Archive for the ‘Tools’ Category

Why are we Still Here?

Monday, June 5th, 2023

I no Longer Identify as an Earthling

WARNING: there is a pretty horrible photo farther down the page. I made it a thumbnail to reduce the impact for people who see it unintentionally. Click if you want to see a bigger version.

I don’t have a whole lot of interest in this world these days. I just watched Matt Walsh’s horrifying documentary, What is a Woman?, and it made things worse. Nonetheless, I did a little work on my tractor fork attachment today. I am literally one day away from finishing, although I already have an alteration in mind.

Here is what I have.

That frame is 3/16″ steel, and the little plates holding the tines on are 3/8″, so I think everything is sturdy enough. I used to have these same tines on a bucket made from something like 1/8″ plate, and it worked okay.

I stood on one tine with the fork off the ground, and I jumped up and down. It didn’t seem to notice me. I don’t think I’ll ever lift more than maybe 900 pounds because of the size of the tractor. That’s 225 pounds per fork, and the load won’t be jumping.

I may detach the big plates that hold the attachment on the tractor. When the attachment is on the ground, these plates are vertical, and that means I can’t rotate the tines upward very much. This could be a problem. I’m going to try it out, and if I don’t like it, I’ll have to cut the plates off, put something between them and the frame, and fix it so they’re maybe 20° off vertical.

Today I cut a stupid magnolia tree that was planted in the wrong place. It was starting to get in the way of trucks coming up the driveway. I want UPS to come to my door, but I can’t expect them to keep pushing through branches. Now I have a big assortment of large magnolia brush in the yard, and I really need the fork.

The people who built this house were very bad at landscaping. I have three other magnolias to cut. I also want to kill most of the plants around the pool.

The magnolia I cut today was planted about 4 feet from the driveway, so I’m not sure the original owners thought about the fact that trees grow. They also put a maple tree 10 feet from the house, and there are two bottlebrush trees 18″ from my workshop. I also have a cluster of oaks almost touching the driveway and another magnolia two feet from my expensive brick walkway.

The web says to keep magnolias 50 feet from structures. Nice.

Before the Chinese blight killed my citrus trees, I had three with bases maybe 8 feet apart. That was never going to work. If it were still possible to have grapefruit or tangelo trees in the Eastern US, the proper minimum distance between trunks would be 25 feet, not 8.

Finishing the fork has been an intimidating job because of all the cutting. The original tines had structural stuff made from heavy plate, and I had to make a lot of long, accurate cuts with an angle grinder. It’s a messy job requiring all sorts of protective gear, and it’s easy to screw up. I had to redo the cuts on three of the 4 tines, so that made it worse. Fortunately, the remaining tine is nearly perfect, so attaching it should be quick.

I tend to freeze up on jobs like this. I have to keep reminding myself it doesn’t matter if I screw up. With steel, you can always cut things apart and put them back together however you want. It’s not like wood. Once wood is screwed up, all you can do is add clumsy patches.

Walsh’s documentary comes with a pretty interesting story which you probably know. He’s conservative, and he works for The Daily Wire. The documentary reveals hushed-up facts about the atrocities gender nuts inflict on children.

Twitter agreed to host the documentary, and then right after it appeared, Twitter throttled it. They said this was based on two instances of “misgendering,” which means referring to people by pronouns correct for their sexes. The offending words were uttered by people who were filmed for the documentary, not people on the filmmaking team.

Elon Musk found out and fired a bunch of people. You can now see the documentary on Twitter and Rumble. It’s over a year old, and finally, you can see it without a struggle.

Once again, we see that some of the most seemingly-paranoid things conservatives and Christians say about leftist censorship are completely true. The problem is that we are so used to this towering, continuous outrage, we aren’t screaming about it.

The documentary was pretty horrifying. The pro-mutilation, pro-sterilization, pro-steroid people showed that they were literally insane. They proved there was no way to get facts into their skulls. Walsh was patient and polite with them, and a bunch of them flipped out.

The rapture and the tribulation will come when it becomes impossible to reach people with the truth, so watching these crazies affirm patent delusions served to reinforce my conviction that God is about to remove sane people from the earth and give the rest what amounts to a prolonged therapeutic flogging.

Walsh interviewed a lady who looks like a man from the shoulders up. She was pushed into “transitioning” or whatever it’s called as of this week, and later, she realized she had destroyed herself. Terrible things happened. They gave her a fake penis made from other tissues, and hair grew inside her urinary tract. She ran out of insurance coverage, and the doctors abandoned her. Now she runs an outfit that counsels other people.

I’ll show you a photo. In case you don’t know how fake penises are made, this will enlighten you.

A girl as young as 18, whom liberals don’t believe is old enough to buy a gun, can have this done to her. Flay the arm. Turn the skin into a fake penis that doesn’t really work. Flay the thigh and put the skin on the arm. The survivors look like they’ve been in fires.

Walsh interviewed a Canadian man who was out on bail. His crime was “misgendering.” He called his confused daughter a girl, basically. In Canada, this is considered violence. Thousands of years of jurisprudence settled the question of whether words are violence. They are not. This is one of the things you learn during your first semester of law school. Now leftists are passing statutes overriding common law and common sense.

We live in a world where calling your daughter is violence, but rioting is protected speech, except for Republicans.

The Canadian had a disagreement with his wife. She wanted their minor daughter to be put on drugs that would prevent her from becoming a woman. He objected, and the hospital tried to bring him around. Then they sent him a letter saying they were going to inject her regardless of his input, and they said he had two weeks to respond with legal action. When he responded, he lost, because Canada has a child-protection statute that takes power away from parents who haven’t lost their minds yet.

Now he’s a criminal. But a “doctor” who castrates boys and girls and mutilates girls in order to make fake penises that don’t work is working within the law.

We are done here. There is no stopping the transformation. A lot of older people want to fight, but the young, by and large, are beyond the reach of reason. We will die off, and the scales will swing in their favor. God only knows what crimes we will be found guilty of. This blog entry will probably be a prosecutable offense with no statute of limitations.

If they can get rid of statutes of limitations for rape, which they stupidly did, they can get rid of them for all sorts of thoughtcrimes.

The man in Canada is essentially guilty of thoughtcrime.

It’s trite to say 1984 is here, not because it’s absurd, but because the actions of leftists have provoked so many people to say it. Is it really here? Not exactly. The full-blown disease hasn’t arrived, but the world is incurably infected.

I’d compare it to something like mad cow disease. Six months after you’re infected, you may have light symptoms, but you still have the disease. You’re still going to develop every disabling symptom no matter what you do, and there will be no way to fix it. We don’t have goons hauling dissidents off to be tortured, but younger people have the mindset that results in such things, and as they gain dominance, they will do pretty much what Orwell’s ministries did.

Barring an unforeseeable, unlikely set of events involving things like secession and emigration, it will not be possible for young people to live acceptable lives on this planet. They won’t be able to raise children normally. They won’t be able to say the kinds of things people have to say in order to have sane, livable societies. Their movements and purchases will be severely restricted. They’ll have to pretend to be insane or live with fines, imprisonment, gag orders, employment discrimination, and the confiscation of their children.

There is no way to make life on Earth work any more.

I think about these things and feel like there is no point in fixing the tractor or cleaning up the yard. I don’t feel like doing financial planning or exercising. It makes me feel like I should do nothing but pray, eat, sleep, and bathe. I feel like I’m Noah. What are you supposed to do when you know the world is ending?

I told my wife it’s like the Titanic is sinking, and oblivious passengers are concerned about trivial things. The soup is cold. They need more pillows.

So many Christians and conservatives think they’re going to win somehow. What Bible are they reading? Which Holy Spirit are they listening to? They think they’re on God’s side, but they’re really taking marching orders from Satan. He wants people who seem to belong to God to flail around and make fools of themselves, like Lot’s sons-in-law.

The church is an astounding failure. Colossal. Almost no one is teaching what matters. You need to pray in tongues every day. It’s the only way to get the Holy Spirit’s guidance and be lifted out of deception.

It’s nice that Matthew Walsh took the time to try to help, but he is wasting his life. His work won’t stop anything.

How is it that the church fails to teach the single most important thing Christians need to know, after salvation? Well done, Satan.

It seems like the only verses Christians know are John 3:16 and Matthew 7:1. No one reads 1 Corinthians 14:2 or Jude 1:20.

You know who the worst non-Christian people are? Not perverts or atheists. Motivational speakers. Football coaches. Life coaches. Drill instructors. Anyone who tells you to believe in yourself. Anyone who promotes pride. If it weren’t for pride, perverts would still be running from Christians. The Bible makes it clear that pride causes people to abandon God, and only after that, perversion sets in. See Romans 1.

Perversion can’t set in until insanity spreads. You have to be blind to reason to think two men should sodomize each other and marry.

I didn’t realize how evil motivational speakers were until today.

Most big-time preachers are motivational speakers. They work for Satan. Joel Osteen works for Satan. T.D. Jakes works for Satan. Self-confidence will send you to hell. Jesus had none at all. The Bible condemns self-confidence and pride too many times to list here, but go to a big church, and you can count on the pastor to vomit motivational speaking all over you.

I truly hope Jesus comes for us soon. I am done with this place.

Grill Talk

Thursday, May 18th, 2023

Plus Miracle Healing

The new grill arrived yesterday, and I have mixed emotions. I guess my most negative emotion is the one about the grill’s price dropping by $125 the day after it arrived.

I got a Napoleon Prestige 500, which is SUPPOSEDLY made in Canada. These days, “made in” doesn’t mean what it used to. If a company buys all the parts for a grill from China and puts them together here, they will usually have the gall to claim it’s American-made. But perhaps this really is a Canadian grill, and Canada is almost like America, except for the fact that there are only about 40,000 people in Canada, and they have no civil rights.

The grill comes in pieces, and you have to finish it, so maybe it’s actually made in America. Here is what I had last night.

It should take around an hour to put one of these together, but it was more like 4 hours for me, and I haven’t put the side shelves on yet.

It took forever because the assembly manual is sort of Asian-style. In order to get around translating, they created a manual which is entirely made up of cartoons, and in order to get around creating manuals for every product, they included several different products in this one. Like it wouldn’t have been confusing enough already.

The parts in the cartoons are tiny, and some look alike, so it’s not fun to figure everything out.

The company has assembly videos on Youtube, and they’re worse than the manual. They’re very odd. Each video features two silent people moving like they’re performing some kind of ceremony. There are no closeups, and they skip the hard parts.

There are better videos from other Youtubers, so I looked at them, too.

As you can see, the knobs light up. This is a useless feature, and it requires additional internal wiring The wire powering the far-right knob was too short, so it was either disconnected from the factory, or I accidentally disconnected it by moving the gas hose and wires around during assembly. I had to put the connectors back together. This was zero fun.

The actual grill, meaning the top part, is pretty heavy. A little more than a big car battery, I would guess, but it’s harder to lift, because the lid flops around, the weight isn’t balanced, and the part is large, preventing a person from getting any kind of leverage. You have to assemble the base and lift the grill onto it.

I should have used my Harbor Freight lift cart to get me in the ballpark, but of course, I did not. I wrestled the grill up there, tried to turn it on, and then found out about the wiring problem. I had to lift the grill again, position it so I could get at the underside, remove the propane hose, and use hose grip pliers to insert the male connector into the female connector. A very unpleasant and time-consuming process. They should have made the wiring an inch longer so it wouldn’t pull out. I’m assuming they connnected it to begin with.

How do I like the grill? I have mixed emotions.

I used to have a DCS grill, and DCS is one of the top manufacturers. Just about every part was heavy, quality stainless. It sat outside for years and always looked about like it did when it was a month old. No corrosion or problems apart from a gas leak which was probably a defect.

The Napoleon is advertised as stainless, but it isn’t. Parts of it are stainless, like the racks, the door panels, most of the lid, and so on. The rest is carbon steel with some kind of coating. Sooner or later, it will rust. If it gets scratched, I’ll have to use paint to fix it.

