The OpenMoko Neo Freerunner may not (yet) be very usable as a phone, but with tangoGPS it already makes quite a useful GPS device. To celebrate this new toy, I mapped a missing street in my neighborhood, the Schachtstraße in Bochum:
...Did he not share bread and salt with us? Every hostility must have its cause; otherwise, our shared humanity would call for faithfulness in friendship.
— Rumi
Quick, what's the two most valuable things in your household? The TV? Your computer? A musical instrument? Or maybe your cash box? These items represent a significant value in our society. But what if you had to sustain yourself? Suddenly, priorities would change. A book on gardening would now become much more important than the latest IKEA catalogue. And what about bread and salt?
Historically, bread and salt hold such a significant value in our life that in many cultures people offer them as a sign of hospitality. Today, most of us in the rich nations get our bread from large factories. Of course, this is not only true for bread, but for most of our food. We do no longer know (or care?) what is contained in the food we are eating. We treat our material possessions with more care than our health and body (and let us not even talk about our psyche).
Of course, this is not necessarily so. Most of us have a choice to act differently, maybe not all the time, but at least sometimes. For example, we could make our own bread. Besides, making your own bread is lots of fun, easy to do, and very rewarding. It can also be a communal activity. Two weeks ago we were visiting friends in Sauerland, who live near an old bakery house. Of course, even in those rural areas of Germany people buy their bread from the bakery or supermarket most of the time today. But the bakery house is still maintained and usable, and several times a year people go through the effort to keep this long tradition active. Two weeks ago, we were invited to take part in it.
<img style="margin:10px;" src="bread.jpg" align="right">
The picture shows the bakery house from the outside and the inside. In the first picture, you can see the trough in which we made 20kg of dough. With four people that was quickly kneaded and pounded. In the second picture, you can see the 18 loafs of bread we made from the dough, after they were baked in the oven that was fired with beech wood. Our host told me that the oven has capacity for three times as many, and that there used to be six bakery houses in the area. People took turns in making bread for a small neighbourhood at a time. The bread tasted really well, and making and sharing it was a lot of fun!
The basis for the bread was sourdough, which is made from rye, to which rye and wheat flour is added. Inspired by the experience, we tried to make our own sourdough bread in our electric oven at home. This was time-consuming, but not difficult. Sourdough can be home-made, but for our first experiment we bought fresh sourdough in a sealed pack at the supermarket. This sourdough is mixed with 500g rye flour and 500ml water the evening before. Next day, add 500g wheat flour mixed with a bit of salt, and also add fresh yeast. Knead a dough ball (this is tricky: basically you need to wrap the sticky dough in flour, but do not mix the flour into the dough, because the softer is, the better the bread), and let it rest for another hour. Then make a loaf and let it rest for yet another while. Bake for about 50m with a cup of water in the oven at 200deg celcius, and then let the loaf rest for another 10m in the warm oven. The third and fourth picture show the result. The recipe is good for a 1.5kg bread, which is huge! It tastes differently, but also very good.
Of course, bread is not the only food out there. The same day we also made fresh spinach with lemon peel and pine nuts, spicey tofu, and wild and wholemeal rice as a side dish. That was a really delicious treat, and if you make the spinach with coconut milk (or without any milk), it is even vegan and free of lactose. And finally, because plums are currently ripe and cheap, we had plum pie.
Neal points out the following remarkable fact from the movie We feed the world: Essen global: In Vienna (Austria), the same amount of bread is thrown away and burned daily that is consumed in Austria's second largest city Graz.
<img style="margin:10px;" src="climbing.jpg" align="right">
Last weekend I was climbing in the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord with my friends. The word Landschaftspark is Orwellian new-speak: A former smeltery, the 200 hectare area has been inexpensively remodeled to a recreational and cultural centrum. Not as good as nature, but definitely better than an active smeltery!
The site is also a memorial to our passing coal and steel industry, and a visible sign of the structural change in the Ruhr area. A different structural change is also visible in the picture: A change in the structure of my limbs and muscles from a passive, at-the-desk-sitting computer geek to an active, wall-climbing animal. Our bodies have been built to move in all sorts of ways, and lack of movement is a major driving force for many diseases of civilization which can be entirely avoided by exercising a little now and then. When was the last time you jumped higher than 20cm into the air?
(Note: If you are in active pain, you probably should first get a diagnosis and treatment before stressing your body, or you might make it worse. Take it slow.)
No sunset, but a grey, great, struggling sky
— Title of a sonnet by E. E. Cummings
This week I received a postcard that took four weeks from countryside England to the Ruhr area in Germany. Apparently, Airmail postage is 48 pence rather than 44 pence, so, according to the friendly, apologetic sticker on the card, they “had to divert it to an alternative service.”
As you can see in the picture, the personnel at Royal Mail turned the card into a piece of expressive art by placing the sticker exactly over the picture of a beautiful lake. Now, there is a sunset somewhere under there, but I am too afraid that removing the sticker will destroy both, the original postcard and the art-work that it has become.
I added a sneak preview for my digital edition of the 1867 book Slave Songs of the United States to the site. After a long time, this project has come to an important milestone: The whole text and all 136 songs of the original edition have been typeset.
The release was announced to the Lilypond-User mailing list, and some helpful corrections and improvements were suggested.
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
— James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
I am re-launching my website, now with up-to-date information on the work I have done in the past years. The new site is based on Emacs Muse by John Wiegley and Michael Olson. Emacs Muse allows one to write simple, Wiki-like text, but using Emacs. With a single key press I can publish the new information in various formats such as HTML and RSS. For eye-candy, I am using style sheets based on John Sullivan's site.
Blogs sometimes resemble the stream of consciousness of the author, and this is my first blog entry here. That is why I chose the first sentence of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce as the quote of the day.
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