Tim's Bloglet - Monday 2 June 2008

Just went kayaking again. The 3rd clutch of cygnets has hatched and was about, all 7 of them, squeaking away to each other. One of those absolutely still evenings, when the only movement of the water was my own wake, ducks, fish and turtles. I like it when turtles watch me suspiciously.

I think of swans as male and female, but all I really mean by that is 'the one that chases me' and 'the one that hangs out with the cygnets'. They could switch hourly for all I know. _
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09:27:29 PM, Monday 2 June 2008

In the channel connecting the tidal marsh to Cape Cod Bay, there were hundreds and hundreds of long, skinny fish with vertical stripes. The tide was coming in, and they were on their way out into the ocean. I am curious whether, if they do in fact migrate between the ocean and the marsh, whether it's tied to the tides or to the sun.

I can't find any good websites for identifying tiny fish found in cold saltwater marshes, since they are neither sports fish nor aquarium fish.

I took over 50 pictures of these. This is why I'm not allowed to have a film camera. _
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04:05:34 PM, Monday 2 June 2008

It's summer! Heard the first bullfrog of the year yesterday, floating out on the pond at sunset. I think I positively like the urbanness of my pond, with it's highway and playground and constant air traffic when the wind is right, alongside it's birds and frogs and fish and turtles. At one point, after a Harley went past up the on-ramp, I focused for a while on the human noises, and there are a lot of them. But then, the natural noises are all coming from things that have woven themselves into human society. What makes a pond at dusk so entrancing isn't the silence. I can get actual silence behind earplugs. Silence is dead. It's the feeling of being silent, while surrounded by life and noises. _
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01:29:56 PM, Monday 2 June 2008

There's an inherent tension in bread, between bread as background starch, as in sandwich, and bread as flavorful fermented product. The whole wheat potato bread tasted great with sweet things, that balanced out the bitterness, but it utterly overwhelmed the subtle pleasures of egg salad, and went right against the grain of the chicken 'n gravy. I take white flour for granted, but it's pretty magical stuff. _
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01:02:46 PM, Monday 2 June 2008

The other day in the bath, staring blankly at the tiles, I started constructing a font, where every letter uses 8 pairs of pixels, arranged vertically. Mostly I was curious if it was possible, and if it'd be readable. Artificial constraints and so forth. _
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04:17:44 PM, Sunday 1 June 2008

The lower hull of a 19th century shipwreck: washed up in january. story here. _
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05:13:07 PM, Saturday 31 May 2008

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05:12:38 PM, Saturday 31 May 2008

Kinsley portrays Bill Ayers as something out of a Wodehouse novel. I hadn't realized he was somebody's son before, he makes much more sense now. Hearing Bill Ayers talk on the local NPR after 9/11 is one of my formative political experiences. I'm still brooding over the George Packer piece about the end of the class and culture wars and the fall of conservatism, which paints a picture of this country governed by the forces of reaction for the past 40 years. The reemergence of Bill Ayers, in that view, is the last, ineffectual echo of the explosion of the old democratic party. _
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03:05:18 PM, Friday 30 May 2008

In a tidal channel by Skaket Beach. At one point we saw two chasing around, when one of them suddenly found a buried female we hadn't noticed, and the pair scampered off quite literally into the sunset. Though scampered isn't the word. Horseshoe crabs more glide disturbingly, to all appearences by force of will alone. You have to deduce the legs. Rather bizarre when they dig, there are just these puffs of sand.

Tidal channels are unnerving when the tide is coming in. I'm rather used to rivers running into the sea, not the other way about.There were also hermit crabs in the same channel, but I failed to catch any, it being about waist deep and cold. _
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03:51:41 PM, Thursday 29 May 2008

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10:53:09 AM, Thursday 29 May 2008

I'm grumpy with Peter Reinhart. His basic innovation to the normal whole wheat bread recipe is pretty amazing, and I've now made 3 entirely edible 100% whole wheat breads, so that's the good bit. I can forgive his stilted, pompous geekyness, it's a cookbook, after all. But I have other complaints.

Bottled or filtered water: Every recipe calls for it. But despite 80 odd pages of throat-clearing and discussion of Delayed Fermentation, TM, he never mentions why. Is this leftover health-nuttiness from his formative years? Is there a baking-geek justification? He doesn't say.

Imprecision. His multi-grain loaf recipe calls for cooked or straight whole grains, with no mention of adjustment to the amount of liquid. After making it, I can tell you this is not because it doesn't need one. This would be all right, if not for the dizzying amounts of

Precision. This is a man who likes his decimal points. 5/8ths a teaspoon of salt? Kneading instructions precise to the minute? (I feel rather smug when I just throw all the pre-doughs in the bread machine for kneading.) He combines this with...

Bizarre editing failures. Every recipe has detailed nutritional information per serving, to 2 decimal points, but no mention of how many servings the recipe makes. And then there's the repitition. Each recipe is 3 pages long, but with perhaps 10 words different between varients. He's got whole wheat bread. Then he's got "transitional" whole wheat bread (see, it's 50% whole wheat, for people just transitioning to whole-wheat cultdom) then multigrain, then transitional multigrain, then rye, then transitional rye... you get the idea. The vast majority of each recipe is copy and pasted from the master recipe. Someone less pompous could have taken the basic insight of this book and written a really terrific 20 page pamphlet. But presumably the flaws in his character that made him choose this format also made him the sort of arrogent fiddler it would take to introduce innovation and theory into the deeply luddite and cred-conscious world of homemade bread.

Okay, the flakiness gets me too. Dude, molasses has nothing to do with the spirit of the new england harvest. The spirit of tax evasion and the slave trade, maybe. _
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04:27:12 PM, Tuesday 27 May 2008

Taken shortly after dawn, facing west. See the sunlight hitting that sign? This is an extreme manifestation of the hostility Massachusetts signmakers feel towards outsiders. _
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12:19:12 AM, Saturday 24 May 2008

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