Sweet Music, Evil Hair, and Giant Boobs

Anyone with enough internet savvy and free time to be reading my blog probably already knows about Pandora Radio. But just in case you don't, lemme tell ya: It's COOL!

Pandora is not like earlier forms of internet radio where you had to listen to whatever the station was broadcasting at the time. The way it works is that you tell Pandora a song or artist that you like, and she creates a station that plays similar music, including bands that you might not know about. It's a good way to discover new music that you'll like. You can't control when a specific song is played, because that would violate licensing stuff, but Pandora does put the station's "founding" song or artist into the playlist every so often. You can create as many stations as you have moods, and they'll be saved in your account so you can tune in any time from any computer.

I don't know how they chose the name "Pandora". Maybe it's after the Mythological Pandora... [Quoting from the Encyclopedia Mythica]:

In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman on earth. Zeus ordered Hephaestus, the god of craftsmanship, to create her and he did, using water and earth. The gods endowed her with many talents; Aphrodite gave her beauty, Apollo music, Hermes persuasion, and so forth. Hence her name: Pandora, "all-gifted". When Prometheus stole fire from heaven, Zeus took vengeance by presenting Pandora to Epimetheus, Prometheus' brother. With her, Pandora had a jar which she was not to open under any circumstance. Impelled by her natural curiosity, Pandora opened the jar, and all evil contained escaped and spread over the earth. She hastened to close the lid, but the whole contents of the jar had escaped, except for one thing which lay at the bottom, and that was Hope.

(Apparently one of the first evils to escape from the box was really bad 1980s hair, which instantly afflicted Pandora.)



Of course it could be that Pandora Radio's creators just picked Pandora as an exotic and sexy sounding name. They wouldn't have been the first to do so. In the 1990s, "Pandora Peaks" was the stage name of an adult entertainer famous for having breasts the size and shape of soccer balls.



Heh heh. This should up my hit count.