DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I became fanatical about baking in 1998. I was buying flour in 50 lbs. sacks from the local bakery. I was making Pain sur Poolish three days a week.

Even though I used only a pinch at a time, I was consuming yeast like, err, Monistat. I needed to buy in bulk.

Cool bakers all over the planet rely on SAF brand yeast. It’s an “instant” yeast, which among other things means the yeast need not be hydrated in warm water prior to mixing — simply measure it dry and mix it into the flour. Also, the product is sold as a 500g vacuum-packed brick that made a really neat whooshing noise when the package is cut open.

The first place I ordered the yeast from told me it would be a year before they could ship it. A year! Their explanation: they catered to survivalists, and had a 14-month backorder due to the impending Y2K disaster. You remember Y2K — the world was supposed to end, causing a dramatic drop in the availability of leavened grain products. Apparently this vendor’s entire customer base had ordered lifetime supplies of yeast and dried beans and bottled water and so on.

Anyway, I found another place to purchase the yeast. I’ve been keeping it in the freezer, using a tiny bit at a time for focaccias and ciabattas and pizzas and the occasional sweet baguette. My 500g stash is down to about 150g — another year’s worth, for sure. I realized today that I’ve been using it for 65 months, a good four years past its official expiration.

My laptop is nearly two years old. It has held up remarkably well; the main symptom of age is the presence of scuff marks on the screen.

It’s a symptom of Titanium Powerbooks — the screen housing is so thin, it can be compressed when packed in a briefcase, forcing the screen to rub against the keyboard. Any dust on either exacerbates the abrasion.

I tried to clean the marks off with Klear Screen products. The marks were more stubborn than I was. I assumed they were permanent.

But then I discovered ScreensavRz. I was at MacWorld Expo last January, and I caught the tail end of a product demo at the RadTech booth. The vendor claimed that most screen scuffs can be polished out with their “Optex™” cloth. The polishing cloth doubles as an insert to prevent future scuffing — just fold the laptop closed around it. The cloth rides between the keyboard and screen.

Today I finally took the time to test the vendor’s claim. I wiped down the screen with the supplied alcohol swab (hey, it’s this week’s theme) then rubbed vigorously with the polishing cloth. It worked! The keycap scuffs are gone. So are six months’ worth of spatter from reading online news at breakfast.

I’m so jaded by modern marketing (overpromise, underdeliver) that I felt compelled to write about it: here’s a product that actually does what the manufacturer claims. Kudos to RadTech. It’s no surprise they had a big crowd at their booth at the Expo.

The Paranoid’s Pocket Guide is a small book with a big worry: Is your cutting board safe? No.

“Take a look at your hands,” admonishes the text, “They’re crawling with bacteria.” Some of those bacteria are listed, along with the symptoms of an infection of same: “Shingella (can cause cramps and bloody diarrhea).”

I don’t recommend you buy this book for yourself, because reading it might affect your ability to sleep, eat, cook, bathe, exercise, or read pocket books. Because you have to figure, this book is itself coated with dangerous bacteria. What if the packer at Amazon wiped his nose while putting your order together? You’ll be carrying alcohol swabs in no time.

Hair in the sink: it could be male pattern baldness, a fungal infection, or a surprisingly common stress-related disorder called alopecia universalis, which causes all the hair on your body, including eyelashes and eyebrows, to fall out.

The book is not entirely about germs and infectious diseases. No, there are a lot more things to be concerned about.

Department stores now release scents into the air that make a person feel good and want to buy.

Bathroom sinks cause over 45,000 injuries every year.

Men with extremely symmetrical features are less attentive to their partners and more inlined to cheat on them.

The best reason to buy this book is as a gift for someone else. Especially someone you don’t like very much. Or, it’s the perfect gift for a friend whose latent paranoias you’d like to reinforce for your own entertainment, which I think is how I ended up with a copy. Thanks a lot, Bim.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (small hardback)

Some interesting, nonconventional thoughts on vegetarianism from “food chain” expert Michael Pollan:

I looked at the environmental issues and I realized vegetarianism wasn’t necessarily the answer. If we were all vegetarian, it would still require a huge industrial food system because there are parts of the country where you can’t grow fruits and vegetables. For example, there are certain landscapes, like the rocky landscapes of New England, where animals are the best way to get protein from the land, not row crops. If you really want to conform food chain to place, meat has to be a part of it. We should be eating less meat, especially with 70 percent of our country’s grain going to feed animals. Yes, we’d be better off with more vegetarians, but I’m not going to be one of them…

We don’t need one kind of food chain; we need 10. Monoculture is as much of a mental problem as an agricultural one.

I think I have that mental problem. I do tend to think in absolutist terms. I embrace complexity unwillingly.

Even so, I believe vegetarianism will never achieve even 10% penetration in the US. Look no further than the Atkins diet for proof — millions of people would willingly eat no vegetables, in spite of the risks, in spite of common sense.

That would be an interesting survey: are there more Atkins dieters or vegetarians in the US?

Anyway, getting back to Pollan’s statement about the environment, I think Pollan does vegetarians a disservice when he says “vegetarianism [is not] necessarily the answer,” because it’s clearly part of the answer. I’d like to know what another eight food chains are that could break up the current beef monoculture and solve the problem of the food industry trashing the environment.

As you might expect, Pollan also has some interesting things to say about “cheap food,” which is the output of the big agribusiness and fast food industries:

The industrial food chain does produce food more cheaply, in terms of the price you pay at McDonald’s or the supermarket, but the real cost of cheap food is not reflected in those prices. You’re paying for it in your tax dollars because you’re giving farmers $20 billion a year in subsidies. You’re paying for it in public health costs. These subsidies make unhealthy food cheaper than healthy food, and so our country is facing an obesity epidemic. The antibiotics you need for your son’s illness don’t work anymore because we’ve squandered them all on farm animals. We can’t take fish from the Gulf of Mexico because of the nitrogen runoff from agricultural fertilizers. The people of Des Moines, Iowa, have to drink bottled water in the summer because their water is poisoned. Those are all costs. The phrase I use is “the high cost of cheap food.”

Here’s the whole article: The High Price of Cheap Food: Mealpolitik over lunch with Michael Pollan

Pictured is Spring Lake, in Annadel State Park. We took a slow two-hour circuit around the lakes with some friends. I can’t call it a hike so much as a stroll. Still, by the end I had developed an intense pain in my hip. How old am I, again? After the hike we went to Costco to stock up on denture glue.

As easy as we took it, the hike was not without risks. In this case the risk wasn’t that I might get attacked by a snake, but that I might get yelled at by an overcautious hiking companion/wife. Never let it be said I wouldn’t put my life on the line for a photo… especially a photo of a harmless non-rattlesnake. (It is generally true that “the only dangerously venomous native snakes found in California are the rattlesnakes, which have a rattle on the end of the tail.”)