Parasites Abandon Husks and Find New Hosts

Am I the only one who thinks the press covers up for celebrities who die in ways that aren’t flattering to them?

Let’s see. Robin Williams. Died hanging naked, alone, in a closet. The web says nude suicide is very rare, so what happened?

It’s very common for celebrities to be addicts and pleasure-lovers. Their drive to receive pleasure causes many to descend into perversion. One of the weirder things some celebrities have gotten into: autoerotic asphyxiation. The idea is that you cut off your air supply while stimulating yourself sexually. Lack of oxygen puts you in a weird state. Supposedly, it revs up your parasympathetic nervous system, which is involved in the sexual response. People who choke themselves say the pleasure is tremendous, and many people have become addicted to the practice. Nearly everyone who does it is male.

Either Williams–a drug addict with self-control problems–decided to kill himself while naked, leaving his wife and loved ones to face a scene that was pointlessly embarrassing on top of the shock and grief, or he was engaging in an addictive sexual activity when he died. Granted, he was struggling with the knowledge that dementia was killing him, but dementia patients are all over the place, and they almost always die naturally.

Anthony Bourdain, another drug addict, went the same way. He had a pleasant dinner in a hotel in France, went upstairs, stripped, and hanged himself. He was known to have bouts of depression, but as far as anyone knew, he was not in despair the day he died.

Why would you commit suicide in the nude? It makes no sense at all. You would be aware other people would find the body and have to deal with the scene.

The web says it’s common for people whose loved ones die masturbating to rearrange the evidence to cover it up, and of course, most people wouldn’t want the press to cover such stories honestly.

I don’t think these men committed suicide. It doesn’t make sense. I think they hanged themselves for pleasure and died by mistake. There is no way Williams wanted his family to find him dead and naked with a strap around his neck. Bourdain didn’t want the friend he was traveling with or the hotel staff to have to deal with a spectacle like that. Come on.

Then there was Anne Heche. She got in a Mini Cooper, floored it, and drove down a straight road into a house. The sun was out. The house was right in front of her. They still call it an accident.

No one drives into a house in broad daylight while sober by accident. She killed herself on purpose because she was miserable. She thought it would be quick, just as you or I would have. She didn’t know she would survive and spend the better part of an hour in a burning car.

Now they’re saying Madonna passed out and nearly died from a bacterial infection. Well, that happens. But the news also says she was revived with naloxone, the drug they use to save people who overdose on opioids. It’s also known as Narcan. It increases blood pressure temporarily and helps drug users keep breathing. The news says Madonna was so far gone, she was essentially dead, and she had to be resuscitated.

They had to stick a tube down her throat and keep it there for at least a day, so she must not have been able to breathe on her own, even after being rescued and receiving treatment.

Kind of sounds like she has brain damage. She was alone when she lost consciousness, she had breathing problems, and lack of oxygen kills brain cells fast. You can ruin your brain in a few minutes by depriving yourself of oxygen, and her breathing may have been depressed a lot longer than that.

Updates from her inner circle say simply, “She’s good,” “She’s very strong in general,” and, “She’s in the clear.” These aren’t things people would ordinarily say when a person is experiencing a full recovery. They sound like weasel words. People would ordinarily say things like, “She’s up and talking,” or, “The doctors say she’ll be fine.” “In the clear” sounds like they’re trying to say she will live, while withholding information about permanent consequences. “Very strong in general” sounds like she’s alive but has serious problems.

Jeremy Renner was crushed by a snowplow on January 1st, and he posted a photo of himself two days later.

The news articles are carefully worded to say there is no evidence she overdosed, and they are also claiming Narcan is used to save people who have septic shock, the problem Madonna supposedly had. Clearly, someone realized people would wonder why Narcan was used, and someone in the pipeline decided to give them a dubious explanation in order to suppress rumors.

I decided to look it up, and what I’ve found is that other drugs are generally used to revive septic shock patients. I also read a lot of things suggesting Narcan is not normally considered. There is some research saying it could work, but that’s not what you would expect to find if doctors were using it routinely. You’d find all sorts of sources discussing its use.

I’m just a layman, but this is how it looks to me. Google other medical problems, and drugs customarily used to treat them will pop right up.

I don’t think Narcan is something most doctors would use in cases of septic shock. I think the stuff we are reading was put together by Madonna’s team and repeated by a cooperative press. I believe she overdosed, and once the Narcan story was out of the bag, her people made up a phony explanation and pushed journalists to use it.

So the question is this: did Madonna try to kill herself?

I would not be surprised. This is a woman who chose a path of extraordinary emptiness and vanity. While still very young, she created a remarkably slutty persona and milked it as much as she could. She published a book of pornography. She sang sleazy songs about sex. She exposed herself from time to time. She aimed her product at a dumb, youthful, immoral audience, and in order to keep her momentum, she, herself, had to try to appear youthful.

No twenty-something wants to see an old woman bump and grind in her underwear. It’s like homeless behavior.

Madonna has experienced a number of age-related humiliations. Lady Gaga copied her entire act and took her place in the sun. She even wrote a successful song using the same chord progression as one of Madonna’s biggest hits, and Madonna was so irritated, she publicly poked Lady Gaga, saying, “this is a wonderful way to redo my song.”

Rapper 50 Cent poked fun at Madonna last year, calling her “grand ma.” He ridiculed her for posing in her underwear at 64. That had to be hard to swallow, for a former sex symbol with an enormous ego and an army of sycophants.

Madonna has shown many symptoms of being unable to adapt to aging. News stories reported that she worked out so hard, she damaged her health. She has had so much plastic surgery, she has become somewhat grotesque.

This is a woman who used to make a living with her looks. She was never more than a 6, but she worked what she had as hard as she could, and it paid off. Men who lacked an eye for beauty used to fund her career because of lust, but now she knows men find her physically repulsive. Instead of stimulating desire, she kills it.

The only men who find her interesting now are the homosexuals who always made up a lot of her fan base. Their devotion has nothing to do with sex. This is the same crowd that thinks Ethel Merman is a goddess.

I think Madonna fell from a very, very high horse, and it may well be that she can’t face her new life as an elderly woman men ignore and other celebrities ridicule. Maybe she can’t handle watching young, attractive women fill the space she once occupied.

Of course, I don’t know what really happened, and maybe her doctors had some reason for using naloxone off label. But that would be unusual, and unusual things don’t usually happen.

She interests me because she is one of Satan’s shills. Satan lets a lot of people become rich and famous through self-destructive behavior. They do very destructive things in order to make it, demons enter and help them, they sit on top for a while, and then they wither and die in humiliation. Michael Jackson. Whitney Houston. Elvis, who died lying by his toilet, naked from the waist down, with his tongue nearly bitten off.

Satan lets some people who serve him do very well, and through them, he lures others in. It’s a great strategy. For every Madonna with multiple mansions, there are innumerable wannabes who stay in the gutter and live cursed lives. They grow old singing in dirty little bars and sponging off relatives.

Madonna is a loss leader. Satan took a temporary loss, refraining from raining misfortune on her as he rains it on many sinners. By doing so, he got many other women to follow in her nasty footsteps, and now, toward the end of her life, he is removing his blessing and letting her know how he really feels about her.

He did the same thing to Prince, who died alone in an elevator, full of drugs, hobbled by arthritis. He really nailed Michael Jackson.

When you plot your life’s course, you should never pattern yourself after a rare fool who behaved stupidly and then got lucky. You shouldn’t enter an arena where the success rate is below one in 10,000. You should do things that generally lead to success. You should try to be an accountant or a dentist, not Elvis Presley or Janis Joplin. Madonna encouraged people to trade their lives for lottery tickets.

It’s very fitting that she called herself the material girl. Material things rot and vanish. They only shine a short time. The things that have real value last forever. Madonna will probably go to hell, and people she looked down on will be in heaven forever, in mansions built by angels.

Because of HIPAA, we may never get an official, reliable explanation of what happened to Madonna, so she and her team are free to craft whatever story they want. HIPAA protection lasts for 50 years after a person dies, so unless someone outside her circle and the medical profession comes up with clues, it will be a very long time before reliable information comes out.

If she did try to do herself in, she’ll probably keep trying. If her infection was a suicide attempt, I doubt she’ll ever admit it. I don’t think her pride would let her.

The Country That Put a Man on the Moon Still Can’t Make Good Cheese

Pizza is like golf. You always think you’ll do better the next time you do it. It’s full of variables, so you’re never really sure you’re doing it as well as possible.

Actually, this is not true. I make Sicilian pizza perfectly. I should have said “thin New York style pizza is like golf.” It’s very different.

In my pizza quest, which got going in earnest in about 2009, I have tried a zillion different things. Every flour known to man. Lots of cheeses, including Grande, which a lot of pros love. Many different tomato products. I baked with a stone. Then I moved to a steel. I baked at varying temperatures. I’ve tried everything except for a special pizza oven, which is not needed if you make New York style pizza.

I thought I was sure of two things: Sicilian pizza could be made well with any flour, but New York style worked best with bread flour. Now I question myself.

My friend Mike taught me how to make pizza, and he uses AP flour. I tried it in the past and didn’t like it. Then after I moved to the farm, I found out I had been using way too much yeast in my pizzas. This put me back into research. Change one thing, and you have to go back and look at everything else. I looked at flour again.

If you want to make pizza dough in the morning and have pizza later the same day, you need about 1/8 tsp. of instant dry yeast per 100 grams of flour. You can go higher for more speed, but as you cross the 1/2-teaspoon threshold, the flavor of the dough starts to suffer. There is really no reason to use a lot of yeast. If you want to speed up fermentation, you can make your dough with warm water and let it rise at 100°.

I used to use several times as much yeast as I needed.

By the way, there is nothing wrong with instant dry yeast. It’s more reliable than active dry yeast, and you get the same results. I’m not sure why people use other yeasts. You can always get fancy and make a live starter you feed every day like a pet, but if you’re satisfied with yeast, instant is the way to go.

Lately I’ve been using AP flour in thin pizza, and I have no complaints. I don’t think I’d use it for garlic rolls, but they’re not quite the same as pizza.

I used to be obsessed with crusts that were somewhat hard and chewy. In recent months, I’ve been more interested in softer crusts. I had tremendous success making hard crusts with high-gluten flour and little or no oil. To get a softer crust that isn’t like Wonder Bread, I am now using AP flour and about 3% olive oil. The percentage is figured in relationship to the weight of the flour. I like pies made with 180 grams of flour, so I use around 1.25 teaspoons of oil. The actual number for 3% is 1.16 teaspoons, but I’m not going to be that picky.

I’m also trying to process the dough as little as possible. Overkneading can increase toughness. I “knead” using a food processor, and it’s really fast, so I have to watch it carefully.

Cheese continues to be a challenge.

When I started, I figured whatever they had at the grocery store was fine, and then I learned it’s generally too dry or too oily. The shredded stuff is nearly always very dry, and they coat it with potato starch and/or tiny fibers of wood cellulose to keep it from caking. I think the cellulose turns the cheese into a hard composite, but I don’t know. Anyway, dry cheese gives you a texture like vinyl, and it burns fast.

I used to live near Costco and Gordon Food Service, and I found I could do very well with a 50/50 combination of Costco bagged mozzarella and GFS sliced provolone. Now, these stores are over an hour away.

Back when I was in Miami, I also tried a bunch of Grande products. They melt really well, but I thought they were a little bland. Not long ago, I was at the GFS in Orlando, and I saw they stocked Grande. On a lark, I bought a bag of East Coast blend, which is half part-skim and half whole-milk. It’s shredded, but they don’t put paper mill waste on the shreds.

For some reason, I like this cheese much better than I used to. Next time I’m in Orlando, I’ll get more.

I used to be frustrated by food service cheese because it came in big packages which got moldy in a hurry. Internet pizza nuts have shown me the light, however. Cheese companies say mozzarella should not be frozen, but the pizza nuts swear it does no harm, so I plan to buy a block, cut it up, and freeze one-pie portions.

The nuts say freezing block cheese is better than freezing shredded.

Because of my location, I have done a lot of testing to find better cheese locally, and one answer was Boar’s Head mozzarella from the Publix deli. It’s a low-moisture cheese, but it’s made from whole milk. It works, but it’s very greasy. It also costs nearly $11 per pound, which is more than twice what top-grade restaurant supply cheese costs.

I found a restaurant supply place near me, but they didn’t have any highly-regarded cheese. They had shredded Roseli cheese, part-skim. It’s made by U.S. Foods, a respected cheese supplier, but this particular product is made with wood dust, and it’s also too dry to make a good pizza. I know, because I bought a bag.

I was thinking of throwing the Roseli cheese out, but I got a wild hair and decided to try mixing it with Boar’s Head. Today I made a 60/40 blend, and it was not bad at all. It melted well, and it wasn’t greasy. It was slightly dryer than I wanted, however, so I think the key is to go 70/30.

It’s annoying that virtually nobody makes a proper shredded pizza cheese for consumers. Anyone who buys grocery shredded cheese knows it doesn’t work. It turns brown in a hurry, the top turns into leather, and it gets grainy. How is it that companies like Kraft and Sargento have been making pizza cheese since the dawn of time and haven’t noticed the problem? They’re not even trying.

The sauce problem is just as bad. I have to buy huge cans of Stanislaus Saporito sauce and freeze them in board-shaped portions I can cut up as needed. You would think there would be one really good national brand of pizza sauce or tomato paste, but there isn’t. I’ve done okay with Glen Muir organic paste and Winn-Dixie paste, but if I want a home run, I buy Stanislaus.

