Mail-Order Bride Shipping Arrangements Made

Thanks, everyone who prayed for my wife to get her visa. They gave it to her this afternoon in Lusaka.

It’s an annoying story. They promised a response within 5 business days and then made us wait two weeks. It’s actually worse than that, because they didn’t do anything at all that we are aware of until she showed up yesterday at the embassy to find out what was going on.

I think they would have let our application go for weeks had she not visited the embassy. I believe we would still be waiting, and I also think she could have gotten the visa last week if she had gone earlier to shake them up.

She had a dream this morning. She was at her grandmother’s house, and a tall Arab dressed in white traditional clothes showed up and bombed the place. Somehow she knew he belonged to her church and attended regularly.

He had arrived on a private plane, and he left on one. He had authority behind him. He was rich.

It sounds bad, but her relatives on her dad’s side curse her and each other all the time. It’s a popular pastime in Zambia. When something good happens to someone in your family, you kill a chicken or whatever and curse them.

The immigration system is weird, as anyone who has seen luxury hotels full of illegals could tell you. I had to pay a new immigration fee today in order to get the green card processed. They should give you a green card when you get your visa, but they make you pay separately.

Looking for flights is annoying. We want her to go business class this one time in her life (until I croak). For $7000, I can get a somewhat better selection. For $5000 or less, I get a research project.

Orbitz offers a bunch of acceptable flights, but when you select one, it disappears or increases in price by a sizeable factor.

Skyscanner is supposedly one of the best flight sites now. We have also used Kayak a lot.

I found an acceptable flight, so we are all set.

Guess it’s time to shop for a turkey.

Rodent Ragnarok

Every so often, our government does something helpful. Today there are two pieces of good news.

First, it is now, once again, effectively, legal to put braces on pistols. Nationwide.

A brace can be pretty much the same thing as a buttstock. Some can be used to hold a pistol up to the shoulder to be fired like a rifle. There are also pistol braces that allow handicapped people to strap pistols to their arms so they can hold them more effectively.

The truth is that braces are popular because they allowed people to have short-barreled rifles without informing the feds. A brace can be used to turn an AR-15 or AK-47 into what is, all but legally, a rifle.

Joe Biden decided to forget about the Second Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act and order the ATF to come up with a rule banning pistol braces without expensive permits that take a year to get. To get a permit, you also give up your privacy. The feds keep a record so they can come get your guns later when the country devolves into utter chaos.

All sorts of legal tussling has taken place, and limited injunctions have been issued against the ATF. They helped some people, but not all. Yesterday, however, a Texas judge enjoined enforcement of the rule everywhere in the US.

What does this mean? It means the rule is gone for good. Probably. The injunction only applies while the case is being resolved, but the judge has made it clear he’s going to block the rule permanently. He has all but sworn it. After that, it goes to the 2A-friendly 5th Circuit. That will take a long time, and the 5th Circuit will very likely affirm. After that, the ATF will shoot for a Supreme Court review. They may not get it, and if they do, we have at least 5 justices who are usually pretty good about defending our civil rights. Some of our civil rights.

I suppose the ATF will file some kind of interlocutory appeal right away, but it probably won’t go anywhere, because the 5th Circuit will be the appellate court.

I’d say there is a 95% chance the rule will be dead for a couple of years. It should take that long for it to make it to the Supreme Court, which may or may not review the case. I’m afraid to guess how likely it is the Supreme Court will review the case or affirm. If they refuse to look at the case, it’s over. If they look at it, the odds of affirmation are definitely above 50%.

If the rule is dead for two years, it should be the end of it, because we are overwhelmingly likely to have a Republican president by then, and he will tell the ATF to let it go.

How important is this case? Probably not too important. To me, it means I can have a shouldered AK-47 6″ shorter in my vehicle. That’s great, but to be truthful, I doubt a 10″ barrel is much more likely to save lives than a 16″ barrel.

Still, the almost-certain end of the rule is a nice change. It means I can have the 10″ barrel, and I can also keep a short .22 rifle (oops–shouldered pistol) in my utility cart when I’m out and about on the farm.

And I won’t have to worry about going to prison over a gun part that has zero upward impact on crime rates.

Is it true to say using a brace is legal? I guess not, since the rule is still on the books. But if they can’t enforce it, who cares? In the unlikely event the rule survives, the ATF won’t be able to do anything to people who bought braces under the injunction. Before dusting off the jackboots, they’ll have to give everyone a chance to comply.

Now people have to ask themselves whether they should buy braces today or wait to see if there is an interlocutory appeal. You don’t want to spend $200 today and then have to discard the brace in two months.

Here is the second great thing the government is doing: they may drop the seasonal part of the squirrel hunting regulations on private land. Which is where I live.

Squirrels are horrible, and they are horrible all year round. They eat vehicle wiring. They eat patio furniture. They eat fruit and nuts. They give me dirty looks. I should be allowed to kill every squirrel I see, all the time, with anything short of an atom bomb. They are no better than rats. I should be allowed to kill a hundred a day and leave the bodies for the crows.

It is not unusual for me to look out the window and see 6 squirrels at once. This area is crawling with them. It’s infested with oaks, so it’s squirrel heaven. It’s too much. They need to go.

I haven’t been shooting them for a while. I’m a Christian. We’re supposed to be people of love. I don’t know if it’s good for me to sit in a tent and pop squirrels with a scoped rifle all day, given that I do it partly in anger. I really should start shooting them again, though. My truck won’t start, and I’m pretty sure they did it. I have a productive peach tree, and I’m lucky if they let me have three peaches a year.

I shoot them out of season, because the wildlife people told me it’s legal if they are menacing my property. This only applies near the house, though. I should be allowed to shoot them anywhere. I should be given a bounty every time I run over one.

I wish God would send a plague and make the hair on their tails fall out. Then they would look like rats, and people wouldn’t think they were cute. Animals that aren’t cute get a lot less legal protection.

They resist trapping. I’ve set various types of traps, and I’ve only trapped one squirrel. The best trap, supposedly, is a PVC pipe over a bucket of water. You provide bait, the squirrels slide down the pipe, and they drown. I don’t want to drown anything. I don’t want to sit in my living room wondering if a small animal is struggling for life in a bucket of water.

I’ve used Conibear traps. These are like little versions of the bear traps in old Warner Brothers cartoons. They crush squirrel’s heads or necks, depending on the breaks, putting an end to them fast. But squirrels avoid these traps.

I hope they make this rule change, and I also hope they grow spines and legalize bear hunting. I don’t care what anyone says; we don’t actually “need” 500-pound predators in our backyards. There is a reason why we killed them off in the first place. Every once in a while, a Florida bear kills and/or partially eats someone, and we are reminded how it feels to be prey.

We always hear the same thing. “If we kill off the grizzlies/black bears/wolves/lions/cockroaches/whatever, our ecosystem will suffer a devastating blow from which it will never recover.” What a load. The chestnut trees that used to cover the country died. Things are still fine. We got rid of wolves in most places, and it made life better. The passenger pigeon is gone, but the world keeps turning. Things would be fine if every black bear in Florida disappeared.

The same leftists that killed bear hunting also feed bears and God knows what else, teaching bears that people are food. Amazing.

I like bears, but we need fewer of them, and I will quickly dispatch any bear that bothers me whether or not I think the government will approve. Better to pay a lawyer than several teams of surgeons or a funeral home.

I’d kill Lassie if I thought she was going to bite me. I’m not going to lose the use of a hand so a dog can have a second chance. I was created in the image of God, and dogs were not. One of my hands is worth a whole lot of collies.

Me first. Those are the rules. I guess it’s only one rule. Anyway, me first. I’m more important than an animal. If Commander Biden had attacked me in the White House, they would have found him in a heap with a fractured skull. I don’t have a Secret Service career to worry about.

There are certain animals in my area that should always be killed on sight. Squirrels, rattlers, water moccasins, big alligators, squirrels, coons, bears, possums, armadillos, squirrels, bobcats, hogs, mice, coyotes, all dogs whose owners paint their toenails, and squirrels. That’s just reality.

I quit eating squirrels because they’re tiny and hard to clean, but I may resume once my wife is here. She’ll eat anything. She’s an African. She eats giant maggots called mopane worms.

Let’s segue into a criticism of the leftist media.

Right now, a bunch of people are fighting anthrax in Zambia. A story says 335 people got it. How? They ate hippo meat. Apparently hippos get anthrax.

What did NPR say about this? They claimed it was about African poverty, most of which is caused by me, personally, because I’m white and can tell I’m not a woman. My colonialism and transphobia are at the root of the problem.

NPR started out its stupid story with the claim that Zambians were so poor, they had to eat hippo meat. Instead of tofurkey meatloaf and Starbucks lemon cake like everyone else.

Poverty caused by white Steve causes anthrax epidemic among POC! Get the pitchforks and carbon-neutral torches!

The big problem with this claim is that hippo meat is expensive. It’s better than beef. Zambians love it. Stores can charge a lot. The people who got anthrax got it from a luxury product they could apparently afford. It infected affluent Zambians.

Doesn’t matter. It was my fault. Put me on the scale and find out if I weigh the same as a duck.

I don’t know if I’ll resume shooting squirrels or not, but I hope other people take it up. Hateful things. Worse than anthrax.

My Palate is Being Microaggressed

My wife is still not here. My latest beer, however, is in the keg and ready to party. I call it Wheat Privilege Ale. I keep it at 17 psi and 35 degrees, so it should contain around 3.22 volumes of CO2, meaning it’s pretty fizzy but not as fizzy as pop.

Guess I didn’t pay enough attention to making sure the phone’s camera was focused.

This is a cloudy wheat beer I came up with in around 2005. I started out with Amarillo hops, which provide a lemony flavor. This latest batch uses a new hop: Bergamot. It is named for the bergamot, a weird citrus fruit used to flavor Earl Grey tea and give scent to candles.

The names of many, if not all, hops are capitalized. I think some are even patented.

It is common for hops to taste and smell like citrus. A long time ago, the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company made a splash with Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, an amber ale brewed with Cascade hops, which are said to provide grapefruit flavors and aromas. Cascade hops became very popular with professional and amateur brewers. Now there are other citrusy hops. Some examples: Mandarina Bavaria, Amarillo, Centennial, Lotus, and Citra. Bergamot must be pretty new because it’s hard to find information from people who have used it.

To me, Amarillo hops are lemony and Centennials lean toward orange. I decided to try Bergamot because some people said the orange or tangerine flavor was really heavy.

Wheat beer is great on its own, but it also takes additions well. Germans put raspberry syrup in finished weissbier. They also put some other syrup in it. Don’t know much about it. It’s green. Belgians put orange peel in their cloudy wheat beer during the brewing process. I figured it would be better to find a hop to give me oranges.

This beer seems to have a tangeriney scent and flavor, with a little hint of zest from the rind.

I really like it, but I just bought some Citra and Mandarina Bavaria hops for future experiments.

I wonder what would happen if I put a little tangerine juice in this beer.

Well, I just got up and tried it. Really nice. Ordinarily, I think it’s kind of effeminate to put stuff in beer, but wheat is its own little world.

It’s like a beer mimosa. I guess I put an ounce and a half of juice in 16 ounces of beer, and it’s superb.

Now I’m going to feel like I can’t drink this beer unless I have tangerines.

This one is going to go great with food. It will pair with anything. I could even drink this with pizza, and I hate beer with tomato sauce.

I received a water test report today. A company called Ward Labs sends people bottles and prepaid labels, and they email reports. I found out I have almost no sulphate or magnesium. Other than that, things are okay. It turns out my water is well-suited to stouts, which I could have guessed, because my stout is what they drink in heaven. It’s not perfect for light-colored lagers, but I can buy a couple of chemicals and fix it.

I would like to learn more about beer, but I’m only one person, and I can only go through so many kegs per year at my leisurely pace. I have 6 recipes I really like, and I only have space for 5 serving kegs. I want to keep at least 4 of my favorites on tap at all times, so that doesn’t leave much room for R&D.

First world problems. Everyone should have them.

Just Give her That Green Card

In case anyone is wondering, my wife is still in Africa.

