DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

We returned to the local pub tonight to see if we’d get lucky with a second good band in as many weekends. Ultimately we failed, or rather the band failed, but we saw some interesting characters nonetheless.

A tall, skinny woman was dancing with some ferocity. Fast songs or slow, loud or quiet, she was all about impact — sharp, jabbing motions that (like Bruce Lee attacks) come straight from the solar plexus.

The intensity was shocking. Later I was not surprised to see her dominate every conversation she became involved in. It seemed to fit with her dancing.

My wife remarked, “dancing shows your personality.” I had to laugh — I do not dance, at all. Draw your own conclusions here!

When I was in high school, I volunteered at a local hospital during our Senior Service project. I spent two weeks pushing metal gurneys down long carpeted hallways, and nearly electrocuting myself when I reached for the elevator button. Very quickly I understood why the wallpaper surrounding the buttons was always rubbed bare — it was not due, as I’d previously concluded, to the poor aim of spastic patients, but to the methodical rubbing by the staff to rid their bodies of latent static electrical charges. For years, I subconsciously rubbed my hand on the wall before touching an elevator button.

Today I was proofreading a scholarly paper and a mental alarm went off when I saw a paragraph begin with the word “From.” Anyone who has been online as long as I have, or who has written as many emails, may realize the cause of the alarm: email clients of yore, or perhaps email servers of yore, would prefix the word “From” with “>” at the beginning of a line, to distinguish it from the email header “From: “. Being somewhat pedantic in my insistance that software programs do not modify my emails, I learned over time to never begin a line with the word “From”.

A quick test of my current mailer indicates that it no longer adds the “>” character. But I wonder if this conditioned response will ever end. Think how much more efficient I could be if I could convert all the bits of my brain that worry about wall-rubbing near elevators and sentence-construction when the word “From” falls near the beginning of a line into productive pursuits. Maybe, for example, I’d one day finish this damn journal software.

Based on a glowing review from Joel Spolsky, I ordered a Samsung 770 TFT LCD monitor today. I’d like to say it will replace this 200lb 20'' Apple display I’ve been using since 1995, but the sad truth is it will only displace the beast by about 17 inches. I’ve needed a two-headed system for years and finally I’m going to get one.

Got another catalog from Eyesore today. I’m a slave to their marketing department. My address is their property, which they abuse at their leisure. My role is to carry their catalog from the mailbox to the house, tear off the address label and fax it to the EyeSore circulation department, which probably doesn’t exist (I believe their fax machine is positioned carefully above a dumpster in a backroom closet of the office, undisturbed save for the weekly emptying of accumulated unsub requests). And then I discard the catalog unopened, and feel victimized about the whole process for a few days (at which point, the next catalog appears, with sickly clipart urging me to buy, buy, buy). Gad.

Houston, we have bacteria!

The latest batch of baguettes smells sour to me. The flavor is mild, but even so it’s as strong as my old raisin starter ever was, even after I’d let the barm go for 3 days so the acids built up (although, in truth, the pH never dropped below 4, so it can’t have been too bad).

The new loaves continue to have the crackly crust and irregular, open, chewy crumb as the first two batches. Is this a trend, or just an early end to the flavor-building process ?

I reread Monica Spiller’s barm-bread recipe and was reminded that high-acid doughs can create loaves of diminished aspect. That is, the acids soften the gluten so much that the bread doesn’t rise as it should. I don’t see evidence of that here, although I admit my loaves aren’t as tall as I’d like, in general.

The obvious answer to that question is to use higher-gluten flour, but the tradeoff there is bread that gets completely hard after a day, like, I don’t know, dessicated shoe soles, or something.

Of course if you bake bread nearly every day anyway, your definition of “stale” begins to be a little different than most.