Did I mention I love to cook? And bake? Well, I do. I’m a crunchy granola type from way back. Shut up! I heard that! Now, listen, I’ve got a lot of fond memories of childhood, but right up there among the best is getting a slice of my Mom’s whole wheat bread, right out of the oven, slathered with butter. The heel is the best part. So when, as an adult, our bread machine finally let us down, after years of reliable service, I thought I’d get back to doing it the old fashioned way.

Here’s the thing about bread machines: They are freakin’ awesome in many ways. In five minutes you can load the thing up with ingredients before bed, and awake to a fresh loaf in the morning. Many people poo-poo them because they are “cheating”. Well fuck that. To them I said, “How many times a week do you have fresh, home-made bread in your house?” In our house it has been once or twice a week for several years. We loved our bread machine. But it never quite had that taste I remember. Oh, sure, I tinkered with the recipe. I tried to get it close to the good ol’ Beard on Bread whole wheat. But it just never was quite right. And then there’s the big gaping hole in the bottom of the loaf from where the paddle tears out. And the fact that it always lets the dough rise the exact same amount of time, regardless of how active the yeast is, or how warm the room is, which means sometimes you’d get these big puffy loafs (always puffier at the top) that crumble when you slice them, or little bricks that are shorter than they are wide.

Still, our daughter developed a taste for home-made bread early, and absolutely refuses to eat store-bought bread. Except the fancy hearth style, which is referred to simply as “white bread” in our home. So when the paddle shaft blew a gasket and started oozing oogy black grease onto the dough (and we’d already replaced the pan/paddle combo once), we decided it was time to move on. Which brought me to you, dear internet, in search of that perfect whole wheat bread recipe.

I found one that was reasonably close, and tinkered with it until I got it closer. Two things an old baker friend taught me about whole wheat bread: use barley malt for a rich, earthy flavor, and oats for a moister loaf. So here’s what I’m working with, to the satisfaction of me and my daughter (my wife and son still prefer store-bought, bless their hearts!):

1 Tbsp. active dry yeast
2 c. warm water
1/4 c. vegetable oil
3/8 c. barley malt
1 tsp. salt
5 c. flour mixture*

Mix water and yeast thoroughly. In a large mixing bowl, combine oil, barley malt and salt and mix well. Add yeast/water mixture to this, and mix well. Add flour mixture a little at a time. Knead on a floured surface for 8-10 minutes. (Critical step! Don’t under- or over-knead!) Grease the mixing bowl and put the dough ball back in there, and cover it up with a tea towel. Let it rise until it doubles in size. Rising time will vary widely based on the quality of yeast, temperature, etc. Be patient. When it’s really double in size, punch it down and give it a few minutes to rest. Grease two bread pans, then shape the dough into two loaves. Cover with the tea towel and let it rise again. Be patient! It will take at least an hour in the best of conditions to rise to it’s full size, even more this time of year in Portland. When it has risen into what look like loaves of bread (what you see is basically what you’re going to get!), bake at 375 for 35 minutes.

*Flour mixture: I started with 3 cups of whole wheat and 2 cups of white. That’s the basic proportion. Then I replaced about a half cup of flour with oats. If you want more whole wheat and less white, you might want to add wheat gluten to make sure it can rise. If you want 100% whole wheat, you definitely want to use some gluten (even though it’s not technically whole wheat then, is it?). You can try 100% whole wheat without gluten, but you’re going to get a pretty flat loaf.

While the whole production takes basically all day, most of that time the yeast is doing the real work. It takes me about 15 minutes on Sunday mornings to mix and knead. Then I’m free to do household chores, do the shopping or hang out with the family. Later, it’s just a few minutes to punch down and shape into loaves, and then you just have to come back in a few hours to throw it into the oven. I throw one loaf in the freezer (after it cools) and keep the other loaf ready for my daughter’s lunch Monday morning.

The best secret about baking bread is this: It really ain’t all that difficult. All you have to do is commit to being around the house for a day. And boy howdy is it worth it!

I told Wacky Mommy, if Che had been Canadian, he’d have been out at the rink with the guys, smacking pucks around. She thinks I’m nuts.