She had her visa interview week before last, and they asked for more evidence that we were really married. We emailed it the same day, but it arrived after working hours because of the time difference. They told us they needed 5 working days. I thought this meant they would finish last week, but we now think they don’t count the day they first see the stuff in their email box. So we should be seeing a response tomorrow, by God’s grace.

The word says, “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will.” We remember this in prayer. Consulate employees are not kings, but the principle applies.

My wife is nervous because she has been rejected so many times by other countries. It’s not the same thing, however. America is legally obligated to take her, and I have the right and the means to burden the system by pursuing legal remedies if the consulate blows it. They’re going to let her in. They want this application out of their pipeline. People in government jobs love getting problems off their desks.

It’s not like applying for a tourist visa to Italy, where they lie to you and verbally abuse you at the embassy and then go back on their word, knowing there is no accountability.

They wanted more proof I had been supporting her. Not hard to supply. They already had bank documents from her end. They wanted to see what I received from my bank, so I sent examples. Barring contributions from a new husband, it would be hard to explain how an unemployed woman went from living in poverty to owning a car and living in a nice rental house almost overnight, and the foreign trips would also be unlikely in the extreme without help, but they want to be sure.

They also wanted to check into the type of wedding we had. We were married online by the only county in the US that will marry a citizen to a foreign national who isn’t present in America. The embassy lady was not familiar with Zoom marriages, which is surprising, since they became very popular during the pandemic. It’s weird, but it’s 100% binding in every state.

The lady was very nice and seemed to have no doubts. I’m sure she can tell the difference between scammers and bona fide applicants, having seen many of both.

I am hoping I won’t have to buy a weekend ticket. The choices are limited, they cost more, and flights are crowded. We would really like to move her out by Thursday.

I think I’m fairly well prepared on this end. I bought 4 containers of Haagen-Dazs, and I have frozen ribs plus a beef rib roast. I have a set of large creme brulee dishes, too.

Thanksgiving will be upon us very quickly, so we will have to get ready. I’m thinking boneless turkey with cornbread stuffing and gravy, as always. Mashed potatoes with tons of garlic and butter. Cranberry relish. Yams blended with pineapple, butter, and brown sugar, with pecans on top glazed with more butter and brown sugar. One pecan pie. One pumpkin pie. Some other stuff.

The local Publix had BOGO Miracle Whip this week, so we are all set for turkey sandwiches.

I don’t know if I will be able to make her understand that you don’t eat creme brulee on Thanksgiving.

We are still planning to hit White Castle on the day she arrives.

I don’t know if her relatives fully understand their situation. They are less resourceful than she is, and she has helped them with a lot of their problems. She’s about to leave them behind, so she is having to tell them to get it together. I don’t know what will become of them. Because she will be here, her ability to help will be curtailed.

She may never see any of them again. Getting them tourist visas is impossible, and I’m not shelling out 5 figures to bring them over anyway. I have no desire at all to go to Zambia, and I don’t think my wife does, either. She’s not all that close to her siblings. Her mother and father died many years ago, the family has been shaken up, and there are age differences.

She put me on the phone with 4 of my new nephews the other day. I can’t remember their ages, but I think they’re all under 10. They asked all sorts of questions. They seemed to think they would be coming to visit. Even if it was realistic to expect us to fund a $20,000 excursion, which it isn’t, Uncle Sam would not let them come. I didn’t explain this to them. They are too young to understand. Sad.

It’s frustrating having very poor in-laws who aren’t very capable. My wife is not much like them. She gets stuff done.

She’ll have to get a Florida phone number, so a lot of relations and acquaintances who now have her number will not have it in a month. She is looking forward to the peace.

While I wait, I fiddle with trivial endeavors. Today I kegged a wheat beer, and I made it with a new hop: bergamot. Supposed to have a lot of orange flavor.

Very happy with the name I came up with.

I hope I have something good to write tomorrow night.

Sliders and Concealed Carry: the Best America Has to Offer

The problem with brewing is that so few conclusions have been nailed down, even though homebrewers seem to know a great deal. Things that should be obvious by now are still unknown to a lot of us.

Example: which tubing to use to hook gas and beer up.

When you have a keezer, which is a freezer modified with taps and one or more tanks so you can dispense beer from it, you have to have a tank, kegs, and taps. You need tubing to get the gas from the tank to the gas regulator, from the regulator to the kegs, and from the kegs to the taps.

In the old days we used plain old vinyl from Home Depot.

After I quit brewing in ’07, people started getting anxious about oxygen.

When you brew your beer and put it in a fermenter, you want it to have oxygen in it. It makes the yeast happy. When fermentation is over, you want the oxygen gone. It interacts with beer and eventually ruins the flavor.

There are a lot of ways oxygen gets into beer. I used to run a tube from a fermenter into a keg with the lid off. That was how I got beer into the keg. Of course, oxygen got in. Wasn’t really a problem, but it could have become one if I let the beer sit long enough. Now I take a sanitized keg full of CO2 and I pump beer into it from the fermenter. Everything is sealed and pressurized.

Everything should be fine, right? No, because I have been using vinyl to get gas from the tanks to the regulators. At least I did this with one tank. I have two tanks in my keezer. One is CO2, for normal beers, and the other is a nitrogen/CO2 mix, for stout. As of a few days ago, I still had vinyl on the CO2 primary regulator.

What is a primary regulator?

I have 4 kegs of beer on one tank of CO2. The CO2’s pressure is hundreds of psi. It has to be stepped down so it doesn’t blow the kegs up. There is a gas regulator on the CO2 tank to get this done.

Most guys are happy with that. They will have the same pressure in all their kegs. Not me. Ales like more gas than lagers, and heavy beers may want a whole lot of gas. I bought a secondary regulator. This is 4 regulators in parallel. Each one can be adjusted to provide a pressure I like. Right now, three are at 12 psi, and one is at 18 psi, for my brutal fake Belgian ale.

Primary regulator on the tank. Secondary regulator between the primary and the kegs.

I had a fat vinyl tube going from the primary to the secondary.

It turns out vinyl lets oxygen in. The CO2 in the vinyl is at a minimum of 18 psi in order to get 18 psi in the fake Belgian, and atmospheric air is at 0 psi (gauge pressure), so how can oxygen get in? Doesn’t the CO2 keep it out? Apparently not. It’s sort of like osmosis. The tube sees 0 psi of oxygen inside itself, but our atmosphere is about 20% oxygen, so it sees oxygen pressure outside. The vinyl is not perfectly impermeable to oxygen, so some goes in.

This is the story, anyway.

An Australian company named Kegland makes all sorts of innovative products for brewers, and they created (or maybe found) EVAbarrier, a stiff tubing that is pretty good at keeping oxygen out. They also sell Duotight fittings to connect the tubing to beer and gas.

It’s really convenient. You don’t have to use hose clamps. You cut your tubing to the right length and shove it into the fittings. They bite down on it and seal it up.

As of night before last, my CO2 system has been connected with EVAbarrier. I was already using it for everything but the primary-secondary leg, so I only had to replace two fittings and one tube.

I resumed brewing at the end of December. I made some errors. Wrong mashing schedules. I accidentally shot lubricating oil into a batch of beer because I used a pellet gun CO2 cartridge instead of one made for beverages. Little things went wrong, but I still have one beer from early this year which is very good. As I get caught up with new technology, things get better.

I have one recipe I’m not planning to brew again. It’s just not great. Other than that, I can’t find factory beer I like as much as my own. If I had to go back to factory beer, I’d go back to my old drinking habits, meaning around a 12-pack per year.

I’m having a stout right now. It’s hard to imagine how this beer could be better.

I was thinking I should brew a wheat ale tomorrow. I have a couple of batches of grain, including a wheat recipe, and I don’t have any wheat beer except for the really heavy one I made last week. Today I realized that if I brew beer tomorrow, my wife may well be here before it’s ready to drink.

Her embassy appointment is finally upon us. She could be here 10 days from now, depending on the breaks and whether she is serious about getting her hair done before she comes.

It’s very weird, being this close. I go to the store and buy things, and I find myself thinking she may be here to eat them.

We spend a tremendous amount of time on the phone together. That’s all about to end. What will we do with our time when we suddenly find ourselves with days that aren’t broken up by calls? We’ll save at least three hours per day, and we will have nearly nothing to do.

I have to face the reality of not living like a single man. I have to get a kitchen table that doesn’t fold up. I need two real dressers instead of the awful, enormous dresser my mother got at an outlet store in the Carolinas in the Seventies. I’ll have to move my $80 Chinese Amazon headboard to a bed in a guest room.

I have talked about buying her a business class ticket. I’m looking into it. She will probably have a flight running around 35 hours. Airlines don’t have much interest in Zambia, so she will have to have a minimum of two stops.

Personally, I am an economy guy. I believe I’ve flown first class twice. I recall my dad upgrading the two of us with his endless points. That happened once. I also recall sitting in a first class seat next to a drunk who was some kind of prisoner. He cried a lot. As I recall, he was a black man in a red suit.

I was probably in college. I don’t recall how I got into first class, and I have no idea why they chose me to sit next to a prisoner. I seem to recall him being handcuffed to an armrest. That can’t be right, can it? Maybe that’s how they did things back then.

I don’t recall having a cop anywhere near us.

If I’m going to spend thousands of dollars, I want something I can touch. A piece of jewelry. A new welding table. I don’t want to spend $200 an hour for a ticket upgrade so my butt can be slightly less sore the next day.

Let’s face it. While an upgrade may be nice for a short flight, there is no such thing as a nice long flight. Moving you to business class doesn’t help. I don’t care if they give you a stateroom with a bed. It’s still going to be a miserable experience. I’d rather have the money than the 10% decrease in suffering.

I brought up business class, however, and my wife liked the idea, so now I’m on the hook. I hope she enjoys it and takes pictures, because I don’t plan on buying any more business class tickets unless Elon Musk sees my blog and decides to send me one of his spare billions.

Finding my wife a business class ticket that costs less than a major operation is a challenge, mostly because everyone hates Africans. Flights that are low on the cost scale almost always involve self-transfers. That means she will have to get off the plane at least once, get her bags, go through customs and immigration, go through security again, and board. It’s not a big problem if you’re American, but if you’re African, many countries will force you to get a visa in order to walk across their airports and change planes.

It’s idiotic. Even if her brand-new green card will motivate a country to issue a visa, it will take forever to get the visa, so it’s not practical. I would have to pay her rent in Zambia the whole time, and then she might get turned down.

West Africans are the problem. Especially Nigerians. They go to other countries, refuse to leave, and start criminal enterprises.

I can’t route her through England. Forget that. Our best bet looks like Turkey. She might have to stop in Dubai on the way. She might have to land in two different African countries.

So what will we do when she gets here?

High on the list: White Castle. The family that owns the company sadistically refuses to expand in any meaningful way, but they opened a restaurant in Orlando. The biggest White Castle on Earth. We’ll be doing that.

Sonny’s. This is a Florida barbecue chain. Pretty good, even though Bidenflation now has them putting “Market Price” beside ribs on the menu.

She loves Italian food. There’s a really good place near me. Run by Mexicans. Go figure. It’s clean. The prices are reasonable. The food is great. The staff is polite.

I’ll have to get her a driver’s license ASAP, not to mention a carry permit. Permits are not required in Florida, but if she has one, she will be allowed to carry in other states. I already have a 9mm for her with a Crimson Trace.

After all this, the dentist. And we have to get medical insurance and a new phone plan for two.

We are not doing too bad for clothing and so on. We traveled to countries with good stores.

We need to get the pickup in shape so we will have two vehicles.

That’s all I can think of. I wanted to take her to Israel, but our timing has worked out poorly. There are no good winter destinations in the US.

Okay, maybe there are, but we have no interest in skiing or beaches, and we’re not going to places that look better with leaves on the trees.

I hope to have her out in the pasture shooting steel very soon. I can taste those sliders already.

Telling the Truth Gives Them Chest Pains

I can’t find my favorite chili garlic sauce. Like we need another shortage. And the people who claim global warming is the problem are apparently lying.

