How to Get That Old Country Sound
Last we heard Buddy Brown here he didn't fare so well. He's an openly conservative country musician with a sense of humor, but he's playing contemporary country and it sounds like all the rest on the radio today.
Now he's put out an album in an early 70s style. This quick video explains all the stuff he did to try to get that sound. I'm not that familiar with everything that goes into making an album, so it was interesting for me. It explains why it's hard to put out songs like Merle's today.
Here's one of the songs from the album:
If you don't mind some bawdy language, here's a fun one:
Pizzapalooza
We tried pizza in the outdoor bread oven for the first time last night. We started with a quick (8-hour) dough recipe made for a medium-hot oven, around 500-600 degrees, and baked about 10 smallish pizzas for the 8 of us, with a variety of toppings. The crust came out amazingly well: crisp with a well-developed flavor.
Since we had several dough balls left over in the fridge, I tried again using the indoor oven today for lunch and found that worked pretty well, too, even though I can't get my oven much above 500. At that temperature, with refrigerated but not frozen dough, it baked in 8 minutes. Apparently the refrigerated balls of dough will last perfectly well in the fridge for several days, and in the freezer for several weeks. Unrefrigerated, they're good for several hours after they've reached their recommended fermentation stage. Pizza dough, unlike bread dough, has an extremely brief first rise followed by a longer second rise. You can finish the whole process in 6-8 hours if you can keep the dough at 80-90 degrees. If you rush it a bit, it will still taste good, but will be a bit springy when you try to stretch it out into a suitably large round. That doesn't turn out to be much of a problem. None of our crusts were thick enough to fail in crispness, and no one minded the wavy perimeters.
We'll definitely be doing this again. If we were going to shoot for a larger crowd, we'd have to use a wetter recipe calibrated for a much hotter oven, so we could cycle the pies faster. They say a Neapolitan pizza bakes in 90 seconds at 900 degrees. We can definitely get the wood-fired outdoor oven up that high, though I'm not sure how easy it will be to hold it there. We'll have to see how much harder it is to work with a wetter, softer dough.
My favorite turned out to be the extremely simple Margherita: a little fresh tomato sauce, mozzarella, and fresh basil leaves. I was surprised to find that the ordinary all-purpose flour version was a little tastier than the fancy Anson Mills pizza flour. So that's lucky, because the local grocery store stocks a good King Arthur AP flour. It can also usually be counted on to carry some fresh basil out of season. For tomatoes, we used a high-quality canned San Marzano brand that we order online by the case year-round, but the grocery store's hydroponic fresh tomatoes have been quite good in the last few years, too. The tomato industry has figured out how to transport a fresh tomato with flavor. The tomato sauce is really just an instant puree; no need to cook it down unless your tomato source is too watery.
We oversupplied ourselves with a wide variety of other toppings, such as onions, mushrooms, bell peppers, olives, sausage, feta, and Alfredo sauce, but another time I may not bother, considering how tasty the Margherita was. The volume of toppings was vastly more than necesssary, as well, but most of the leftover veg went into some excellent omelettes this morning for us and our two houseguests. (Last night we were joined by four neighbors.)
Here's the indoor slice from today, which had a decent crust, though not as crisp as the outdoor pies from last night:
Emergency Vehicle Driving
This weekend is the annual recertification exercise for driving big fire trucks and such. The over the road exercises are fine, as is most of the obstacle course, with the exception of the serpentine event. There you have to weave the vehicle through a series of cones, which is fine; but then you have to back it through the cones in the opposite direction from how you went forward. Everyone eventually passed it, but there were numerous second tries.
By coincidence the exercise coincided with the 50th birthday of a member. Thus, a surprise party.
Less happily it also coincided with a benefit barbecue by a neighbor county for a firefighter who was burned in a recent emergency. We sent the birthday boy over to pick up some Boston butts from their benefit, which also gave us time to set up the surprise party.
There’s a lot of value in these civic organizations. Even apart from the rescue and fire protection, the community is stronger and better because of these common efforts.
Garden Expansion
We’ve decided to lay in a third raised bed this year, expecting food to be somewhat expensive or even somewhat short. The older beds are turned over and ready. The new one is framed, but the hard work of breaking the earth is yet to be done.
Exposure in Maryland
Restoration of a traditional practice is usually, but not always, a good thing.
Cesspool of Sellouts
The city is actually looking much less like a cesspool of any sort following a campaign to drive out the homeless and clean up the town. One of the small parks near this sign on Patton avenue was being used by families with small children instead of the usual sleeping addicts. I’m not sure what occasions this radical departure from the city’s deeply held values of tolerance and inclusion, but it was surprising. My wife had asked me to link up with her because she needed to walk by that park, and disliked the usual harassment she faces when doing so. This time, cute children instead.
We also saw a pair of immature bald eagles struggling for dominance on the east fork of the Pigeon river. This was heading back along US 276. There was massive flooding there recently, and though progress has been made there are still clear signs of the disaster. The road is no longer closed between the Parkway and Waynesville, though. And there’s a new Scottish pub in Waynesville, an ideal motorcycle destination provided virtuous moderation is practiced (or else accommodation in Waynesville is found).
* AVI and others from the real North occasionally note that their own usage of "Yankee" has a very different content than the one that Southerners intend. In this case, though, 'Yankee' is the speaker's own choice of appellation -- if you watch his channel's intro video, that's the word he chose to describe himself.
R.I.P. Good Dog
I took in this beautiful creature, Greta, several weeks ago. She turned out to be 12 years old and heart worm positive, with liver enzymes too high to stand treatment unless we could get them down. She was emaciated and had tapeworms. After we got rid of the heart worms, she led the life of Riley here for two weeks, eating all day every day and fattening up nicely.
