You Can Eat Them Raw

A while back, I wrote about my plantains. I have a couple of trees. The nursery guy said they were big, long plantains, just like the ones you get at the grocery.

The fruit appeared and got mature. Funny, the plantains were short. They were maybe seven inches long. But they were as big around as regular plantains. Okay, I guessed that was still all right.

I peeled a green one and nuked it. I ate a bite. The texture was wrong, and it had no flavor. But maybe I had cooked it too early. Maybe it was some kind of special plantain that had to ripen a little before it could be eaten.

That was a few days ago. Today I started peeling a yellow one. Plantains are very hard to peel, unless they’re pretty ripe. I did what i usually do. I made slits down the peel with a knife, and then I started yanking the peel off.

Hmm. It sure peeled easy.

Then I looked at the flesh. Plantains are kind of mango-colored on the inside. Not quite as dark, but same general color. This one was white. What on earth?

It smelled like a banana. I took a bite. It WAS a banana. My plantain trees are producing bananas. They gave me the wrong trees.

Now I have to figure out what to do every month with thirty pounds of bananas shaped more or less like a beer can.

Here’s to regularity.

Seriously

Here they are.

It’s MEDICINAL

You won’t believe what Sondra K. is growing.

Weep, Hippies

I am still waiting for someone to tell me how bees, which are supposedly addled by nicotinoid pesticides, could set up housekeeping in a yard full of imidacloprid. It’s in the lawn, the trees, the shrubs, and the vegetables I’ve planted. Yet the bees had no trouble making a home here and finding their way back to it over and over.

I think I’ll be waiting a long time for that explanation.

A beekeeper came last week and plugged the places where the bees were getting in, and he blasted the cavity they were exploiting with poison, presumably doing in the queen and all bees inside the house. But the remaining bees–thousands–weren’t ready to give up, and they swarmed on the chimney. I suppose they could still smell the queen, dead though she was. They make special poison that shoots a long way, for the specific purpose of killing bees and wasps, and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than paying a beekeeper. So the swarm got a good dose of it, and now there are dead bees all over the place. I only wish the ghost ants were as easy to slaughter.

The experience got me thinking. It would be nice to have a bee gum. Honey is expensive, and the bees will give it to you for nothing. But I wonder if it’s possible to keep bees here. It’s not that I wonder if they could survive. I just wonder if the honey would be worth eating. If you put bees around the wrong plants, you get pretty weird honey. I’ve seen very strange honey at my grandmother’s house in Kentucky. Some was very dark, like dark corn syrup. I’m not interested in accumulating bad honey.

I am only familiar with the flavors of three types of honey. Clover, orange blossom, and sourwood. I like them all, but the last two are the ones I like best. I’m not sure how you get sourwood honey. The sourwood tree is not very common. Maybe there are beekeepers who plant groves of it. The honey is very clear, and it’s bright yellow.

I learned about sourwood from my grandfather. We used to wander around in the woods from time to time, and one day, he pulled a leaf off a tree and told me to chew it. It had a very sour but not disagreeable taste. I suppose that’s where the name comes from.

The bees down here are very small and dark. I didn’t recognize them as honey bees. Evidently they all look like that here. The bee guy thought they were completely normal.

It’s too bad the bees didn’t tell me they were coming. They would have been welcome in a regular hive. In the walls? Not so much. It feels weird, exterminating useful bugs, but it beats having the house ruined.

Interesting news: the hippies are not as excited about imidacloprid as they used to be. Now there is evidence that a natural fungus is damaging bee populations. Also, the damage isn’t as bad as some of the nuts would have us believe.

Glad to hear that. The global warming myth and the ethanol farce are about to drive us into a recession. We don’t need any more Chicken Littles right now, removing wonderful pesticides from the market and driving food prices even higher.

Bees Not Confused

Liberals told us DDT harmed birds by making eggshells weak. It’s not true, but we banned DDT, and as a result, millions of human beings died of mosquito-borne diseases.

Now they tell us imidacloprid, a newer pesticide, confuses bees so they can’t find their hives. They tell us we’re going to run out of bees in a year.

Well I treat everything in my yard with heavy doses of imidacloprid. And I have a bee problem. As in a swarm I had to poison.

Funny, wasn’t that NOT supposed to happen?

