Month: November 2009

from behind closed doors

Dear Homeowner,

We regret to inform you that several individuals placed in our care are no longer eligible to continue residence in our facility.

In the uppermost level of the facility, several bagged items have greatly exceeded recommended levels of frost. In particular, the contents of the bag of store-brand Mixed Vegetables have become inextricably melded together.

In the Lower Level, in the departments known as “Vegetable Crisper,” we have become concerned about the rapid degeneration of one Bunch of Celery and several Zucchinis (aka “Courgettes”).

On the Main Level, a large container of Plain Yogurt has only recently expired, yet it is only the most recent such instance. There are several partially used jars of Salsa, Spaghetti Sauce and Various Condiments which should no longer be considered Viable for Consumption. While many are not yet visibly spoiled, our records indicate that these items have been in long-term care far beyond recommended time limits. We have been notified that the opening of the jar of Sweet Pickles, in particular, most certainly pre-dated the birth of your first child.

Additionally, there are many other items whose earthly remains may no longer be identifiable by visual means. There is a glass container which houses, according to our records, what had once been a portion of Canned Black Beans. We consider it advisable that these remains be removed from our premises and disposed of posthaste. Failure to do so may result in additional spoilage and potential generation of new life-forms.

Please remember that while we strive to provided the utmost in Low-Temperature Care, our ability to maintain levels of ick-free storage depends on your upholding your portion of the contract. Should these matters not be resolved in a timely matter, we may consider closing our facilities to further new items.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Your Refrigerator and Freezer

—

This week’s Monday Mission was to post in the form of a letter of regret. I have done so. Perhaps regrettably. To find more regrettable letters, check your mailbox. Or stop by Painted Maypole.

the penultimate post

Oof. It’s 11:00 p.m., and I have yet to post anything. It would be kinda silly to make it this far into NaBloPoMo and blow it on the penultimate day.

I’m quite fond of the word penultimate. It’s one of those words that gets misused frequently, often in a way suggesting that the user thinks it means something like “more ultimate that ultimate.” But ultimate is just that: final, unique. The end all. Penultimate? It’s the second to last. It’s not quite the be-all and end-all of ultimate.

I suppose that’s much of the appeal. It’s the not-quite. Most of us never achieve the level of ultimate for most things. Who among us will get to be the ultimate authority on some subject? Will we ever achieve ultimate happiness? Ultimate calm? Bake the ultimate chocolate cake? I, for one, am not sure I’d want to. Because wouldn’t that mean I’d reached the end?

Penultimate is a word that gets used frequently in phonology. We talk a lot about the penultimate syllable of word. For example, in a given language it might be the penultimate syllable, or the penult (as many like to call it, skipping the formality of the polysyllabic phrase) that bears the word-level stress. Or you might talk about the antepenultimate syllable. Or even the preantepenultimate. It really amuses me that there is a word that means “4th from the end.” (Mind you, when talking “ultimate” syllables, phonologists tend to say “final.” It’s seems somewhat anticlimactic.)

As usual, there is a backlog of posts I’d like to write, but clearly I’m not going to manage anything of them now. (Have I mentioned that I am a very slow writer? I type, I delete, I re-type, I edit. And often I delete and re-type once more.) So rather than write about something that might take some thinking, I’m apparently going to just ramble on for a bit just for the sake of rambling. Because ultimately, that’s what’s blogging is often about.

—

Oh, and one last thing, since I like to have at least one picture in a post. Can anyone identify this?

a few recording tech relics (photohunt)

This week’s PhotoHunt theme is “technology.” After my recent rush of bread–related posts, some of you might be expecting me to post a bread machine. (Clearly, the thought did cross my mind.) Instead, I’ll take the opportunity to post a few photos of some fairly old-school recording equipment.

I work in a phonetics lab, and these days, most of our recording is done using a laptop, a microphone, and a fairly compact pre-amplifier. However, it wasn’t so long ago that people used a more elaborate (and bulky) set-up to make high-quality recordings. For a variety of reasons, part of the lab was dismantled last month, including a recording room that had been in use for decades. While I still had the chance, I felt compelled to bring in my camera and get a few photos of the fairly vintage equipment. (I think many of these pieces are a good 30 or more years old.)

