“We choose to go to the moon”

I was told when I was a kid that Senator John Kennedy once held me – an infant at the time – during his presidential campaign in 1960. I heard about it years later, when my mother wondered whether we should donate our Super 8 film of the event to the JFK Library that was finally being built in Boston. We sometimes vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard – just summer weekend trips, I think – taking the ferry from Hyannis, where the Kennedy compound was, so I imagine it probably happened there, perhaps on Saturday, 25 June 1960, the single public appearance in Hyannis that’s listed in his campaign schedule that summer. I would have been six weeks shy of my first birthday.

Seventeen years later, after the data processing head at my high school did some lobbying with John’s brother, Edward Kennedy, the Senator (well, people in his office) magnanimously offered me a grant of four years’ tuition, room, and board at the University of Massachusetts. That would have been swell, but U. Mass. didn’t have a computer science curriculum at the time, so I passed.

So I feel a small personal affinity for the Kennedys. Though these connections are distant and tangential, that affinity feels closer and more direct whenever I listen to John’s full “We choose to go to the moon” speech at Rice University in 1962. It remains stirring, and tingles the spine when you know the triumphs and tragedies that were to follow.

Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s “intellectual blood bank”, wrote the initial drafts of the speech and edits by both Sorensen and Kennedy followed. Kennedy also made some handwritten adjustments before delivering it, including a last-minute joke on the page below. The complete story of the speech is in this article at the JFK Library.

If you follow along with the copy of the speech Kennedy was reading from that day, which appears on pages 25-42 in this document archive from the JFK Library, you’ll see that in the last couple of minutes, he paused, abandoned the text, and spoke in a more conversational manner, commenting first on the sweltering heat and clapping his hands for effect at the end of this part:

I’m the one that’s doing all the work, so we just want you to stay cool for a minute. However, I think we’re going to do it, and I think we must pay what needs to be paid. I don’t think we ought to waste any money, but I think we ought to do the job. And this will be done in the decade of the ’60s. It may be done while some of you are still here at school at this college and university. It will be done during the terms of office of some of the people who sit here on this platform. But it will be done, and it will be done before the end of this decade.

The full text of the speech as actually delivered is available here.

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“Whatcha got in the bag, Mike?”

From Carrying the Fire by Mike Collins:

The security people have roped off a walkway for us, and we give jerky little waves to the photographers as we walk stiff-legged toward the van. Charlie Buckley, the head security man at the Cape, is there to greet us—another little pre-flight ritual. There are certain amenities to be observed, such as presenting Guenter Wendt, the czar of the launch pad, with a going-away present. Guenter has spent the past couple of weeks telling me what a great fisherman he is, and how he regularly plucks giant trout from the ocean. In return, I have located the smallest trout to be found in these parts, a minnow really, and have had it, uncured, nailed to a plaque and inscribed GUENTER’S TROPHY TROUT. I carry it now inside a brown paper shopping bag, which Charlie Buckley eyes suspiciously. I am a bit nervous about it myself. What if my awkward gloved hands drop it and the trout tumbles out in front of all those photographers? They are here to see us leave the earth, with dignity and perhaps a little pomp, but what if their cameras instead record an ungainly scramble after a tiny dead fish? What would Walter Cronkite say?

I knew about the trout, but after reading of it again the other day and then watching the new Apollo 11 film Blu-ray, my eyebrows shot up when I saw he had good reason to be nervous: The bag was safely upright as they left the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building, but when Collins turned left to follow Armstrong into the Astrovan (a converted Clark Cortez Motorhome), it caught on his Portable Oxygen Ventilator and tilted dangerously downward; another five or ten degrees and he would have let the trout out of the bag.

Click for a larger version

In the White Room, Guenter’s estimate of his fishing prowess:

Mike’s counter-estimate:

Wendt, who died in 2010, still had the trout when he was interviewed in 1992 below – after having it gutted and properly mounted, of course. The video is cued up to the trout bit.

Armstrong gave Wendt a voucher for a free ride in a space taxi and Aldrin presented a booklet called “Good News for Modern Man”, a condensed modern version of the New Testament. In 2015, the trout plaque, taxi voucher, and booklet sold at auction for US$10,625, $8,125, and $5,000, respectively.