It’s very disheartening to see people blame everything on man-caused global warming, which probably doesn’t exist. Drought? Global warming. Floods? Global warming. Heat? Cold? No change? All caused by global warming.

There are people out there claiming sexual perverts are disporportionately harmed by global warming. Explain that.

The shortage began with Huy Fong sriracha sauce, which is a below-par sauce made in California. It’s the one with the chicken on the bottle. At some point, hipsters decided they had to put sriracha on everything, including things that taste bad with sriracha on them, and, being the mindless herd creatures they are, they decided Huy Fong was the only brand worth buying. This seems to have established a large consumer base.

A year or two back, Huy Fong’s production dropped. Hipsters lost it. They scrambled to corner the sriracha market. For a while, Huy Fong’s unimpressive sriracha commanded astounding prices. Now you can buy it on Amazon for the low, low price of $14 per bottle, which is still grotesquely inflated.

I didn’t care. I like sriracha on a few things, but Huy Fong’s product isn’t that great. It leans toward ketchup. I have an ancient, nearly-full bottle in my fridge.

You want good sriracha? Try Shark brand. It’s amazing. You can get it at a site called Import Foods. I have two bottles. The medium and the hot are virtually identical, so buy the cheaper one.

Shark is a real Thai product, made in Thailand. By Thais. The California guy who runs Huy Fong is Vietnamese. “Huy Fong” sounds Chinese to me, but let’s not go there.

The eco-nuts want us to think a drought in Mexico caused the Huy Fong shortage, but even the MSM says otherwise. It turns out Huy Fong committed fraud and nearly destroyed Underwood Farms, the CALIFORNIA (not Mexico) operation that supplied most of the peppers. Underwood Farms sued and won $14 million, and the verdict has been affirmed on appeal. The original verdict came down in 2019, so the problems existed before that.

Underwood Farms now sells its own line of sauces, and Huy Fong is hopping mad but can’t do anything about it.

I would have called the Underwood Farms brand “Su Yu,” but no one asked.

I don’t eat Huy Fong sriracha, so why do I care? Because now they aren’t shipping their chili garlic sauce, a different product which is excellent. It suddenly disappeared from stores. My guess is that they redirected a lot of peppers to the sriracha operation, because sriracha is now liquid gold.

I used to dump chili garlic sauce on my hummus when I ate breakfast. I did that until two days ago. Then I went to the store and saw no Huy Fong products at all. I Googled and saw Reddit posts in which people asked what else they could use. It looks like chili garlic sauce vanished quite a while ago in most places, but I didn’t know because I bought it in big bottles which take a long time to empty.

Now, breakfast is a sad and gloomy affair, during which I pretend Frank’s Red Hot is an adequate substitute for chili garlic sauce.

I managed to locate the sauce on the web at a reasonable price, in a very strange place. I haven’t bought it yet because I am looking at alternatives.

I read that you can make your own sauce from red jalapenos or Serranos, sugar, garlic, salt, and vinegar. These peppers are not hard to find because, hello, there is no pepper shortage. Peppers are everywhere, as are sauces that have no connection to Huy Fong.

I may make my own sauce before springing for the real thing. The site I found advertises two jars for an okay price, but it doesn’t say how big the jars are. That makes me want to wait.

I also learned that there are other Asian pepper sauces I should be looking at, so I may order a few. One is called sambal, and there are different kinds of it. At least one type is flavored with shrimp paste, which sounds pretty good. I found three varieties of sambal, and I may order all of them. Import Foods recommends sambal oelek to replace chili garlic sauce.

Asians make the best pepper sauces. Mexicans aren’t even in the running. I’ve tried all sorts of Mexican sauces. Some are pretty good, but nothing compares to Huy Fong chili garlic sauce or Shark sriracha. Yesterday, I bought a goopy sauce made by Thai Kitchen, and it’s fantastic. It’s not good with hummus, because it’s sweet, but it’s a wonderful discovery. It’s used on egg rolls. I may as well start looking around to see what else I’m missing.

Americans make a lot of bad hot sauces. I think Tabasco may be the most overrated sauce, after Huy Fong sriracha. It’s harsh and flavorless. Frank’s and Crystal are better, and you can get a quart of Crystal for 4 dollars.

It’s kind of strange that Mexicans make mediocre hot sauces compared to nearly everyone in the Far East. After all, the New World has had peppers forever, but the rest of the world didn’t get a chance until around 1500.

So in a nutshell, leftists lie again, Shark is better than Huy Fong, and it may be a couple of weeks before I can make breakfast great again.

What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

My latest beer, an orange lager, is nearly ready to keg, and I only started on Monday.

Brewing is like cooking, because it’s really a kind of cooking. It’s a culinary art. Beverages are part of every cuisine. I stand by that. Like all types of food and beverage preparation, brewing is full of myths and old wive’s tales. You know what I mean. “Steaks have to be rested.” “Dough has to be kneaded for 10 minutes.”

Traditional lager brewing takes a long time. Lagers are fermented at lower temperatures than ales, slowing the yeast down. Then they are “lagered,” which means they sit and age for weeks to kill the off flavors. How much of this stuff is really necessary? Not all of it.

There is a site called Brulosophy. The proprietor tests beer myths. For example, he may make two batches of the same beer, boiling one for 30 minutes and the other at 60. He then makes people taste the results and tell him whether they can tell a difference. He applies statistics to determine whether there really is a perceptible difference. He has brewed beers at different temperatures with excellent results. He has tested to see if lagering is needed. He has done all kinds of things to annoy traditionalists. There must be a bounty on him in Germany.

Also, homebrewing has changed over the last few years. For one thing, many people, myself included, now ferment some beers under pressure. The pressure suppresses off flavors that ordinarily arise when you ferment at higher temperatures. If you crank up the pressure, you can ferment faster and get the same results. Yeast likes heat.

I started pressure-fermenting as soon as I heard about it. I made the mistake of buying a plastic pressure fermenter called an All-Rounder. It’s made by Kegland, an Australian company. Actually, I think they’re Chinese, because they have a shop on Aliexpress, the guy who does their videos looks Chinese, and they have at least one product they can’t sell in the US because of patent problems.

The All-Rounder is just a huge plastic jug with a round bottom. The screw-on lid has fittings on it for disconnects, which are devices that let gas and liquid go in and out.

I got a decent lager out of my All-Rounder on the first try. I fermented at 75°, which was convenient. No fridge needed. It had a taste that reminded me of freshly-mown grass, but it wore off after a month.

I decided I did not like the All-Rounder. The jug is flimsy. It weakens with repeated use. You’re supposed to pressure-test it and eventually get rid of it. I don’t want a fermenter blowing up in my garage, and I don’t want to spend a lot of money on the same product, over and over. It’s like buying an inkjet printer for $50 and spending $5000 on ink.

I now use Torpedo Megamouth 6-gallon stainless kegs. These do not blow up if the pressure gets too high. Like ordinary homebrew kegs, they have pressure relief valves, and these valves release long before the pressure can hurt stainless steel. Plastic, not so much. Not if it’s old and weak.

I make 5 gallons of beer at a whack, so a 6-gallon keg will hold all the beer plus whatever foam grows on top. I add a product called Fermcap to prevent the foam from getting too thick.

I wondered if fermenting at 75° caused my off flavor. I also suspected oxygen, because I believe there was a point where I had to let a tiny bit of air into the All-Rounder. I decided to ferment this latest batch at 60° instead.

There are always a few little problems on brew day, but I got this thing into the fridge in the evening on Monday.

Of course, I always have to make a mistake, and this time, I failed to set the keg O-ring properly. As of yesterday, I thought the beer was doing nothing, because the pressure wasn’t building. I have a gauge on the fermenter, and it was stuck at zero.

Instead of doing the obvious thing and checking the seal with soapy water, I fiddled around for several hours. Finally, I got out the spray bottle, and I found the issue. I fixed it up and pumped 15 psi into the keg. While I was doing all this, I had to crack the keg lid open, and I saw all sorts of krausen, which means foaming yeast. The fermentation was flying.

Today when I checked, the pressure was way over 15. It was past the numbers. Maybe 25, if I had to guess. I adjusted it and tested the beer’s specific gravity, which drops as beer ferments. I got 1.013. That was a lot lower than what I expected. Things are going quickly.

I had some unusual problems measuring the gravity on Monday. Not sure what was happening. I was using a cheap refractometer which generally works fine. I have a theory that, because I was mixing boiled water into the wort to change the gravity, I got some samples which had more water in them than others. Or maybe stirring the crud on the bottom of the kettle up while mixing the water in increased the gravity for some readings. Anyway, my best guess is that the OG (original gravity) was 1.053, or 0.001 above the target. A bullseye, really, because refractometers and hydrometers aren’t as accurate as brewers like to think. This beer’s gravity plunged 40 points in under 60 hours.

My target FG (final gravity) is 1.012, so 1.013 means the beer is either finished or nearly so. If it was actually lighter than 1.053 to start, it’s done. If it was heavier, it may have some time to go.

It tastes fine, except for the harsh yeast bite every new beer has before the yeast drops out. Yeast is bitter. I’m not getting any grass flavor.

It looks like I can ferment a great lager in 4 days at 60°, which tells me there is no reason to go to 75°. I remember when people were keeping lagers in their fermenters for much longer. Four days will be fine.

Now I have to decide when to clarify and keg the beer.

Conventional wisdom says beer doesn’t ferment after kegging, but I know this is wrong. It may be true for factory beers, some of which are pasteurized, but I know at least one of my beers (stout) gets dryer after kegging, and that means yeast is at work.

I would like to have yeast on the job after kegging, to continue to improve the beer.

What about clarifying? I will be adding gelatin to the beer, and this makes all the floating stuff fall out, presumably including yeast. If I clarify before kegging, will that be too much for the yeast to handle?

Stout isn’t clarified, so I can’t really judge by what it does.

When I got started in brewing, they told me not to touch a lager for weeks after I kegged it. Should I listen to that advice now? I don’t think so. Many people question it, and not just people who don’t know good beer.

I think this beer will be very good as soon as I keg it, and it will be perfect a month later. The plan is to keg it and then put it in the keezer at 35°. I’m a slow drinker, so I will probably take 6 months to empty it. I think it will age perfectly well during that time, and I think the beer will stop improving after a month.

Brewers who do lagers often do “diacetyl rests.” This means heating your still-unkegged beer a few degrees and letting it sit until the diacetyl goes away.

Diacetyl is the chemical they put on fake buttered popcorn. Sometimes beer generates it during fermentation. I don’t plan to do a diacetyl rest. My understanding is that warm fermentations don’t produce diacetyl. This is one of the reasons people use pressure. I have also read that commercial brewers use pressure for this reason.

I think I’ll just shoot gelatin into this beer tomorrow and keg it using a closed, oxygen-free system. I should be drinking it on Saturday.

Tomorrow I’m making stout. I haven’t finished my last keg, but the thought of being without stout is terrifying. After that, I might go nuts and make a wheat-heavy Belgiany beer I made in the past. It’s very strong and full of flavor, and you can literally age it for years without ruining it.

By the middle of next week, I should have a keg of orange lager and a fresh keg of stout ready to drink. After that, I’ll feel safe enough to play with other things. I don’t want to run out of staples. They come first.

I wanted to call my orange lager Mar-a-Lager, for obvious reasons, but someone took the name a long time ago. Same for MAGA Lager. “Bigly” is taken. “Covfefe.” I call it Great Again Lager. Best I could do.

Because the beer I’m making now is already under pressure, carbonating it should be either easy or unnecessary. Another benefit. Carbonating a flat new beer is tricky, and you can end up with a long period of foamy beer.

It’s nice, having kind of a system worked out. I don’t wonder what equipment I need or what changes I have to make. The basic plan is in place. Everything else is small strokes.

So Much for European Enlightenment

Got some pretty interesting news this week.

First of all, my wife’s final embassy interview was postponed 10 days. No explanation given. We got the news earlier this week. Today, the embassy’s Facebook page (which, incredibly, exists) said 10 embassy employees had been fired for corruption.

Postponement explained.

My hope, of course, is that they fired people who were likely to DELAY issuance of visas. I hope they kept the ones who rubber-stamp everything.

