She apparently died quietly at home, fully clothed, not as she lived, raucously and naked most of the time.

I’m going to go celebrate her life the same way I always have, provided Ingrida didn’t throw out all of my back issues of Swank.

They smashed the windows and invaded the building.

The press is referring to them as anti-capitalist protesters.

Rife with apparent contradictions, this situation, an outgrowth of the generic protests of the G20 meeting, is relatively easy to analyse.

The protesters are bored, idle and ill-informed. The police are edgy, ill-informed and have developed a siege mentality.

The outcome was never bound to be good.

Well, a lot for a household of two, not a lot for an industrial factory like Wonder.

I've been making a medieval loaf modeled after the Pain Poilane, named for the baker who revived and commercialized it, Lionel Poilane. His brother, Max Poilane and his daughter, Apollonia Poilane, still bake the bread in Paris; Max has a small, boutique practice manufacturing hand turned loaves. Anna has a substantial factory using kneading machines, but with wood fired ovens and controlling for quality rather than minimising cost.

Pain Poilane was introduced to me by my friend Ghabida, who designed the logo for Xocolatl (click on the image for a larger picture) We had lunch after I got back from the family Ayyam'i'Ha celebrations and in the course of the conversation it came out that my bread baking skills had, in my estimation, greatly increased. She told me that the best bread in the world is Pain Poilane and nothing can beat it.

Naturally, I took this as a challenge and set about researching the stuff.

In any event, the loaves retail for £11 in the U.K. and $45 in the U.S. That's a lot of bread for, um, bread, but I guess they need (knead?) the dough. (<-- okay, even I don't think this is funny, but...how could I resist a pun hat-trick?)

At any rate, I eventually found a series of bakers (the Bread Baking Babes) who, in 2008, under the leadership of the now sadly deceased Sher, attempted to replicate the Poilane loaf. They all tried it and blogged about it.

The result was that I thought I'd try and make a sourdough Scottish Hearth Bread, the same way the Scots must have made bread when they would have cooked with wood burning ovens.

I left a paste of rye and water out until yeast took hold. After four days it was a sour smelling frothy mixture and very sticky. If you try this at home, wait until it smells like vinegar; there's a sharp point that started around day two and went into day three where it was seriously pungent, not at all in a good way, and we just needed to wait it out.

Then you make a "firm starter," which is basically fresh yeast that you make at home. Work a cup of flour into a cup of sourdough starter and let it sit out for 24 hours.

Then you make bread. There are many different instruction sets on the web, but I used a three stage process with a proving oven set to 40 degrees. I use my combination microwave/convection oven as a proving oven, since it has settings that go all the way down to 40 centigrade (104 Fahrenheit).

The three stage process is to add the firm starter to two cups of water, two tablespoons of salt - I feed mine a teaspoon of barley malt extract and a single egg yolk, too - and three cups of flour. You're going to need to work this dough until it is clear (I'm not sure if anyone else uses this term; its one that my friend Keith and I may have made up, but basically, it means that the dough will stick to itself but not much else and has a smooth appearance; you'll know it when it happens). In order to work a dough ball this size until it is clear, you can either knead it on a surface for about two hours or you can stick it in a kneading machine for forty minutes. Add flour in tablespoons and let the machine work it into the dough.

At some point, the dough will no longer leave bits of itself on the side of your mixer bowl and will instead pull away, slowly. When you touch it, it will feel like a non-Newtonian dilatant fluid.

Warning! If you have a Kitchen Aid or an Oster or a Kenwood or basically anything other than a Bosch or an Electrolux, you'll need to take extreme care. Sure, the Kitchen Aid is nice, but mine got hot and started to smell like it was burning; I had to turn it off and let the dough rest for half an hour while I cooled my mixer then start again. I'm experienced - this wasn't some newbie mistake - it's just that this is more dough than the Kitchen Aid can really handle.

At any rate, let this rest a while, then turn it out onto a floured surface, knead it until your comfortable with the spring then drop it into a heavily floured linen and pop it into a dry, clean bowl in your proving oven. Leave it there for ninety minutes. Your mileage may vary; my first loaf had to be proved for three hours. My last loaf (number 6) was ready after twenty minutes. The starter gets stronger the longer you care for it, so the proving time will shorten.

Then turn your now proved dough out onto a baking surface - I use a metal sheet dusted with corn meal - pre-heat your convection oven to 240. As soon as you put the loaf in, turn it down to 220 and bake for 25 minutes at 220, with two cups of boiling water poured into a pan on the bottom of your oven. Then turn the loaf 180 degrees and bake for 35 minutes at 200.

The Scottish Hearth Bread #5; click on the above link to see a larger picture of Theo, son of my friend Ghabida, holding the 5th loaf of Scottish Hearth Bread. He asked if I had a moustache, like other chefs! And I do, as you can see in the picture bar above my blog (that's me in the brown baker's apron).

We had just been to see The Watchmen , so I thought it would be fun to put a smiley face on it. The Watchmen is fantastic, by the way, telling a story that is essential to the human condition at the same time that it requires beings of exceptional power, with real flaws

I wish my mother was still alive; she taught me how to bake and this is the first time I've felt like I've made bread good enough to let her judge it.

Queen Street is a major thoroughfare in Edinburgh, the only road of any size connecting the east side to the west side now that the City Council has closed off George, Rose, Young and Princes Streets.

