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7
Feb 23

Seriously, I want this bread, very much

I walked into the studio this evening for the news recordings and watched two young women deliver the news. A young man did a weather forecast, which he we wrote and produced over in the atmospheric sciences. Another person delivered a tightly written around-the-world segment. They have two co-directors of news, and they each pitched to pre-recorded packages to stories they’ve recently produced. It’s all quite impressive.

The impressive part, to me, though, was one of the young women sitting at the news desk. One has been there a few times and she does a nice job with it. The other, this was her first time anchoring. After, I told her, a not insubstantial part of what we do at the desk is about delivering with confidence and poise, control and power. Her face fell a little bit right then. But, I said, a very interesting thing happened as you went through that show just now, your poise and confidence grew with each story you read through.

She was pleased. Everyone was.

Please enjoy the weekly effort at reducing the number of files I have open in my browser. It seemed a good week to have a theme, so let’s have a theme! The theme is food. Bookmark these links for yourself, but, whatever you don’t, don’t just leave these open in your browser.

This one is a recent discovery. Please don’t share this one with anyone I know, lest they make it and I have to eat it and learn it is, in fact, amazing.

Chocolate peanut butter skillet brownie.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup dark brown sugar
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 tablespoons vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
¾ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tablespoon instant espresso powder

1 teaspoon salt
1 cup chocolate chips, plus more for topping
¾ cup creamy peanut butter
vanilla ice cream, for serving

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Heat a 10 to 11-inch oven-safe deep saute pan/skillet over medium heat. Add the butter. Once melted, turn off the heat and whisk in the sugars until dissolved. Whisk in the eggs, making sure to quickly combine them so they don’t cook. Whisk in the vanilla extract.

In a bowl, stir together the flour, cocoa, espresso powder and salt. Add it to the skillet and stir until combined and on lumps remain. Stir in the chocolate chips. Dollop the peanut butter all over the batter then swirl it in with a knife.

Bake the brownie skillet for 25 to 30 minutes, or until it is just barely set. You don’t want to overcook it! When it comes out of the oven, you can sprinkle with chocolate chips if you wish.
Let cool slightly then serve topped with vanilla ice cream.

Feel free to copy it from here, saving yourself the postmodern angst of having to scroll through 500 words and a ton of photos to get to the good stuff. Ironic, I know, and you’re welcome.

If you want something more healthy, 10 fruits you should eat every week, according to a dietitian:

Did you know research published in 2018 in the American Society for Microbiology’s journal mSystems shows that eating up to 30 different kinds of plants in a week can positively benefit your gut microbiome? Having a healthy gut can improve heart health, boost immunity and even benefit mental health. Eating more fruit is an easy way to increase the number of plants you’re eating in a week to keep your gut bacteria happy—and these 10 fruits pack in a plethora of health benefits with every bite.

From increasing your fiber count to boosting your body with crucial vitamins and antioxidants, here are the fruits recommended to consume every week, backed by experts and research.

Now if I can get two or three more refrigerators I can keep all of these fruits close at hand.

When we went to Washington in June of 2021 — our first non-family anything since Covid began — we discovered the Cottage Bakery in Long Beach. At that time I wrote:

I discovered the joy of a locally made bread I’ll never be able to try again, one so full of flavor and appeal that I described it as a sommelier does a wine (with a lot of complimentary adjectives). They describe it as “A multigrain bread we developed for that special beach flavor! Sweetened with honey and molasses and full of whole grain taste.”

They’re underselling the bread.

It is called Willapa harvest bread. Sadly, they don’t ship across the country. But this bread, y’all. So I started looking for the recipe. A recipe. Any recipe. I think this might be close to what I’m after. Now I just need to try it. Honey molasses whole-wheat bread:

Tested size: 12 servings; makes one 9-inch loaf

INGREDIENTS
2 cups whole-wheat flour
1/2 cup bread flour (may substitute all-purpose flour)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup sunflower oil
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup molasses
1 1/2 cups buttermilk (regular or low-fat)
DIRECTIONS
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Use cooking oil spray to grease the inside of a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan, then line the bottom with parchment paper.

