8 November 2006 – HELLO COME IN

Hello friends and readers, as you may or may not know, I have been working for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners training college students to serve as Polling Place Administrators (PPAs) on election day. The city of Chicago obtained new touchscreen voting machines by mandate from the passage of HAVA (Help America Vote Act) requiring that there be a way for people with certain dissabilities (blind, quadrapalegic) would be able to vote with privacy and without assistance at the polling place on election day.

Anyway we got a bunch of those new machines, and the Judges of Election (the folks that run the polling places) had TONS of problems running and using the machines during the March primaries. The board or elections decided that something had to be done to save their jobs and make the elections run smoother. Their solution was to recruite and train 2000 college kids to be there and know how to setup and run and troubleshoot the voting machines.

election improvements Well as you can see by this handy graphic from the Chicago Tribune , there was a marked improvement between these elections and the primaries in March: So as you can CLEARLY see from that graphic, my friends and I single handedly saved many people their jobs and helped this election to go forth successfully.

We spent election day (from 5:00am until 10:00pm) answering call after call taking down complaints from voters, and helping judges and PPAs solve problems. Some of the more comical calls we recieved (comically scary maybe) were from judges wondering when we were going to be bringing them coffee and donuts (sorry we don’t provide) or wondering why there was not a television included in their equipment so they could watch their training video to learn how to run a polling place (yikes!).

The majority were about little problems with machines where we would talk them through how to change the paper, get out a stuck voter card, help them realize that the machine is in fact unplugged and that is why it won’t work, and generally run them through the simple procedures they had been trained and were outlined in their handbook they should have had with them. There were a few calls from frustrated voters about judges who were generally disrespectful and had an obvious disregard for the election process and the voters privacy. For those we sent out investigators to hopefully smack some common sense and respect into these people.

It was my first election that I worked, and I think everything went pretty well. Our boss was very happy with the work that we did, and asked if we were interesed in doing this again in January for the next elections. Only thing I need now is to finally recieve the crapload of money that they owe me, this elusive check that is mysteriously floating around the county building just out of reach. I will call tomorrow and they will probably just tell me “Friday at the LATEST”, which is what we heard last week, and the week before, and the week before, and the… sigh.

This is something I wrote for a friend’s ill-fated music blog Freshly Baked Bread awhile back… the site never took hold, so I never continued with my efforts to make more breads. Oh well…

DISCLAIMER: This is not about music. Not really anyway. This might seem like the wrong outlet for a column about bread. But for the sake of occasional variety and for having a site with a need for some sort of content, perhaps it is perfect synchronicity.

With that in mind, I will make it easy with the transition for those who cannot quit cold turkey.

So what is Bread of the Week? It’s a pretty simple concept: every week (or as often as time will allow) I intend to discover and share a new bread recipe. I will then on many cases (probably not every week, but hopefully often) attempt to bake, eat and review such bread. And because this is mostly a music blog, I will attempt to find an artist that best represents my efforts to serve as listening recommendations while elbow deep in flour.

So without further ado, WEEK ONE! This week, I thought I’d go simple and make Banana Bread. Nothing fancy here but seems pretty delicious as the weather grows colder.

Ingredients:

The ingredients here are fairly straightforward and will no doubt become household items (if they aren’t already) the more and more baking is done.

Directions:

Preheat your oven to 375Â°. Break egg into mixing bowl. Do not add the shell. In fact, throw it in the trash not the sink because it can mess up your garbage disposal unit. Beat egg slightly. Add sugar, melted butter, and vanilla. Blend bananas and add to egg mixture. Sift together flour, soda, and salt and add to mixture.

Add nuts. I chose not to use nuts because I am not too keen on pecans and am allergic go walnuts. Use at your own discretion here…I don’t want any senseless lawsuits because you didn’t realize you had nut allergies.

Grease up a loaf pan with some sort of shortening or buttery substance for no stick purposes. Bake at 375Â° in greased loaf pan (4 1/2″ x 9″ x 5″) for 45 minutes or until inserted wooded toothpick comes out clean. Cool and remove from pan.

Slice bread when cooled at desired thickness. Add butter to slice. Put slice in mouth, and chew until bites are small enough in mouth. Then swallow. Enjoy. This makes roughly six to eight servings so choose your favourite six to eight friends wisely for maximum enjoyment.

After some initial joking and second guessing, I ended up downloading a few songs by, you guessed it, Bananarama. Bit of an obvious choice but I thought it would be a good excuse to see what all the hype was about years back.

Turns out this British girl group had other songs beyond the 8th grade dance party staple, “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye).” Good thing I am not making pastries because this music is already cavity inducing enough as it is.

Come back next week when we explore the depths of another bread.

Mike is an amateur bread maker, having never baked before in his life. He also writes on music at npr.org and hellocomein.com.

Day: November 8, 2006

In the heart of the machine.

Bread of the Week — Bananarama