The second bit of news is that the Europeans have denied her a visa again.

We were trying the Czech Republic. They respond to requests pretty quickly, and they seemed to have a relatively positive attitude toward Africans. For example, the Czechs have a scholarship program that brings Zambians to Czechia to study. We told them we would go to Prague and then Rome.

We weren’t all that excited about visiting Eastern Europe in November, but we knew a Schengen visa would get us into Italy as well as Czechia, so we were willing to take the bad with the good. Actually, I was hoping to change our travel plans after we arrived and cut our Czech time to three days. Once you’re in Europe, they can’t do anything to make you go where you said you would. Nobody needs to spend a whole week in the Czech Republic.

Today we found out we were rejected. They had a ton of documentation proving my wife was not going to stay there illegally and clean toilets for a living, but they didn’t care. We showed them she was about to be cleared to move to the US. We proved assets way beyond what was needed to pay for the trip. We showed them we had already paid for accommodations and tours. We gave them our original marriage certificate, which, bizarrely, they required. Didn’t matter.

So what’s the explanation? Prejudice is the only plausible answer. They just don’t want Africans. They don’t trust them. Maybe they let a few students in, to take study positions where they can be closely monitored, but forget visiting as a tourist. They don’t care how obvious it is that you won’t be a problem. They don’t want to look at the facts.

They put her application in a pile or threw it out, and they waited for her to come back for an answer. Then, without looking her documents over, they told her to take a hike.

The good news is that I’m glad, because this means she will be her sooner, and we will avoid spending a huge amount of money on a trip to a third-rate destination in bad weather. They did me a big favor. Now I don’t have to go to Prague.

I’m sure Czechia is nice, and Prague may be the most beautiful large city on Earth, but it’s a historical and cultural backwater compared to places like Paris and Rome, and these days, it is jam-packed with tourists, even in winter. Tourists are thicker than TBN preachers in hell.

Also, the food looks unbelievably bad. There is a reason we never see Czech restaurants in malls. Remember the dinner scene in Top Secret?

The farther north and east you go in Europe, the more off-putting and strange the food gets. Spain, Italy, France, Greece…excellent. Germany…passable. Scandinavia, England, and Russia…like prison food.

Based on Youtube videos I’ve watched, it appears Russians are swarming Prague. I don’t know how well they mix with tourists from NATO countries. I am not all that eager to mingle with Russian tourists. I suspect they are like British tourists. Drunken, loud, and likely to vomit at any second. Dublin sidewalks are always decorated in British vomit.

Russians sound like the kind of people I would have wanted to hang around with in college.

Americans used to be the problem tourists on this planet. As other countries have accumulated wealth and started to travel more, that distinction seems to have become harder to award. The mainland Chinese do unspeakably rude things, for example. Communism makes people coarse. The Taiwanese are probably great guests.

To get back to Prague, it looks a lot like Disney World. Throngs of tourists everywhere, even in the slow season. Tons of businesses designed for tourists. Lots of scams.

If it’s bad in cold weather, imagine the summer.

Rome sounds better, but my research suggests it’s not what it once was. It’s hard to book activities in November. The crowds are legendary. Also, tourism forums warn about the omnipresent pickpockets, who have formed a de facto industry.

I wasn’t excited about this trip. Wrong season. Lackluster primary destination.

Now that Europe has once again shown us its true, hypocritical nature, my wife should be able to arrive here a week earlier, which is fantastic. We lose 10 days because Zambia is crazy, but we gain days we would have spent traveling. There is absolutely no reason to expect anything but a quick visa issuance. America isn’t Europe. We actually let people in. Boy, do we let people in.

We feel cheated because we didn’t get a second trip this year, but hey, America is huge, and my wife hasn’t seen it. Maybe we can see the Smokies before the leaves fall off. Meanwhile, we can apply for a visa to visit Israel, which is a better destination than any European country.

European visas are not that hard to get once you have a green card. I think the Europeans don’t want to make Uncle Sam mad, and besides, they realize nearly no one wants to leave the US and move to Europe. Half of them are trying to move here.

American winter destinations are generally pretty bad. There are the beaches, which neither of us wants to see. The beautiful non-beach areas will be cold, there will be no leaves on the trees, and many locations will be rainy and muddy. Most of our big tourism cities have turned into mental asylums. Neither of us ski or plan to learn, so forget the western mountains.

Maybe we’ll never see Prague. That’s okay with me. I’ve never wanted to visit. It makes me think of Franz Kafka. Prague will never see my dollars, so it’s a two-edged sword.

When I got the news about the visa, I went online and canceled a whole lot of engagements. Around $3000 for hotels and an Airbnb. Another grand or so for activities. Thank God I didn’t buy airline tickets. There may be some long faces in Czechia and Italy today. Nothing I can do.

I feel God has blessed us once again.

Your Colon Will Thank You

My standard breakfast is vegetable stew with some kind of meat in it, but making it is a big chore with a lot of cleanup afterward, so lately I’ve been having my other standard breakfast: the kibbutz breakfast.

I learned about this in Israel, while picking grapefruit every day. Kibbutzniks are supposed to be atheists, because their movement began in Marxism, but they have two meatless meals every day anyway, perhaps to avoid offending old people who like to fool themselves and pretend they’re keeping kosher. I’m assuming they still eat what they did when I lived there.

They provided boiled eggs, various raw vegetables, plain yogurt, hummus, really bad white toast, and something called porridge, which seemed to be Cream of Wheat. I think they also served cottage cheese, but I don’t recall for sure. I believe they served margarine, which is disgusting and probably unhealthy. They also had terrible jelly. They may have had raw oats, too. Back when I was there, kibbutzniks were not known for good taste in food.

When I picked the right things from the menu, I ended up with breakfasts that were healthy and reasonably tasty. Now that I’m in America, and I’m not dependent on kibbutz kitchen workers who make bad choices and can’t cook, I can do a better job than they did. I use pita instead of toast. I get or make better hummus, with lots of hot pepper sauce. I use full-fat cottage cheese, and I eat sour cream instead of yogurt.

As for vegetables, I like carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, red bell peppers, and hot pickled peppers.

It would be nice to have tahini, but making and using it are a lot of aggravation.

It works pretty well, and you can probably guess that constipation is not a problem for me. And I knock off my day’s fruit and vegetable requirement in one meal.

The big obstacle is the pita. It comes in tiny bags here, and it gets moldy fast, so I have to keep going to the store if I want to have pita on hand. The solution? Homemade pita.

I saw a bunch of recipes online, but they looked stupid to me. “Knead by hand for 10 minutes.” “Stir the yeast into warm water and wait until it foams up.” “Mix in half the flour and wait until it looks fluffy to add the rest.” Come on. Wives’ tales and mythology. I wasn’t going to mess with all that unnecessary labor. The fact that bakers did something stupid 500 years ago doesn’t mean I have to keep doing it today.

I got out one of my pizza dough recipes, and it worked great. In case you want to try it, I’ll provide it.

INGREDIENTS

180 grams flour
120 grams water
0.8 tsp. salt
1.5 tsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. instant yeast
1/2 tsp. oil, your choice

I used high-gluten flour, but I think flour with less gluten would be better, because eventually you get tired of chewing.

Blend the dry ingredients in a food processor with a chopping blade. If you make a lot of dough, use a dough blade. Add the water while continuing to process. As soon as the flour is wet, stop. A lot of flour will be stuck to the sides of the bowl. Use a silicone spatula to push it back down. Continue blending until you have something resembling dough. Wait 5 minutes. Add the oil and blend again for maybe 30 seconds. Done.

Remove it and stretch it in your hands a few times, turning it inside out and pressing it back together. Do this to put tension in the dough. Make a ball or disk and put it on a sheet of nonstick foil sprayed with a little oil. Cover with a glass bowl. Let it rise fully.

Preheat your oven to 500°, using a stone or pizza steel. Cut the ball in 4 pieces. Shape each piece into a new ball. Roll them out as thin as you can, like 1/16″. Let them sit for 20 minutes.

Throw each piece on the hot stone or steel. It will blow up magically by itself, creating an inner pocket. You know those bubbles that form in pizza crust? They’re the same thing as pita pockets.

Turn your dough after maybe 90 seconds and bake it until it looks right.

That’s it. Very, very easy. It will taste better than store pita, and you can make it every couple of days in order to avoid shopping trips. You can scale it up if you need bigger batches.

I use a lot of flour when rolling out dough, and instead of a rolling pin, I use a length of 2″ PVC pipe. Rolling pins are stupid. The only problem with the pipe is that I can’t put it in the dishwasher, but that doesn’t work well with rolling pins, either.

I suppose you could fry this stuff and end up with something like poori, but I don’t really know. I think you would have to replace some of the water with yogurt. The main blessing here is the method, not the ingredients. It should work with other kinds of bread.

I Definitely Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue

The Cone of Certain Death is once again upon me.

Before I went to Hong Kong and Singapore, I prayed repeatedly that God would keep hurricanes away from my house while I was gone. He came through. Now, three days after my return home, we are getting the usual pre-storm hype. MAJOR Hurricane Idalia is BARRELING DOWN on me, and doom is assured.

I never pay any attention to the Panic…I mean “Weather” Channel. I don’t listen to the TV nuts. I watch the NHC site and keep track of changes in the forecast paths and the expected width of the storms. Right now, things are looking good. I am completely outside the area where the eye of the storm is expected to go, by maybe 75 miles, and the path updates are trending westward, away from me.

When Irma hit in 2017, the remains of storm went pretty much right over my house, and a lot of trees went down. This time, the storm is going to be very far away. My best guess is that I won’t get much wind at all.

The wind forecasts over at Accuweather are disturbing but probably wrong by a wide margin. They’re calling for sustained winds of 55 mph at some point. I think that’s way off, based on about 30 years of observing storms and forecasts. Last year, a storm passed by, and I noticed a breeze of maybe 10 mph at the exact time the forecasters were claiming 50. It was amazing to watch. How can you keep a 50-mph forecast on your site when you know perfectly well you’re 40 mph off?

My theory is that they lie deliberately in order to cover their butts and increase ratings. Scared people keep their TV’s on.

It’s dismaying to live in a state with tropical weather problems and to know that the people I rely on to inform me are very nearly worthless.

People who don’t live in Florida like to tell me I live in a hurricane zone. Insurance people like it more than anyone. Thing is, hurricane winds have never been recorded where I live. I looked it up. You can’t say you’ve been in a hurricane unless there was at least one minute during which the wind never dropped below 74 mph. That does not happen here.

We barely get tropical storm winds, which start at 39 mph.

Forecasters deliberately conflate gusts with sustained winds. You can have hurricane-speed gusts without clearing the hurricane bar. It’s normal to have brief blasts of high winds when you’re not really experiencing a hurricane. Still, forecasters love to talk about the gusts and play down the low sustained winds, which are what actually count.

They are predicting tropical storm winds from around 7 a.m. to about 1 p.m. I will be amazed if we get them at all.

Accuweather is reporting a hurricane warning for my area. A watch is when you MAY get a hurricane. A warning is when you WILL get a hurricane. The warning here started yesterday at 5 p.m. and ends tonight at 1:15. Someone explain that to me. How can they be sure a hurricane will hit, when they, themselves, say it won’t? Why did the warning start a day and a half before the high winds were expected?

The storm won’t even be here by 1:15, so how can the warning end then? Whatever arrives will get here tomorrow morning at about 7.

I need to check the definitions. Here they are, from the NHC:

Hurricane Watch
A Hurricane Watch is issued when sustained winds of 74 mph or higher are POSSIBLE within the specified area of the Watch. Because hurricane preparedness activities become difficult once winds reach tropical storm force, the Watch is issued 48 hours in advance of the onset of tropical storm force winds.

Hurricane Warning
A Hurricane Warning is issued when sustained winds of 74 mph or higher are EXPECTED somewhere within the specified area of the Warning. Because hurricane preparedness activities become difficult once winds reach tropical storm force, the Warning is issued 36 hours in advance of the onset of tropical storm force winds.

