Look, there's random and then there's *too random*

So my iPhone has a fair chunk of my music, but it can't hold anywhere near all of it. I've been preparing for a "small" iPod for a while, rating songs and getting comfortable with Smart Playlists so I had an easy way to tag "here is the best stuff". My iPhone has a few key artists - everything I have by the Beatles or Jonathan Coulton, plus a few "by hand" playlists that incorporate most of my Norah Jones, Sarah McLachlan and a few others. It also has everything in the "My Top Rated" smart list which is anything with 4 or 5 stars in iTunes. As of right now I have 6913 tracks in iTunes, 5088 of which are unrated. Of the 1825 rated tracks 226 are in "My Top Rated". I let the phone take "My Top Rated" out for a shuffle spin today.

It led off with Bugs Bunny from the Bugs Bunny on Broadway CD - What's Opera, Doc? OK, that's a bit eclectic but I'll defend the four star rating there, this is a classic piece of culture. Even as the final Looney Tunes sting fades away it launches into … Roger Waters playing Another Brick in the Wall Part Two live from the In the Flesh set. This is not a segue you can take smoothly.

Fine though, I can roll with the Pink Floyd or it wouldn't be on there. After that it switched to Aqua's Barbie Girl. Now this is really stretching the definition of coherent playlist well past breaking. I mean Bugs Bunny to Pink Floyd to Aqua in three songs? That's not eclectic, that's psychotic.

After that it settled down and played Depeche Mode with Black Celebration, which it followed up with MC Frontalot's It is Pitch Dark. OK, that's spanning like 20 years of my life, but I can see that I likely played Infocom games while listening to DM. The last track on this little odyssey was Oingo Boingo's Gray Matter, which again, I can go from a song about Zork to a song about brains with a minimum of twitching. Shuffle mode, you have redeemed yourself. FOR NOW! But the double secret probation mode will remain in effect until further improvement is observed.