It's alive!

Yesterday, I baked the first loaf of bread using our new sourdough starter ("Alice"). It's very yummy, with a nice sour tang and a deliciously moist, springy crumb. It's really cool to have created a nicely risen loaf of bread out of nothing but flour and water (and a little salt at the end, and a lot of time). You really can create yeast bread from scratch!

Kim and I are both fans of very sour bread, so I'm going to experiment with ways to intensify the flavor. (The Bread Bible has multiple suggestions.) The one thing I still need to figure out is a way of making the process time out better. The rising time for the bread was something like 9 or 10 hours (with several hands-on steps along the way), which makes for a long day and/or a late dinner, and that doesn't even count the 20 hours or so of expanding the starter in advance (with a hands-on step 8 hours in). There's got to be some way of timing this all out that also allows one to hold down a job.

Still, good stuff!

Yahoo Mail is obsessed with blood

I sent Kim email today complaining about my dry skin and lack of lotion at work. In it, I wrote, 'I have this fear that my knuckles are going to progress from "dry" to "dripping blood" by dinnertime.' When Kim wrote back from her Yahoo Mail account, I happened to look at the raw source code of the message (different story), and where she had quoted my message I saw something odd.

( Yahoo's weird obsession with blood... )

I conclude the following:

• Yahoo has a long list of terms that make it uneasy.
• Yahoo assigns various scores and categories to each one (and tracks who said it).
• Yahoo is so proud of these assessments that it silently adds them into all outgoing mail just in case the recipient's email program wants to use them.
• Yahoo believes that "dripping blood" is always "news".
• Yahoo also associates "dripping blood" with "category: travel".
• Yahoo's programmers take some seriously messed-up vacations.
• Someone out there sees special formatting every time "dripping blood" is mentioned.
• You could probably do amusing things to them with the right "compatible" scripts.