Your e-mail is racist

Your e-mail is racist.

One of the chain e-mails I received this morning gave me pause. It was typical anti-Obama fare from one of my conservative Republican friends. Obama lacks experience. He’s just a community organizer who hit the big time. He doesn’t know how to run an organization or balance a budget. Etc.

The source opined freely about Mr. Obama’s lack of presidential fiber, his Marxist rhetoric. And like many flywheels from the political right, its author went out of his way to refer to President Obama as Barack Hussein Obama. (Hint: he’s a muslim and a terrorist.)

In all, just more uninspired, unremarkable GOP talking-points invective.

And patently racist.

Save the “Hussein” mention, in substance the e-mail made no inflammatory remarks about race. It was above board and without bigoted overtones. It never even alluded to the fact that Mr. Obama is half African-American.

But racist it was. The e-mail was quoting a speech made by Congressman Allen West and his subsequent defenses of the speech on TV and radio.

Allen West, you see, is a black guy. How do I know? The e-mail creator went to the trouble of wrapping the text around a headshot of the Florida Republican.

That picture was speaking 1,000 words, loud and clear. “See …” I could hear it, yelling. “See. Even black people think Obama’s doing a crappy job. Even this black guy went out of his way to call him a Marxist terrorist. If a black guy is willing to criticize Obama, he must truly be evil.”

Why else would they bother to include his photo? If it had originated from Trump, Boehner, Gingrich or Gohmert, do you think for a second they would have taken the time to code in a photo?

My friend who sent the e-mail is not a racist. I doubt for a minute he harbors any ill will towards Mr. Obama over the fact that he was born half black. But the work of the e-mail’s original creator is another declaration of hate, a celebration from those bigots who revel in the thought of a black man criticizing a black President of the United States.

Attack of the Bread-Baking Robots

Friend called the other day. Wants a bread machine. (Good move.) Asked my advice. After talking for like 10 straight minutes, I realized I know a hell of a lot about bread machines. Here’s the lowdown:

What’s a bread machine?
It’s this, for sure. But the one we’re talking about was made possible by clever processors and micro Japanese. (Strike that. Reverse it.) It’s a uniquely 20th century home appliance that automatically mixes, kneads, proofs and bakes one loaf of bread. The baker needs merely to measure ingredients, press a few buttons and walk away. The machine does the rest.

How long have they been around?
An enterprising team of Japanese inventors created the bread machine in the mid-80s. It made its U.S. debut in the 90s. I’ve worn out three since then. Our first was a glass-domed Welbilt. The kids affectionately dubbed it “R2D2.”

How do they work?
Simplicity in operation is made possible by an amazingly complex marriage of electronics and electro-mechanical whatzits and gizmoes. Think about it – the machine has to:

• Mix water, flour, yeast and other stuff
• Knead the resulting dough for a prescribed length of time
• Proof the dough, letting it rise at optimum temperature
• Punch it down (the second knead)
• Let it rise again
• Bake
• Cool

That's a lot to ask of one device. The fact that they work at all is a small miracle. The fact that they work so well and are not that difficult to buy is even more amazing.

What else do they do?
Well it doesn’t do windows, if that’s what you were thinking. But some machines claim to be able to make jam, bread sticks, yogurt, host a late-night talk show on NBC and who-knows-what-else. I think this is a stretch and can’t imagine they’d do any of that very well. That said, there are a few bells and whistles that do work and are worth looking into. More below in the buyer’s guide.

My bread machine adventure

I was hooked from day one. Remember DAK? R2D2 came from Drew Kaplan’s Sharper-Imagesque catalog for electronics nerds. And, in typical Kaplan style, it worked as well as his inimitable copy described.

R2D2’s generation of bread machines shared a cool-factor asset that was also a liability: the big glass dome top. It was hugely popular with kids and company: you got to watch the machine putting the bread going through its paces. But a lot of heat was lost through the glass, so we quickly learned to put aluminum foil over the dome during the baking cycle. Otherwise you’d end up with an insipidly white crust at the top of the loaf. That’s why today’s bread machines have no window at all – or just a small porthole that doesn’t let out much heat.

The first generation machines also had basic features, namely a timer and crust control. You could dial in the darkness of the crust and set the machine to bake some number of hours in the future. They've gotten more sophisticated since then.

How to buy one

What the old machines lacked was loaf size control, “extras” dispensing and a way to deal with power failure. Of the three, the last is the feature I won’t do without when shopping for bread machines.

Because the cycle is so long – three to six hours, depending on what you’re making – if the machine loses its program during that time due to a power failure, your dough may not make it to bread, or worse – your bread might end up half-baked. And the world is half-baked enough without that.