I guess hippies who see this entry will whine about how a beekeeper would have taken the bees for nothing. WRONG, patchouli-suckers. Here they charge you to pick the bees up. So the cute little bees got poisoned. Just like roaches.

Imidacloprid is a godsend, because it’s one of the few things you can use on whiteflies, and whiteflies spread the new tomato plague: tomato yellow leaf curl virus. Florida growers say it will wipe them out if they can’t use imidacloprid.

I think the hippies are going to lose this battle.

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I should make a correction. DDT is believed to cause some thinning in the shells of birds of prey, but the effect doesn’t apply to birds in general. And I’ll bet DDT kills fewer eagles and hawks than windmill farms.

Nuclear energy is safe, cheap, and inexhaustible. Too bad the hysterical hippies prevented us from doing the responsible thing and using nukes to generate our electricity. The backward socialist French are overwhelmingly nuclear, and we’re not.

One more thing. DDT can be used responsible and effectively without causing significant problems for birds, but instead, we limited it to applications that are nearly worthless.

Oh, well. The millions of folks who died were mainly Little Brown People, and the left owns them, so they can do with them as they wish. Sure, they died in agony, but it could have been worse. They might have survived, become Christians, eaten meat, and bought SUVs.

No Fuss

I keep meaning to tell everyone; I found a way to grow healthy tomato plants without much work.

First, you have to have a complete break in the waste line leading to your septic tank. Then you have to pay someone to fix it and re-bury it, using the same dirt that came out when he dug it up.

Do the math.

All Life Will Cease

June is really here. It has been rainy all week, and today the air is so thick you can cut warm, drippy, moldy, grey slices out of it with a cheese knife. It’s not all that hot outside, but it feels so nasty, you just wouldn’t want to be out there.

On the up side, what’s going on, RE hurricane season? NOTHING. That’s right. NOTHING. Read it and weep, greenies. Another year of Hog on Ice hurricane gloating is underway. OOH! OOH! GLOBAL WARMING KILLER STORMS ARE GOING TO GET US! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! It’s not happening. And this is the THIRD YEAR IN A ROW.

We are three weeks into the season, and so far, all we’ve seen is a pathetic tropical storm which shouldn’t even have been named. Even William Gray has decided to bag it. He predicts seven hurricanes, which is pretty lame.

There are two problems with the “killer storms caused by global warming” theory. 1. The storms aren’t happening. 2. Global warming is a fantasy. It’s the first major scientific theory based solely on peer pressure.

I think I’ll promote an equally credible theory. KILLER EARTHQUAKES ARE CAUSED BY CRABBY ELVES. LOOK OUT FOR THE CRABBY ELVES. A consensus of scientists consulted about crabby elves has been formed. One hundred per cent of scientists questioned, i.e. me, believe in elfogenic killer earthquakes. IT’S A CONSENSUS, BABY. KISS THOSE SKYSCRAPERS GOODBYE.

Technically, I’m a scientist. So what I say must be true.

Forgive me, George

It’s a terrible, terrible thing to gloat when something bad happens to another person. Especially if that person is a friend. You should never do that. It’s unconscionable and petty and disgusting.

However…

GEORGE MONEO’S MAC JUST CRASHED! GEORGE MONEO’S MAC JUST CRASHED!

Okay, okay. I’m sorry! That was a momentary lapse! Pay no attention! I’m really ashamed.

It’s awful, but at the same time, come on. It’s funny. Every time I have a computer problem, George gives me a lecture about how it wouldn’t have happened if I had a Mac.

I confess, Windows is garbage, and IBM compatibles no longer offer any advantages other than initial price. I plan to buy a Mac when this computer craps out.

But it’s still funny.

Although maybe not to George. Not for another year or two.

You Only Need One Blog

My life is finally complete. I received the extra 1911 clips I ordered. Now I can keep the original clips loaded with Gucci ammunition and use the new ones at the range.

Words cannot describe my joy.

I had heard that the SW1911 came with Wilson Combat clips, but the clip I ordered for it is a Wilson, and it’s not like the originals.

I also received the Hodgdon reloading manual. It’s a MAGAZINE. Can someone explain? I guess it doesn’t matter, as long as it works.

