myself. I must admit, they are rather nice for avoiding solicitors with fliers, sur- veys and Scripture. But at least my music doesn't suck. Now leave me alone, or else I'll stick these earphones into my ears and, pretend that Les Savy Fav is drowning out' your voice. 7. "Consequence" - The Notwist 8. "Sine Wave" - Mogwai 9 "Shame" - The Blood Brothers Total Time: 85; 28 MOM" THE TRUTH IS.. WITB TIIFSF IH '11-1GIOUTS. WE eOULON'T SUCIC IF WE TRIED. 44 (,hy isn't it called a runathon?" I asked myself and unin- terested fellow runners during my first and only marathon two years ago. . "That would be silly," I was informed. "A marathon is so named because Pheidippides ran 26.2 miles from the city of Marathon to Athens in 490 B.C. to tell the Athenians that the Greeks had defeated the Persians." Perhaps it is also silly to use the word marathon and the derived suffix -athon to describe doing anything for "an abnormal length of time." Following the 1896 Olympics in Athens, at which the 26.2 mile race was dubbed "the Marathon," events of all sorts became -athons, from 1908's "Murphy Marathon" potato peel- ing contest to the annual "Stay- Awake-Athon" at the University of New Hampshire, with bikeathons, telethons, and bakeathons.along the exhausting way. No one is peeling potatoes, baking, or stay- ing awake for 26.2 miles, so all these events have in common with the city of Marathon, named for its native marathou plant, is that they take a long time, as did one event that began in Marathon 2,500 years ago. This shameless misusageathon is a stirring example of the American tradition of contriving suffixes and applying them to any and all words we can. One could dub it suffix- gate, so it shares its ending with virtually every scandal since the Watergate break-in in 1972. The media has clung to this newfound practice of "gating" every scan- dal that comes about in govern- ment and society, from France's Winegate in 1973 (perhaps the first misusage of -gate in this sense, this scandal involved wine sellers attempting to pass off wine from Southwest France's Midi region as wine from Bordeaux. Why, I never...!) to Irangate (a.k.a. Contragate) and Monicagate (a.k.a. zippergate). Presumably, only fortunate timing (i.e. dying before Nixon was elected presi- dent) saved Warren G. Harding from constantly hearing about the Teapot Dome Gate scandal during his term. These contrived terms are not metaphors thoughtfully relat- ing present events to Watergate; indeed, most recipients of -gate share nothing with Nixon's scandal but the involvement of an elected official. The media seems to add -gate to every scandal in order to cheaply evoke Watergate, the series of events which gave Americans such a distrust of government that the emotional reaction associated with that scandal can be transferred to whatever the scandal du jour may be, creating public interest and selling newspapers. Not as harm- ful as William Randolph Hearst's Mainegate, but uncreative nonethe- less. Lest we forget the classic Christmas-gift-for-old-women T-shirt slogans chocoholic and shopoholic. Presumably these are people dependent on "chocohol" and "shopohol" respectively, what- ever those may be. Not to say that there is no place for Bollywood-style clever misus- age of invented suffixes. Clinton's Whitewatergate would have been a cleverer term had Nixon been African-American (but one could use the phrase "...had Nixon been African-American" to qualify far more interesting ideas than that). And I would have enjoyed hearing the media refer to Strom Thurmond's recent posthumous scandal as daughter- gate, but it didn't seem to catch on. Strom, I might add, had witnessed the media's savvy at misusing suffixes firsthand after a North Carolina newspaper writer nick- named Thurmond's States' Rights Democratic Party the Dixiecrats in 1948 (Alan Burns of Clemson's Strom Thurmond Institute informed me that the term was not used by Strom or his supporters until after the 1948 election, if at all). The intent of the term Dixiecrat was to carry the meaning of Democrat and along with it most of the ideals of the Democratic Party to the fac- tion through the suffix -crat. But nothing in -crat implies "govern- ment of the people," and it could just as easily have carried other connotations, from aristocrat to plutocrat. -crat (can you start a sentence with a hyphen?) merely means "a supporter of a specified form of government," so literally, a Dixiecrat would support a govern- ment of the American South. As long as we're coining terms for Strom's party, Segregationcrat and Racistcrat come to mind. It seems the retiring Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.) may be the last sur- viving Dixiecrat, but I would also call attention to a close relative of the group, the states'-rights- supporting and Republican-siding Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), whom I would call a Bible-Beltcrat. But if adding -stock can magi- cally transform a word into a music festival, can adding -aquic dick turn it into a drunk-driving manslaughter scandal, thanks to Ted Kennedy's incident? Can the 1993 ambush in Mogadishu, Somalia, spawn words like Fallujadishu to describe recent events? It wouldn't seem any more absurd. Who is to blame for suffixgate' Partially the media, for exploit- ing the public's emotions in orde: to turn a profit; partially carnival barker-esque entrepreneurs, for drawing crowds to their businesse with absurd names like Washeteri and Elvis-a-rama; but largely, the American public, for allow- ing itself to be manipulated and wrung of its hard-earned dollars through such spurious means. T2 multitude must demand creativity in order to receive rich, thought- out rhetoric from the media and others. Perhaps then, contrived suffixes will be confined to clever gems, and we'll hear more Ypsituckys and fewer Enrongates Dan is quite thefan of strang off-the-wall trivia that will serve hi no purpose in the future. Ifyou shay this love, e-mail him your stories mul/koff{ umich.ed U PENNSTATE PENN STATE DICKINSON SCHOOL of LAW OFFICE OF ADMISSIONS M'eet the Dickinson recruiter LAW DAY Michigan Union Building September 27, 2004 11 a.m. - 3 p.m. I s - Visit our web site at www.dsl.psu.edu Penn State is committed to affirmative action, equal opportunity, and the diversity of its workforce. UEd. DL (