So the newer machines can hold onto their program during a (brief) power failure.

And if you like stuff in your bread, like whole seeds, nuts, raisins, etc., the older machines didn’t really have a way to handle it. If you put these adjuncts in with the flour, water and yeast – it gets ground up into the dough. So you end up with raisin bread with no raisins, essentially.

R2D2 used to beep when it was time to add stuff. But you had to be there to hear the beep and add the stuff, which was not always convenient.

Some newer machines have a dispensing system, not unlike the soap dispenser in your dishwasher. You load it with whatever’s going in your bread and a trap door springs open at the right time to drop them into the dough. Pretty nifty. And worth looking for.

Newer machines also come with programmed settings for various size loaves which makes them more versatile, to a point. Each bread machine has its own butter zone for loaf size – and won’t be happy going far under or over the optimum. In fact, it's a bit of a mess and a hassle when your bread outgrows the machine. Don't ask me how I know that.

So, how do you go about buying one? Like most things in life, it’s all about budget. The Cadillac is the Zojirushi – expensive, durable and in tests they seem to make the best bread. However – they have no trap door for nuts and raisins so that’s a consideration if you like your bread with stuff in it.

You can get a really nice machine for about $100. I am partial to the Breadman since it makes good bread, has power failure backup and a trap door for stuff. Only complaint: the non-stick coating on the pan isn’t so tough and the pan may need replaced before the machine wears out but that’s not too big of a deal.

After that, they run the gamut, all the way to under $20 at the thrift shop. And that’s not a bad place to start. If you’re not squeamish about used kitchen equipment, the bread machine is one of those devices that is often given as a gift to the person with everything. Sometimes, Mr. Everything uses it once and just doesn’t get into it. And his $150 machine ends up at the thrift shop, where you can pick one up for a lot less – ahem – bread.

Here’s the thing: it’s a bit of a gamble. The machine could have been cast off because it’s broken. My advice for thrift shop expeditions:

• Pick from the clean ones.
• Pay as little as you can
• Check that it has all its parts: pan and mixing blade that fit.

And ask if you can plug in the machine and turn it on. You should see the blade spinning and feel a little bit of heat coming from the heating element. That’s a fairly good indicator that the machine will work – but unfortunately the only way to tell for sure is to make bread in it. That’s why you have to go with the cheapest machines to minimize your risk.

One more caveat – the best bread is made with the best flour. I use King Arthur exclusively. Mass market brands just can’t hold a candle to KA – but I’ve never tried Lily White and my southern friends tell me it’s excellent. Other organic and small-mill flours like Bob's will perform well, too.

Even though we’ve been bread-machine baking for nearly 20 years – the family still gets excited to walk into a house filled with the aroma of freshly baked bread. Yours will, too. Have fun.

My Donut Diet

Yes, you read that right. Donuts can help you diet. Of course there’s a catch. What were you thinking, that donuts have suddenly become healthy? But it’s a wonderful catch. One all humanity should experience at least once.

They’re not just any donuts. They’re Frog Hollow donuts.

Deep in southeastern New Jersey, there stands a small cottage in the shadows of a thicket of oak, ivy and Virginia creeper. It’s so unassuming that the uninitiated pass right by.

When the Patterson family is inside baking up donuts, the “open” banner flies under a “donuts” sign that any self-respecting Madison Avenue suit would find comically small. The founder, Joseph M. Patterson, his son, Joseph R. and miscellaneous other Pattersons have been churning them out there since the elder Joseph opened the place in ’71. Long before there was much else in Greenfield, N.J. – years before the Wawa, the pizza place and the hardware store sprung up down the street.

The locals can spot the “open” colors from a mile. Sometimes you swear you don’t need the banner. You think you can smell them frying away, when the wind’s blowing just right. (Donut lust plays tricks with the brain.)

You wait for that banner like a kid waiting for Christmas. And the payoff is 10 times better than anything Santa Claus ever stashed under a tree. In the pantheon of donut perfection, the Frog Hollow vintage stands head and shoulders above the rest. No contest, turn off the lights, call the cops, period.

For years the front door didn’t latch. It had a doorknob but there was no point turning it – you just gave it a shove and in you went to the quiet, dark-wood cool under the shade. They fixed the doorknob years ago but I still am not used to actually turning it.

You make your way to the counter, temporarily blind as your eyes have not yet adjusted to the darkness. Joe R. is usually doing the baking duties these days, flanked by his wife, Deborah or one of the kids. But a few days a week Joe M. still mans the counter, as he has for over three decades.

