Music!

To those that know me well, I enjoy listening to music.  However, I don’t fret about quality as much as some people do.  I actually think 192 kbps for mp3s is good enough to listen to.  I can bear the size increase for 320 kbps for a slight incremental benefit in quality.  But the sound quality for flac does not warrant the sometimes three fold increase in size.  When I look at it, most of the time, I’d need to have very expensive sound system to notice the quality difference.  And frankly, I listen to music in my car, at the gym, at work and at home so the quality difference will be pretty unnoticeable.

Currently, my iPod music library is full of anime and anime character songs at the moment.  I have some classical as well as trance music as well too.  I also have some albums that anime seiyuus put out.  I have a few random instrumental only music albums.  To some, it might be a pretty eclectic collection.  

But music is all a matter of personal taste.  And I’ve noticed that the one type of music that I’ve pretty much stop listening to is a broad genre I call “American music.”  It’s a broad category of American artists/groups in pop, alternative, and rock that have signed under the big record companies.  Oh sure there are some songs I enjoy listening to (Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars, Coldplay’s Viva La Vida) but these gems are very rare.  I find much of the music that is given air play are not worth my time to listen to.  I don’t know if its the composer or the conglomerate machine that decides what “sounds good” when the songs are recorded.  

Perhaps the RIAA and the big record companies need to start putting out good albums so their music CD sales will start rising?  Oh wait... maybe they should have spent all the money that was used to sue people into producing better music.  Or even better, spend all that money into developing a new business model (hello iTunes!!).  Ten years ago, during the height of all the mp3 downloading, no one would want to spend close to $20 on a CD for only two or three songs.  Aside from the fact that you could probably get the album for free off the Internet, even the hit singles would cost $5.  Totally not worth the money.  The record companies unwillingness to break up a CD into song components and charge a “fair market vale” for hit songs was probably their undoing.  

But all that’s in the past now... what’s still for certain is... I enjoy anime music much more than any other genre.  It has much better melodies, beats and emotive response than American music.  I want you to listen to an awesome song with pictures from my favorite anime, Aria.  This Makino Yui song represents the epitome of what I love about anime and anime music.

Gourmet Food Trucks (11)

Re:  Ludo Truck


So there’s this chef called Ludo Lefebvre (wiki) who help plan the menu for this truck.  I’ve honestly never heard of him maybe some of you have.  But this truck came on the scene a few months ago.  I’ve been meaning to try it but never really got a chance to do so until recently.

This truck offers fried chicken (not shown), chicken strips (the middle strips) and this fried chicken ball (the two fried things on the outside).  I’m not a big fan of having to pick bones so I ordered chicken strips and the fried chicken ball.  The chicken strips didn’t seem to be very spectacular.  They honestly tasted like something you’d get from Ralph’s or Chicken Now.  The fried chicken ball however was uniquely different.  It had this creamy herb sauce in the ball and tasted very good.  This truck also offered four different types of dipping sauces.  I tried the bernaise and honey bbq.  

Unfortunately, neither of the sauces appealed to me.  The two chicken orders also came with a cole slaw with a very vinegar type dressing.  The cole slaw would have tasted better if it weren’t so vinegar-ish.  I think the sourness of the dressing took the taste away from everything else.



On a side note, the cole slaw should have a lid to prevent accidental spills.  I didn’t know these cole slaw didn’t have lids so I put them in a bag in such a way that the dressing leaked out onto the passenger side chair.  =[





Re: No Tomatoes

I’ve never had Dosa truck or India Jones truck.  This truck is also new into the LA food truck scene.  I believe they said it was only their first month in operation.  They certainly are not listed in the twitter feeds I normally visit.  I tried their Chicken Tikka Masala over rice.  Aside from not having enough sauce, this tasted very much like a normal dish you’d find at a typical Indian restaurant.  The price for the amount though was pretty good -- six dollars for a good amount of rice and curry.  After having this, I wonder how the other two Indian cuisine trucks taste like.

Re: Mighty Boba Truck

Boba Milk Tea with Taiwanese style treats like fried popcorn chicken and sweet butter toast.  The milk tea is pretty good though the standard mix is a bit sweet for me.  Supposedly they are willing to remake the milk tea to make it more or less sweet.  Perhaps they should have a number system to determine the sweetness for a better customization.

The popcorn chicken is like Tapioca Express' popcorn chicken.  It's really nothing special.  I would however like to try the sweet butter toast.  These toasts are usually 1-inch thick with sweet butter cream.  I think its the same type of cream that is found in some of the Taiwanese bakeries bread (which is very good).

Re: Dumpling Station

Finally I don't remember if I had blogged about Dumpling Station in the past.  I may have and probably wasn't too impressed.  I wasn't too impressed again after having deep fried kimchi pork and beef dumplings.  Maybe I'm just not ordering the correct type of dumpling?