Yesterday I was in a bookstore, and I saw a reloading magazine, and it had stuff about lead bullets, so I nabbed it. The dude who wrote the article claims he gets “reliable” loads with Winchester 231, as compared with Unique. I’m not sure what that means. Is it normal to have reliability issues with powder? That would explain why I keep having to pound slugs out of my barrel. Although I thought the main reason might be stupidity.

He published–they count if they’re published–loads including one for 6 grains of Unique and a 230-grain Laser-Cast bullet. I suppose that means I don’t have to be scared of my 5.2-grain loads. A while back, some readers were questioning my admittedly ignorant idea about going up to 6 grains. Looks like the question is answered.

Mike is on the way from Delray. If at all possible, we’ll shoot. Trail Glades is not open, but there’s an indoor place where I can rent a Performance Center Smith & Wesson 1911. You know I can’t pass that up. I have to see if superior iron makes a difference.

More excitement: I harvested two tomatoes. Brandywine and Dr. Wyche’s. I am really crazy about those Dr. Wyche’s. Hard to describe the flavor. Usually yellow tomatoes are a little bland, but these, which are a bit orange, have a lot of character. I hope I can get them to produce indoors.

I was busy with something tedious earlier today. I expect to be able to get back to writing tomorrow. In the meantime, watch this educational video provided by reader Steve B.

Gas Mask Required

My habanero gold bush gave me an embarrassment of peppers. That’s the correct term, I’ve decided. A pride of lions, a murder of crows, an embarrassment of peppers. Because peppers produce so prolifically, you can’t find uses for them, and it’s embarrassing.

I couldn’t stand to let them rot. So I took every last one off the bush, fed it through a food processor, and added enough fresh lime juice to keep the result from spoiling. It would be even better with a little garlic and maybe a bit of oil, but it should be very good just as it is. These things are so sweet and fruity, they’re perfect for this use.

Aaron hates pepper sauce with vinegar. Lime juice is a pretty good alternative.

I wore nitrile gloves while I worked on the peppers, but I’ll bet anything I still got nailed. I’m afraid to put my hands near anything sensitive.

My Trinidad scorpions are turning red. I plan to try one tomorrow.

Connect the Imaginary Dots

I did something unbelievably stupid at Home Depot the other day. I was buying various chemicals and poisons, and I saw something called “Miracle-Gro Singles,” and without really reading the label, I bought a bag. I thought it was some sort of premeasured fertilizer stick that fell apart and dissolved in water, sparing you the aggravation of using a spoon to measure. But when I got this stuff home, it turned out to be Miracle-Gro in tiny foil packets, which you have to cut open and empty. I’m sure it costs three times as much per pound as regular Miracle-Gro, and it’s a pain to use. Dumb buy.

My newest crop of tomatoes is disease-free, and I think I’ve decimated the bugs around here to the point where they have a hard time crawling to a nice place to die, let alone attacking my plants. Next week I have to start moving them to the bed and the pots I plan to put indoors. I am still mad that Mike grows tomatoes indoors in New Hampshire without a light, while I can’t grow them outdoors in Florida.

The difference in flavor and texture, between the best store tomatoes and ordinary home tomatoes, breaks my heart. I had forgotten until recently. In Kentucky, I was spoiled with a lot of great tomatoes my aunt and my grandmother grew. But years of unripe orange baseballs had dimmed the memories.

In other news, Osama bin Laden continues to be dissatisfied with our actions and those of Israel. How can this be? We took tasty, nutritious, relatively inexpensive pork off the menus at a whole bunch of our public schools, violating (by liberal standards) the principle of separation of church and state, so tiny delicate Muslim children would not have to be in the same room with it. I figured that would mollify him. What more does he want?

Bin Laden says our actions prove we stand with the civilized, morally superior Israelis and against the mouth-foaming cultist loons. My response? I call on all right-thinking Americans to condemn bin Laden’s blatant racist attack on Barack Obama. Do we have to take this from a clown so unimportant his last name doesn’t even start with a capital letter?

Okay, fun with bin Laden is over. Let’s get back to trying to kill him.

Sometimes I’m go glad this blog has “Hog” in the name. And I have to admit, just for fun, I really do put pork fat on my ammunition sometimes. Do I expect to be attacked by terrorists? No, but a lot of career criminals are Muslims. Islam is very big in the joint.