But Friday night she sustained a trifling injury in a scuffle with one of my other dogs. I thought nothing of it until the next day when she swelled up everywhere and was prostrated. She spent all weekend at the emergency vet hospital, where I thought she was improving, but it seems that the minor injury triggered what must have been a serious auto-immune disease, because she seemingly lost all ability for her cells or vessels to retain fluid, and her own system was destroying all her red blood cells. Her immune system may have been on crazy high alert from the heart worms. That probably means it wasn't ever going to be in the cards for me to get her strong enough to treat the heart worms, and when we put her down this morning she escaped what otherwise would have been a long decline with heart disease.
She was such a sweetie. I don't regret taking her in and giving her two good weeks with all the food she could eat and a safe place to sleep. This is her just last Friday, right before she cratered. We have buried her here with all our other dogs.
Good for Will
This was very satisfying video of Will Smith punching Chris Rock at the Oscars. Straightforward and heartfelt. I'll bet he didn't stop to agonize about whether it was woke or fashionable.
Another Exciting Afternoon
Up here we’re so far from everything that whenever we call for Medivac it’s always to some totally improvised LZ.
Childhood
Over at An Eccentric Culinary History:
If you want a single dramatic example of how much America has changed in the last century or so, stop talking about trips to the moon and super computers and start talking about this: in 1910, two brothers, Temple and Louis Abernathy, saddled up a pair of ponies and rode alone from their home in Frederick, Oklahoma, to New York City, almost 2000 miles away, to see Teddy Roosevelt give a speech. At the time, Louis, called “Bud”, was 10 years old, Temp was 6.
It's a good story.
Saturday Night Firefight
Part of the Nantahala National Forest burned tonight, but not a very big part. The National Weather Service warned that the high winds would make for a fire hazard, and sure enough they blew down a power line. That caused a fire, which the high winds quickly fanned up and over the ridge and down into the next valley. We managed to contain it between the road and a nearby cold water creek, plus some artificial fire breaks created by guys with leaf blowers. That worked until the Forest Service got up there with a bulldozer to plow in a proper fire break.
This Would Be A Good Year to Plant A Garden
Thirteen percent of global calories won't get raised this year due to the war in Ukraine.
The US has an option here: suspend ethanol for the year, and use that corn for food instead. That violates the dearly-held Green policies of the current administration and those in power in Congress, however.
As Predicted
"Scientists, gender law scholars and philosophers of biology" have weighed in on the question of what a woman is and -- exactly as predicted yesterday -- they want to be clear that a biologist couldn't tell you either.
Slandering Americans Overseas
The 'very good people on both sides' slander aimed at Trump is bad enough, but -- as David Reaboi points out -- it is amazingly awful to slander American citizens as Nazis while in Europe supporting a government that actually has an openly neo-Nazi wing, the Azov Regiment.
Ukraine may still be worthy of support because they are being invaded, and we are supposedly devoted to opposing wars of aggression. Or they may be worthy of supporting because it is in our national interest to tie the Russian military down and degrade it, so that it is less of a competitor.
However, if you support Ukraine it's not because you're opposed to Nazis in some sort of principled way. You're siding with a government that has formally integrated Nazis into its military; and while the government has suspended political parties that have any sort of pro-Russian agenda, the Nazi political party associated with Azov is still licensed to operate.
Army Approves Lower Standard for Women
The ongoing saga of the Army's new fitness test has reached a crescendo. As you will recall, the Army declared it was getting rid of its 'old fashioned' fitness test -- which consisted of a two mile run, pushups, and situps -- in favor of a new-fangled "Combat Fitness Test" that would test a wider range of capacities more directly related to the things you'd really do in combat. Unlike the old test, too, they declared that the test would be both gender neutral and age neutral.
It turned out that 65% of female soldiers failed the new test, which would have had to result in their expulsion from the force. The rest scored notably lower than male soldiers, which would have made them less able to obtain promotions as enlisted promotions are partly based on fitness scores. So, they started talking about redesigning the test -- but not, we were assured, in a way that would hold women to lower standards.
The next step was to admit that women would have to be scored only relative to each other, and not relative to the men in order for them to remain promotable under the new system.
That was not sufficient either. The test will now scrap the events women couldn't pass, and allow both women and older men to pass with lower scores.
At this point, then, the ACFT has comprehensively failed: it will neither be age nor gender neutral, it will not hold women to equal standards, it has eliminated test of combat-related capacities that are difficult for women, and it has become thoroughly a political exercise designed to produce desirable results rather than to serve as a fitness exam. In addition, it still has the logistical problems that come from swapping from equipment-free events like running or pushups to tests that require equipment to perform.
Comprehensive failure is becoming the norm, I notice, whenever the brass gets involved.
Beware Fitness & Good Health
Fitness especially may lead to terrible things. Allegedly Nazism, that perennial fear of leftists even though it’s a form of socialism.
After discussion of how fitness is now feared as yet another gateway to right-wing politics, the author makes a good point: the left is who is building all these gateways.
The Left has made a habit out of forbidding things that are normal or even admirable to pursue—physical excellence is just one of those things. Raise doubts about transgender pronouns or election integrity and you—moderate, well-adjusted, not-even-all-that-political you—are suddenly a potential Unabomber.If you wanted to force people into the arms of conspiracy theorists, you could hardly come up with a better strategy than to pathologize normalcy and make observing basic facts into a thought crime.
Who among us can define woman, though?
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