Captain's Phlog                         2020.06.13 
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|_____| 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.

Stay well. Stay safe. Stay Gopher.

[theNumberSixtyTwo]connolly[circleA][googleMail]