DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

During the first few days of his life, my son frequently made an unusual and unsettling noise, a sort of combination gagging and gasping sound that was no small cause for alarm for his first-time papa. I asked a nurse about it. Her explanation was reassuring; she said that Raphael was “managing his own secretions.”

I was relieved. Not only was Raphael not ill, at less than a day old he had managed to learn something lots of college seniors still haven’t figured out.

The nurse’s phrase struck me as excellent advice, in general:

1. Manage your own secretions.

   Combine that with what I’m told are the two core rules of Google’s Engineering team:

2. Don’t be evil.
3. Don’t be stupid.

and you’ve got an entire life philosophy. Those three rules will certainly get you through school with more grace and success than is achieved by most graduates, or at least me. In fact, most of the things I regret about my life so far could be attributed to either being evil, being stupid, or failing to manage my own secretions.

Who do you stare at in public places? Which coworkers do you like the least? Who makes up the endless stream of losers who appear on talk shows like Jerry Springer? In all cases, the answer is the same: people who are evil, people who are stupid, people who fail to manage their own secretions.

The next time you fly, look around at the other passengers. If you’re very lucky, at least those nearby will be neither evil (hogging the armrest, reclining into your lap) nor stupid (trying to stuff a carry-on the size of a refrigerator into the overhead compartment), nor failing to manage their secretions (drooling, sneezing, other possibilities I can’t bear to contemplate).

Unless you keep a journal, in which case all those behaviors are entirely welcome. Heh.

“These vegan cookies suck!”

Pictured is a cross-section of the best bread I’ve made in a year. I hit a perfect combination of dough hydration, timing, and oven technique.

I baked 25 loaves like this last year, and seven so far this year. Yesterday’s two were superior: crunchy crusts with nice Maillard coloring, chewy crumbs with fully gelatinized starches, distinct but not overpowering sour flavor.

The recipe is always the same, or nearly so — my own multigrain sourdough. Yesterday I made three changes from the usual procedure:

1. I used no whole-wheat flour in the dough (although I did use it to refresh the starter). Because the finished dough contains such a high percentage of non-gluten grains (spelt and rye) and flax seeds, the finished bread is usually somewhat dense. This time, I used high-protein organic bread flour (Guisto’s Ultimate Performer, about 14% protein) exclusively to compensate for the other grains and seeds’ lack of gluten. This made for a somewhat lighter loaf and a significantly more open crumb.
2. I used 33% more starter, adjusting flour and water in the final mix to compensate. Using a higher percentage of starter in the dough can bring more flavor, at the possible risk of accelerating yeast growth to the point where the dough rises too quickly, the yeast cells die off, and the loaf gets acidic and nasty.
3. I cooked the hell out of the breads. I was going for what bakers euphamistically call a “European bake,” which is what you get when you pull the bread out about a minute before the crust turns black. I pushed these about as hard as I could; in fact I was pretty sure I’d burned one of them, because when I thwacked it it sounded like an empty shell.

The dough turned out wetter than usual. This means it both rises faster (less resistance to gas pressure from the wild yeast) and needs to be baked earlier (so the yeast still has a kick when the dough starts to spread in the oven). The higher-than-usual percentage of strong flour lent the crumb some structural assistance. And the deep baking ensured a thorough gelatinization of starches, as evidenced by the shiny translucence of the thin walls around air pockets in the crumb. This is the science behind great bread — for more, read Reinhart or even McGee.)

We served the bread with a recreation of the spread we’d liked so much at Millennium, “truffled sun-dried tomato butter.” I had no recipe, so I dumped arbitrary amounts of each of the ingredients named in the title into the Cuisinart and whizzed it into a pink paste. It was awesome, although I felt oddly guilty for slathering the goo over my perfect crumb, not that that kept me from eating about a pint of the stuff.

Hanging around San Diego Airport after Etech, surrounded by approximately 3 million people whose flights were delayed for one reason or another, I thought this sign seemed especially cold. The gate area was packed with bodies and luggage and clusters of people standing uncomfortably, shifting from one foot to another, wanting nothing more than to get the hell out of there to wherever they were ultimately going. But in the interim, they’d all be subjected to numerous invasive questions, accusatory looks, explosive-residue swabs, X-rays, and searches.

Think about what you sacrifice when you fly. While you’re thinking about it, take off your shoes and belt and put them into this basket. Empty your pockets. Raise your arms and turn around. Don’t worry; your laptop will still be there on the conveyor when we’re through, although we’re not liable for it, and in the meantime we’re going to shoot this big ray-gun at it and maybe open the lid and fondle it for a moment. Say, you didn’t have any film in that carry-on, did you? And don’t mind me while I grab your crank.

In line, I always hear nervous jokes like “What’s next, a cavity search?” (although, to be fair, it’s usually me who’s making them). While I can’t imagine that ever happening, I wouldn’t be surprised if some ladder-climbing TSA executive had proposed it in earnest. In any case, I’m sure the invasions will get worse before they get better.

Apple’s iLife ‘05 is a surprisingly good deal. The combination of iMovie and iDVD gives users the ability to create impressive, professional DVDs. Maternity wards should give one of these free to new parents, instead of that cheesy gift bag of disposable diapers.

There is one catch: iDVD doesn’t recognize 3rd-party DVD burners. It can only burn discs using an internal Apple “SuperDrive.” (SuperDrive is Apple’s marketing word for a combination CD writer and DVD writer.)

This is apparently an improvement over previous versions of iDVD, which wouldn’t even run if no SuperDrive was present. (!)

We have an external CD/DVD burner. It connects via FireWire. I’ve used it for four years to burn hundreds of CDs and a handful of DVDs, and it has worked on four different Macs.

But iDVD refuses to acknowledge its existence: the “Burn” menu item is grayed out.

Fortunately, there is a workaround: create a disk image and write it to the DVD using a third-party application:

1. In iDVD, select File->Save As Disk Image.
2. Use Toast (or any other DVD-burning application) to burn the resulting image to the DVD. Be sure the app recognizes that it’s burning a DVD, rather than a data disk with a DVD disk-image file on it.