According to IDC, a mere six percent of households in the US own portable digital music players. This seems inordinately low; according to my eyeballs, 90% of people riding the DC Metro on a given weekday own iPods. (Five percent have old CD players with cheap foam headphones that leak like the Exxon Valdez, and the remaining five percent are too busy fingering their M16s and looking steely-eyed to listen to anything.)

The same survey says that six percent of households have satellite radio receivers, though I know scarcely anyone else who owns one. Is this a red state/blue state thing? It would explain the eighteen channels of country music they transmit on Sirius.