Personal entertainment: threat or menace?

I recently bought an iPod Shuffle, and I'm reminded of an experience I once had listening to a Superman cassette tape that a friend loaned me. I was walking to work in downtown St. Louis, and almost stepped off the curb into Market Street in front of oncoming traffic because Superman was having a big fight with Doomsday. I find music/entertainment at the personal portable level like that very immersive. I guess I'm that way with movies and other forms of entertainment too.

So recently I've been enjoying my little personal music device, because you walk through a door or get off the elevator and the earbuds deliver some awesome chord change and you feel like you're listening to the soundtrack of the movie called "I Drove to Work on Thursday." But today, I was making the usual harrowing three-lane change in heavy traffic aboard the Berkeley Bridge, and I was listening to the theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I became certain that somewhere Lee Van Cleef was on that bridge and I had to kill him first. I can't explain this on a rational, left-brained level, it's just an emotional and inspirational thing.