Combine the whole-wheat and bread flours, the baking powder, baking soda, salt, oil, honey, molasses and buttermilk in mixing bowl. Stir for 75 strokes, so all the dry ingredients are moistened, then pour into your loaf pan, spreading the batter evenly.

Bake (middle rack) for 40 to 50 minutes, or until the top is evenly browned and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean, or with a moist crumb or two.

Remove from the pan and place on a wire rack to cool for at least 10 minutes before serving.

If you want to sweet talk the nice people at the Cottage Bakery in Washington state and see if they’ll share a few tips with someone a.) not in the bakery business and b.) well removed from their customer base …

Closing those three, I now have 40 tabs open on my phone browser. I seem to be stuck on that number.

It is time for another visit to the Re-Listening project. This is a stroll down memory lane, all of my CDs, in order, in the car. Today we’re somewhere in early 1997. Live’s fourth album came out that February. I liked the third one, everyone did, so I got the fourth one. The first single came out in January and it was immediately a big draw for an early 20-something.

The memory I have with that song is an open road and an odometer needle that points just a hair over toward the right. I don’t know if I’ve ever noticed the string section at the end. It stuck out to me on this listen. It’s a dissonance that doesn’t really work, at least from here.

But back then, that song went to 35 on the US Radio Songs chart, topped the Alternative Airplay chart and made it to number two on the Mainstream Rock chart. This was the most successful single on the record, and that makes sense. When you listen to the whole thing, by the time you get to the 10th track, or May, when this was released, you couldn’t be faulted for thinking this entire record was produced on a dare.

Try as I might, and this is of course a silly thing, I can’t think of a memory of listening in this in the daytime. I did used to make most of my long trips in the darkness, but that’s a weird lack of recollection on my part.

Of the whole record, this is the second, and other, lasting song on the album that captures my attention. It’s a stripped down and live performance of Live, from November, 1997. Or maybe it was April. Some international dating conventions are tricky.

“Secret Samadhi” topped the weekly charts, and the album finished at 42 on the year-end chart. It was certified double platinum in Australia, Canada and the US, but the misses outweigh the hits for me.

These days, after allllll of their internal drama, Live, with nine records in the catalog, is still touring, though the only original member is lead singer Ed Kowalczyk. When is an old band a new band? How long can a band swap out players and use the same name? This is, admittedly, a lame Theseus’ paradox, but it is hard to imagine Live without Kowalczyk.

In our next visit to the Re-Listening project we’ll check out a breakthrough smash from a little band from Gainesville, Florida.

But, for now, I have to go ~~rock out~~ iron a dress shirt for tomorrow.

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3
Feb 23

Who has purple eyes anyway?

And what are your weekend plans? Did you ease into them? Rush into them? Have them foiled by bad news at 3 p.m.?

The risk adverse should stop taking meetings at about noon on Friday, for that very reason. But that’s not a problem here. The sun is out, warming nothing, but the sun is out. I kid, of course. It got up to 55 degrees today, another effort at that first gut-wrenching stage of winter tricks. “Look, it’s almost over!”

I know better. More winter, as they say, is coming. I don’t know when, or why, but it will.

I’m equally prepared for the second stage of winter tricks, too. The first signs of the tulips will be upon us in a week or two. The unsuspecting will herald this as a sign of spring. We know better, by now.

Turning back to the Re-Listening project, and back to late 1996 or very early 1997, the car was today and yesterday filled with the sounds of two guys from Texas. Jack O’Neill and Cary Pierce met in college, where they were theater students at SMU. They made themselves as a duo, building an incredibly loyal audience in the folk and alternative rock scene. If you liked tight harmonies, 12-string guitars and hyperactive live shows, this was a good band for you.

