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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Sunday, May 18, 2003

Humor In Uniform L. Paul Bremer III grooves to the club mix of Karl Rove's hip-hop masterpiece, Weapons of Mass Media Distortion, while on a casual air cruise over downtown Baghdad. Despite the recent statuary crisis which left many town squares void of heroic representational art, Bremer has asked local sculptors to abstain from replacing fallen statues of Saddam with those they favor - a triumphant one of him with an M-16 held high over his head like an umbrella. "You can take a girl out of the country," he quipped, "but you can't take the country out of a girl!" Bremer, for the record,  prefers more subtle expressions of absolute power, such as a "fly-over" in an armored helicopter gunship. 11:35:31 PM    comment []

Compositive               I wonder, if we’d starting quoting The Raven’s old posts like they were scripture, if he’d come back just to tell us to cut it out. I think about his post – with some research I could do chapter and verse (I must confess I have no memory, without computers and the internet I’d be a sod farmer) - where he mentioned that now, along with all the other threats, we have to be on the lookout for road rage psychos when all we want is a quick trip to the ABC for a desiccant inducing single malt. Life and death, when all we really want is a drink.    “Darkness there, and nothing more” – I read Poe too young. Today is chilly and overcast so I thought I’d try to pressure cook up a batch of split pea soup. Napalm soup on the tongue, let it cool. Flavorful. I cooked it an hour and there was some burning, mainly onion, on the bottom of the P-cooker. I drained the carrots, surviving split peas, disappearing kielbasa, and the pork side meat from the grocery with Jimmy Johnson’s picture on the package. Fat was there, but it incorporated like it might be hollandaise.   Cooked down the strained part, listened to the 5th, my god, you can hear the flute sparkle when the dynamic range is wide enough, no timpani can punch it down in the mix, then used the hand blender to mix in part of the solid stuff, the rest I just threw in. Liz came back from the store and brought me a bag of songbird food. She said it looked like the day mental patients went out for groceries. Damn, I missed it. Added some half and half to the split pea soup to thin it down and white it out. Something serious is about to happen. Please don't ask if I'm okay. I am, thanks for asking. I got your horse right here, his name is Paul Revere. 3:05:38 PM    comment []

Whew! Up since 3am plugging up the new receiver. This is like a brain transplant for the system. Of course, there was no sound at all when I first fired it up. I turned it all the way up to 10. After a while, I learned that it can go all the way to 100, 89 more than Spinal Tap. At 25, I had sound on FM, but nothing on DVD or Cable. After a while, I discovered that the Cable sound was playing with the input set to DVD, but not vice versa. I'd assumed I could switch the audio inputs to match the video. Wrong. The coax digital input on the receiver is designated to be DVD and nothing else shall it be. I wanted optical since the cable box only has a coax digital output. After some futzing around R-ing TFM, I decided just to let them go where they want to go - so now I press "DVD" when I want cable and vice versa. Then it was time to play the Zappa DTS CD. I read the display and it said "48KHz PCM". Still only Saigon. I pressed buttons and tried to decipher pictograph menus. Impossible. RTFM again - oh, it says you should run setup first before you play a DVD. Hmmm...the default for DTS is "Off." Switched it to "On," and soon was I listening to Ancient Armaments in beautiful 5.1 DTS. Wish the Beethoven was the 9th instead of the 5th. "Victory" is appropriate, but Freude is what I feel. I haven't even bothered to hook up the VCR - I can't remember the last time I used it. I'll hook it up when I need it. I'm burned out after spending most of yesterday and 5 hours today on this project. 8:43:05 AM    comment []