Doddering Shuffle.

Driving home from work last night I was listening to my iPod shuffle. Jake was sleeping; despite all his attributes he's rather indifferent to music it seems.

The shuffle is currently holding 280 ska songs. I leave it set on shuffle mode and let it wander through the range of first-, second-, and third-wave ska on-board. Sometimes it plays successive songs from the same artist or group, but last night it did something odd: it played the same song twice in a row.

First it played "Meat Dance" by Slow Gherkin off the split CD Invisible Tank. This caught my attention because it's a more up-tempo cut of the song, released in 1998, that I hadn't heard recently.

That was immediately followed by the original cut of "Meat Dance" off the 1995 comp This is Raj...and This is Ska. Weird. Out of 280 songs, what are the odds the shuffle would play two version of the same song, one right after the other.

Even stranger is that I randomly Autofill my shuffle from my ska library, currently holding 681 songs. (Raise your hand if you didn't thing there were that many ska tracks in the world. Now put your hand down; you look like a fool sitting in front of a computer with your hand raised.)

So out of the random Autofill where only a third of the songs will be selected, these two tracks made it into the shuffle, then while being played randomly, they end up back-to-back. (Well, technically back-to-front, but that's not the expression.)

If I didn't know better, I'd say the Universe is trying to tell me something.