They are happy to see you. We’re happier to see them. After all, we’re the ones that are leaving the place with a bagful of Frog Hollow Donuts. You catch up on things. One recent morning, we chatted about the high school marching band and the recent change of leadership in its boosters club. You savor this small talk. We’re proud to be the object of envy for the tourists who drove two hours or more to stand in line behind us. It’s a chance to broadcast a message of unbridled glee: we're locals and we can get Frog Hollows any time we want.

Well, not exactly. Which is a key reason they are officially diet food.

Frog Hollow is only open a few days a week during the tourist season. If you want a Frog Hollow in the dead of February, you simply can’t have one. Score one for the diet.

Second – the Frog Hollow donut is so sublime, so completely, unabashedly superior to any other – they simply destroy your desire for lesser attempts. That insipid, sweet, boring second-rate stuff they sell in gas stations, chain donut stands and supermarkets won’t even turn your head, once you’ve sunk your teeth into the crisp, creamy bliss of a Frog Hollow. The Frog Hollow donut empowers you to walk right by.

That's my kind of diet food.

Beat the recession tips: the thrift shop

Sometimes they're dark and dirty. Sometimes they smell bad and the staff is downright scary. But when finding bargains is on your to-do list, the thrift shop calls your name.

I know what you're thinking. You wouldn't be caught dead in a thrift shop. Let me tell you something. I've seen plenty of affluent soccer moms in thrift shops. Doctors' wives, even. And if you're lucky, your town might have a clean, bright thrift shop with a friendly staff and no bad odors. It's worth exploring.

Even if your thrift shop is a dark cave, if you can defeat your fear, you can save some serious dough. I'm here to prove it.

We live in a disposable society. Americans love buying crap they don't need and then dumping it as soon as they get tired of it. More loot for us thrift shop hunters.

There are a few rules of the road. (At least in my Thrift Shop Rulebook:)

• I won't try on a hat in a thrift shop. (Head lice.)
• I won't try on trousers in a thrift shop. (Crabs.)
• Don't go anywhere near beds or mattresses (Bedbugs.)
  
• (You can expound from there.)
• You can't always buy what you want when you want it. But if you are patient, you'll find it. Eventually.
• Because the store stinks doesn't mean it's dirty. In most cases, the smell comes from old shoes. Once you realize that, it somehow seems a little less offensive. Plus you can sometimes avoid the smell by avoiding the shoes.
  

Generally speaking, unless I am desperate, I pretty much ignore the clothing. But if you need a specific thing in a hurry - like party wear or the elements of a Halloween costume - the thrift shop often comes through.

A few recent examples of amazing thrift shop bargains:

• A black blazer to complete a Riff-Raff (Rocky Horror Show) costume: $10
• A black silk shirt: $4
• A $60 Waring retro blender with two glass jars: $9
• A plastic model kit worth $7 on ebay: 49¢
• An entire black-and-white darkroom, including the enlarger: $25

And my favorite: My wife has not quite embraced the iPod revolution. She has one, but she only uses it at the gym. If she's working around the house and wants music, she finds the CD she wants and loads it into her boom box. She had a real nice Sony boom box - but it broke down and she was without it for quite a while. She did not want to replace it, scoffing at the expense - $75 for an equivalent Sony.

So, while stalking thrift shop bargains, I found the unit that matched her broken one - although it's the newer, nicer model. There was no power cord but I scrounged one that fit from the wire box and found a power outlet under ladies' suits. I grabbed a CD and a cassette from the book section of the store and sat on the floor to put the unit through its paces. It was perfect, save for an even coat of dust and grime. At home, I salvaged the power cord from her old unit, and Simple Green took care of the dirt.

The unit cost me the princely sum of $7.

Yeah, baby. That's like 90 percent off.

You can learn a lot from Looney Toons

It started when Daffy Duck introduced Porky Pig to Hymie, his invisible kangaroo pal, in the classic short Daffy Duck Slept Here.

Porky’s response (or so I thought): “You’re pixelated. There’s no kangaroo here.”

Wait a minute. I though pixelate was one of those new, techie words – like debug, Firewire and gigaflop. Yet here’s Porky uttering the word back in 1948, before many of the folks who refined digital imagery pixels were in diapers.

After a bit of research, I realized I was wrong. Porky’s was the older version: pixilated.

Notice the small spelling difference. Pixelate, is derived from pixel, a portmanteau blend of picture (pix) and element coined in 1969 to describe the individual elements of a TV picture. In 1948, pixilate had one meaning and one spelling, with an i. It’s derived from the root word pixie and is used to describe somebody acting drunk or goofy.

The thing I love about this little bit of language trivia is that a digital image can be described as pixelated when low resolution lets the individual pixels show through for a blocky, blurry effect.

