Lard and Hot Steel

September 2nd, 2016

Take That However You Want

I finished Ovid yesterday. The last thing I read was the letter from…now I’ve forgotten…Medea to Jason. No, it was Sappho to Phaon, whoever that is. I had to check. You can see how much it impacted me.

It’s essentially a remake of the other letters, which are remakes of each other. Sappho said a couple of things that were relatively clever, but they weren’t clever enough to raise her above the level of the other jilted stalkers.

My main reaction to finishing Ovid: relief. Of course. Now I get to read Augustine. I don’t like calling him “St. Augustine” because he’s not a saint. By that I mean he’s not better than other human beings. He’s not someone people should pray to. Great guy, maybe. Not a saint. The saints were created to replace the Greek pantheon. God had nothing to do with it.

If you had told me a year ago that I was going to have to read Augustine, I would have looked for a way out of it, as I did, successfully, back at Columbia University. After my ordeal with the Greeks and Romans, Augustine sounds like a trip to Disney World. Bring him on. I can’t wait.

The Sappho letter lends credence to the idea that Sappho was a truck-driving, Anne Murray-listening, overall-wearing ladies’ lady. She complains that Mr. Phaon has ruined her for women. After her Phaon fornication binge, women just don’t do it for her. Does this mean she was really a lesbian? I don’t think so. Ovid lived a long time after Sappho, so he probably didn’t know much more about her than we do. Once you get a reputation, justified or not, it tends to stick. Maybe Sappho had already been lumped in with the field hockey players and non-shavers of legs before he was born.

Maybe there is a document out there which proves Sappho liked women. I will never know, because I am done with the classics. I wouldn’t read another classic author even if his book was a collection of winning lottery numbers in Roman numeral form. But the document must not exist, because people who actually like the classics do not agree on her orientation.

I don’t know why I’m discussing this. Maybe it’s because it’s the only thing about Sappho that is even remotely interesting.

It’s hard to think of anything exciting enough to follow up speculation about whether Sappho was a flannel-wearer, but I will try: today my belt grinder is going to arrive. If Fedex gets it right. I ordered it a week ago, and the shipper decided to fix it so it required a signature, so I’m stuck at home.

I think I made a good buy. I’m spending maybe $200 more than the cost of building my own grinder, but I will save a pile of work and time, and it looks like the grinder I chose–the Oregon Blade Maker–is a tremendous deal and a good product.

I say that before trying it.

If Sappho were alive, I bet she’d have a belt grinder.

Is it okay to make jokes like that? I don’t actually care, but I guess these days it’s likely to bring out the pierced and tattooed villagers with thrift store torches and Ikea pitchforks.

The coming increase in the persecution of Christians is a frequent topic here, but there are some aspects I haven’t thought about yet. Here’s one that just occurred to me: we will probably be beaten and imprisoned by hipsters. That’s terrible. It’s embarrassing. I’m not sticking up for the Nazis, of course, but I feel like it’s less of a blow to your self-respect when the man who shoots you in the head is wearing a smart military uniform with shiny death’s head pins. We’re going to be murdered by “men” who look like Snuggles the Fabric Softener Bear with glasses. It will be like getting punched out by Truman Capote.

Suddenly the Romans don’t look too bad. Having your brains clubbed out by a 6’8″ barbarian centurion…that’s a man’s death. Centurions didn’t have to say, “Hold my latte,” before they killed people. We’re going to be slaughtered by the snowflake patrol.

I never thought musing about persecution would look like this. You have to wonder what people will make of it when I’m gone.

I would not be the first Christian to have a sense of humor about it. They say that when Lawrence was roasted on a grill (by the church), he looked up and said, “I’m well done. Turn me over!”

If I have to take sides, I think I’ll side with John, not Lawrence. Lawrence was grilled, and grilling is about health, not flavor. John was deep-fried. It didn’t take, but it was certainly a superior method of preparation. Now that we know KFC’s secret recipe, I can request to be breaded.

I look forward to trying the grinder, but it won’t solve my scale problem. I will still have to find a way to clean mill scale off of steel, without ruining the shape of the metal. A surface grinder would be great to have. Another possibility: buy steel a little oversize and put screw holes at the ends. Screw it to a big piece of metal, put the metal in the mill vise, and mill the scale off. The large piece of metal and the screws would hold it flat, better than a vise could.

While I wait for the grinder, I’m working on my next food project. I keep making large batches of food so I can reheat during the week instead of cooking from scratch over and over. Yesterday I gave up and bought collards, hocks, neck bones, corn meal, tomatoes, and Vidalias. I’m going to make collard greens and hoe cakes. I just hope I don’t overeat. This food will be off-the-charts good.

