the hypothetical wren

I was really busy last week, a state which continues through now, with a projected end of Wednesday at 11 p.m. All of the detritus of the semester has built up and is clogging the drains: grading, emails, getting necessary documents sent in the right formats to the proper place. I fear I am not up to it: yesterday, I spent FOUR HOURS writing a 500-word proposal for a conference, based on work I’ve already done. This should not have taken this long. Today, I am revising a good, well-argued paper I wrote a few years ago, turning it into a half-assed conference paper — my fingers are magic that way. Anyway, in the interest of continually providing content, I offer you the above photo.

This is a flyer that I acquired when I worked at the Denver Post, a decade ago. One of my jobs there was to edit the calendar section that appeared on Fridays, in the “weekend” section — this involved opening a lot of mail and coming up with interesting and new things to say about the indistinguishable parade of craft shows, community theater productions, seminars on wealth creation, and other items of interest going on the Denver metropolitan area each week. The worst, though, were county fairs — they’re all essentially the same. Some might have America performing for the crowds; others dig up the zombie remains of the Oak Ridge Boys to bring in the folks. But, other than that, all county fairs consist of the familiar tropes of mutton bustin’, cattle ropin’, giant vegetables, photography contests, funnel cakes and edible things on sticks. So making each and every county fair on the Front Range sound different! and exciting! took all of my powers of describing things in less than 100 words. But then, I got this flyer in the mail — how could you not be excited about a Lamb Carcass Contest?

Now, with the help of the internet, I know a bit more about such competitions. From the University of Nebraska:

Lamb carcass contests provide youth and their families with information that can enhance breeding programs and the overall educational experience of a 4-H sheep project. Carcass contests help create an awareness of current lamb carcass qualities that are considered desirable by the lamb industry and by consumers. Carcass contests identify those carcasses that excel in the qualities of meat yield and meat quality. Ideally, market animals that excel in live animal characteristics also will excel in carcass characteristics. However, carcass contests seldom account for live animal characteristics such as rate of gain or structural soundness. Thus, animals that excel in carcass contests may or may not be the most desirable animals overall. Selection, breeding, nutrition and management practices can affect both carcass and live animal characteristics. The practices that result in superior live animals and that produce superior carcasses can only be identified when carcass information is available and can be easily interpreted.

Congratulations, dead animal! You have excelled in the areas of meat yield and meat quality!

At the time, though, I had many questions, some of which still persist. If the entry deadline is in July, but the fair isn’t until August, what do they do with the carcasses? Are the lambs entered alive and then magically rendered dead for the competition? What sort of trophy do you get for this — is it one of those really tall ones that cheerleaders win? Why are the clip-art sheep smiling? Don’t they know what’s about to happen? Wouldn’t the Boulder County Fair be more likely to feature contests such as Outstanding Goat Cheese or Best Vegan Pie Crust?

My most persistent question, though, stems from the flyer’s design: who decided to combine Dom Casual and Chicago, two of the ugliest typefaces ever kerned and leaded, into one uglier flyer?

Anyway, I found this flyer in my personal archives not too long ago, and decided to put it on my office door. No one really notices it, unfortunately, or they’re too horrified to say anything.

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Posting is still strong at the other site. Its format fits in well with my crow-like tendencies to collect shiny things, as well as my 30-second attention span. It’s a lot easier than real blogging, let me tell you.

Most of my actual Internet activity consists of piling up links, pictures, and other flotsam. Some of that makes its way here, in the form of links.

However, most of it is interesting, but not quite worth a post of its own, at least not here. So I’ve set up a new timewaster — my own tumblr site, with photos (not my own photos, though), links, things I want to buy and more. It’s mainly designed so I can keep track of things, but you might enjoy it, as well.

(The above photo is of the strangely empty bulletin board outside my office. I did not make the face with the pushpins.)

Last episode’s yogurt bout turned out well. I ended up with six containers of passable plain yogurt — not the best I’ve ever had, but definitely edible. The results were more tangy than the plain yogurt I usually buy, since I didn’t add any sugar to the yogurt mixture (many of the recipes for homemade yogurt suggest that you might want to sweeten it to get results “similar to the yogurt familiar to many Americans”). This was fine, however, the texture of the yogurt I made was the downer here — the results skewed closer to Dannon than the Fage-like thickness I was seeking.