I was far too lazy didn’t find time in my busy schedule to load .38 Super rounds yesterday, so I’m going to go to the range with a box of .45 reloads and some cheap 9mm factory rounds. I have decided the face shield is a good idea, regardless of how stupid it looks. Until I really get a handle on consistency, I think it’s a good idea to take measures to insure that I continue to have a face. Such as it is. In fact, I have started to wonder: what exactly was wrong with all those guys who melted their chins with bad .38 Super rounds? Here’s my wild, irrational conjecture: after two or three of your buddies have cases disintegrate a foot from their faces, you should probably think about protective measures to make sure you don’t end up like them.

No, no. Too wacky. Like George Bush’s insane idea about putting money in the stock market, where it increases and funds the economy, instead of giving it to the government, which spends the money–and more–before it arrives.

That was crazy, wasn’t it? Clearly, the tiny, vanishingly small risk of losing your entire investment in the stock market outweighs the total certainty of having the government lose it immediately. I do love liberal logic.

Hey, if anyone cares, Natchez Shooter’s Supply has good prices on 9mm right now. Good by today’s standards, anyway. Also, R&R Arms is selling Golden Bear 115 grain for $8.47. I don’t know if this stuff is any good. It’s Russian, I believe. Wolf 9mm is Russian, and I found it extremely accurate.

I love 9mm, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP, because I know I will never have to pay for brass, regardless of how long I live. This stuff litters the floor of every range in America. And .357 isn’t too awful hard to find. So far, I’ve found a grand total of one .38 Super case which didn’t come from my gun. And when I convert to 9mm x 23 or 9 x 23mm or whatever it’s called, I may as well give up trying. I’ve never even seen one of those.

It’s late. Time to get in the car and go exercise my second amendment rights while I still have them. I’ll do some shooting, and then later in the day, I’ll shop in stores with a loaded gun in one pocket and a razor-sharp switchblade in the other. If you’re in a blue state (good phrase to describe your situation), I apologize for rubbing your face in it.

I Must Learn to Have an Original Thought Once in a While

I have started on the book of Numbers. And I have to say, the title is appropriate. There are some parts of the Bible I just skim. I know I will never remember the names of the tribe leaders and how many people were in each tribe. I admire anyone who can memorize things like that.

I feel the need for a break, so I am perusing my weekly Winn-Dixie ad. As you may recall, Winn-Dixie is the Florida supermarket chain which is NOT funding a lawsuit to make it impossible for people to carry arms in their cars. As far as I know. Wish I could say the same of Publix. I haven’t shopped there in quite some time.

I was busy with nonsense on Thursday and Friday, so I neglected to check this week’s ad. And it breaks my heart, because skirt steak has been on sale. Oh, the ache.

They’re also selling boliche (eye round roast) for $2.99 a pound. This stuff is wonderful, if you do what the Cubans do with it. Open a channel down the middle and stuff it with fat and/or sausage. Brown it and put it in a pressure cooker with various stew ingredients. Give it an hour and a half. It will be excellent. I think you could make it better by adding a beef rib (nearly free) to bulk up the sauce.

Boneless pork roast, $1.99 a pound. Be still, my heart. The things I can do with that.

Rib roast, $5.99 a pound! Oh, yes. Get me some of that. The freezer is already full of aged rib eyes, but I can make room for more.

Lots of good stuff today. I better go grab something that cooks up fast and easy, so as to minimize the impact on my Sunday.

I ate a Cherokee Chocolate tomato and a Dr. Wyche’s yellow tomato today. I managed to grow them, although they were small and not pretty. The flavor was magnificent. Much better than the heirlooms you get at stores. People keep telling me hybrids are the way to go. Whatever. I may never know, because I can’t grow hybrids, either.

I have a new batch of tomato plants going. We’ll see how they do. The Dr. Wyche’s tomatoes are considerably better than the Kentucky Beefsteaks I grew, so in the future, I guess I’ll just try to grow Dr. Wyche’s. That offends my national pride as a person born in Kentucky, but I have to call them as I see them.