“No ‘General’, just Mike. Old Mike if you want to be formal. And if you really want to get into it, Lucky Old Mike.”
– Collins during this interview at the National Press Club, April 2019

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Io Saturnalia!

The new left-hand view from my couch as of yesterday

Note: You can click any of the pictures in this article to see a 1920×1080 version.

(“Io Saturnalia!”- the “io” pronounced “yo” – was the traditional greeting during Saturnalia, the late December Roman festival that Mary Beard discusses here.)

I’ve been waiting for more than a year to see if Bandai in Japan might re-issue their gorgeous 1:144 Saturn V model, which is almost three feet long, in time for the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, but now that we’re just a few weeks away, it doesn’t appear they’re going to. Prices for the limited quantities of used models and really limited remaining quantities of new ones are not that far apart, and I’m thinking they may rise sharply as 20 July looms, so I got a new one from Japan a few weeks ago – cost approximately a bundle. I haven’t had a Saturn V model since the age of nine, when I built Revell’s kit as the Apollo missions progressed before me. This one, with die-cast metal engines and so precisely and carefully crafted and painted, is considerably nicer.

Following my love of things of high quality, I started thinking about the best way to display the model. First, I found a set of remote control mini LED spotlights in the cool white spectrum to approximate the xenon arc searchlights used at Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39. The remote allows brightness control in 10% increments, and it’s now programmed onto my Logitech Harmony One, so I still have just one remote for everything.

Once I had the model in hand, I decided on dimensions for its case, and commissioned Specialty Plastics in Ohio [2024 update: I removed the link because they’re no longer in business] to build a quite splendid mirror-backed acrylic display case, 36″ wide x 14″ deep x 10″ high.

Then I started looking around for an appropriate table to put the case on. As I browsed, I halfheartedly saved three or four okay-but-not-great designs, but was then delighted to find this low-slung coffee table with a strong 1950s/1960s vibe whose design fits nicely with the model and its case. The name of the design wasn’t specified on Amazon, but the box it came in said it’s called Manhattan Age. Perfect.

The coffee table arrived last week, so I had that assembled and waiting. When FedEx arrived with the display case yesterday, I was rather busy making Parker House rolls, a double recipe of Comfort Diner meatloaf, roasted garlic mashed potatoes, butter-braised carrots, and crème brûlée for dinner guests coming over last night, but I forgot about all that stuff for an hour or so and set everything up.

The final and quite satisfying result is pictured here.

S-IVB third stage, Spacecraft Lunar Module Adapter, Command and Service Module, and launch escape tower, with recovery helicopter in foreground

S-II second stage

S-IC first stage with CSM and Lunar Module in foreground

 

The business end

From above the case

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An Essex boy at heart

Essex, Massachusetts, that is.

My view of the salt marsh during tonight’s dinner at J.T. Farnham’s; click for a larger version

This year’s menu:

I got my usual clam plate with fries and onion rings, plus a quart each of clam chowder and haddock chowder to bring home. Market price on the clam plate was US$24, lower by a few dollars than last year.

I was more interested in eating than taking pictures, so here’s a plate they made earlier. They look this scrumpdillyicious every time. This is what I think of whenever I use or hear the phrase “golden brown and delicious”.

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Hogwash probably caused by cosmic rays

Once again, I’ve come away from listening to an episode of RadioLab convinced that they sometimes play dumb for effect. In this episode, “Bit Flip”, they went on for some minutes about how none of them had any idea what the significance of the number 4,096 might be, even as someone started going through the powers of two for them. The rest of the episode was devoted to detailing how not one of them had ever heard of the rare but real effect cosmic ray hits can sometimes have on electronic equipment – a good amount less rare at very high altitude and in space. They seem to have never heard of cloud chambers, either, and, after building one and seeing the effect for themselves, announced that yes, it seems those cosmic ray dealy-bobs really do exist. Pardon me?

I do like RadioLab, but my bullshit detector has clanged loudly more than once in the past as I listened, in maybe eight or ten episodes over the years. Their ubiquitous and multiple exclamations of “What?! I can’t believe it! But how?” have long fallen flat on my ears – not just because they always go over the top with their supposed disbelief/shock/surprise in this scripted show, but sometimes because I know the topic at hand actually came up at some length in mainstream science news stories years ago. When this happens, I say to myself, in Ray Goulding’s voice, “Wattaya, dumb? Don’t you know anything, you people?” (I’m quoting from the Bob & Ray sketch below – Ray’s on the left.)