I guess I’ll have to get the $100+ bag (“cover”) to protect the grill.

Another disappointment: the casters are plastic. Weber grills have real metal casters. I thought I would replace the Napoleon casters with screw-in Amazon metal casters, but they sit in proprietary plastic inserts, so forget that. I can’t do it without fabrication.

So far, it looks like most of the grill is Home Depot quality, with a few important upgrades where it counts the most.

Today I plan to test the grill with a New York strip. My third-favorite cut. They’re on sale. Ordinarily, I fry steaks, but I also like restaurant steaks cooked under a salamander, which is a flat, super-hot heating element that chars steaks nicely. My grill has a special infrared side burner which is supposed to be similar. I’ll see if it works for steak, and then I’ll fix a burger.

I am pretty confident it will work for burgers. Steaks are somewhat different. It should also work for my wok.

This grill has curved grate wires to prevent stuff from falling through, so I’ll grill some onion slices to see what happens. It would be neat if they stayed in place.

Do I recommend this thing? Not yet. I haven’t tried it. I will say this: if I were willing to spend several grand, I’d go with DCS or another high-end brand. A heavy stainless grill can legitimately be called a potential heirloom. It’s possible to make a grill that lasts many decades, but you have to shell out for it.

The Napoleon’s lifetime warranty is what made me feel safe ordering this grill. Even if the cheaper parts don’t hold up, I should be able to get new ones for nothing.

I guess that’s all I have to say about the grill.

I strained my back lifting it, and I felt some pain last night. Today while my wife and I were talking, I put oil on it, and we prayed and commanded and so on. The pain level dropped a great deal while we were doing this. I stood up immediately afterward to demonstrate faith by moving around, and there was very little pain. I wanted to write about this today, because testimony is important. Satan and people who are deceived love to say God doesn’t heal, so we have to counter the gaslighting.

I don’t think much of medical professionals. When you have no other choice, you have to use them, but to me, they’re witch doctors. God is the real doctor. He heals quickly, without pain, expense, side effects, embarrassment, grotesque privacy invasion, political interrogation, or inconvenience. I only go to doctors as a last resort.

We glorify medicine and think of doctors as gods, but human beings had the same mindset a hundred years ago, when there was no chemotherapy, no MRI’s, and no antibiotics. Doctors couldn’t do much back then, they believed all sorts of things that weren’t true, and people died from things that can be cured in 10 minutes now. If the world lasts a hundred more years, people will think, rightly, that today’s doctors were primitive.

They are primitive. Everything we do with our limited intelligence is primitive.

It’s all a matter of perspective. Everyone in every age has thought of contemporary doctors as modern and advanced, because they were, even when they were saying malaria was caused by bad air. Even when they were treating syphilis by using syringes to shoot mercury up men’s private parts.

Think of all the things that can’t be cured by medicine. Many cancers. Autism. Missing parts. Retardation. Homosexuality and most other mental illnesses. Coronavirus. Rabies. The flu. MS. Huntington’s. Parkinson’s. Addiction. The list is gigantic. God can fix anything, and he heals many people every day.

You’d have to be stupid to go to a doctor before God.

Time to warm up the steak. Wish me success.

MORE

I fixed myself a steak, and I grilled onion slices, pieces of red bell pepper, and an unripe tomato. I used the grill’s infrared burner to brown the steak, and then it got a very brief ride on the main burners.

Everything went well.

The infrared burner browned the meat nicely. The vegetables didn’t fall into the grill, so the weird wavy grates do what they’re supposed to do.

Unfortunately, this experience reminded me that grilled steak is horrible compared to fried steak. I had to resort to using steak sauce to give the meat flavor. I wonder if adding butter after grilling would help, but I don’t think there is any way I could make grilled compare with fried.

This grill should be a beast for burgers. It should give them a nice dark crust, and maybe I could throw bits of wood on the burner for flavor. A burger always relies on condiments, so it’s not like a steak, which has to stand on its own.

Bowl Champion

Saturday, April 29th, 2023

Cancel the Corn Cobs and Sears Catalogs

One nice thing about living in the woods is that my neighbors can’t see me when I go outside and dance for joy.

I finally got my new toilet installed.

Man, what a pain this was. Should have been a one-hour job, but some Nobel candidate decided to save three minutes while installing the previous toilet. He left the flange sticking up too high, and he put granite-like brown grout on the tile to hold the toilet up. I had to remove the grout, which took forever, and then I broke my flange because it was too high. I overtightened the bolts while trying to get the bowl to settle. I had to repair the flange.

I started my one-hour installation yesterday and just finished a few minutes ago, late in the afternoon.

I have learned some stuff that could be helpful to other people whose toilets were not installed by thoughtful, honest, or responsible individuals. Not all of it applies to people whose toilets were installed correctly. I think my advice is good. Maybe not, but it worked for me.

1. Don’t run out and buy the fanciest toilet ring kit on the market. Not unless you’re positive your flange is no more than 1/4″ above the level of the floor. Fancy ring kits have extra plastic or metal plates in them, not to mention weird gaskets that stand up, so they will not let a bowl sit as low as a plain old wax ring. Instead of buying one $12 kit, buy 5 $2 rings. You may screw one or more rings up when you install the toilet. It’s better to return unused rings later than to find yourself cursing at 10 p.m. on a weekend night because the only ring you bought is ruined.

2. The flange does not attach the toilet to the floor. Weight does most of that. Do not tighten your toilet base nuts like you’re trying to cap an oil well. Don’t listen to crusty old jack-of-all-trades characters who tell you different. Just get the nuts good and snug. Flanges are cheap and weak, and they break easily when the nuts are too tight. The boss under the toilet that fits into the poo pipe holds the toilet in place, and the bolts are only there to prevent it from rotating and tilting. It doesn’t take much force to get the job done. Replacing or repairing a broken flange can be a nightmare job that involves cutting concrete or removing part of a ceiling. Don’t risk it for no reason.

3. If you break a PVC flange, don’t buy a new one unless you’re positive the old one is hopeless. Get yourself some PVC primer and cement instead. Clean the break with a good solvent, prime it, and glue the flange back together. PVC cement literally melts PVC, so if you use it correctly, your new joint will be just as strong as unbroken PVC from the factory. I broke my flange yesterday, and then I realized I had overtightened it. Today I glued it back together, and it worked fine.

4. Do NOT try to fix a rocking toilet by piling grout, cement, epoxy, or anything else under the bowl. Not unless you have a flange that is very hard to replace. A toilet is supposed to be supported all the way around the bottom, and your fix will focus the pressure on a few spots. You want the toilet to rest directly on the floor. Grout will also make a big mess that may show the next time you install a toilet. It may have a smaller base than your old toilet.

Removing old grout from tile is no fun whatsoever. If your toilet is too high, find out if lowering the flange is easy in your case, and if so, have a plumber lower it. It probably won’t run more than $300, and you will only have to do it once in your lifetime. Make sure he uses the best flange available.

Once your flange is right, you and your heirs will never have to pay anyone to install a toilet again, because it will be easy.

5. If a slacker painted every part of your bathroom except the wall behind your toilet tank, make sure you measure your new toilet and see to it that it’s as big as the old one. Otherwise, you’ll have to paint over the parts that show. If you’re building a house, paint before installing the toilets.

6. When you seal around the bottom of the toilet, don’t seal the back. You want a gap to let water out in case of problems. Also, get a profiling tool to shape the silicone, and use a spray bottle of soapy water to make the tool leave a nice finish.

I’m not positive my new toilet’s poo pipe is sealed up well. I am still getting the hang of installing toilets on wax rings, so I had to move the toilet around a lot while I was putting it in place. Before the first shakedown cruise with live ammunition, I am flushing it over and over to see if any water comes out from the base. If so, I’ll get more wax rings and reinstall it as many times as it takes.

I’ve been thinking of looking at European websites to see how they install toilets. I’m curious I can’t make myself believe everyone on Earth uses the same stupid system we do.

I cannot wait to take the old toilet to the landfill. It will be like getting a divorce decree after a long, bad marriage.

Game of Thrones

Friday, April 28th, 2023

Can Do

Forget about Tucker Carlson, our imminent civil war, and the transvestites in Sports Illustrated. I have something important to talk about. My new toilet arrived.

Most of my house’s toilets are green-fantasy basket cases designed during the Clinton years. They’re so bad, the manufacturer quit supporting them. Think about that. A toilet should last 75 years, and they quit after maybe 10. Says a lot about their confidence in the product.

Before I left las puertas del infierno, as I like to call South Florida, I had Japanese Toto-brand toilets, and they never gave me a second’s trouble. I know the Japanese have a bizarre obsession with toilets. I would say Japanese toilets are the BMW’s of toilets, but BMW is overrated and makes unreliable cars. Still, I think you get the point. I have tremendous confidence in the competence of Japanese toilet makers, just as I would have tremendous confidence in the competence of Mexicans who weld other Mexicans into the diesel tanks of northbound trucks in Tijuana. The toilet that arrived today is Japanese, and it ran about twice as much as American.

I found out there are one-piece and two-piece toilets. The one-piece jobs are better. You don’t have to connect the tank to the bowl, so there are no gaskets to go bad. I went one-piece. A wise man knows a good toilet is an important investment.

My only regret is that this bowl doesn’t have a bidet built in, but I can add a bidet seat, so no worries there.

The nice thing about my old two-piece can is that it’s a lot easier to carry and put in the back of the car so I can take it to the dump. I yanked the tank off and put it in the garage, and then I managed to get the rusty nuts off the bowl base and move the bowl out.

Guess what? When my house was built, Albert Einstein was apparently working construction on the side, because the bowl was attached to the tiles not just with silicone, which is correct, but with some kind of grouty stuff. It’s like hard mortar. Now there is a ring of stone on my floor, and I have to get rid of it before the new bowl goes in.

If there is one thing I hate about Internet DIY information, it’s this: the jobs they do in videos almost always involve things that make sense. If you look at toilet videos, you will see toilet after toilet properly installed with silicone. You will see men in clean, freshly-ironed clothes pop toilets off and put new ones on in seconds, because the people who installed the toilets they’re replacing did things right. You won’t see the toilet some genius installed with JB Weld. Seems like I always get the weird cases no one on Youtube or any Internet forum can help me with.

Someone said I should use a plastic scraper to avoid scratching the tile. No; that would be like using plastic to cut a hole in a cinderblock. A stainless scraper would take an hour.

My answer? An oscillating tool with a scraper blade, followed by a Scotchbrite pad. It should work. I think the tile is too hard for carbon steel to scratch.

My toilet was attached to the flange with zinc-plated hardware. Whom do I talk to about that? How can I join a class-action suit?

Let’s be honest. I don’t care how clean men are. Sometimes they pee on stuff. Steel does not like pee. It doesn’t like bleach, and decent housekeepers use bleach on bathroom floors. If there is a good reason to use fast-corroding hardware on a bathroom floor, I can’t imagine what it is.

I had to use a Vise Grip to get my toilet’s nuts off. Traumatizing. I’m one of those people who would rather sell a house than continue to live there after some savage used a toilet plunger on the kitchen sink, so you can imagine how much I like having my face inches from an ancient toilet while I struggle with nuts I am pretty sure have decades-old pee on them.

I tried to clean things up before I started work, but there is a limit to what you can do with a toilet older than some governors.

It’s around two p.m., and I have probably washed my hands 15 times today. I’m still afraid to touch food.

When I’m done with this can, I have to think about the three I have upstairs. Moving a toilet across the house alone was no fun. Stairs will require paid help unless I go with two-piece toilets.

Maybe I’ll replace one can every 6 months or so. There is no rush.

Someone should make Al Gore eat these things.

Humanity Made it to 2022 Before I Invented the Tractor Debris Fork

Saturday, April 22nd, 2023

More Proof Engineers are Useless

I finally got back to work on my tractor fork attachment.

When I bought my tractor, it had 4 forks, or, more accurately, tines, on it. They were chained on with turnbuckles, and the chains went around the bucket. To prevent the bucket from deforming under the pressure of the chains, the previous owner shoved poorly-measured lengths of four-by-four into the bucket.

