Pandora

i was recently introduced to Pandora, and i've loved it all week except that right now P and i have reached that point in the relationship where the honeymoon blinders come off and we realize we didn't know each other as well we initially thought we did and we don't actually value ALL the same things like we initially thought and it's very jarring. i think it's just a spell.
Back it up for the fogies and musically/internetally-challenged: Pandora is a website that functions as a radio and uses the Music Genome Project to analyze the artists or songs you type in to offer you a selection of songs with melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics, etc that align with your entry. Then you mark each offered song with a thumbs up or a thumbs down and it adjusts its offerings accordingly.
OR DOES IT? Because i watched La Vie En Rose last night and am consequently enamored with the late Edith Piaf, so i entered her name and got a nice selection of Edith, Pink Martini, Dinah Washington, and several artists i would never have discovered on my own. It was all well and good until my new 'station' took a turn for the worse, down a shady little street called 'Broadway' and into the musical territory. BLECH. i'm okay with the occasional musical, but i prefer my characters to be morally-challenged and to spontaneously break into gritty or interesting songs, a la RENT, Chicago, Sweeney Todd or to some extent, Moulin Rouge. What Pandora has been offering up for the last hour has hardly been thus. Carousel, Annie Get Your Gun, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang..... NO THANK YOU. i've given thumb downs (thumbs down? thumbs downs?) to each and every 'musical' song but it keeps pumping them into my queueue! Boo! i don't want anything from any character described as 'plucky' or 'charming' and i don't want to hear anything about the frontier. How did i go from a morphine-addled French diva to an obnoxious red-haired orphan dancing with a mop? The pedaling mice and button-pushing monkeys at the Pandora lab must have been fed fruit juice this afternoon instead of their usual musical-wisdom-inducing meal of wine and grilled cheese sandiches. (Get it? fruit juice? no? call me, i'll explain it. It's very clever.) i say again, BLECH. i don't welcome any song where the 'singer' hammily talk-shouts their way through a verse then tosses out a long note and Clay Aikens their way through the chorus. Yes, i am a snob with emo tendencies, thanks for asking.
But, as our bookwormy friend Lavar Burton used to say, "don't take my word for it." Other than this little hiccup, Pandora has been the best thing to happen to my long work day since i took the long tendrils of my Office Plant and hooked them around the nails in the wall to create a tacky, creepy 'Attack of the Garden Suite' look. i highly recommend this spiffy site. You can put in your favorite song or artist and let it play that music's kissing cousins all day, or you can explore new avenues of musicology. The mix it creates for you is stored as a 'station' so if you create an account (free. easy. (not in the skanky way.)) you can listen to the mix as often as you like, and you can create multiple stations. Marvelous. Now if you'll excuse me, i have to go punch Eva Peron in the face for assuming all of Argentina spends it days crying for her.