Friday, June 18, 2004

This is one of the most interesting essays I've read on the war in Iraq:

lgf: No One Asked Us: "...Watching politicians declaim and hearing television experts expound on why we went to war and on their opinions of those running the White House and Defense Department, I have one question.
When is someone going to ask the guys who were there?
What about the opinions of those whose lives were on the line, massed on the Iraq-Kuwait border beginning in February of last year? I don?t know how President Bush got the country behind him, because at the time I was living in a hole in the dirt in northern Kuwait.... "

The artcle is amazing!

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

How I make DJ CDs:

I take my 192 encoded music with good id3 tags, chuck a few folders onto a cd with easy cd creator, burn a disc, then drag and drop the finished disc into winamp, saving it as an m3u playlist, then closing winamp, I open the m3u file in mixmeister, which nearly crashes the computer. Mixmeister then examines the tracks, and determines the beats per minute (BPM) which is important when DJing. When it finishes this process, about 20 minutes, I can then save the playlist as .txt file which has title, artist, album, song length, BPM, genre...etc...then that .txt file gets thrown into a word processor, the list of trax gets numbered to correspond with the numbers on the CD, and any extra information or formatting is removed. I make three copies of each disc: two for the DJ system, one for the car, and a list of the tracks on the CD. I mark up the page with notes about the songs, and then put it into plastic page holders, which sit in a loose leaf binder. Fun, eh? I don't know any way to make it easier.
Tso What?: "General Tso's Chicken - fried boneless dark-meat chicken, served with vegetables and whole dried red peppers in a sweet-spicy sauce - is one the most common yet enigmatic dishes you will find on a Chinese menu. It makes you wonder: Who was General Tso? What was his association with chicken? Why in God's name is this dish (which even a culinary incompetent like me could probably make) listed as a 'Chef's Specialty' on most menus?"

And I thought that it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken. Apparently this is a synergy of a ruthless general from recent Chinese history, New York City and it's introduction to Hunan and Sechuan cuisine, marketing strategies and pure conjecture.