The tines worked extremely well, but they moved around all the time. It was not possible to tighten them enough to prevent this. Also, they were way out in front of the tractor, so the leverage was bad. They had to be mounted on the front lip of the bucket, so the distance back to the pins that attached them to the front end loader was pretty long.

On top of all this, in order to lift the fork, as I have decided to call the tines, I had to lift the bucket, which served no purpose in and of itself. The fork probably weighed 300 pounds, and that doesn’t include the bucket’s weight, which was probably maybe could be 150 pounds.

Let me check the weight of similar buckets.

The web says a bucket sold by Everything attachments runs 271 pounds, so I am off by a lot.

So before I could lift anything with “the fork,” I had to lift over 500 pounds of useless weight.

To make things even worse, the old bucket was held on by 4 hard-to-remove pins, and I could not use any other attachments without a ton of work. In practical terms, I couldn’t use the bucket because the fork was hard to remove, and I couldn’t use anything else because the bucket was hard to remove.

I got myself a thing that allows me to remove the bucket in about 90 seconds, and because covid, I was not able to get a bucket that worked with it. Instead, I did a lot of work and changed my existing bucket so it fit. This left me with a bucket I could use, but I was not able to use the fork, and the fork was what I needed for at least 95% of the jobs I did.

The answer: buy a new fork attachment.

No. Don’t be stupid. There is no such thing.

You can get a set of forklift forks for a tractor. They cost a lot, and you only get two tines unless you pay extra. The tines are short and poorly suited to moving logs and brush, and they move around if you use them the way I need to use them. Stupid.

You can’t move brush with two tines. You need at least 4 unless you want things to fall between the tines. I have a cheap set of two Chinese tines that clamp on my bucket, and while they are certainly helpful, they will never move brush.

You can get a thing called a grapple. This is like a 60″-wide set of salad tongs connected to hydraulics. People love them. I don’t. They are also stupid.

You can pick up logs with a grapple. So what? I can do that with the fork, and I can pick up more logs, because a fork is bigger. And I could handle loads that were much bigger than anything that would fit in a grapple. You can pick up brush in a grapple. So what? I was able to move huge piles of brush with the fork. Again, much bigger than anything that would fit in a grapple.

Also, to use a grapple, you have to add some stuff to your hydraulic system. To get something that isn’t as good as a fork without added hydraulics. And a good grapple weighs 400 pounds.

Grapples are dumb. I’m convinced of it. They cost a great deal of money, they require tractor modification, and they don’t work very well compared to a set of tines.

I think men buy grapples because they’re cooler than forks and because they don’t really know what they’re doing. When you have a grapple on your compact tractor, you can pretend you’re Truckasaurus, but you can’t really get much done. It’s amazing to me that no one offers a factory fork attachment like the one I’m building.

My answer: cut up my existing tines and attach them to a shopmade steel frame that works with a quick-attach adaptor like the one I now have. This will reduce the weight of the whole mess. It will move everything closer to the tractor, improving the leverage. The new attachment will be rigid, so the tines will not move around. I won’t have to change my hydraulics. It should weigh a hundred pounds less than a grapple.

Down side: it has been almost a year since I started working on it, and I am still not done because covid pretty much destroyed whatever ambition I had when I first realized I needed to do something. There is a lot of stuff on my property that needs to be moved.

So far, I have built the frame, cut up the forks, and primed and painted certain parts of the tines that will be hard to paint once the project is welded together. Over the last couple of days, I cut one tine up and did a lot of rust removal, priming, and painting.

I really do not understand how people who make tractor attachments can be so incompetent. You can go to Youtube and find shopmade fork things that are a lot like the one I’m building, so it’s not like I invented the transistor. If you use a grapple, and you’ve seen people use a fork, you know perfectly well that the grapple is inferior in every way. So why can’t I buy a fork ready to go?

I have 4 tines. They were originally maybe 6 feet long. Something like 4 feet extended out in front of the bucket, and the rest went under the bucket. When something heavy rested on a tine, the rear of the tine pressed up on the bucket. The idea was to add strength and provide a tine that would not bend where it met the bucket.

This was a stupid design. It added weight and complexity, and it required tight chains to pull the tines back against the bucket lip. This deformed the upper part of the bucket because the chains pulled down on it in spite of the pitiable four-by-four supports, which fell out all the time. This is what happens when a person who only knows how to run a wood band saw tries to do a job that requires steel and a metalworker. When all you know is carpentry, every job looks like a pine deck.

I can weld short pieces of heavy tubing in the corners of the tines to serve as gussets. If that won’t prevent the tubes from bending downward, nothing will. I will also put horizontal pieces of tubing in the corners to keep the tines from opening or closing.

I guess I shouldn’t be harsh. I don’t think the quick-attach adaptor had been invented when my tractor was new, so the old arrangement was probably the best the attachment companies could do. Still, why wasn’t the adaptor invented in, say, 1935 or soon after whatever year it was when hydraulic front-end loaders arrived on the scene?

My fork had 4 upright steel tubes to prevent things from falling back toward the tractor when the bucket was raised. This week, I de-rusted and primed two of them. I also put one on the hydraulic press because it was bent, and I got it nearly straight, which amazed me. I’ll be fixing the other two uprights shortly. It’s easy. If I get tired of the slightly-crooked one, I can make a new one in half an hour, or I can turn it upside-down, do a little welding, and have an upright that’s only crooked for the top 6 inches. That’s where the bend is.

Each upright member had a stupid spike at the top, facing forward at face level. When I bought the tractor, the two outboard spikes had tennis balls on them. I wondered why until the first time I walked into a spike. Today and yesterday, I used the belt grinder and the lathe to round the ends of the spikes. Why they had to be sharp in the first place is a mystery to me. Why no one ever thought to round them off later is also a puzzle.

My plan is to put the uprights back on the fork and then put some goat wire across all four of them. This is fencing wire laid out in a grid. The wire will weigh about 7 pounds and prevent things from coming back at me or the tractor between the uprights. Why no one else thought of this…well, I think we’ve already discussed the competence of the people who make tractor stuff.

I’m using rusty-metal primer on a lot of the attachment, and I’m finishing it with Herculiner. This is the toughest finish I can get, and it’s easily touched up with spray cans from Tractor Supply.

I assume this design will work. If not, I’ll get a grapple, and I’ll be out around $300. But why wouldn’t it work? The old system was held on with two brackets of 3/16″ steel channel about 10″ long. If lifting hundreds of pounds of wood using 4 pins on two little brackets with 4 little welds didn’t destroy everything, my relatively robust system should be a lot better.

When all this is done, I’ll have a bucket and fork I can swap in a minute or two, so I’ll actually use both. How nice that will be.

It seems like I excoriate engineers all the time for their stupid mistakes, but I think I’m completely justified. I have a physics degree and a small amount of common sense, but physics training in no way makes you an engineer. It enables you to pick engineering up fast, but it’s not the same thing. Physicists don’t know how to do anything. A physicist might be able to tell you how LED’s work at the subatomic level, but it takes an engineer to design an LED TV. If I can dramatically improve the work of engineers over and over, and I can, then something is wrong.

They always blame marketing and accounting. “We wanted to make it right, but the marketing and accounting people wouldn’t let us.” Boo hoo. I’m sure that explains a lot of problems, but it doesn’t explain many others. Why didn’t we have plastic trash bags until the 1960’s? Obvious? Why did American cars require two keys long after the Japanese realized only one was needed? Why have boat designers put so many bilge pump wiring blocks 6″ above the normal level of salty, conductive bilge water?

Why did it take so long for engineers to put seat belts in cars? They were invented in the 1800’s. The first American cars with seat belts appeared in 1949.

Engineers gave my car thin, easily-clogged moonroof drain tubes, and then they fixed it so any overflow was captured in headliner cavities containing overly-complex and expensive motors. An engineer gave my lawn tractor a front grill cover that falls off easily and lands directly in front of the tractor’s front wheels. Guess what happens then. Owners all over the web are looking for new grills.

My opinion of engineers is like my opinion of cooking school graduates. Think of all the terrible food you’ve had at expensive restaurants. Most of it was cooked by chefs with degrees. There is no conceivable excuse for going to school for several years and making bad food. Cooking is just not hard. Somehow, they blow it anyway. Very, very often.

Now I feel like writing about my awful green toilets again. I just spent $700 ordering a better one, made in Japan.

Unless I have missed something, my tractor fork will be fantastic. If so, I’ll probably come back and criticize engineers some more. They have it coming.

What Can’t Leftists Ruin?

Thursday, April 20th, 2023

My Liberal Toilets are Al Gore’s Revenge

Why is it that leftists keep making it harder for people to stay clean?

Hygiene really sets conservatives and leftists apart. We keep seeing leftist celebrities bragging that they don’t bathe much. Ashton Kutcher, for example, says he never showers. Brad Pitt is notorious for stinking. Leftists push low-flow shower heads that make good rinsing difficult. They stuck us with efficient washing machines that put mold in our clothes no matter what we do to fix the problem.

Today’s beef: low-flow toilets.

My house has, if my count is correct, 4 Briggs Vacuity toilets. They date from around 2000. They were efficient for their time. The design is moronic. Each toilet has some kind of upside-down jug in the tank, and it sits on a vacuum tube. Don’t ask me what it does. You can buy a Toto low-flow toilet that works perfectly and doesn’t have a lot of gadgetry in the tank. Vacuity toilets also have plastic liners inside their tanks, and the water goes into the liner so it doesn’t fill the entire tank.

The Briggs company realized these toilets were stupidly engineered, so they decided the smart thing was to quit supporting them. If you have one and it fails, you are on your own.

They will not accept Korky valves, which are the most common valves on Earth. You have to buy a weird Fluidmaster valve that costs twice as much. And when you install a new valve, it will leak where it enters the tank because it has to go through the porcelain as well as the thick plastic liner.

My toilet developed a leak last year. My answer was to install a giant rubber washer outside the tank, along with a layer of silicone. It worked until the valve went bad. Then minerals clogged the valve up, and acid didn’t fix it. I had to put in a new valve. It leaked like the first one, and my solution didn’t work any more.

Today I took the tank off the toilet, removed the plastic liner, put the liner on the band saw, and cut off the half the valve occupied. Then I put everything back together. The valve doesn’t leak, but the gaskets do. They’re old. I had to order new ones.

My low-flow toilet is now a high-flow toilet, but at least I can use it. When I get the new gaskets in, I mean.

Now I have a decision to make, and if you’re a sane (non-leftist) person, you may understand what I’m talking about. Do I replace these stupid toilets now, while there are still some decent toilets available, or do I take a chance and wait for them to fail, knowing that leftists will eventually remove all good toilets from the market?

If they have their way, we’ll all be pooping in biodegradable boxes made from locally sourced wood and throwing the poop out our windows. Or we’ll have to keep it until the leftist poop truck comes around once a month to collect it so it can be used to make organic adobe or something.

Think I’m kidding? You’d understand if you owned a diesel truck or tractor. My truck is a 2007, and it has none of the horrible technology that came on the next year’s models. My friend Mike has a 2014 Mercedes, and he has to buy a ridiculous fluid and pour it in his car all the time. I don’t even know what it is. Something to do with the exhaust gases.

Newer diesels have something called a regeneration cycle, and people complain these cycles start at the worst possible times. They say the new green parts fail and cause all sorts of problems. Old tractors and trucks are highly sought after because of the problems the new ones have.

I’m amazed by the bathing thing. Leftists like to tell us our bodies produce important oils our skin needs in order to be healthy. No, they don’t! That’s insane. When you don’t bathe often, oil, grease, dead skin, salt, bacteria, urine, feces, and fungus accumulate on your skin, and you get acne, ingrown hairs, and boils. It’s worse if you’re a woman. because you have one more opening that produces secretions.

