Geoffrey Morrison

I use my iPod to deal with crowds. If you’re like me, sometimes you just like cranking up some tunes to push the world out to more acceptable distance. This is especially true trying to shop during the holiday season.

So for the always-hectic Black Friday weekend, I figured I’d put together a few songs that are, shall we say, not sticky-sweet holiday shopping tunes. Drown out that Bing, Nat, and Perry, and power through the season with these.

I'm skeptical of any audio product with a fancy design. In my experience, the more trendy or attractive a product is, the worse the performance. Maybe this prejudice comes from a place of subconscious competition, given that I'm so trendy and attractive.

So I approached the Parrot Zik with caution, not least because I found out that "Design by Starck" was not a misspelling and had nothing to do with Ned or even Robb (What about Tony? - Ed.).

But turns out, zee Ziks are zuper.

I have to admit, I didn't think I'd get into this game. I like my action games actiony, and my strategy games real-time. A turn-based action game? What kind of unholy chimera is that?

I never played the original X-COM (the 1994 version had a hyphen, and an incredible following), so the excitement surrounding this remake was lost on me.

Once I tried it, though. . . wow is it easy to get sucked in.

Hot on the heels of Apple’s latest iPad (and lukewarm on the heels of Amazon’s new Kindle Fires), Google announced new Nexus tablets in unsurprising sizes and price points.

As I’ve said before, hardware is largely irrelevant to the tablet market. Greater resolution or processing speed doesn’t help you get more content to download.

To that end, Google announced new licensing deals to bring more content to Play — and I have a chart to prove it.