But I don’t think that; I think they’re well aware and perhaps hope and trust that everyone has forgotten about them by now. Some of those news stories have occurred within the lifetime of RadioLab itself, but even for the older ones, Robert Krulwich especially, co-host of the show and also science correspondent for National Public Radio, is of an age that surely he remembers most of them. He’s the one I most suspect of putting on an act in such episodes. I can imagine him saying, “Yes, of course I heard of that back in the ’90s, but look, we gotta stick with the show’s M.O.: Salient facts are scripted as surprises known by none of us.”

Also galling about this episode is that they seemed to conclude that all the cases they talked about are highly likely to have been the result of cosmic ray hits, something which is certainly if minutely possible but, since there is no evidence after the fact, is certainly impossible to prove, or even say with any level of confidence unless you’re experimentally set up to detect the particles as they hit. Particularly egregious was their strong implication that an Australian Airbus in-flight upset was likely caused by a cosmic ray hit. (In effect, “See? Can’t even trust airplanes!”) Mushrooms would thrive in this steaming pile of horse potatoes. The Australian Transport Safety Board’s entirely opposite conclusion, after exhaustive study, was that Single Event Effects, the catchall name for such cosmic ray hits, were “very unlikely” to have been the cause of the malfunction. So RadioLab goes and finds some schmoe who says the equivalent of “So what they were really saying is that there’s still a pretty good chance, yeah?” and they nod enthusiastically – not because it makes any sense, but because it matches the narrative they chose to follow.

I often used to tell people in a nonchalant manner that due to a long-standing superstition among publishers, you can’t find the word “gullible” in any printed dictionary. The number whose immediate response was a wide-eyed “Really?” was not insignificant; they are perhaps the target audience for this episode.

“Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.”
– Mark Twain in a letter to Joseph Twichell, 15 March 1905

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“13 Minutes to the Moon” podcast

After listening to the first episode, which was well done, I can recommend the new “13 Minutes to the Moon” BBC World Service podcast, promoted as “The full story of the people who made Apollo 11 happen and prevented it from going badly wrong.”

It will run for twelve episodes – if they’re all 45 minutes like the first one, that will be nine hours total.

Background on the series: Apollo Moon landing: The 13 minutes that defined a century

Programme site: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2

Podcast page (RSS link at upper right): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2

 

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Carrying the Fire now weightless

16 July 1969: Collins suiting up in a frame from this year’s “Apollo 11” documentary film

Mike Collins, Command Module Pilot of Apollo 11, wrote what is considered one of if not the best of the astronaut memoirs, Carrying the Fire, originally published in 1974. It’s finally been released as an ebook, so I’m rereading it in its weightless form now. If you read it after watching his recent hour-plus Aero-Astro classes at MIT here, it’s quickly obvious that he had no ghostwriter for this book – a rarity in such memoirs. It’s fully and delightfully in his own voice.

Gemini and Apollo astronauts underwent both tropical and desert survival training in case they reentered – or aborted during launch phase – away from recovery forces and ended up in entirely the wrong place; cold weather training wasn’t needed because the orbital mechanics of Gemini and Apollo flights dictated paths near the equator. Wrapping up the narrative of his Air Force tropical survival school training in Panama, he has this to say in the book:

“Somewhere along the way I picked up a couple of hundred companions, chiggers, evenly distributed from the waist down. I cannot adequately explain to the unchiggered what they are missing. My dictionary says simply that chiggers are ‘the parasitic larva of certain mites.’ It doesn’t say they are also abominable little red creatures who burrow into your skin, where they ultimately die. Uneasy in their terminal tunnels, they either jump about or dig deeper, or secrete some irritant, or something; at any rate they itch like crazy. Friends are always pleased to offer remedies. ‘Rub them with Scotch and sand. They’ll get drunk and stone each other to death.’ They merely itch worse when they (or you) have a hangover. ‘Have you tried an ice pick?’ The most popular notion (false) is that they can be suffocated, and I have heard doctors recommend covering each spot with clear nail polish. Why clear rather than blush pink (my natural color) I cannot say, but I can say with authority that it doesn’t work either, nor does the iodine-like chigger medicine sold in pharmacies. The only thing to do is wait ten days for the truculent little bastards to die or depart, leaving behind a cratered field of battle not easily forgotten by the landowner.”