So I thought I’d make a t-shirt design with Che as a skater. It would say something like “Left Winger”. But it turns out Cafe Press will have nothing to do with selling images of Che, at least not that one famous one in particular. Back in 2000, Alberto Diaz Gutierrez (a.k.a. Alberto Korda) claimed copyright to the famous image which is based on his original photograph. There’s a lot of convoluted debate about fair use, not to mention the fact that Fidel never signed on to international copyright accords. Nevertheless, Korda successfully claimed copyright in British court, and stopped Smirnoff from using the image in a vodka ad. Which I think is a good thing. (Korda said it never bothered him when people used the image in solidarity with Cuba, just when it was used against Cuba or to sell something. Which I guess is what I wanted to do, so…..)

So since Cafe Press said no, and my research made me feel a little guilty about wanting to sell t-shirts with that (ahem) maybe a tad tasteless image, my wacky shirt idea has transformed into a minor site redesign. Hope you like it, and find the irony in it. In case you don’t, here is my Thursday Thirteen, all about irony.

1. Che probably never played hockey. But he looks good on skates, no?
2. I am a pacifist, and this is an anti-war site. Yet Che Guevara made his name as a warrior.
3. I am a vegetarian, pacifist hockey addict.
4. The longer I live the more I see the pure, unadulterated truth that lies at the heart of every contradiction.
5. I’m a socialist, yet I sell crap on my crappy Web site.
6. I don’t think I’m going to make it
7. to thirteen tonight.
8. And I hope you don’t care
9. if I just go to bed
10. and bid you farewell
11. and
12. Good
13. night.

Living in Portland, Ore., outdoor ice skating is a novelty concept. When I first moved here in 1989, they had a rink set up in Pioneer Courthouse Square, completely enclosed in a large tent. That was the last year they did that. I remember taking a few turns around the tiny little rink that first winter here, then pretty much hanging up the blades until just a few years ago.

I learned to skate outside, on the pond at City Park in Iowa City, as well as on Lake MacBride and the Coralville Reservoir. Also on the flooded and frozen parking lot at Mercer Park, where my dad broke his leg ice skating. We had no indoor rink in Iowa City, though the city council used to talk about building one from time to time.

I never skated on an indoor rink until my Mom started working for Parks and Rec in Littleton, Co., and we’d go to South Suburban Ice Arena occasionally, where some famous figure skaters trained and my cousin played powder-puff hockey.

I remember the last time I skated at City Park. I was a young adult; it must have been the winter of ’86-’87. I showed up at the pond pretty much at the exact moment one of my coworkers coincidentally showed up. The city had a big old stop sign with the words “thin ice” printed beneath “stop”, cut in half with hinges so it could be folded up when the ice was safe. My friend and I looked at the sign, and looked at the ice. It had been cold, and it was hard to imagine there would be a problem. He went ahead and folded the sign, and we laced up our skates. He was a far better skater than I, and we casually stroked around the pond. It wasn’t long before a cop showed up and accused us of folding up the sign and sent us on our way. (Having discovered our mutual love of ice, we later took a road trip up to Minnesota to see the North Stars play at the venerable old Met Center in Bloomington.)

Though I remember every winter hearing of snowmobiles or 4x4s crashing through the ice on Coralville Reservoir or Lake MacBride, I never heard of skaters going through the ice. Since I’ve been away from it for so long, outdoor skating has a romantic allure to it. The crisp, fresh air, hot cocoa in the warming hut, and strange little things like large goldfish (carp) frozen near the surface of the ice. I’ve conveniently forgotten about the horrible, pitted, chipped ice surface (which will trash your blades as quick as walking on concrete), the bone chilling cold, and the massive pressure cracks that grab you by the ankles and send you sprawling.

Then today, I read this. Wacky Mommy always says, no way is she going to skate on a pond. Now I know I’ll never convince her it’s safe. And now that Iowa City has an indoor rink (well, Coralville, anyway), there’s no need to trash your blades on the pond at City Park if we move back to Iowa City.

But I still have my memories.

After 81 weeks, Thursday Thirteen founder Leanne is pulling the plug. The whole shebang has gotten really big, really fast, and I suspect that may have something to do with her decision.

