perfidy

This installment of my ongoing bread-blogging is about mediocrity. Although I sometimes forget it, it is entirely possible for a highly reputed artisan bakery to be nothing more mediocre.

I don't mean to say bad. Bad bread is another thing entirely, and usually comes as a gummy sliced loaf touted as "whole grain" but packed full of lethicin and additives to make the texture over as something akin to Wonder Bread. A loaf of oversweetened spongy whole wheat bread studded with toothbreaking seeds is as appetizing as cat vomit, especially for $4 a loaf for the Pepperidge Farm and Cape Cod offerings at my local Stop & Shop. No, my object today is mediocre bread.

This morning I took my weekly summer jaunt into the yuppie haven of Marblehead to hit the weekly farmers' market. While stocking up on six different kinds of greens, locally made cheeses and the first beets of the season, I picked up what looked like a beautiful baguette with which to enjoy the aforementioned cheese. I specifically chose this baguette because another vendor at the market recommended them as the "best bread in Boston."

I now know that this statement is not only a lie but also a calumny and an act of treachery.

A baguette is among the very simplest of doughs: nothing but water, flour, yeast, and salt gently kneaded together to form a fairly soft mass without a great deal of strength. True baguette dough is always made one of two ways: with a pate fermentee, which is basically yesterday's dough left overnight and incorporated into today's bake; or a poolish, which is a mix of equal weights flour and water with a tiny amount of commercial (or wild) yeast added and left to stand overnight to ripen. Either method results in a slow-rising dough that contains a surprising depth of flavor. Pate fermentee generally contributes a slightly sour note to the loaf, where poolish is slightly more sweet and wheaty tasting. Either way, you end up with a very flavorful loaf.

Like the best French recipes, making a baguette is simple but not easy. There is a highly refined set of techniques for rising, shaping, slashing, and baking that helps achieve desired result.

And what is that desired result? You want a caramel-brown and very crisp crust with well-defined flaps rising from where you slashed the loaf, a proper ratio of crust to crumb (the baguette must be neither to fat nor too skinny), and a crumb that is creamy yellow in color and rather springy and interspersed randomly with a lattice of holes ranging from smaller than your pinky tip to the size of a large marble. No holes or larger holes means you need to work on your shaping technique and possibly on your dough formula.

These simple ingredients, when handled according to the best techniques, add up to one of the culinary wonders of the world. I have bought French baguettes in Paris that rank among the very best things I have ever tasted, and despite the fact that baguettes made here in the USA can never quite replicate the fleeting and transcendent flavors of their French counterparts, they can come awfully close to equalling this perfection.

So what of the highly touted and expensive baguette I bought today? Well, eww. Up close, the crust proved to be a tawny gold color several shades short of brown and devoid of any of the crispness or delicious browned flavors that baguette crust promises; the loaf as a whole was nearly floppy. The thing had been made much too fat and a bit too short so there was far too much crumb for the amount of poor crust. The crumb itself was pillowy and nearly snowy white and the hole structure was more like that of Italian scala bread with its fine network of tiny holes than a true baguette. The flavor was insipid and lacked any of the depth and complexity that comes from pre-fermenting. It tasted more like a straight dough whipped up start to finish in about five hours. In short, everything that could possibly have gone wrong did, except for the slashing. The slashes on top were perfect, with the desired trademark "ears" that ideally allow one to pick up a baguette by one of these flaps. At least that was done right.

I can (and have) do better than this in my own kitchen, and I am not a master baker by any means, merely a dedicated amateur. The Bread & Butter Bakery in Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA should be ashamed to offer such half-assed product for sale anywhere, especially for better than $3 per loaf. If they cut the amount of dough per baguette by an ounce or so, increased the bake temperature and oven steam, and paid more attention to flavor, they could not only get a fair $3 for their baguette but would cut production costs as well. I can only hope that this was just an unlucky day for the baguettes; I dimly rememember being fairly happy though not impressed with their breads last year, including their epi, which are made with baguette dough.

People keep telling me I should open a bakery; if this is my competition, maybe I should think more seriously about it.

Saturday's Telegraph tells the tale of just where a good chunk of the world's aid dollars have gone, specifically focusing on Nigeria, Africa's largest, natural-resource-richest, and most populous country. $220 billion, down a rathole in the last 40 years, just in Nigeria.

