I totally have an excuse for falling down on Doombot posting. No, really, it’s a good one: I’m buried under iPod cases.

Aside from my current gig over at MacUser, I’ve been tapped to help out with reviews of iPod cases for Macworld’s Playlist site. Turns out there are a lot of these suckers, and the existing Playlist reviewers had been inundated, to the point where they could easily spend all their time reviewing nothing but iPod cases, as though imprisoned in some sort of Sisyphean nth-level of the underworld. “Don’t panic when you see the first box; it will contain a bunch of cases,” Dan Frakes, Playlist’s Senior Reviews Editor, wrote me in an email. Dan has a gift for understatement. I think of a bunch of case like a bunch of, you known, a bunch of bananas; a dozen maybe, tops.

Try more like forty or fifty. All types: rubber sleeves, acrylic cases, leather, armbands, cute Panda-decorated ones. You name it, I probably have it.

Now begins the arduous process of painstakingly reviewing each and every one. Most of the cases in the box are for the iPod nano. Which they also sent me.

At first, I was at a loss as to what I was going to do with two iPods. I haven’t quite got the hang of it yet; I’m still carrying both around with me, which kind of defeats the purpose (yes, that’s right: if you mug me, you get two for the price of one). There are things I like about each of them; the nano is so small and light, it’s kind of hard to believe, especially since it sounds as good as my video iPod. Obviously, the nano doesn’t play video (which would be ridiculous on its screen), but it does display photos, though I haven’t tested that capacity yet (I’ve barely used it on my larger iPod, to be honest).

Anyway, my reviews haven’t started showing up yet, but that should be happening within the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you need to know about a case for your nano, I’m the man to talk to. There’s also another project in the offing that’s not public knowledge yet, but I expect to write something about that in the next week or two.