Buses in San Francisco now say FARE REQUIRED on the LED displays on the front and side where they used to only indicate the line number and final stop street name or something like that. For a few seconds that is replaced with what it used to say, which is helpful.
It’s an LED display because buses aren’t fixed to a line and might be used on one line on day and another line some other day.
Anyway, this implies that FARE REQUIRED is also a temporary situation that might change, which is nice.
In the interim between now and it going away, I just accumulate 5 seconds or less of vitriolic hatred for the bureaucrat who is imposing this useless delay on my life while I stare at a thing I already know waiting to find out if the bus is going to be one I’m waiting for or not.
I add this to the 2 seconds of my life the new BART gates take to open when the old ones were instant and when I collect enough I convert these seconds to Camel Cash™ which it turns out is still a thing.
"Well, it’s complicated, they are doing that because—“
Let me stop you right there. Enjoying and knowing complications is gross and I want no part of it and do not truck with those who do. No. Absolutely not. It sucks and I’m right that it sucks. Thank you.
Figure 1. Macro photograph of a rose in peak bloom. I don’t know the name of this variety of rose but it is a very pale pink with yellow and white highlights that make it seem almost iridescent in the morning shade. Stunning enough that I stopped the take a picture, and I pass lots of blooming roses on my walk to and from school drop off in the mornings.Figure 2. Selfie at home in the mirror by the door. I’m wearing a black 501s and a black chore coat with my handle, Gravely, chain stitched on the right breast in goldenrod thread, over a black and white plaid flannel over a light pink t-shirt. I’m wearing a new-to-me Twitch Unity Guild baseball hat in light pink with the twitch glitch logo with stacked unity pride flag drop shadows. A blurred print of Booty-Boop, my old avatar, by Joan Cornella is behind me on the wall over one shoulder and a rainbow Eames ball coat rack on the wall over the other shoulder.
I made baguettes for the first time yesterday, purely on a lark, out of the pantry, because I was making coq au vin for dinner and my copy of the Tartine book on the shelf happened to catch my eye.
Bread is always a side quest challenge and not a destination for me, where the main course pairing and some time to kill is more motivating than actually having the bread.
Figure 1. Three loaves of shaped baguette dough, about fifteen inches by four inches, slid on rice flour onto a wooden pizza peel and just before being launched into the oven. Each has been slashed with a razor at a sharp angle, the farthest five times, the middle three times, and the nearest twice.
As in, when I’m on a cut (a fat, protein, carb, and fiber oriented caloric deficit practice using scales and calculators), I pretty easily fall into carb deficiency and have to force myself to bother to eat enough carbs, usually as rice, to sleep comfortably.
That said, I maintain a nameless from-scratch starter and have a large deli container of SAF instant yeast on hand, and a pantry full of various types of flour, so I kinda lay this trap for myself.
I would have preferred a longer, skinnier loaf but this is how big my baking steel is. The slashes should also have been deeper, and my shaping leaves a lot to be desired. I cannot use my ample sized neapolitan-style pizza oven for bread like this because bread like this springs best in steam.
Figure 2. A man (the poster, me) in glasses leaning over, head cocked to one side, putting his ear to three baguettes on a cooling rack on a cutting board. The loaves are fresh from the oven and making ticking, hissing, and cracking noises as they cool.
I have no idea which setting on my fancy kitchen oven is best for this kind of thing. Aero bake? Bake? The rear loaf got darker on the top than the loaf in the front. My razor slashes were definitely too shallow, and I think I degassed the dough too much in my clumsy shaping, and so the crumb was tight.
All that nonsense aside, this recipe (and I guess most modern ones) calls for using both a from-nature starter in a levain, and a from-commercial-yeast starter in a poolish, which is just cute as a snapshot of industrialization.
I’ve overheard bakers and pizza makers at IRL places I enjoy explain to questioners that is their proven approach as well, and I really need to get down to firming up pizza dough recipes that build on the same approach to get my dough to the next level.
It is funny to make all of these observations to myself when someone tries my baking or cooking, and only to hear “oh don’t be hard on yourself, this is great" or something like that.
To be super clear, if you find yourself in that kind of conversation: thinking about what to change about next time about some craft and critiquing output the craft is the entire point of doing the craft. It isn’t a self-esteem thing, if anything, is quite the opposite.
I used to make beer all the time. When the last year or so of batches was all, to my mind, commercial quality, I ran out of things to care about and lost all motivation for making the stuff. It became a big chore of doing dishes and collecting ingredients instead of a way to occupy my mind with a simple challenge of one or two things to improve right next time.
In a way very real way, that’s what hobbies are for, to me. I’m just not gonna be explicit about it.
“check it out, I successfully tricked my brain into not being a dick for like six hours today doing this.”
I’m also very jealous of the memorization gang who can put their mind to the gear in every hobby. That probably works really well. I can never remember, and could not care less about gear, parts, model numbers, and attributes.
It’s process or nothing with me.
Anyway, the bread was incredible with dinner and now I’m gonna make french toast with it, which I just wing every single time.
It would be funny if electeds and then other federal workers and then eventually everyone just started wear neck gaiters pulled up over their noses and wrap-around sun glasess all the time like ICE does. Like, not haha funny but, you know.
We’d have to invent new ways to politely eat and drink around each other. Everyone would be shouting all the time through the masks and talking with their hands on account of eye contact and other facial context being out the window.
One of the dumber things about the torment nexus is that a lot of it also gives tree falling in a forrest in the ways that it enables regressive, alienated attribution to things that previously we dealt with attribution free or better, that left no legacy in the material world.
To use pithy examples, I would rather live in a world where graffiti emerges “from nowhere” and trash left after a party is an emergent property of parties and so on.
If we are gonna universalize some idiot’s preference, it should be mine that we universalize and not some rich weirdo’s. But it’s always some rich weirdo’s.
After many stubborn attempts to pass and use various pyrex (hiss) and pyrex-imitator (hiss) measuring cups and various purpose built gravy boats (hiss) I’ve switched to the one thing in the house that can pour hot liquid correctly: my little blue (beep beep beep) hario v60 carafe (snaps).
With it, I can serve gravies and curries at the dinner table quite neatly.
I want to ride my bike to the park and hike a little but I assume my bike won’t be there, or it will be there without a seat when I return to it, if not this time, then next time. I don’t want to ride with a pannier, much less heavy ineffective locks.
How do event operators fund and staff their bike valets and what would it take to build a network of fixed operators?
I assume both the efficacy and land-use and even just the capitol expense of “better racks" is a lost cause.