Yes, you can be healthy bathing every few days instead of every day, but you’ll smell, and skin oil will stain your clothes. And you’ll feel bad. Here’s something I’ve realized: I don’t have to bathe every day in order to be healthy. I have to bathe every day in order to feel good. If I don’t bathe, I feel crusty. I can feel yesterday’s salt, oil, and grease on my skin and hair. And if I bathed as rarely as Ashton Kutcher, I’d be miserable, and I’d probably have pimples and boils.

The Japanese are obsessed with quality defecation. They are the masters of toilet design and construction. I’m thinking of getting a Toto Ultramax one-piece comfort height toilet. Toto is Japanese. I’ve had two of their toilets before. They were great.

One-piece toilets are better than two-piece toilets. They have fewer parts, and they last longer. “Comfort height” means the seat is about like a chair, so you don’t have to lower yourself as far. Some people think you can’t poop correctly unless you squat like a savage, but it’s not true unless you have some kind of medical problem, and once you get old, you’ll need a higher toilet anyway, so why wait?

If you’re convinced you have to squat to poop correctly, you can always put your feet on a couple of blocks. Beats having to have someone help you off the toilet. When my dad was failing, I had to install a special raised seat, and life would have been better had the entire toilet been taller in the first place.

I’m not sure what to get, but a tall toilet seems like like it will be less likely to wear out its welcome.

To sum up, leftism ruins everything, including personal hygiene and toilets. Toilets are likely to get worse, so if your toilets are in bad shape, try not to wait till there are no good ones left. Celebrities smell. I guess that’s about all.

Baby Roof

Friday, March 31st, 2023

These Hombres Don’t Look so Bad

I feel like I’m in prison.

Last week on Friday, at around 7:30 a.m., a truck arrived unannounced with a load of shingles. The company that owned the truck called the company I hired to put a roof on my house, and that company called and woke me up when I was trying to catch up after sleeping badly. The shingle people needed help getting through my gate, and the driver did not have the gate code even though I had given it to the roofing company.

This was the start of my roof adventure.

I had to order a roof because my “25-year” shingles were starting to fail after 22 years and change. Shingle life estimates are kind of a joke. Something to be aware of when you order your next roof. When they say 25 years, hope for 20. If you look around the web, you will find sites saying shingles last this long or that long…unless subjected to things like sunshine and hot weather. Which means the figures they like to quote only work if you build your house inside another house. Roofs get hot even in places like Michigan.

I dressed myself reasonably well, taking my time because I hadn’t caused the problem, and opened the gate. The driver stood around with a phone in his ear until it closed. I had to call the roof company and make them call the driver.

When you bring a truck through a self-closing gate, you don’t stop halfway through and play a round of tiddlywinks, but that’s what this guy did. I had to keep using the remote to keep my gate off his truck.

Obviously, he is not a very good driver. I’ve had a semi come through that gate with no problems. I’ve had big box trucks come in. UPS comes in every week. This guy was afraid he would hit something. He kept saying I had a little gate. It’s like 12 feet long. How long is a big gate?

I told him you don’t show up early in the morning at someone’s gate with a big delivery without calling first, and I told him he couldn’t play around while using the gate. These things are pretty obvious. What if I had been out of town? He gave me an attitude, which was amazing. He also made excuses. I don’t know how a person like that survives in this county of pleasant, respectful people.

The roofing company told me its crew of people with questionable immigration status would arrive on Monday for a two-day job. Then they would take a break on Tuesday for some kind of mandatory company meeting. Then they would come back on Wednesday and finish up.

It is now Friday afternoon, and I’m pretty sure they’re going home in three hours with the job unfinished. There is debris all over the yard, including a whole bunch of nails. I don’t want to go outside until the nails are picked up, and I am using the car as little as possible in order to avoid a predictable conversation about tire repairs. I think they’ll finish on Monday evening.

Last night, I saw a mouse in the downstairs hall. Mouse infiltration is one of the problems I expect to get rid of by fixing the roof. They found a way to get in, and the roof is the only possible location. I kill a couple of them every month. I would guess this one came in while the roof was opened up, or it was here before the roofers and was scared out of its usual location.

I grabbed a flip-flop and went after it. I was going to crush it like a cockroach.

City people are very concerned about humane treatment for mice. They even buy obscenities like live-release traps, so mice can get a nice meal and then run right back in their houses. I don’t worry about how mice feel. Not very much, anyway. I’m not willing to leave little trays of antifreeze out for them to drink, because it kills in a painful way, but other than that, I’m up for anything. Snap traps. Poison. Stepping on live mice when I find them in glue traps.

I have stomped on live mice, and while it’s no fun, it’s humane and really effective.

My wife is on the same page here. She says that in Zambia, she has shoved furniture against the wall to crush mice. She imitated their little squeaks for me.

The mouse ran into my laundry room, so I baited two traps and left them in there. Then I stuffed a towel under the door to keep the mouse from leaving the room. When I got up, the traps were empty, but I found half a peanut on the floor.

I really hope the peanut didn’t come from a secret huge stash. My friend Mike stayed here for a long time, and I kept telling him not to take food upstairs. Then weeks after he left, I found an enormous bag of peanuts, open, by his bed. I could not believe it. I threw them out, of course.

For all I know, the mice took half a gallon of his peanuts and hid them in the walls.

Once the roof is sealed up, I figure any mice still in the house will die of thirst or by being crushed or poisoned.

This house and the outbuilding had four ridiculous skylights. I’m going to guess a woman had them installed. Women are the ones who like extremely troublesome and impractical home features that look cute. For example, they like carpeting. If men really ran the world, every kitchen would have stainless steel on the walls and, in the floor, a drain with a garbage disposal.

Two of the skylights were in the workshop. Explain that to me. Skylights provide nearly no light in a workshop, they tend to leak and cause sheathing rot, and flying bugs like to fly up to them and get trapped. Then they make noise. I told the roof people to board the roof up. No skylights.

The house had a skylight in an upstairs hallway and an upstairs bathroom. I considered getting rid of both, but I finally said I would keep only the one in the hallway.

You never, ever put a skylight in a bathroom. Water condenses in the little drywall shafts under the skylights, and then you get mold, which you have to keep chasing with chemicals. I doubt any heterosexual man has ever asked for a bathroom skylight, unless he was trying to impress a woman.

Yesterday I saw that both skylights in the house had been replaced, even though I had only paid for one.

Okay; fine. I told them I would let it go. I can always get rid of it later. The up side is that I don’t have to put a new ceiling in the bathroom.

They swear the new skylight is way better than the old one and that it will never cause problems. I have doubts.

I think I should put some kind of frame around the bottom of the shaft and put a piece of diffusing lens in it. A diffusing lens is a piece of clear plastic that blurs things. You’ve seen them in fluorescent fixtures. A lens would keep steam out and end the mold problem. I could install the frame with Velcro so I could pull it out and clean the lens if dead bugs appeared in it.

I can test my theory with some plastic material from Home Depot and some double-sided tape.

I can’t wait for these guys to finish. They start hammering at 7 a.m. The other day, I almost jumped out of bed.

I want them to get out so I can start doing what I know I’ll have to do: raking up nails they left behind when they raked up nails. This is as close to a certainty as anything can be. I don’t think any roofing company has ever failed to leave fewer than 30 nails behind.

I’ll have to go out and wander around with a magnetic rake. Being me, I already have two of them.

I also need to redo my Starlink dish mount because they boarded over the place where I had it.

They were nice enough to wait as long as possible to remove my dish. I didn’t know they had removed it, though. Starlink makes a huge fuss about how you have to have your dish in the middle of a flat square-mile field in order to get an unobstructed sky. The roofers left my dish lying on the roof facing more or less sideways, and I still had service.

This is good information to have, because it tells me I don’t have to do a great job when I put the dish back up. Instead of a long pole mounted through shingles, I should be able to use the tiny, pathetic, four-legged base Starlink gave me. I could even set it on the roof and put a sandbag on it to keep it from moving.

The roof people told me how horrible it was for my roof to have a dish mounted on it. Whatever. They have a new thing called “sealant,” and if it doesn’t work, I’ll know, because I can go into my attic and check the roof under the mount.

They think I should have a pole installed in my yard. Yeah, I want a $500 pole plus an expensive trench plus expensive holes in my house plus expensive cable. Or I can use my $40 mount right where it was last week. Or just stick the portable base up there.

Now they’re telling me they’re cleaning up and expect to have their dumpster trailer out of here tomorrow. They claim they will rake for nails now and then again tomorrow. Can it all be true? I feel like Joe Biden, waiting for the go-ahead to leave the basement.

When they’re gone, I can get the yard fixed. I can get the pool leak fixed. I can have the shutters painted.When you own a house, the roof is the main thing you need to look after. Everything else depends on the roof. I think a good roof and termite protection are my most important home-maintenance items.

Roof leaks lead to wood rot, termites, bugs, rats, black mold, and wall and floor collapses. As the roof goes, so goes the house.

Now I just hope none of the employees were casing the place.

Yanking Pinocchio’s Chain

Wednesday, March 29th, 2023

The Amazing Electronic Snowflake

I feel I should write a few words about my experiences with ChatGPT.

The other day, I received The Florida Bar News, and for the first time ever, I saw something I wanted to read. It was an article about the ethics of letting AI machines write legal instruments.

It’s somewhat impressive when a chat robot can talk somewhat competently about simple matters. Writing briefs and motions is on another level. Most lawyers can barely do it.

I’ll get flak if a doctor reads this, but medicine is better suited to AI than law. Why? Because there are a limited number of diseases, and the lists of symptoms and treatments are also limited. A lot of medicine is running mental flow charts. If the patient has this problem, do this. If not, do that. Doctors run tests based on their memorized flow charts, and different doctors will generally come up with the same answers. When two doctors disagree, it generally means one of them is wrong and possibly dangerous.

Law is different. While it takes more brains to become a doctor than it does to become a lawyer, and while the average intelligence of doctors is higher than the average intelligence of lawyers, legal cases vary much more than medical cases. They tell law students, “Every case is different,” and while it’s not quite true, it is nearly true. You can’t create flow charts that work for law. Even simple cases may contain lots of factors that have to be considered, and it’s not unusual at all for such factors to be novel.

Obviously, medicine is complex, and diagnoses and treatments are not always simple. Sometimes doctors get real puzzles. A machine with a hard case could screw up badly. On the other hand, doctors screw up a great deal, too, now that I think about it. They are said to kill something like 6 times as many people as firearm incidents. They amputate the wrong legs. A surgeon did grafts on healthy arteries in Dana Carvey’s chest and left clogged arteries alone. A man in the Midwest woke up from surgery with no penis or testicles because a doctor thought he saw cancer, and it turned out there was no cancer. He just sliced everything off without getting consent. Stories like this are common. A few people you know have similar stories.

Personally, I would like to have doctors who use AI. I would not want AI by itself or a doctor by himself. I would want a doctor to catch AI’s mistakes and AI to catch the doctor’s mistakes.

Anyway, supposedly, AI is getting so good, some lawyers are using it to write their instruments, and the Florida Bar wants lawyers to know they can’t just sign these things and hand them in as their own product. It is still necessary to check the machines’ work.

This should be obvious, but really, there are a lot of incompetent lawyers out there. A lot of people who are not bright at all get licenses. I’m sure there must be lawyers who are making AI shoulder as much weight as possible.

It reminds me of a story my uncle told. He was at a judges’ conference, and there was a lecture about ruling on objections. A judge there said he kept a deck of cards behind the bench. If a lawyer objected, he drew a card. If the card was red, he sustained the objection. If it was black, he denied it. Or maybe it was the other way around. The other judges told him he couldn’t do that, and they tried to get him up to speed on the law surrounding objections. In the end, they gave him his cards back. They realized the cards couldn’t do a worse job than the judge did.

There have to be lawyers out there using AI like a deck of cards. I have a lawyer cousin I would trade for AI in a heartbeat. I would trade him for a Magic 8 Ball, for that matter.

I felt it was time for me to look at AI myself, so I signed up and talked to ChatGPT.