I’ve never felt like I fit in especially well with the TT crowd, even though my first TT got me listed as a featured blog.

This despite my anti-war, anti-Libertarian, anti-religion, pro-feminist TT. Four weeks later, Leanne posted on my blog arguing against my slam of Mel Gibson after his anti-Jewish tirade. I guess I struck a nerve.

But I didn’t let this dissuade me. I continued to post TTs about war, politics and religion, probably pissing off most of the TT regulars, but that wasn’t enough. I had to go one farther by posting Thirteen Things I Will Never Blog About (and if I do, Somebody Please Shoot Me). This one even pissed of my wife, who generally understands my sarcasm. It also drew a gentle rebuke from Leanne.

Now, I’m not out to piss people off. I’m just what one friend calls a “sarcastard”. Not wanting to leave any raw nerves, I followed up with an entry about those exact 13 things I vowed never to blog about, which may or may not have put me back in the good graces of the founder.

Anyway, I’ve managed to find the three or four TT regulars who share my lefty politics, and I figure I’ve pretty well alienated the other 250 or so. Sorry about that. For all of you, here are my Thirteen Goodbyes.

1. To all the dog lovers, so long.
2. To the cat lovers, meow.
3. To all the devout Christians, good bye and Godess bless.
4. To all the posters of cute baby pictures, I hope your children grow up strong and don’t resent you for publishing their pictures on the World Wide Web before they were old enough to give you their informed consent. And I hope their friends don’t look them up when they are in middle school and tease them about pooping in the pool. And I bid you adieu.
5. To the wives and families of soldiers fighting in foreign lands, I sincerely hope your loved ones return home safe and sound. I cannot imagine the gut-wrenching anxiety you must be going through. May we someday live to see the global outbreak of insurmountable peace, when all of humankind recognizes warfare as obsolete and shuns leaders who would wage it. Goodbye and Godspeed to you and yours.
6. To the bloggers of ailments and injuries, may you have a speedy recovery. I’m sorry about your colons, knees, kidneys and gall stones. Adios.
7. To the suburban dwellers, may your lawns always be green, your SUV fueled, and your children better dressed than the neighbors’. Take care.
8. To the Libertarians, I hope someday you get a chance to live in a truly libertarian society. Like Somalia, for example. No government intrusion when there is no government! Good bye, have fun, and good luck!
9. To the Republicans, it’s been a rough year, eh? Don’t worry, my friends, the Democrats will most likely fuck up the ’08 elections and hand it to Rudy or McCain. Farewell.
10. To the Democrats, quit gloating. You didn’t win the ’06 elections, the Republicans imploded. Lot’s of luck in ’08, you’ll need it. See you in the funny pages.
11. To the fellow travelers, hang in there. I really believe someday everything will be very different. See you on the other side.
12. To all who have taken the time to read my posts and comment, thank you, and sorry I’ve been lame about reciprocating. I’m a bad blogger. Bad, I tell you! I love you. Stop by and see me sometime.
13. Finally, to Leanne, thanks for hosting the hub. It’s been real, and some weeks my TT has been my only post. Sorry if I in any way contributed to the demise of Thursday Thirteen.

Suddenly Wacky Mommy has a wild hair about moving from Portland to — get this — Iowa. Here’s the deal: I grew up in Iowa and left in my early twenties. She grew up in Portland and is still here. So somehow dragging me back to the place I fled as a young adult is okay, but staying in the town she grew up in is not.

Now, when I say Iowa, you have to understand, I’m talking about Iowa City, a.k.a. the Johnson County Free State. It’s got an inordinate amount of culture for a town of 60,000. Anyway, I never really considered it until I had kids and discovered how crappy and underfunded the schools are in Portland. Anyhoo, WM is pretty sick of P-town, and blogged all about it today. To counter her bile, I’m going to list Thirteen Things I Love About Portland.

1. The weather. Nine months of rain just makes you feel, uh… wet.
2. Libertarians. Low taxes. Crappy schools. Could there be a connection? Nah!
3. The northern light. Ah, darkness at 4pm.
4. The amazing traffic engineering that makes it impossible to get around town unless you already know where you’re going and exactly how to get there, turn by turn.