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Hard drive replacement tip

One of my internal hard drives at home used for media has been logging some errors recently, and I confirmed with the free CrystalDiskInfo that its SMART records show it’s close to running out of reserved sectors that can be used to replace bad ones, likely meaning some physical degradation has been occurring lately. The yellow “Caution” that CrystalDiskInfo shows for the drive means the drive should be replaced ASAP before it inevitably starts getting unrecoverable errors – or possibly suffers a catastrophic failure – so I ordered a new 6TB drive to replace the crusty old 4TB, which was due for an upgrade anyway because it’s nearly full.

Last night, I started copying the old drive to the new with Microsoft’s RichCopy utility, which can do multiple copy threads at once and is therefore a lot faster than copying with Windows Explorer or with xcopy at the command line, but after eight hours it wasn’t even 10% done, so I abandoned that.

I then remembered what I didn’t remember last night, which is that the free Macrium Reflect that I use for backup can clone disks to same size or larger drives. I hadn’t tried it before, so I started it 20 minutes ago. Watching it in action, I see it actually takes the target drive offline and uses volume shadowing to make the clone. It’s writing 180+MB/second to the target drive instead of the 12-15MB/sec RichCopy was achieving and is already 5% complete, so instead of 80+ hours it will take about 8.

Postscript: I ended up having to use AOMEI Backupper to clone the drive (their free version allows you to clone non-system disks). Macrium Reflect kept reporting an unrecoverable read error 73% of the way through, but I had verified with chkdsk /r, which checks all sectors for bad blocks, that the only bad blocks were in unallocated sectors on the drive. Macrium’s “Intelligent sector copy” clone method, which I had selected, is supposed to copy only allocated sectors, but it was obviously trying to copy unallocated sectors, a hundred or so of which are bad on the old drive. Backupper was a little slower than Macrium (160MB/sec rather than 180+), but it didn’t try to read any unallocated sectors.

These are all free utilities:

CrystalDiskInfo: https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

RichCopy: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/33971726-eeb7-4452-bebf-02ed6518743e/microsoft-richcopy?forum=w7itproperf

Macrium Reflect: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

AOMEI Backupper: https://www.backup-utility.com/

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Precisely so

I read this a couple weeks ago in The QI Book of Advanced Banter, a book of quotations from the “Quite Interesting” series research folks. I hadn’t thought of happiness in this way before, but it makes a lot of sense:

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

Charles Kingsley

I think he has that just about right. In fact, I know so.

In addition to all those linked targets of my enthusiasm, I can also be enthused about just the occasional comfort and luxury: Yesterday, I upgraded my 2013 Elantra to the 2019 version below that I’ll be picking up Monday evening.

It’s a middle-of-the-line, lower cost Value Edition, but it has a 7″ display with Android Auto, sunroof, pushbutton start, proximity keyless entry and trunk release, rear-view camera, blind spot and reverse cross-traffic warnings, auto-dimming rearview mirror, automatic headlights, two-zone automatic climate control, heated seats, remote start and more remote control via phone app – all the latest tech, with perhaps three-quarters the features of a Tesla (the best three-quarters). For instance, the Elantra has no “Autopilot,” he typed, being careful to put it in quotes since it ain’t that at all but its name alone encourages all manner of Tesla misadventures.

I read most of the 535-page 2019 Elantra Owner’s Manual last week, admittedly just skimming the 67-page section on seat belts, child restraints, and airbags. I had a list of things to check during the test drive yesterday – for which I’ll get a US$50 Amazon gift card from Hyundai – and got positive answers to all of them.

Chief among them were two questions about Android Auto on the 7″ display to ensure I could replicate what I do currently with my pedestal-mounted Bluetooth-connected phone, its configuration shown here in 2012.

