The Deep Cuts smart play list

For the last 18 months or so, I’ve been listening to less new music. Oh, I still listen to a lot of it, but I’m also rediscovering a lot of stuff in the dusty back shelves of my iTunes library.

The way I do it is through a smart play list, which is a playlist that iTunes will auto-populate based on criteria you set. I realized a while back that, although I was succeeding in my goal of not just listening to the same stuff that was in my CD collection when I graduated college (and succeeding albums from only those artists, forever and ever, amen), I was turning into some sort of NME/Pitchfork douchebag who could only listen to artists that were five to 10 minutes from being discovered, and nothing else. (Which is ironic, since I think that the staff of Pitchfork should be dealt with harshly, using their titular farming implement.)

So back into the library my iPhone now goes, with a Deep Cuts play list, which I named after a segment that one of the Washington, DC classic rock stations (does anyone really have the ability to distinguish one classic rock station from another?) that basically consisted of “hey, it turns out there’s more than four songs that we can play, although we promise to still play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ every hour.” They would go “deep” into an album and play something other than the main hit said album was best known for.

My version of this idea is an iTunes smart play list with the following criteria:

Genre is Rock
Play Count is 0 (I reset the play counts of all the songs in my iTunes once a year, just so I can track the year’s top 100)
Last Played is not in the last 12 months
Limit to 50 items selected by random

Then there’s several bands that I exclude — I have Billy Joel’s 1970s albums in my iTunes collection, but I don’t want him popping up in the middle of a bunch of modern rock tunes.

So every time I listen to the play list (which I have set to random play on my iPhone), I get a whole lot of surprises. Often it’s songs that have made my previous top 100 lists — the current Deep Cuts line-up includes “Swimming Pool” by the Submarines, “I Turn My Camera On” by Spoon and “One of these Days” by Kraak & Smaak — but it’s also a lot of stuff that I’ve rarely, if ever, listened to since getting my first iPod for Christmas in 2004 (including, at the moment, “Jesus Wrote a Blank Check” by Cake, “Since I Don’t Have You” by Guns N’ Roses and a remix of “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood).

The nice thing about this sort of play list is that it should work for anyone, whatever their taste. (If you don’t like rock music, just change the genre to one you prefer.)

Wired preps an iPad edition

I’m not sure if this is practical for everyone — I’m curious how much more time this adds to the layout guys’ workload — but it’ll certainly be interesting to see a rich media version of a “print” product. Hopefully I’ll be able to borrow an iPad and check it out later this year.

Michael Kinsley uses 1,800 words to praise tight writing

Full disclosure: I met Michael Kinsley years ago, and he acted like a complete dick.

I was doing a profile of local boy Pat Buchanan for the now-defunct McLean Providence Journal and spent an evening at Crossfire, where Kinsley and Buchanan were then the partisan co-hosts. Kinsley was extremely condescending and snide — he seemed to find the notion of a local newspaper doing a profile of a resident who had run for president and hosted a cable talk show seen in multiple countries to be “cute.”

That said, I mostly agree with this piece from the January/February issue of the Atlantic, other than its basic premise, which I partially disagree with:

One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory.

He then goes on to beat up on several papers, including the New York Times and Washington Post, for writing long stories full of background and reporter opinions delivered via a third party expert. He doesn’t ever cite any evidence that readers don’t like long stories or that anyone has actually ever photographed a reader in the wild tossing down a paper and screaming “TL:DR!”

Like a lot of journalists his age, he also seems to be unaware that every day, readers link countless stories to their friends and colleagues and very few of them are the tiny little news nuggets that consultants keep insisting that readers prefer.

Overall, though, his insights into the journalistic process are spot-on, and might be pretty illuminating to non-journalists, especially when he lets the cat out of the bag about third party experts’ opinions in many news stories. (Which is why I mostly avoid doing it: The only opinions I think a reader cares about are the reader’s own and the involved parties’.)

The total number of words Kinsley needed to illustrate his point, including taking a shot at the NYT for a 1,456-word story? A not-particularly-tight 1,797 words. (I used 374 here, for the record.)

Why the iPad can’t save newspapers

Spoiler alert: It’s a revenue model issue, specifically, print advertising versus online advertising.

Some have noted that it could make sense, from the perspective of circulation economics, to induce newspaper readers to switch from print to iPad. That well may be true: The savings on circulation marketing, printing, and delivery costs would be significant. Such inducements could take the form of discounts on iPad purchases. The Times has actually experimented with an analogous program using Times Reader and a Samsung netbook, offering $100 off the hardware to new non-print subscribers to the software.

But newspaper economics are not limited to circulation economics. In fact, most newspaper revenue comes from advertising. And one of the most important realities about the state of newspapering these days is that online advertising revenue, on a per reader or per impression or any other relevant basis, lags so far behind print revenue that it seems destined to never catch up—never to come even close.

Thus, it has been clear, for perhaps three to five years, that any sudden conversion of all print readers to Web readers, while greatly reducing costs, would reduce revenue even more, deepening losses at unprofitable papers and throwing those that remain profitable into losses—losses that would likely be impossible to reverse except through huge further expense cuts, especially in newsrooms. The downward spiral in product quality would be accelerated, likely leading to fewer readers and more cuts.

And this is a pretty major stumbling block. Every time the otherwise quite insightful folks at Buzz Out Loud start in on how it’d be great if newspapers would just stop worrying about paper, they forget about advertising, causing me to yell at my car stereo while I’m driving.

(From The Daily Beast, which I’ve somehow managed to avoid stumbling across until now.)

The origin of chili mac?

A former coworker linked this article on Facebook, which makes the very dubious claim that DC invented chili mac, a dish I grew up eating.

What makes it dubious, for starters, is that the Hard Times Cafe’s “chili mac” was actually Cincinnati chili — chili served over spaghetti noodles, although the Hard Times version was less sweet than the Cincinnati versions I’ve tried over the years. The chili mac I had growing up was two cans of Hormel chili (one with beans, one without) served over a bunch of elbow macaroni, with dried Kraft Parmesan cheese shaken on top. (Today, at home, we use Stagg Dynamite Hot chili and refrigerated shredded Parmesan.) Hard Times did do the shake cheese thing, though.

My mom, who served it to us as a way to stretch the family’s food budget until payday, learned it from her mother, whom I don’t think ever went anywhere near Washington, DC, until after I was already born.

Looking online, I see a lot of people claiming that chili mac is a derivation of Cincinnati chili, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, etymology-wise. Wouldn’t it be “chili-ghetti” or something, then?

There’s an appalling (to me) lack of scholarship on this subject. Chef Boyardee (who turns out to have been an actual guy originally named “Boiardi”) had a single can version of the dish starting in the 1970s and the U.S. Military now has a version as an MRE (Meal Ready to Eat ration), but that also seems to be a recent thing, with no precursor in the older c-rations the military used to eat.

But the origins of chili mac may actually be almost as old as normal chili, and date to the same part of the world: The oldest citation I’ve found is this claim that it’s a Texas recipe dating to at least 1918!

I am excessively curious about this. Does anyone have any additional insight into this?