I have like 60 pounds of it.

Anyway, the big message I wanted to convey today is that you can make a pretty good pizza if you get Boar’s Head mozzarella and cut it with a little shredded low-quality cheese. It’s a pain, because you have to shred the Boar’s Head yourself, but you do what you have to do.

I should also say I found a pretty good pizza cutter. I have a big stainless rocking cutter, and most people love those. I don’t think much of it. I like 4″ wheels. I had one made by OXO, and I thought it was great until the hollow plastic handle came off and poured dishwater on my cheese.

It was surprisingly hard to find anything better. I decided to check sites that supply pizzerias, since they have to sell things that actually work. I found a Winco 4″ cutter with a solid plastic handle. So far, it works fine, and it can’t hold water. Winco is a well-known restaurant equipment company. I have their stainless bowls.

The Winco cutter is NSF certified, and it doesn’t seem to mind the dishwasher at all.

So, to sum up all the useful info:

1. AP flour works fine for New York Style pizza. I would stick with High-gluten or bread flour for garlic rolls.
2. Use very little yeast if you want a good pizza crust.
3. Instant yeast is preferable for people who don’t want to deal with starters.
4. Roseli shredded mozzarella is too dry to be any good, but if you mix it into Boar’s Head, which is too oily, you get a pretty decent pizza. This may also work with nasty shredded cheeses sold in grocery stores.
5. Grande makes hassle-free pizza cheese, both shredded and block.
6. Freezing mozzarella won’t hurt it, and you should probably stick with block cheese when freezing.
7. OXO 4″ pizza cutters have hollow handles that collect dishwater, so try a Winco.
8. If you like a softer crust, add more oil, use AP flour, and go easy on the kneading.

Plus Miracle Healing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to warm up the steak. Wish me success.

MORE

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

Everything went well.

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

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

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

Who’s up for Bacon-Wrapped Bacon?

I just wrote a blog post, but I think I’ll write another one. I just ordered a grill.

When I moved here, I got myself a little Pit Boss stainless portable gas grill. I paid around $100. It was great for what it was, but it didn’t burn hot enough. I replaced the pathetic gas regulator with one for a big turkey fryer, and now I get huge flames hot enough to produce acceptable burgers. It’s probably dangerous, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.

The grill is cheap, though, and it’s not a permanent solution. The heat shield things under the grate are about gone, and I had to warranty the grate once. My wife is coming, and we need some real stuff.

I used to have a DCS grill. DCS makes “pro” grills, whatever that means. I think it’s BS. You never see a regular barbecue grill in a restaurant. I haven’t, anyway. DCS grills look a lot like the ones at Home Depot, and my guess is that they’re aimed at consumers. They’re made to last a long time. That’s the big difference I can see.

The DCS I had cost about $1000, and it was around 30″ wide and 18″ deep. It did okay with burgers. It eventually developed a gas leak. So much for “pro” quality.

When I decided to upgrade from the Pit Boss, I looked at DCS, figuring their stuff had to be better than grills from hardware stores. I was amazed by the prices. A nice full-size DCS will run about 10 thousand dollars. That’s moronic.

Because I hated my greenie washing machine that made my clothes stink, I bought a commercial Maytag water hog with a heavy stainless tub. I paid under $1000. You can’t tell me a grill is worth 10 commercial washers. The washer has a cabinet, a tub, a transmission, a motor, electronics, and valves. A grill has a cabinet, a grate, valves, and a burner. Much simpler to manufacture, and surely much cheaper.

I wanted a good grill, but there was no way I was spending anything remotely like 10 thousand dollars.

I researched, and I learned a few things.

Evidently, consumer grills have gotten much better over the last decade. They don’t rust out in two summers like they used to. They get good support from their manufacturers. They also heat much better than the old ones.

People recommended Weber, which surprised me. I’ve had cheesy Weber products. I learned they make some nice stuff now. I can get a big stainless grill with porcelain-coated cast iron grates for $1330. It comes with a “sear zone,” which means there’s an extra burner to turn on to get proper meat browning. It also has a side burner, which is probably not that useful, but it can’t hurt.

I was going to get one of these things, but then I learned about Napoleon grills.

Napoleon is a Canadian company, so almost American. They make grills in Canada, not just China. For $1500, I can get a grill like the Weber I wanted, but it will have stainless grates, a rotisserie and added rotisserie burner, and a side burner that has an infrared element.

The infrared element is like a restaurant salamander. It’s a big rectangle of something or other that gets red hot. You can put a burger or steak over it, and it will brown it more or less correctly. Much better than the Weber’s sear zone. You can also heat pots on it.

I might be able to use a wok on the infrared burner. Right now, I have to use a turkey fryer.

On top of all this, Napoleon offers a lifetime warranty, with some caveats. That blows Weber off the planet.

I don’t like grilled steaks because I can’t get a grill hot enough to do it right. I fry steaks in butter on cast iron. Maybe the Napoleon will make me love the grill again. At the very least, it should do burgers correctly. I’m tired of hacking in order to get what a grill should do right out of the store.

I see know-nothings on the web bragging about their steaks with pretty grill marks. You don’t want grill marks. You want a steak that’s brown all over. Steaks with grill marks have no flavor except in the marks. It’s astounding that people can’t figure this out.

A fried steak, properly done, has a heavy brown crust that covers its surface. That’s why I fry. I suppose it’s why the French fry steak.

Good steakhouses don’t serve steaks with grill marks. They brown them all over, one way or another.

It’s a shame to pay for good meat at post-Biden prices and then ruin it. And steak is really easy to prepare, so no one has a good excuse.

I am eager to see what the new grill will do. I may even let my wife touch it.

The Amazing Electronic Snowflake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just for fun, I asked it this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never Get Between a Hog and his Slop

Coronavirus is like political correctness. It’s a filthy enemy that waits till you think it’s dead and then starts to squirm again.

Something like three weeks ago, I started to feel a little off. I thought it was because I needed sleep, but within a couple of days I had chills, and then I had something like a mild cold. Then my sense of smell vanished for a day or two. I also had problems with my sense of taste.

I’ve been brewing beer since early January, so I am very excited about getting new beers in the can. Well, the keezer. I need to taste and smell things all the time. It was frustrating when I couldn’t smell beer and when perfectly good beer tasted like club soda with soap and hops added.

The problem went away, but I think it came back. A couple of days ago, I tried my latest beer, and it wasn’t good at all. It didn’t taste like it was oxidized or infected with exotic organisms. Those are the problems most failed beers have. The hops tasted metallic, and the malt tasted like horehound.

I also tried a new factory beer. It’s a Kolsch-style ale. Kolsch is a German ale style which supposedly tastes a great deal like lager. Brewing lagers, at least the old way, takes more time and effort than brewing ales, so if there is a beer style out there that will get me lager taste with ale effort, I want to know about it.

I poured this stuff into a glass, and the head disappeared right away. That’s not a great sign. It was extremely clear and light in color. I tasted it, and it was sort of like a combination of Miller and ginger ale or Sprite. Pretty bad.

I gave up on it and poured it down the sink. I got myself a glass of my own stout, which is magnificent.

The stout was only okay. It seemed more sour and bitter than it should have been. I wondered if I had somehow infected it with bacteria.

Last night, I decided to try an Old Rasputin imperial stout in order to see if my senses were working. I think this beer has no flaws. It could not be much better. If I tasted anything funny, the problem had to be with me.

Sure enough, the bitterness and acidity seemed high. The beer was only pretty good, and for Old Rasputin, that’s a disastrous performance.

I guess something is still playing around in my head, changing the way things taste.

I’m strong. My nose isn’t running. I don’t have a fever. My throat is fine. My bones don’t hurt. But I’m afraid to drink beer because I may find out it tastes bad, and then I’ll end up throwing out beer I’ve worked and spent to make. I’m also unable to get my hair cut, because I don’t want to make the barber sick. I’m starting to look like Phil Spector.

I suppose coronavirus must come and go until it disappears entirely. I don’t remember being warned about that.

In other news, the cousin I baptized sent me a photo of what looked like the roof of a church. Her text said, “I’m at Asbury.”

I figured Asbury was a church near her. I was glad to see she was together with believers. Then the next day, I saw a news story about the Asbury revival.

Asbury is the name of a Christian college in Kentucky. It’s an easy drive for my cousin. People say the Holy Ghost is falling on them, and the usual worship and joy are filling the place.

What are my feelings about it? I see both good and bad things about it.

First, it’s great whenever there’s a real revival. I hope this is one. Second, I think Christians will make too much of it and use it to feed the delusion that revival is going to sweep the world. It’s not going to. It did that already during the 20th century, and the world said it wasn’t interested.

I think it’s helpful to write about the Pensacola revival, which is known officially as the Pensacola Outpouring and the Brownsville Revival. A big charismatic revival took place near Pensacola between 1995 and 2000. People spoke in tongues. The usual things happened. Now it’s sort of like Woodstock for Christians. Old hippies are perversely proud they debased themselves at Woodstock, and many who weren’t there lie and say they were. Call it stolen degradation. Christians who visited Pensacola like to talk about it.

The Outpouring may have done a lot of good. Surely it must have. But there were excesses, and disgraceful characters like Todd Bentley showed up and used it to glorify themselves and turn people away from Jesus.

People think the Outpouring was a big deal, but was it?

Paul went from Israel to Italy on foot, evangelizing as he went. Some think he made it to Spain. He and a few friends turned entire nations to charismatic Christianity. Look at the cities of the seven churches of the Revelation. Were they in Israel? No, they were in Turkey, in places where demon worship had been dominant. All, or nearly all, of Europe became Christian because a few people passed through and did healings and so on.

What happened after Pensacola? NOTHING. Oh, sure, it’s probably true that a few thousand people were changed. But America was a nation of more than 300 million people, and overall, we paid no attention. Canada wasn’t transformed. Neither was Mexico. Neither was most of Florida. Not even Pensacola.

These days, revival is like a case of coronavirus that hits someone who has been vaccinated twice and infected three times. It flares up and burns out fast.

My prediction is that what’s happening in Asbury will do a small number of people a lot of good, and then life will go on as usual.

We have become like Catholics. They get very excited whenever a Catholic claims to have been healed. They ignore it when thousands of Protestants get healed, but if a spirit claiming to be Mary appears to a goatherd standing in a creek in Albania and his bunions go away, they build a shrine and start flocking to the place to buy creek water.

We have become like Jews. In the time of Jesus, they had no prophets and had not had one in 400 years. Not one they accepted, I mean. They had John the Baptist. They couldn’t get a miracle to save their lives. But they knew an angel occasionally troubled the waters of the pool of Bethesda, and whoever got into the water first after a visit got healed. So the pool became a destination for medical tourists. They lay around it hoping to beat each other into the water.

Miracle healings are commonplace, and so is prophecy. The Holy Spirit does amazing things for people every day. Jesus appears to people. It’s crazy to think an isolated event that helps almost no one is a good sign or in any way normal.

What’s happening at Asbury, if it really is happening, should be happening every day where there are Christians. Churches should always be full of people singing and praying in tongues and working miracles. Instead of being excited about one little revival, we should be sobered by it. We should realize that if God manifests himself to thousands of people and no wave of conversions follows, we are close to the end, because it proves we have rejected him. We have rejected Yahwah, Yeshua, and the Holy Spirit. God has no one left to send.

Thank goodness the Holy Spirit didn’t come as a man. We would be trying to kill him.

There was an outpouring at Azusa street over a century ago, and it spread all over the world. That does not happen any more. People need to wake up and see the obvious.

I had a dream this morning, and I didn’t think it was related to the revival, but maybe it was.

It was Thanksgiving day. I was with my family, meaning my mother’s relatives. We were having dinner. At first, it was just the actual family, but as the dream progressed, something like 75 people appeared in the room.

My relatives were sitting at tables, and the food was on the tables. That’s not how you serve dinner to a big group. You put the food on tables, and you seat the people at other tables. That way, everyone can get to the food. In the dream, the food was in the middle of the tables where my relatives were sitting, so they made it hard for anyone else to get any.

They were hunched over their plates like hogs or dogs, shoveling the food in and thinking only of themselves. They looked straight down at their food. They didn’t talk. Most of my relatives are only interested in getting whatever they can for themselves, and I can’t think of anything much they have done for the poor, so this made sense to me. But I don’t think it was just about my relatives. I think it was about all the people who are supposedly my brothers and sisters in Christ.

I complained because they weren’t putting the food on tables where other people could get at it.

I decided to try to get something for myself. I saw a buffet table that had been set up, and a friendly bearded man in a chef’s toque was serving. He seemed to be Australian. He asked me if I wanted mashed potatoes. I wasn’t all that interested, but then I remembered that mashed potatoes were customary on Thanksgiving, so I said I wanted some. He gave me a huge plate with a giant mound of potatoes on it, and he hid big pieces of turkey in it. Entire legs.

While I was going around looking for other food, I must have put the plate down, because one of my relatives stole it.

Given the way the distribution of my grandparents’ wealth has gone, this is not surprising, either.

I saw some ladies who had sort of a booth where they were giving away candy. As I walked by, I grabbed three packages of peppermints without asking and ate one. I felt like I was stealing, but the candy was free.