I look forward to making the hoe cakes, because I have a Griswold griddle I’ve never used. I Ebayed it and used electrolysis to get the crud off. It looked brand new when I was done. Then I seasoned it with bacon fat. It should be wonderful to use. A griddle is great for things like pancakes and crepes, because it provides easy access for a spatula.

I don’t think I’d want to be griddled. I keep hoping I’ll be hit by a meteor. I can’t come up with anything that beats that plan. Makes a mess, but that’s not my problem.

Maybe I’ll post a photo if I get the grinder running. Or maybe I’ll just lie on my back eating hoe cakes.

5 Responses to “Lard and Hot Steel”

  1. Stephen McAteer Says:

    “I keep hoping I’ll be hit by a meteor.” – I’m hoping for a massive stroke around the age of 95 personally…

  2. Steve H. Says:

    “Massive stroke” is on my list, too. But 95? I don’t know if I can deal with 80, let alone 95. I’m ready to go NOW.

  3. Sharkman Says:

    This is very funny, as always, but I must respectfully disagree with you on the Christian persecution issue, and your analogy between the Nazis & Jews and the Hipster Douches & Christians.

    During the run-up to the Holocaust, the Jews, while paying attention to what was going on around them, had no real expectation that the Nazis were going to try to exterminate them. Also, they were almost completely unarmed. Once the word got out what was happening, and some Jews managed to arm themselves, the result was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, in which the Jews very much made the Germans pay for what they were doing, losing of course in the end.

    On the other hand, American Christians are extraordinarily well-armed, knowledgeable about the history of religious persecution, and willing to fight any attempt at real persecution. There aren’t enough armed Hipster Douchebags on the planet Earth to get even close to rounding us up, so I don’t really believe they will ever try. I’m actually laughing at the vision of these Nancy-boys trying anything against us more serious than attempting to bounce a feather boa against our heads.

    Regarding the Jews and being armed and awake, I think that if the Jews had been as well-armed as we are, Hitler would never have touched them, and if he had, they’d have brought down his regime well before he had a chance to invade Poland, which was where 4 million of the Jews he killed were living. But they weren’t armed because the Germans took everyone’s weapons away very early in the regime, and the vast majority of Jews in Europe were also unarmed.

    You are correct that our government will try other means to ostracize us, but it will never achieve complete disarmament the way the Nazis and Commies did. There are just too many of us who would fight them.

    I really must buy your cookbooks.

    SMOD (Sweet Meteor of Death) 2016!

  4. Steve H. Says:

    The problem is that the girly men (and manly girls) will control the government. Once they have a stranglehold on the courts, they can take away our guns. Sure, many people will resist, but most of us will turn our guns in, just like the Canadians and Australians did.

    With the military and police behind them, not to mention the power to cut us off economically by instantly denying us participation in cashless commerce, they will have the upper hand. Most people will not be willing to lose their jobs and businesses along with the ability to buy groceries.

    If Hillary wins, we will be looking at at least 12 years of extreme-leftist federal judges, plus something like a 6-3 liberal tilt on the Supreme Court. Once that happens, the metrosexuals will be coasting downhill to victory.

  5. Sharkman Says:

    You do make very compelling points, though I that most people will just lose their weapons in terrible canoeing accidents, rather than turn them in if there is confiscation.

    I recently watched the almost unwatchable movie Son of Saul. It is filmed very close-up to the protagonist, so you only see the horror of Auschwitz off to the side. At one point the Germans have “too many Jews to kill” on one particular day to do it the “orderly” way they usually do, by gassing and burning in groups as they arrive with the victims not really knowing for sure what will happen to them. In this scene, the Nazis herd several thousand Jews off the trains en masse at night and shuffle them all in a long line to pits where they are murdered one by one, with flame-throwers used on the full pits as others are filled. A whole train-load of Jews walk to their deaths, seeing everything right in front of them as it occurs. I am still haunted by this movie.

    I agree that the Left does have this planned for Christians, but I still believe there are too many people like me who will resist. Better to be ready when they try it than to end up shuffling to the lime pits with your kids trying to explain to them why you are all about to be murdered in a couple of minutes.

    With all I said in my comments, you’ll recall that I’m still planning and setting up Sharkman’s Apocalyptic Election/Government Oppression Bolt-Hole in the San Juan Islands up in the PNW. It always pays to listen to the enemy when they say they hate you and want to destroy you, which is what the Lunatic Left/Soros Progressives have been saying to us in countless ways for decades.

    Americans have resisted All-Powerful Government before; we’ll do it again.