Ferment everything

Inspired by the ancient Sumerians, my beer-brewing boyfriend, and the evidence everywhere of natural yeasts—in unfortunate places, but including my fridge and socks—I began to ferment items with purpose. I have yet to ferment either of the cats, though one of them lately has begun to smell like a Swamp Thing. But to date:

1. Beer. A precise craft, I learned, at least when the boyfriend does it, but likely not as much so if I ever take the helm. He is accessorized with tubing and gadgetry, which increases his allure. We made a tasty brown ale and bottled it yesterday. A week ago the mother bear who is roaming Starr Hill broke into the kitchen and dragged off thirty pounds of malt grain, but lost interest or hope partway through the drag and left it—or perhaps could not juggle both that with the seven-gallon bucket of animal crackers (the roommate’s) that continues, at this date, to be missing.

2. Sauerkraut. The recipe I jotted down in Trencin, a small town in Slovakia, from a friend’s cousin whose English was terrible but way better than my Slovakian. “Cut cabbage hearts out,” I noted ruthlessly. “Slice. Hard cabbages, the winter cabbages. Mix with a jar of salt (for 12 big cabbages). Wait couple hours. Layer with: allspice [could have been juniper, now, I'm thinking], pepper, bay leaves, apples. Stick in barrel. Squeeze out all air—anaerobic fermentation. [This was a particularly difficult point to translate.] Go to Croatia. [Easier.] Come back. Eat.” The first effort failed completely. I bought five cabbages and followed only the stick-in-barrel exhortation, thinking I’d get to it right after I returned my library books. As they turned black, my roommate and visitors began to avoid that part of the kitchen. The second effort, with new cabbage and renewed determination, used allspice. I don’t have any juniper berries.

3. Sourdough. Starter begun last month as a classic biga, using a bit of store-bought yeast, was at first slow and uninteresting, is now active and interesting. It is mainly used for pancakes, which boyfriend makes for me. The key bit learned so far: a. Mix everything but the eggs and the soda the night before. In the morning add soda-in-water, eggs, wait an hour before cooking. This week we may try screen-printing them, a la the weekly Instructables, with Gov. Sarah Palin’s image and a “Thank you, welfare mom!—$3,269 in 2008″

Except my pancakes will say nothing of the sort. Since I’ve only been in Alaska this time for eight months, I don’t qualify for the PFD—which means, though I’ll be paying just as much for fuel as the next Alaskan gal, I also don’t get the state energy assistance handout. That would be a big deal, more than a month’s worth of income for me. But I’m going to pretend I have an ethic of self-sufficiency through hard work and not whine about it, because I don’t deserve it. It’s hard to do, though, when I see my lazy, shiftless, born-in-Alaska friends raking it in. I’ll just say: Drinks are on y’all this year.

Long live the ebobo!

The Wildlife Conservation Society is saying there are a lot more gorillas than we thought. It’s so unusual to have good news from this area. I spent a year following around gorillas; we were always in fear that the loggers would suddenly decide the trees in the area were worth something.

I feel a little wistful when I see the NYT’s sharp glamour shots of ebobo, as they’re called in BaAka. They represent a lot of work. Two years of habituating one group, and getting close was rare, though we made a lot of progress. After I left the field assistants finally fully habituated Kingo and his ladies. But I remember how we would crow if the family felt comfortable enough with us to sit in a tree 25 meters away. There were a lot of days huddling in the rain, a lot of days following trails that led nowhere, a lot of days getting charged by irritated gorillas.

LOUDER IS MORALLY SUPERIOR

Every day I get a message from Obama’s Alaska campaign head that makes me a little less likely to vote for Obama, let alone write about him in my newspaper. OBAMA GOES WITH THE TUNA FOR LUNCH. Etc. Thanks, I heard you. Tuna, really?

It’s hard to imagine anyone remotely typographically hip who would vote for a campaign that sends all its messages in capital letters. My god, how will they write if he gets dessert?

It snows here on non-primary days, too

Alaska has never mattered before—so it’s a step up to get any political coverage at all. The AP’s headline was on voters braving cold weather and going to primaries in odd places. A woman in Barrow was hosting a primary there and making oatmeal cookies. A nice detail—I’m covering the Juneau Republican primary tonight at the Hangar on the Wharf.

But hey there, national media: it’s no big deal and just no story at all to brave snow for the primary. At least not in Juneau. (Time magazine said it was -50 here. It’s not.) Hint: The kids up here don’t get snow days unless they’re covered in an avalanche. Snow is what we’ve got here. We brave it to get the paper in the morning, to take the dog out, to go to the grocery store. I consider it a novelty, but I just moved here three weeks ago.

What’s big news is that anyone is voting at all. Or that Ron Paul supporters have been registering “in droves,” according to the local Republican party organizer.

Off to the Hangar—

I smell someone sneaking iLiteracy to the iPod generation

Amazon is pre-hawking the ‘electronic paper’ reading device, available Nov. 29. I heard about it at every industry-related free-food event at the journalism school in the last two years.

It is called Kindle, perhaps to distinguish it from the old paper-paper — aka Kindling.

I was hoping for something like a Silpat with words on it (actually, if it could double as a cookie sheet, that would be revolutionary). But this looks like a Palm Pilot for a storm trooper.

I wonder how long it would last at the bottom of my backpack, where the bananas and the other books usually end up?

All Qaeda, all the time

I’ve seen plenty of pictures of Lahore lawyers’ riots today, a response to the new Musharraf’s de jure martial law. It sounds like the Punjabi Musharraf’s claw for power is all about keeping the Taliban, the Supreme Court, and the opposition leaders down. I almost never hear, for example, about how the Baluch insurgents have reacted. They seem to have no voice at all. And I cannot remember the last time I read the word “Pashtunistan” in the Washington Post. I’d love to read a less al-Qaeda-focused or more ethnically nuanced take on what’s going on over there. The only piece I’ve read recently that started to do that was a NYT piece in October; it was like a Pakistani Ethnic & Tribal Politics for Dummies. I’m no cowgirl, but the treatment makes me want to brush up on my Urdu and saddle up for Peshawar.

Cop story of the day

2:30 a.m. Interstate 30, near the Hunt County line, Texas. A Royse City policeman pulls over a truck for speeding. Driver is acting suspiciously. Police searches vehicle. Driver is transporting human heads. He is detained for eight hours while a judge tries to find something wrong with carrying human heads around.

Judge called to the scene: Apparently upset that heads were packed unceremoniously. “It was completely and wholly inappropriate in my view.”

Police lieutenant’s rule of thumb: “When you are carrying human body parts, it’s good to have some documentation that they are legitimate.”