Littleton Grist Mill flour and the bread it made

My Mom & Dad brought me back a bag of stone-ground whole wheat flour from their travels. It was from the Littleton Grist Mill in Littleton, New Hampshire and came in a nice cloth bag, as below:


And, today, I made some bread with it, using my current technique, though adjusting a bit for stone-ground flour because it doesn't seem to need as much moisture for the same result (and the technique I use is always dangerously close to being over-hydrated). The bread is pictured below:



When I took it from the machine, it looked like it had collapsed, but the structure inside doesn't show much collapse at all. What seems to have happened is that a big air bubble formed under the skin at the top of one side of the loaf and this big bubble (and not the entire structure of the loaf) was what collapsed. Sort of like the one and only time I tried making a baked cheesecake.


It's a nice-tasting 100% whole wheat loaf. As with most bread machine loaves, it's not that pretty, but the soaker and pre-ferment technique means that the flavour is not compromised as much as with a quick-and-dirty bread machine loaf.

Matt and the Case of the Missing Baskets (at Georgetown Superstore)

Well, I went into Superstore on Friday and couldn't find any shopping baskets anywhere. When I asked a lady in the shop where they were, she said they didn't have baskets anymore. She told me that too many people had been taking them home, so they had removed them.

Who takes home a shopping basket??

So, I took one of the green $5 ones that you're supposed to buy and put it back when I was finished. But I won't be doing this every time.

Since it's much faster to get around with a basket and a basket holds about a backpack's worth of shopping, it seems like it's now more difficult to shop there with anything less than a car where you can easily bring your reuseable plastic basket.

Conservatism re-energized, not only on my man-island but also in Canada and abroad

Ever since the financial crisis began, my initial expectation of myself and others was that we would react by turning away from free market ideology -- a realization that unregulated free markets had failed us and that we needed to look for something else.

But it hasn't happened. Having read extensively about what went wrong, and been exposed to the massive complexity of these systems, I am more concerned than ever that government would try to manage such a system. Whatever job they try to do, I am convinced that it would be a worse job.

I am now more, not less, appreciative of free markets because I think I have a better understanding of them, having been forced by curiosity to investigate how they work.

And I think I sense it happening in others. I think that, ultimately, this will force conservatives to go back to their roots of small government and more purely free markets. In the long run, I think this will be good for them. I think they will distance themselves from neo-con policies and return to a more purely conservative model of fiscally-responsible and smaller, simplified government.

In Canada, we have a problem. Our only conservative option has increased the size of government, is overspending, and is not acting according to his stated principles. Unfortunately for him, his stated principles would have played well in the current environment, but they are now publicly irretrievable. Their main alternative -- the Liberal party -- seems to have no idea what they are doing, but would probably err on the side of big government and overspending. These are not Chretien's Liberals, who talked a big Liberal game but acted like fiscal conservatives (if a government is going to lie, this is my preferred lie).

In the US, Obama is setting the stage for a conservative rejuvenation by overspending and over-regulating. This gets tiresome very quickly for a country that preserves a spark of can-do individualism. With Bush, the Republicans hit the proverbial rock bottom (even though Obama didn't manage much more than 50% of the popular vote -- quite far from Mulroney's 2-seat wipeout in Canada in the 90s) and will be forced to figure out what they're going to be about in the years ahead. This can only be positive in the long-run.

Despite my own predictions about my own reaction, I am enthusiastic about the idea of Tim Hudak as the leader of Ontario's Progressive Conservatives. I have a sense that he will be clear about what he wants to accomplish and that he will accomplish a lot of what he sets out to accomplish. I have seen him debate on a number of occasions and he is very partisan but also very clear and he leaves you with the impression that you know where he stands. That is rare in the current environment. He is being tarnished with the anti-Harris brush by the media, but Harris was elected to two majority governments, the first of which followed an economic situation similar to the current one, and which followed a government whose politics were as murky as the current government's are. I wasn't of age to vote when Harris got his first majority, and I wasn't a citizen with voting privileges when he got his second, but if this is what he was fighting against then I can appreciate why he was elected.

And, in the recent parliamentary elections in Europe, many socialists governments were reduced in size. And this wasn't just a flip-flop from the incumbent to the largest alternative due to sour circumstance: as The Economist notes, "The pattern of misery for the left was powerful enough to trump the adage that deep recessions punish governments in office." Britain even elected a couple of openly-racist members of the British National Party. Interestingly, the BNP also advocates things like local economies, reduction of foreign oil dependence, and the use of the military to protect home soil rather than waging war in foreign countries in addition to deporting people of non-British origin. And they seem to be far more serious about it than the more mainstream parties.

But I suppose all we know for certain is that things won't stay the same.

RIP Michael Jackson

I don't really know what to say about Michael Jackson. I like a lot of his music and there are a lot of memories attached to the music he made. Particularly the "Thriller" and "Bad" years -- "Bad" was one of my first tapes, which I got when I was in grade 5, and my Mom and Dad had the "Thriller" album and seemed to play it a lot. Also, the "Dangerous" album, which I got on CD when I was a teenager. All three of those albums were excellent and there was no filler on any of them.

Of course, I remember the "Thriller" music video. But, mainly because of my age at the time, the "Bad" videos are the ones I remember most -- "Bad", "The Way You Make Me Feel", and "Smooth Criminal", in particular.

