So as I've been mentioning, the air's been getting colder, and along with that, it's been getting drier and windier. No biggie, a fine chance to enjoy my wool overcoat while thinking that soon I should shop for a good winter jacket. I'm thinking along the lines of REI, except the nearest store is 5 hours away, but that kind of thing. Something lightweight but good down to 0 degrees. You know, leveraging the space-age fabrics we invented over the last 30 years instead of making jetpacks and helicars.

But I digress...

What I meant to post about was the effect this weather is having on my music listening. No, no. This isn't some monotribe about listening to "Winter Kills" on endless repeat or anything. It's all about the static.

So I use my iPod all the time, putting it in my pocket, with a ling headphone cord stretching from there to the in-ear Sony earbuds I use. These headphones are great. They block a lot of external noise, have great fidelity, and with three different sized sets of plugs to choose from, they don't hurt your (err, my) ears with prolonged use. The in-ear part is all rubber, and the only but of metal is on the outside, where it doesn't touch the skin at all.

Herein lies the problem...

It seems that with the dry, cold wind whipping along the headphone cord between pocket and ear, it builds up quite an electrical charge (and I'm sure the 5400rpm drive inside the iPod probably isn't helping much either). Something about the way the headphones are made seems to necessitate that the charge is not balanced between the two earbuds. so the charge builds up until, after about seven seconds, click-ow! a tiny spark leaps around from the metal bit on the earbud, questing for something grounded, until it finds my ear, two millimeters away.

Both ears...

...at the same time...

...every seven seconds.

It only happens when I'm walking outside in the cold and wind, and the clicks are just annoying enough to be annoying, but not tear-it-out-of-my-ear-and-kill-it annoying. Personally, I'm just wondering how this kind of thing makes it past testing.

So now it looks like I'll have to turn to an alternate set of headphones, depending on the weather, or tape tinfoil from the earbud to my ear, so that the current flows cleanly, instead of arcing periodically.

In effect, I need to ground myself for listening to electric music...