The best invention ever?

Don and Michele came over on Friday for dinner....good dinner, great wine (as usual). That evening, I think we saw a demonstration of the gratest invention ever.

But before we get to that, a gambling note....after dinner, we broke out the cards and chips and we introduced Don to the Ultimate Hold 'em Poker table game. I'm not so sure if Don likes the game - he lost approximately 19 hands in a row - but his wife was on fire.

What kind of streak was she on? Well, I dealt the cards, and she passed on betting before the flop. The flop came:

3d Kh 6d

Michele put 2x her bet in. The last two cards were:

5d 7d

4 Diamonds on the board. Don swore and flipped over his cards as he folded. I flipped over...the Ace of Diamonds. Sorry for your luck! Michele just smiled and calmly turned over the 4 of diamonds for the straight flush. That would have been a $250 winner on a $5 table.

In no more than 40 hands, I dealt a straight flush and 2 separate quads.

Anyway, Don then pulled out his iPhone and showed us Shazam. This is the iPhone app that can listen to 10 seconds of music and then return the title and the artist, as well as a method to purchase that tune for your iPhone.

OK, we thought, how well does this really work? We had the satellite radio playing on our DirecTV, so we held it up to the speaker - it was a Colbie Caillat song - and it listened for 10 seconds, then "processed", then presto! It came back with the song.

I was unimpressed. How hard can it be to recognize tunes the current top 20? Let me test it with my "eclectic" music taste. (you mean "grandmotherly" taste? -ed.) Oh quiet.

So I turned it to the Broadway station. It was playing "The Impossible Dream" from Man of La Mancha. We clicked on Shazam - it listened for 10 seconds....and presto! It came back with:

Man of La Mancha

Original Cast Recording, 1956

Whoa. We may have something here.

It was dead on for 5-6 songs in a row that were not common knowledge songs. Rap, Country, Easy Listening (or, as most say, "music for the dead") - it retrieved them all.

We even turned it to a station playing bad 80s Hair Music. It was playing some unrecognizable Great White song. It reached the instrumental part - and we activated Shazam at that point. Shazam listened for 10 seconds of the instrumental part of the song - no lyrics - and it came back with the right artist and title.

How? How can it do this? How? My mind is still baffled.