Mike tells me his plants grow beautifully INDOORS in NEW HAMPSHIRE with ONE HOUR OF SUNLIGHT PER DAY in TWO-GALLON BUCKETS. I am so mad. I gave him the seeds, so I know I could have done this. It’s time for me to try. I should have known better than to trust the people who claimed plants had to have all-day sun. I’m going to put two plants indoors, even if I have to throw out furniture. In here, there will be no bugs and no fungus.

Mike and I are a lot alike. Neither of us does anything the orthodox way. I tried to follow the rules, and I got nothing for it. He did everything wrong and has tons of tomatoes. What was I thinking?

See you at the meat counter.

New Peppers

My tomatoes elicit nothing but pity and ridicule. However, I do quite well with peppers.

Here are the habanero gold peppers I grew from seed. Some are ready to pick.

Here’s a yellow habanero, for comparison. Yellow habaneros are fairly big for habaneros, so this will give you an idea how big the others are. The habanero golds are about the size of Clementines, and they get even bigger.

As I’ve noted before, I don’t think “habanero gold” is an authentic variety. I found these peppers at Norman Bros. Produce, a yuppie vegetable market here in Miami, and “habanero gold” is what it said on the bin. Store owners often mislabel peppers. I’ve never seen anything like these, online or in stores.

If you can grow only one type of really hot pepper, this would be a good choice. They’re big. They look great. And they’re super sweet. The first time I bit into one, I thought I was in for a sweet, fruity, mild pepper. Then my eyes exploded in their sockets. I exaggerate; they’re hot, but not hotter than other habaneros. They’re fantastic sliced on chili.

I’m also very happy with my cayennes, on the milder side. Sweet as candy, and mild enough to eat out of hand. You wouldn’t want to eat a handful without a glass of water, but they don’t compare to chinense peppers. A while back I ground some into a paste and fried them in oil with garlic, salt, and sugar. Man, that was good.

I have maybe a thousand prig ki nus. They’re great, but I don’t know what to do with them.

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Hey, pepper heads. My Trinidad scorpion bush is starting to bear. It blew past the habanero gold, and it’s going to be a monster. Envy me, losers.

Do Not Let Logic Become a Buzzkill

I wish I had the number for Al Gore’s compost-powered personal cell phone, because I want to call him and thank him for this delightful weather. It’s about 60 degrees outside, bright and sunny, at almost 11:00 a.m., in Miami, in mid-April. For this city, that is COLD. I’m sure this somehow proves global warming exists, because everything proves global warming exists. Global warming exists, therefore anything that happens is evidence that it exists. That is the position of leftists everywhere, and it seems totally logical to me.

Here’s something that may make you laugh. One of the things I pray for every day is a collapse of the global warming fraud. Partly because it’s destructive and expensive and dishonest, but also because I want God to remind us that He controls the weather.

It used to be that when natural events made human beings suffer, people examined themselves to see if they had sinned or in some way fallen short. Even heathens worried that they had upset their false gods. Academics claim early religions were motivated largely by a desire to assure good weather and good harvests.

Now we begin by blaming George Bush, regardless of the nature of the misfortune, and then we blame capitalism and the United States and, if at all possible, the Jews. The answer to our problems is to cripple industry and commerce, so we can be just as happy and healthy as people in primitive cultures, who die at 30, in the dirt, infested with parasites. The truth is, the ultimate source of health and prosperity and peace and so on is God. And you can only cheat Him for so long before he cuts off your allowance.

Wealth is a tremendous gift. But now leftists call it a curse, claiming it’s “killing the planet.” On the one hand, we’re supposed to believe living things have the capacity to evolve and adapt to anything. On the other, we are told that a two-degree change in the average temperature will turn the world into a lifeless rock. And we’re positive the change is caused by the things that make us prosperous. The things that bring us money to buy medicine and food and books. The things that enable us to give our surplus to the needy. The leftist position is, we should kill our prosperity just to be on the safe side.

Okay. Good plan.

Some leftists say we can save the planet if we kill the economy right now. But the leftists I truly love are the ones who say it’s already too late. The world is definitely going to die because of the stuff we’ve already done! The first type of leftist, I understand. They want to use ecology as a weapon to inflict socialism and totalitarianism and atheism on us. A weapon to make us dependent on the state. The second kind…they’re just FUN. They’ve completely lost sight of traditional leftist goals. They’ve forgotten that they’re supposed to be manipulating us to change. They just want us to feel bad and die. For some reason, that cracks me up. They’re like a yellow light at a traffic intersection. They don’t inspire you to stop what you’re doing. They inspire you to FLOOR IT BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. Get out there and burn some gasoline while you still can! Eat, drink, and drive a big tasteless Humvee, because tomorrow we will fry like earthworms on a hot sidewalk. Like computer-generated polar bears in a lying documentary.