This means constant traffic at all times, day and night. This is irritating enough in and of itself, but the council didn't stop there. No, they dug up part of the road in front of our flat and put two large metal plates over the whole. Then they went on strike.

So now there's constant traffic and each time a car passes over the plates, we get two large bangs like a gun going off. This happens constantly. And the City Council is on strike, so there isn't even anyone to complain about them not fixing it, but it's illegal to do anything ourselves.

So this morning I went and stood on the plates in oncoming traffic to force the cars to go around me so Ingrida could get some sleep. Some drivers were baffled, some were filled with moral outrage and more than one tried to get as close to me as possible. One actually hit me, at very low speed, a BMW driver - I gently folded his wing mirror closed for him, an act of kindness to which he responded with trembling rage. But he didn't get out of his car, possibly because it seemed unwise, perhaps because he was in too much of a hurry.

Either way, at least Ingrida got about forty-five minutes of sleep before I went to work.

I can't wait!

Are they right or wrong to do so?

The particulars of the scheme are as follows:

Current employees accrue rights to their pension over time. As they work, part of their annual salary includes 1/60th of their final salary to be paid upon retirement, but not before age 60.

The best you could have done under this scheme, because of Scottish law, is leave school at 17 and begin working at the Grangemouth plant and retire at 60. That's 43 years of work for Ineos. The pension scheme is then 43/60ths of your final salary, or a little more than 2/3rds.

But most folks only work there for 30 years - some start earlier than others, but most retire between 20 and 30 years of service.

Average pay is £30,000 a year, but most folks at retirement are at the higher end of the pay scale, around £45,000 a year.

So most folks are going to make between £15,000 and £30,000 a year, although it's theoretically possible to be taking home a maximum of £43,000 a year at age 60.

If you've made it to age 60 in Scotland, your average life expectancy is another 18 years.

Ineos claims that the cost of their pensions scheme is growing and that they can no longer afford it.

The union, Unite, claims that the new pension deal offered is unfair.

Employer perspective

First, is the pension getting more expensive?

It costs Ineos more to support their pension than it costs other similar companies. Other companies only pay an average of 16% of their wage bill for their pension. So Ineos is paying more than the average.

It's also true that pensions have been getting more expensive in general. It feels odd to write this during a liquidity crisis, but the world is awash with capital - and all of it is out seeking a return. This means that return generating assets get bidded up until the return is lower.

Pension funds are not any different. They have to bid for return bearing assets, too. And the returns per unit risk have fallen as more capital competes.

In general, the rate of return on annuities has declined to rates that are pre-war. By which I mean World War I, not II. It's been a long time since we've seen economic conditions like these, which indicate a fundamentally low rate of return on money. The amount of money required to fund pensions is inversely related to the return on that money and the difference can be shocking.

For example:

Let's take the average worker at Grangemouth, who has 20 years to retirement and makes £30,000 a year.

Now let's make some basic assumptions:

1. 2.25% annual increase in pay
2. 50% final salary pension
3. 10% return on investment

The final salary will by just over £46,000.

To fund your pension of £23,000 for the rest of your life, your employer would need to put away £300 a month until you retire.

Where can you get a 10% return on your investment?

Investments in this class are now very risky, not suitable for retirement funds. So let's assume a far more realistic return on investment: 4%.

What does the fund look like now?

Now, to fund a pension of £23,000 a year for the rest of your life, your company suddenly has to put away £1600 pounds a month. A drop of 6% corresponds to a 5.5 times multiple in the amount that you have to pay for pensions.

So, yes, the pension scheme has become more expensive - and it will be much, much more expensive in the future.

Employee Perspective

From the employee perspective, it's worth figuring out whether there's real benefit in a defined benefits pension. If the pension is expensive and getting more expensive, then you'd want to make sure that you get your pension.

If the pension fund folds, the company will have to cover, which in some cases may push them completely under.

If the company folds, you'll lose your defined benefits pension.

If a company goes into receivership because of pension fund default, the usual outcome is for the pension liabilities to be wiped clean and for the company to continue on under new management, only without any pension for anybody.

If you have a defined contribution scheme, then this usually amounts to an immediate raise for everyone in the company, with then automatic enrollment in a defined benefits scheme, with options to choose which scheme to take.

If I were in the position of the employees at Grangemouth, I'd ask for the defined contribution scheme as it stands to be capitalized fully by long term debt paid for by a one time charge, then for it to be closed. That means that everyone who has already been assigned rights out of it - including current workers - will receive those rights pro rata up to the day that the fund was closed.

And from that day forward, the company should be asked to give a 10% raise in pay to everyone who was covered under the old pension - and then automatically enrolled in a new, severable, defined contribution pension scheme that extracts that 10%.

Employees then have the choice afterwards of disenrolling in the scheme or choosing a different one, should they be clever or risk seeking.

The cost to the company will be the one time charge of winding up the defined benefit scheme, with the return on that investment being the full cost of pensioning their employees in the future. They never have to worry about it again.

The benefit to the employee will be a big bump in immediate pay, plus a retirement fund that won't go bust if their company does.

Final Recommendation

Ineos and Unite have a common interest in seeing this come to a resolution where a defined benefit scheme saves the company a bundle and puts a bundle in the pay packets of the employees.