I sat down next to my aunt. This is the lady who had a delusional fit the other day because I complained about the way she mishandles family property and money. She accused me of living alone in poverty, but a recent real estate transaction made it necessary for me to inform a title agent I was married, so I guess now she has to live with the knowledge that I have a wonderful young wife. And I am not poor.

Anyway, she looked up from the food and said, “Isn’t this wonderful?” I said it was not, and I pointed out the obvious problems. She got very angry. She said she should know better than to ask me or my cousin Russ about things because we were always so negative.

My aunt is like an Asian. Appearance is everything. Admiration is everything. The truth is a threat that has to be kept out.

Maybe the dream was about the stunted revivals we have now. People who are supposed to be brothers and sisters show up to get whatever they can from God, they take things other people are supposed to receive, they reject and abuse anyone who points out the truth, and the revivals die like young tumors eating big doses of chemotherapy drugs.

I felt like I was starving when I woke up. I felt exactly the way you would feel if you showed up for Thanksgiving dinner and found out your relatives ate or hid every last scrap of food.

I told Rhodah. She said I should get a big, fat McDonald’s breakfast. So I did!

I think the Australian guy and the candy lady were angels. God uses angels to give us way more than we need, and then people do their best to steal it.

All sorts of suppressive spirits have been after me since before I was born. Some–probably the most effective ones–worked through relatives. My sister used to torture me while I was lying in my crib. She didn’t want my parents to bring me home from the hospital. When we got older, and there were big meals at my grandparents’ house, she always tried to make me sit at the kids’ table. I would go in and shove a chair in with the adults and the rest of the older children. When I was in my forties, it still infuriated her whenever I rode in the front seat of a car! That’s how crazy she is.

We all have enemies, and we all have friends. Some are natural, and some are supernatural.

My sister ended up getting a lot of what she wanted me to have. She got disinherited. She got lung cancer. She lost her law license. She lost the house she lived in. She was convicted of a felony. She will never have a husband or a baby. No one, not even other people who are close to Satan, can stand her. She can’t have friends. Only temporary hosts.

There are people who can only be cursed, and there are people who can only be blessed. If you’re the first kind, and you try to harm the second kind, the curses go back to you, multiplied, and they turn out to be great blessings to the people you tried to hurt.

Jesus told us to be good to our enemies. He said we would pile burning coals on their heads. That’s because they can’t be blessed. Every blessing you try to send a person like that comes back to you, and it turns out to be a curse to them because of what they do with it.

You can see this principle in the instructions he gave the disciples. He said:

And into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace be to this house.
And if the son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it: if not, it shall turn to you again.

“Peace” is a bad translation. It’s a general term referring to a state of blessing.

What happens to the man who doesn’t receive your blessings? Here is what Jesus said about cities that wouldn’t receive blessings:

And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.
Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.

He meant that. There will be punishment.

This is one reason it’s important to pray for your enemies. You’re really praying for yourself.

I guess I sound like I’m not in favor of revival. That’s not true. I’m not in favor of mistaking small, fleeting revivals for important movements that indicate the world is going to be saved. It is not. The Bible is very clear about this, and so is the Holy Spirit, who wrote the Bible.

It’s all About the Data

The whole brewing enterprise is going very well.

Day before yesterday, I was finally able to get my first ale into a glass, and yesterday, I started drawing beer that was carbonated more correctly and had less suspended yeast in it. Yeast is bitter, and not in a way that improves beer.

I’ll post a photo.

The beer is still cloudy. It may stay that way. This is what I wanted. I can’t explain why, but this is a beer that should be a little chewy. If it turns clear as I take more out of the keg, it will still be great, but this photo shows what I was trying to do.

I bought 4 of those glasses. They’re called Brimley nucleated glasses. “Nucleated” means they stuck a laser or something in each glass and made tiny dents in the bottom. This creates what are known as nucleation points, and it means bubbles form on them and stream up into the beer.

I was not really interested, or even aware of the existence of, nucleation points when I started looking for glasses, but they don’t seem to hurt anything, and I was willing to compromise because it was so hard to find sturdy glasses with a good shape and a low price.

Brimley himself must be a Chinese guy, like Mr. Bauer from Harbor Freight.

Wing Wa Brimley, son of Mei Ling and Wo Fat Brimley.

I am controlling my food and beverage intake these days, but Saturdays…come on. I’m going to have a pizza or a Coke occasionally. Yesterday, I must have had a quart and a half of beer. It’s delightful. The complex aroma and flavor. The fine-textured Kirin-y head. And the satisfaction of finally getting it in my hand. These all drove me to go overboard.

Also, this stuff is just plain good. I have a problem when I create recipes: sometimes the results are so good, it’s very, very hard to stop eating. Beer is made from recipes, so the same problem applies when I get it right.

I will not say I make a great beer or a beer that should win prizes. It’s all subjective. I will say I really, really like the beers I designed. Really. A lot. Seriously.

I always say I don’t drink to get a buzz, but I will not lie. I want to be honest and correct myself. While I’ve been researching new beers and…wow, “researching” sounds so legitimate! Like saying, “I EXPERIMENTED with marijuana before being put in charge of document security in the Clinton White House.” Anyway, during my research, I have had several strong beers, and there is no way to drink twelve ounces of a 10%-alcohol beer without feeling something, especially if you have my Gary-Coleman-like moderation-induced tolerance. I have felt some pleasant sensations, and several times, I drank a little more to extend them.

I have been a little concerned. I don’t ever want to be drunk again, and my feeling has been that it’s a bad idea to see beer as anything other than a delicious drink. I’m not going to worry, though. I’m in the initial-enthusiasm phase of my return to brewing, so naturally, I will drink a little more now than I will in the future.

The Bible says God gave us wine to make man’s heart glad, so I suppose it can’t be true that it’s evil to feel a little sensation from beer. I don’t want to be a self-medicater, but being a Sadducee–a legalist–is worse.

I still want to make a couple of strong beers, but I have realized they’re not for every day. If I drink a bottle of imperial stout in the evening, I feel a little different when I get up the next day. The general rule is that I feel energetic and enthusiastic when I wake up, so I don’t want to face mornings with a vague sensation that reminds me I drank the night before.

I keep thinking about the relationship between Christmas and the rapture. I feel that beer is suitable for celebrations, as we see in Deuteronomy 14, and this is why I’m supposed to make it. I think I’m celebrating the rapture–the second Christmas–in advance. I’m ahead of most people. Last night, I lifted a glass and told God I was celebrating. I kept thanking him for coming for us the first time.

As for my views on how we see Christmas and gifts, I believe God told me this yesterday: Christmas IS the present. That’s really true. I told this to Rhodah, and she quoted John 3:16. God “gave” his son so believers would not perish but have eternal life. Jesus is a gift. The best possible gift. But we have Jesus-free Christmases during which we get excited about puny gifts like jewelry and gift cards.

Giving is essential to a blessed life. If you want to receive, give to others on God’s command. Not preachers in Lamborghinis. Actual human beings with hearts and needs. The things we give are seeds, and we receive harvests. God gives to receive a harvest, and so should we. He gave his son so he could have us. Jesus, who is God, even received a harvest when he gave away fish and bread.

If you don’t have a lot of money to give, you can give prayer, labor, a ride, a free professional service, or something else of value. Rhodah says T.B. Joshua said that if you have nothing else to give, give your ear and your heart. Sometimes people just need to talk.

I may crank out a wheat beer today.

The Shortage Glut

Are things getting crazy again? Looks like they may be.

There was a big increase in global suffering in 2020, as we all know. Coronavirus popped up and made us all miserable. Here in the US, leftists threw terrible, diaper-bursting tantrums, terrorizing the police, beating up people they disagreed with, and destroying property. And of course, there were shortages.

As time passed, we got used to coronavirus, leftists got their president and reduced hostilities, and there was some easing of shortages.

Now covid has erupted in China, defying the ridiculous zero-transmission orders their vile government imposed, and which our own death-fearing leftists still praise. Bird flu has quadrupled the price of eggs. Food packages have shrunk, and prices have gone up. I suppose riots will resume, since that’s the only part of the puzzle that’s missing.

China is really something, and so are our press and medical establishments, which are both dominated by leftists. If you go to Google and look up “coronavirus China,” you will get a government-doctor graph that says there are about 5,000 new cases in China per day. If you Google the news, you will see figures like 76% and 90%, describing the current infection totals in Chinese cities.

Clearly, if 76% of the people in any large Chinese city are currently infected, the entire country has a daily rate which is in the hundreds of thousands or millions. But our handlers still post absurdly low figures.

Why would the medical-government complex allow CCP numbers to be published in their names when even our feeble press is acknowledging statistics that prove those figures aren’t even close to correct?

If there is one sane thing happening in China, it’s this: if a Chinese person who has covid dies in a train wreck, they don’t call it a covid death. Here, death figures have been wildly inflated because hospitals and the government have financial and political interests in jacking them up.

It seemed like the official figures made a little sense early in 2020, but eventually, it became obvious they were being cooked, and there was no way to know what the truth was. Fall down an elevator shaft, and you were counted as a covid death. As long as you had the sniffles, you counted, and no test was required, so colds and the flu were good enough.

We will never know how many people got covid or died from it. It’s like asking about the Atlantic slave trade. Sure, over a hundred million people died during shipment. Whatever you say. Never mind that there were roughly a hundred million people on the entire continent of Africa in 1600, and only a tiny percentage were sold to slavers by their fellow Africans.

Slaves were expensive. Letting them die in huge numbers for no reason would be like loading ships with new Toyotas and letting them roll into the ocean. It never happened. There weren’t that many to begin with, and slavers tried to keep them alive so they could sell them. Slavery was a capitalist industry. Industries that lose money don’t last 400 years.

Talking to leftists about covid is like talking to flat-earthers about satellites.

To get back to the point, things seem to be getting worse again. This comports with the Bible’s warnings. The tribulation will come, and before that, there will be labor pains. Things will get bad, and then they’ll get better. Then the pattern will repeat. It seems we are entering a labor pain.

Today I read about eggs.

We have always had eggs. Chickens are mentioned in the Bible. We have always had influenza. There have been bird flu epidemics in the past. Now, if the establishment is to be believed, we have a unique epidemic which is expected to stay with us until some external force ends it. They are telling us it will not go away on its own like all the other bird flus. So we have had chickens for thousands of years, and during most of that time there was no science to help end epidemics, but somehow we never had a permanent poultry epidemic until this century.

The bird flu is like coronavirus in that it is firmly established in the wild. We can’t vaccinate every pigeon and crow. This is why you paid $7 for jumbo eggs the other day.

Just when I learned how to make creme brulee.

Will it run its course until birds around the world develop resistance, or will it be killing poultry until Jesus returns? Wish I knew.

If there have always been bird flus, why is this one different? Let me guess. Global warming. Or homophobia. Maybe if more male shop teachers were allowed to teach while wearing mammoth artificial breasts with protruding nipples, eggs would be cheaper.

Yesterday, I called a gas company and asked about buying a beer gas tank. Sorry; no could do. Steel shortage. They said that if I brought them my own tank, they could swap it, but they were not selling new ones.

There is no steel shortage. The Ukraine war, and probably other things, put a big dent in steel demand. Steel was a lot more expensive in the recent past. I suppose there must be a tank shortage. Maybe companies are hoarding them, or maybe the Chinese people who make them are bogged down by coronavirus. Anyway, one more thing that’s hard to get.

It’s not a trivial problem. Gas bottles are used for all sorts of things. Anesthesia. Welding. Weird industrial uses that are little known but very important.

Gas is also expensive. There is a CO2 shortage. On the one hand, we are told that CO2 is destroying the world, but on the other hand, there is a shortage of CO2 for things like beer and soda production.

Why is CO2 expensive? Because of coronavirus? Because of backward environmentalist legislation? No, it’s because gas supplies we have relied on in the past have experienced contamination, and it’s taking time to fix it. One CO2 source was contaminated by an extinct volcano. No human being, not even a white one, caused that.

Citrus is disappearing all over the world. Bananas are threatened by a devastating fungus. The king crabs and snow crabs just vanished; look that up. Of course, some are blaming global warming for the crab problem, but scientists who are probably more honest are blaming a complex and cascading combination of factors.

Deer are in trouble. Chronic wasting disease, which is like mad cow disease or kuru for deer and people who eat the wrong deer parts, is killing deer in large parts of the US and Canada, and in the Florida Keys, screwworms are literally eating deer alive. Deer have a high coronavirus rate, although they don’t get very sick. Yet.

I guess I’m wasting my time, telling people about shortages and diseases. We all see these things happening.

Here’s another shortage I find interesting: the gas stove shortage. It’s not here yet. Leftists have decided to try to ban gas stoves and ovens. That is amazing. How can anyone be that stupid? It can only be demons at work.

Gas stoves cause global warming, apparently. So what about grills and other portable cooking tools? Will propane be sold only with permits based on what we plan to do with it?

From personal experience, I can tell you it’s wonderful not to have to need electricity to feed yourself. Living in a hurricane state, I’ve had to grill my food many times. If leftists get their way, gas stoves and ovens will start to vanish as they age, and everyone will depend on the power grid.

This could kill a lot of old people. I’ll give you the example of a relative of mine; a diehard faux leftist hypocrite. She just got rid of her gas fireplace appliance and replaced it with an electric one, and she lives in an area where winter weather sometimes kills the power. She’s feeble and sick, and so is her husband. They’re not rare cases. I would hate to live in rural Minnesota or Montana and lose heat in the winter.