Let’s see. A hurricane warning is issued 36 hours in advance of the onset of tropical storm force winds. So, if hurricane winds had been expected, that would have been 7 p.m. yesterday, which is later than 5 p.m. So 34 hours, not 36? Why? And hurricane winds were never expected, so why post the warning at all?

Am I wrong, or are they ignoring their own rules?

Okay, here is what’s certain: there will be no hurricane here. Period. Count on it. It just does not happen.

Here is what is extremely likely: we will not get a tropical storm here. We might, but we probably will not. If we do, it almost certainly won’t last long, because hurricanes are more or less circular, and circles are small far from their centers. I will be far from the center. The region of high winds that passes over me will be small, if it exists at all. Because it will be small, it will pass over quickly.

There is a small possibility we will get worse winds than I expect, along with a bunch of downed trees. That looks like the worst case, unless tornadoes count. You have to be really cursed to get hit by a tornado. They are not common during hurricanes.

It’s good that I’m on the east side of the storm, with a coast between me and the eye. The only possible high winds will be from the south and west, and they will have to go over land to get here. On the down side, I have some big trees to the south of my workshop.

I haven’t prepared at all except to get some water. I can bathe in the pool and use the water to flush the toilets. I can drive to get food if the power goes out. Not much can be done.

I have ingredients for pizza.

I prayed about the storm, and I cursed it and so on. I think God told me there was no reason to get involved in preparation, so I’m relaxing. Tomorrow we’ll find out if I’m hearing from God or just lazy and prone to believing what I want.

As for the rest of the state, things look good. Forecasters are certain it will hit land north of me and east of the panhandle. In other words, it will strike an area where very few people live. Not comforting to the inhabitants, but it’s better than seeing Fort Lauderdale slammed.

Here’s some idiocy from The Drudge Report’s leftist owners:

Honestly, it’s like they sleep on rubber sheets.

Deceased Bizarro Food Influencer Strikes Again

In case anyone who reads this blog is wondering where I’ve been, I have two things to say that might be clues. You really have to try Ki’s Roasted Goose in Hong Kong, and you should avoid the chili crab at Keng Eng Kee Seafood in Singapore.

My wife and I keep meeting abroad while we wait for her American visa, and we just spent two weeks in the Far East.

I have never had any interest in seeing Hong Kong (or any Far Eastern destination), but beggars can’t be choosers, and very few countries will let my African wife visit without a fight. China will not accept her, but Hong Kong, which is part of China, lets Zambians in straight off the plane. She wants to see as many countries as she can, and she didn’t want to revisit our prior destinations without including something new, so we threw Hong Kong into the mix.

Before the trip, people gave me a lot of bad information. Somehow, the Internet has made it harder to learn the truth about other countries. It should have made it easier. Because there is so much money to be made from cheap Internet exposure, people who have a lot of eyeballs on them are able to charge a lot for lying about hotels, restaurants, and attractions, and they are making the most of it. Also, forums are full of people who give bad advice for no clear reason.

Regarding Hong Kong, I was told I should get a hepatitis shot or immunoglobulin because something like 6% of the population has the disease. I was told I could get typhoid from eating raw food. People said I should avoid the tap water. I also read that I might be arrested and imprisoned for no reason.

Regarding hepatitis, it’s not easy to get without close contact, so that’s not a real problem. Typhoid affects people who eat dubious things like raw oysters, and I won’t even eat cooked ones. The tap water comes from a completely modern purification system, and it contains chlorine, just like the tap water you probably drink.

I think the people who get arrested are generally Americans with Chinese backgrounds, or Chinese people with American green cards. If you go to Hong Kong to protest the CCP, you may have a problem, but I went to eat restaurant meals and be with my wife.

I was also told people in Hong Kong would be rude, but they seemed fine to me. Of course, I spent most of my childhood in Miami, so I barely notice rudeness that would put most people in therapy.

I guess I can tell you some useful things about Hong Kong.

First, the food is generally very good. It’s not always fantastic, but you will find very little food that is truly disappointing. We went to a number of places, recommended and unrecommended, and the only truly worthless one was the Peninsula Hotel. Everything else was either good or excellent.

Singapore is different. People claim it’s the food capital of Asia, but that’s completely baseless. There is good food there, and there is also a lot of really bad food. You have to talk to locals in order to find out where you should eat.

The Peninsula has a famous high tea service. This is a British thing. “Tea” is a beverage, but the British think it’s lunch. They have a pretentious custom of sitting down in the afternoon and eating really awful girl food with hot tea. Scones and cucumber sandwiches figure heavily.

The Peninsula’s high tea is a tourist thing. It has no redeeming features whatsoever apart from the nice atmosphere. It has no inherent value. They charge you around $250 for tea and a weird three-tier tray of worthless food. You take selfies and enjoy feeling important, and then you leave.

The lowest tier on the tray holds cranberry scones which are overworked. A scone is a sweet biscuit, and when you work biscuit dough too much, it gets gummy, sort of like Pillsbury canned biscuits. The Peninsula’s scones were okay, but not like the real thing. The second tray held cucumber sandwiches with the crusts removed. If you have to remove the crust from your bread, you made bad bread. The crust is supposed to be the best part. The cucumber stuff is just cucumber mashed up with something resembling mayonnaise mixed with low-fat sour cream. Pointless. You also get weird little pastries full of a similar condiment mixed with lumps of bad smoked salmon. It’s hard to make me dislike smoked salmon, but the Peninsula Hotel pulled it off.

The top tier contains about three pastries per person. They are small and not very good. All you need to know. They had something on there that was sort of like a tiny raspberry shortcake, and it was acceptable, but the other items were gross.

We took a food tour in Hong Kong the day after we arrived, and it was really helpful. We had beef brisket and noodles in a soup pretty much like pho. Very, very good. The name of the restaurant is Sister Wah. We also had dim sum at the Imperial. Excellent. We finished up with roasted goose at Ki’s Roasted Goose, which is a chain. We met Mr. Ki himself. He happened to be at the location we visited that day. Very friendly guy. Funny.

Ki’s taught me that America’s rejection of goose is a huge mistake. It’s far better than our standard poultry, including duck. It’s sort of like fatty, juicy, delicious pork. Chinese people gut and clean their geese, and then they slow-roast them. They apply stuff to the skin. I would guess it’s mainly MSG and some kind of sugar solution. In the end, you get a very, very juicy goose with a crisp skin that will make your eyes roll back in your head. Sort of like Peking duck, but much better.

We had roasted goose twice, and it was fantastic both times. The vegetables were also very, very good. If you go to Hong Kong and eat every meal at Ki’s, no one will be able to criticize your judgment.

They give pork belly the same treatment. It’s nothing short of amazing.

The meat is served with plum sauce and beautifully prepared rice. It doesn’t need anything else. Adding too much stuff to it is like pouring sauce on a good steak.

We assumed roasted goose would be all over Singapore, but it isn’t. They use duck because of bird flu issues. It’s good, but you can’t compare it to goose, and Singapore cooks just aren’t as good as Hong Kong cooks.

The dim sum was wonderful, but I would recommend staying away from the steamed barbecue pork buns Youtubers brag about. They’re not great. The pork is very sweet, and there is no acidity or heat to balance the sweetness. Steamed pork buns are popular for breakfast. I would sooner hit the nearest McDonald’s.

Hong Kong is also known for egg tarts. An egg tart is a tiny pie crust filled with egg custard. Maybe it’s exciting to Asians, but I’m used to flan and creme brulee, so I found it lacking. I would not order one again.

We didn’t eat any expensive food in Hong Kong, and by “expensive food,” I mean legitimate expensive food, not garbage like the Peninsula Hotel’s farcical tea. I don’t think there is any point in looking for high-end restaurants in Hong Kong, because the food is so good everywhere else.

Hong Kong is hot, and the wind never blows. Well, it blows, but you feel it mostly when you’re up on a hill or a building, because Hong Kong buildings are tall and close together. The humidity is amazing, and I am saying this as a person who lives in Florida. Laundry takes forever to dry. There is mildew everywhere. When you walk down the streets, water from air conditioners drips on you no matter where you are.

Hong Kong is built below some steep hills, and the buildings pretty much stop at their bases, so the hills are not very developed. We took a tram up the side of Victoria Peak and shot some video. We were around 1800 feet above the narrow streets, and the difference was amazing. The air was cooler, and it actually moved. And we were in the clouds part of the time. Worth the money and time. Victoria Peak is not an alp, but it punches above its weight.

I picked up some camera stuff in an area known for electronics stores. The selection was fantastic, as was the help. Much better than the US. Prices were about the same, though.

The subway and buses were wonderful. When you get to Hong Kong, you buy something called an Octopus Card, and you load it with money. After that, you use it to take you everywhere. We only took two cabs the whole time we were there.

The subway I know best is the one in New York. It stinks of urine, it’s a great place to get beaten or killed, and passengers are constantly harassed by young fatherless morons. It’s really dirty. You can’t use the restrooms because they never work, they are never cleaned, and they belong to violent drug dealers who don’t like visitors. Hong Kong and Singapore have clean, efficient, safe subways. Very different. Best way to get around.

The harbor is nice. You can take a ferry for almost nothing, and it gives you good views of the impressive skyscrapers and peaks. When tiny waves rock the boat, the Chinese people go, “WOOOOOOOO!” Makes a big impression on them.

We stayed in Sheung Wan, a real Hong Kong neighborhood a short distance from the busier areas. We used an apartment-hotel, so we had the luxury of access to washers and dryers. Unfortunately, the staff and other guests were always using them. In the future, I would choose a place with laundry machines in the suite itself.

The neighborhood was full of conveniences such as 7-Eleven, McDonald’s, and bakeries. Very livable.

American cities are full of grandmother-raised, fatherless minority kids who are constantly looking for victims. It was strange to be in busy cities where you don’t even think about things like that. It was very strange not to see ghettos. A typical big American city is MOSTLY ghetto.

Singapore was great, as always. They have cards similar to Octopus Cards, and we used ours to go all over. Our experience with the food was not all that great, though. Liars like Anthony Bourdain have polluted the world with corrupt reviews pushing bad restaurants, and we got burned again.

Bourdain and a popular food vlogger with a channel called Marion’s Kitchen have promoted Keng Eng Kee for seafood. We tried it. Disgusting.

They sold us a $95 chili crab. They said it was a whole kilogram. It looked like a crab, but it was really a collection of shell parts from unrelated crabs, piled up to look like one creature. It appeared they had boiled a lot of crabs in a sauce much like the glop in a can of Spaghetti-O’s. If you took that stuff and added a small amount of Texas Pete and a ton of sugar, you would have nearly the same thing.

There was no meat inside the crab body. The sauce was full of tiny slivers of overcooked meat, however. I believe over 3/4 of the kilogram was sauce and shell.

Our “crab” had three claws. They were poorly cracked, and the meat wasn’t worth the effort of extraction.

We also had deep-fried prawn rolls. Imagine balls of almost-decayed shrimp and vegetables, battered by a machine in a factory and fried in old oil. That’s what we got, as far as I can tell. No salt or seasoning. Worthless.

My wife ordered chicken wings seasoned with shrimp paste. Take several old chicken wings, salt them very lightly, and fry them in old oil. You will get pretty much what she got. The shrimp flavor was barely detectable. A total waste of money.

We also had pork ribs in coffee sauce. They fry boneless pork in breading. It’s almost certainly cheap pork shoulder. There are no bones. Then they soak it in a sweet coffee-based sauce. It’s okay, but the sauce takes all the crunch out of the breading. I think they let the ribs soak in it en masse instead of applying it right before serving.

Anthony Bourdain and the other people who recommended Keng Eng Kee knew they were lying, but I guess they got some cash. Locals recommend a chain called Jumbo. We didn’t try it.

Would I go to Hong Kong again? I guess so, if it were convenient. I would go for the food. My wife would go for the shopping. Hong Kong has huge Western-style malls. I don’t think Hong Kong can sustain a tourist’s interest for more than 5 days, but it’s pleasant.

Having visited Hong Kong, I now realize Singapore’s reputation as a food city is undeserved.

On our last visit to Singapore, we found some good places to eat, but we also found bad ones. Just like this time, Anthony Bourdain’s lack of integrity figured in our misfortune.

