new year's resolution every year: organize the damn cd collection already!

pieman's asking me a bunch of music questions. ay, caramba. this is going to take awhile.


8 big binders x 256cds, 3 med x 150 cds, 4-5 small x 100, 12 smaller x 20, 10 smaller binders with mp3 discs, oh help.

does anyone remember when guam was the big internment camp for the vietnamese refugees after the fall of saigon? the only thing i really remember--which came back to me when reading a post about fried eggs and fried rice on oslofoodie's blog--was that the 'fugees weren't eating the food provided by the military. couldn't hang with the weird american stuff, so the military had to look for fresh fish and veggies for the folk. anyway, for breakfast, they ended up cooking white rice, and fried eggs with oyster sauce, which is now a signature dish for aussie chef kylie kwong. crazy.

also a little nutty was a factoid i picked up on the late late show with craig ferguson who is totally hot dwarfy (more on that later). he had the chief designer of the 2005 mustang on, hau thai tang, whose family had fled saigon four days before the fall. apparently, his mom worked for an american company so they could leave with the company; the military knew that saigon would fall, so the family was told to pack one bag for each family member, which stood by the door. they were instructed to listen to armed forces radio, and the signal was bing crosby's "white christmas". once they heard that, it was time to go. !!! how many people today break out into a cold sweat when that comes on because of this??

oh the things i learn from late night television.

weirdly, ottmar liebert's got a flickr page. i don't know why i think it's weird, but it's definitely weirding me out.

things are slowing down at tsunami help. everything's moving to wiki world, which is completely foreign to me, so i won't even bother. i think my time there has wrapped up. there are all these new people who want to take it into some new direction that's beyond my scope.

i am still one of the administrators for the missing persons page and the flickr missing persons page. missing persons? missing people? the flickr page frustrates me mightily. i think that it's there more to comfort people as it's the only page i know of where there's a community in place and who will interact with you. unfortunately, flickr is so american-centric, i'm not entirely sure anyone's really looking for anyone seriously as all our people seem to be european or asian. and frankly, the white folk aren't interested in the brown folk. i can't help but think we've provided a freak show for people to gawk at. it's like a recurring soap opera for some people. you should go over there and look at some of the comments, it makes you wonder if people have lives. i can't be too hard on them though because at least they are showing a modicum of interest in this great tragedy. the biggest reason i volunteered was because i was pissed off at the apathy of the fucking food bloggers who didn't seem to care. who still don't seem to care. sadly, my anger fueled my action, it wasn't my compassion. but i'm not quitting the work yet. even though i cannot bring myself to call the people i list in the database as victims, i do know they are missing and i work under the assumption that they are dead. if someone is found alive, that is the blessed cherry on the top of the sundae, and if we have a confirmation of death, it's awful. usually though, my sadness only lasts a night--but a bad night where i think of washing my hands of it all--and i wake up in the morning, not more determined, but just willing to go back and see what else i can do. even though i think everyone's dead, i feel that everyone will be found, eventually. i have hope for that, and that has to be something, right?

so i'm still over at tsunami help, which is what i'm calling the SEA-EAT blog, because i'm beginning to really mind that moniker. i'm doing clean up and recaps, but there's a really wonderful person over there (there's a lot, actually) named meghi who has created a very clean and lovely layout, which has made it easier for people to find information. there are, i gather, six or seven core people, with a guy named peter griffin at the head of it all. i don't know if i could really call anyone boss but i try to, just so i can get someone to answer some questions for me. it's run in this incredibly democratic way where everyone is in charge and no one is in charge, but somehow stuff gets done, and fairly well. donna, angela and i have somehow made ourselves in charge of our flickr missing persons page. so far, we've got 24 photos on the list, and of the 30 or so people depicted on those photos, four have been found safe and safely. not our doing, but it feels like we had a teeny, tiny part in the happiness. i can't say i'm heavily emotionally invested in this, otherwise i'd hand over the reigns to donna and angela, but i'm invested enough to stay on and to also occasionally search online for news of the missing people in our group. i found information about one of them who is safe, but i haven't gotten confirmation from the person who posted this information, and it's not the same person who contacted us to begin with. so i've got a dilemma. do i tell the person who originally contacted me about the good news, even though it's unconfirmed? what if i'm wrong and i've totally gotten her hopes up? and what if this happens again, but it's terrible news? am i responsible for breaking it to our contact? i don't know what to do except for to stop looking, but that seems like i'm breaking a promise to those who are still searching. what do i do?

happy new year. i know it will be.