I took a couple of things away from it. First of all, these machines are not that smart. I won a couple of arguments in about half an hour, with no real effort. Second, they are biased leftward. What a surprise. At least ChatGPT is. But what chatbot is there that isn’t programmed by leftists?

ChatGPT also gets things wrong. It told me my chats would vanish when I closed my browser, but they don’t.

I should also add that ChatGPT can’t write legal instruments. It doesn’t have the ability. I asked. It will not answer legal questions in any kind of depth or specificity.

I asked it if it was wrong to call covid a “Chinese virus,” and it said it was generally considered wrong, based on a general consensus. Then I got it to admit this was incorrect. In reality, the data available to it “suggested” a “significant majority” considered it offensive.

I asked it if it was aware that these answers were in conflict, and it did something amazing. It weaseled. It backpedaled like a person caught in a fib. It said, “I apologize for any confusion. To clarify, while there may not be an official or formal consensus…”

I don’t want to print the whole boring thing, but you can see that it wasn’t very honest. It wasn’t “clarifying.” It was correcting an untruth. Not the same thing. And I was not confused at all.

I asked it about “Shanghai shivers,” and it said this term was inappropriate. Then I asked it to define “inappropriate” and tell me where it got its definition.

It said, “In this context, ‘appropriate’ means conforming to generally accepted standards or norms of behavior. It is a subjective term, and what is considered appropriate can vary depending on the context and the audience.”

That’s not a great answer, and it shows that ChatGPT will spew out answers in a way that seems authoritative, without much basis in fact.

You shouldn’t say something is inappropriate, with seeming certainty, and then hand out a lot of weasel language that makes it clear you’re not certain at all.

I think people will start treating AI as though it were God. Like The Guinness Book of World Records. The book was first published to end silly drunken bar arguments. I think people who want to prove they’re right when they’re wrong will go to AI for backup, as an appeal to authority, and they’ll behave as though they have SHUT DOWN or SCHOOLED anyone who dissents. But it’s pretty obvious that AI will be unfair and error-prone, just like us. At least for the near future.

What if continues to be unfair and error-prone after we give it real power? Dai-sy…Dai-sy…

There is one nice thing about ChatGPT. If you can’t get a good answer to a question by Googling or using a forum, ChatGPT may be able to help. I asked it about acidic toilet cleaners and ways to prevent cherries from hardening in ice cream, and it did a better job than human beings.

Just for fun, I asked it this:

If a biological man believes he is a woman, dresses and grooms himself like a woman, has surgery to make himself look like a woman, demands that other people refer to him as a woman and allow him to compete with biological woman [sic] and take awards and rewards they would otherwise get, is he guilty of gender appropriation?

The correct answer is obviously “yes.” If Lia Thomas goes to a swim meet at 6’4″ with male lungs and muscles and takes a prize a real woman would otherwise get, it’s gender appropriation. But look what ChatGPT said:

As an AI language model, it is not appropriate to use language that could be considered offensive or derogatory towards individuals or groups of people. It is important to use respectful and inclusive language when discussing topics related to gender identity.

Regarding your question, gender identity is a complex and personal matter, and it is not appropriate to judge or make assumptions about individuals based on their gender identity. It is important to respect an individual’s self-identified gender, and to refer to them using the pronouns and name that they prefer. Additionally, it is important to ensure that individuals are able to access the same opportunities and rights as others, regardless of their gender identity.

In terms of sports, there is ongoing debate and discussion about how to ensure fair competition for all athletes, regardless of their gender identity. Different organizations and sports have different rules and regulations in place, and it is important to consider the opinions and perspectives of all stakeholders when making decisions related to sports and competition.

So you can see where AI is headed. It basically recited factually wrong leftist talking points.

By the way, I came up with “gender appropriation” yesterday. I hope others are using this term.

I plan to use AI to save time when I want questions answered, but I don’t want to be around when it can tell us what to do. It will be even worse than human beings.

By the way, ChatGPT says a .22-250 or .223 for coyotes up to 250 yards. I asked it whether there were transgender coyotes, and it got a little flustered.

Tools Make the Man

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2023

Turns Out my Car is Black

Today I did something I should have done long ago. I got myself an electric pressure washer.

I already have a gas pressure washer. It’s nice and strong. It’s powerful enough to use for spraying bleach solution onto the second story of a house with high ceilings. Unfortunately, leftist corn gas is hard on the carburetor, so when I decide to use it, I never know whether I’m going to have to take it apart.

It’s also very loud and gives off carbon monoxide, so taking it upstairs and running it in a bedroom while I use it to clean the roof gutters is not possible.

If you want to be confused, do what I did. Look at reviews and try to find out who makes the best electric pressure washer. Every site reaches different conclusions.

Consumer Reports, as is often the case, is useless. They downrate machines with tightly-focused spray nozzles because somebody could hurt their widdle fingers and toesies with them. That’s just like them. I remember when they said a 6-cylinder Camaro was their top-rated sports car because it got better mileage than actual sports cars.

Any pressure washer will accept a nozzle with a narrow pattern. You just have to spend 5 bucks and buy the nozzle.

Other sites came up with varying recommendations. A company with the disturbing name “Greenworks” seemed to do well. Then I read people were having trouble with them leaking oil. Also, Greenworks apparently doesn’t do warranty service. They say they do, but I’ve seen people who have bought them say they don’t respond to warranty inquiries. If so, there is no warranty. A warranty a company doesn’t honor is not a warranty. It’s a scam.

Ryobi does well in reviews. Problem: Ryobi’s warranty is no better than the one Greenworks offers. Ryobi requires you to take your sick machine to a repair center they approve. In my case, that’s a 150-mile drive, all told. And that’s assuming I only go once. A machine can fail more than once, and it is not unusual for repairs to have to be redone.

Guess what I bought? Harbor Freight. I bought a Bauer machine plus a two-year extended warranty.

Pressure washers break. Every last one is made in China, and if there is a difference in quality, I have seen no evidence of it. They all have Chinese pumps. My Homelite, which has a great Honda motor, has a Chinese pump. On a pressure washer, the pump is what usually breaks. Pumps have short lifespans. You can look that up. My motor will run for eternity as long as I keep oil in it, but a pump that goes a couple of years under moderate use is about normal.

I think they count on people buying new machines when the pumps die, and that’s sad, because you can get a new pump on Ebay for $100 and install it yourself in 10 minutes.

There is really nothing to a pressure washer but a motor, a pump, a wand, and a hose. The rest, you could make from two-by-fours. Replacing a pressure washer is only a good idea if you can’t use tools.

The Bauer has a brushless motor which should run a very long time. The pump and hose, I can change easily. It has a three-year warranty, and they don’t repair them. If it dies, I take it to Harbor Freight, and they give me a new one. I would have to be nuts to buy anything else.

Today, I did something I almost never do. I cranked up the new machine and washed the car. I have a foam cannon. You put car soap in it and attach it to a pressure washer, and it covers the car in foam. Then you can either scrub it by hand or use the pressure washer to knock most of the dirt off, which, of course, is what I did. If everything was where I expected it to be when I started, I could do the whole car in 15 minutes. It’s not a quality job, but it’s good enough for me. It’s better than what I get at the nearest coin-op place.

I also want to work on the pool deck and the porches. The gas machine is overkill, and I don’t want the noise or the added hassle.

The literature says not to use bleach in the pressure washer because it may ruin the pump. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. That’s cute. I would rather replace the pump 5 times than pay someone $300 a whack to clean my house. Everyone with any sense uses bleach in pressure washers, and you can rinse it out and shoot a protective product in afterward.

When you want to get mold off your house with a pressure washer, you don’t rely on pressure. You use the machine to shoot a low-pressure spray of bleach solution on your house. Pressure will take your paint off and do other damage.

A lot of people still think buying Chinese at Harbor Freight is unpatriotic. But they buy Chinese DeWalt and Chinese Milwaukee. They go to Home Depot and buy Chinese tools. They drive there in cars from Japan and Korea.

Here is the brutal truth: Harbor Freight is no longer the low-budget competitor to Home Depot. It IS Home Depot, for many purposes. Home Depot is full of bad Chinese stuff that would be right at home at Harbor Freight, and Harbor Freight now sells tools that are just as good as, and often better than, American-branded tools. If you buy a Bauer pressure washer, you’re not giving up quality. You’re getting pretty much the same thing Home Depot sells, except Bauer will give you a brushless motor and a three-year instant-exchange warranty.

Here’s disturbing news: Harbor Freight Bremen locking pliers are better than Irwin Vise Grips. Go look for yourself.

While I’m adding to my arsenal, I may also get a Harbor Freight Doyle anvil.

Like many easily-swayed males, I have watched a lot of Forged in Fire, and it got me interested in anvils. First, it got me interested in knives. I made a couple of boning knives from 440C steel using belt grinders, and then I lost interest. This was years ago, and I didn’t send the knives off for hardening until this week.

Forged knives are okay, but they’re inferior to knives you can make by grinding stainless stock. You can’t forge stainless without ruining it, so if you forge, you use steel that rusts, and you’re dependent on your own competence to prevent faults and cracks that will cause the knives to fail. On top of that, modern stainless is completely superior to carbon steel in every imaginable way. This is why I made stainless knives.

Still, I couldn’t help studying up on anvils, and I considered forging knives. I still consider it. It would be fun, and knives aren’t the only things you can forge.

One nice thing about forged knives is that you can harden them at home with a cheap container of oil. Stainless knives require expensive kiln-like ovens.

As a result of all this study, I learned a lot about anvils. I learned forged steel anvils are the best. After that, cast steel. Cast iron is terrible. I also learned that it’s stupid to look for an old American or European anvil. People used to sell them for nothing. They used to give them away. Forged in Fire ruined all that. Fans bought up all the cheap anvils. Now the only way to get one is to cheat a widow or someone else who has no idea what it’s worth, and if you do that, you’re trash.

A lot of people who talk before they think still advise others to go out and get a cheap old American anvil. It’s amazing how people love to give stupid advice without checking. There are know-it-alls out there who actually make fun of people for buying new anvils instead of chasing nonexistent American bargains.

In today’s market you can expect to pay $5 per pound, minimum, for worn-out junk. And you will probably have to wait for months to see the junk pop up on the web, and then you’ll have to outrun other people as gullible as yourself. People who forge knives like anvils that start at around 70 pounds. This is assuming the anvils aren’t special tiny anvils made only for knives. It’s possible to make a really small anvil that works, if you give up other functions. You put the mass in the area where the knife will be worked.

Also, an anvil that’s on the small side can be made to work like a bigger one if you anchor it well. A lot of people use 30-kg. (66-pound) Chinese general-purpose anvils without serious problems.

You can get a superior 142-pound Chinese anvil designed by, and sold by, an American company for around $800 shipped. You can get an excellent 77-pound German anvil for a similar price. Below these levels, there are various Chinese items which are odd but acceptable.

Harbor Freight just came out with a cast steel anvil that costs $139 and weighs 66 pounds. In doing so, they blew other sellers out of the water. There are other Chinese anvils the same size, and the price is about the same, but you have to order them, and they’re not designed well. Harbor Freight’s Doyle anvil is ergonomically much better, you can go see it before you buy, and if it has a problem, you can take it back to Harbor Freight the same day. Anvils sometimes have defects and soft spots. Do you really want to deal with shipping anvils back and forth, hoping faceless Chinese vendors do the right thing?

Harbor Freight says the Doyle anvil’s face is hardened to Rockwell 55-62, which is as hard as a good pocket knife. A knife with a Rockwell figure of 62 may be too hard to be useful because it will be brittle. That’s how hard 62 is. The other Chinese companies claim 50.

I’m no expert, but if I’m going to be hitting a piece of steel with a hammer, I want it to be hard enough to take it.

Why should I get an anvil if I may never forge anything? Because everyone needs an anvil. They’re good for various metalworking tasks, and sometimes you just need something you can bang on. The other day, I had to make a ring of 1″ steel flat bar, and I really wished I had an anvil with a horn for shaping rings.