Singapore has facilities known as food centers or hawker centers. They are similar to American parking garages. They have no outer walls. They contain rows of food preparation stalls made of stainless steel, and every stall is a separate business. You can get many types of food in a food center. Chinese is most common, but you can also get Indonesian, Indian, Thai, and Malay food. Food centers are very cheap. You can get a good meal for about $7.50 US.

Before his ignominious demise, Bourdain the pretend regular guy hyped a food center stall known as Tian Tian Chicken. It sells Hainanese chicken, which is a bizarre dish consisting of limp, lukewarm steamed chicken draped over rice. For some reason, Chinese people love Hainan-style chicken. I don’t think anyone else does.

We went to Tian Tian, and we had to wait in line for about 10 minutes. It’s always busy. They sold us a plate of food, and we tried it. The chicken looked almost as though it had been boiled. It had almost no flavor. The rice was anointed with a sauce pretty much like the liquid from Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, only not as good. We threw out most of the dish and found a local guy who showed us better places. He said only tourists ate at Tian Tian.

I’m not sure Anthony Bourdain even knew what good food was. He raved about Waffle House. I’m not from Mars; I’ve been to Waffle House. They give you 20% of the pleasure you get from Cracker Barrel, for 80% of the money. Waffle House is where you go when Cracker Barrel and McDonald’s are closed. It’s kind of astonishing that a renowned food authority would be willing to endorse a place everyone knows is a dump, but somehow Bourdain did it and got away with it.

On this latest trip, we hit the food centers again. Some food was very nice. Some was pretty bad. Just like last time. You really need local guidance or the willingness to buy several plates of food and throw out the ones you don’t like.

We only saw one food center in Hong Kong, and we didn’t get around to trying it. Based on our other experiences in Hong Kong, I’ll bet the food is good.

We found a good Chinese chain in Singapore: Din Tai Fung. It’s based in Taiwan, where leftism has not yet succeeded in destroying the character of the people. Din Tai Fung is basically a dim sum joint. A huge variety of dumplings and similar items, served by hustling waiters who never stand still.

The big problem with the Din Tai Fung we tried is that it’s too busy. It’s in the basement of the Raffles City hotel, which sits on a mall, and there is a ton of foot traffic. You have to wait up to half an hour to get into Din Tai Fung there, and dishes you want disappear from the annoying electronic menu while you’re trying to order them. Nearby, in the Suntec City mall, there is another Din Tai Fung, and you can walk right in.

Unfortunately, Rhodah discovered Shake Shack during our trip. We ended up visiting twice. I don’t like Shake Shack. It’s a costlier version of Five Guys, which is a costlier version of Wendy’s. It sells pretty good burgers and fries, along with mediocre shakes and very bad ice cream. Unlike Five Guys, it doesn’t offset the enormous cost of the burgers by giving you three times as much fries as you actually want.

Rhodah thinks Shake Shack is wonderful, so I guess we’ll be buying more $25 fast food meals in the future.

We also visited Five Guys twice. I can take it or leave it, but Rhodah loves it. We paid about 45 US dollars for two burgers, a soda, a shake, and one order of fries. That’s even worse than the price here.

One of my big gripes with Shake Shack and Five Guys is that they serve big balls of grease that harden in your intestines and resist expulsion. I love fattening food as much as anyone, but there is a point where it becomes overkill. When you do something to a dish to make it fatty, there should be some purpose other than one-upping the restaurant next store.

We hit Ruth’s Chris again, but this is our last time, because it costs twice what it costs in America, and the food isn’t that great. Her steak was undercooked, which is inexcusable. What is Ruth’s? A steakhouse. How do you cook steak to medium doneness? Well, figure it out after 96 years of serving steak. I can teach a person how to do it in 30 seconds, so Ruth’s should be able to get it done in 96 years.

Ruth’s also served me crab cakes that didn’t taste great. Making a good crab cake is extremely simple. The final insult was banana cream pie made with green bananas. Singapore may well be the banana connoisseur’s Mecca. You can go into a market there and see numerous varieties of bananas. Ruth’s ought to be able to find decent ones for pie, and a competent chef will not put green bananas in anything.

If we ever go to Ruth’s Chris again, it will be in the US, and we will stick to steak and potatoes.

We ended up taking a food tour, even though we were familiar with Singapore. I arranged it because the Hong Kong tour was so helpful. We tried Malay, Indian, and Chinese food.

Malay food looks great but doesn’t have much zing to it. It’s on the bland side. They sometimes supply pepper sauce, and my advice is to ladle it on. When a plate of colorful Malay food arrives at your table, you may expect all sorts of powerful flavors, but it’s an illusion.

I can’t say enough about Indian food in Singapore. We tried it in a number of places, and apart from one food center stall, every place did a fantastic job. Whether the bill was $135 or $58 (Singapore dollars), the food was about the same.

On our first trip, we blundered into a place called HeritageOne, in Little India. The food was top notch. Better than the expensive places we visited. I recommend it highly, even though they don’t serve samosas. It was so good, we made a second visit when we returned to Singapore.

On our tour, we were given Indian pancakes and puri with various sauces. Wonderful. The food was so good, I was able to forgive the name of the restaurant: Kamala.

Having spent a total of around 24 days in Singapore, I feel like I know a little about it now. My conclusion is that you can get good food, and you don’t have to pay a lot for it, but there is also a lot of expensive food that isn’t great. It’s best to avoid tourist-heavy areas. The food will cost you twice as much as food elsewhere, or more, and it won’t be any better.

We did some things we didn’t do on our first trip. We rode the big Ferris wheel in Singapore, and we visited Gardens by the Bay.

I guess soon every big city will have a Ferris wheel. London has one, and so does Hong Kong. Singapore’s wheel is named the Singapore Flyer, and it has big air-conditioned cars. Not much to say about it except that I guess it’s worth the money.

Gardens by the Bay is a big landscaped area featuring a couple of indoor gardens and several big steel towers shaped sort of like trees. They’re actually shaped more like funnels. Little steel tornadoes.

The main indoor garden is not great. Just a bunch of well-tended plants with little signs on them. We didn’t see the second indoor garden. It’s based on the movie Avatar, and we both hate Disney. James Cameron makes fairly good movies, but as a human being, he’s kind of irksome. A billionaire whose moneymaking enterprises burn enough oil to run a major city, yet who preaches environmental asceticism to the peasants who pay his bills. He also claimed he found the tomb of Jesus Christ, which is pretty funny. I mean the tomb where his dead body was buried and rotted. Cameron apparently thinks any ossuary in Jerusalem with the name “Yehoshuah” on it must belong to Jesus. “Yehoshuah” was a common name in Israel during the life of Jesus. Like “Bob” in the US today.

The funnel towers look great in photos of Singapore, but in reality, they’re a lot like carnival construction in ordinary attractions like Six Flags. They’re also much smaller than the photos lead you to believe. You can go up to the top of the main funnel and take photos of Singapore. That’s fun.

We were suckered into riding on Singapore’s only cable car development. It takes you to a tourist island known as Sentosa. The cars are not cooled, so you get hauled up near the sun, right by the equator, in a little glass box.

The ride was okay, but Sentosa itself is run-down and boring. Not much to see. We paid for two cable car trips, but we only used one. We used it to get to Sentosa, and then we used it to leave.

Singapore is great, and I enjoyed both of my trips a great deal. If I sound negative, it’s because I’m mentioning the lows as well as the highs.

I feel like I was blessed this time when I found my flights. Nothing over 24 hours long. I still suffered quite a bit. My first flight went over the North Pole, and it lasted about 18 hours. That’s 18 coach hours. With no empty seats to speak of. On Cathay Pacific, which has tiny seats apparently designed for Asians. On the way home, I had to take a 15-hour flight from Dubai at 2:30 a.m., and it was jam-packed. If a flight leaving at 2:30 a.m. on a Sunday is popular, when are the slow times?

On the flight, I learned something interesting. Indians have body odor problems. That’s not me being racist. It’s a fact. For some reason, Indians have resisted taking anti-B.O. steps Westerners have come to consider normal. You can read about it on the web. The flight I took from Dubai was very popular with Indians, so there were some pretty fragrant people on board, including the guy sharing my row with me, who also appeared to be mentally ill. They always find me.

Will we return to Singapore? Not soon, I hope. In fact, I have reason to hope we won’t be traveling much in the future. Rhodah finally has her embassy interview appointment, so if things go as they usually do, she will be here before the end of October.

Our immigration saga has taught us to feel like making overseas trips twice a year is normal, and of course, it isn’t. We want to see Israel together, and I would like to take her to Europe, but this business of constant foreign travel will presumably have to stop. We have to have money to live on when we get old, and neither of us wants to work.

We both wonder if God has a reason for sending us to Singapore and making us like it so much. Sometimes I think he’s showing us a place we can escape to when perverted America becomes too dangerous for us.

It was very strange, being in a country where no one is afraid of sodomites or rioting punks.

While we were there, the city was having some kind of night festival, and there were activities and displays all over the place. One night while we were walking home, we went through Fort Canning Park, which is a big green space in the middle of town. We saw many people walking with their children, enjoying the festival. We never thought about street crime, except to notice that it wasn’t an issue. We didn’t have to worry about riots or fights. None of the parked cars we saw that night had broken windows. No one tried to sell us drugs. No whores accosted me. We didn’t smell weed. It was completely different from the filthy international disgrace which is urban America.

It occurred to me that life there was normal. It was the way it was supposed to be, and it was something I could not have in my own country, the world’s biggest Christian nation.

I don’t want to take Rhodah to New York. How would I keep her safe? I would be surrounded by armed punks, and I would not be allowed to have a pistol. We would have to play roulette with our lives and property. I can’t even take her to Paris or London without careful research about the safe areas.

We will never have safe cities again in America. That’s amazing. We just have to support the police, punish and restrain criminals, and allow people to carry guns. It’s that simple. But it will never happen. As long as this age lasts, our cities will be disgusting cesspools of cruelty.

I’ll probably write more about the trip when my brain gets over 12 hours of jet lag.

No Riots, no Burning Buildings, no Pink Hair, no Problem

Rhodah and I are still waiting for our embassy interview so she can be brought to the US. We made the mistake of obeying the law instead of shoving her in amongst a group of military-age Somali males crashing the border in Texas, so we are still not finished.

Looks like we’re going to Hong Kong and Singapore so we can be together. I just bought a new camera so we can finally have a trip where we come back with decent video. It hasn’t arrived yet.

I don’t understand my feelings about Singapore at all. It’s a big city. Not a lot of green space. People generally live in apartments instead of houses. Hot weather all year. Lots of things I would ordinarily hate. Nonetheless, I really like Singapore, and so does my wife. I feel at home there. I wouldn’t mind living in Singapore if I had to.

Things to like about Singapore: minimal sexual perversion and coercion, extremely low crime, high standard of living, all types of goods in great abundance, stability, good food, and nice people. While the weather is hot, it’s not as unpleasant as Florida or Georgia. Mass transit is cheap and safe, and unlike New York’s trains and stations, Singapore’s don’t reek of urine.

There are nearly no bums in Singapore. We saw one lady begging, but she was an outlier.

What can you get in the US that you can’t get in Singapore? Guns are a lot easier to get here, assuming you live in a free state, and you can own them for self-defense and even carry them. In Singapore, you can get a license to keep a gun in your home, but they are rarely granted. Sounds bad, but on the other hand, you’re safer in Singapore without a gun than I am here with one.

Singapore is often called repressive, but whether a repressive government significantly impacts your enjoyment of life kind of depends on what it represses. If government restrictions don’t affect the kinds of activities in which you participate, you’re not likely to be bothered by them.

I think most people who call Singapore repressive are sexual perverts and perversion promoters. If you go online and look up Singapore repression, you’ll see that perversion is the main topic. Singapore only decriminalized sodomy last year. They shouldn’t have done that, and they’ll regret it, but it shows why perverts find Singapore unappealing.

We found the cost of living in Singapore to be reasonable. We stayed in a nice hotel for something like $230 per day. It was somewhat nicer than Hyatts and Sheratons here. We were able to get a lot of great food for between $5 and $10 per meal, and that’s Singapore dollars, which are somewhat smaller than ours. The trains were cheap. Not much to complain about.