Oddly, ammunition is getting cheap. You can buy .22 rounds for as little as 5 cents each. I can get 9mm for $7.50 per box before tax and shipping. It was more like $30 not long ago.

For a long time, my feeling has been that God would see to it that the guns and ammo kept flowing, because humanity will want those things after the rapture. People will want to kill each other, and God will let it happen, because his children will not be here to intercede. Even when we claimed there were shortages, guns and ammo were selling like crazy. We used the word “shortage,” but it looks like the scarcity was only on retailers’ shelves. We were buying so fast, they could not keep up.

One of the curses of the tribulation is a spirit of murder that takes over the world. It’s going to happen. There is no way to stop it. God has predicted it, so that’s that. It makes sense that people would be armed very well during that time.

No one should consider it strange if a pandemic causes a series of shortages, but we have shortages that are only attributable to accidents and what insurance companies used to call “acts of God.” That should make people think.

A pandemic itself is like that. People don’t cause them. Well, there is the covid lab theory, but it’s not proven, and it’s an outlier. Labs didn’t create the bird flu or the deer diseases I mentioned.

Over the last week, I heard two charismatics predicting a bad year. One is a man who goes around healing people. I don’t know how accurate his prophecies generally are. The other was Mark Hemans, the Australian healer and teacher. He appears to get solid information from God. He compared the time we’ve just experienced to the eye of a hurricane. There is nearly no wind in the eye of a storm, so people tend to go out and celebrate as it passes, thinking they’re in the clear. Then the other side of the storm shows up and drives them indoors.

I was walking into a store two days ago, and I thought about my dependence on stores. I knew that if this one and the other local stores closed, I would be in a bad way. My little farming efforts amounted to nothing last year. Is this the year when we will start driving by stores with taped-off entrances?

It’s going to happen. If it’s not this year, it will still happen soon.

Maybe this year won’t be too bad. I have the feeling this will be a year of celebration for my wife and me. I feel as though we will be comfortable, and we will be full of the awareness Jesus will be here soon. I certainly hope this is true. I don’t look forward to begging for food or fending off hoardes of city dwellers who think I have it. They will be hit worse than anyone. They have no way to look after themselves, and they will be surrounded by desperate people who are in the same boat and who will do anything in order to get food.

In the Bible, Hebrews boiled and ate their own children, and they were no worse than modern Americans. If a person will eat his own child, what will people do to strangers?

If you don’t have a good relationship with God, you will sink when America finally enters the drainpipe. Biden can’t save you. Money can’t save you. Bags of junk silver, weapons, and a generator can’t save you. One of the purposes of the tribulation will be to show people God has always been the only source of provision and safety, so He will make sure they understand. Everything else people trust will be proven useless.

Sehr Gut

My first post-2006 brew day is behind me, and it went great. Sort of.

I bought myself a used Braumeister 20L V2 brewing system, which does everything for you up to the point where it’s time to chill the wort. It mashes and boils, in other words. That’s a lot of help. You just put your water and grain in the machine, turn it on, pull the mash thing out when it beeps, throw hops in when it beeps, and drain the wort into your fermenter.

In the past, I had to mash in a huge kettle on the counter wrapped in towels. Then I moved everything to a big cooler and sparged with hot water I had prepared separately. Then I lifted the refilled kettle back to the stove and boiled. The kettle and cooler were too big to wash in the sink. I had to stand in the kitchen most of the time, because nothing was automatic.

Instead of typing “Braumeister” over and over again, I’ll just call the machine Helga. It’s much easier to type.

I made a major mistake this time. I read the manual, and it said to use 12 liters of water for mashing. This sounded crazy, because I was making around 20 liters of beer. I figured the Germans had come up with a way to use less water. Some kind of greeny thing.

As I was doing the mash, I heard weird noises from Helga. It sounded like liquid was hitting something very hot.

Helga mashes in the following way. She is a cylindrical kettle with a ring-shaped heater in the bottom. You put a smaller cylinder (mash pipe) inside the big one, with screens on each end and grain inside it. You add water. Helga heats up and starts pumping water up through the grain, so it overflows out of the inner cylinder, down to where the heater is.

It sounded like liquid was hitting the heater. Seemed to me the heater should have been submerged, so I added water until the noise stopped.

I got a bunch of error messages. They said, “Temp Err.” I Googled, and other people had had the same problem. There were no answers.

After a while, there was a burning smell. It wasn’t bad, so I let it go.

Helga has a cute insulating jacket she wears to make her more efficient. When I took it off later, I found a big burned place on the inside.

When I looked back at the manual, I saw that it recommended 12 liters of water for a smaller model. Helga was supposed to get 23. The heater was exposed part of the time, and it heated up one side of Helga so the jacket was scorched.

When all was said and done, I had a specific gravity (reflects sugar concentration) of around 1.040. I should have had 1.056. I turned up the boiling temperature, and eventually I added around 5 ounces of malt extract I had on hand for making yeast cultures. I got up to 1.054, which is good enough.

The lack of water prevented the mash from going as it should have, so I didn’t get as much sugar as I had hoped.

The funny thing is that before adding the wrong amount of water, I checked the manual several times.

Cleaning up was pretty easy. I took the mash pipe and screens out. I put the screens in the dishwasher. I washed the pipe and Helga herself in the kitchen sink. Not too bad.

I made the mistake of using loose hops instead of putting them in mesh bags, so I ended up with a lot of hop mush in the bottom of the kettle. I ran a lot of clean water through the pump to make sure there were no hops in it, and I tipped Helga over and rinsed everything down the drain.

When I was done, I drained Helga into my fermenting bucket, Franz, and put it in the pool, where the water was at 65°. Two hours later, the wort was down to about 71°. It only needed to be below 80° in order for it to be safe for yeast, so I suppose I can take fermenters out after an hour or so from now on.

I have gone back and forth about fermenting temperature.

I chose to begin my return to brewing with this recipe because it ferments at room temperature, but after buying the grain, I bought a little freezer for fermenting. I put a temperature control on it to get it to 68°. Fermenting at 75° can produce strange alcohols that cause headaches and hangovers, if certain people on the web are right, and I thought maybe I should ferment at a more conventional temperature.

Upon reflection, I decided to move the temperature back up but still use the freezer. Higher temperatures produce chemicals that can make beer taste better, and I didn’t want to miss that, nor did I want to violate a sound principle of cooking: never mess with a recipe if you need to learn something from it.

Brewing beer is a type of cooking.

I needed to know how the original recipe would work, and using a lower temperature would prevent that from happening.

I could have fermented on the floor in the house, but that could have caused problems. First, beers sometimes overflow when fermenting. Second, I am doing this fermentation with a loose lid to let gas out. Bugs could get in if I didn’t put Franz in a container. I don’t have a lot of bugs, but I do have a few.

I am using a brand new freezer to keep something at more or less the same temperature that surrounds the freezer. Sounds odd.

Now I’m waiting for my kegging stuff to arrive. I ordered something called a Torpedo Megamouth keg. It’s about 18″ tall and 11″ wide. Shorter than a Cornelius keg, which is what most people use. It will fit in my spare fridge so I don’t have to get a beer fridge yet.

I’ve also ordered a fancier fermenter. I chose something called a Fermzilla All-Rounder. It’s a clear plastic jug with a big mouth. The one I got comes with a valve on the lid, so you can do fermentation under pressure. My understanding is that this allows warmer fermentation, faster fermentation, and some other things I forgot. The All-Rounder is easy to clean, you can see what’s happening inside, and it’s generally better than a bucket.

Should I get a beer fridge? I guess. Not sure what to do. I don’t really want a big fridge with taps sitting out in my Christian house, scaring Christian guests, but if you’re going to make beer, you really need to be able to keep at least three types ready to drink.

I felt tremendous peace after brewing. The process was rocky when I got started, but as time passed, things went more and more smoothly, and I started to feel as though angels were doing things for me. When I got to the point where it was time to clean up, I was surprised to see how little there was to do.

I can’t explain any of that.

I still feel like God wants me to do this. I am not all that excited about drinking beer. I don’t look forward to being lectured by legalists. I’m enjoying myself, but I don’t know what it’s all about.

A-I-AIO!

Yesterday was pretty interesting. I drove to Orlando to get beer ingredients and equipment.

I used to have all sorts of brewing items. A fermenting fridge. A freezer turned into a kegerator. Brew kettle. Lautering tun. Stir plate. Kegs. Gas bottles. Measuring stuff. When I left Miami, I had no help and a parent with dementia, so I must have thrown out or given away $10,000 worth of belongings, and most of the beer things went. Also, my kegerator died one day without warning, so that had to be hauled off.

Over the last couple of days, I rooted around, and I learned that I had a cornucopia of brewing paraphernalia. Here is a comprehensive list:

1. A brew kettle I no longer need.
2. A wort chiller I no longer need.
3. A hydrometer I no longer need.
4. A mercury thermometer I no longer need.
5. A control to maintain a high temperature in a freezer.
6. A $6 handle for lifting carboys.

So all I lacked was the other $90,000 worth of equipment.

Brewing used to be cheap, apart from equipment. I used to spend $20 for 5 gallons of the best beer on Earth. Best to me, I mean. People like different things for some reason. I nearly always ordered ingredients online. I placed orders large enough to get free shipping, so all was well.

This week, I went to Morebeer.com, which has apparently absorbed and digested some of the other companies I used to use. The cost for ingredients for one beer had shot up to close to $50.

I realize Joe Biden is president, and this is the beginning of the apocalypse, but that seemed unreasonable to me.

The problem was made worse by their unwillingness to sell me the amount I needed at a uniform price. If you need 9 pounds of a malt, you can’t order it. You can order 5 + 3 + 1, with the per-pound price going up sharply as increments shrink, or you can order 10 pounds and either throw out or try to store the excess. Holding onto extra grain is not practical. It’s mouse bait, it takes up room, and you have only 6 months to use it. Basically, you have to pay for something you don’t want.

On top of this, Morebeer charges about 10% to crush the grain in preparation for brewing. You can spend $160 on a machine to crush grain–one like the one I threw out–or you can pay as you go.

The nice thing about Morebeer is that they kill shipping on big orders, but by the time you’ve given them a lot more money than you want to, you’ve paid for shipping.

The local place I found 1) charges way less for malt across the board, 2) crushes it free of charge, 3) lets you order malt and hops in tiny increments, 4) bags things separately and labels the bags, and 5) charges about 40% less for yeast.

I probably spent $30 or more in tolls and gas yesterday, but I saved about $30 on ingredients alone, I got exactly what I wanted, I got it fast, and I was able to look around the store and see if I needed anything else. Yes, you can do that at Morebeer.com, but it’s not the same as being there in the flesh. You don’t have to scroll and flip pages.

During the drive, I prayed and listened to the Bible, which is what I always do in the car unless someone distracts me. Guess who I heard about? Naboth.

Talk about good timing.

Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard, but Naboth didn’t want to see. Ahab started crying, literally, so his wife Jezebel paid two losers to accuse Naboth of blasphemy. Naboth was stoned by a mob, and Ahab took the vineyard.

Why is this interesting? Because Naboth, a man who made wine, is the good guy in the story.

Please don’t try to con anyone with the idea that “vineyard” was a mistranslation. The Hebrew word clearly means a place where grapes are grown. Naboth wasn’t growing tangerines.

I really feel that God pushed me back into brewing, and I find it confusing, so I have been thinking and praying about it. Very often, when there is something I need to know, related material pops up on my car stereo. Looks like it happened again.

A lot of Christians are intolerant teetotalers. They insist that no Christian should ever drink anything alcoholic. I don’t know where they get this idea.

1. Jesus drank wine. Hello? He also ate meat. In fact, it was a sin for a Jew to be a vegetarian because of the Passover requirement. Jesus drank wine during Passover, which was months after the grape harvest, so fermentation had to have occurred.

2. The Bible says wine is a blessing. Psalm 104 says God gave it to make man’s heart glad. And no, doesn’t mean we’re glad because we’re not thirsty. Come on. Don’t torture the text.

3. Losing a vineyard’s production is a curse in the Bible. See Deuteronomy 28:39.

4. In Deuteronomy 14:26 the Lord commanded the Jews to have a feast and have “wine, other intoxicating liquor, or anything you please.”

Back in Biblical times, Jews were not knocking themselves out in their vineyards because they liked table grapes or raisins. If they were excited about fruit, the Bible would be full of material about things like figs and pomegranates, and it isn’t. Wine and grapes are mentioned much more often. The Jews wanted wine. And God had no problem with it. Misuse of alcohol was what he hated. It has never been much of a problem among Jews.

Some Christians make the ridiculous claim that the wine ancient Jews drank was just unfermented grape juice. The problem with that is that ancient Israel had no refrigeration and plenty of hot weather. Heat plus grape juice and a couple of weeks equals wine. It takes considerable work for a low-technology person to eliminate or reduce grape juice fermentation in a hot climate.

It is very obvious that Christian teetotaling is a post-Biblical creation. At the same time, the Bible condemns drunkenness beyond any doubt.

Some of life’s pleasures are wrong all the time. Others are only wrong when they cause problems. Food and drink fall into the latter category. If alcoholic drinks cause you no problems, there is no reason to avoid them. If they do, you should abstain.