"Smooth Criminal" is an amazing video -- almost like a mini-musical. Here it is:



I also bought his other albums. "HIStory" wasn't bad, but you could tell an unhealthy anger was driving some of his music by that point. That album had one or two songs that sacrificed music to get even with one or two public figures. He did an interesting remix album after that, but I knew it was pretty much over when I bought "Invincible" and there were one or two obvious singles and a lot of filler and mediocre ballads. It took him a long time to release that album.

So, as an artist, I had pretty much chosen to draw a line under him after "Dangerous" and think of him in those terms.

But it's still sad what happened to him later on. Obviously, I have no idea what really happened. But I don't think I ever expected him to make a serious comeback musically.

Well, RIP Michael Jackson.

Gerry Nicholls's "Loyal To The Core": on Stephen Harper, the NCC, and non-partisan conservatism

Gerry Nicholls has written an interesting book called "Loyal To The Core", which briefly documents the course of the National Citizens' Coalition (NCC) before, during, and after Stephen Harper.

It describes the pre-Harper role of the NCC as a conservative watchdog that wasn't partisan and held all parties to account according to a set of conservative principles. It also describes how the NCC changed during Harper's leadership of the organization, and how the line between the NCC and the Conservative party became blurred as the NCC began to be used to back partisan interests, which had not been its traditional role. It describes how many of the principles Stephen Harper fought for during his time at the NCC are now falling by the wayside, seemingly in a preference for power over principle. It explores why this might have happened.

Along the way, you come to see a more fleshed-out characterization of Stephen Harper from someone that has worked with him that in some ways aligns with the rather negative image of him portrayed by the media, but that in some other ways shows this image to be quite far removed and unfair.

It is a short book, written in easy prose, and without embellishment. You will come away with a better understanding of both Stephen Harper and the NCC, and it will be a fair understanding. I recommend it.

Why does everything have to be a game?

I don't find many things offensive, but this idea of turning everything into a game most definitely is. It's offensive and insulting.

What is a game? It's an invented problem with an invented solution, the latter of which you have to discover for no other reason than that you've been given the task.

Games can be useful as abstractions, but someone somewhere along the line -- probably some kind of educational consultant commissioned to write a report, with a name not the same as but as similarly suspicious as Fraser Mustard -- decided that you can never have too much of a good thing.

Are we meant to be surprised that people raised on this type of thinking go ahead and work in jobs where they care little about its relevance or meaning to the outside world? We shouldn't be, because that's what games are all about.

Inventive movies like "Saw" ("we're going to play a little game..."), whether knowingly or unknowingly, make a mockery of this idea by contriving situations in which people play a game that is actually consequential to their survival for once. The games in that world are antitheses of games in the real world, in which the outcomes are inconsequential. I'm not surprised that someone raised on the concept of everything being a game -- and the creator is in the right age bracket -- would go and create a movie like that. It's almost as if he wanted games to actually matter for once.

In the UK version of "The Office" during the training seminar, the group is asked to play a game involved a fox, a bag of grain, a chicken, a boat, and a river and the orderly and peaceful movement of the first three from one side of the river to the other. Gareth interjects with questions about reality and wonders what they are meant to be learning from such a farcical situation. Tim responds in exasperation: "It's not about learning. It's just a problem to be solved." Here's the clip:



That about sums it up.

Manual reel lawnmowers and the broader implications of what they represent

For about 5 years now, I've been using a manual reel lawnmower. I don't have a particularly small lot -- 50' x 130', and my house is small, so a lot of that is land -- but it's still not that much of an ordeal. It is really no heavier than a manually-propelled gasoline lawnmower, thought it has a narrower cutting path and requires a few more traversals of the lawn to get it cut.

There are some basic rules that you have to observe to get along with it:

• don't less the grass get too long: if the grass gets too long, it will be difficult to cut and you will need to make multiple passes
• keep it sharp: you don't have to sharpen it very often (maybe once a year, if the blades are of good quality), and sharpening is very easy if you use a gelatinous sharpening compound
• make sure it's adjusted properly: if it's not adjusted properly, it will still cut but will be noisier and more difficult to push

One of the interesting things about the above rules is that you can make the same mistakes with a gasoline mower, but when your own human energy is at stake, rather than the energy stored in a fuel sold to us by violent dictatorships in exchange for our financial support, you tend to pay more attention to them. All of the above will cause a gasoline mower to use more energy to do the same job, but it's invisible to us because it's economic to use brute force to overcome them. Gasoline is relatively inexhaustible when compared to our own body energy. We have to rest if we get tired, but if we run out of gasoline we can just drive to the gas station to get more. There, too, lies another example: we wouldn't push a couple of thousand pounds of steel to the gas station for no reason other than to go to the gas station if we had to expend our own energy to do it. Even if we hired someone else to push us, we'd do it in something a whole lot lighter.

This is just a tiny example of how tolerant we are of waste if it doesn't affect us materially. It is duplicated many times over in the most seemingly-insignificant things we do every day. It makes me wonder how different our world in general would be if we had to live more closely to the real consequences of our behaviour.

The garbage strike in Toronto, for example. What if we had no-one to clean up our mess for us? What if we had to live next to the garbage we create? It can be done. If you only used natural products from the environment around you, none of the waste would be garbage that couldn't be used in one way or another for something else. It would also be apparent when we were over-using those resources because we'd just be able to see that the trees and shade were all gone, the water had all dried up, and the animals weren't coming here anymore to participate in the ecosystem.

You get time to think about these things when you're behind the relative quiet of a manual reel lawnmower.