So, for this weekend’s batch, I’m leaving the yogurt in the cooker for a few hours longer — 13 hours instead of the 10 specified in the manual. I checked it before I left the house today (at 11 hours) and it was already less gloopy than the yaourt that came into the world last Monday. This week’s flavor is lemon herb — I made a simple syrup while the milk was cooling (1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 water, zest from one lemon, and a teaspoon of dried herbs de Provence, bring to a boil, cook 10 minutes or so until sugar is dissolved, stirring occasionally) that I added to the yogurt before putting it into the jars. A quick taste of the emerging yogurt revealed that it had a nice lemon flavor without being sickeningly sweet.

Continuing on in the hippie/survivalist/DIY food theme, I’m also making bread this weekend, using the now-ubiquitous no-knead bread (albeit with some high-altitude adjustments) that swept through the Internet some years ago. I like bread, but I’ve never been that good at making it. I went through a bread-making stage about five years ago, inspired by a thrift-store purchase of the Tassajara Bread Book. I made some extremely dense loaves of dark-brown bread; bread so dense that it had its own gravitational pull, causing stray crumbs and grains of salt to slowly inch towards it. My dad and I grimly endured slices of that bread, which didn’t seem to work for anything that bread is good for. It sucked up liquid and fat like a Shop-Vac — if I dunked a piece of the bread in a bowl of soup, the result would be a soggy, heavy chunk of dough with a few solid pieces of vegetables left in the bowl. I left part of a loaf out on the deck for the birds once, and there it stayed; eschewed by the local starlings and magpies for the more-tempting crabapples and pieces of Dog Chow to be savored instead. Perhaps I just didn’t do it right — Brown’s book hints strongly that you can only successfully make bread if you have a special spiritual stoneware bowl, made by gentle spirits in Vermont or Marin County, and if you think special gentle thoughts toward your yeast as you work the dough (instead of the I hate you stupid fucking dough I will smack you around if you stick to my fingers again that I tended toward). This bread recipe, however, calls for five minutes of stirring and 20 hours of more-or-less leaving it alone, which I think I can handle.

(I wrote this on Sunday, but didn’t post it until a day later. The bread turned out fine, although it had an underwhelming second rise. I split the dough in two, since I was concerned that my 4-quart pot would be too small to cook all of it (I froze the other half). But the dough that I cooked successfully turned into edible bread. The yogurt was pretty good, too.)

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This is one of the best Flickr sets I’ve ever seen — a collection of Polaroids of various bits of vernacular typography. Somewhat related: the new Center for Vernacular Typography, which also has its own Flickr group (although I’m not sure that all of the photos therein fit into the Center’s definition of what “vernacular” means). A confession: I registered the vernaculartypography.com domain for myself earlier this year, but, as you can see, I haven’t done anything with it yet. It happened in a post-comprehensive-exams haze of purposefulness, when I briefly thought, hey, think about all the things you have time to accomplish now!

Hey, look, I bought new shoes. They are extremely comfortable — I taught three classes the first day I wore them, and my feet didn’t hurt afterward, which is the best endorsement I can give a pair of shoes.

This post, in its draft form, originally contained a long, dull section about my dissatisfaction with school and my research right now (multiplied X number of times by my discouragement over The Election), but reading over it depressed even me, so I’ll just say that lately, running something like the coffee bike for a living sounds like a very appealing career choice.

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The top photo is of one of the windows in the UNM education building.

I am spending my Labor Day doing various things around the house (surely not what the labor movement intended for its national holiday) — sweeping, straightening up crap, and, for the first time, making my own yogurt.

My mom found a brand-new yogurt maker for $2 in Roswell, either at a yard sale or at the Goodwill (can’t remember which one, although either is equally likely). She’s not a big yogurt fan, nor is anyone else in my family. Except for me.

I like yogurt a lot, whether it by itself or in sauces, drinks, dips or stirred into soups. Not only that, I like plain yogurt more than any other type of yogurt, due to the flavor of most store-bought flavored yogurt. The amount of artificial sweeteners in most yogurts is so strong to me that it overrides both the sourness of the yogurt base and the added fruit or other ingredients. Cherry yogurt, blackberry yogurt, coffee-flavored yogurt and nearly any other variety that I’ve tried all taste the same to me — horribly over-sweetened. Usually, I just buy plain yogurt, and then add honey, some jam or other things to taste. I also often drain yogurt to make it thicker, to turn it into something akin to Greek yogurt, only less expensive.

Yogurt has been getting steadily more and more expensive, though. I used to be able to buy a quart of plain yogurt at Trader Joe’s for $1.69. Now it’s a dollar more. Similar price increases have occurred at Whole Foods and the food coop, and other places where I buy my yogurt. For a while, I was buying it on sale and freezing it, but I have a pretty limited freezer capacity, especially given the fact that I freeze a lot of things: cooked beans, homemade stock, bread (a freezer is key to eating both inexpensively and well when you’re cooking for yourself). So, I might as well try to make my own.