When I was young, I drank to get drunk. Often. It was one of life’s great pleasures for me. The thought of doing that now is repulsive to me. I remember the dizzy feelings and the way I smelled of alcohol. I remember the stupid things I did. I remember hangovers and vomiting. I don’t want any of that, ever. To me, now, alcohol might as well be mineral water, except for the taste.

Since the idea of returning to homebrewing arose, I’ve had several beers (never two in one day), but before that, I was having maybe two drinks per month. By “drink,” I mean a real drink, not a 14-ounce martini or a huge cocktail. I mean a small glass of sherry, a shot of expensive whiskey, or maybe a beer. If I couldn’t have another drink for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t be a huge sacrifice. I keep alcohol on hand primarily for cooking. I use sherry for pork roasts and soup, whiskey for barbecue, beer for barbecue, and wine for lots of things.

Actually, I should come clean. I forgot that I had several beers and one gin and tonic in Singapore last month. I was in a foreign country, and I wanted to see what the beer was like, so there were times when I had one beer with a meal. I had the gin and tonic because tourists in Singapore are supposed to go to the Raffles Hotel Long Bar and have cocktails.

Alcohol doesn’t cause me problems. It used to, but that ended a long time ago. There is no reason for me become a teetotaling legalist fanatic. Avoiding alcohol because it messes up your life is not legalism; it’s common sense. Avoiding it because you think God will put a black mark on a scoreboard in heaven is legalism. Christianity is not a game of points.

Listening to Naboth’s story made me feel a lot better. I don’t want to do anything God hasn’t told me to do, and alcohol has been involved in the destruction of many, many people. For example, my dad and his father were alcoholics. Also, I would prefer not to upset future guests any more than necessary. Sooner or later, I’ll probably have to get some kind of kegerator, and there it will be, in my house, staring people in the face.

You have to fear God’s disapproval, not other people’s.

I suppose many people think there is no reason to drink alcohol except to get drunk. That’s a problem of limited perspective due to lack of knowledge. If you’ve never had alcohol, or you’ve never drunk except to get hammered, maybe you could get the impression that alcohol has no other purpose. It’s not true at all.

It’s a lot like saying there is no reason to own more than one gun, which is like saying drugstores should only carry one medicine or there should only be one size spoon. It reflects unfamiliarity with the subject.

I have never been much of a wine person, but I know a little bit about beer. It’s an exhaustive topic.

Beers start with grain. Most beer is made from barley, but there are zillions of different barleys. Dark ones. Light ones. Barleys that provide sweetness to beer. Cheap, nasty barley for beers like Budweiser. Beers are also made with corn, oats, wheat, and rice. I’m sure you will find other things beer can be made from. Anything with starch should work. They all contribute different flavors and colors.

The next main ingredient is hops. There are many different varieties, and they taste different. There are American hops that taste like oranges, grapefruit, and lemons. There are European hops that taste like cloves. Using the wrong hop in a beer can ruin it. Adding the hops at different times during brewing also makes a big difference in what you end up with. Many recipes use more than one type of hop.

The last important ingredient is yeast. The Wyeast company, one of the two big suppliers, lists over 60 beer yeasts on its site, and there is a reason for that. They work at different temperatures. They produce different flavors. Yeast doesn’t just produce alcohol and gas. It produces chemicals that change the taste of beer.

With all the different ingredients and brewing methods, there are many, many very different types of beer. The range of flavors is staggering. They suit different occasions, seasons, and foods.

Anyone who thinks all beer is the same should try a weissbier next to an imperial stout and an IPA (India Pale Ale).

If you can understand why there are so many different wines in the world, you should be able to understand the reason for making different beers. No one with any brains would say champagne is interchangeable with chianti. You should be able to understand that it’s not about getting drunk. If it were, I wouldn’t ever have one beer by itself. Lovers of good beer are actually pretty sophisticated.

If I start believing God is against the brewing operation, I’ll sell my stuff and take the hit. I am not married to the notion. I can go either way.

My brewing appliance, a Braumeister 20L V2, should get here tomorrow. That means I may be brewing Sunday.

For anyone who is still reading, the Braumeister is a self-contained system, commonly known as a self-contained system or all-in-one. There are a bunch of these things on the market. I don’t think they existed when I quit brewing.

I picked the Braumeister because the others appear to have problems. The Braumeister is German and more expensive than most. Sometimes those things mean something. I have seen new ones prices at $3000, but the great thing about brewing is that guys give it up, so I found a lightly-used one for a small fraction of that.

AIO’s, to use brewer jargon, let you do everything but fermentation in one vessel. When I used to brew, I mashed first. This means I put the grain in a kettle of hot water so the enzymes in it would turn the starch to sugar. Then I moved it to another device, and I rinsed the liquid and sugar out, back into the kettle. This gave me a sweet solution called “wort,” which rhymes with “squirt.” Then I boiled the solution with hops and drained it into a fermenting container. After the first fermentation, I could choose to move it to a big bottle, or carboy, and let it finish.

This is how I remember it, anyway.

With an AIO, you dump the grain and water into the machine and leave it there until you move it to the fermenter. It controls the mashing temperatures and times (there may be several for one batch). When mashing is done, you remove the grain and boil the wort with hops and whatever else you want. The machine has a timer. Then you cool the wort, put it in a fermenter, and add your yeast. This is called “pitching.”

You end up with less stuff to wash, and you don’t have to stand next to the kettle all day. The electronics prevent a lot of fussing with a clock, turkey fryer, and thermometer.

Here is what people say: AIO’s don’t make better beer; they make better brew days.

I plan to make an ale I named “Senseless Cruelty.” Maybe I’ll change that. It’s a high-IBU (bitter) ale like an IPA. I chose it because this is the only beer I ever fermented at room temperature. To ferment cooler, I will need another fridge or a fermenter that will fit in the little one I have. I expect to put the fermenter on the garage floor. Sometimes fermentations go too fast, and things leak, so I want to make my return to brewing with a safe approach.

In order to be ready on Sunday, I need to make a yeast starter today. I have yeast, so I have to boil some yeast extract in a flask and add yeast. Then I’ll let it ferment until I brew. The more yeast you have when you pitch, the less likely a problem is.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I look forward to seeing what the purpose is.

Plus a Much Better Gift

It’s Christmas Eve, and I am all by myself except for Marvin. But don’t pity me. I spent a lot of the day communicating with close friends and my beautiful wife, and I made Marvin and myself a pretty decadent dinner. Now I’ve decided to come here and save the world. I will tell you how to make creme brulee very easily.

My wife loves creme brulee, so I decided I should learn how to make it. The other day, I made my first batch, using a surprisingly clumsy recipe from The New York Times. Even in its withered state, this major metropolitan newspaper has ample resources to find a good creme brulee recipe, and they didn’t do it. There is no way to justify that.

The recipe required me to use a water bath, and that doesn’t work for various reasons. Mainly, it requires you to use tall dishes. Creme brulee should be served in a shallow dish, and the dessert itself should be one inch deep at the very most.

Today I made Caesar salad with homemade croutons and anchovies, potatoes au gratin (sort of), a standing rib roast, and I felt it would be a crime not to have a dessert, hence the creme brulee.

I roasted the beef at 175° on a lark, and it worked beautifully. When it got over 100° inside, I cranked the oven to 550°, and I took the meat out at an internal temperature of 115°. It was nearly perfect. Pink nearly all the way to the edge. Tender. Not that juicy, though. I dry-aged it, and that removes some water. I think that may be a mistake for a roast. Next time, wet aging.

To age it, I salted it and left it in the fridge for something like 10 days. It was wrapped in plastic for the last three or maybe 4 because I was concerned about dryness.

I did something else that was new. I rinsed the excess salt off the raw meat. This turned out to be a great idea. I applied butter and pressed garlic before roasting.

This was not the greatest piece of beef. I cut a steak off of it a week ago, and it was not as juicy or tender as it should have been. Publix always puts rib roasts on sale at this time of year, and that’s why I bought this one. Unfortunately, just about all the roasts I saw at the store lacked real marbling.

Aging it made it tender and flavorful, but I should have wet-aged it to keep it as juicy as possible.

I used the Caesar recipe from Bon Appetit. It’s the best one I’ve found. You still have to increase the lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, and anchovies to make it work. The recipe calls for canola oil, but I avoid that stuff. I used cheap olive oil.

I took the NYT creme brulee recipe and more or less halved it. I increased the ratios of egg yolks and sugar to everything else. I doubled the vanilla extract. I skipped the water bath and 325° recommendation and baked at 205°.

The texture was perfect. The flavor was intoxicating. Better than restaurant creme brulee. Could not have been better except for the caramelization. I am not all that skillful with a Bernzomatic torch. I may buy an attachment called a Searzall to improve my work. The caramel tasted fine, but the browning looked uneven.

Here you go.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup cream (I used regular whipping cream)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract or fake vanilla extract
pinch salt
3 egg yolks
3/8 cup sugar

Heat your oven to 205°.

Forget all the stuff about heating this or whisking that. Dump everything into a bowl and mix it with a mixer on a fairly low setting so you don’t beat a lot of air into it. You do not want a foamy creme brulee. Just make it smooth and dissolve the sugar.

This makes 4 small servings or two fairly large ones. Your call. Size your dishes appropriately. Fill them up and put them in the oven.

Here is the uncertain part: I think this takes 90 minutes to cook, but I’m not positive, because I kept fooling with it. When it’s not jiggly any more, it’s done. Don’t wait for a knife to come out clean. I don’t think that will ever happen.

When it comes out, sprinkle sugar on top and roast it with a propane or butane torch. You can use a broiler, but they say the results are not as good.

Chill until…chilled.

That’s it. Very simple.

I spent some time thinking about Jesus today. This is his day. Why aren’t we excited about that?

If he had not come down from heaven and endured life in this miserable place for our sake, we would all be going to hell. Heaven was the first Christmas gift. What greater gift is there than eternal salvation in the presence of God and people you love?

I turned on a long Youtube of old Christmas songs. I did not have to deal with any wokeness. I did not have to hear anyone rap about Santa Claus. I didn’t have an elf on my shelf. I didn’t have to sit at a table with vegan killjoys or angry same-sex couples with multicolored hair and vape pens next to their plates. No one lectured me about Christmas being a patriarchal white supremacist holiday. It felt a little bit like Christmas Eve at my grandfather’s house in the 1970’s.

My uncle used to cook a rib roast and potatoes au gratin for everyone, and that’s why I like to do it now.

I say I made potatoes au gratin “sort of” because real potatoes au gratin isn’t really a great dish. I made something a little more like macaroni and cheese with potatoes instead of macaroni.

Next year, I’ll be doing this with my wife, and I hope to have a bunch of guests, as I often have in the past.

Merry Christmas, everybody. I hope you’re with family or friends you love, but even if you’re not, someone loves you, and you can still have the biggest gift of all.

One More Place to Experience Rejection

I hate social media, but I joined Reddit so I could get some help with Starlink. Since then, I have asked a few things about other topics. It’s not always easy to find a forum where you can get information, and Reddit has a lot of specialized groups.

I found out Reddit has a “karma” system, which is offensive, of course, to people who are not Hindus and do not want to be dragged into the Hindu religion. It’s amazing how Hinduism has somehow escaped being labeled a religion. You can talk about karma and do yoga all day and not be accused of promoting a religion when, of course, you are.

Imagine what would happen if Reddit gave people holy points and damnation points and said comments made Jesus smile.

Reddit karma is a social credit system. If people like something you say, they give you a karma point. If not, they give you a negative karma point. If you get enough positive points, you get the privilege of starting groups. If you get enough bad points, your stuff may be put where it’s harder to find, and Reddit has shadowbanning, although I’m not sure if karma is involved in that.

So basically, it’s a system that allows other people to persecute you anonymously. As a result, you feel pressured to say things that make people happy by reinforcing what you perceive to be the existing majority opinion. It pushes you to keep useful information they won’t like to yourself. It makes healthy dissent wither and fosters the overgrowth of disinformation. So it’s a lot like Twitter. And Facebook.

Reddit has confirmed some of my prejudices.

The sad thing about prejudice is that it is usually reinforced by experience. It works, except when a prejudice is based on irrational feelings. Prejudice is generally based on years of observation. It really is a bad idea to go to black neighborhoods at night. It’s a bad idea to start a big STEM company and insist all the engineers be female. It really is dangerous to drive in China.

One of my prejudices is that lots of Internet cooking people are jerks. Boy, did Reddit confirm this. In a food group, said it was a shame known outlets published bad recipes, which it is, and three guttersnipes voted me down without being man enough to say anything.

I don’t know why food people are so hateful, but they really are. The nastiest Internet troll I ever saw, which is saying a great deal, was a food guy who called himself Sheldon Martin. His email address was penmart10@aol.com. I still remember that address, because the things he said were so foul. You can probably find his old postings online. Search for “penmart10@aol.com” and “prolapse.”

I just found some of his material. Take a look at this really mild example.

I won’t dispute your knowlege of pottery, although I seriously doubt it’s been more than remedial, probably an ugly ash tray you once made during a therapy session in a mental institution, but I know with absolute positive certainty you ain’t any kind of cook, ‘specially not a baker.

Some guy disagreed with him, politely, about pizza stones. A lot of his stuff was extremely filthy.

Another valid prejudice: there is no way to deal with Musk fans without facing a wall of insanity. There are people who will praise Tesla and Starlink no matter what. If Starlink satellites went nuts and started shooting gigawatt lasers down into daycare centers, the Muskhive would lunge at the throats of anyone who complained.