Not unlike what you might see when pixilated.

Beware the Beer Scams

Miller's newest piece of advertising dreck inspired this post. It's "Triple Hops Brewed" says its new ad agency, BBH-New York. Miller gives them $150 million a year. And that's the best they can come up with? Pathetic.

It's probably not the most egregious. But it's gotta be in the top 10. And since it's the scam that ticked me off most recently, figured I'd wax poetic about some of my favorite examples of big-brew/big-agency beerhype:

1. Triple Hops Brewed: What a crock of you-know-what. It refers to how many times hops are added during the "brewing" phase, when "wort" the unfermented, sweet beer is being boiled in the kettle. The oils in hops are not soluble in wort. So they have to be boiled long and hard to get them to dissolve out. Then we can taste them in the finished beer.

If you hop early in the brew, you get mostly bitterness in the finished beer. But long boiling destroys some flavor and aroma components. So brewers hop both early and late, to coax different characteristics from the hops. Hopping a beer three times is so common it's not even worth mentioning, let alone making it the centerpiece of an entire multi-million dollar national ad campaign.

A barrel of Miller lite has about as much hops as my little finger. The issue is not when they add the hops, it's how little they add.

2. Beechwood Aging: This is a crock that actually has roots in truth. The Czech/Bohemian brewers of the 19th century discovered this trick. Beechwood is used as a traditional "fining" agent in European pilsner - the lightly colored, well-hopped, bottom-fermenting lagers made famous by such labels as Budweiser-Budvar (the original Bud) and Pilsner Urquell.

When people started drinking beer from glass vessels, brewers started looking for ways to make the beer look better. Before the development of filtering, fining agents were used to remove solids from the beer. They mostly go after dissolved proteins that tend to become solid at serving temperature, lending a cloudy appearance to the brew served in glass. Subjecting the beer to wood chips will help. Millions of microscopic nooks and crannies in the beechwood serve as places to trap solid particles. And unlike its cousin, oak, beechwood is relatively inert in liquid - it does not impart any significant flavor components.

America's King of Beers, Budweiser, is beechwood aged. No problem. But then, like all mass-market beer, it's cold-filtered. Cold-filtering removes any and all particulates in the beer, rendering the beechwood aging completely irrelevant. It's done out of a sense of tradition, only. Advertising it as a real benefit is misinformed at best and disingenuous at worst.

3. Cold Filtering You probably recognized that term earlier, because it's another piece of crap that beer ad agencies have been foisting on the populace for years. If a beer is filtered, it's cold-filtered. On his worst day, a brewer would never filter beer warm. Filtering is pointless unless you have something to filter. Remember those dissolved solids from the beechwood aging example? They stay in solution unless you chill the beer. Chill the beer, solidify the solids. Now you can filter them out. See? It ain't rocket science. And it does not make one beer stand out against another.

And there's an even bigger scam at work here. Cold filtering isn't done for you, it's done for them, because Mass Market Model-T beer is made to be packaged. Like pasteurization, filtering makes the beer more stable for sitting on room-temperature shelves for who-knows-how-long. And, like pasteurization, it does little or no good for beer flavor.

Recommendation: drink beer that insults neither your taste buds nor your intelligence.

Conflicted about motorcycle inspection

It was going to be an hour wait, which is pretty odd for the 10th of the month. Turns out there was only one lane open. New Jersey is retrofitting all its vehicle inspection stations with lift equipment that will enable checking wheels off the ground. I wasn't too concerned. I was caught up with work, it was a beautiful spring day and mercifully the mosquitoes were bothering somebody else.

I packed up my jacket, removed my helmet and settled down to enjoy the breeze. I had been in line scarcely 10 minutes when a remarkably friendly inspector walked over to me and told me to get out of line and roll to the side of the building, where he would inspect the bike pronto. Sweet!

I sustained quite a few looks of envy (and a few of hostility) from the hot and frustrated cage drivers as I rolled past. I waited at that assigned spot for only another five minutes or so before the inspector reappeared and completed the inspection.

First he checked my headlight. Then my turn signals, which are not even required on motorcycles in the Garden State. (I've always thought this was kind of odd, but there you have it.) That was it. He went back into the building and reemerged with my sticker after another 10 minutes or so.

Here's the conflicted part. I was really grateful for the preferential treatment - but puzzled by the inspection itself, which seemed a complete waste of time. They didn't check the brakes, tires, wheels, chain, helmet or any other essential bit of gear. Just the lights. OK, NJ. Whatever floats your boat. Ya gotta love government contractors.

Not complaining, I'm good for two years. (Maybe I'll be as lucky next time.)