my fyre blog: SanDisk Sansa M240 1GB MP3 Player w/ FM Tuner

this might be worth getting since you were thinking about getting a cheap mp3 player for will. it could be for christmas, maybe.

Sent to you by David via Google Reader:

SanDisk Sansa M240 1GB MP3 Player w/ FM Tuner - $12.99

via Woot! - One Day, One Deal on Aug 30, 2007

Mental health professionals across the country are reporting an alarming rise in iPod Grief Syndrome, as consumers are thrown into deep depression upon losing their expensive, high-capacity MP3 players.

"We're creating a generation of casualties," writes Stanford University researcher Stephanie Cupertino in her book Greatly Insane: iGS and the Future of America. "One careless moment on a subway or at the gym, and iGS sets in. Not only did iGS sufferers invest large amounts of their barista tips in their now-lost iPods, they also store their most beloved music on the devices' ample hard drives.

"Entire neighborhoods, like Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Logan Square in Chicago, look like the sets of zombie movies," Cupertino continues. "Their streets are haunted by hollow-eyed young people, eerily humming snatches of Carl Craig remixes and Franz Ferdinand b-sides, just so they won't walk in silence."

Experts now recommend cheaper MP3 players with less storage capacity for those at risk of iGS. "Let's face it: people lose things, things get stolen," says Dr. Brandon Carlsburg, an iGS specialist in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood, another epicenter of the epidemic. "With a player like the SanDisk 1GB MP3 Player, that inevitable loss is much less acute. You're out, like, eighteen bucks. And while 1GB stores plenty of music for normal commuting or workout purposes, nobody's going to use it as their sole music-storage device.

"I always tell my clients 'buy two or three, if you can.'"

At a group session for iGS sufferers in Queens, New York, Maya Schulte agonized over everything she'd lost when her iPod evidently fell out of her knapsack during a street festival last week. "My whole music collection - gone, like that," Schulte said. "It was like the whole world slipped out from under me. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't stand up. Do you have any idea what favors I had to do to get those advance MP3s of the new Hold Steady album? Oh my God...and I never even got a chance to listen to it."

Carlsburg says such stories are commonplace.

"We thought we were getting a Utopia," he says. "Thousands of portable songs, a totally cool-looking design. But we never asked ourselves: what happens when somebody slashes open our backpack and steals Utopia?"