Our Daily Bread

My bread is a light rye, made with one part rye flour to two parts white flour. I started out trying to duplicate my grandmother's Bohemian rye, but eventually gave up and settled for my own version, which I call Beaglesonian rye. I talked to a professional baker once, and he said it's almost impossible to duplicate somebody else's bread. You can follow the recipe religiously, but yours will come out differently. He wasn't sure why. I use margarine instead of butter. My hypothetical wife taught me to use Crisco instead of the lard that her mother used to use. I read the labels of both Crisco and margarine, and they are almost the same, mostly partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. I will try slicing it upside down next time. My bread has enough body that I don't crush it but, when I get to the bottom crust, I have to bear down so hard that I scratch the cutting board. Cutting the bottom first might work better, I'll let you know.

I'm not sure what the computer equivalent of the unconscious mind is. You could say that a computer's mind is all unconscious because, as far as we know, computers haven't developed consciousness yet.

I read in the newspaper that Michigan has recently passed legislation allowing driverless cars on the public roads, even without human supervision. (They call them autonomous cars.) GM has been testing an electric model on their own property and now plans to test it on the road. They will have a human on board, at least for now. They are concerned with how variables like weather and traffic will affect the car's performance. Michigan law also allows autonomous taxis, and GM plans to build them someday. I guess you would just call them on your cell phone and they would come pick you up and take you where you want to go.

I have been seeing on the Weather Channel that you guys in Chicago have been colder than we have been in Cheboygan lately. While that is unusual, it's not unheard of. I remember a year or two ago when you had 30 below actual temperature. The coldest I can remember around here was 28 below, and that doesn't happen every winter. Cheboygan, being on the waterfront, doesn't get as cold as the interior areas, so they might get 30 below occasionally. We are on the fringes of the  lake effect Snow Belt, while Traverse City, about a hundred miles south of us, is right in the middle of it. They get more snow that we do, but theirs melts sooner too.