The Blog I'm Not Writing

Department Of How Am I Just Now Seeing This Movie?

That would be A Million Ways To Die In The West. 

AMWTDITW is a takeoff of a specific genre, ala the Airplane/Police Squad/Naked Gun lampoons of, respectively, disaster/detective/mystery movies.  AMWTDITW’s writer/director/producer/lead Actor Seth MacFarlane pays respects, in a way, to that most American of movie genres, the western, and his AMWTDITW is the even more profane and scatological, red-headed stepchild of Blazing Saddles (and thus might not be everyone’s cup of whiskey). 

Just about every western cliché gets its moment, with a few contemporary updates (e.g. MacFarlane’s mild-mannered sheep farmer protagonist debates self-esteem issues and gently chastises his fellow Old West townsfolk when they use ethnic slurs).  I started watching AMWTDITW on Monday, during my morning pre-breakfast/pre-yoga, ~ 35 m elliptical warmup, and finished two days later.  Other movies and series I have watched or am watching during elliptical time include Tacoma FD and Fisk, both of which my spirit animal recommends.

Hats off to the composer of the AMWTDITW score; the opening theme in particular is a mahhhhvelous homage to the classic western movie soundtracks.  And I’ll put more hats on, just to be able to take them off to Netflix, for adding this to their streaming recommendations for moiself.

And the last hat goes off to one of the best movie sight gags I’ve seen, involving a sheep.    [1]

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Department Of Wildlife Identification

What is this?

Did you guess that it’s an antiskid pad that is glued to the foot of the legs of one of our kitchen table chairs – a pad   [2]   which detaches itself, and then is patiently reglued by MH, at least 10x per year for the past twenty-seven years?  You are correct.

I’ve seen it on the floor a million times….okay; more like 270 times, according to the above estimate.  So why then, last Friday afternoon, did moiself  see the pad on the floor and for the first time realize that it reminded me of the door to a trapdoor spider’s burrow?

That long time ago would be in the galaxy which contains the city of San Diego, where my family lived for two years, during what was moiself ‘s  kindergarten and first grade years.   [3]  The house we rented was on the rim of one of the many canyons winding through the city – a canyon my sisters and I and our neighbor friends considered to be an extension of our backyards.  We spent many glorious afternoons – and almost all of the summer days that we weren’t at the beach – exploring and playing down in the canyon, experiencing what now might be referred to as a “free roaming”  or “free range” childhood.  (Sadly, I have little doubt that when MH and I took the parenthood plunge in the mid-90s, were we to have let our own children have such freedoms   [4]   someone would have sicced Child Protective Services on us.)

There were all kinds of critters and trees and bushes and cacti and dirt paths in the canyon, and a small creek that somehow managed to survive even in the summer heat. My friends and my “canyon games” included Desert Scientist, Runaways In the Forest; Tracking the Wayward Outlaw, Pioneers Exploring the Prairie, and so on.  As for the latter game, I had to temper my fascination with the local flora after getting chewed out by my mother one afternoon. “How can a straight-A student be so stupid?!?!” she muttered, while she used a pair of pliers to tediously yank, one by one, the spines out of my jeans pocket – spines from the “baby cactus” knob that I thought was so cute I had to take it home to show my folks.   [5]

The canyon’s many snake holes and trapdoor spider dens were among my favorite canyon features to explore.   [6]  My friends and I sometimes played a version of Ding Dong ditch with the latter.  A trapdoor spider constructs the door to its burrow using dirt and plant material that the spider hinges on one side with its silk.  The TD spider then places twigs round the door, and weaves some of its silk as “triplines” around the twigs and down into its burrow.  When we found the telltale door to a TD spider’s burrow, we’d tap the ground around the twigs and the trapdoor (or sometimes tug on the twigs), mimicking the vibrations of passing prey, then raise our fingers as the trapdoor flew open and the spider quickly lunged out of its burrow.  The TD spider, realizing that instead of a juicy grasshopper within its reach there were just a bunch of giggling juvenile hominids, would flash its eight eyes in an expression that seven-year-old moiself  interpreted as the arachnid equivalent of, “You gawddamn kids get off my lawn!,” and just as quickly back down into its burrow and pull the door shut.

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Department Of The God That Is Not In The Gluten

Dateline:  last Saturday; 12-1:30pm; the classroom of a local gourmet grocery store/café which offers culinary classes; attending a sourdough baking class with 12 other civilians.

While chatting with the students standing on either side of me and overhearing the comments of others, moiself  surmises that the class is roughly 50% newbie sourdough bakers, and 50% experienced sourdough bakers who are interested in expanding tips and techniques.   [7]  The class teacher (whom I had met a few months ago, while buying one of the sourdough boules he makes on the weekend and sells in that store), is a fulltime middle school teacher.  He introduces himself and says a little about what got him into baking sourdough bread, which he took up as a hobby during his spare time when he was in the Middle East “…on a Christian mission.”

