A traditional macchiato as served in Italy
Marcingietorigie - Own work
_________________________
Thursday, May 9, 2019
Here I must take umbrage to Café Nero’s policy of having the cashier/order-taker follow through the customer’s order by making the espresso herself.
The barista is an artist.
Not one who dabs on brick or wood, but an artist.
Take heat. The good barista starts with heat, not only the machine, but the cups.
Coffee brewed at a preset temperature must drip into a warmed cup.
Traditionally, the responsibility for heat falls directly on the barista.
Under the every-cashier-a-barista set up, warmed cups is a community obligation.
And we all know that everybody’s business is nobody’s business.
While the grind can be set early in the day, the measure is cup by cup.
While scoops can help the measuring, one person’s level scoop may be another’s mounded scoop, another’s convex.
That measure of coffee is dumped into the portafilter (that will soon clamp and seal onto the coffee maker)
The taste and the texture of the coffee is decided here.
Although the beans are premeasured, does the experienced barista feel that there are beans enough?
A practiced barista may make slight adjustments here.
And be careful.
Any loose grounds, especially around the top rim of the portafilter should be brushed off or the gasket on the coffee machine that should form the watertight seal with the portafilter can become crusted with ground coffee.
A leaking seal may spoil the flavor of the cup.
A cashier knows/cares about this?
I don’t think so.
Then the all-important tamping of the beans, which must be done in a smooth even motion, applying 30 pounds of pressure.
The tamped coffee should be level and well-compacted.
It may be argued this is the most important of the several discretionary steps to making good espresso.
Tamping is an art that is learned from a lot, a lot, of practice, not spending half the time talking to customers, fetching pastries, collecting money.
Given the number of steps to making a good cup of espresso and the time and spirit needed to perfect the craft, I must take umbrage to Café Nero’s policy of having the cashier/order-taker follow through the customer’s order by making the espresso herself.
Let’s enjoy this fine day,
The hours are ticking away and if we don’t make the most of our time another day will soon click past.
Unnoticed.
Unappreciated.
Tick Tock.
In clock language:
Enjoy today.
Enjoy the week.
____________________________________________
Postings Count, Weather Brief, and Dinner
Thursday, May 9, 2019
Our 398th consecutive posting, committed to 5,000.
After 398 posts we’re at the 7.96 percentile of our commitment, the commitment a different way of marking the passage of time.
Time is 12.01am.
On Thursday, Boston’s temperature will reach a high of 54* with a feels-like of 50* with mainly sunny skies.
Dinner for tonight will be a choice of either marinated steak or roast chicken sandwiches.
______________________________________________________
Question of the Day:
How does the paranormal figure with out of body experiences?
_________________________
Thursday, May 9, 2019
Love your notes.
Contact me at domcapossela@hotmail.com
This from Howard D:
Curious that the acronym for out of body experiences is the same as the one for Order of the British Empire.
If you knew any recipients of the Queen’s honors (a knight or a duke, or whatever) you could ask if the conferral is at all like an out of body experience. I imagine it is for Jews... (what with the British cultural stereotypes and Fagin and Shylock and all).
Anyway, I’m eager to hear what it is that inspired your research suddenly about OBEs (unless it was using those new toilets in the Public Garden).
And speaking of those, I have a feeling you are familiar with the French solution to providing clean toilets on the street. I realize they cost 50¢ (or whatever), but they are robotic, clean themselves after every use, are as impregnable as a strong safe, and require no intervention except maintenance whenever something goes wrong.
I imagine it would be an unforgettable OBE if you happen to get caught inside one of those French loos when the clean cycle starts, and you get sprayed from all directions with sanitizing chemicals...
I predict those new toilets in the park will be dumps, or closed down, by the end of the summer. I have great faith in the cluelessness and lack of fellow feeling that characterizes a significant portion of the American public, even in Boston, the Athens of America.
bonus question: If Boston is the Athens of America, does that mean Washington DC is the Sparta?
xo
hhd
Web Meister Responds: Thank you, Howard. Always wonderfully amusing.
___________________________________
Chuckle for Thursday, May 9, 2019
After an intense high speed chase, an officer finally got the lawbreaker to pull over.
“Trying to give her back.”
"You know, I was only pulling you over to tell you your taillight is out. Why the hell did you take off like that?"
