A carnival of technology

I decided to try something different with food today: I tried to make pasta. I like making things from scratch, and I like pasta, so this seems like something that would ultimately go well. I don’t know the first thing about making pasta, though, so this attempt wasn’t everything I had ever hoped for.

In retrospect, I actually have a book about making pasta (thanks, mom), so I probably should have started there. Instead I just set out with an ingredient in mind, and the Internet suggested that I could put the basil I had into some fettucine noodles. I took a few photographs of the experience if you want to see my failure. My first problem was that the recipe I was using was completely useless. The dough was way too dry, so I ended up just adding another egg and some more flour and water until it seemed right. I don’t know what kind of consistency pasta dough is supposed to have, so I probably got it wrong. The dough I made was slightly damp and sticky and about right if I were making bread, but pasta dough probably ought to be a little drier. I’m not sure. The next mistake I made was making the noodles way too big. I think that the thickness problem could be partially solved by buying a rolling pin—I don’t have one so I just use an empty bottle, and that doesn’t have a lot of heft—but mostly I just need to be more patient. I ended up with some very large noodles that were impossible to cook.

Due to the aforementioned impatience, I also didn’t dry the noodles completely before cooking them. I gave them about an hour, so the noodles were still quite damp, and the end result was very doughy. I didn’t cook all of them, so I’m going to let the rest dry all the way and cook them later, but I suspect that thickness is my primary problem. The alfredo sauce, on the other hand, was delicious.

While I’m on the topic of food, I tried a new bread recipe this weekend. This one was recently published in the New York Times, and it’s unusual in that the dough requires no kneading. Instead, it’s allowed to rise slowly over the course of 18 hours or so. It came out ok, but I have a couple of complaints. The mistakes I made were using the wrong yeast (I didn’t have any instant yeast, but active dry seemed to work pretty well) and doing a bad job of baking the bread. The prescribed method is to use a heated, covered pot for about half an hour and then uncover it for the last stretch. The only thing I have of an appropriate size that can handle temperatures that high is my crock pot, and, either because it’s too wide or because I can’t cover it tightly, the crust ended up being a bit too hard. Other than that my only complaint is that the holes are a bit big, which is to be expected. I suspect this could be solved with a minute or two of kneading after the long rise.

I didn’t try to add any flavorings on my first try, so the result, though certainly ok, is pretty plain. As a bread I don’t find it very interesting, but as a technique I think it’s one worth remembering.

I still don’t like the MARTA Breeze system, so I’m going to complain about it for a little bit. I’m sure I’ll have a new post about something ridiculous I bought or some goofy food I cooked in a day or two. I finally decided to buy a shaving brush and accessories, so I’ll probably post about that in a few days when it all arrives and I pitch my can of Barbasol.

I probably posted about this before, but Breeze sure does make it easy to lose fares. Monday was a holiday here in Los Estados Unidos de América (fun fact: your Spanish teacher probably taught you that the US is Estados Unidos, but the long name of Mexico is actually los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, and, as you know, we’re not Americanos in Spanish, since the rest of the continent takes Amerigo Vespucci’s name outside of this nation’s humble borders. So really we kind of messed things up by rebelling first and trying to take all the good names), and, unlike other federal holidays like Columbus Day, most everyone gets Memorial Day off. On most weeks I buy a seven-day pass on Monday. It costs $13, so it pays for itself in terms of single fares at 8 rides, the number I usually take in a week. This being a short week, I’ve been buying individual fares instead. The Breeze vending machines do not make this easy. In a particular transaction, you can purchase one fare, two fares, or ten fares. Even those with the patience to stand in front of the machine for five minutes, tapping cards and feeding in money, will find that the rides are still stored in pairs in the Breeze system. Your six rides will display as alternating one and zero remaining until finally genuinely exhausted. This is annoying enough on its own, but when combined with the dodgy transfer system, it becomes even more difficult to figure out what any particular tap really did.

When the Breeze system broke last week, MARTA, while trying to figure out how much money they lost, pulled out the datum that about 65% of daily riders use passes instead of buying individual fares. When I get off the train at North Springs and head for the bus, I don’t normally stop to tap my card at the gate at the entrance to the bus bay. The gate doesn’t require it for this direction (and can’t, since the magnetic card readers are only on the other side), I don’t want to bother, and an unlimited-ride pass allows a certain freedom in that it doesn’t matter whether any particular tap is a new ride or a continuation of an existing one. As for the other 35% of MARTA riders, I’m willing to bet that most of them, let’s say 85% for the sake of making things up, started their ride on a bus. The fare gates at the train stations no longer offer anything physical, so the magnetic bus-to-rail transfer card serves as the senseless proof that one paid to be on the bus parked inside a station you need to pay to enter. As such, the exit from train to bus is a mad rush of colliding into half-opened gates with no one tapping anything, and, when I don’t have a pass, I’m apt to forget the protocol and miss the tap necessary to pick up a transfer. I did so today, and I ended up paying an extra fare when I boarded the bus. Oops.