   Okay, seriously, I’m not as down on P-town as Wacky Mommy. There are many things I’ll miss.

5. The professional theatre scene.
6. The mountains.
7. The ocean.
8. The Columbia River Gorge.
9. The greenness. (The flip side of nine months of rain.)
10. The weather. Yeah, it goes both ways. It may be raining, but you can survive just fine without winter gloves or hats or scarves or boots. Or long johns or sweaters.
11. The northern light. Ah, twilight at 10pm.
12. Summer. The most perfect three months you can imagine. You can almost forget the nine months of rain.
13. It’s the place I met my wife, and where my children were born.

So you may have discerned that I’m a little conflicted about leaving. Wacky Mommy’s champing at the bit, though, so we’ll just have to see what comes.

Those who know me off-line (and some who have only read about me here) know that before I developed a mid-life obsession with playing hockey, I had an avocation as a musician. I’ve played out on alto sax, clarinet, bass guitar, string bass and guitar. Music is thus very evocative to me in terms of moods, times and spaces. I once had an argument with a writer friend of mine who insisted that language is more specific than music. My response is that music is every bit as precise; in fact more so.

Anyway, without any more rambling, here are Thirteen Pieces of Music You Should Take The Time to Really Hear:

1. Beethoven’s 9th Symphony I know this is totally cliche to say, but this really is about as close to perfect as you can get with a musical work. As Homer J. Simpson would say, “This show has everything!” It was my favorite record when I was eight, and I still get goose bumps when I hear it. Wacky Mommy got me a nice CD of it by the Cleveland Symphony for x-mas.
2. Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13 A.K.A. “Pathetique”. I’m listening to it now, recorded by Glenn Gould in either 1980 or 1983 (stupid liner notes aren’t specific) on CBS Odyssey. Ludwig van and Glenn Gould are a formidable combination.
3. I’ve often thought it would have been nice to have started out on strings instead of winds (my first instrument was cornet) and have become a cellist. Maybe that’s why I’m so fond of chamber music, especially string quartets and trios and piano trios and such. You can’t go wrong with Any Beethoven String Quartet. Pick one and listen to it uninterrupted. Then listen to it again.
4. Any Brahms String Quartet. See above. Pay attention to form.
5. A composer friend turned me on to Bartok’s string quartets when I was working in a sheet music store in Beaverton, Ore. I special ordered the score to read along with, but the best way to listen to his quartets is with the lights off, sitting perfectly centered between your speakers. I recommend Bartok’s String Quartet No. 5 Sz 102. Bela was writing rock ‘n’ roll in 1935. Then there’s Bartok’s String Quartet No. 3 Sz 85 which you shouldn’t listen to if you’re feeling anxious or touched. Old Bela wrote some choice cello lines in this one. (Note: If you’re not already comfortable with the string quartet, you should start with some Brahms and Beethoven, and turn on with Bartok when you’re ready to blow the doors off. Seriously. Work up to these.) I’ve got a nice recording of Bartok’s three, four and five recorded by the Chilingirian Quartet in 1988 on Chandos.
6. I never appreciated Bach until I played Bach, first on clarinet, then on guitar, and finally on piano. There is a mathmetical precision to his rhythms and harmonies that are best understood and felt from the inside. With two voices, he could weave a tapestry with richly implied harmonies. With four voices he can lose all but the most intrepid listener. I can’t get enough of his simpler works, like the Two- and Three-Part Inventions, BWV 772-801. I have a recording by Glenn Gould, in which he reorders the pieces to better fit his interpretation. I’m so used to hearing them in this order, it sounds odd to hear them in the order in which they were written. This recording by Gould is on Sony Classical, recorded 1964. My wife requested that we play this CD for the birth of both our children.
7. One final classical entry. If you like the two-part inventions, and the three-part inventions left you wanting more, take the next step to Bach’s The Art of the Fugue.
8. But enough of the old stuff. Let’s move into the second half of the 20th century at least. Get right into it with Thelonius Monk’s Brilliant Corners (Riverside, 1956) featuring Sonny Rollins on tenor sax.
9. Keep that inimitable Monk groove going with Monk’s Music (Riverside, 1957) to get a sense of the places the 32-bar popular song form can go. Deceptively cute melodies are backed by jagged swing rhythms and complex harmonies both sublime and strident, and give way to solos by Ray Copeland on trumpet, Gigi Gryce on alto sax and both Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane on tenor sax. Ruby my Dear alone is a clinic by Hawkins in playing the hell out of a ballad on the tenor sax. (Somewhere I think there’s an outtake of Coltrane playing the lead on this at the same session, but the CD I have today does not have that as a bonus track.)
10. Moving up a couple years to 1958, you’ve got to get cool with Miles Davis Kind of Blue. Featuring Cannonball Adderly, my favorite alto player, trading solos with Coltrane, this record is so well worn that Davis’ solo on So What has become as important in recognizing the song as the head itself.
11. Speaking of Coltrane, let’s move right up to 1960, put on a sweater and listen to some of his own compositions. John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, that is. A mind-blowing record in 1960, it can still open your eyes.
12. Almost done, and it’s tough to figure what I’ll leave off… Definitely not Mingus Ah Um/Charles Mingus. Absolutely one of the most important jazz albums in my collection.
13. Finally I leave you with a Latin jazz selection, Poncho Sanchez Cambios (Concord Picante, 1991). Go ahead and get up and dance to this one, featuring Freddie Hubbard on trumpet and flugelhorn. This is some of the funnest music I can think of to listen to. I’ve heard Poncho live a few times, and he puts on a hell of a show. These guys tour like mad, and there’s fairly high turnover. This is his band at a peak, anchored by the incredible bass and timbale combo of the Banda brothers, Tony and Ramon. There is nothing locked-in like the rhythm of brothers playing bass and drums (think Aston and Carlton Barret). If I ever got back into the music world, it would be playing (or composing/arranging) music like this.