I started off with a quart (32 ounces) of skim milk. I used reconstituted nonfat dry milk, since this is what I had on hand. (Recipes often recommend doubling the amount of milk powder you use in order to get more flavorful yogurt; I used the usual proportions, since I didn’t have quite enough powder.) I made it yesterday, and then let it sit in the refrigerator overnight, so that the flavors could meld.

The milk needs to boil for about a minute or so, and you should stir it while it’s cooking so that it doesn’t scald.

Yogurt tools and helpmeets, from left to right: yogurt maker base, glass yogurt jars, whisk, cooking thermometer, cup of plain yogurt to use as a starter.

I poured the hot milk out of the pain and into a large measuring bowl, so that pouring the milk into the glass yogurt jars would be easier. Then, I let it cool down to 110 degrees, which took about twenty minutes.

I tempered the plain yogurt (I used about half a cup of it) in a separate bowl with a small amount of warm milk, so that it wouldn’t curdle, and then I mixed it until it was smooth. Then, I added the mixture to the large bowl of warm milk, and blended it thoroughly.

I only had enough of the milk/yogurt mixture to fill six of the seven glass jars. This isn’t a problem — homemade yogurt only lasts a week or so, and six jars of yogurt is plenty for the week ahead.

The jars go in the yogurt maker, and they have between eight and 10 hours to wait. The maker is just a warmer, which keeps the ingredients at a constant temperature — you could also use other methods. The yogurt is forming as I write this, so I don’t yet know what the results will be. I hope this is worth my while. I think I might make some chai syrup (similar to that in this recipe, only with more pepper and maple syrup instead of honey) to stir into it — I’ve had some chai yogurts before that were very good. I also want to try and recreate a ginger yogurt that I bought once in Whole Foods in Denver and have never seen again — it was ginger with blueberries, but the ginger taste predominated. So, so good.

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I was recognized the other day in the SUB, because of my shoes. That was the first time I’ve been recognized that way — usually, people know my bike from my photos of it, and ask me if I’m the person who owns it. Speaking of bikes, I wrote something for Duke City Fix on the new bike-parking facilities in Nob Hill.

Now that my camera is working again, and I’m settling back into the school thing for my last fully-funded year of graduate school, I hope to get more into writing. All of my writing has suffered over the last year. Crap for school, emails to friends, and other verbiage has been sporadic and shoddy, and I’m trying to train myself to write regularly once again. After all, I do have a dissertation (and dissertation prospectus, and a paper for this conference) to churn out sooner rather than later, and having some sort of discipline (something I’ve never been good at outside of a school or employment context) seems key. My friends would also appreciate more email from me.

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Some links of interest:

This week’s issue of the New Yorker contains an article about Colorado politics and Bill Ritter, the current, non-charismatic governor that is non-awful; in fact, it actually gets some things right that are often overlooked. Most political reportage on my home state makes me groan, but this one didn’t (despite the use of the cowboy cliche in the illustration; I guarantee you that 95% of Coloradans have never worn a cowboy hat in their lives) — it does a decent job pointing out that the dominance of state politics by the Republican religious right is a recent phenomenon, and something that has been declining over the last five years or so. I’ve read a lot of things over the last few years that tend to assume that Republican control of the state is The Thing That Has Always Been, rather than a product of the late 1980s/early 1990s. Democrats have always done well on the local and state levels — the governor’s office, for example, has been occupied by a Democrat for 44 of the last 60 years. This article is one of the few that I’ve seen that recognizes that — it’s a decent read, although I’m not sure what I think of the author’s conclusion.

The Next American City blog asks why people who are often opposed to anything that smacks of urbanism — dense populations, being able to walk places, prioritizing spending on mass transit and bicycle facilities — spend their vacations in places that are interesting, walkable and built on a much more accessible scale than modern American suburbs.

I Love Typography has been running an occasional “History of Type” series this year — a few months ago (you can tell I’ve been collecting links for a while) the series covered Didone-style typefaces. Characterized by a contrast between thick and thin strokes, including razor-thin serifs that contrast with, these typefaces (often of French origin, designed around the time of the French Revolution and its aftermath) are among my favorite serif faces. They’re often thought of as “high-end” or “luxury” typefaces — as the article points out, Didone faces such as Bodoni are often used and over-used in fashion magazines — because of the difficulty of using them. Those delicate serifs have require quality paper, good ink, and a high amount of typesetting skill to print correctly. My favorite modern Didone-style typeface is H&FJ Didot, Jonathan Hoefler’s revival of the work of Firmin Didot, which is graceful, useful and stunning.