The Bucket is not on my Bucket List

Now that I’m a Northerner, I continually learn new things about winter-related problems.

I moved 300 miles north from Miami, to a farm on the tundra near Ocala. In my 4.5 years here, we have had at least 5 days of freezing weather. Okay, 5 days containing at least an hour of freezing weather. Whatever.

The first time it hit, it killed a bunch of ornamental plants. I could not believe the previous owners had paid good money for plants that had to be pampered, so I said, “good riddance.” I never replaced them. I’m not going to run outside with a stack of old sheets every time the thermometer dips.

Two days ago, they told us the weather would get cold, and I paid no attention at all. I figured anything 27° could kill or damage wasn’t worth having.

The power company sent me texts saying I would be entered in a prize drawing if I responded with a photo of my thermostat set at 65°. They were trying to get people to reduce the load on the grid. Naturally, I complied. Then I put the temperature back on 75° where it belonged. They didn’t say I had to LEAVE it at 65°. That law school education keeps paying off.

No, I didn’t really do that. I just considered it a reminder to use both sides of the electric blanket later on.

It was my civic duty. If the power people are failing to maintain an adequate grid, they don’t need customers enabling them. They need to feel some pressure so they build up the system. Sure, I got a little hot during the night, and I had to roll back the covers so the sweat could evaporate, but that’s okay. A man’s got to do what he’s got to do.

This morning when I got up, things seemed fine. I have towels I put on furniture in case Marvin feels like pooping, so I threw a bunch in the washer with bleach. Then I made breakfast. After breakfast, I tried to use the kitchen faucet, and nothing came out. I checked the washer. The wash cycle had run, and the water had been pumped out, but the towels were sitting in the bottom of the tub doing nothing because no new water could come in.

I had frozen up my water system at 27°. I hadn’t known it was possible. I realize water freezes at 32°. Nothing gets past me. But my water pumps are deep below ground, the pipes by the house pump are generally insulated, and the pressure tank is large, so there is no way it can freeze up during a short frost.

It turned out the pressure switch was the problem. It has 1/4″ tubing connecting it to the system, and the tubing has no insulation because Florida. The tubing froze up fast, so the pressure switch did not work. The water I ran earlier in the morning came from the reserve in the pressure tank.

This serves to remind me why I have so much contempt for engineers and people who build things. The water system has 2″ pipes which will never, ever freeze, and they’re covered with insulation. It has 1/4″ tubes which will definitely freeze and shut down the system, and they’re naked as jaybirds.

It also serves to remind me I need to put poison out for the squirrels. Shooting is too slow. They ate part of the pipe insulation.

After an hour or so above 32°, the water came back on, and all I had to do was open a tap and let the rust out. It always gets rusty when the system goes on and off.

What a relief. I had been worried about the pressure tank. I thought maybe there was something in there that could be harmed by a quick freeze. Something expensive that couldn’t be fixed on a Sunday.

It was scary, thinking I only had 5 flushes remaining between me and the inevitable Home Depot bucket. I had oatmeal and hot cocoa for breakfast, and well, you know how that works.

Thank God that’s over. Think I’ll go relax in the living room, which is currently at a bone-chilling 73°. Hey, I wonder if my heat pump can break a hundred. Think I’ll go find out.

Popeil Appeal

I guess I have a lot of nerve, because I have decided to second-guess the great Ron Popeil.

As some readers know, I recently picked up a Ronco Showtime rotisserie oven, unused, on Ebay. I felt I needed it. My dad had one, and it was great. My friend Mike has two of them. You would think nothing with the Popeil name on it could possibly be worth buying, what with all the attention his spray-on hair got, but it isn’t true. The original Showtime was a reasonably well-built product made in South Korea, and it did what he said it would do. It made great food.

It’s very weird that the Showtime has no present-day competitors. George Foreman sold rotisseries, but they vanished from the market. You can get vertical rotisseries, but they’re stupid. The fat runs off the food. No self-basting.

I’m going to guess the food Nazis are behind the vertical rotisserie problem. Who else would drive a policy that dumb? Competent cooking is literally impossible without fat, and fat is good for you, but people are still convinced it’s evil. What kind of fool would spend hundreds of dollars on a machine designed to cleanse food of the very thing that makes it delicious and juicy?

So far, I have cooked four things in the oven: a chicken, a rib roast, and two pork roasts. I learned a couple of things.

1. You have to be careful about applying too much salt, because the rotation of the spits makes it hard for things to run off the food. More of the salt will stay where you put it.

2. Some dishes would probably be better if the oven had a lower heat setting.

The pork roasts I fixed were magnificent. The rib roast I made was fine, but it was too salty. The chicken was done, but not done enough to be tender, and the skin was getting dark when I took it out of the oven.

The Showtime has three settings, but none of them have anything to do with heat. You get one heat setting, and you’re expected to accept it. The spit assembly can be placed in two different positions, one of which is farther from the heat, but the difference in heat that reaches the food is small.

I looked into ways to vary the heat, and I found three solutions, only one of which have I seen applied.

