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.

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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

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*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.)
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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.

two birds with one post

It’s Saturday, and for me that often means I post an entry to PhotoHunt. This week, the theme is “birds.”

Meanwhile, Becky of Welcome to My Life has informed me that she has posted the interview that she did with me as part of The Great Interview Experiment. So, I thought I should put up a post about that as well.

I had a lot of fun answering Becky’s questions, and I love the way she posted my answers along with some additional dialog. Go have a look:

If you’re having dinner with zombies, be sure to wear your nylon lamé pants, and use the good china. My Great Interview Experience.

I do rather have the feeling that she found me to be a bit of an odd bird. (But I suppose I am.)

Speaking of birds, here are a couple of photos I took of some birds in San Francisco last June. As they were flying towards me, I thought they were seagulls. But as they got close and flew overhead, I saw that they were pelicans. (Or at least I believe them to be pelicans.) What’s more, I was pretty impressed with how clearly I managed to get a shot of two of them, considering I was just using my little point-and-shoot.

For more people shooting birds, go pay a visit to the other PhotoHunt entries at tnchick.

For more people shooting the breeze with The Great Interview Experiment, go pay a visit to Neil at Citizen of the Month. (And please check out my own interview with Voix de Michèle.)


Two birds, coming over the horizon.


Two pelicans fly overhead.


Pretty cool, don’t you think? (This is a crop of the one above, by the way.)