All hail our robotic overlords

OK, now look: I know this sounds ridiculous, but I really, really think my iPod's shuffle songs feature has free will. Or maybe from spending so much time in Japan she (her name is Ruthie) has become highly intelligent and efficient and has learned to anticipate my needs. Maybe she's been hanging out with Aibo.

But recently -- and only recently -- she's been playing songs from my Christmas playlist. Now, this playlist has been on my iPod since last year, but never has she played anything from it until maybe last week. I'm curious to see whether she'll stop playing from that list come Dec. 26 (she'd better ...). Stay tuned.

But I've been detecting some higher-level intelligence from Ruthie for quite some time now. I swear sometimes she can tell when I'm bummed out and plays songs to help me chin up. And she knows -- I swear to God she knows! -- how to choose a scholarly progression tracing Uncle Tupelo to Wilco (or Son Volt-Jay-Farrar-back to Son Volt), even though those are all in different playlists. AND! She seems to know that Golden Smog is tangentially related. Spooky!

She even seems to know how to clump together stuff I discovered in college (Kim Richey, Greg Brown) for a nice nostalgia trip -- even if some of the songs she chooses from that group are from albums recorded after I graduated.

So am I crazy? Does anyone else's iPod do this? Or is Ruthie special, perhaps because of her time living among the world's most advanced robotics AND because of the wisdom she has achieved in her unusually long life span (the copyright date on her backside says 2002)? She may be too fat for her iPod socks, and she may be down to about an hour and a half of battery life and prone to quirk, but dang it she can READ MY MIND. So I'll be keeping her around for a while. That that, Nano.