I pointed out some bad things Starlink had done, and I got whacked with Hindu demerits. There went my chances of going to Internet Nirvana and getting high with Steve Jobs.

It reminds me of communism. Communists tell people to rat on their neighbors anonymously. They tell kids to do this to their parents, and some do.

I could not resist trying to game the system. I went to a couple of areas and made some comments I knew people would love, and now I have overwhelming credit in the eyes of Krishna Berners-Lee or whatever.

It’s pretty stupid, and it shows how Satan is using the Internet to brainwash us into conformity. I guess I’ll delete my account and start a new one if I ever need Reddit again.

Hack Chef Bests Pros Again

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

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

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

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

Now I’ll add my criticisms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, wait.

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

There; that fixed it.

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

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

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

“A Trip Through a Sewer in a Glass-Bottomed Boat”

Ordinarily, I don’t watch secular entertainment, but the other day, I felt an urge to watch the movie Le Mans. This is a 1971 film starring Steve McQueen. He plays a race driver participating in the yearly 24-hour race. I could not rent this movie on Youtube, so first, I rented Grand Prix, a 1966 movie featuring James Garner. It’s about drivers going through a series on the famous Formula One circuit. The next day, I found Le Mans on Amazon Prime, so I watched it, too.

Last night, I started to watch The Front Page. This is a movie based on a play written by a couple of leftists. One, Ben Hecht, was a newspaperman before he wrote the play. The movie has been remade several times. I watched the 1931 version which is now in the public domain.

I felt it was okay with God for me to watch this stuff. I removed Amazon Prime from my TV afterward.

James Garner was a folksy, self-deprecating, appealing actor. On the other hand, he was also a fierce leftist who smoked dope all the time. He was also very litigious, and he got into a road rage fight in which a former Army Captain and Green Beret named Aubrey Williams put him in the hospital. Steve McQueen seems to have been less politically involved, but he smoked dope a lot, too, and he treated women very, very badly.

Garner’s fight may not have been his fault, but the stories don’t smell good, and his own accounts vary. The man who beat him up was a veteran with no criminal record, and he provided a pretty credible story. He said he walked up to Garner’s car after they got into a dispute while driving, and Garner grabbed his necklace and jerked it down, banging his head against the roof of Garner’s trademark Firebird and putting him in a bad position.

This is exactly the kind of dirty trick a smart aggressor might pull, and it’s not one I have heard of elsewhere, so I am skeptical of claims Williams made it up. If it were me, and I were inclined to lie, I would just say he opened his door into me, jumped out, and started swinging.

In one of his varying accounts, Garner admitted he pulled the necklace trick, so you have to wonder what to believe. He claimed he did it in self-defense.

Williams had his sister with him, she jumped in, and they put Garner on the ground and broke his tailbone. Later, Williams was convicted of a crime. Of course, juries are known to be gullible, and who would convict Jim Rockford in California?

Maybe Garner told the truth, but it sounds fishy. Williams was also accused of stealing gold chains from Garner, so that diminishes his own credibility.

Williams is black, so that may have factored into his conviction and the acceptance of Garner’s dubious account. Afterward, he kept it classy, believe it or not. He said, “I used to really like him. I didn’t even recognize him during this encounter. I didn’t realize he was involved until I read about it the next day.”

In 1964, Garner, an ardent environmentalist, approached and threatened a 65-year-old politician who was three inches shorter than he was. The disagreement was about a property that was going to be developed. Garner was about 44, and he was 6’3″ tall. The police had to step in and prevent a fight, or more likely, a one-sided beating. Nice people don’t beat up old men.

Today, at least in Florida, doing what Garner did is a felony.

There is something about Garner I just don’t like. I feel like something is not right. I don’t trust his reputation.

McQueen would probably win a poll for coolest actor of all time. He was the highest-paid actor of his day. Female co-stars practically begged him to have sex with them, and he often agreed. He had the ability to do some of the impressive things his characters did on screen. He was so good with a motorcycle, he did stunts for The Great Escape. They could have used stuntmen, but it was too hard to find people as skilled as he was. He actually had to be filmed on two motorcycles, as Army Air Forces pilot Hilts and as a Nazi, chasing himself. He was also a skilled car racer. He was a fairly serious martial artist. When he wore things, other men bought them. Men are still paying huge sums to have old Ford Mustangs fixed up to look like the one he drove in Bullitt. He wore a big ugly Tag Heuer Monaco watch in Grand Prix, and they were still using him in ads long after he died.

McQueen and his teammate came in second at Sebring in 1970, so he was a legitimate pro racer, like Paul Newman. He’s not a duffer like Tom Cruise, who has raced without much success.

McQueen was a heavy smoker and drug user. He killed Ali McGraw’s career by forcing her to quit working at her peak so she could be a housewife. He beat his first wife and also put a gun to her head to make her confess an affair.

Garner was similar in some ways, but he had a real marriage and didn’t achieve the heights McQueen did. He had a brown belt in karate. He could have been a pro golfer had he chosen. When he trained for Grand Prix, his teacher discovered he had extraordinary talent, and he claimed he could have been better than most of the top F1 drivers. Garner went on to race cars in his spare time.

Grand Prix was not a great movie. Pete Aron, Garner’s character, was involved in an incident involving a teammate. The teammate wanted to pass Aron in Monaco, and Aron resisted, which was a faux pas. Eventually, Aron let him pass, but the teammate’s car hit his rear wheel, and both cars were wrecked. The teammate ended up with serious injuries, and he struggled to get back to work before the end of the season. He blamed Aron for his injuries.

The teammate’s wife hated racing because she feared her husband would die. She left him after the accident, and she then began having sex with Aron, making things much worse.

That about sums it up. Various racers had sex with various women. The teammate came back to work. An older racer died in a wreck.

The teammate’s wife asked a great question. She asked Aron why men risked their lives for something unimportant. Aron told her it was very important to them. His explanation was that he was only alive when he was racing. The rest of the time, he was just waiting.

Le Mans had even less depth. Steve McQueen played Michael Delaney, a Porsche driver. He had a rivalry with a Ferrari driver named Stahler. The previous year, Delaney had been involved in an accident in which a woman’s husband died. The woman returned the next year to see Delaney and the others drive.

Delaney wrecked again, ruining his car. He and the widow had some boring conversations and ended up in his trailer. His team’s manager came in and told Delaney he had to drive another team member’s car because he was the only hope of a Porsche victory. Delaney left the trailer, drove hard, and came in second. He and the widow never made it into bed.

So why write about two bad movies?

I got a message: people do stupid things with their lives. We strive for earthly glory. We sacrifice important things, including our bodies themselves, for what amounts to garbage in the long view.

Who won the Formula One championship in 2005? No one cares. How much good did it do other people? Was anyone saved from damnation? Did anyone get a miraculous healing? Were any addicts delivered? Were the poor fed? Did unwanted kids get families?

Some guy who drove a car got a little richer. Some endorsements were sold. Some big, fat companies that sold trivial things got more publicity. Then the next season came along, and the champion was not the champion any more. He had to compete again.

People are like monkeys, and Satan is the monkey trainer. He waves shiny prizes that have no lasting value, and we cut each other’s throats to get them. In the process, we give up our relationships with God, along with Spirit-driven accomplishments that would have stayed with us for eternity. We give up the chance to accumulate new brothers and sisters to take with us to heaven. We give up the chance to end suffering and set people free.

These movies reminded me of my dislike of professional sports. Ignorant people do not know that pro sports and God have been at odds since before Jesus. There are actually Christians who think football teaches people to be closer to God, which is the opposite of correct. Football teaches aggression, violence, pride, cheating, greed, lust, and obsession with fleeting things.

The Greeks conquered Israel, and they instituted nude athletic competitions. Social-climbing Jews joined in, defying Yahweh and the priests, and they even tried to undo their circumcisions. Look up “Hellenism” and find out about it. It was a very big problem. Athletes have been distracting people and teaching children destructive values for millennia, not decades.

The characters in these movies treated themselves like garbage. They made themselves disposable. They served a vain purpose for a few years, helping on one except themselves.

As for The Front Page, it disturbed me because it made me realize I did not hate leftism enough. After I watched, I apologized to God for this. God really hates leftism. Satan was the first leftist, and all leftists are his children.

Let me tell you about Sacco and Vanzetti, whose story was one of the motivations behind The Front Page.

Believe it or not, Italian immigrants were a big problem a hundred years ago. I used to think Italians formed social groups to defend the reputation of their ethnicity because of the mob, but there is more to it than that. Italy sent us a large number of terrorists who, instead of kissing the ground of the country that saved them, and instead of working to be good citizens, murdered a lot of American citizens and tried to destroy the government.

For some reason, anarchism developed a following in Italy. Anarchism is the ultimate leftistm. Anarchists believe there is no such thing as a legitimate government.

I’ll be blunt. You have to be an utter imbecile to be an anarchist.

Am I saying you’re an imbecile because you don’t like the government? No. I don’t like the government, either. I’m saying you’re an imbecile because you think it’s possible for human beings to exist without government.

If you put 10 strangers in a locked compound, a month later, they will form a government. We will always form governments. People want to control each other. They want to protect themselves from other people. They naturally form gangs and generate leaders in order to achieve these goals.

A government is just a gang with a flag.

Anarchists believe they can get rid of the government and then live government-free lives. That is beyond asinine. Kill every government employee in the United States today, and new governments will start to spring up in under 24 hours. And they will make you miss the government you eliminated, because they will be incompetent and much more cruel and amoral than an established government that has been honed over centuries.

It’s not just people. Put chickens or dogs together, and they form hierarchies.

The true choice isn’t between government and no government. It’s between different governments.

Only true idiots can be anarchists. It is incomprehensible that anyone can be that stupid.

Sacco and Vanzetti were part of a faction that killed all sorts of people. They set off a lot of bombs.

They were convicted of murder. Sacco shot someone, and Vanzetti was his partner. They were guilty as hell. Ballistics tests and witnesses prove it.

Still, their convictions and executions are controversial. There were supposedly improprieties in their trials. I don’t know the details. I am willing to stipulate that they may have been tried unfairly. The fact remains: they were worthless, despicable, dangerous human beings, and their kind needed to be sent a message. They deserved execution, and their executions probably did America a lot of good.

You can wrong a murderer by trying him unfairly and executing him. Doing such things is wrong, and we have to fight corruption in the justice system, but unfair trials don’t make murderers innocent. Oswald was lynched by Jack Ruby, but he was still guilty.

Leftists have been whining about Sacco and Vanzetti for decades. They have turned them into martyrs and heroes. Michael Dukakis, the inept former governor of Massachusetts went so far as to proclaim a day in their honor without consulting or according any courtesy to the families of the victims.

The Front Page is about Earl Williams, a leftist who is about to be executed for murdering a policeman. Williams is portrayed as a sweet, impressionable little man. A cuddly, vulnerable murderer you naturally want to hug. Most of the action takes place in a room at the penitentiary set aside for journalists.

The journalists are extremely vile. They’re supposed to be funny, but they’re disgusting. As they call their papers to send in stories, they lie without the slightest hesitation. They make sick jokes about the upcoming hanging. A prostitute who tried to help Williams shows up to criticize them for their callousness, and they ridicule her until she jumps out of a window. A paid shrink shows up to analyze Williams, and Williams shoots him. They joke about that while he’s in the operating room.

The interesting thing is that Ben Hecht knew the subject matter. He was writing about journalists as he had known them. I assume he exaggerated their faults to some extent, but he must have based their personalities on his real life experiences. Watching the movie will make you wish they were the ones being hanged.

They remind me of comedians. Comedians tend to be disgusting people.

I quit watching after a while. The characters were off-putting, and the movie was poorly done compared to the Cary Grant version.

Afterward, I read up on Sacco and Vanzetti, and I thought about Ben Hecht and the way he had portrayed his former colleagues.

It made me hate leftism more than ever. I certainly understand why people would be upset over an unfair trial, regardless of who the defendant was. But lionizing a couple of dangerous, vicious criminals who were also ungrateful and toxic immigrants? How can anyone do that?

I didn’t like the idea of writing a movie that made terrorists look good, and I didn’t like the godless, hellbound journalists. I hated their cynicism and the pleasure they took in the suffering, injuries, and deaths of others.

The word “leftism” comes from the French Revolution, but the concept is far older. It’s just rebellion. Any hierarchy that doesn’t have God at the apex is leftist.

When Satan tempted Eve, it was an act of leftism. Adam and Eve were leftists. They rebelled against their only legitimate authority.

The best government is a face-to-face relationship with God. After that comes submission to prophets and priests who obey God. After that comes submission to kings who honor God. After that comes rule by godly assemblies. After that come various forms of democracy, which is a degenerate and evil institution.

Adam was under the best government. Since then, things have gotten worse and worse. The Jews had prophets and priests, and that wasn’t bad, but they stupidly demanded a king. When the time of kings ended on Earth, the world descended into backward systems which put nations at the mercy of every moron who could pull a handle and cast a vote.

Moses was chosen directly by God. David was anointed by a prophet. Hitler was elected. Something to think about.

It’s astounding, where leftism and hatred of God’s authority has taken us. In places of power, we now have spectacular degenerates whose very nature we could not have conceived in the near past.

Have you seen the amazing specimen Biden appointed to be his deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy? You have probably been reading about him. His name is Sam Brinton.

