Not much going on, but I rarely get a chance to use the “Snakes” and “Reptiles” tags. So:
Obit watch: Evan S. Connell, Jr., noted novelist and historian. (Son of the Morning Star: Custer and The Little Bighorn
Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Random notes: January 11, 2013.
Friday, January 11th, 2013Resolved.
Friday, January 4th, 2013I think Calvin has the right idea.
But I was puttering around in the kitchen yesterday, putting together a loaf of sourdough beer bread, and a couple of thoughts occurred to me.
- There’s something kind of magical in the transformation of water, flour, and yeast to bread. I know some of the science, but it still kind of amazes me when I dump a bunch of stuff in one end, and get something I can eat (that tastes good!) out of the other.
- I have a really nice bread machine
that I haven’t been using as much as I should. I need to step that up, and I’ve already started working in that direction.
- I’ve been working through, or plan to start working through, several cookbooks: primarily Bread Machine Baking
, though I want to try adapting some of the ones from Breads from the La Brea Bakery
to bread machine use. Laurence Simon has some recipes on his site that I’d like to try as well.
- I’ve also been improvising some breads. For example, on Sunday I made a basic white bread from the cookbook that came with the machine, but I added a tablespoon of Penzeys Italian Herb mix and 1/2 cup of grated parmesan. It came out okay, but a little salty for my taste. (A major reason it came out that way is that I misread the recipe and added too much salt. If I had put in the correct amount, I think it would have been better, even with the added salt from the cheese.)
- But I haven’t been documenting the recipes I’ve tried, or my improvisations.
So I’m going to start keeping a bread journal of what I bake, where it came from, what changes/improvisations I’ve made, and how it came out.
I’m just using a simple notebook for this right now. But I’m thinking about posting these as regular entries (maybe once a week; as a single guy, a loaf a week is about what I go through) on a blog. Probably here; I thought about doing this on the SDC blog, but that’s more restaurant targeted than food in general. I don’t see that fitting in with the shared vision Lawrence and I have for that blog.
Would folks be interested in this? I don’t think there’s any danger of me turning into a foodie d’bag: TJIC would probably…well, maybe not sneer, but at least say something to me for using a bread machine rather than mixing and kneading by hand, for starters.
I’d also like to get some feedback on what I might be doing wrong. The sourdough beer bread tastes pretty good and has just about the right texture for my taste, but the top crust came out cracked and uneven. (The basic white bread+ I made came out distorted: one end rose to a normal level, but the other end just barely rose at all. I blame that on the salt problem. It was also pretty dense, but again, the salt problem, plus I kind of expect cheese breads to be dense.)
How about it, folks? Feel free to leave comments.
(I haven’t said this in a while, so let me drop this in here: if you buy stuff from Amazon using the links above or the search box to the side, I get a small kickback which I could use right now. Just saying; no obligation to buy.)
(Oh, and speaking of magic/science, I’ve started reading Ruhlman’s Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking
(Note to self: look for good kitchen scale when out thrift-shopping again.)
(Note to self 2: they’re really not that much on Amazon
Speaking of books…
Wednesday, December 19th, 2012…I’ve been a little distracted, but I’m thinking the time has come to pull my favorite Christmas story
Interesting questions.
Wednesday, December 19th, 2012- Why did I have to find out about the exhumation of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock from the Onion A/V Club, of all places?
- It has been a while since I’ve read In Cold Blood
. Is there any evidence that they were ever in Florida to begin with, much less Sarasota? Serious question: I honestly do not remember.
- Sarasota county still has evidence that they expect to get useful DNA (in some form) from, 53 years after the crime? (To be clear, it isn’t the evidence that surprises me: I’d expect them to keep evidence for unsolved crimes until the sun goes nova. What I’m having trouble with is whether DNA would be preserved after being stored for that long.)
- If they do get closure on this case using Smith and Hickock’s DNA, will this be the oldest solved cold case ever? Or oldest solved using DNA? Anybody know what the current record is?
Random notes and obit watch: December 18, 2012.
Tuesday, December 18th, 2012Remember Pat Lykos, former Harris County DA, unceremoniously tossed from office in this past election cycle? Remember the whole BAT Van scandal? (If you don’t, the “HCDA” category” will provide you with a historical overview.)
Anyway, Amanda Culbertson and Jorge Wong, two of the people who brought up the problems with the BAT Vans, are suing Ms. Lykos, Rachel Palmer (another prosecutor in the DA’s office) and Harris County itself.
The NYT informs us that there hasn’t been a big hit book this holiday season. (Apparently, last year’s big hit was Steve Jobs
Obit watch: Senator Daniel K. Inouye.
Maurice Herzog, noted French climber.
Herzog died of natural causes at the age of 93.
TMQ Watch: December 11, 2012.
Tuesday, December 11th, 2012TMQ was oddly silent last week about Kansas City. TMQ is oddly silent this week about Dallas. TMQ loves him some Patriot offense.
We actually watched last night’s game at the home of some friends. (Those friends shall remain nameless to protect their privacy, but thank you, nameless friends for hosting us!) We have not seen a Monday night game since the contract moved to ESPN, and we were amazed at just how awful the commentary was. We were also amazed at how much time was spent talking about Every. Single. Little. Aspect. Of the New England Patriots (especially Brady) and how little time was spent discussing the Texans.
We’re not that upset the Texans lost. A win would have been nice, but 11-2 is pretty good, and it isn’t like they lost to an incompetent team.
Additional note: as we write this, news is breaking that Paulie Tags has thrown out the New Orleans Saints player suspensions. We’re not sure what to make of this, or how this is going to play out. We need some time to think about it.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ….
