XM Radio offers digital quality reception of 100 specialized channels, no more than 6 minutes of advertising in an hour, each channel focused on a specific kind of music, news or whatever. It costs $10 a month, but what doesn't? I have a sense this is a major shift, the biggest change in radio since television. And I want one.

So that means you're going to run out and buy one?

I'm thinking about it for the apartment, anyway. Get one later for the car. I don't spend much time in the car.

"Thinking about it" for you means you're not going to do anything at all, which means it can't be such a big deal, which means you're wasting time even mentioning it.

Mumble.

Monday. That's probably true, talking, not buying, but the thought came when they mentioned it on public radio yesterday, since it coincided with a day in which I dug out two or three old records and played music I haven't played in a very long time. South Pacific, The Merry Widow, some really dorky stuff by Nelson Eddy. It started with Neil Young in these last few weeks, having bought his Decade album, then a little Roxy Music, music of my twenties and thirties, then yesterday sliding into the degenerate tunes of my pre-teen - early teenage youth. Not unlike riding on an airplane and the pilot, who has always conducted himself in the coolest and most appropriate manner, suddenly begins to giggle over the intercom and slur his words, something about "the air seems warmer" and "will the cabin attendants please refrain from removing their clothes", while the wings, the wings start rising and dipping, rising and dipping in a disconcerting rhythm of their own.

The playing of the old music, hearing about this satellite radio business, thinking about the fact that people who buy records are between twelve and thirty years old, thinking about these things, the kind of thinking you do on a late Sunday afternoon with a nice whiskey and water in your stomach, wondering if old music junkies my age, if we had access to this satellite radio stuff that played old music and new music that fit right into our own particular interests, if these old farts who think nothing of plunking down big bucks for tickets to a Rolling Stones concert, maybe these old farts might start buying music again, rejoin the market. It might be old music. It might be tunes from the deep dark past. And it might be current. Which brings me full circle. Be nice to get into the music again, I'd like to be able to find and conveniently buy a fairly eclectic mix, if I could only hear it, if I could only find it somewhere, maybe with this satellite radio business.