This Definitely Not the Daily News special report is dedicated to Azahar of casa az fame, who is today celebrating the start of her third year of blogging and who a few weeks back in the midst of a tech consumption frenzy stopped to ask me, "What's an iPod mini?"

by Elmer Schmedlapp
Seattle (DNTN) A team of archaeologists is attempting to decipher the contents of a recently discovered iPod mini to see if knowledge contained on the ancient device can give scientists insights into lost technologies and long-forgotten music listening practices.

The mini, which apparently fell behind the bookshelf of Walla Walla, Washington resident Wanda Woodsworth while Woodsworth was out walking one wet Wednesday in winter, 2005, had been given up for lost ever since.

Woodsworth recovered the long-dead Apple product last week while moving furniture.

"It had been so long, I didn't recognise it for what it was at first" said Wordsworth, "so I phoned the university. They got really excited, told me not to touch it until experts could identify it, then evaluate its contents. "

The mini was a sleek, brushed-metal device which first appeard in January, 2004. It was suddenly pulled from the market 20 months later by iPod maker Apple because its relatively small 4 or 6GB size and miniature hard drive storage system was deemed "so last Thursday" by a bunch of 20-something shitheads sitting around a table at Silicon Valley focus group session.

"It was like, meh, whatever, get rid of it, you know?" said Charles "Chuck" Biscuits, a group member. "We thought, hey, like, you know. Yeah."

Apple abandoned the mini barely six months after releasing a second-generation model amid cries of protest from Apple store salespeople, who this reporter can assure you once told him the mini was the best iPod ever produced.

"It was such a perfect design, easy to read display, great heft to it in the palm of your hand," said Apple store owner Filbert McNutt. "Sure their battery life sucked, but if it died, you still had one great-looking paperweight. We were selling them so fast, we couldn't stock 'em, and then - Bang! Gone. I forget what they even looked like."

One scientist at the university lab where the mini is being dissected said her team is excited at what they might find on the ancient personal audio player.

"The world has just so moved on since 2004," said researcher Marla Baverstock. "To think that the ancients were actually willing to pay good money for iPods with monochrome displays, no video capability, and a spinning hard drive! How utterly desperate those times must have been."

Cultural anthropologists are also looking forward to analysing the song selection stored on the mini's drive. They say it's an artefact which will give clues as to how the world might have been enjoying some down time while contemplating the horror of another four years of the George W. Bush administration.

"It was a unique time for music, pop culture, and world history in general," said ET cultural and sexual deviations beat reporter Adda Dictomy.

"The number of people with a close-up view of Britney Spears' and Paris Hilton's crotch was still in the low four figures instead of the billions now thanks to the Internet, Anna Nicole Smith was still trying to convince everybody that her years of wiping the bum of a billionaire 70 years her senior was out of sheer love, SUV drivers were bitching about gas prices half the level they're at now and people living in trailer parks and working at Burger King were being flim-flammed into half-million dollar mortgages so they could live in their dream home for a few months, then have it pulled out from under them.

Gosh, those were the days."

© 2008 lettershometoyou