The current generation of iPods can be had with a hard drive as big as 40 Gigabytes, and the iPod Photo can be had in a 60 Gigabyte model. If you don’t limit yourself to the storage available in a portable digital music player, you can have an exponentially more capacious warehouse for all of your MP3s on your computer’s hard disk — a desktop computer with a 250 Gigabyte internal drive is not uncommon these days. That’s a lot of music. So it occurred to me this morning, when the chorus of some half-remembered song popped into my head inexplicably and then haunted me all the way to the office, that iTunes and iPods — or whatever substitutes you care to name — still don’t allow you to find that one song that goes something like “Doo de dum de doo…” You know the one I’m talkin’ about?

Whether or not I really have a use for an iPod Photo or not is unclear to me, but seeing how I’m in the market for a new one of these things, there’s a decent chance I’ll own one by the end of the year. However, I still have a quibble: I like the fact that Apple is continuing to expand the feature set of its increasingly important digital device, but I’m frustrated by the company’s apparent unwillingness to just go the whole way — how much longer must we wait before Apple just makes the iPod what it so obviously is: a true multimedia portable digital assistant? Most of the groundwork for this is there; all that’s missing is a touch screen screen. With these photo features, the iPod Photo amounts to one big tease. Anyway, all I know is the U2-edition iPod is really dumb.

To be sure, the Red Sox absolutely, a hundred and ten percent, for sure deserved to win their first World Series in forever last night — it was probably the most well-earned championship we’ll see this decade, if you forget the inconvenient fact that they got into the post-season by virtue of the wild card. Personally, as a fan of the Yankees, it was a weird experience to see them do so well, being so accustomed to wishing ever more bad luck on them. I’ve never bought the image of the team as a gang of ‘lovable losers,’ something they’ve been cultivating with almost obsessive care. This year’s team, in fact, has struck me as having more than its fair share of assholes. Still, I was rooting for them all the way.

The early word is that there’s a Jon Stewart backlash imminent. The fake news anchor’s recent and notorious Crossfire appearance — and the mention of his name and influence in seemingly every article published anywhere about the character of this year’s electorate — has brought us, as a society, ever closer to the day when the man and his television show are officially played out. That will be a shame, but in the meantime, I’m going to enjoy the unexpected gift that my girlfriend picked up for me over the weekend: my very own copy “America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction,” the current Amazon number one bestseller from the producers of The Daily Show.

What an exhausting week I had last week; I was burning the candle at both ends trying to get some work out the door, and it completely drained me by Friday night. In fact, when I was taking a cab home late that evening, I was even too tired to notice that my iPod had quietly fallen out of my jacket pocket, and now it’s lost to me forever. There’s a tiny candle of hope that I hold out for finding it, somehow, through the good graces of Mayor Bloomberg’s 311 information line, which, in theory, is working overtime to help me make a connection with the cab driver (luckily I got a receipt) through the city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission. The emphasis there is on tiny. I mean, would you try to find the owner of an iPod you found in a taxi cab?

The whole episode pains me to even think about it. I really don’t want to pay another few hundred dollars for what I still consider to be a grossly over-priced product, but I’ve become so attached to the thing, it seems untenable to consider doing without one. That’s a sign of a captive consumer, right? Anyhow, the iPod I lost was a 20 gigabyte, second-generation model from 2002 — so it kind of irks me too that, though the newer versions are slimmer and feature larger hard drives, they have basically the same feature set as mine, with few improvements. At least, not enough improvements to justify spending another large chunk of change on one when, just last week, I still had a perfectly good iPod in my possession. Feel me?

Much to my dismay, news outlets and politically-oriented weblogs are continuing to devote time, words and breath to the fact that John Kerry mentioned Mary Cheney, vice president Dick Cheney’s daughter — who happens to be a lesbian — in the course of last night’s debate. You can find all of the details elsewhere, so I’m not going to detail them here. In my opinion, it’s much ado about nothing — Kerry’s reference was both respectful and relevant — and the brewing furor is yet another example of trumped-up indignation on the part of conservatives (however, I admit that even some of my pinko friends found it somewhat inappropriate).

As it happens, this incident is a good illustration of one of the reasons I find it so frustrating and stressful to watch the presidential debates, especially when George W. Bush is a participant.

It’s a really, really stressful night to watch television if you follow either the Major League Baseball postseason — both leagues are in the first two games of their championship series tonight — or the race for the White House — Bush and Kerry are in the midst of their third and last debate. I keep going back and forth between these the debate and the Yankees/Red Sox game, and it’s like maddening. I can’t look away though. Anyway, as a friend of mine joked yesterday, “I hope the Yankees beat George Bush.”

I’m back from Sicily as of yesterday afternoon. I didn’t have internet access while I was away, or I would have written several posts about how amazing Italy is; I’m going to try and round up whatever thoughts I can recoup after ten days of sleeping in late, eating decadently tasty food and drinking lots of red wine, and write something here soon.

In the meantime, I’m feeling a little fuzzy-brained and jetlagged and a little deflated after returning to the reality of a non-vacation life. Mostly though, I’m feeling incredibly sad about Christopher Reeve’s death yesterday. There’s not an actor’s performance in any film that means more to me than Reeve’s in “Superman: The Movie.” It had a profound impact on the way I saw the world as a child, and it still chokes me up to watch it as an adult. It was acutely painful to see Reeve suffer that horrible accident in 1995, and now to see him go at the relatively young age of 52… I can’t possibly articulate the meaning of this loss in a way that would do it any kind of justice.