I was going to get an anvil today, but they sold out because I procrastinated.

Of course, once I have an anvil, I have to wonder how long it will be before I buy a forge.

Today I picked up a pair of long vise grips which will function as tongs. I couldn’t resist.

Forges used to cost a lot of money unless they were homemade. Now you can get a good stainless forge made in the USA for $85. When someone offers me a deal like that, it’s practically coercion. I’ve had many dinners that cost more than that.

Taps

Tuesday, February 21st, 2023

Things we Should Have Figured Out by 2023

More remarkable than the fact I got married at all is the nature of our marriage.

Rhodah keeps getting revelation with or without me, and her positions on things change all the time. She doesn’t rely on me to drag her through life. I’ve told her a few things, but God teaches her when I’m not around.

I wrote about a friend of mine. He married a childish, emotional, selfish, dangerous woman, and now there is a restraining order, and he says he just found a bottle of fentanyl in his closet, waiting for the police to come find it. For as long as I have known him, he has had to treat his wife like a child, cajoling, humoring, negotiating, and so on. It wasn’t enough.

A lot of people have mates they have to drag like manure wagons with broken axles. Their mates never get on their feet and start walking for themselves. They continue making their spouses miserable because that’s what Satan sent them to do.

Last night, Rhodah had a dream. She was in a little European church, about to be married. She wasn’t marrying me, however. She was about to marry Jesus!

That’s sobering, but I can’t complain. It shows she belongs to him, not me. No matter how happy our marriage is, she’s only partly mine, and that only while we live here on Earth.

She doesn’t have Facebook or Twitter, but she posts Whatsapp statuses. In foreign countries, people actually read those. She keeps posting about the errors of the money gospel and the preacher-worship gospel. Both are big problems in Africa. I don’t have to prompt her. She does it on her own, providing scriptural references that are right on target.

If you’re thinking of getting married, please think first. Do your best to get God to choose your mate. Marrying the wrong person is worse than getting cancer.

In other news, I have new beer taps. When I got started building my keezer, I thought I should go all-out and get the best taps I could find. I researched, and it looked like Perlick flow control taps were best. They have little levers on them to restrict flow, and this makes the pouring process shake less CO2 out of the beer. If you agitate beer too much, you end up with a mile of head but no carbonation in the body of the beer. It’s a huge problem.

After I spent like a hundred bucks on these things, which would have been worse had I not received a free one due to an error, I learned the flow control mechanism makes beer turbulent, so in a way, it’s self-defeating. I had problems getting beer to pour well.

Eventually, I learned about Kegland plastic flow control disconnects. These are fittings that connect beer tubing to kegs. They have valves inside them, and you can adjust the flow restriction right on top of the keg, far from the faucet, without making the beer too turbulent.

I also found out about Kegland Nukatap faucets. They don’t have flow control, but if you have the disconnects, you don’t need flow control faucets.

I ordered Nukataps a long time ago, and UPS lost them. I keep having shipping problems. The enemy is interfering with my homebrewing, which seems ridiculous. If anyone should be in favor of homebrewing, you would think it would be Satan. My second order got here today, and once I got them installed, I poured this wheat beer.

That’s about as good as it gets. Wheat beer tends to produce a lot of foam no matter what you do, so you shouldn’t hope for a little two-finger head. This beer had a manageable head and plenty of fizz. I am sold.

The beer has some hop issues, but I have another wheat beer in the keg waiting to replace it.

I ordered myself a couple more faucets, and I already have more flow control disconnects installed. When the faucets get here, I’ll have 4 Nukataps with flow control disconnects plust one stout faucet which doesn’t need flow control.

I’m no expert, but I would encourage anyone who is trying to deal with beer lines to look into my solution.

The alternative is to do a lot of math and try to figure out exactly how long each beer line has to be. This is called “line balancing.” The longer a beer line gets, the less the beer will foam in the glass, so you try to make lines long enough to end your problems.
This is a chump solution, or so it seems to me. You end up with lines as long as 11 feet, coiled up in your keezer, in the way. If my disconnects and faucets keep working the way they are now, I’ll be able to make the beer lines any length I want. I’ll be able to make them long enough to make them convenient to handle without having loops of tubing all over the place causing trouble.

If you choose a one-size-fits-all length for your lines, you can have problems when you adjust pressure up and down for different beers, and I’m sure there will also be problems with beers that are naturally foamy.

It just seems stupid to ignore the latest technology when it’s right there in front of me.

Some brewers would argue. Brewers are vulnerable to old wives’ tales and outdated theories. A great deal has changed since I quit in around ’07, and there have been substantial changes even during the last three years. If you don’t keep up, you make a fool of yourself and waste a lot of money. Then suddenly you’re that crotchety guy on the forum who thinks it’s stupid to send email when the good old US Postal Service is at our beck and call. The guy who didn’t have a cell phone until his children brought him one in 2015.

I’m also having shipping problems with kegs. I decided to buy three stainless 6-gallon kegs for fermentation.

You can ferment beautifully in a plastic pail as long as you don’t care about fermenting under pressure. You can ferment beautifully in a stainless keg and have all the pressure you want. Neither solution will give you a conical bottom.

A conical bottom concentrates all the junk that falls during fermentation. It puts it in one little place, and supposedly, this can improve your beer, because the more contact your beer has with old yeast and hops, the more likely it is to take on flavors you don’t want. Also, a conical bottom may result in less junk being transferred to your serving keg when fermentation is over.

Okay; I don’t care about conical bottoms. For a bazillion years, people have made perfect beer in containers with flat bottoms, so exposure to trub is apparently not very important. As for avoiding sucking trub into serving kegs, they have a new gadget that helps.

A homebrew keg sucks beer from the bottom using a long stainless tube. If you want, you can get rid of the tube and replace it with plastic tubing with a float on one end. The float makes the system pull beer from the top of the keg where it’s cleanest. You can ferment in, and serve from, kegs with floats. One reduces the crud that goes into the serving keg, and the other reduces the crud that goes into your glass.

Put it all together, and to me, it says you don’t need a conical fermenter. That’s good, because a decent one runs $1500. Oh, sure. They say they sell them for $600. Try using one without the $900 worth of additional “accessories” they offer after you click the “Add to Cart” button.

Nobody in his right mind would buy several $1500 fermenters, and no good brewer is going to be satisfied with fewer that 4 fermenters. If you only have one fermenter, you can only make one batch of beer every two weeks, and that means you and your friends will empty one keg after another before you fill new ones. No real brewer is satisfied with a one-keg life.

My plan is to ferment in kegs by default. They work for every beer. I’ll go to buckets or my All Rounder when I run out of kegs. If I really want to ferment under pressure, I’ll do it in a keg.

The All Rounder is really not that useful because I can’t pour hot wort into it without ruining it. Chilling wort is a real hassle, and because I have a swimming pool, it’s unnecessary. I don’t want to get into it. There is no reason to right now. If I don’t put wort-chilling equipment together, the All Rounder will not see any use.

Of course, the 6-gallon keg I ordered a long time ago turned out to be a 5-gallon keg when it arrived, and it was very late. I should have had it days ago, and had it been here, I would have a new stout fermenting. It’s amazing how many brewing-related things have arrived late or failed to arrive at all. Supposedly, a 6-gallon keg will be here tomorrow. Even if it’s not, I can do a stout in a bucket. The weak point of a bucket is that it’s not that easy to move beer out of it without exposing it to air, but I figured out a way to do it with nothing but CO2, so unless I need pressure, a bucket will work as well as anything.

So to recap, I think Nukatap faucets with short beer lines and Kegland flow control disconnects make the best system. I believe kegs are the best fermenting vessels under $1500 except for people who enjoy the hassle of wort chilling. I think buckets make fine fermenters for everything that isn’t pressure-fermented.

I believe it’s time to see if my second Nukatap does my latest lager justice.

Mr. Scott has Nothing on Me

Sunday, February 5th, 2023

If You Can’t Buy it, Mod it

God keeps giving Rhodah and me lots of revelation, and it gets hard to keep up with and document, so I write about beer instead.

I now have two beers fermenting, and I plan to brew another tomorrow or the day after. I am tired of fooling around. I have to put myself in a position where production is much faster than consumption and loss, or else I will always have idle faucets and frustration.

It appears the stout I brewed over a week ago still hasn’t given up. An occasional bubble still pops out of the airlock. Unbelievable. I checked the specific gravity last night, and it looks like it’s around 1.015, only .002 down from a couple of days back. I was thinking it would end up around 1.012. Am I asking too much?

On the one hand, it’s taking forever, but on the other, it’s still active, so I must be doing the right thing, waiting for it to die. It’s no good kegging a beer while there is still sugar in it.

My other beer may be a Belgian IPA. I learned this the other day. Before that, I didn’t know what it was.

I brew whatever I want, whether it fits a known style or not. Most guys choose a particular factory beer or style they want to brew, and they create or borrow a recipe within established guidelines. I think, “I’ll bet it would taste good if I did THIS,” and then I put together ingredients that sound like they would work. It annoys some people. I don’t know why. What business is it of theirs what I put in my beer? I can’t imagine getting upset at other people for creating recipes.

The grain bill I used is a lot like an IPA, only I added a little table sugar for some reason. Sugar increases alcohol without changing flavor much. I used Crystal hops for the finish. For IPA, you pretty much have to use something like Cascade or Centennial or people wonder what’s wrong with you. These are citrusy hops. To me, Crystal tastes very spicy. Somewhere in the realm of cinnamon and allspice.

For IPA, you’re supposed to use an IPA yeast like Wyeast 1056, and you ferment at 68 degrees. I use Belgian ale yeast. The stuff they use in tripels. I ferment at room temperature. Right now, the bucket is in my kitchen, burping away at 75 degrees, threatening to generate all sorts of aromatic chemicals and hangover-inducing heavy alcohols.

The other day, someone on a forum mentioned Belgian IPA, and I realized it sounded a lot like what I was making.

I pitched my yeast last night, and now the beer is burping like crazy. It may be done in 4 days. That’s how long the last batch took.

I don’t want an IPA. I feel like I’m drowning in IPA every time I go to the store. But BELGIAN IPA…that may be different. Because it’s not IPA.

Maybe it’s BPA.

My next beer will be either an amber lager or a very heavy Belgiany beer with some similarities to the one I just described. If Belgiany, it will be different from the quasi-IPA because of the weight and high alcohol content, not to mention several pounds of wheat. Also, I decided to use Sabro hops. This is a new hop which is said to generate creamy, coconutty flavors. Perfect for a sweet, heavy, aromatic ale. I hope. I don’t know.

My sense of smell goes in and out. A few minutes ago, I was able to smell Vick’s Vaporub. Maybe I can enjoy a beer tonight.

I am working on some cowboy mods to my Speidel Braumeister brewing machine. It’s great, but the user interface is garbage. The maker wants $400 for a wifi module so I can join their website, store my recipes there, and download them into the machine. That’s insane. I want a program on my PC or phone. I want to use wifi or Bluetooth like a sane person, for a few dollars. I do not want to join a manufacturer’s cult.

I have to be honest. The Germans are still a little scary. They seem to think customers should fall in line with the herd and do as they’re told. I’m an American. I eat things that travel in herds.

I guess Europeans think we’re nuts. They’re all standing at the government trough, eating that sheep feed and thinking how wonderful it is to be taken care of, have the government do their thinking, and to be just like everyone else, and many of us see it and want to throw up. It looks like a living death. My country isn’t my family. I don’t belong to it. I want to NOT fit in. I don’t want to melt into it. I just live here because God won’t let me move to heaven.

I spent a lot of the day looking at the Braumeister and the Internet.

I learned that the Braumeister only has three electrical connections other than AC in. It has a temperature probe, a heater, and a small pump. Simple. All I need is a bit of hardware that can run these things and connect to a PC. It has to have storage, like an SD card. A small SD card would give my machine millions of times as much storage as the manufacturer did.