I caught up to them just under a decade into their career. I played their cover of “Please Come to Boston” and their original “Three of Us in a Boat” on the air whenever I could manage. And then, in some way that I’ve forgotten now, their record “Finest Hour” came to me. This is the first track on that record, and the first time, I think, that I heard them with a rhythm section.

There is a slice of their audience that regarded this as their most anticipated, and most disappointing record. A full band took something away, they argued. And the dynamic of O’Neill and Pierce was hitting a rough spot. Few seemed all that happy at the time, as I recall. But, still, this is a catchy little pop tune. It’ll come back up again.

Classic formula here, you have to bring things down a notch on the third track. They hit three continents, nine countries and 45 states, before going their separate ways for five years. Then they got back together. Older, wiser, less youthful exuberance, same quality performances, from what I’ve seen online of late.

One of the best songs on the record. And we’re going off the strength of the theme, the peppy chorus, the creative use of mahogany hair, juxtaposed against a lyrical great force that takes the narrator to a … ferry. Aside from that, though, great song, and “Vineyard” is one of their signature tunes.

They started doing what they called “Destination Shows,” which, if anything else, caters to a maturing audience with purchasing power and no sense of rock ‘n’ roll whatsoever.

These shows are a whole new fan experience where people can enjoy gorgeous scenery, share delicious food & wine and have “campfire”- type access to their favorite band. It’s a vacation and concert in one. Each Destination Show provides a unique experience dedicated to the local culture: Napa/Sonoma vineyards at sunset, a ranch in Austin Hill Country, high society in Dallas, a two-mile-high a private club in Aspen, amazing history at the Biltmore in NC, a 14,000 square foot hacienda in San Miguel de Allende, MX – and the list goes on.

“We have been doing destination events for 10 years now and they have been a huge hit with our fans and have allowed us to make so many great new ones along the way,” said Cary Pierce. “I think these events continue to grow and sell out because people want more than “just a show” – they want an experience. They want to create lasting memories, explore a new place or visit an old favorite. In some cases, we’re offering them a trip of a lifetime. We’re finding there a lot of people that really value these experiences.”

That actually sounds like good fun … oh no … I’m an aging audience member!

Anyway, this one is a bit of a departure, and it works because of that.

Remember, a few embeds ago, I said we’d hear more about “Trials.” Here’s the hidden track remix.

The other half of the album, to me, all sounds like this one. Not my favorite, but there’s a half dozen tracks I still enjoy, more than a quarter-century later, on a record that was something of a wash, and that’s pretty great.

Happily, Jackopierce is still working. They released a new song last month. They’ll be in Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina on the first weekend of March.

I took a bike ride last night. I had intended to use Thursday as a rest day, but The Yankee invited me for a quick workout. A good rule of thumb about bike rides is to never turn down an invitation. So I did a quick hour, got 17 miles through Zwift’s Makuri Islands. I found one more Strava PR, on a sprint that doesn’t matter. Also, I was treated to this neat scene as I rode through one of the virtual villages. It was a good place to use the many different camera angles.

So what have we learned? Rest days are important — they would be if I was doing high volume, I’m doing average volume — but accept the invitation.

The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 55 routes down, 65 to go.

To the weekend! To the miles ahead!

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1
Feb 23

If this feels thin, blame Wednesday, or the first of the month

We are showing documentaries all this month — and much of next month. In my role as vice deputy to the assistant auxiliary button pusher, I get to put the discs in the player. (“Soon I’ll be on fries! Then the grill … ” ) Some of these are going to be really, really good.

This one is up tomorrow.

In the office until late in the evening, because we were in the studio tonight. Looking out the window, someone got pulled over on Indiana Ave.

I guess you just park in the two lane road when the lights go on behind you. Having a car on campus is a perpetual exercise in defensive driving anyway, today’s morning commute involved five lane changes in just three blocks, and then you get things like that.

We go back to the car, back to the CDs and return to the Re-Listening project once more. This is an August 1992 record, but it’s 1997 or so when I finally picked this up. A friend gave this to me, or perhaps we traded for it. Either way, it was a solid deal for me.