Morris, Weingarten, and MacDonald.
Friday, December 7th, 2012I have written before about my complicated relationship with Gene Weingarten and his writing.
I have a tremendous admiration for Errol Morris as a filmmaker.
I own, but have not yet read, A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald
The intersection of these three things: Weingarten in the WP profiling Brian Murtagh, the federal prosecutor in the MacDonald case. And, in the process, taking on Morris and his book. Weingarten believes MacDonald is guilty:
So Weingarten should maybe be taken with at least a small grain of salt. But he does bring up several places where Morris himself admits problems. For example, a woman named Helena Stoeckley allegedly confessed to a federal marshal, Jimmy Britt, that she was present when the killings took place. Britt filed a sworn affidavit stating that Stoeckley confessed while he was transporting her to the trial. Both Britt and Stoeckley are now dead.
More:
Punchline: it wasn’t broken. And:
The entire article is pretty long, but I commend it to your attention if you have any interest in the MacDonald case.
(Hattip: Ted Frank by way of Popehat on the Twitter.)
“…with the eyes wide open”
Thursday, December 6th, 2012Something about the state cemetery that I didn’t realize until I went there; many of the monuments are, for want of a better work, architecturally interesting.
There are quite a few standard flat tombstones (especially in the section for the Confederate dead) but it seems like many people have the attitude of “This is the state cemetery; let’s make it interesting.”
I wish the focus had come out a little better on this one. I think it works, but in retrospect, it would have been better if i had taken another shot with a smaller aperture to get better depth of field.
(And call me a sentimental old fool, but I like the inscription.)
(Tom Lea Institute. The Tom Lea Collection at the University of Texas.)
Well said, sir.
Tuesday, December 4th, 2012
(That second photo was taken by my mother with her camera.)
(Biographical information on J. Frank Dobie from the Handbook of Texas Online.)
(Interestingly enough, both Webb and Dobie are buried in the state cemetery, but Roy Bedichek, the third member of the group, is buried elsewhere. It isn’t unusual, as we will see, for the cemetery to have monuments for people who are buried elsewhere, but as far as I can tell there’s none for Bedichek. And for those of you outside of Austin who aren’t aware of the significance of Webb/Dobie/Bedichek, here’s a nice article on the state cemetery website that explains it all for you.)
Random notes: December 3, 2012.
Monday, December 3rd, 2012Jim Washburn is out as defensive line coach of the Eagles. Yes, already.
Obit watch: David Oliver Relin, journalist and co-author of Three Cups of Tea. I wish I had more to say on this, but right now I’m not sure what I can say.
As I recall, the case of the lawyer who shot at a census worker was well publicized at the time. The lawyer. Carolyn Barnes, denies the incident ever happened. But she was declared incompetent to stand trial and sent off to a state mental hospital.
Here’s the punchline: her law license is still valid, and she’s representing at least one client.
So, in other words: if the state hasn’t taken away her law license, she’s sane and can be tried for shooting at the census worker. If the state takes away her law license, that just certifies that’s she’s insane and can’t stand trial. That’s some catch.
Obit watch and a bit of personal indulgence: December 1, 2012.
Saturday, December 1st, 2012This has not been a good week for various reasons. Add another one to the list.
Jeff Millar, columnist and former movie critic for the Houston Chronicle, and also writer of the “Tank McNamara” comic strip, has passed away.
Millar’s time as a HouChron columnist and film critic overlapped my childhood and teenage years. I’ve written before that he was one of three people (Siskel and Ebert being the other two) who made me love movies. (My teenage years were a time when teen slasher flicks were approximately every third movie in the theaters. It was so bad, Millar came up with the “teen scream checklist” format for his reviews of those movies; I laughed every time I saw he’d done one of those.)
(And I’m glad somebody mentioned “Murray the Wonder Publicist”. I had almost forgotten about him.)
“Tank McNamara” was a hoot in those years, too. It still is, but sports have become so ridiculous that they’re hard to satirize any more. And I was a big fan of “Second Chances”, too: it was often funny, but also deeply moving (and I wonder how much of it was autobiographical). (Somebody should do a complete collection of that comic, damn it.)
I even saved up my pennies and purchased a copy of his novel Private Sector
And the columns. Most of them were side-splittingly funny. But the one that I remember best right now was one he wrote about his first wife (the legendary “Spot” of his columns) after her death. I’d love to find a link to that, but the HouChron doesn’t go back that far.
I had it in my head that, at some point, I was going to write Mr. Millar and thank him for his influence in my life. I met him once, when I was a teenager, at a book signing. But I was too shy and intimidated to talk with him much. We had a brief email correspondence shortly before he retired as a reviewer, and that was the extent of my contact with him. I tried several times to see if he had a presence online, and couldn’t find any contact information, so I gave up on it.
Too late now. I guess this has to be my thank-you note.
Domo arigato, Millar-sensei.
Quote of the day.
Thursday, November 29th, 2012I’ve always liked Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (also known as Tiger, Tiger in the UK).
The last chapter struck me rather forcefully the first time I read it. Especially the ending: I’m putting this quote behind a jump because it contains possible spoilers for the book.
Obit watch: November 26, 2012.
Monday, November 26th, 2012Noted Russian SF writer Boris Strugatsky.
TMQ Watch: November 13, 2012.
Tuesday, November 13th, 2012Unleash the kraken 1972 Miami Dolphins auto-text! Plus, we all live in a nuclear submarine, TMQ has a new book out, and more, in this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback! After the jump…