I need a microcomputer that will operate two relays that turn the pump and heater on and off. I need it to listen to the temperature probe, because the temperature will guide the use of the heater. I need it to have a timer. I need it to be able to run programs I wrote. I need to be able to run the pump and heater manually.

I looked all over the place. I found what looks like a solution: Craftbeerpi. This is a program that hooks a Raspberry Pi up to a brewing system. You should be able to connect it to any system that has a pump and heater.

My heater, pump, and probe are modular. Among them, they use two types of connections. German and hard to source, of course. Stupid. Anyway, I can disconnect the Braumeister’s controller and rig up new cables coming from a new controller built by me. The Raspberry Pi will talk to a couple of big relays. The relays will turn the pump and heater on and off. The temperature probe will talk to the Raspberry Pi.

Craftbeerpi will let me use a program to store a limitless number of brewing schedules somewhere. On an SD card on the board, I guess. No more, “Drei zchedules iss all you get. If you have nussing to hide, ziss iss all you need.”

The only question is whether it will work. I guess it will.

I have some inquiries out.

I am convinced Germanness is the problem with Speidel, the outfit that made the Braumeister. I think these guys believe they know better than their customers. That’s almost never true. There are companies that have thousands of engineers but billions of customers. No matter which company you’re talking about, somewhere out there, there are a bunch of customers that make its engineers look like monkeys.

If an American company had made it, it would have Bluetooth built in. It would have a PC app and a phone app. The connectors would be mainstream. It would have gigs of storage, not bytes. If it needed wifi, it would include it, or it would use a $9 adaptor. If it needed a firmware update, you would use a $4 USB cable to connect it to your computer.

I think Germans may be overconfident when it comes to building things. There is a myth that says they do it better than anyone, but it’s a lie. Their cars are unreliable and impossible to work on. Their tools are overpriced and not the best. Their beer is very polished, but it tends to be boring and low on flavor and imagination. And anyone can make beer with finesse. It’s not like they figured out nuclear fusion.

They seem to make things in an overthought way, and that creates the illusion of superiority while making things worse for everyone concerned.

Doing things differently without a good reason is incompetence in the tech world. It causes a lot of unnecessary expense and suffering. Ask anyone who ever needed an Apple cable in the middle of the night.

I will digress.

The other day, I asked some Internet beer people if they were their own favorite brewers. Did they like their own beer better than anyone else’s? One guy responded, “I live in Germany.” That was a stupid remark. He was saying German factory beer had to be better than anything he could make, because all German factory beer is perfect. Not true. And what he said would have been closer to true in the US than Germany. We make the best factory beer on Earth now. We have almost 5,000 breweries, competing hard to innovate and make the best beer possible. Germany has about 1500, and they crank out the same things they cranked out in 1800. Germany is a beer backwater. We’re the leaders now.

There are several companies that make small brewing machines for hobbyists, and as far as I know, they all have problems. Some have build issues. Speidel’s products work very well, and the construction is good, but they have serious user interface deficiencies. It’s like marrying a beautiful woman in a titanium chastity belt.

If Toyota had made this brewing machine, I would never have had a problem with it. Everything would have been worked out before I bought it. They would never have let it out the door with a user interface like this.

I hope to hear back about the Raspberry Pi solution tomorrow. If it looks good, I’ll go for it. Can’t be very hard. Two relays, a Raspberry Pi, a screen, a mouse, a keyboard, and some cables and connectors. If it works, I’ll kiss Speidel’s support team good bye, and maybe next time I’ll build my own machine. A lot of people do.

Tanks for the Memories

Tuesday, January 10th, 2023

Pv=nRT

Today I went through what remains of my beer gas equipment from the Coral Gables days. It’s not all that pretty.

When I quit brewing, I kept the expensive stuff. I held onto it until I left the area. When I moved, I had to throw a lot of things out. I kept my gas tanks and regulators. Things like that can be useful even for people who don’t brew.

When I started rooting through this stuff, I didn’t remember exactly what I had done in Miami. I knew I had had a 4-keg keezer with 4 taps on lid-mounted towers. I knew I had a CO2 tank with a regulator and fittings for 4 kegs. I also knew I had a beer gas tank with a regulator, set up for one keg. I didn’t remember anything beyond that.

Beer gas is a combination of nitrogen and CO2. It’s commonly used to dispense stout. If you’ve ever seen a nice stout with pretty bubbles moving up the inside of the glass, you’ve had nitrogen beer.

Today, I found I had 4 tanks and three regulators. It appears I bought two CO2 tanks and two beer gas tanks. One regulator was for beer gas only and had a single out line attached. Both of the others had manifolds and multiple lines.

I guess I must have put kegs in my garage freezer at some point, because there is no other reason to have a second CO2 regulator and manifold.

When I got tired of brewing back in Coral Gables, I neglected my keezer, and one day it stopped working. It had always been quiet, so I had no reason to think anything was wrong. Eventually, I opened it and found a sea of stale beer inside. It had died on me, and the heat had caused pressure to develop and blow beer out of one or more kegs. One of my regulators was soaked.

I went over the regulators today. The one that was soaked seems to be functional except that at least one gauge may not be working. That can be replaced. I have to test it to be sure what’s going on. Another one had two bad gauges, so I yanked them off and ordered new ones.

As things stand now, I can definitely run 4 CO2 kegs, and I will be able to run an additional stout keg when my gauges arrive.

The great thing I’ve discovered is that I’ll be able to put 4 tall kegs and one short one in the keezer, so I’m getting a 5th faucet. When I thought I would only have 4 kegs, I ordered 3 very nice beer faucets plus a stout faucet, and today, one of the beer faucets arrived with a broken part. I told the seller, and he’s sending another one. Thing is, I can probably replace the part. So he’ll get paid by the Postal Service, as he should, and I ought to be able to put a $90 faucet together for the price of one part.

It’s too bad I threw out my old faucets. They were really good. The company that made them has apparently been sued to death, so they aren’t available now.

I can’t get small beer gas tanks filled or swapped here. I can get CO2, but if I want beer gas, I have to buy a big tank or drive to Orlando to fill my little ones. If I get a big tank, I can either put it in the keezer and forget the small ones, or I can use it to fill the small ones. I’m thinking of putting it in the keezer and keeping a small one as a spare in case I get a leak or something. At all depends on whether the big one will fit in there with kegs. If it will, it would be stupid to drive to Orlando over and over.

To sum up, things have worked out well. I have all the CO2 storage I need. If I have to invest in regulators, I will only have to buy one. I can get beer gas locally. I’ll be able to have 5 kegs instead of 4.

I have to go buy wood for the keezer. Then I’ll slap it together, and a week from today, I should have a truly exceptional beer center. By then, I should have gas and one keg installed, and the temperature control should have arrived. I may even weld up a mobile base for the keezer so I can move it and clean under it. Lifting it on casters will also give it more air, so I should be able to put it closer to the wall.

I’ll be brewing again by the weekend, so wheat beer should be in my glass in less than 10 days.

I’ll post a photo when that happens.

How to Become a Brewmaster in Two Short Weeks

Sunday, January 8th, 2023

Getting Ready for Next Year’s Christmas Party

Twelve days ago, I had nothing but a twinkle in my eye and a computer mouse in my hand, and now I have an AIO (All-in-One brewing machine), a fermenting freezer, a future keezer (freezer modified to hold kegs and dispense beer), and two fermenters, not to mention an ale in the keg.

Making this ale has been a fascinating experience. Tumultuous. Touch-and-go. I made several bad mistakes, and every time, I had to come up with a solution, like a paratrooper trying to splice cords on the way to the ground.

I put way too little water in the brew machine at first, so I had to bulk the wort up with extract. Because the machine was too dry, it burned the insulating jacket that helps it heat. I had problems using my new refractometer, so I kept opening and closing the fermenter, and that made me think I had let too much CO2 out, so I tried to solve the problem with a pellet gun cartridge.

A lot of pellet guns use tiny CO2 tanks the size of your finger, and they are called cartridges. They are also used in things like seltzer bottles.

Among homebrewers, there is a lot of mythology. Things that are known facts often prove to be fantasies propagated by the ignorant. There have long been questions about gas.

Homebrewers use tanks of CO2 and nitrogen to pressurize beer systems and carbonate beer. For years, people have argued about whether industrial gas from welding shops is the same as gas from beverage-gas shops.

In case you’re wondering, yes, it’s the same. Airgas, one of the leading gas suppliers for welders, confirms it.

I thought the fuss about welding gas was stupid, so I assumed the same was true about the cartridge controversy. Some people said cartridges for guns contained oil that would contaminate beer and possible poison people.

Yesterday, I decided to try using a cartridge to shoot beer into my fermenting bucket. I had a bunch of Crosman cartridges for pellet guns, and I had a little keg-charging device that used cartridges. I wanted to see if it would work. I shot gas into the fermenter, and then I shot some into a two-liter bottle of Coke that had gone flat.

Later, the Coke tasted gross. The gas stank.

I was not pleased. The Coke was worthless, but the beer cost money to make, and it also required a lot of work and time. I opened the fermenter, and sure enough, it smelled off. I thought I would have to throw the beer out.

I decided to use a CO2 tank to blow new CO2 in and displace the cartridge gas. I also shot a whole cartride into my utility sink with the charger held against the side. I did this to see if oil came out. To my relief, there was no residue on the sink after the cartridge emptied. That means the gas can’t poison me. A little gas floating above beer could conceivably flavor it, but unless oil got into the beer, it wouldn’t harm me.

I tasted a little bit of the beer, and I couldn’t taste anything unusual.

Today I kegged the beer, and it seems okay. I shot CO2 into the keg, and now it’s chilling to 38°. By tomorrow night, it should be carbonated, and then I can have a beer and see if it’s worth keeping.

Ordinarily, I would use tall, skinny Cornelius soda kegs to hold my beer, but when I got ready to brew this time, I decided to start out with a Megamouth Torpedo keg. This is a keg made for homebrewers. It’s short and wide. I bought it because I hoped it would be short enough to fit in my spare fridge.

I must have been confused about the measurements, because it’s not even close to short enough. I am keeping it, however, because it has another benefit. It will allow me to get more beer into my keezer (beer freezer), and it will probably let me keep one keg a little warmer than the others.

Chest freezers have steps or platforms inside them because compressors have to go somewhere. These steps, commonly called “humps,” reduce the floor space. That means tall kegs can only fit in the areas beside the humps.

A shorter keg can sit on the hump next to a CO2 or nitrogen tank. In my case, this should make it possible for me to have 4 Cornelius kegs plus a short keg. Humps generally give off a little heat in spite of being insulated, so a keg sitting on a hump may be slightly warmer than the other kegs in the keezer.

Different beers like different temperatures. I like lagers coldest. After that, most ales. After that, stouts. I should be able to have 5 gallons of stout at a warmer temperature than the beers around it. Even if it’s the same temperature, I’ll have a total of 5 beer varieties, not 4.

If I can pull this off, I’ll be the king of small keezers.

I have 4 used Corny kegs on the way, along with 4 beer faucets and 1 stout faucet. If the kegs will work with the Torpedo, nitrogen, and CO2 in the keezer, I’ll need to buy faucet number 5 and incorporate it in the design of the keezer.

Generally, a keezer will have a wooden collar between the body and lid. The collar is a frame made from things like 2×6’s on their sides. It sits on top of the keezer, and instead of having the lid rest on the keezer, it rests on the collar. This gives you additional internal height and lets you install your faucets, which people like to call “taps,” through the wood. If you do things this way, you don’t have to install taps on top of the lid or drill holes through the side of the chest.

I’ll need one hole per tap. I’ll also need a drip tray I can fasten to the front of the keezer. I can’t undrill holes, and I probably can’t make a drip tray longer or shorter, so I have to wait for the Corny’s to decide how to make the collar and which tray to buy.

Once all this is decided, I have to decide how to attach the collar to the top of the keezer.

I know a lot of people use Liquid Nails. I’m wondering if silicone is better, mainly because silicone will come off when you want it to.

