Ah, the joys of being an iPod owner. Lately my iPod has taken to hanging once every couple of days, requiring a menu/play-pause reset to bring it out of its sulk. It's also taken to bouts of extreme whimsy, jumping out of one album into another mid-song, often only managing one or two tracks before it leaps again.
Sometimes, if you time it just right, you can catch it in flagrante, tracks whistling by on its display as it exercises its curatorial instincts.
As a teenager I used to play the (Original, West End Games) Star Wars roleplaying game. This furnished me with vast quantities of trivia about the (surprisingly comprehensively constructed) Star Wars universe. Apparently, Droids (like R2-D2) needed to have their little metal minds wiped from time to time or they would develop 'personalities'. It seems the same caveat applies to iPods.
Having established that my iPod has a bad case of personality, I can administer the George Lucas cure. I'm going to put the iPod equivalent of a gun against its little metal head and return it to just-unwrapped factory-fresh condition.
That'll teach the bugger.