A taste:

The stolen fortune tallies almost exactly with the £220 billion of western aid given to Africa between 1960 and 1997. That amounted to six times the American help given to post-war Europe under the Marshall Plan.

British aid for Africa totalled £720 million last year. If that sum was spent annually for the next three centuries, it would cover the cost of Nigeria's looting.

They've got 35 billion barrels of proven reserves there, and I'd suggest they get to work digging them up, because more money from other peoples' pockets doesn't look like it's ever solved a problem in Nigeria.

Sani Abacha was one of the worst, as detailed in this add-on story, but his kleptocracy was unique only in its absolute size, and would have been far larger if he hadn't died of a heart attack under the ministrations of three Indian prostitutes after only 5 years in office. You see, even at the high end of his estimated thievery, he was responsible for only 1.5% of the total aid money wasted in Nigeria. And Nigeria wasn't the only failed experiment in assuagement of white guilt - it was just one part of the roughly 100% failure rate among African nations who've received aid.

Sometimes, a rational guilty white man just has to say "If at first you don't succeed, try, try... aw @#!?% it!". And perhaps, in some small way, some Nigerians might agree:

Mr Obasanjo will travel to the G8 summit to press the case for debt relief. Nigeria is Africa's biggest debtor, with loans of almost £20 billion, because previous rulers not only looted the country but also borrowed heavily against future oil revenues.

The G8 has refused to cancel Nigeria's loans, despite writing off the debts of 14 other African countries this month.

Prof Pat Utomi, of Lagos Business School, said that was the right decision. "Who is to say you won't see the same behaviour again if it is all written off?" he said.

I'm thinking "Nobody", that's who.

[wik] For other views, not all at odds, see the first three letters to the editor in the June 25, 2005 Houston Chronicle.

The top 100 movie quotes of all time (according to the AFI) have been released.

The top dozen:

1. "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," "Gone With the Wind," 1939.
2. "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse," "The Godfather," 1972.
3. "You don't understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I could've been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am," "On the Waterfront," 1954.
4. "Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore," "The Wizard of Oz," 1939.
5. "Here's looking at you, kid," "Casablanca," 1942.
6. "Go ahead, make my day," "Sudden Impact," 1983.
7. "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up," "Sunset Blvd.," 1950.
8. "May the Force be with you," "Star Wars," 1977.
9. "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night," "All About Eve," 1950.
10. "You talking to me?" "Taxi Driver," 1976.
11. "What we've got here is failure to communicate," "Cool Hand Luke," 1967.
12. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," "Apocalypse Now," 1979.

I can't believe that the ending line from Casablanca doesn't make it higher than 20. Travesty! Also, they should have included the whole quote from Apocalypse Now! - "It smells like... Victory."

Although I am partially appeased by the inclusion of #77. "Soylent Green is people!"; my biggest problem... no Ash quotes.

Insensitive. Bastards.

Kristol thinks that O'Connor will be the first to go.

If such "economic development" takings are for a "public use," any taking is, and the Court has erased the Public Use Clause from our Constitution, as Justice O’Connor powerfully argues in dissent. Ante, at 1—2, 8—13. I do not believe that this Court can eliminate liberties expressly enumerated in the Constitution and therefore join her dissenting opinion. Regrettably, however, the Court’s error runs deeper than this. Today’s decision is simply the latest in a string of our cases construing the Public Use Clause to be a virtual nullity, without the slightest nod to its original meaning. In my view, the Public Use Clause, originally understood, is a meaningful limit on the government’s eminent domain power. Our cases have strayed from the Clause’s original meaning, and I would reconsider them.

So says Clarence Thomas, regarding the second elimination of a clearly stated constitutional limitation in as many weeks. This particular travesty has been a long time coming. The courts have been drifting in this direction for decades. Earlier cases, notably in Pittsburgh and Portland, saw home and business owners kicked to the curb to satisfy the "public good" of large corporations and rich developers.

Now, I am not one to rail against capitalism and corporations as a matter of habit. When business entities and rich individuals are made to play by the same rules and on the same field as everyone else, the harm that they can do is limited, and what harm that is done can be remedied in law. This ruling changes that altogether. Now ownership of property is subject to the whim of whoever last arranged for a city councilmen to get a blowjob, or who wrote the most recent check to the mayor’s reelection fund. Property rights are no longer absolute. Whoever has connections can have property rights reassigned, and the whole of government enforcement powers will be enlisted to point a gun at the head of the poor schmuck who wants to keep his home.