1. Attach a simmerstat to the oven.

2. Buy an AC speed control for power tools and splice it into the heating element circuit.

3. Put a diode and a switch in the same circuit.

A simmerstat is a device found on stove burners. It turns a burner on and off repeatedly. The overall effect is to lower the heat output. Depending on the ratio of on time to off time, you can get plenty of control. Because the simmerstat shuts the juice off instead of shunting it through a resistor, it doesn’t give off a lot of heat. Resistors always use up energy and give off heat. A stove burner coil is a resistor.

I do not know how a speed control works, but since they don’t heat up and catch fire, I know they don’t use big resistors. Maybe they work like simmerstats.

A diode will only pass current in one direction. A heating element in a Showtime oven runs on AC, which means the current switches direction 60 times per second. If you stick a diode in the circuit, half of the time, the circuit will not pass current. That means you should get something like a quarter of the energy output. For DC, it would be a quarter for sure. Don’t ask me about AC, because AC is somewhat different, but half is in the ballpark.

A Youtube genius got himself a big diode and a switch, and he modified his oven. Now he can cook stuff slowly when he wants to.

I considered the alternatives, and I decided to get a diode. A simmerstat or speed control would involve a lot of work to make it part of the oven, and I don’t think I really need a wide range of heat settings. I think high, low, and off will get the job done. I ordered a diode, an SPDT switch, and some spade connectors, and when they get here, I plan to roast a chicken. When I’m done working on the oven, it will look no different than it does now, but for a toggle switch on the control box.

Once the heat issue is solved, my only complaint will be that the top of the little broiler-style drip pan that sits in the bottom of the oven is hard to keep clean.

The oven literature says the pan is nonstick, but to me, it looks like plated steel covered with some kind of ceramic. It sticks to everything. Whenever I use the oven, I cover the pan and grate with foil and poke holes in the top for the grease, but stuff still burns onto the top.

I don’t trust the pan to remain rust-free in the dishwasher, but maybe it will. The new ones do. I need to find out. The dishwasher should remove nearly all of the crud.

I made my second pork roast last night, and it was superb. I will post the recipe, which is extremely simple. Obviously, it will also work in a conventional oven.

INGREDIENTS

pork roast (shoulder)
12 oz. apricot or peach nectar
2 tsp. pressed garlic
1 tsp. sage
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. butter
1/2 cup sweet Marsala or Harvey’s Bristol Cream

Salt your pork roast and let it sit for a while to take the salt in. Boil the other ingredients together until you get a thick syrup that doesn’t run. Cover the roast with the syrup and roast it however you want. Make sure you burn the outside a little to make a nice crust. You’re looking for around 150° on the inside. I think low and slow is the way to go, followed by increased heat to brown the crust.

I gave a 4-pound roast something like 25 minutes per pound, and it was excellent. Very juicy.

It would probably be even better to double the sauce and reapply it halfway through. It’s easier to apply the sauce once the roast is attached to the spits.

I like to bone my roasts and tie them back up, tightly, with twine. You save maybe $1.50 per pound for 5 minutes’ work. To make tying easy, use a butcher’s knot. Look it up.

You can’t imagine how good this tastes.

Smell the pork package at the store to make sure there is no boar taint. If you get a smelly roast anyway, you can brine it with baking soda to kill the stink.

I look forward to my first low-temperature chicken. Should be wonderful.

EUREKA

Aside from the day I “met” my wife (online) or the day we married–no, wait–aside from the day I accepted salvation, the day I received the baptism with the Holy Spirit, AND the days I “met” and married my wife (bases covered now), today is the most triumphant day of my life. I stuck it to the greenies by modifying my old-fashioned eco-hostile washing machine to make the inlet valve easier to clean, and I made the best thin pizza I have ever had.

I got myself a Maytag Commercial washer from Lowe’s last year. It would have been better to get a sister model from another vendor, because the Lowe’s job has a shorter warranty, but I needed a washer fast, and Lowe’s was ready. I got the washer because my old clothes-fermenting Samsung washer was making new noises.

The people who used to own this house weren’t cheap, so they got very expensive laundry machines. Unfortunately, they bought them after Uncle Sam (more like Aunt Sam or maybe Uncle Rupaul) ruined washers with stupid environmentalist rules. Newer washers use too little water, and they never dry out, so they make clothing stink with mildew. There is no remedy for this. If you’ve ever stood next to someone and assumed he smelled like mildew because he was a filthy person, you were almost certainly wrong. Everyone who uses a greenie machine smells like mildew on warm days.

My Samsung started making noise, and I leapt for joy, because I was awaiting the day when I would have an excuse to junk it. I didn’t even consider having it repaired. I had already done my research. Speed Queen used to make good washers, but they stopped. Maytag was the best option.

The Maytag will do a load of clothes in 27 minutes instead of the 90 minutes the Samsung needed, and it only has minimal electronics, so I don’t have to worry about trying to buy a discontinued computer in the future. It uses tons of water, and it dries out between uses. It’s the best.