Six of the 12 tracks on the Gin Blossoms’ sophomore album were released as singles, but I bet you didn’t know that. (I didn’t know, until just now, that “Lost Horizons” was the first single. What a choice that was.) It took more than a year for this record to gain any traction, even within its own record label — what can we say, the music industry is weird — and so you’d be forgiven for not knowing any song here until 1993 or 1994. But about that time, it became hard to escape Robin Wilson and the rest of the guys. This thing ended 1994, it’s second full year in the wild, at 54 on the US Billboard 200, and went platinum four times.

Only their hits fill the emo category. The deep cuts offer a lot of other emotional styles. Here’s the accordion-tinged “Cajun Song.”

Maybe that’s my favorite song on the record.

Here is their September 1994 Farm Aid version of “29.” Robin Wilson is 29, singing about being 29. They all look like kids.

Or maybe this deep cut is my favorite song on the record.

There’s some simple poetry in there that’s appealing.

Then, of course, there’s the last track, which is my other, other, favorite song. Jesse Valenzuela sings the proto-country pop tune, “Cheatin.” This is from a 1993 live show.

If you see the Arizona boys play these days — and we saw them twice last year — they of course play all the hits. Wilson is still Wilson. Valenzuela is still the key to the whole thing. It’s a good quality nostalgia show. Their last new record was 2018’s “Mixed Reality” which will show up in the Re-Listening project much, much later.

Up next in the Re-Listening project, we’ll move to the east, to hear from a Texas-based band occupying the seemingly odd intersection of late-stage folk rock and alternative rock.

Hey, it was the nineties.

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31
Jan 23

The view stretched on for miles

So there I was, 11 p.m., huffing and puffing through my third bike ride of the day. OK, second ride, but third route. Still, “third ride” sounds more maniacal. I rode 39 miles this morning in London.

After a day at the office, an evening in the studio and delicious leftovers for dinner, I went to Zwift once more. Just naked mile collecting, really. I have three spreadsheets. Well … had three spreadsheets. This was the butt of a mild joke today. It was an implied joke and those are the ones that stick with you. So this evening I consolidated the three files into one single document. One part of the spreadsheet compares my top months, mileage-wise.

This morning, I topped my previous best, May 2016, when I had time to pedal and numbness to pedal through. But I realized that if I did juuuust a few more miles, I would get to a pleasing number. So I did that this evening, riding in Zwift’s made up world of Watopia. For some reason the photo capture part of the app didn’t work this evening, which is a shame. I had a great wide shot of some Mayan temples. That part is odd, since I wasn’t riding in the Maya region of Central America and modern Mexico, but rather on an island in the Solomons, some 7,000-plus miles away.

But this evening, when it was done, I set a new best, humble as it is. I tabulated a chart showing January in the saddle. That blue line, if I can stay above it throughout, would give me a record-setting year, in terms of miles. The red and green trendlines show slightly more ambitious goals.

The purple line is where I am now.

So, not a bad January.

Another part of my spreadsheet presently ranks out the best Februaries. None of them are impressive and it shouldn’t be hard to post a new superlative. I’ll start on that after a rest day or two.

The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 53 routes down, 67 to go.

Let’s clear out a few tabs. This is the feature where I link to things I’ve been keeping in a browser somewhere. Rather than have this stuff disappear forever, I can reference them here. (Blogging! I know! So wild!) Some of these are absolutely worth the effort. The last several weeks I’ve shared a bunch of pages that I’ve held open for a long time. This one here, however, is just from last fall.

Bryan Collins’ 101 design rules:

Musings, ramblings, and principles that I’ve shared with my team and randomly on Twitter. Reminding yourself of the principles that ground you is simply a good practice. Here are mine.

1. Design is hope made visible.

2. You can live your life as the result of history and what came before, or you can live your life as the cause of what’s to come. You choose.

