Captain's Phlog 2020.06.13
__________________________________________________
_____
|_ _|
| |
_| |_
|_____| am not one of those folks who does things
perfectly... though I can be a perfect jerk at
times. If you're like me, you watch some Youtuber
doing x and it looks just so. Then, YOU try your
hand at x and well...
"Is there a picture of it in the cookbook?
I bet it didn't look like that!"
- George Carlin
That's me with pretty much anything I touch. It
invariably tends to fall short of The Bar. Time
was, The Bar was the court of peer review and
originally it was vernacular. By this I mean the
task was commonplace and the outcome based on rote
criteria. Your roof was thatched because that was
the available material and the technique was an
everyman skill, etc, etc.
There is a danger of this becoming parochial. I
remember a cartoon - was it The Far Side? - where
the authorities were leading someone off in the
dead of night. In a neighborhood of beige houses
with grey roofs, he had just got done painting the
mother pink.
I worked in the hobby industry for years. For most
of that time Athern was the standard HO scale box
car. It was a prepainted "shake the box" kit. Add
some chalks and you had a respectable model to add
to your layout. There were always 'craftsman' kits
available in wood or Sterne that a driven
modeler could lavish hours on if that was their
thing but they were the exception and given
everyone has finite time for play, most didn't go
this route.
Then some time around '95 the Earth shifted. Kadee
introduced assembled boxcars of a detail level
seen only in limited edition brass for 4 or 5
times the price of an Athern kit. Expensive but
reachable. (most railroad modelers were adults
with jobs at this point) What happened next paved
the decline of so many a hobbyist. Someone would
buy a Kadee box car. Who wouldn't after all? Just
one. They'd take it home, put it on the rails, and
BAM! Just like that every other stinking car on
their layout looked like crap. They purchased a
boxcar and brought home inferiority and
disenchantment.
The WWW with all it's fancy JPEGs and MPEGs does
that with bread. When I first set out to make my
own bread (pre-crisis thank you very much) I
watched, studied, followed, duplicated... maybe
NOT duplicated because mine was consistently old
tat in comparison. The bar that was set for me was
too high. The bar I ACCEPTED almost put an end to
my bread making fun.
I WAS having fun so instead of throwing out my
bread, I threw out the bar. I use a yeast culture
like a sourdough starter - but mine lives in the
fridge 6 days a week. I adulterate my mix to
save on flour - I've used 30% potato flakes at
times, 30% oats at others, and now 60% pastry
flour (thanks to 50lbs I bought for $15US) - I
don't really like kneading so I don't do much of
it.
My bread is great for my 2 slice a day habit and
I wouldn't be ashamed to serve it to a guest but
there isn't enough sherry on the planet to get
Julia Childs to say kind words about my product
I'm sure.
For some folks, striving for perfection in
something is enjoyable. But if you don't roll
that way, maybe you need to tune out the teachers
who lead off with smug perfection and twelve takes
under perfect light. They're doing that for the
dough, not the bread.
