Monday, March 14, 2016

Changing the clocks

Never been a big deal for me - except when I forgot. After a couple days of  "Wow, it's still light." or "Is it dark already?" I adjust to either.

I don't doubt there are people for whom the one hour switch can be more traumatic but there's a part of me that also thinks that any small inconvenience is too much to bear for some folks. What's the problem? You move the clocks ahead, you set them back. If you were to drive to California from here you'd have to set your clock back three times. You ever hear anyone bitch about that?

It always amused me, though, that there was an official time to change the clocks, something like 2:11 am. Who gets to decide that? I suppose it's important for computers and lots of other things that are time regulated that the switch happen at an agreed upon time, but why not midnight or on some other hour?

When my kids were small I tried to sell them on the idea of a tradition of time change ceremony. I told them the time would change at 2:17 in the night and that I'd get them up so we could do the time change ceremony, saying good bye to winter and welcoming the spring and the summer with candles and song and a ceremonial procession around the yard. In the fall it would be to thank the season for the harvest and hope for a mild winter.

Even when they were small I could never pull it off.

"Why don't you just change the clocks before we go to bed?"

And that's what I do.

Saturday, March 12, 2016

Self Driving Cars

There's a lot of interest lately in the development of cars that drive themselves, you know, safely taking you from one place to another while you scan pictures of cats on your cell phone. Seems like a really shaky idea to me.

Now I don't mind being driven. I've done my share of driving over the years and the idea of letting someone else do the driving is quite attractive. I learned to use the bus while we lived in England and it was really convenient. But I don't like the idea of being taken, especially by an automatic car. Well, I might relent if all the cars were automatic and on some sort of level playing field, but basically we'd be riding around inside mobile computers. That's what they are, after all, computers with GPS and a lot of sensors to keep them on the road and avoid running into things. In theory, it would make everything safe.

But computers get hacked. Suppose someone got into a few of these computers and gave the automatic cars a bit of attitude. We'd never know which ones have been hacked. Could even be our own. How would you like being driven around by Basil Fawlty? Or if your car was programmed by Microsoft and had to be rebooted half way to work and Basil was right behind you?

One could make a pretty good argument that our cars already do too much of our thinking for us. It all happened around the time the repair guys went from being mechanics to technicians.

What is it about us that seems so willing to give away control and responsibility?

Sunday, March 6, 2016

Bread

I came across Don Wilder in the grocery store years ago.

"I bake beans, you know."

That explained a lot. Don Wilder was a nice guy. Solid, honest (as far as I know), and frugal. He once bought a house in Brattleboro for around $6,000 and when he paid for it at the closing he put three bags of coins on the table. It took the Realtor and the lawyers three hours to count it at least twice. It was all there, though, to the penny.

Don Wilder baked beans.

I, on the other hand, like to bake bread. Not enough to make it a business, but a loaf or two at a time is rather enjoyable. It's not a big deal, it can be simple or complex, but it's always good. And once you get used to a substantial slice of bread a lot of the commercial bread just doesn't cut it anymore.

This is not about gluten. I actually add gluten to my bread. That's what makes it rise, after all, and with the seeds and dried fruit I sometimes add, it needs the extra gluten to push it up and hold it until it bakes.

Another thing, and I'm not a purist, but if you read the list of ingredients on almost any baked good you'll see stuff that will never be in your own kitchen. You'd be amazed at what goes into a tortilla, for instance, a simple peasant food. Pull a package off the shelf sometime and see what goes into those things. Then check out the sell by date. Those babies have a shelf life.

So I've been quite smug about making our bread. All basic ingredients and I know what's in it. But then came the story that wheat farmers spray the wheat with Roundup before harvesting to help it dry out. This story has been going around for a while. So I wrote to King Arthur Flour and asked them what the hell.

In their response they acknowledged that in very rare cases "glyphosate" might be applied as a last ditch measure to save a crop in an unusually wet year since it acts as a drying agent. If that were to happen, it would be a week or so before the actual harvest and any residue would only be on the outside of the grain which would be cleaned off during harvesting. But the cost is so prohibitive it would be extremely rare for this to happen. King Arthur stays in close contact with their growers and know of no instance where this has been used in any of the wheat they buy.

It annoyed me a bit that they refused to use the word Roundup and called it glyphosate instead. Even if they keep their wheat pure, what about other places? The word glyphosate in a list of ingredients looks a lot less hazardous than Roundup.

Anyway. I now spend the extra for King Arthur Flour, just in case.

Used to be food that came from a factory was suspect. 

Now we can't even be sure of the raw ingredients.