I still can’t believe Al Gore says polar bears, which are semi-aquatic, are drowning. What next? Maybe we should go put little life jackets on otters! Parachutes for pigeons! I am too busy. I volunteer Heidi Cullen for these jobs. The otters will probably resist, because they’re bitter and religious, but that problem can be solved with a tranquilizer gun. When the pain of the bites and scratches gets to be too much, they can shoot Heidi Cullen. That will make her feel better.

April has been really nice so far. Sometimes April is hot and miserable here, but this year, I’ve been able to sit outside and relax without sticking to the patio furniture. Thanks, Al. Keep the good weather coming, my man. You probably won’t feel the weather, because you’re always inside a climate-controlled mega-mansion or an SUV the size of an aircraft carrier, but the rest of us–the bitter, religious, gun-loving haters of immigrants–enjoy it a lot.

The unseasonable cold is doing good things for my plants. Supposedly, it helps tomato blossoms set, and I suddenly have a bunch of them on my previously pathetic Brandywine vine, so I have newfound hope that I may one day grow a full-size red tomato. The biggish yellow tomato on my Kentucky beefsteak vine will be ready to pick in a day or two. I’m hoping the city-fied squirrels here are too stupid to know what a tomato is. Otherwise, it may be time to risk arrest by shooting them from inside the house. There’s a cool type of ammunition made for this purpose. It’s called a colibri round. It’s a .22 cartridge with no powder. The primer drives the slug at air rifle speeds. Very quiet. I guess if I were to go on a squirrel murder spree, I’d use a regular air gun, in order to avoid becoming famous as the nut who fired a gun in Coral Gables. Still, they’re neat. I almost wish I still had rats.

Funny thing about tomatoes…the vines seem to grow from the ground out. If you drive a nail into a tree when it’s a year old, the nail will be the same distance from the ground in a hundred years. Trees grow from their tops; the wood doesn’t rise as the tree grows. But it seems like my tomatoes keep getting higher and higher, as if the vines are growing from the bottoms, not the tops. Is that possible?

I have a new batch of Tobago seasoning peppers, which are supposed to be mild but otherwise similar to habaneros. I grabbed a few and put them on takeout Mexican the other day. First, I tried a piece of one to see how hot it was. It seemed very hot for a mild pepper. Then I realized it wasn’t hot at all, because I wasn’t crying or drinking from a quart glass of ice water. My truly hot peppers are insufferable. Still, even though the Tobago peppers were good, I have to say I prefer my Home Depot cayennes, which have tons of cherry flavor and just enough heat.

My Trinidad Scorpion bush is a monster. Huge leaves the color of spinach. Lots of blossoms. And I think the bugs are afraid of it. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the peppers. They are supposed to be hot enough to etch glass.

The peppers I’m most excited about are the habanero golds I planted from a store-pepper seed. The bush is beautiful, and it’s loaded with huge peppers. They’re nearly as big as Clementines, and they’re still green! The pepper I used for seed was gigantic. Maybe three inches long. And the flavor was stupendous. If these are as good as that one, you might be smart to ask me for seeds.

I hammered the yard and, as collateral damage, myself with bifenthrin spray yesterday. “Orange dog” caterpillars are constantly attacking the citrus. And I will not have it. For some reason, the Persian lime is immune to everything. It’s a beast. The other stuff, I have to keep an eye on.

Seems like I have no problem growing sour things and things that burn, but it’s hard to grow sweet things. Perhaps this is a reflection of my personality. Maybe I should put Marv in charge of the tomatoes and fruit. He won’t even bite the veterinarian.

Hmm…I spend a lot of time sitting. Maybe that means I could grow potatoes. That will be a useful skill in the full bloom of the Ethanol Famine.

We Can’t All Worship St. Obama

Been busy with boring tasks today.