Well what do you know, this blog turned one the other day, and it totally slipped past me.

I started this blog on February 1, 2006 as a successor to WackyMonkey.org, which was a non-bloggy blog I used to post on occasionally. It’s still out there, just as I left it a year ago.

This remains a relatively low-traffic blog, since I do very little (i.e. nothing) to promote it. (Wacky Mommy, on the other hand, has been around for two years, and her traffic has gone up dramatically in the last few months.)

Even though y’all rarely (if ever) comment, I know you’re out there through the magic of logging. I even know who you are and where you’ve come from. BWAHAHAHAHAHA! So thanks to both of you, and here’s to another year of hockey, politics, and life.

Here’s a recent sample of search terms that bring people to my humble blog. I should note that for quite some time, MoreHockeyLesswar.org has been in the top 10 Google results for Cholle recipe. I get quite a few hits from India. I hope they like my recipe! A precursor to this blog, WackyMonkey.org , was the number one result for “weird monkey sex” for a really long time.

I’ve got to say, it always amazes me some of the things people will type into a search engine. I mean, Jesus H. Christ, what kind of meat head types “is it true that black people do not play hockey because of weak knees” into Google, and what the hell do they expect the computer to say back?

“I’m sorry Dave. You’re a fucking idiot, so I won’t be able to answer your questions today.” That’s what I’d say if I were their computer.

Anyway, what brings you here? Here’s my personal invitation for you to de-lurk and say hello. For your amusement, here are some searches over the last few days (and yes, people, I know I’m perpetuating this nonsense by reprinting these terms and further seeding the Google index):

• history of helmet use in u s. professional hockey?
• everett silvertips tickets wanted ads
• squatting laws in mexico guadalajara
• locker fights.com
• rough boys hockey fights
• you know ogie oglethorpe
• is it true that black people do not play hockey because of weak knees
• guy pulls worm out
• increasing junior a hockey game attendance
• www.morehockeylesswar.org
• pie hockey
• bong hits jesus song
• viktor sjodin movie
• marijuana penalties guadalajara mexico
• hockey is dying
• silvertips mascot portland
• i want to drive a zamboni
• ogie oglethorpe jersey
• feminist quotes
• cat fights.com
• how to make cholle
• children hockey accidents
• i want to drive the zamboni
• cholle cook
• more hockey less war
• silvertips
• dropping leaflets methods
• funny hockey expressions
• the rules the woman is always right
• bring back emotion in hockey
• network54 hockey forum
• easy garbonzo bean recipe
• more is less
• cum shot
• disney on ice half price
• swift hockey socks

