DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

For a change of pace we went to the local pub to see if we’d like the band. As it turns out, we did, but that’s not why I’m writing.

A man at the bar had impressive hair, straight and black, down past his belt. He nursed a beer, but was occupied doing card tricks on a fuzzy red placemat. I thought, in passing, that maybe the bar handed out cards and fuzzy red placemats, to accompany the dice cups that are certainly more popular.

The tricks were as impressive as the hair — one-handed cutting, fanning the deck, spreading the cards across the placemat and flipping them all over like dominoes. I admit I stared briefly. What the hell; he was a showman.

Later he took a table with a woman who he’d clearly just met. His attention was nearly evenly divided between the conversation and the cards. The cards won. At one point he’d put the deck back into the box, but within 60 seconds he was shuffling and dealing again. I glanced over from time to time and was wowed repeatedly. At one point he’d done a two-story fanning trick; at another time he held the deck, split into two stacks like a ‘V’, and by jiggling his hand the cards would fall evenly into two piles. A third time, I kid you not, I glanced over to see flames coming out of his hands. What’s up with that?

He left soon after that. I was amused at the sight of him carefully rolling up the fuzzy red placemat — not bar property after all.

The second batch with the new starter came out of the oven a few hours ago. The crust was amazing, a record-setting crust, a crust about which books might be written: crisp and crackly over a chewy crumb, just like bakery bread never is. The flavor was, ahh, hell. It was bland.

Peter Reinhart writes that new starters take a few weeks to develop their “full complexity of flavor.” So I’m going to hang out and bake bland bread for a few weeks in hopes that Lactobacillus plantarum and Lactobacillus brevis take residence in this frothing slop that smells, I must admit, like an unkempt locker room.

I’ve had to update my Enterprise checklist again. This installment:
   Make sure the car doesn’t stink like wet dogs.

I am, again, in awe of the staff of Enterprise Rent-a-Car. They manage to offend me every time I do business with them.

I read through Ed Wood’s Sourdoughs International site again and got to wondering if my standard wild yeast culture was perhaps substandard because I’d “seeded” it with organic raisins. So I mixed up a batch of whole wheat and spelt flour and some spring water and set it out to ferment for a few days. We’ll see what happens.

This sample is more complete than most, with an intro and outro, because I put it together for my answering machine. The basic rhythm features a ride pattern split over 3 sources, played in an even time, so that the ride pattern takes three bars to resolve. This is one of my favorite things to do to add life to a straight-time groove because the cymbal pulse comes at odd-feeling times, e.g. 1, and of 2, 4, and of 1, 3, and of 4, etc.

The snare is totally straight, 2 and 4 with no ghosting.

The kick is somewhat interesting but not so much that I’m going to write anything about it.

Patronize these links, man:

• Virtual Drummer loop
• MIDI
• MP3