Brinton has disclaimed his proper gender, calling himself nonbinary. It is impossible to figure out what he is trying to be. I will post a photo. It’s fair use.

What exactly is this?

As you may know, he has been fired for stealing luggage repeatedly. Gay men like luxury goods. I don’t know if the bags were Vuitton or what, but it makes sense that a person like this would want luxury bags.

Brinton claims to have “survived” brutal conversion therapy, but a person who interviewed him says his story does not check out.

He’s involved with our children. This freakish person. He helped create official policy enabling schools to hide children’s sexual confusion from their parents. Fox says he:

played a key role in developing a model school policy adopted in multiple states that instructs school districts to keep “unaffirming” parents in the dark about a potentially suicidal child’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

Look at him. And if you live in a place where his recommendations have been adopted, he has power over your relationship with your children. YOUR children. Not the states.

We paid him to do this. We voted for the people who gave him the power.

I live in a country where we paid this creature to give government the power to hide and nurture sexual perversion–abomination–in our children. It is inconceivable to me that anyone could be anything but shocked and distressed to know this happened.

It’s going to get much worse. If Jesus tarries, we will see creatures like this in the Oval Office. There is no limit to the oddities and abominations we can come up with and empower with Satan’s help.

Yesterday and today Rhodah and I were talking about the rapture. I told her I felt bad because I ate a lot of ice cream, but I said part of me doesn’t care, because I feel like the world is ending, so what difference does it make what I eat?

Today we tried to think of the things we would eat if we heard the rapture trumpet blow. I said I would rush to the freezer and open the ice cream. Or I’d be lifted to heaven with a slice of pizza in each hand. Of course, we were kidding, and we had some laughs, but the rapture will come, and most of the things people do in the weeks leading up to it won’t matter. They will be preparing, well or counterproductively, for a future that will not come.

If you quit working out right before the rapture, no big deal. You won’t be here long enough to go flabby and feel bad about it. If you spend your retirement money, no big deal. Stop mowing your yard? No big deal.

Stop touching up your roots. The rapture is coming. Don’t plant your crops. The rapture is coming. Don’t show up for jury duty. Speed. Quit your job. Throw out your contraceptives.

I’m not suggesting these things. Just thinking about actions that will stop mattering at some point.

People will be pulled out of jail cells, defendants’ chairs, operating rooms, and even wombs. More abortions will take place on that day than on any other day in the history of the world. God will have to remove the innocent from the wombs of degenerate women.

We also tried to think of things we would buy if we had all the money in the world. I had a hard time coming up with anything. Finally, I blurted it out. “I’ll start flying business class!” Not even first class. The extra money doesn’t seem to buy you much.

I thought of business class because I take a lot of long flights, and I really hate flying coach, but paying $5000 or more for one seat is more than I am willing to consider at the moment. Put a billion in my account, and I’ll spring for it.

I said I would also get Rhodah more rubies, but not really big ones, because ostentation is wrong.

I would make sure my home was in top shape, and I would probably try to move to Tennessee

That’s about it. No Lamborghinis. No gold Rolexes. No more Zegna suits.

To get back to the rapture, I really do not want to be here when the cabinet consists of a bunch of smirking, effeminate bald men with bro staches and tacky prom dresses.

I care less and less to be involved with this world, and I am having a hard time motivating myself to do anything but pray, eat, and work to bring my wife home. I assume this will pass and the rapture will come much later than I hope, because this is how things have worked so far, but my feelings are real.

I can’t wait for the day when it finally happens.

Jethro Takes His Self a Trip

I’ll tell you what. You haven’t lived until you’ve taken a 30-hour plane trip.

I got home from Singapore this morning, and I haven’t slept in quite a while. My wife and I had a great time there, but the flights were really something.

Singapore is so far away from me, it doesn’t matter which direction the jets take. They could go north, south, east, or west and get there in about the same amount of time, as long as they didn’t run into fuel problems. My flights to Singapore flew east, and so did my flights home.

The web says Singapore is around 10,700 miles away, so it’s pretty much on the opposite side of the globe. The time difference is 13 hours in the fall. Until this trip, I had no idea two time zones could differ by 13 hours.

My first international flight took off from JFK and landed in Doha. It took off pretty late. It should have been empty, right? Well, it turns out Doha is hosting an event you may have heard of: the FIFA World Cup. An event of which I took no notice because I’m not the kind of person who cares about millionaires kicking a ball into a net.

People from Latin America were shoehorned into the plane’s every crevice. The aisle seat I had carefully chosen in hopes of getting an empty row turned out to be a waste of money.

Actually, I didn’t get to sit next to an empty seat on any of my flights. Not even the 15-hour one from Singapore to San Francisco.

I was spoiled when we traveled during the covid statistical hump. I got to lie down across rows of seats. People were terrified of flying, and Rhodah and I reaped the benefits. It looks like those days are gone. We flew on the slowest days of the week, and every plane was still packed.

I know this will sound insensitive, but I miss the slow tourist traffic of the pandemic. We flew on empty planes. We didn’t have to wait in line at restaurants. We had the Great Pyramid to ourselves. Looks like those days are gone, unless the black death makes a comeback.

What can I say about Singapore?

I was afraid it would be unpleasant because I hear bad things about Far Eastern destinations. I thought it would be like Blade Runner crossed with Slumdog Millionaire, sort of. I was afraid the people would be hard and selfish, and I was concerned about the weather. Singapore is nearly on top of the Equator.

Here is how I would describe Singapore now: it’s a little bit like Miami would be if the people were vaporized and replaced with better ones.

Singapore is very orderly. The streets are clean, and there is a great deal of beautiful, meticulous landscaping in public areas. People obey the traffic laws, which seems weird given the large number of ethnic Chinese. Everything is built well. Signs are in English, probably because there are three major ethnic groups, each with its own language. Or languages. Whatever.

The people in Singapore are very polite and helpful. We experienced nearly no rudeness. There is nearly no crime in Singapore.

Singapore is also wealthy. They have stores like Chanel and Bulgari everywhere. They have impressive skyscrapers. The cars are generally clean, dent-free, and relatively new.

There is food everywhere in Singapore. There are so many restaurants, it’s hard to understand how they can all make money.

The hotels are very nice. Ours was just about perfect. Spotless and quiet, with several restaurants and a gym. I think there was also a pool in there somewhere.

I just realized I forgot to tip the maid. Dang.

That’s okay, though, because tipping is not customary in Singapore.

Here’s something weird: the weather in Singapore is better than the weather in Miami. It doesn’t get really hot, and the island is in a breezy location.

Now I will digress and tell the world about a high school history teacher who told me a tremendous number of baldfaced lies. His name was Morgan Kelly. I guess it’s okay to mention his name, because he has surely been dead for at least 20 years.

My prep school taught grades 7 through 12, and when I arrived in grade 9, Mr. Kelly was already a legend among the core group of students who had started two years earlier. He was an amateur sailor. He had a lanyard with a spliced monkey’s fist for a keychain. He wore green coach’s shorts every day. He sounded like Burgess Meredith’s Penguin. He taught history.

Mr. Kelly impressed the younger kids by telling the time by looking at the sun. He claimed he could nail it within a few minutes. He would point at the sun with his extended left hand, look down his arm, pause briefly, and make his estimate. Over and over, he amazed the kids by proving to be right.

By the time they were sophomores, they started to realize his watch was on his left wrist.

Anyway, Mr. Kelly told all sorts of lies.

He claimed he was a tail gunner in World War Two. Ordinarily, I would not doubt a claim like that, but because I know he lied about other things, I don’t know whether he was really a tail gunner or even if he served.

He said that when he arrived at the place where they sorted out bomber crew trainees, the men were told to form a long line ordered by height. I would guess Mr. Kelly was about 5’4″ tall. Everyone at Mr. Kelly’s end had to become tail gunners because only short people could fit in the gunners’ stations.

Is this really how tail gunners were selected? I wonder. Maybe it’s true. Mr. Kelly had thick glasses, which means he wasn’t capable of the job, but maybe his eyes went bad after the war.

How likely is it that my school checked his military record? They might have checked to see if he had an honorable discharge, but I can’t imagine them asking for anything beyond that. I doubt they checked his record at all. They would have asked for his college credentials, but they wouldn’t have needed his military information.

I don’t think he was ever in a bomber, because he would have told us war stories.

He told a huge lie about the Chinese military.

He said he was on a troop plane going over the Himalayas, and there were Chinese soldiers on board.

Okay, right away you can see some issues.

Why would they fly troops over the Himalayas? It would be unbelievably expensive, not to mention dangerous. They would have moved troops with ships and trains.

Why would Chinese troops be on a plane with American bomber crewmen?

Okay, so now we get to the part I am sure is a lie. He said several Chinese were playing a game of chance. I think he said they were throwing down cards. He said they would play a round of their game, look at the results, grab one person who was playing, and throw him out the side door. While the plane was in flight.

We believed it. We were kids.

Of course, the Chinese military did not permit soldiers to murder each other in card games. This should not have to be explained to anyone. You can’t win a war by throwing your troops out of airplanes. Also, even if the game were permitted, how would you find people willing to play? If you did, how would you get enough men onto one plane to play the game? If you have to throw a man out after every hand, and you have 20 men, your game will last around 20 minutes. Not a great way to kill time on a plane.

Even if all the obstacles mentioned above were overcome, why would American servicemen sit and do nothing while people were thrown out of a plane?

So, yes, he was a big liar.

Here comes the lie he told about Singapore.

The British were building a bridge in Singapore. It was 120° Fahrenheit every day. The workers had to work outdoors, obviously, but at night they slept in air-conditioned barracks.

They were only able to cool the barracks to 90°, but it seemed so cold after working in 120° heat, the men had to wear winter coats indoors.

Lie number 1: 120° heat in Singapore. It doesn’t happen. It rarely goes above 92°, and that’s something you can’t say about Miami.

Lie number 2: men who found the 90° temperature in the barracks too cold would solve the problem by wearing winter coats. No. They would adjust the temperature.

I don’t know why Mr. Kelly lied to kids so much. I took Ancient History and Ancient Chinese History with him, and I guess I can discard everything he taught us.

I didn’t sweat much at all in Singapore. It was surprisingly comfortable. Rhodah, however, was shocked by the humidity. Apparently, Zambia doesn’t have any. In the past, she had heard me complain about the humidity in Florida, but she had no idea what I was talking about until we went to Singapore. We went to Egypt, which was hot but dry. We went to Turkey and Ireland, where the weather was cool. In Singapore, she suddenly understood why people buy anti-perspirant.

I just remembered another lie Mr. Kelly told.

Americans needed to land planes somewhere in China. There was no runway. The ground was covered with rocks. Fortunately, China was incredibly full of human beings. Their numbers were astounding.

The mayor of the city where the runway was needed told the people who lived there to go and stand where the runway had to go. Then he told them to pick up one rock each and leave. They did, and the runway instantly appeared.

I don’t know how we fell for that one. Having a lot of people doesn’t really get you past the problem that you can fit hundreds of rocks into the area one person takes up. Pick up one rock, and you still have hundreds more.

Man, that guy lied.

Another Mr. Kelly lie just popped into my head.

Some ancient Chinese pottery manufacturer had a slave, and one day, the slave got trapped in his kiln and burned to death. When the kiln was opened, the pots had a magnificent red color. The manufacturer couldn’t figure out how to reproduce the color, so he decided to throw a slave into the kiln every time he made red pots.

I’m starting to think we were really stupid.

Okay, Google and see if you can find this story, or any story about the ancient Chinese having a really gorgeous and highly prized red pottery glaze. I couldn’t find anything like that on the web. After that, try to find a story that mentions the part about murdering slaves.

Then ask yourself how many pots you would have to sell to pay for one expensive slave. And why use a slave when you could use a dead body or a pig or goat? Dead bodies would have been pretty easy to come by in ancient China or ancient anywhere.

How does a slave get stuck in a pottery kiln? Why wouldn’t he yell for someone to let him out?

I knew someone who served in Iraq, and he had a photo of himself shivering in a sleeping bag in a very hot room. He said the hot room seemed cold to him. Soldiers there wore a lot of hot gear, and the daytime temperatures sometimes broke 120°, so for all I know, the photo wasn’t a gag. But it never happened in Singapore or anywhere else in Southeast Asia.

Soldiers love jokes and pranks.

The food picture in Singapore is interesting. Nice restaurants and well-known restaurants there are unbelievably expensive, like $40 for Five Guys or $400 for two at Ruth’s Chris. On the other hand, there are cheaper places where locals eat, and they are real bargains.

It appears there are three types of restaurants in Singapore. Independent establishments, food court restaurants, and food center restaurants.

By “independent,” I mean restaurants that are separate from other restaurants. Food courts are about like American food courts, except the restaurants are jammed together very tightly, and a typical food court will have a huge number of them.

A food center is a concrete building with a roof and no exterior walls. Inside, there will be long concrete structures broken into stalls. Each stall will be around 8 feet wide, and most food center restaurants occupy one stall.

Between the rows of stalls there will be sturdy plastic tables and seats which are fixed to the floor.

You can get an incredible assortment of foods and beverages at a food center. Malay. Cantonese. Sichuan. Indian. A typical entree will run around 5 Singapore dollars, and that amounts to about 4 US dollars. Some stalls sell excellent food. Some sell food that is merely good. Some sell stuff you will prefer to discard.