Hi everybody. There’s a new meme in town, called Friday Fiction. The idea is that every week you write something, then leave a comment or trackback ping at the hub. It’s modeled on the Thursday Thirteen meme, but with a focus on fiction. I’m not a professional writer, nor do I play one on the Internet. It’s just for fun, and just to encourage me and you to keep the creative juices flowing. If you don’t have a blog, but wish to participate, leave a comment to that effect, and I’ll get in touch with you about submitting your work to the hub.

I don’t know how to start a meme, so this may be a slow starter. Have fun!

Odds and ends, odds and ends
Lost time is not found again

— Bob Dylan, “Odds and Ends”

It’s been a tumultuous few weeks here at Wacky Blog Central, so let me just lay into it.

1. I migrated all our blogs to a new server over the weekend, and other than a few glitches, things have gone swimmingly.
2. One glitch was that I made the mistake of using SuSE’s yast2 to configure apache, and it totally f’ed up my virtual host set-up. This caused all of Wacky Mommy’s traffic to be routed to this blog for a day. I fixed it by doing it the good old fashioned way: editing httpd.conf, and all its subordinate *.conf files with vim. I mean, seriously, yast2 totally f’ed up the virtual host configuration.
3. Another glitch was that I didn’t set up the aliases for www, which meant if you put “www.” on the front of our blog URLs, you wouldn’t find us. (Why anybody — and by this I mean Web site owners — still uses www is beyond me. It made sense in the old days, when www.somedomain.com meant “a computer named ‘www’ on the domain ‘somedomain.com'”. These days, though, I would guess 99.9% of Web sites are virtual domains, so the www is just plain spurious. Subdomains can still make sense, for instance if you have a software package site, you can have mysoftware.com, docs.mysoftware.com, downloads.mysoftware.com, etc. But www is just silly. Of course it’s the World Wide Web. Why waste those keystrokes?)
4. Another unrelated but stupid pilot error glitch was that I let this domain expire yesterday. Oh, man, I can’t believe I did that. I renewed and everything seems to be back in order. It is if you’re reading this, anyway.
5. The dog had a massive “accident” in our home last night. Shudder. Thank god for the the following:
   1. Carpet shampooers
   2. Bi-O-Kleen Bac-Out
   3. A strong intestinal constitution (me, not the dog)
6. The new TV device for the new computer doesn’t work as well as the old ATI All-in-Wonder. I’m not sure if it’s the USB interface (probably) or the hardware mp2 encoder, but there’s this horrid delay when watching from an external source (like a VCR). And the DVR software pretty much sucks. It’s cool to have a remote control, but damn, when you’re watching a recorded show, and you fast forward, it’s virtually impossible to stop and play again without it jumping to the beginning. Why the hell isn’t there a commercial skip feature? Basically, they haven’t made the effort to make this a fully-featured DVR.
7. Did I mention the dog crapped all over the house?
8. Yeah. It’s fucking horrible.
9. On a brighter note, the sun’s been shining in Portland for several days. Cold, clear and crisp.
10. We had “family art night” at school last night, which I was expecting to be an evening of sitting at grade-school cafeteria tables with the kids as they pasted things together. Instead, we were treated to a concert by Trashcan Joe. No glue, no markers, no glitter, no whining about not being able to make it look like the teacher’s example. Nice.
11. Due to a snow storm two weeks ago, and a fever last week, I went nearly two and a half weeks without playing hockey. I finally get out on the ice yesterday and was pleased that I haven’t totally lost my cardio.
12. I still haven’t cleaned up all the boxes from the new computer and misc. peripherals.
13. We’ve got a Web server (this one!) in our bedroom. It’ll be there until I decommission the old server, which means migrating the mail server to the new Web server and a couple other virtual domains and…. and…. Oy. Maybe running our own blog farm isn’t such a great idea.

Busy busy busy.