  1. Whether Google Maps on Android Auto could display surrounding roads in satellite view, with green/yellow/red traffic status, without first entering a destination. I found that it can, but every video review I had looked at only showed the Directions display with a destination.
  2. Because my current podcast app, BeyondPod, is, according to users in its support forum, unstable through Android Auto and was even banned by Google for a period of months last year when it disabled all other audio apps in Auto, I needed to find a podcast app with Android Auto support and verify that I could access my always custom playlist on the Android Auto display. Most podcast player apps, including BeyondPod, won’t pass a custom playlist to Android Auto, instead giving you access only to a list of categories and podcasts by name, which stupidly disables the ability to automatically and seamlessly listen to podcast episodes from all your feeds in the exact order you want. My testing showed DoggCatcher sensibly does pass any custom playlist(s) through to Android Auto. DoggCatcher also supports another feature I used a lot in BeyondPod: a virtual feed folder where you can copy in MP3s and M4As that aren’t actually podcasts – for instance, audio books and BBC Radio 4 programmes that don’t have a podcast feed but which can either be downloaded if a button is there or captured via its programme ID with get_iplayer. (It’s legit: BBC Radio allows audio downloads with get_iplayer regardless of your location. It’s video content that they protect well.)

The two things that surprised me during the test drive were the much-improved suspension and the fact that the 2019 model is at least 50% quieter inside than the 2013, something that’s not easy for car makers to achieve. I’ve always thought of my 2013 model as really nice, especially given its extraordinarily low price relative to similar competitors, but I think the 2019 version just might be all the way to magnificent – and the price is still low.

Start to finish, including the 45-minute test drive, trade-in inspection, brief negotiation, signing, and my round trip to the credit union to get the check for the dealer, took about five hours. The dealer gave me a good trade-in value – in fact, a fair amount more than I had anticipated, no doubt encouraged by the day-long detailing I had arranged last week for the six-year-old, 88,000 mile car, which afterward looked maybe 95% new. Yearly detailing with a final one just before trade-in can be a good investment. The best part of the deal for me is that the rebate Hyundai included will effectively pay 100% of my credit union auto loan interest.

After I pick it up, I’ll be celebrating with popcorn shrimp and catfish at a Cajun place just down the road from the dealer.

Here’s the remote app on my phone, showing the car’s status 32 miles from where it sits at the dealer until tomorrow:

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The reward of deferred gratification

Revenge is wicked, & unchristian & in every way unbecoming, & I am not the man to countenance it or show it any favor. (But it is powerful sweet, anyway.)

Mark Twain in a letter to Olivia Langdon (later his wife), 27 December 1869. She was in Buffalo, New York and he was in New Haven, Connecticut nearing the end of a forty-nine city tour of the Northeast US in which he lectured on his travels in the Sandwich (now Hawaiian) Islands

In December, I wrote of an unnamed greedy 3rd party bookseller on Amazon who apparently fraudulently cancelled my US$54 order of a Ricky Jay book when he thought he could boost the price to the sky and make a mint off it (this was the day after Jay died).

In the four months since, I’ve enjoyed seeing that seller’s obscenely inflated price for the book drop precipitously on both Amazon and AbeBooks as the book sits unsold and once again gathering dust as it probably had for some years. His highest price was over US$200, about 400% of the price I ordered it at, and in the last four months he dropped the price at least six times. I guffawed when I discovered that, last week, he dropped it back to the original $54 on both sites. (Why “he”? It’s cynical, I’ll admit, and possibly bordering on sexist, but also based on decades of experience.)

And why am I writing about this again? Because today, I received in the mail this “As New” copy of just that book from a bookseller in Malmö, Sweden who doesn’t seem to view recently-deceased authors’ books as revenue-squeezeboxes. The book cost me US$33.57, including overseas postage, and arrived in six business days with a passel of cool stamps.

On the cover is Zazel, real name Rosa Richter, the first woman to be fired from a cannon, 2 April 1877. She was fourteen at the time.

Click for a larger size

My temptation is to write to the December seller again with something along these lines:

I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear that I just received an as-new copy of that Ricky Jay book for the excellent price of $34 postpaid. Sorry I haven’t kept in touch, but I’m back and eager to hear how that greedy bastard thing is working out for you.

But that seems excessive, with unhealthy, red-faced teeth-gnashing the likely result, so writing it here will suffice. I’m sometimes mean in thought but rarely in deed.

