November bargain, Part the Fifth, Subpart A

EDIT: olna_jenn, I added a few more lines to the end of this and tweaked the time notations a bit. It should help.

( A Grandfather's Legacy; Or, Sergeant Preston Vs. the Creepy Thing. Part one. )

Well, I do feel a bit better about the human race.

Iraqi baby gets help in Israel
By David Chazan
BBC, Jerusalem

A week-old Iraqi baby girl has been taken to Israel for a heart operation which cannot be performed in Iraq.

Doctors say the arteries to her heart are reversed and she needs emergency surgery within the next week.

The story is making headlines in Israel, where there are hopes that the history of enmity between Israel and Iraq may end if the American-led occupying forces manage to restore stability.

Cradled in her mother's arms and swathed in a red and yellow blanket, tiny Bayan Jassem was welcomed by Israeli doctors with the Arabic greeting "Salaam Aleikum".

Her trip to Israel was organised with the help of an Israeli charity called 'Save a Child's Heart'.

Bayan and her parents were accompanied by Jonathan Miles, an American who has often escorted Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals.

A day after Bayan's birth near Kirkuk in northern Iraq, an American doctor diagnosed her condition.

He contacted Mr Miles who in turn got in touch with the Israeli charity and doctors.

The hugely complex operation Bayan needs is to be performed at the Wolfson Hospital in Holon, central Israel.

The director of the hospital is an Israeli, who was born in Iraq.

He said he hoped that the operation on Bayan would serve as a bridge between the Iraqi and Israeli peoples.

The human race is not always stupid, thankfully.

I was gonna bitch about this more,

but as I went into the restroom, all fuming and fussing, I encountered someone from our International Services department. She had a bundle of Red Cross messages that have to be delivered to people's family members in Liberia because ordinary communication isn't happening there.

God's way of telling me to shut up and quit complaining, I s'pose...

Anyway, here's the deal. USAir sold out of seats on the day I wanted to go to Canada in January, so I went to Priceline. In a fit of pique I told them that I wanted a ticket for $100 from La Guardia to Buffalo on 3 January (a Saturday), returning on 10 January (also a Saturday). I assumed it would laugh in my face and tell me to go away.

I was wrong. I got my ticket. There's taxes and stuff, so the total is $143, but within two minutes an airline accepted my offer.

Problem: now I have to get from my part of New Jersey to La Guardia airport for an 8:30 AM flight. I mean, thank God it's domestic rather than into Canada; I can get there at 7:30 instead of something earlier, but really. That's gonna be a trick and a half getting there early enough. I don't suppose any of y'all on my friends list have advice on how to go about accomplishing this without trusting the *shudder* long term parking lot?

Okay, THIS I get to bitch about.

A recipe from a web site called "Diana's Kitchen", for Alaska sourdough starter:

1 package Yeast
1 tablespoon Vinegar
2 1/4 cups Warm water
1 teaspoon Salt
2 tablespoons Sugar
2 cups Bread flour
Dissolve yeast in 1/4 cup warm water. Add sugar, vinegar, salt, all purpose flour. Add remaining water until a creamy batter is formed. Place in a glass bowl,cover and let sit until it starts to ferment. About 3 days. It will take on a powerful boozy smell. Stir again until creamy and measure out what is called for in the recipe.
Replenish starter with equal amounts of flour and water.
Store in the fridge and bring to room temp before using.

All right, let's get one thing straight, shall we? The yeast you buy at the supermarket is tamed, domesticated yeast. It's been raised, fed, and bred by humans to behave perfectly normally in laboratory conditions for decades. It's an organism called Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the strains that get made into active dry yeast or any other form of yeast available in the store are genetically tailored through ages of breeding to produce reliable, replicable, swift (comparatively, anyway) results.

Sourdough is produced by wild yeast organisms acting in conjunction with strains of lactobacilli. Depending on where you get your starter, you could have one of several different species, but the most commonly found is Saccharomyces exiges. It's very very happy to live in acidic conditions, which domesticated yeast is not.

Adding vinegar to your damned domestic yeast does NOT magically turn it into a sourdough culture! If you want a sourdough culture, either buy a dried sample of it from the region whose taste you wish to replicate (the local lactobacilli and yeasts vary a great deal) or set out your water and flour and sugar mixture and wait for the local organisms to get down and get frothy with it! Yes, it could take a day or two to see anything happen - deal with it. Sourdough isn't the same as modern yeast. Takes forever, makes a different texture of bread. You can't just whip up sourdough, you can't even do sourdough in the space of four hours. You have to invest time in it. Either be content with your packets of S. cerevisiae or set aside a chunk of time for the wild stuff. Don't try to pretend one is the same as the other.


... okay, I feel better now.