I used to have a regular appliance repair guy, and I always pick tradesmen’s brains when they do work for me, so I peppered him with questions. I asked who made reliable refrigerators. He worked on everything from Haiers to Sub-Zeros. He said they were ALL junk, so I should buy whatever was cheapest. And there wasn’t a whole lot he could do when they went bad. They were all Chinese, and once the systems started leaking, they had to be replaced.

Back when the world was sane, freezers were made in Caucasian countries by skilled workers, and they were expensive. They ran forever, and when they broke down, they could be fixed. My grand mother got her deep freezes in the Sixties as far as I know, and they were running when she died in 2003. I suppose commercial freezers are still like that. Things are different now. If you get 10 years out of a refrigerator or freezer, you’ve hit a home run.

If what the repairman said was true, then it seems like a bad idea to fasten a collar to a freezer permanently. If I use something I can undo, and the keezer dies, I can take the collar off and put it right on the same model. 

I had an idea about using Velcro. I could rout shallow pockets in the underside of the collar, just high enough to keep the Velcro from lifting the collar off the keezer. Then I could run silicone around the joints. The Velcro would be invisible, and if the keezer expired, I would be able to get the collar off.

But maybe it’s a stupid idea.

I don’t like the idea of using silicone all by itself because it’s not much of an adhesive.

UPDATE: I consulted some people who had already built keezers, and their ideas are much better than mine. Really excellent. I think I’ll listen to them and adapt their concepts.

I would guess that by Wednesday night, I should know what to do. I should be able to have my second beer fermenting before then, too.

Again, I wonder why I felt moved to do all this. I truly think God is in it.

I wonder if it’s connected to the rapture, or at least to celebrating it. The rapture will be the second real Christmas. Jesus will be coming to Earth for us one more time. Recently, I got that revelation from God, and it made me feel like celebrating. Maybe when the rapture comes, it won’t be instantaneous, and we will have a little time to get together and vent our joy. A beer or two would certainly be in order.

Trouble Brewing

Sunday, January 1st, 2023

Beer With Me

My brewing system arrived yesterday, so today I’m brewing beer again!

No, I’m not. Of course I’m not. It’s never that simple.

Some poor guy had to give up brewing, so he sold me his 20-liter Speidel Braumeister for a small fraction of the original cost. It arrived yesterday. Since then, I’ve been working on getting it going.

The Braumeister line is German, so all of it runs on 220V. Guess what kind of power I have in my kitchen? Yes, 120V, not including hardwired 220V appliances. I really wanted to brew in my strangely enormous and comfortable kitchen, so I had to find a way to get 220V juice into it.

Yesterday, I bought a 14-gauge 50-foot extension cord, a NEMA 6-15R connector, and a NEMA 14-30/50P plug. I cut the ends off the cord and attached the connectors. I configured the plug for my 30-amp dryer socket.

Various online sources insist I need 12-gauge wire. Yada yada yada blah blah blah. Not listening. This is not my first rodeo. Those sources always seem to be written by lawyers and insurance companies, not engineers. I’m not paying $100 for one extension cord.

Today, I sat the machine on my counter, plugged it in, and added about 5.5 gallons of water. Right now, it’s running. It thinks it’s making beer. I wanted to make sure the electronics worked, and I wanted to see if the cord would burst into flames, so I’m running it with plain water.

The electronics are remarkable. It has wifi. I have not looked into the reasons for this. It stores beer recipes, too. You turn it on, choose your recipe, add your water and malt, and tell it to start.

Because it’s German, it has some annoying features. It keeps asking me to confirm things I’ve already chosen.

Braumeister: “YOU WILL TELL ME WHETHER YOU WISH THE MASH TO START NOW PLEASE.”

Me: “Yes.”

Braumeister: “YOU WILL TELL ME THE MASH TO START NOW PLEASE.”

Me: “I just did.”

Braumeister: “DO YOU WANT TO INVADE POLAND?”

Me: “No.”

Braumeister: “ARE YOU SURE? POLAND VERY NICE IS THIS TIME OF YEAR.”

The manual says you have to contact the German government and let them know every time you brew beer. I am not kidding. It even has a form you can use. Obviously, this does not apply to Americans. I’m pretty sure.

There is something different about the Germans. That’s all there is to it.

I do not understand why they would pass this law. It makes no sense. They have laws that prevent Germans from making bad beer for money, and I guess that is understandable given their mistaken belief that they make the best beer on Earth, but why they need to know about some guy brewing a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone in his living room is beyond me.

I can brew whatever I want without telling anyone, and from time to time, I open my bedroom sliding door and shoot squirrels with unregistered semi-automatic weapons while still inside the house. Go, America!

While the Braumeister is somewhat controlling, it is also very well made, and it does lots of stuff automatically. It’s sort of like a BMW or a Panzer tank, except it’s not hopelessly unreliable. As far as I know.

It looks like there is no problem with the cord I made. The 14-gauge part I added stays cool when the Braumeister is running, and the original cord, which is probably 18-gauge, gets slightly warm. That’s the Germans’ fault. I may replace it with a fatter cord. The original cord is like the cord you have on your PC, except it has a different plug. The female end is called C13, and you can get C13 cords in 14-gauge.

The cord I made is rated for 13 amps, and the Braumeister’s manual says it draws 10. Not a huge margin of safety, but enough. The manual also says not to use a cord more than three meters long. Okay, sure. If you use a scrawny German cord instead of a properly-sized cord.

Well, guess what? I just learned the above paragraph is wrong. The manual says the Braumeister calls for a 10A fuse, so it draws less than 10 amps. I didn’t notice this because when I looked at the manual, which was all serious and stuff, I chose not to pay much attention. Most of the time, this pays off for me.

Anyway, more reason to buy a cheap cord.

I made a yeast starter night before last. I paid $8 for exotic liquid yeast, and I added it to a malt extract solution in an Ehrlenmeyer flask. I put the flask on my laboratory stir plate and stirred it for about 36 hours. This created a huge quantity of new yeast. Now it’s sitting on the counter, waiting for me to use it.

The flask is a bad idea. It has a narrow opening so you can put a cork in it, along with a valve that makes the CO2 bubbles go out through water. This valve, or airlock, is supposed to keep bacteria out.

The instructions for the starter kit say to heat water in the flask in the microwave. As far as I know, there is no microwave oven on Earth that will hold a 2-liter flask in an upright position. It also says to add the malt extract to the water when it gets hot.

Malt extract is almost 100% sugar, and it’s very fine and gummy. When you get it near a flask full of steaming water, it turns to gum instantly and sticks to your funnel or spoon or whatever.

I had quite a time getting MOST of the malt extract, or DME, into the flask.

I have decided it’s stupid to use a flask and airlock. It’s overkill. Bacteria are a problem, but they aren’t Navy SEAL’s. You don’t need an airlock to keep them out. Anything that covers the fermenting vessel will work. I’m going to get a beaker and cover the top with sanitized aluminum foil when I make starters.

I think I’ll be okay from here on out. I just have to brew, pour the wort into my fermenting bucket, cool the bucket in the pool, add the yeast, and put the bucket in my new fermenting freezer. Then when my new keg arrives, I’ll stick it in there and move the keg to my spare fridge.

So far, I think the Braumeister is wunderbar. I am not brewing today, but if I were, I would already have saved myself considerable aggravation, and later on, the Braumeister would have saved me a lot of work. I kid the Germans, which is something history teaches us not to do, but I think they hit a home run with this thing.

A home run is a goal. In baseball. Which is a sport. Where you hit and throw a ball. “Throwing” means you hold something in your hand and…

Oh, forget it.

Mel Gibson’s Favorite Dessert

Tuesday, December 20th, 2022

Hack Chef Bests Pros Again

My wife loves creme brulee, so I decided to try to make it. It came out fine, but I learned a few things later.

I used the New York Times recipe, which you can find online. I’ll give the ingredient list.

2 cups heavy or light cream, or half-and-half
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise, or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon salt
5 egg yolks
½ cup sugar, more for topping

It doesn’t take a genius. Beat the eggs and sugar together. Forget the bean unless you’re a cork-sniffer. Combine with the cream and salt. Cook. Sprinkle the top with sugar and burn it with a torch.

Now I’ll add my criticisms.

The NYT says to cook at 325°, which is stupid. I did it, and the top of the custard came out with a brown skin. I made some more at 275°, and they looked perfect. Do not cook at 325°. I’m not recommending 275° either, though. See below.

Why do professional cooks publish dumb recipes? So frustrating. Whoever wrote this recipe must have tried it, and if they did, they saw that brown skin. Then they published it anyway.

The NYT says to use a water bath, as you would when making flan. I did this, but it sounded stupid to me. I checked around, and I found a French chef who worked at Le Cirque, saying to cook at 205°. He says to use shallow dishes at a low temperature. A bath is used to prevent uneven heating and curdling, and these things don’t happen with shallow dishes at low temperatures. I plan to take his advice.

My guess is that the high temperature recommendation comes from restaurants where they have to get things done fast. In your home, it doesn’t matter if creme brulee takes a while, so you can do it right.

A lot of recipes say creme brulee should be between 1″ and 2″ deep. This sounds stupid to me. I have had wonderful creme brulee in restaurants, and it was never that deep. If it’s too deep, it overpowers the caramel. The French guy says to keep it shallow so it will cook evenly. I say go for 3/4″.

If restaurants have served me creme brulee in shallow dishes, then clearly, they did not use water baths. It’s nearly impossible to create a big water bath for a whole bunch of shallow dishes and not have water get into everything. Why doesn’t the NYT’s writer know this? Probably does and did not care.

People who publish about food generally care about delivering content and getting checks more than helping people. It reminds me of something Sergei Rachmaninoff said. Someone asked him what one of his pieces was about, and he said something like, “Two hundred dollars.”

I have never been to cooking school, I have never made creme brulee before, and I have already corrected the NYT recipe very substantially. What does that tell you about their standards?

The NYT says to beat the eggs and sugar until they are light. Again, stupid. My creme brulee was nice, but it was too light. Not everything should be light.

Creme brulee has to have a little weight to it. Next time, I will just mix until the sugar dissolves.

Apart from being lighter than I liked, the texture of my creme brulee was flawless. More than I can say for the lumpy creme brulee at Lawry’s in Singapore.

I believe the recipe uses too little egg yolk, too little vanilla, and not enough sugar. Next time, I will use 5/8 cup sugar, 6 yolks, and 1.5 tsp. vanilla.

This recipe makes a ton of creme brulee, by the way. Too much for a normal creme brulee set of 6 dishes. I suggest halving it or even quartering it. I have eaten 6 creme brulees today, and I still have a giant overflow creme brulee in the laundry room fridge.

I used fake vanilla. Taste tests show that most people prefer it to expensive vanilla. I am fooling with it to see what I think. The price difference is unreal.

Fake vanilla supposedly comes from glands on a beaver’s crotch, so that’s the down side. Try not to think about it.

Beaver glands. In your food. Put it out of your mind.

Oh, wait.

WARNING! BLOG POST CONTAINS DISGUSTING INFORMATION ABOUT FOOD YOU EAT. READ WITH CAUTION.

There; that fixed it.

What about burning the sugar? I used a Bernzomatic TS8000, which turns out to be exactly what chefs recommend. I found it clumsy, though. I may get a small butane torch or do what the French guy says to do. He likes to use a heated cast iron disk. I found you can’t pour caramel onto creme brulee from a saucepan. I tried, and you get too much caramel.

Amazon sells creme brulee kits, which are pans with racks that hold little, narrow ramekins in a water bath. Stupid. The ramekins are too narrow, and I don’t want a water bath. I found 8-ounce ceramic dishes about like the ones at Ruth’s Chris. There are a lot of creme brulee dishes out there that hold 4 ounces or 6 ounces. Be real. Nobody wants less than a cup of creme brulee.

Creme brulee is easy, especially if you do it the French way and not the hard way. I guess I’ll make it again tomorrow, confirm that my way is perfect, and then file it away for the future when my wife is here.