3. When talent doesn’t hustle, hustle beats talent. But when talent hustles, watch out.

4. When you work only for money, without any love for what you do in and of itself, your work will lack energy. People will feel that. So give every project everything you’ve got, at every moment, every time.

5. A good philosopher will say: “Know thyself.” A good shopkeeper will say: “Know thy customer.” A good designer will say: “Know both.”

This might be one of the last things I opened on Twitter. And it is worth seeing. There are 96 more chestnuts for you there, should you follow the link above.

This one, meantime, has been sitting on the phone for quite some time. In hatboxes, pouches and bags lie the items that define us:

In Carson McCullers’s novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Mick, a teenage girl, owns an old hatbox that she keeps hidden under the bed. The box contains personal valuables, ‘three mystery books her Dad had given her, a compact, a box of watch parts, a rhinestone necklace, a hammer, and some notebooks. One notebook was marked on the top with red crayon – PRIVATE. KEEP OUT. PRIVATE – and tied with a string.’ This strange assortment of things is of little material value, but of immense sentimental importance. The hatbox is her own small space, where she keeps the things that make her who she is.

Many people own such a shoebox, a drawer or some kind of chest in which they keep the things that are of strangely intimate value. The idea of these small spaces that contain things of high personal value is an overlooked part of Western culture.

Honestly, this is a good starting place, but there’s no reveal or resolution here. I was so hoping for one, something that might help to explain “Why do I have several of these?”

Know what I have several of? Tabs! These came from my phone, where I am now down to 39 tabs.

We return to the Re-Listening project, and while we are still somewhere in the late 1990s as I play all of my CDs, in order, this one is from 1995. It is also a cassette-to-disc upgrade, so I am glossing over this.

So today we’re on to Edwin McCain’s “Honor Among Thieves.” I like him, saw him live a few times in venues both big and small. I enjoyed the music because the South Carolina style appeals to my musical sensibilities of the time. “Solitude” made its way onto the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and landed in the top 40 of the Mainstream Rock Tracks, Top 40 Mainstream and Adult Top 40 charts. Also, this is the one where Darius Rucker came on to sing for his friend. It has never not been funny that McCain wound up singing harmony to his guest on his own debut single. But, Rucker was set to become Elvis at that moment, so it made sense in more ways than one.

If you look up live performances of that song, McCain has slowed it down over the years, and it works pretty well. I imagine he’s on stage thinking, “I still have to sing this song?”

Just one more, since we’re glossing over the cassette-to-CD set. I was reading something recently about someone learning how to write songs, and how to write pop songs. As I listened to this record again I found myself thinking about how that could apply to McCain’s debut. It can get fairly narrow in places here, though his work blossomed over the next few records. There are still one or two standouts on this record, and this time through, it felt like “Jesters, Dreamers & Thieves” has aged the best.

Here’s a 2004 live performance. The song was a decade old, and they let Craig Too Cool Shields take his sax out for a little spin.

We’ll hear a bit more from Edwin McCain soon. I think I have two more of his records that will show up in the Re-Listening Project.

But, coming up soon, probably tomorrow, is some wildly successful power pop. Hey, it was the nineties.

cycling / Monday / music / photo / Re-Listening / video — Comments Off
30
Jan 23

Me three

It is a lovely shade of gray. There, I’ve said it. One might think that Stockholm syndrome has kicked in once again. Last year it was Feb. 7th when I mentioned that condition. The year before that, it was Feb. 19th. This is a disturbing trend. There was a bit of direct sunlight Saturday. We might have some tomorrow, or possibly on Friday. This photo was from my trip to campus yesterday. It was 2:30 p.m.

There are 80 days until spring arrives.

I was on campus yesterday testing, in my role as the manager of a television, some DVDs and streaming projects that we’ll be screening next month. Documentaries and art aplenty! Some of them look very good. Others, I am sure, will appeal to more discerning viewers. It is a nice collection of titles, to be sure, and now I know they will all play on command. Hopefully they’ll also play on schedule.