The buses are a daily reminder of how rough and incomplete this Breeze transition has been. There have been changes—the poor suckers who take MARTA to the airport now have to pay an extra 50¢ for a temporary card, and I think my stashed tokens are now officially only collectors items (whoops)—but it’s still a hybrid system. Buses accept Breeze cards (if the reader is working), but they don’t issue them. Handing over your exact change when you board earns you a magnetic swipe card or a tear-off transfer, instead, like it always has. The bus-to-rail transfer I got this evening also reminded me of how badly the magnetic card readers have been handled. Unlike the weekly and monthly passes issued after the new fare gates were installed, which replaced the old action shots of MARTA stuff happening with colorful ads extolling the virtues of smart cards, the bus-to-rail transfer cards have the same design they’ve had for years: a simple color coding for AM or PM, the words “Bus 2 Rail” and instructions to “Insert This End.” Back in the old days, passes and transfers were inserted into the front of the turnstiles, and, if you were lucky, your pass would come out the other end. It broke sometimes, but there was no way to screw it up. Everything was clearly labeled, and if you inserted the card face up and forward into a functional turnstile, it would let you in. The new magnetic card readers are open, like a credit card reader, and, though there’s a little picture showing you which way the stripe should go, this instruction presents a spatial relation puzzle that is not intuitive and can’t be solved as quickly. This, as well as the slow reaction of the gates, creates a jam any time a bus arrives. Busier stations have employees stationed at every entrance and exit, but the need for this is to me a sign of a broken system. Daily riders will eventually pick up the nuances through repetition, but it’s always going to be new to someone.

Breeze sucks. I dread the day when MARTA’s dream of replacing the current bus system comes to fruition.

I’m afraid to read. I’m afraid to write. At every turn, it seems like words may take the shape of Pynchon’s terrible haunting and suddenly transform into orgies of corpophagia and rockets and chess symbolism and pirhanas in the dildoes and who knows what else. It’s terrifying. I tried picking up another book, and I kept seeing bits of Pynchon’s style and found myself unable to go any farther. Maybe it was just a poor choice. Either way, I’ve perhaps unfairly reconsidered the opinions of the person who recommended it as unreliable. I don’t think I’m ready for another serious book yet. I need a palate-cleanser, something that doesn’t mean a damn thing and doesn’t get all fancy with the words.

I’ve decided to read Sisters, Lynne Cheney’s lesbian Western romance that I paid three digits for a while back in a moment of poor judgment. I bought it mostly for the hey-look-at-the-goofy-thing-I-have aspect, but maybe I can get a buck or two worth of entertainment out of it, too. I read the first chapter, and it looks like it’ll be as bad as I could have ever hoped. Even the typesetting is awful, as if some of the letters just don’t have the energy to hang onto their given line. Attacking the cheap printing is really kind of ad hominem, though, and the writing itself is not short on failings. It reads like bad slash fiction, full of inflated descriptions of nonsense and words that should never appear in serious works. I’m pretty sure that there has never been a “settee” in anything worthwhile. I know from the Internet that it isn’t going to be as titillating as I might hope, but it’s still delightfully bad. It even gives me a little hope in that it apparently doesn’t take a whole lot in terms of quality to be published. I just hope I don’t have to marry a rich Wyoming politician.

I have finished. I will never again feel ashamed for any abuse of parentheses or dashes I commit in the future. Even in the final chapter, I found a tiny detail—the ghost shirt—a bit of trivia tossed into the prose that I only recognized by the words hitting a point in the moiré between myself and Pynchon that we both happen to share, this time because I’d just read a Vonnegut novel that used it as a symbol, yet I have no damn clue what it was supposed to mean.

I have finished.

The last few chapters I’ve read in Gravity’s Rainbow are really what it’s all about. There’s been action, characters intersecting through metaphor, names able by their very mention to invoke ponderances of a dozen others, dramatic irony, entertaining interludes that probably won’t mean anything for a while if at all, sex, drugs and dirty songs. I love it.

I read a short chapter over lunch today at Al Capri, where the ziti special was delicious. I had to read most of it while trying to ignore “Slow Ride” playing on the radio, but I only had six pages or so to get through, and a trip to the bike shop earlier had already conditioned me against the wiles of classic rock. They seem to like Pink Floyd and Rush a lot at the bike shop. “Freewill” was playing when I left. When I got home tonight, I found that my usual Tuesday-night medical drama pulp had been preempted by some sort of American Idol–esque reality show junk, so, my head full of chicken and disappointment, I returned again to the sea of words. I’m on page 627, the end of section 3. Bring it, Pynchon.