The rule of law is a cool thing. Five of our Supreme Court Justices have a pretty hazy conception of what that means. Property rights are in many respects the true basis of liberty. (Not freedom. Freedom means having nothing else to lose.) Autonomy depends on having a sanctuary from which to exercise it. A man’s home must be his castle. Over the last century, but especially over the last couple decades, the Constitution has ceased to be what it originally was – the final arbiter of what is permissible for government. So many provisions and amendments have been twisted beyond recognition as to be entirely negated. Just in the last ten years we have seen serious inroads into the

Slippery slope arguments are always dangerous, but things like this really tickle my paranoia. Like Johno, I immediately thought of Ruby Ridge. But I also thought of this:

America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.

How do you go about arresting these trends? The list of bad things is long: the drug war, RICO laws, sneak ‘n’ peak searches, the militarization of law enforcement, Waco, Ruby Ridge, restrictive gun laws, increased surveillance, certain provisions of the Patriot Act, campaign finance reform, ad infinitum. And hand in hand with the creepy illogic and clear unconstitutionality of the bad laws is the creepy incompetence of those enforcing the laws. Ruby Ridge and Waco are classic examples, but the fumbling of the BATFE, TSA, Border Patrol and numerous others are just as bad.

I don’t know where this is all going. But on days like yesterday, I have a feeling we might be in a handbasket.

[wik] Some other good links: Justice Thomas’ complete dissent, Professor Bainbridge’s essay at TCS, and The Opinion Journal’s take on the matter.

[alsø wik]Zach Wendling has a sort of funny, kind of scary idea about the only likely defense against developers paying off local officials to take your house.

Yesterday I left work early so the grunting men could move my office, came home, and got savagely depressed on half a glass of cheap wine and a private screening of The Big Lebowski.

A man's home is his castle, and yesterday the Supreme Court named them all Ruby Ridge. The Truth Laid Bear (linked) has aggregated a number of reactions to the Kelo case. Here's mine: The very notion that anyone's home - anyone's - is now up for grabs as long as a state or muncipal government thinks there might possibly be some potential gain in tax earnings to be had by tearing that home down, makes me want to puke. This session of the Supreme Court has really beefed a couple in a row here; between Raich and Kelo, I figure my best bet is to buy my own island and build a house there. That, or come up with a few billion dollars and move to a kleptocracy.

Eugene Volokh has argued (presumably rightly, he's a smart dude) that Kelo merely articulates or sums up recent trends in property law and therefore isn't anything new. True. But as Glenn Reynolds has observed, sometimes it takes an incident like this to open people's eyes to how deranged a situation has become. Take the aforementioned Ruby Ridge - before that awful standoff and Waco not long after, Americans who weren't already survivalist types had no idea that the US government could operate that way. Now every American above a certain age remembers what happened and knows somewhere deep inside in that place where you get nervous at traffic stops not to trust the guys in bad suits and aviator shades.

How can Kelo end well for anyone? The Republicans need to work pretty hard to distance themselves from this opinEyion, in which three out of five Justices in the majority were appointed by Republican presidents. Anyone that Bush nominates for the Court will (hopefully) have to distance themselves from the body's recent statist excesses. In the short term, it's possible that the housing market might come in for a shock as people realize that the deed to their house no longer counts for much. In the long term, I think we will probably see a few emboldened and outraged neighborhoods in standoffs with authorities. Either way, not good to say the least. Our liberty is a shockingly fragile thing when you stop to think about it, and days like yesterday make it seem like we're close to the edge.

Come for my house, and they'll have to call the 5 o'clock news and the National Guard. That's a g-d d-mn promise. All the dude ever wanted was his rug back, and all most people ever want is to be left the hell alone. In their house.

From Rocket Jones, via Simon, by way of Mr. Brown and through rx78ntx, we find real life Dilbertisms:

A magazine recently ran a "Dilbert quotes" contest. They were looking for people to submit quotes from their real-life dilbert-type managers.