But enough about the hour I spent at work on the weekend, and get to the site’s most popular weekly feature. It is time to check in with the kitties. They are doing well.

Here’s Phoebe in that Saturday morning sunlight. The curtains flew open, as they do in the morning, and there was this warm, yellow light rushing in. She might have been as stunned as I was about it.

Poseidon … he’s hanging out in the sink again.

Don’t let the charming face fool you. That cat is a piece of work.

Got in a nice Zwift bike ride on Saturday. I wimped out on yesterday, though. There just didn’t seem to be a good time for it, I told myself. Wimped out entirely. But, on Saturday, I rode through a volcano.

I wonder what the sulfur would do to your breathing if you could put a road through the inside of a volcano. Also, I wonder if you could put a road inside a volcano. It seems to be a stretch.

Anyway, aside from taking Sunday off, I’m still well ahead of projections for the month. Plus I have tonight’s brief ride, and perhaps one tomorrow morning, to add to the tally. This evening I rode the 2018 UCI Worlds short course. Two climbs, and I set Strava PRs on each of them. And then I bested my time on the sprint segment, and thought I would collapse in my run up to the finish line.

Zwift says I finished the course in second place. I assume that means today. I assume only two people have ridden that course today. Anyway, my avatar was having a fine time on this descent. He, who doesn’t always abide by the strictest rules of physics, hit 57.6 miles per hour on this descent.

That’s a bit faster than I’ve ever gone on a real road.

The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 51 down, 69 to go.

According to the new rules I just made up for the Re-Listening project, we’re going to gloss over the discs that are cassette tape replacements. This was a good decision which, of course, takes place near the possible end of cassette-to-disc upgrade period. (Hey, it was the nineties.) I’m listening to them, you can be sure. And the five-and-a-half minutes I spent at one red light yesterday (thanks city planners!) helped make sure I got through this next disc, which was U2’s “Achtung Baby.” Released in late 1991, it would sell 18 million copies worldwide (and I have two fo them, I guess …) and it won a Grammy for best rock performance. Making the record, their search for evolving their sound, almost broke the band.

Of course, a few weeks ago Bono said they were always almost breaking up. They were also recently hoisted for all to see at the Kennedy Center Honors and, now, here they are, getting glanced at in the Re-Listening project.

Turns out they re-released this thing on the 20th anniversary, and again on the 30th anniversary. There was also a video release, the worldwide tour, five singles, a documentary, a concert film, and who knows what else. It’s amazing we aren’t sick of this but, Achtung Baby, it’s still a great record.

Of those five singles, three hit the top of the American charts. The other two landed in the top five. They could do no wrong for a while there. And these days they get roasted by Borat.

So … among the deep cuts … Normally, as I get into the music, I try to conjure up an anecdote or a memory that I’ve associated with the work. That, and being a space filler, is the point here. But this is record is going on 32 years old now, and my memories aren’t all that great. But you know this got dropped into my knockoff Walkman a lot.

Bono is, I think, one of those people who made it OK to think of being a tenor. And now he’s adding some depth and texture to his voice on this record. Who knows where sounds come from, really, but I bet some of the croaky things he does all over this thing are why I do them when I sing along to stuff in the car now.

Amazing rhythm section alert.

And the last track on the album, though this album never really ends for all of the work others have done covering it. (Aside: Look up “One” covers sometime. It’s impressive how many people tie that into their own work.)

After this tour they’ve apparently only played it live twice.

Know what U2 are doing again? All of the classics! They’ll soon release “Songs of Surrender,” a reimagining of their old works. Nostalgia sells, and it moves a lot of units. Let’s listen to the first track, a version of “With or Without You” you’ve waited on for 36 years.

It’s interesting, and risky. Here you have one of the most iconic songs — a band-defining guitar riff, a picture perfect bass line and that big cathartic wail — and invert the entire thing. Starting there is definitely a statement. We’ll all have to give it a listen to find out what’s what. It is due out in March.