I’m on page 567 of 776, so if I stop here for the night I’m still on track for the ~25pg/day schedule to finish by the end of the month. Here are some assorted thoughts:

The word “preterite” is used a lot. As noted by another reader, this word is used in Calvinist sense of humanity being divided among the Elect and the Preterite, though Pynchon more often uses it to refer to a kind of existential segregation: without heaven or hell coming into it, Slothrop and other characters are lost in life, free from or unsure of boundaries of allegiance or morality, and this puts them into a sort of hopeless state, muddling through one catastrophe to the next, damned because they were never meant to be saved and unable to find hope because of it. Pynchon also throws in a twist by showing us glimpses of Slothrop’s ancestors, Preterite in the Calvinist sense, either for emphasis or just to add to the confusion of this particular line of symbology.

“Moire” is also used with noticeable frequency. Pynchon will just toss the word in here and there, but I think at one point he did make explicit the use of the term to relate to the interference pattern of intersecting personalities. I suppose that Slothrop now being again in Tchitcherine’s clothes should be notable within this idea.

I haven’t been looking up any of the foreign words as I go through. I find I get the feel for a chapter better without the breaks, and I think that, falling back again to that other experience, V. left me jaded as to this habit’s effectiveness. I miss an important symbol here and there, but the Internet didn’t know a damn thing about Maltese. I think I’m able to pick up most of the German that matters, I think, and Pynchon was kind enough to spell out the connection between the Schwarzkommando and the S-Gerat.

I do wonder how much of this book is flying completely over my head without me even suspecting it. In V., Vheissu tied into the idea of a hollow earth, a new world underground with its entrances at the poles. The only reason I noticed that at all is because I had just read a Rotten Library article on the topic. Pynchon sure does toss a lot of weird stuff into his books.

There have been some extended interludes away from Slothrop, but there have only been brief returns to earlier characters like Pointsman and Prentice (look out, those P’s probably mean something, and the clue isn’t in the title this time around). I wonder where he’s going with them.

There will be bike stuff at the end for all of you eagerly awaiting my latest transportation tales. I know I am.

I don’t really know much about cocktails. I suppose cocktails are a proud American tradition, which usually means it’s something that grabs my fancy and becomes a misguided obsession, but for any number of reasons I just haven’t frequently crossed paths with this particular style of drink. The main reason is probably that cocktails were commonly used as a way to cover up the taste of bathtub gin during Prohibition, and I usually prefer to taste whatever spirits I might drink. Cocktails seem to me like a world of girl drinks and silly shots, and I’m trying, in the name of history and living in the past, to change my opinion on that.

Since I don’t know what I’m doing, I decided to just take the International Bartenders Association official list and start at the beginning. It’s split into four sections: apéritifs, dessert drinks, big drinks, and things that people might actually order at a bar every once in a while. I began with the first list, on which the Americano, a blend of Campari and sweet vermouth, is the first item, and that was probably a bad idea. Both ingredients are Italian, Italians came up with the idea of combining the two, and Italians are apparently insane. Maybe my primitive tastes just aren’t sufficiently refined to appreciate all of those crazy herbs and whatnot, and the fancy script “Bitter” on the bottle of Campari probably should have been a warning, but I just was not ready for that taste. It did not make me hungry, either. As far as bitters go, I think that Angostura has the better idea: put it in a bottle smaller than the label and suggest drops instead of ounces. I just don’t know what to think at all of vermouth. I guess I’ll be revisiting that idea once I get some cocktail glasses and start experimenting with martinis.

Besides my limited glass selection, I’ve also found a void to be filled in my bar tools, allowing me to buy yet another item that has a very specific purpose. I don’t have a muddler. I’ve attempted old fashioneds—again because of history or whatever and the delightful idea that everyone these days is doing it wrong—using the butt-end of a wooden spoon, but that doesn’t seem as fun or effective as it could be. I suspect a muddler would at least see more use than the fixed-cup spanner I bought for the bike last week.

As as bike stuff, my fancy new slick tires came, and they seem pretty sweet. This pair is 23mm wide, 2 narrower than my last pair, which doesn’t make a whole lot of difference as far as riding but made them a little easier to get on the rims. And they tell the world that I don’t need cosmetic tread patterns, which obviously makes me a cool dude.

My new tools also arrived, so I removed the bottom bracket from the Trek. One thing that didn’t occur to me while looking up prices on ebay is that all of those bottom brackets are of the cartridge style, whereas mine is open bearing. The thing’s probably worthless, but hey, new tools. After that I got sick of working on the bike, so I didn’t do anything as far as removing other parts or figuring out how much they’re worth. Maybe I’ll start on that during the week.