Singapore is like a little bomb shelter for conservatives, if you want the truth. It’s not too close to China or Russia. It’s too far away for American perverts and socialists to invade profitably after they take over the US and our military. It’s too far away for social invaders from Central and South America to barge into. It’s not filling up with Islamists. It doesn’t need aid, so it won’t end up like Christian Africa, where we twist arms by connecting charity to filthy sexual aberrations God hates.

Is conservativism really about liberty? I wonder. Maybe it has more to do with safety and wealth. Do I really want a bunch of guns if crime is extremely low and the government stays off my back? I like shooting as a hobby, but I could give it up if the return were worth it.

In America, I have some guns for fun, but I keep others in order to defend myself, my wife, guests, and my property. My government is increasingly hostile to affluent Caucasians who mind their own business, and so are leftists, especially minorities. We also have a problem with crime that is not politically or racially motivated. In other countries, my situation would be different, and so would my attitude toward arming myself.

Here in the USA, we have a big population of blacks and Hispanics, and they commit a gigantic amount of violent crime and property crime. Most crimes of both types are committed by these groups. They have backward cultures that glorify the abuse of innocent people. This is reality, not the woke explanation. Statistics compiled by nonpartisan entities prove these things. White people do bad things, too, but at a much, much lower rate.

Other countries are different. Singapore is around 75% Chinese (non-red), and the rest of the people are mostly Indians, Malays, and Indonesians. Singaporeans like to work and make money. It’s a hard place to start a street gang or do a drive-by. It’s a hard place to riot and destroy homes and businesses. It’s not likely one or two ethnic groups will team up against another, as American blacks and Hispanics have teamed up on whites, and try to take what they have and turn them into milk cows.

We also have a sick government which is becoming more dangerous every month. Professional victims are taking it over. They’re getting rid of cash bail and decriminalizing theft. They are trying to destroy rural areas and suburbs, pushing people into cities where they are easier to control and prey on. It’s not merely likely that sane, decent Americans will eventually have to fight the government. It’s certain. We will see secession and/or guerrilla warfare when things get too hot, and unarmed “haves” will be slaughtered publicly, with their executions posted on social media. We’ve seen the same basic thing in revolutionary France, Cambodia, China, Russia, Cuba, and other places where smelly, ignorant, hateful mobs took over.

In the USA, unless you are willing to trust God and accept martyrdom, it makes no sense to be unarmed, but there are places where arms are a much lower priority.

If you have retirement money, life in Singapore is easy. You just live. You don’t have to endure endless daily bombardments with terrifying news about your once-great nation. “Will the Democrats force my county to put housing projects on formerly-private estates?” “Will the Democrats impose wealth taxes and impoverish me in my old age?” “Will my children be unemployable because they refuse to call male perverts women?” “Will my daughter have to be naked in front of males every day at school?” “Will Antifa/BLM nuts climb my fence and kill and rape my family?” These are things people in Singapore don’t worry about, but they are very real possibilities in the US.

As I’ve gotten older and learned more from God, I’ve become less impressed with the US and democracy. This is not the best country to live in. Not any more. And democracy is overrated. A good king, or “dictator,” as kings are called now, is better than democracy, any day. I’d rather have Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis as a king with a lifetime term than the situation we have now. I’d even take Rand Paul or Ted Cruz.

Democracy is a degenerate system of government, one step above rioting. It puts power in the hands of ignorant, malicious, bigoted imbeciles who have tremendous incentive to loot. Looters have more power than builders, because everyone gets one vote, and looters are more numerous. It also gives too much power to women, who, as a group, invariably vote stupidly.

In the US, we have the idea that it’s sort of illegal or shameful to contemn representative democracy. It’s neither. It’s perfectly acceptable to push for a monarchy or theocracy if you like. You just have to do it without committing offenses like treason and sedition.

I can say these things because I’m not a politician or any other type of person who depends on the love of the mob.

Anyway, America-worship is based in delusion. America is still very high up on the list of desirable places to live, but it’s not the best, and it will eventually become intolerable. Probably before Singapore and even places like Kenya and Uganda.

We are told to be grateful to America for what it has done for us, as though it were person with feelings; a rich mommy that sent us big checks every month. In reality, America never did anything for me. God did. He can bless me anywhere. Look how well Joseph, Esther, and Daniel did under tyrants. Look what he did to Laban because of Jacob. America is just an instrument God used to bless me.

America doesn’t actually care about me. If I died right now, no flags would be lowered. God and certain people care about me.

I’ve done a lot for America. I paid taxes and stayed out of trouble. I submitted to institutionalized racism in the form of affirmative action. I contributed to charities. I registered for the draft, which is a very big deal, at least if you intend to back up your word when called. No entity but America ever asked me to offer it my life and risk being maimed and forgotten.

If I should be grateful to anyone here, it should be the servicemen who fought so I didn’t have to.

I’m extremely grateful for every good thing I have, including the diminished rights I still possess, but I’m grateful to God, not nations. I want to continue to be an asset to America, but if I move to another country, I’ll try to be an asset there, and that country will have whatever loyalty I’m required to extend. I wouldn’t want to be like the disgraceful, parasitic people who become US citizens and then fly flags from their old countries. Dance with the one that brought you, right?

I am censored, libeled, and ostracized from the marketplace every single day, and America’s government–my country’s government–is behind it. That’s really something. I never had these problems during the last century, apart from the time I got desperate and applied for a government job. White people were not the target hiring pool. Other than that, I was nearly a full US citizen.

How grateful should I be for the good things when I’m already fairly well down the Nuremberg rabbit hole, with increased persecution soon to come? Should Jews who were once treated well in Germany have been grateful to their government in 1930? Am I wrong for weighing the very bad along with the good?

These things matter. Losing free speech is not a small thing. Being excluded from economic participation is not trivial.

To get back to travel, we’re only looking at Hong Kong because Rhodah wants to see it. If it were up to me, I would skip it.

I haven’t been to Hong Kong, but I’ve been researching. I’ve been told the people are rude, largely because so many have moved there from the workers’ paradise on the mainland. Funny thing about workers’ paradises; everyone in them always wants to move back to capitalist oppression.

Communism has made or kept the mainland Chinese coarse and selfish, and tourists in Hong Kong have to deal with them because they wait tables and drive cabs. Also, it looks like hotels and other facilities are more run-down in Hong Kong. People are less likely to speak English, even though it’s an official language. Everyone in Singapore speaks English, and they place a high priority on education. They’re not coarse, either. We didn’t see people spitting or littering. Everyone was courteous.

Look, Singapore is better than American cities. Better, not different. Let’s just say it. On average, American city dwellers are inferior to Singaporeans. Inferior. That is the right word. Some people are better than others.

Regarding Hong Kong, I have to say that the food looks very good.

Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Hong Kong Chinese are supposedly more cultured than mainlanders, which is not a high bar to clear. On the mainland, people urinate on the streets and let their kids poop there. Sometimes they pull these stunts in Hong Kong, and it doesn’t fly. Mainland Chinese tourists have terrible reputations in every single country they visit, as do Chinese businessmen.

Capitalism makes people better.

Having lived in Northern Florida, far from abusive, dangerous wokiees, for 6 beautiful, precious years that are like enormous pearls to me, I am disturbed whenever I think about visiting places where people are rude and selfish. I get Miami flashbacks. It’s too bad God won’t evacuate that place and put a fence around it to prevent it from coming back.

Hong Kong still uses the Hong Kong dollar, and I have read that people expect cash, so that’s a drag. As much as I hate the war on cash, electronic money is great for tourism.

I should have bought a better camera sooner. In fact, I did. I tried, I mean. I started Youtubing unsuccessfully in around 2016, and I have bought two unsatisfying action cameras. The latest, in 2019, was a Gopro. The cameras haven’t worked out. You really have to control them from phones in order to get them to function, and they’re very hinky. They turn on and off without warning. They refuse to connect to my phone and tablet. They change video modes unexpectedly. My Gopro ruined a video I made in Turkey. It’s just voices and a still photo. Unacceptable, when so much is at stake.

Phones are fine for photos, but I want something dependable for video, and it has to work without a phone.

My phone cost $750, and it does a ton of things. Oddly, the camera I bought costs about $150 more, and all it does is shoot photos and video.

I had a hard time choosing. I finally went with a Sony ZV-1 II. This is considered a point-and-shoot camera, although you can mess with a lot of settings, including the f-stop. I also considered the ZV-E10, which is similar but allows you to change lenses.

The ZV-E10 is more of a grown-up camera. No doubt. You can travel with a standard lens for vlogging and a zoom lens for versatility. Also, the sensor on the ZV-E10 is better. Thing is, it costs a lot with an extra lens. A good zoom lens will run around $650. Maybe I should have sprung for it, but the trip itself is not cheap, and I’m in the middle of Florida’s homeowner insurance explosion crisis, so I’m not feeling like this is the time to throw cash around. Although it probably is.

Our lives are great, but the rapture can’t come soon enough. I can’t wait for the day when I find myself looking back at Earth the way I now look back at the open latrine known as Miami.

Oh, Boy! Fetch the Condiment Sommelier!

We live in a time of bizarre and unpredictable shortages. A week or two ago, a new one popped up: sriracha sauce.

When I was young, sriracha was just something you expected to see on the table during rare visits to Thai restaurants. No one was excited about it. It went well with Thai food, but it wasn’t that great with most other things.

At some point, hipsters discovered it, and for no good reason at all, they developed a sriracha obsession. They use it inappropriately on all kinds of things, including tacos and something called avocado toast.

Don’t get me started on avocados. They shouldn’t even be called fruit. They’re okay in guacamole, but you could just as easily make it from something like zucchini or yellow squash, because avocados have nearly no flavor. When I was a kid, there were two avocado trees in my yard, and I can’t recall eating a single one. I let them rot on the ground.

It’s bizarre to me that women love avocados so much. It’s like eating thick green water. And mashed avocado looks exactly like baby poop.

The web says a lot of implausible Paltrowesque things about avocados. It claims it gives women shinier hair, clearer skin, better vision, lower blood pressure, smaller waists, bigger bustlines, more hits on Instagram, and a higher chance of landing rich boyfriends.

I made some of those up.

In my defense, the ones I made up are probably just as valid as the others.

I guess I’ll take heat for this, but fooling women is just about the easiest way there is to get rich. My mother once paid $18 for a bar of soap. She had it for years. I think she was afraid to use it.

If it weren’t for female gullibility, the Mormon church would still be meeting in people’s living rooms in upstate New York.

I don’t know why pretentious millennials got so excited about sriracha, but they seem to have very empty lives. I guess they’ll jump at anything that gives them a reason to celebrate.

Anyway, there is a big ol’ American company that makes what is probably the best-known sriracha. The familiar one with the rooster on the bottle. The company is called Huy Fong Foods, Inc. It’s in California. I don’t know too much about what hipsters like, but it appears they think Huy Fong has no equal. An article I saw said Huy Fong used to buy peppers in the US, but they started buying in Mexico.

Hmm. Things are going so well in California. I wonder why anyone would decide not to buy California produce and to outsource to Mexico. Yes, it’s a real puzzle. We should assemble a think tank.

Mexico’s pepper fields are doing poorly due to drought, which is caused by global warming, Donald Trump, and misgendering. As a result, Huy Fong has cut production back. People have started putting Huy Fong sriracha on Ebay, and some have paid $70 for a single bottle. Right now, Amazon’s cheapest bottle is $25. The next-best deal is about $43. That’s a big bottle, though; 28 ounces. Normal bottles are not available from Amazon.

When I saw the story, I wondered how stupid millennials were, so I looked around the web to see if anyone was selling Huy Fong sriracha at the regular low price, and I didn’t see any. I didn’t want it, because I still have about 7/8 of a bottle I bought years ago. This stuff lasts forever. I was just curious, and I thought it would be funny to find a $5 bottle on the web while men who were allergic to testosterone were paying 14 times that much.

While I was thinking about this, I remembered a long-abandoned quest. The quest for Shark brand sriracha.

