DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I want your opinion, and I’ve made it really easy for you to give it to me… with both barrels, if necessary.

If you have a moment, please take the survey.

I’ve just launched a major redesign of this website, and a major rewrite of the underlying software. New features include:

• valid CSS/XHTML 1.1 markup via templating — no HTML in the source code
• search term highlighting for internal or external searches
  (To see an example of search term highlighting from an offsite search, try this Google search and click the debris.com link in the results.)
• nested channels
• context-specific page titles

More features are in the works. (Famous last words? Hey, just because this launch took me 2.5 years doesn’t mean the next one will too.)

I broke out one of my starters yesterday and did a little baking. Well, OK, actually I broke it out two days ago — the poor thing had been sitting idle for so long it had collapsed completely, leaving a flattened crust with a tiny smear of viable culture underneath. A few refreshments later, it was back to normal.

My new favorite bread recipe is the Cheese Board’s “Berkeley Sourdough,” as printed in The Village Baker. It begins with a firm levain, mixed down into a soupy starter, following which the dough is overnighted in the bowl, prior to shaping. The technique is unusual. I like it because it accentuates the sour flavor of the finished bread.

I make it with about 40% wholegrain spelt and my usual random mix of wheat flours. The crumb was exquisite. Or as one friend remarked, around a mouthful: “This bread is really good.” Two seconds pass. “This bread is excellent.”

The shaping went really well, I thought. Baguette shaping is notoriously difficult to do well, and although I’ve never done it often enough to get good, I thought I’d turned out a four competent loaves. Ooh, was I wrong.

The two freeform loaves spread badly in the oven. The resulting loaves measured about four inches across and two tall — like no baguettes you’ve ever seen, unless you’ve eaten my baguettes in the past. But here’s the secret of shaping errors: the bread tastes great anyway. Flat baguettes make great sandwich rolls.

The other two loaves were baked in a baguette tray. One actually retained its intended shape, and went with us to Thanksgiving dinner. The other one spread sideways off the pan resulting in a sort of organic, amorphous sagging shape never before seen in a commercial bakery. Or even in my home, which has certainly seen its share of poorly-shaped loaves.

It became my test loaf. Bakers always sample their breads before serving them to company. I had to eat a third of it before I was sure it was good. I very nearly brought it along for the drive, too.

The neighborhood turkeys have again made a complete nuisance of themselves. We never noticed before we had our driveway paved, but now we know: these birds crap everywhere.

Today I cleaned up some of the mess. I scraped up about a dozen dried-out deposits, which had chemically welded themselves to the asphalt. From my perspective at the other end of the rake, it felt like a covalent bond, meaning the asphalt molecules were sharing electrons with the dessicated turkey feces. The shit was stuck, in any case.

The flock seems to be bigger this year. I guess there aren’t enough local predators. I tried being a predator last year — I bought a wrist rocket on Ebay, with the intention of dissuading the turkeys from eating all our persimmons. But the slingshot was a cheap offshore replica, more capable of inflicting pain on me than the turkeys. On my first shot, the band snapped off and just about took an eye out. I decided that shooting from the hip would be safer, although it didn’t help my aim.

Also preventing my success was the fact that for ammunition I was using the only projectile I could find in the kitchen: dry-roasted almonds. They’re not as aerodynamic as you might expect.

I am having recurring fantasies that one of my neighbors will decide to have fresh turkey this Thanksgiving. If so they’ll have to move quickly — last year, the flock was making daily drive-bys until the day before Thanksgiving, when they disappeared for about four days. I’m not kidding. Those birds knew.

But for the next day or two, at least, a hunter would need to simply sit on our front porch. He needn’t wait long; our driveway is the turkeybahn. The birds go one way or the other a couple times a day. I’ve even seen them run laps.

I saw an eye-catching book in the secondhand bookstore the other day: how to de-junk your life, an instruction manual for reducing the clutter in one’s home.

I have clutter. My clutter has been documented before. I regularly add to my clutter. I even have an affinity for it.

According to author and self-styled storage expert Dawna Walter, one way to reduce clutter is to throw away all one’s compact disks. It’s an intriguing idea, which I’ll deconstruct because it is outrageously, staggeringly, spectacularly dumb. Let’s take a look. She writes:

Use technology to help in your conquest of space. CD writers enable you to download your CD collection to the hard drive of your computer and access your collection whenever you need it. Once you have downloaded, you can recycle your CDs or sell them through secondhand shops. This would enable you to limit the selection you have on display to your current favorites. The initial investment would more than pay for itself by freeing up space throughout your home.

I’ll start with the obvious: CD writers are not required for ripping CDs. It’s a minor point, but tends to indicate that neither Walter nor her editors have any idea what technology can do.

Nearly as obvious: what Walter suggests is illegal. The RIAA is making headlines by suing people who share music online. How does she think they’ll react to people who copy CDs and sell the originals?

Her suggestion to recycle CDs is lame. There is no reason to destroy functional CDs, except maybe when they have the AOL logo on the face. Anything that still works, that still serves a purpose, should be sold or donated; if you put in in a landfill, someone else will just make another one.

Walter doesn’t explore the idea that CDs are portable, whereas home computers generally are not. The nice thing about a CD is that it can be carried from the living room to the kitchen to the car, and played in any of those places.

The irony of all this is that there is a way technology can be used to reduce CD clutter: make MP3s of your favorite songs, and connect a computer or MP3 player to all your stereos. Or wear an iPod everywhere. Then, box up all your CDs and store them somewhere safe, so you can re-rip your favorite songs when CPUs get faster and encoding algorithms get better. I admit this approach is beyond the reach of most people, who already own CD players and who don’t own whole-house stereos with MP3 capability. But it has these advantages over Walter’s misguided idea: it’s legal, and it’s free.

Which brings us to the reason I’d found this book in the used bookstore… clearly, the original owner realized that an important step in clearing the junk out of his or her life was to dump this absurd book.