After a pause and a sigh of relief the man said, "Last week my wife ran off with a cop.”
“Okay. So?”
“I was afraid you were trying to give her back."
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Answer to the Question, Thursday, May 9, 2019:
How does the paranormal figure with out of body experiences?
Writers within the fields of parapsychology and occultism have written that OBEs are not psychological and that a soul, spirit or subtle body can detach itself out of the body and visit distant locations.
Out-of-the-body experiences were known during the Victorian period in spiritualist literature as "travelling clairvoyance".
The psychical researcher Frederic Myers referred to the OBE as a "psychical excursion".
An early study which described alleged cases of OBEs was the two volume Phantasms of the Living, published in 1886 by the psychical researchers Edmund Gurney, Myers and Frank Podmore.
The book was largely criticized by the scientific community as the anecdotal reports lacked evidential substantiation in nearly every case.
A 19th-century illustration of Robert Blair's poem The Grave, depicting the soul leaving the body.
A 19th-century illustration of Robert Blair's poem The Grave, depicting the soul leaving the body
The Theosophist Arthur Powell (1927) was an early author to advocate the subtle body theory of OBEs.
Sylvan Muldoon (1936) embraced the concept of an etheric body to explain the OBE experience.
The psychical researcher Ernesto Bozzano (1938) had also supported a similar view describing the phenomena of the OBE experience in terms of bilocation in which an "etheric body" can release itself from the physical body in rare circumstances.
The subtle body theory was also supported by occult writers such as Ralph Shirley (1938), Benjamin Walker (1977) and Douglas Baker (1979).
James Baker (1954) wrote that a mental body enters an "intercosmic region" during the OBE.
Robert Crookall in many publications supported the subtle body theory of OBEs.
The paranormal interpretation of OBEs has not been supported by all researchers within the study of parapsychology.
Gardner Murphy (1961) wrote that OBEs are "not very far from the known terrain of general psychology, which we are beginning to understand more and more without recourse to the paranormal".
In the 1970s, Karlis Osis conducted many OBE experiments with the psychic Alex Tanous.
For a series of these experiments he was asked whilst in an OBE state to try to identify colored targets that were placed in remote locations.
Osis reported that in 197 trials there were 114 hits.
However, the controls to the experiments have been criticized and according to Susan Blackmore, the final result was not particularly significant as 108 hits would be expected by chance. Blackmore noted that the results provide "no evidence for accurate perception in the OBE".
New studies show that consciousness survives the death of the body.
In April 1977, a patient from Harborview Medical Center known as Maria claimed to have experienced an out-of-body experience.
During her OBE she claimed to have floated outside her body and outside of the hospital.
Maria would later tell her social worker Kimberly Clark that during the OBE she had observed a tennis shoe on the third-floor window ledge to the north side of the building.
Clark would go to the north wing of the building and by looking out of the window could see a tennis shoe on one of the ledges.
Clark published the account in 1985. The story has since been used in many paranormal books as evidence a spirit can leave the body.
In 1996, Hayden Ebbern, Sean Mulligan and Barry Beyerstein visited the Medical Center to investigate the story.
They placed a tennis shoe on the same ledge and discovered that the shoe was visible from within the building and could have easily been observed by a patient lying in bed.
They also discovered the shoe was easily observable from outside the building and suggested that Maria may have overheard a comment about it during her three days in the hospital and incorporated it into her OBE.
They concluded "Maria's story merely reveals the naiveté and the power of wishful thinking" from OBE researchers seeking a paranormal explanation.
Clark did not publish the description of the case until seven years after it happened, casting doubt on the story.
Richard Wiseman has said that although the story is not evidence for anything paranormal it has been "endlessly repeated by writers who either couldn't be bothered to check the facts, or were unwilling to present their readers with the more skeptical side of the story."
I keep a blacklist of cafes that don’t respect their baristas.
____________________________________________
Good Morning on this Thursday, the ninth day of May, 2019
Our homily objects to the Café Nero’s premise that anyone can be a barista.
We posted the weather and date and the number of postings.
And the question and answer taught us more about out-of-body experiences, listing, thanks to Wikipedia, many of the reported paranormal events
And now? Gotta go.
Che vuoi? Le pocketbook?
See you soon.
Your love.