For more people’s photographic interpretations of the theme, pop over to tnchick.

rockin’ rolls: bread hits of classic rock

And my brother’s back at home
With his Bagels and his Scones
We never got it off on the Cornbread stuff
What a drag, too many crumbs

               David Breadbowl
               – All the Yeast Dudes

Boulanger Records announces Rockin’ Rolls: A Collection of Classic Rock Bread Hits. This two-disc set promises to be the best thing since sliced bread.*

Disc 1 –

    Creedence Crumpet Revival – Fortunate Scone
    Rusk – Frybread by Night
    Fleetwood Matzo – Dough Your Own Way
    Iggy Poptarts – Crust for Life
    The Doughs – Challah, I Love You
    Deep Pumpernickel – Toast on the Water
    Croissant, Stills, Lavash & Young – Teach your Ciabatta
    The Bagels – You’ve Got to Hide Your Loaf Away
    Steve Muffin Band – Take the Honey Bun
    Pink Flatbread – Dark Side of the Croissant
    Croutons Trio – Where has all the Flour Gone?

Disc 2 –

    Pita Frampton – Baby I love Your Grain
    Blood Sweat & Tortillas – You Bake Me So Very Happy
    Blue Oyster Crackers – (Don’t Fear) the Sourdough
    Nick Cave and the Bad Seedbuns – Into My Oven
    Americrust – I Knead You
    Lof Zeppelin – Stairway to Leaven
    Grateful Bread – Uncle John’s Baguette
    Rye Toast Speedwagon – Kaiser Roll with the Changes
    Chapati Smith Band – Biscuit the Night
    Challah and Oatbread – Naaneater
    The Rolling Scones – Sympathy for the Bagel

—-
*I wonder if I need to start having warning labels on my posts: This post contains extremely high levels of puns, wordplay and other silliness. Proceed at your own risk.

breaking bread

Today is Thanksgiving in the US, a holiday marked primarily by having a large meal together with family and/or loved ones. In previous years, I’ve set the table with utensils, and served up some turkeys. This year, I want to make sure we include bread (and a few other bready baked goods) in our ongoing ThThTh feast.

  • break bread: an expression meaning “have a meal together with people”
  • “Breaking Bread,” a song by Johnny Cash
  • “bumped his head on a piece of bread”: a line from the song/nursery rhyme “It’s raining, it’s pouring” in the version I learned as a child (though not in more commonly known versions). Did anyone else learn this version?

    It’s raining, it’s pouring
    The old man in snoring.
    Bumped his head on a piece of bread,
    And didn’t get up till morning.

  • bread: a slang term for money
  • breadwinner: one who earns money for a household
  • dough: another term for “bread” as in “I’ll need some dough to buy bread”
  • dough: a mixture of flour, water and other ingredients used to bake bread, as in “I’ll knead some dough to bake bread.”
  • The Pillsbury Doughboy: an anthropomorphic wad of dough used to sell products for Pillsbury.
  • half a loaf is better than no bread or half a loaf is better than none: an expression meaning, roughly “getting something is better than getting nothing”
  • “Half a loaf is better than low bred:” a joke made by John Steed in The Avengers episode “The Correct Way to Kill”

  • The Little Red Hen: a fairy tale about a hard-working, wheat-growing, flour-grinding, bread-baking hen who gets no help from her lazy companions, who prefer to loaf.
  • “give us this day our daily bread:” a line from the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer recited by Christian church-goers
  • bread line: a queue to receive food from a charitable organization
  • whitebread: a slang adjective used to describe someone whose tastes are bland and culturally mainstream, or things associated with such a person. Such as white bread.
  • bun in the oven: an expression meaning “knocked up”
  • The Muffin Man: an English nursery rhyme. Do you know the muffin man?
  • muffin top: the lumps of flesh about the waist caused by wearing pants that are too tight
  • Hansel and Gretel: in this fairy tale, two children leave a trail of breadcrumbs to mark their path so that they won’t get lost in the woods. It’s not a particularly effective method.
  • bread is the staff of life: a saying about the importance of bread. Etymology online says:

    Staff of life “bread” is from the Biblical phrase “to break the staff of bread” (Lev. xxvi.26), transl. Heb. matteh lekhem.

    I’ll take a page from Magpie and redirect you to this blogger, who poked further into the orgins of the phrase.

  • “I’ll grind his bones to make my bread,” a line spoken by the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk:

    Fee-fi-fo-fum!
    I smell the blood of an Englishman.
    Be he ‘live, or be he dead,
    I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.