Yesterday’s sabbath observation went well. I feel strange calling Sunday the sabbath, but I don’t know what else to call it. I read a lot and relaxed and spent a fair amount of time in prayer, and oddly when I woke up today, I was still not perfect.

Maybe it will take two consecutive Sundays.

I am still confused about prayer in tongues. I reviewed some NT teaching on it, and the scriptural support is there. I guess what I question is whether I have ever done it, because when I do, it always sounds unconvincing. It’s a tough issue for a sincere person. You want to do it, so you try, but how do you know you’re not making it up? What if you’re so good at making it up, you think you have it when you don’t, and you quit trying to get the real thing, and it passes you by? And then you feel truly stupid in the afterlife, because everyone else got it and you didn’t.

People being what they are, I can say with certainty that not all people who do it are really doing it.

I read more of the book of Enoch, and I tried to find information on why it was rejected by the Jews and by most Christians. The bit about angels reproducing is problematic for Jews, but it has also been suggested that they bailed on Enoch after Christianity appeared, because so much of the book seems to be about Christ.

I cannot buy into some of it. I do not believe there is a place where lightning is kept, ready to throw, like cigars in a box. But it seems like the facially weird bits can be pared away from the plausible parts that ring true.

I found out about it while I was researching Mt. Hermon. On my own, years ago, I got the idea that the Jordan Valley seems to be set up in a way that symbolizes the progress of human lives. I don’t think God’s symbolism is confined to the Bible. The water originates above, falls on Hermon, goes into several springs including one by an ancient shrine to Pan (the model for modern depictions of Satan), moves on to the lake where the disciples symbolically harvested fish, and then passes through the desert to the Dead Sea, which contains Sodom and Gomorrah. Not the new town, Sdom, which is on the banks. The actual cities. And we all know what they represent. From there, the only escape is evaporation.

If this idea pans out, it came from God. If not, it was all me.

The Enoch story lends a little credence to it. It says evil angels alit on Hermon and went from there to procreate with women, creating a race of superhuman beings which did all sorts of horrible things, leading God to flood the earth. The parable of the wheat and the tares seems to comport with this idea.

I don’t have it all worked out, but anyway, I haven’t yet accepted the notion that Enoch is garbage. Jesus’s brother quoted it, so surely it’s worth something.

I may sound silly talking about angels, but I know they exist, so I don’t care. Some day we’ll be dead, and you’ll have to admit I was right. If you’re a Christian and you don’t believe in angels, you must be watching too much Oprah. You have to believe Jehovah and Jesus are two real beings, and that they are observing us at this very moment, and that Satan is real, and that there are legions of angels and demons. If those things sound ridiculous to you, what exactly is it that makes you think you’re a Christian?

The shrine to Pan is located at a thing called the Banias. It would be called the Panias, or something similar, but Arabs don’t have the letter P. Pagans used to worship false gods there and throw sacrifices into the spring. You would think that would defile the Jordan all the way to the Dead Sea, but I haven’t read anything suggesting that the Jews cared about this.

I went to the Banias once while I was a kibbutz volunteer, on a weekend tour sponsored by the kibbutz. I didn’t realize at the time that it was adjacent to the location of Caesarea Philippi, an evil city and the site of Jesus’s declaration that he was the Messiah. Remember “Get thee behind me, Satan”? He said that near the Banias. Which may have some prophetic significance. He said it to Peter. But are we sure he was only addressing Peter, given the peculiar location?

The Banias is truly creepy. There’s a giant hole in a red rock face, which the kibbutz volunteer supervisor told us was believed to be the birthplace of Pan. And there’s a stagnant pool there, which used to be a bubbling spring. That’s where they threw the sacrifices. Not sure if they were all animals.

I’m dying to go back to Israel. I should just get up and go. Spend a week. I wonder if I can still go to all the places I went last time. Jericho is out, I suppose.

A recommendation: for some reason I no longer recall, I had a copy of The Spirit-Filled Bible, and it seems very good. Maybe the reason I used to read the Bible too little is that the versions I had lacked useful annotations and so on. This book is packed with them. Background on each author, historical information, insight on the actual words used, and it was written by people who believe in the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Sunday was very nice. There is more to it than I’m telling, but it was a very good day. Peculiar thing; my tomatoes and peppers seem to be doing much better, suddenly. I don’t claim a causal connecition, but it’s true.