Yeah, I know.  Moiself  be thinking, why is this detail necessary? Is he one of *those* (Gotta take gotta make, every opportunity to witness!)?  Well, he’s a genial guy, so, let’s hope he got that out of his system and now it’s on to the bread.

Obviously, in a 1½ hour sourdough baking class there will be no start-to-finish product; rather, each student is presented with premeasured ingredients, and goes through the processes of feeding the starter and mixing the dough, gets tips on shaping and rising and scoring the loaf and baking, and gets to take home the dough they’ll mix, with instructions to bake it the next day.

Near the end of the class the teacher brings out an enormous bin of dough that he’d mixed five hours earlier, to show the class what the sourdough will look and feel like after the  recommended five-hour rest.  He will divide the dough into 12 equal portions, and each member of the class will get to practice different techniques in folding and pre-shaping the dough, reshaping the dough, transferring the dough to a rising bowl…  This ready-for final-rise dough we will also be able to take home, to bake at a later time.

As he stands at the head of class he taps his fingers against the dough peeking out around the edges of the bin, and gives a brief explanation of how flour and water combine to make bread.  Many people mistakenly think wheat flour contains gluten.  The two main components of wheat flour are starch and two proteins, glutenin and gliadin.    [8]   When wheat flour is mixed with water , this action helps combine the two proteins, which form gluten.

Correct.  But then he has to add, “And this is where, as a Christian, I see the hand of god…” and he hovers his hands over the dough.

And this is where, as a religion-free, reality-loving person, I somehow manage to prevent moiself  from doing a face palm (if only to keep my forehead flour-free).

What I want to say, but don’t:

“And this is where, as an Atheist, I see chemistry….”

…and physics, if you wanted to go even further into the explanation of the chemical bonds and structures of the proteins involved.
The point: there is nothing supernatural about how you go from flour + water + salt + leavening agent + time + heat = bread.

Again: this is where *I* see chemistry.  You know, the chemistry you just mentioned to the class.  You gave a brief, fact-based, natural world explanation of what happens when you make bread, then you introduce the supernatural?  Why?
Perhaps the bakers of ancient times raised their hands in prayer to Vesta when they put their loaves in the communal ovens, but most of us we now know that there is nothing magical/supernatural about baking….”

Does he also sees “the hand of god” in other natural processes?

Sometimes, classes for which you registered online send you a questionnaire or survey link after the class is over, so that you may offer feedback to the class’s organizers and/or teachers.  I keep checking my email, hoping to have the opportunity to offer a more abbreviated version of, “Hey, the class was mostly fun and useful, but I did not appreciate the teacher referencing his    [9]  religion in a baking class.  I found it odd that he credited an imaginary deity the supernatural within seconds of having mentioned the scientific explanation of how gluten is formed.”

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [10]

Hubert Reeves, Canadian astrophysicist

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Parting Shot:  I love it when/I hate it when…

I love it when a religious believer who makes supernatural attributions to culinary results and a baker who is religion-free can use the same recipe and ingredients, follow the same instructions, and produce equally yummy-looking and tasting bread loaves.   [11]

*   *   *

May you raise your hands in praise of the person who gives you homemade bread;
May you be inspired to re-watch your favorite spoof movie;
May you never feel too old to play ding-dong ditch;    [12]

…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] No no no – and shame of you for even thinking that.

[2] Not to pick on that particular chair pad; none of them stay on for long.

[3] Due to my father’s temporary work transfer.  He was being groomed to be the chief of the audit division of one of the IRS’s 33 districts, a position he later turned down, as the promotion would have required permanent relocation, and his devoted wife and snippy little ungrateful bastards loving children told him they would refuse to leave So Cal!  (He was promoted to Assistant Chief of the audit division of the Los Angeles district, a title he retained until he retired).  My parents, knowing the transfer was temporary/for training purposes, rented out our Santa Ana house and in turn found a house to rent in San Diego for two years.

[4] We’ve never lived by a canyon or any large open area, but if we’d just allowed our kids to roam the neighborhood for hours, arranging play on their own with the neighbor kids without parentally supervised and/or arranged play  dates (which is how I was raised), I know someone would have called the cops on us.

[5] How I managed to get it in my pocket without sticking my fingers, I’ll never know.  Yet, that’s what I did.

[6] I discovered that western diamondbacks will give you a percussion performance with their rattles if you jab a stick down the gopher holes they are occupying.

[7] Rice flour is great for getting sticky dough off of your hands!

[8] Actually, he only mentioned the gliadin.

[9] Besides Friendly Neighborhood Atheist® moiself (and at least one other, if I gauge the eye-rolling reaction of another class participant correctly), I’m fairly certain (judging from conversations overheard/jewelry worn) there was at least one Muslim and one Jew among the other students.

[10] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.  No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[11] Which proves the religion-free person’s point. 

[12] Except that, dammit!, everyone’s porch has cameras these days, so the anonymity is gone.