I used to live in Miami, and Miami has lots of Thais. It has great Thai restaurants. While I was there, I learned to love sriracha, but it was not Huy Fong. It was Shark brand. A local joint served it.

Shark sriracha is sweet and has a complex taste. You can literally pour it on white rice and enjoy it. I like dumping it on Thai food in restaurants, but I can’t do that where I am now, because they don’t have it.

While I was thinking about Huy Fong, Shark came to mind, and I decided to make another effort to find it. I succeeded.

I found an Asian grocery site, and I ordered two bottles. I got two because they had both medium and hot sauce. I didn’t know which one I liked. I was giddy to find there were different grades. They sell for about $13 and $16, respectively, and the bottles are huge: 25 ounces.

I spent a little, it’s true, but I wasn’t buying something I can ordinarily find at Publix. I have never been able to buy Shark locally. I would have had to pay a lot to get Shark even without a shortage.

My sauce arrived today. I just tried it.

This stuff is wonderful. Both grades. I would not buy the hot version again, however, because it tastes almost exactly like medium, and it costs three dollars more.

I guess this will irk any hipster who reads this, but Huy Fong is American, and Shark is made in Thailand. Hipsters are all about being authentic and original, while aping each other’s tattoos and wearing old people’s discarded clothing, so you would think they’d be all over Shark.

Googling around, I see some people agree with me. Serious Eats had a sriracha contest, and Huy Fong was beaten by Polar brand and Shark. Huy Fong is very good, and I’m not knocking it, but Shark is better.

Interesting note: sriracha is easy to make at home, so anyone who blew $70 on a bottle is either rich or foolish.

Huy Fong makes one pepper product I can’t live without: chili garlic sauce. This is a thick sauce made from vinegar, chilies, salt, and garlic. It doesn’t scream “ORIENTAL” when you use it, so it’s versatile. I love it in hummus, and you can use it to heat up nearly anything.

I wonder what it costs right now. I used to go through a lot of it back when I was hitting the hummus hard.

The Asian site I went to for sauce had a lot of other interesting stuff. I popped for some red curry sauce. I have a tendency to assume Asians make everything from scratch, but on the web, I’ve seen them pouring all kinds of stuff out of cans and bottles. I want to see if I can make a decent red chicken curry with packaged sauce as a base ingredient.

It’s very hard to stop collecting hot sauces. I have Crystal, Frank’s, two kinds of Huy Fong, three kinds of El Yucateco, two kinds of Shark, and sometimes I also keep two kinds of Matouk’s.

I hope this blog post is useful to you. Maybe someone whose handlebar moustache is drooping from sriracha deprivation will see this, try Shark, and never look back.

Enthusiasm Outpaces Skill

Yesterday I fired up the new Walmart pizza oven and made a Neapolitan-style pie. I am here with the results.

After reading about Neapolitan pizza and consulting experienced people, I decided to use these dough ingredients:

INGREDIENTS

100 grams Primo Gusto high-gluten flour
60 grams water
0.75 teaspoons salt (supposedly 3 grams)
1/8 teaspoon yeast

When you bake like an intelligent person, you weigh everything carefully, and you list the weight of each ingredient as a percentage of the weight of the flour. I was told that Neapolitan pizza requires a dry dough with 60% hydration, meaning the water should weigh 60% as much as the flour. The ideal salt percentage is said to be 2.5-3%, which is common to a lot of breads. I use measuring spoons for yeast because I’m not going to sit around weighing tiny amounts of leavening. It’s not critical.

I usually go with 67% hydration, a small amount of sugar, and a little oil (except for Sicilian), so the dough I made for Neapolitan was pretty stiff.

Unfortunately, the grams-to-teaspoons conversion I used for salt appears to have been wrong, so I may have used about 50% more salt than I should have. Salt slows fermentation, and too much salt ruins the flavor of bread.

I let the dough rise for two hours at room temperature, and then I refrigerated it. Early the next day, I set it out to ferment at room temperature again. I got these instructions from the web.

When the oven was hot, I didn’t have a lot of time to wait for the dough. Late in the afternoon, I took it out to shape it, and although it had doubled in size, it was awfully hard compared to my usual dough. I stretched it anyway.

I made a small pie because I don’t have a peel the right size for this oven. It’s on the way. I have a peel 9″ wide, so I sized the pie to fit it.

For sauce, I pureed Cento San Marzano peeled tomatoes. They were really sour. They say you shouldn’t put anything but salt in Neapolitan sauce, but I was the one who had to eat it, so I left the salt out and added a little sugar and pressed garlic.

Pizza without garlic is a missed opportunity.

I also mixed a little fresh basil into the sauce. A lot of people dump fresh basil on finished pies or bake it on top of the sauce and cheese. Those people are nuts. Fresh basil is not tasty at all, and baking it on top of everything can burn it. I think they do it for the sake of appearance.

A destructive obsession with presentation is one of the hallmarks of bad cooks. The world is full of bad cooks, including cooks with degrees, who proudly present beautiful bad food, thinking they’ve done something wonderful.

For cheese, I tore up about 2 ounces of Belgioioso fresh mozzarella and dumped them on the sauce.

I did something I should not have done. I decided to try my usual method of loading the oven. Most people put corn meal or semolina on their peels to make raw pizzas slide off. I don’t, because it’s a dumb thing to do. It makes a mess, and often, it doesn’t work. I put a sheet of nonstick foil on my peel. I slide the foil and pizza onto my steel, and two minutes later, I pull the foil out. Works great for New York style pies.

Looks like it does not work for Neapolitan, however.

I put the pie in the oven, gave the hot stone some time to dry up the underside of the crust, and tried to pull the foil out. It hung on something, and when it came out, it had a little hole in it. I don’t know if it stuck to the pie or what.

Neapolitan pies in cheap ovens cook quickly on one side, so you have to turn them. When I tried to turn the pie, it resisted. Turned out there was a tiny hole in it, and sauce had gone through and hit the stone, gluing the pie down in one spot. I broke it free, but by the time I got it moving, one side of the pie was black.

When I took the pie out, it had problems.

The dough was underfermented, which is one reason it was hard. This prevented it from blowing up properly, so the pizza was somewhat heavy. It also tasted salty. Finally, the bottom was undercooked. It should have been partially charred. I think the foil did me in. I’ll post pictures.

I think this oven will make good pizza if I get things right. Today I’m making another pie, fermented overnight at room temperature. It should be much poofier. I’m also going to use the hated corn meal.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to make big pies, because the heat is so intense near the back of the oven. The bigger a pie is, the closer the rim will be to the heat.

The sauce was surprisingly good. I make a more flavorful sauce for New York pies, and I’m sure it would be better than yesterday’s sauce on Neapolitan pizza, but it was okay.

The cheese was also surprising. If you put fresh whole milk mozzarella on a New York pie, it shrinks and shoots water and grease onto the pizza. In yesterday’s pie, it just melted and spread out. No problems at all.

Will I continue and then move on to an expensive gas oven? Can’t say, but so far, the results are encouraging.

Not Sure This is Pizza

So much has happened in the last few days. With the sound judgment for which I am so widely known, I bought a pizza oven, and I also decided to take another shot at making a bread starter.

There are two kinds of pizza that really float my boat: New York Style and Sicilian. I make good New York pizza, and I make the best Sicilian imaginable. I make both in a plain old wall oven. So why mess with success?

Can’t really answer that.

For years, I’ve been reading people’s impassioned words about Neapolitan pizza, and I haven’t paid much attention. It’s made in special high-temperature ovens, a lot of people claim you have to use 00 flour, it sounds like a pain in the butt, and the only two allegedly Neapolitan pizzas I’ve had weren’t good.

I ate at a chain called Anthony’s Coal-Fired Pizza near Hollywood, Florida. The pizza had very little sauce. It had some kind of meat on it, and it seemed greasy to me. The crust was sort of flat and useless. It wasn’t mediocre. It was a step down from that.

I ate a weird pizza at Mozza in LA, and it was like a bowl-shaped cracker with arugula and a fried egg on it. Two things that shouldn’t be anywhere near pizza.

Neapolitan fans rave about the crust. They say it’s puffy and delicate and crispy and so on. I haven’t seen that yet. It all seemed like crackers to me.

Nonetheless, curiosity overwhelmed me, and I started looking at pizza ovens. I learned that Walmart had released a really cheap one that works very well. I don’t want to blow hundreds or more on a big oven when I don’t know if I like Neapolitan pizza, but I am willing to spend a little on a small trial oven, and that’s what I did. Yesterday.

The Walmart Expert Grill 15″ charcoal-fired oven costs $117, and it takes about 20 minutes to put together. Hard to beat that. People say it will do the same thing a $700 oven will do.

They call it a 15″ oven, but there is no way you can get a 15″ pie in there. I think 14″ might be managed, but I have doubts. This type of oven heats more from the side than the top, and you have to keep turning pizzas in order to get every side evenly done. The bigger a pie is, the closer the rim will be to the hottest part of the oven, so it seems to me a big pizza will burn at the edges before the middle gets cooked. But I don’t really know.

The flames you see in the photo are not from charcoal. I dropped a couple of pieces of oak on the charcoal to see what would happen. People say a little wood adds flavor and heat.

I’ve gotten expert help, and I’ve learned some stuff.

First, the dough can’t have any sugar or oil in it, and the flour can’t be malted. Sugar and oil will burn. I don’t know what malting does. One reason people use 00 is that it’s not malted. I am told that any unmalted white flour will work, though, so I’m trying to make my first pie with Gordon Food Service Primo Gusto high-gluten flour, which I already had here. The text on the bag doesn’t mention malt. If I can make it work, I can avoid expensive flour.

Second, you’re supposed to use whole milk mozzarella. The squishy stuff. This type of cheese is completely hopeless in other types of pizzas. When you make a New York pie with it, the cheese shrinks, and all the water squeezes out onto the pizza, along with a lot of grease. I’m told this is not a problem at Neapolitan temperatures. I am also told that Belgioiso cheese is excellent for Neapolitan pizza, and that’s great, because it’s available everywhere.

Third, you’re not supposed to use pizza sauce. You use mashed-up peeled San Marzano tomatoes. I had no luck with these in New York pizza, but everyone says they’re what you need in Neapolitan. You mash the tomatoes up and add salt if you want.

Fourth, you want to let the dough rise at least overnight, and you may want to get fancy and use a starter to add complexity or whatever. I have found that starters are of no use whatsoever for New York and Sicilian pies.

Fifth, you want 60% hydration in the dough, which is a low for other types of pizza.

I fired my oven up today to burn the Chinese industrial waste out of it. The highest temperature I measured on the stone was 588°, and that disappointed me. Maybe I can fiddle with it and do better. I found out my infrared thermometer only went up to 600°, so I can’t do much research until a better one arrives.

As for starters, I have made them before, but they always grew so fast they got away from me, and they turned black and so on. Reader LauraW mentioned starters in a comment, and I started reading about them, and I learned that it’s normal for starters to get disgusting when they run low on flour. I also learned that you don’t need to buy bacteria or strange flour to make a starter. Plain old all-purpose flour works.

I got my new starter going about three days back. I used 100 grams of flour and the same weight of purified water. I didn’t want my well’s bacteria in there. As of today, the starter really stinks. Sort of like cheese. Sort of like feet. The web says this is okay, because it’s going through a phase. I hope so.

The starter should be ready to use in about 4 days, so I’ll try it in a Neapolitan pie if I haven’t given up on the oven yet.

My plan is to use fresh mozzarella and San Marzanos, along with some fresh basil. That’s all. I have a feeling I’m going to be disgusted, since these ingredients sound bland. That won’t matter as long as the crust is good. If the crust is worth all this effort, I can put real pizza ingredients on top of it eventually.

I have no interest in becoming a purist. If I stick with this, I want to be a guy who makes phenomenal pizzas with real Neapolitan crusts, no matter how much I have to bastardize the cheese, sauce, and toppings. If I like the traditional stuff, whoopee, but if I don’t, I won’t let it stop me.

If I get heavily into this, I’ll spring for a real gas oven and add it to my patio arsenal. I don’t want to keep dealing with lump charcoal until I die.