  • the best thing since sliced bread: an expression said appreciatively of something really innovative, or just something really good. Often said facetiously.
  • bread and circus: as the wiki says, since I’m too tired/lazy to say something on my own “is a metaphor for handouts and petty amusements that politicians use to gain popular support, instead of gaining it through sound policy”
  • Project Bread, a Massachusetts anti-hunger organization. I’ll donate $5.00 to them for each commenter who includes the name of a type of bread in the comments below.

image credits: bread from wpclipart, Little Red Hen from Ella M. Beebe Picture Primer (New York: American Book Company, 1910) 87 from clipart ETC.

baking bread

Last month, Magpie wrote some posts (and even a nonet) about baking bread. I left a comment saying that she had just about inspired to give bread-making a try, as soon as I got some yeast. She replied by sending me a link to Laurie Colwin’s recipe for oatmeal bread.

The idea with this recipe is that you can fit the steps of baking bread into a busy schedule, investing only 15 minutes of active work. You make the dough at night before going to bed, do a bit with it in the morning, and then bake it when you get home in the evening.

Once I finally got around to remembering to buy yeast at the grocery store, and after an additional wait for another shopping trip because I’d forgotten that the recipe also called for wheat germ, we were good to go.

I thought that making and kneading the dough would be a good activity to do with Phoebe, since she really likes to help. (I’m eager to train the kids for hard labor, which should free up more of my time for blogging. Or maybe I should just train Phoebe to blog for me.)

The recipe suggests that the whole process should take only 15 minutes. I figured that the first step shouldn’t take much more than 10 minutes. With my cluelessness, I planned to tack on another 15 to 20 minutes. And then with Phoebe’s help, we knew to expect things to take at least an extra half hour.

I’ll let you decide whether Phoebe liked the process.


Phoebe smiles for the camera. (“That was a really big smile,” she said afterwards.)

The next day, I “knocked down the dough,” which was a new expression for me, and split the dough. The recipe said to use 2 loaf pans. We have only one loaf pan, so I figured I try to make a “boule” on a cookie sheet. (As the dough spread more than rose, I think the shape of the bread could be better described as a “frisbee.” )

The resulting bread was tasty, but not quite what I expected. It was very dense. The recipe called for leaving the dough out to rise during the day, covered with a tea towel. My guess is that the air in our house is too dry this time of year for such prolonged exposure. It did seem like there was already a bit of a crust before I even put the bread in the oven, so I wonder if once that crust formed, the dough stopped rising. (I wonder if the tea towel used to cover should have been damp. I’m open to other suggestions, too.)

We had the “boule” (or “discus”) for dinner. The loaf bread, also quite dense, worked really well for slicing thin to make toast.

The flat-topped loaf, which worked to make tasty toast.


What was left of the discus could have been used as a weapon the next day.

Monday’s efforts to amuse

    Another Monday Mission’s come-
    Can’t think of what to write.
    Realizing this may seem dumb,
    Or maybe somewhat trite.
    Should I just post some tripe and run?
    Type nonsense (that’s the gist).
    In just a moment I’ll be done…
    Cross this one off the list.

—-

Today’s Monday Mission, in case you hadn’t guessed, was to write a post in the form of an acrostic. I decided to go all meta on you.

I seem to have come down with a case of crankiness. (I’m not sure where I caught it. Since I know how contagious it is, though, I’ll try to keep my distance.)

In my crankiness, though, I kept thinking about the acrostic message that “accidentally” came through in a veto memo from Arnold Schwarzenegger, also known as the Governator of California.

For more (less cranky) acrostics, stop by Painted Maypole.

connected

We are all connected;
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically
–deGrasse Tyson

I saw this video at Voix de Michèle. (I recently connected with Michèle through the Great Interview Experiment.)
————-

There are times when I feel a bit overwhelmed by the connections.

Facebook has been great for tracking down friends my past lives, and I’ve reconnected with friends from many different phases in my life. But it’s too much all at once. I can’t keep up. There are friends that I’ve wondered about for years, tried to track them down on the web, and yet now that I’ve found them, I haven’t even managed to send a message.

I have other friends who live nearby, but we haven’t managed to stay in touch. Mostly it’s my fault. There are people I should just call.

I owe cards. Wedding cards. Sympathy cards. I owe thank you notes. Emails.

Don’t even get me started on being a just a tiny speck.