Here are the top ten finalists:

1. "As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday and employees will receive their cards in two weeks." (This was the winning quote from Fred Dales, Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, WA)
2. "What I need is an exact list of specific unknown problems we might encounter." (Lykes Lines Shipping)
3. "E-mail is not to be used to pass on information or data. It should be used only for company business." (Accounting manager, Electric Boat Company)
4. "This project is so important, we can't let things that are more important interfere with it." (Advertising/Marketing manager, United Parcel Service)
5. "Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule." (Plant manager, Delco Corporation)
6. "No one will believe you solved this problem in one day! We've been working on it for months. Now, go act busy for a few weeks and I'll let you know when it's time to tell them." (R&D supervisor, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing/3M Corp.)
7. Quote from the Boss: "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say." (Marketing executive, Citrix Corporation)
8. My sister passed away and her funeral was scheduled for Monday. When I told my Boss, he said she died on purpose so that I would have to miss work on the busiest day of the year. He then asked if we could change her burial to Friday. He said, "That would be better for me." (Shipping executive, FTD Florists)
9. "We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees." (Switching supervisor, AT&T Long Lines Division)
10. One day my Boss asked me to submit a status report to him concerning a project I was working on. I asked him if tomorrow would be soon enough. He said, "If I wanted it tomorrow, I would have waited until tomorrow to ask for it!" (Hallmark Cards Executive)

In today's Washington Post, one can find the story Into the Mix: A Ban on Flag Desecration. It begins:

With the public image of Congress in the tank, House Republicans have vowed to focus on legislation that affects people's everyday lives, especially energy, tax and highway bills. But today the House will take up more red meat for the red states -- a bill "proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States authorizing the Congress to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States."

House Republican Conference Chairman Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio) chuckled when asked if that was a conflict and suggested that anyone who sees one is looking at the world through blue-colored glasses. "You know, this is probably as relevant to people's lives now as any other time," she said, "because of what's going on with Democrats putting everybody in the world before our soldiers and the American safety. They're so worried about what's going on at Guantanamo Bay. And the flag has a place in that debate."

As a "red state" resident, and fully realizing my views are nobody's but mine, my first thought was "Huh? WTF?" With all due respect to Deborah Pryce who, back in my Ohio days I thought was an acceptable representative, the only part of her comment I can agree with is "...this is probably as relevant to people's lives now as at any other time." You know.

And there, the agreement ends. Because, you know, Deborah fails to realize that perhaps it's also as relevant to people's lives as is the color of shoes Paris Hilton chose to wear today. There are a lot of things it could be as relevant as, since the universe of things with zero relevance is enormous.

Heck, it's about as relevant as how many Korans it takes to stop up a Cuban prison toilet.

At least it is to me.

[wik] Well, the House has passed the amendment bill (for something like the fifth time), 286-130. A New York representative had this to say:

"If the flag needs protection at all, it needs protection from members of Congress who value the symbol more than the freedoms that the flag represents." said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., whose district includes the site of the former World Trade Center.

He's not my representative, but that doesn't make the reason for his position any weaker, methinks.

Senator Dick Durbin (Dick-Ill) has tearfully not really apologized for the ridiculously offensive statements he made the other day.

Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line," the Illinois Democrat said. "To them I extend my heartfelt apologies." His voice quaking and tears welling in his eyes, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate also apologized to any soldiers who felt insulted by his remarks. "They're the best. I never, ever intended any disrespect for them," he said.

Aside from bicyclists riding in the road four feet from a paved and well maintained fricken bike path, there is little in this world that pisses me off more than these pretend apologies. Not just from senators, but from anyone.

"I'm sorry you felt bad that I did that." Bullshit. Either say you're sorry for what you did - and admit that it was wrong, or stfu. These sort-of apologies place the blame on others. "Some people are offended, and I'm sorry they feel that way." What Durbin said was not only wrong on the politeness/civic amity/professionalism spectrum, it was historically/factually wrong. And the whole tears thing is so patently fake. There is no excuse for what he said, and his tear-stained apology should read more like this:

My remarks crossed the line. What I said was factually incorrect, and morally reprehensible. I was wrong. I apologize to the people of the United States, and especially to the United States Military, the guards at Guantanamo, my constituents and my family. In my unhealthy desire to make a political point, I offended you all, and for that I am deeply sorry.

Something like that would be a real apology. It also pisses me off that no one in the media is willing to parse a sentence, and comment on what he's actually saying. Fah.

Preparations are in full swing for this year's Sportsman's Club Testicle Festival.

Plan accordingly.