Modern rental cars often include SiriusXM radios, and they can be fun to fiddle with it. In addition to a decent variety of music, you can catch baseball games, tune in to terrible talk radio, or simply marvel at the ridiculous number of channels on offer. Sadly, a once-humorous divide in political channels is no longer as ridiculous as it once was. Years back, Sirius offered “Sirius Left” for left-wingers and “Sirius Patriot” for right-wingers. Now they’ve got the more ambiguous pairing of “SiriusXM Progress” and “SiriusXM Patriot”.
My favorite way to enjoy SiriusXM is with the alerts it can pop to inform you when music you want to hear is playing. When you begin a road trip, just star your favorite songs and artists as you hear them. When that song or artist plays again, on any station, the radio will pop an alert. With a quick tap, you can tune in and get that party started. Now, my rule is that you must tune in, which can have some interesting consequences. If you star enough artists, or the song of the moment (currently it’s The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face”1), you’ll get very frequent pop-ups. You might not hear a full song for some time, but you’ll be amused to flip repeatedly, possibly from a song to the same song starting on another channel. See how many tracks you can chain together, without ever hearing the end. My record is thirteen different songs.
Because these are rental cars, sometimes you’ll find other people’s favorites still on there. You can clear these out easily enough. Of course, when you do, you might just be presented with something like this “Who’s On First?”-esqe dialog.
I like to think that whoever favorited this artist did so solely to make some future person see this ridiculous dialog box. I’ll certainly be favoriting “Yes” whenever possible, explicitly for this reason.
Footnotes:
The Weeknd, I think you may be having a stroke. This is no laughing matter. Please stop singing, and seek immediate medical attention. ↩︎
