Earbud and Digital Camera rant

Earbuds suck. These sorry ass excuses for headphones that come with the IPOD, and most everyone uses, simply bite. These things sound like music in someone else's house through the phone. I used to be able to buy these Sony headphones, which sound a million times better, at our friendly neighborhood Dolphin, but no more. Four more stores proved similarly fruitless. I have three broken pairs of these things. One got eaten by a rat at my school trying to get at the Maxwell House slime instant coffee I drink to get through difficult moments with apathetic island students. That coffee is kind of like the description of the Kramer painting in that long ago episode: "I'm horrified, but I can't look away." Another pair simply wore out, and another I snapped on like day two in a freak accident -- kind of a "Bizarre Gardening Accident," as Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap would put it.

While I'm on the topic of things that piss me off, put digital cameras high on the list. I bought this Sony, a reputable name albeit an economy model, in June, and I got one with the design flaw that countless people encountered and vented about on Amazon. I'm hoping the designer and the people setting up the warranty department get impaled with a fork and have each ditch sawed off with a butter knife. Sorry just saw SAW III, a needless macabre beating of a cinematic dead horse if ever there was one. I had a Canon digital camera I bought when I arrived on island that lasted about a year, but that doesn't seem like nearly enough time for one of these things. I'm practically being driven back to film cameras by this crap. I'm trying Olympus next, and if that doesn't work, I'm going film.