Fixing a flat tire on a bicycle can be something of an art. Besides the mechanical aspect of removing the tire and replacing the tube, there’s a necessary investigation, lest the cause of the flat quickly repeat itself. Sometimes finding these causes on the road is difficult. The flat might have been from a tiny shard of glass lost in the pavement two miles back, and finding these tiny pin-pricks, even if just for the reassurance that the flat isn’t repeatable, takes a watchful eye, a sensitive ear listening above the roar of passing cars, and the patience to try to find that tiny rush of air against cheek or back of hand. And sometimes you find something like this sticking out of the side of the tire:

I should have just stayed in bed today. I got to Medical Center before realizing that I didn’t have my wallet, I was nearly run over by some jackass on the return trip who decided to pass me, turn right, and then try to turn around into my path again from the hospital parking lot, and once I actually got onto a bus, a supervisor decided to ride along, keeping that trip within 400’s oft-ignored and artificially lowered for the construction that has since moved several miles north speed limit of 55mph. And then I ran over that thing on Mt Vernon on the way home. I don’t even know what it is. A piece of a nail? Why is it so crooked? Why is there no point or head? I don’t know what it is, but it sure can mess a fellow up.

I had another road find today, one that didn’t destroy a tube. I came across a Nissan emblem in the middle of the road that looks like it came off of a car in a wreck. Apparently those things are made of plastic. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it.

I have passed the halfway point. I’m on page 398, still in section 3, which has unfolded in a form more or less close to what I predicted. There are some additional conflicts emerging, and Slothrop is in a hell of a new bind, adding to the interest driving my motivation for finishing.

A couple of overachievers have finished the novel, so the contest aspect is essentially over. I guess we have to decide what to buy for Jared now. Finishing the book by the end of the month has been a sort of informal goal in this game, and, though I’m well behind several of the other readers, I’m still on track for that. One of the commenters says that Section 4 is a return to Section 1’s form, and, honestly, I eagerly await it. It’s nice to have some plot and a touch of clarity driving the novel, but the twistings of words into opaque tapestries in Section 1 where setting and character floated in and out of consciousness was such a unique drug. I want more.

I don’t understand what the deal with these bicycle people is. It’s like it’s become popular to try to navigate these undulating hills and streets that haven’t been paved since Sherman using only two wheels and no engine. Of course, I was doing the cool thing before cool was cool, and, as I’ve been documenting here, I’m not quite right in the head. It seems like every day I see more bicycles on the road. I’ve even had to fight (to the death) a couple of times for space on the bus bike racks. Maybe those $3/gal gas prices are finally starting to push a bit at its seemingly inelastic demand.

I’ve been riding home lately from North Springs station instead of taking the train since I figure the extra distance will do me some good. Today, while huffing and puffing through the uphill section of Peachtree Dunwoody, some dude in a minivan pulled over and flagged me down. He did not have any candy. I didn’t even realize what he wanted at first: he pulled off into a gore where the road goes from two lanes to one, I thought he was turning around, and I was a little nervous that he was going to pull out in front of me. It turned out that he just wanted to know where I got my snazzy gear. He was mostly curious about the mirror, which I think makes him the first person to ask me about it that realized that it’s a mirror. I often wonder whether or not drivers can make out the mirror when they’re behind me. A lot of people need a backwards glance (I don’t actually look backwards, but turning my head sideways seems to get the message across) in order to find the courage to pass me, so I’ve always assumed it’s essentially invisible. It does look a little odd to see someone with an extra piece of plastic hanging off their face if you’re not familiar with it, which makes me wonder how the guy was able to buy a bike and not know where the buy the various silly accessories.

Nashbar had a sale and a free shipping deal recently, so I decided to take the opportunity to buy some new tires. My tires are starting to go square and the rear one especially is full of holes. I figure I got around 1000 miles out of this pair, and I don’t know if that’s average for bike tires or a consequence of me riding skinny things just shy of racing tires. The ones I bought don’t have folding beads, so I’m a little curious how they’re going to be shipped. While I was buying things, I got what I think are the remaining tools I need to disassemble my busted Trek. Maybe I’ll get around to selling the pieces off soon. I didn’t have a way to remove the bottom bracket, and this part appears to go for about $15-30 on ebay. The tools cost about $30. Eh.

Motivated by another flat tire on Sunday, I also bought a new pair of tire levers. I’ve been using those skinny blue ones, and wow, those things suck. It takes me a few minutes of frustrated prying and stabbing to get a tire off with those, so I decided to look at what else the world of tools had in store for me. I bought a pair of wide yellow levers that have a big scoop on one end and fancy hooks on the other to lock onto the spokes. I tried them out, and they’re really impressive. I didn’t know that removing a tire could be easy.