If you want to eat well and adventurously in Singapore while saving a ton of money, food centers are the way to go. The trick is to keep ordering things until you find things you like. The initial investment may be $20 or so per person, but it will pay off in the end by helping you avoid unnecessary experimentation.

One tip: don’t go to the stall Anthony Bourdain recommends. His photo is still on the window. Bourdain was not a great cook, as he admitted, and his advice about food is not reliable. He went to the stall in question and ordered something called Hainanese chicken rice. He raved about it as though it had made the earth move for him, and Gordon Ramsay’s face also appears on the window on a sticker.

The stall usually has a long line of people waiting for chicken. There was a line on the day when we stupidly listened to Bourdain and Ramsay.

Hainanese chicken rice is basically a boiled or possibly baked chicken cutlet, skin on, sliced, and dumped across rice made with chicken broth. It is served lukewarm. It is limp. It tastes not quite as good as what you would get if you boiled chicken in Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. I am not exaggerating. It is worthless.

It may be that Chinese people who are raised on it like it. There is a big difference between authentic Chinese food and much of the Chinese food Chinese people make in America.

After we tried the chicken rice, I bought myself a Tiger Crystal beer (very good) from another vendor and told him the food was basically garbage. He agreed. He said all the people in line were tourists who had been fooled. He said the chicken rice was no good. He very kindly led me to another stall, where he recommended laksa, a pho-like dish with rice noodles, shrimp, and some kind of meat. Much better.

We liked the Maxwell Food Centre and the Albert Food Centre. There are others.

If you go to a food center, buy a package of paper towels and a package of antiseptic wipes first. Food stalls don’t provide napkins, and the tables and seats are often in need of cleaning.

I would advise avoiding fancy American chain restaurants. We tried Lawry’s, for example, and it was just plain bad. I think Asians sometimes copy the appearance of American food without capturing anything else.

We had Egg McMuffins in Singapore, because we had to, and they were good but not quite as good as American. They don’t toast the bread enough. We tried Five Guys, and it was better than American because they made the fries correctly. I think the reason is that they hire conscientious Singaporeans instead of American high school slackers who can’t be bothered to follow the formula.

We didn’t go in for sights much. The famous Marina Bay Sands, which is three buildings joined by a pool that runs across them at the top, did not get Rhodah excited enough to pay the $23.50 cost of going up for a look. She was pretty excited about the high-end mall at the bottom, however, much to my chagrin.

We visited the Singapore Botanic Gardens. If you want to see what Asians can do with gardening and landscaping, this is the place for you. All sorts of perfectly-tended plants and trees. They also have some weird wildlife. We walked right up on some kind of monitor rooting for food, and it didn’t mind us being there at all. We also saw some red jungle fowl, which are supposedly pre-domestication chickens. There are otters in the gardens, but they didn’t show.

The gardens has a huge orchid area. Pretty impressive, if orchids are your thing.

We went to the National Museum. It’s very small, and you can get in and out in less than an hour. They had some interesting exhibits, but not a whole lot has happened in Singapore, so there was a limit to what they could do.

We had a very satisfying trip in spite of Singapore’s limitations. It’s an extremely comfortable city to stay in. It will spoil you.

While I was there, I came to a crazy realization: I don’t actually hate cities. I hate AMERICAN cities, because of the people who live in them. Our cities accumulate the worst we have to offer. Singapore isn’t like that. You don’t have to be bullied by entitled homeless people or frightened by potential muggers. People don’t ignore you or abuse you. You can walk around at night and not worry that you’re in a neighborhood where your presence is considered consent to beatings, robbery, racist behavior, or rape.

There is no Antifa in Singapore. There are no self-pitying street murals that condemn the police while ignoring the people who do nearly all the damage.

I could live in Singapore without going crazy. I could even stand not being allowed to carry a pistol.

While the subject of bad behavior is on my mind, I may as well mention a remarkable conversation I had today. My aunt said a bunch of horrible things about me.

My aunt is in charge of some things related to my grandparents’ estates, and I am not very happy with the job she is doing, or, in my view, not doing. Everything should have been sold and distributed many years ago, but a few assets are sitting around doing nothing, and I would like to have my financial connections to my family cut. I’m just tired of being involved in it. I’m not very concerned about the money.

My aunt has Parkinson’s, and dementia is one thing Parkinson’s can cause. I can’t diagnose anyone, but I am wondering if she is getting close to the point where some decisions have to be made regarding her care and that of her husband. Today I had to tell him over and over who I was. I told him his wife had three sisters and I was the son of the eldest. I told him I was his nephew. I told him I was his wife’s nephew.

Anyway, she started the conversation by angrily criticizing me for being unavailable to discuss a deal involving a property. I received a text from her in Singapore, and I responded when I saw it, saying I was in the process of flying home and would try to get back to her the following day. She was very angry at me for taking the trip! This is someone who has never spoken angrily to me until this year, so it was strange to hear the tone of her voice and the openness of the hostility.

I didn’t get that at all. I said I had taken a vacation, and she demanded to know who takes a foreign vacation in winter, as though it was a hostile act no decent person would perform. She was seething. Why? She said, “I hope you had a nice time!” Still angry. I said, “I did!”

I have complained to her this year about her failure to take certain steps to get things sold. I have never been nasty to her, and I have never insulted her. I have been blunt, though, and Southerners don’t always take that well. It’s a serious failing we have. Often, we prefer to be passive-aggressive and treacherous. Smile in your face; stab you in the back later. Being blunt is like violating an unwritten code or something. It’s not done.

She said she needed to apologize for saying nasty things about my religious beliefs. She said she apologized wholeheartedly. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I said so, and that I accepted her apology anyway.

So has she been making fun of my beliefs to the family? I don’t know. When I have talked to her about my beliefs in the past, she has generally given me the impression that she was right there with me. I took her expressions of agreement with a grain of salt, but I didn’t have any reason to think she contemned my faith.

I don’t really care about this stuff. A bunch of family members are long dead, and the rest greatly reduced their involvement with my dad and me over a decade ago, so I haven’t been part of their circle in a very long time.

I wonder if we see things differently. Maybe it would bother her a lot to find out I had criticized her faith to the family, so she assumes I would be upset if she had done the same thing to me. I don’t really think or care about what they say about me, though. I have so many things to think about.

I’m just guessing here. Maybe there is no rational explanation.

Bizarrely, she accused me of taking off to Egypt to see if I could find a wife to come home with me. She, whose son is on wife three, was saying I was a loser with women. I was amazed. Where did that come from? How long had she been holding it in? Why did she pick Egypt? Does she know I went to Egypt? Why would anyone go to Egypt to get a wife? I can’t imagine a worse place, unless it’s the area where my family comes from.

I now know she doesn’t know I’m married. I didn’t correct her. I didn’t think it would help.

I have tried to get her to list properties on the web for sale, and I have mentioned the fact that I manage properties and have sold some. I guess she did not like that, because she blurted out, “My property is worth much more than yours!” I had no idea what she was talking about, so I asked her what she meant. I think she was saying she had a bunch of rental properties that were worth more than what I have.

I don’t have any idea what she has, and she has no idea what I have.

She said everyone else in the family had planned for retirement and I had not. Where she got this idea is a mystery.

Apparently, she thought I was trying to get her to liquidate things because I was desperate for money. I said, “Do you think I’m poor?” She said, “Fine. You’re filthy rich!” So first she wanted to insult me by saying I had nothing, and then, I think, she wanted to make me feel bad for bragging about being rich. Which I didn’t do!

She said she had her treasures, which were her grandchildren, and she said I had no one, except my sorry dog. What?? I didn’t know where to go with that. I said I didn’t have a dog.

I never said anything rude. For example, I didn’t try to come up with a snappy comeback about her pets.

She said the family was going to do whatever it wanted with or without me, so of course, I asked her why she had called me. What is the point of asking for my support when it doesn’t matter? She said I couldn’t do anything about it, which is not true at all.

I told her I would never sue or contact the attorney general or anything along those lines, because I’m a Christian and I don’t intend to live that way. But I’m not going to say things are going well when I think they’re not.

I said she needed to advertise properties on the web, like everyone else does now. She said she was in “the hot spot,” meaning the frantic world of undesirable Eastern Kentucky rural real estate. She wanted me to know she knew more than I did. She then told me I was ashamed of my people and my culture, which seems irrelevant. I think she was telling me I did not understand the mysterious and unique methods of selling property up there.

I AM ashamed of my people and my culture! Every mature person who has come out of Eastern Kentucky is ashamed of the people and the culture. I used to be proud of my roots, but I was deluded. Immaturity, racism, illegitimacy, toothlessness, violence, adultery, drugs, generations of welfare recipients, hatred of learning…yes, of course I’m ashamed of my people. I didn’t say so, however.

I’m ashamed of being like them in counterproductive ways.

I used to love Eastern Kentucky, but the smart people left a long time ago. For years, my aunt has tried to promote the area as unappreciated and full of brains and talent, but that’s not even a little bit true.

Think about Singapore. In 1965, it had to start out as a new nation. It was poor. It was in the middle of nowhere. Now they call it the Switzerland of Asia. Money everywhere. A harbor full of ships. A highly educated populace. Skyscrapers. Safety.

Now think of Eastern Kentucky. It’s loaded with coal. All they had to do was keep their mineral rights, sell the coal, develop other industries, and invest, and it would have become the Kuwait of Appalachia. Instead, they sold their inheritances to outsiders and became their laborers. They never built a decent university. No infrastructure. No industry other than coal. They kept their corrupt politics and courts. They held onto racism. They fell in love with handouts. They planted marijuana patches full of booby traps. Since 1965, Eastern Kentucky has gotten worse.

Yes. Sure. I’m ashamed of it. Why would I not be?

Maybe “ashamed” is the wrong word. I’m critical of it. I am honest about it. I reject a lot of it.

She went on to accuse my parents of being ashamed of it. That’s true. They were. They didn’t try to disguise themselves or cure their accents, but they were realistic. My dad used to quote Kentucky author Harry Caudill, who said that everybody who had any get-up-and-go got up and went.

My dad was the best lawyer I ever knew or knew of. He flew all over the country representing companies like PPG, UPS, and Nabisco before the NLRB and the federal appellate courts. He was the head of litigation in one of Florida’s top firms at the age of 33, three years after joining as an associate.

My mother loved classical music. She read. She loved good restaurants and trips to Europe.

What were they supposed to do in Eastern Kentucky? My dad wrote a brief for my grandfather once, and my grandfather told him it was too good for the judges up there.

Since my beliefs have been mentioned, I’ll talk about some of them.

I am certain everyone has demons. They are around us all the time, influencing, or trying to influence, our hearts and minds. Many of the thoughts, desires, and emotions we think are ours really come from demons, and some, in some people, come from the Holy Spirit.

Demons use people to express themselves and fulfill their desires. They give us habits and leanings. Some try to turn us into the people they would be if they had bodies. They get us to wear things they like. They get us to cut ourselves up and get tattoos.

They manifest in things like overeating, pornography, rage, depression, delusions, to name a few.

I believe that when people become demented, the demons get promotion. Before dementia sets in, people resist them to a certain extent. They also cover their influence up, pretending to be nicer and better than they really are. Once the host loses the ability to steer things, he or she becomes more like the demons.

My grandmother liked to boss people. She covered it up when she was young and able, but she became demented, and one day, she announced, “I want to be the boss!” I believe that was her demons talking. Sometimes my dad, who had vascular dementia, would curse me for no reason and then forget instantly. I think that was demonic, too.

Now my aunt is fading, and she seems like a different person. Maybe she is a different person. Maybe other beings are finally getting to spit poison at me, after veiling their feelings for decades. She used to tell me she admired me. She tried to impress me, probably because I grew up in cities and had more sophistication than the rest of the family. She’s done with that now.

God has told me all kinds of brilliant things, which makes sense, because he is God. He told me this: “Things get better, or things get worse.”

It sounds extremely simple and obvious, but it’s important. Every day, you improve or deteriorate. You never stand still and remain unchanged. Nothing does, except God. Troubled people who don’t know the Holy Spirit deteriorate. Whatever is wrong in their hearts and minds gets worse.

God brings improvement and order. Where God is absent, rot and chaos are unstoppable. God told me this: “Bring order.”

I’ve talked to Rhodah about my family, and she feels the same way I do. Don’t sue. Don’t turn anyone in. Don’t wade into the food fight. The amounts at stake are too small to make a real difference in our lives, and getting into unforgiveness and juvenile squabbling would take all the joy out of life.

Paul said it was better to suffer wrong than to take another Christian to court. I would only call one or two of my relatives Christians, but I think Paul’s advice applies anyway. If anything is taken from me, God will repay it with interest, and He will be pleased that I’m pursuing his presence instead of playing verbal laser tag with people who are in real supernatural trouble.

We have been praying for my family. It doesn’t seem to help them. I don’t know what else we can do. I thought about contacting relatives to raise awareness about my aunt’s condition, but they know already, and nothing is being done.

It seems likely a very abrupt move to assisted living is in her near future, and I am told nothing is being done to prepare. If she’s angry with me for questioning her actions as my fiduciary, you have to wonder how she will handle assisted living staff telling her what socks to wear.

It’s very unfortunate. I used to have a great relationship with her. I don’t see that being restored any time soon. If my grandfather had done a better job planning his estate, maybe the family would still be whole.

At least I can say I never took advantage of any of the others. I’m not the world’s finest person, but I have managed to avoid that.