Related serendipity: The day after I got that good price on Celebrations of Curious Characters, I received an email from AbeBooks saying they found a book I put on my want list in 2002, Natalie Wood: A Biography in Photographs, whose press run in 1986 was fairly limited. I clicked, fully expecting the US$100+ price I’ve seen a dozen times in the past seventeen years, but immediately bought it when I saw the price was $16.76. It arrived on Saturday. Now that’s deferred gratification.

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Uneasiness sets in

Jeremy Hardy, Ricky Jay, and John Clarke were on my mind this week because “The News Quiz” just started a new series (the 43-minute “Extra” podcast is posted Monday nights here), I got good news about a particular book, and it’s now been two years since Clarke left us.

There are some people you wish would live a long time. When you have just a handful that you respect highly, it becomes increasingly unsettling as their numbers dwindle.

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In praise of (the) Arnold Palmer

For the last few years, and year-round, my favourite drink – other than the occasional margarita or three at the Border Cafe – has been the Arnold Palmer (the non-alcoholic version, that is). Contrary to the 1:1 iced tea to lemonade ratio places most often serve under that name, Palmer himself preferred 2:1 tea to lemonade, as do I, except that I use a freshly-squeezed lemon-limeade.

My tea of choice for a couple decades now has been Luzianne quart-size tea bags for iced tea, the brand most often served in the Southern US. I like a strong tea whose taste doesn’t water down quickly in ice, so I use five quart bags to make a gallon of tea.

I go through about a gallon-and-a-half of this mix about every five or six days, which would normally involve a rather large bowl of simple syrup; instead, I use a sucralose solution. In the past several years since its patent expired, pure sucralose powder has been widely available at far cheaper prices than, say, Splenda packets – about one sixth the price in the end. It’s not a supermarket item, though, because the pure powder is 600 times sweeter than sugar; because of this, Splenda uses dried corn syrup powder as filler, which is why you see dextrose in its ingredients. I make a solution of 4g sucralose powder to 2 oz/60 ml of water and use a lab eyedropper bottle to dispense – 3 drops for coffee, 9 for a single 12-ounce lemon-limeade, and so on. It’s even simpler for the iced tea – exactly 1/16th teaspoon of the powder is perfect for a gallon. My lemon-limeade is the juice of half a lemon and half a lime plus 10 ounces/300 ml of water.

As to citrus squeezing, this is the best tool – great for both lemons and limes. I made a half-gallon of lemon-limeade earlier today, and squeezing every last drop out of twelve lemon and lime halves with this, leisurely, took maybe five minutes total. By the way, the bad reviews of this device you might see are from people who don’t know that you put the cut face down in the juicer. Yeesh.

Chef’n FreshForce Citrus Juicer. Dumb name, but it’s the best.

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The inadequacy of your bread

Eater.com article: How Tech Bros Fell in Love With Baking Bread

It appears there are some people out there buying the 52-pound (that’s weight), US$600 Modernist Bread volumes and actually using them (more on the books in the comments here). I suppose some home bakers might feel inadequate reading the details in the linked Eater.com article on expensively-overproduced hobbyist bread for the braggart, but I didn’t. Mostly, the words “overthinking”, “overkill”, and “overcompensating” came to mind, and, as I finished the article, “Criminey.”

Mind-boggling though those details are, it was still sort of interesting to read.

A sample caption from breadstagram: “Loaf from yesterday’s cut video. 80% bread flour, 20% whole wheat, 80% hydration, 2% salt, Leaven was 100% hydration, whole wheat, young (4 hours), and comprised of 10% of total *dough* weight (60g for a 600g loaf). Hand mixed via Rubaud Method for 10 minutes. Bulk for 3.5 hours, low 80s F, with coil folds at 60 minutes and 120 minutes (around 40% rise in volume).”

Yeah…no. The stress these people put on themselves doesn’t sound enjoyable. I’m glad my bread-baking remains at a relaxed level. I’d stop doing it if it seemed that much like work.

Sourdough boule in my kitchen

 

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The moon within five years?

Really?

Show me the money.

One guess as to what it was that cost that much

“Was it worth it all? It certainly was to me personally, which obviously makes me suspect as an objective witness to the expenditure of $24 billion of the taxpayers’ money. Besides, I frankly gave little thought to the financial end of the space program, just as I never considered what percentage of the GNP Flash Gordon might reasonably twit away exploring the caverns of Mongo.”

Michael Collins, Command Module Pilot, Apollo 11

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