Problem: the inlet screens were not removable.

Washers typically have hot and cold water inlets in the back, and these inlets are almost always fitted with internal plastic screens you can pull out and clean. This keeps rocks out of your clothing. I can’t believe tiny rocks will damage clothes, and I doubt they hurt washers, since washing machine instructions never say, “Don’t put muddy clothes in machine.” The screens are there, however, so you have to live with them.

My water has a lot of rocks in it, so every few months, the washer starts making scary sounds. Then it quits. The first time this happened, I thought it was broken. No. It was just whining.

I saw that the inlet screens were full of crud, so I tried to pull one out. It would not budge. I couldn’t get it out with pliers. Turning it didn’t help. It wasn’t screwed in. It was a permanent fixture.

Things like this remind me that every engineering class has a bottom 5%.

To clean the screens, I had to pull the washer out into the room, remove the hoses, and use things like an old toothbrush. Unacceptable.

I didn’t want to butcher the original valve. Some day I may need warranty service, and I don’t want the lonely Maytag guy to look at my modified valve, tell me I’ve been a bad boy, and refuse to work on the machine. I decided it was worth it to buy a whole new valve assembly. I forget what it cost. Probably around $60.

I also bought some removable screens made for other washers. You can find them on Amazon. I got 4 for about $7.

I took the new valve and ripped the screens out of it. I shoved new ones in. They fit perfectly. I was ready. I stored the valve assembly in the laundry room and waited for the day when the washer started whining again. Today is that day.

In order to get the old valve out, I had to take the control panel off the machine. That was impossible, because it was held on with special Torx screws that require bits with cavities in the ends. Tamper-proof screws, because, as everyone knows, repairing your own belongings is TAMPERING. I gave up and called Maytag.

Are you high? Do you really think I don’t have a huge supply of tamper-proof bits? Did you seriously fall for that? I got the bits out, took the washer apart, slapped the new valve in there so it looked OEM, stored the old valve, and washed my clothes.

The next time the rocks build up, I can remove a hose, pull a screen out, rinse it in the sink, reverse the procedure, and go back to making pizza or whatever. If the washer develops any other problems during the warranty period, I’ll put the old valve back in before the repair guy arrives.

Is it wrong to play warranty tricks on Maytag? Sometimes. If I had a CNC shop, and I decided to make my own souped-up washer transmission, and it ruined the machine, it would be wrong to put the old transmission back in and pretend it had always been in there. Inlet screens are different. The screens I put in do the same job the old ones did, only better. It will be impossible for them to harm the machine. It would be unfair for Maytag to use inlet screens as an excuse to cheat me out of warranty work.

Corporations play that game sometimes. Some won’t touch a product that has been opened by a consumer. That’s just plain evil, so I don’t feel bound to cooperate.

I only have a three-year warranty, and I probably won’t get to use it, so I don’t think my subterfuge will ever come into play in a repair situation. I still think the money I spent on the new valve was well worth it. A non-warranty repair on a major part could cost a great deal. Also, inlet valves go bad often, and now I have a replacement valve ready to go.

As for pizza, today I had the best thin pizza ever, from any source, anywhere. I am done searching. I’m sure I will continue tinkering, but the recipe I used is recorded and stored, and unless a miracle happens and I manage to improve it, I will use it until I die.

The best thing about it is that it didn’t take a day or more to prepare. People claim you have to let dough ferment for over a day, preferably in a refrigerator. I did that a few days back, and today’s pizza, which rose over about 4 hours, was better. The texture and flavor were magnificent. It puffed up nicely. It had big bubbles, which I like. It browned beautifully. I literally start to drift into a dream state when I close my eyes and remember how it tasted.

I used the last recipe I posted here. I made the dough with cold water to slow down the rise, and I proofed it at 75° on my kitchen counter, on a pan, under a glass bowl to reduce evaporation. It took around 4 hours, not 24. I suppose it could be 2% better if Gordon Ramsay moved in and worked on it for a month, but I have never eaten its equal.

For cheese, I used about 3 ounces of Boar’s Head low-moisture, whole milk mozzarella from the Publix deli, sliced, combined with Sargento thin-sliced provolone. I put the provolone on top because it doesn’t burn easily. Anyone can find these cheeses or their equivalents. No Internet orders or road trips needed.

Walmart sells LMWM mozzarella in blocks for $3.68 per pound. I plan to try it. Boar’s Head costs $10 per pound, which is impossible to justify based on the manufacturer’s cost. If other companies can sell it for less than half that price, Boar’s Head has to be overpriced.

I plan to get a piece of steel for pizza. People say steel is better than a pizza stone. A good pizza steel only costs $139 on the web, so why not?

You believed that? You really thought I would pay that? I’m going to my metal dealer. I’ll bet I can get a 15″ square of 3/8″ plate for under $25.

I don’t know what kind of tool-illiterate leggings-wearing morphodite would pay $140 for a piece of steel plate, but he isn’t me.

It must seem silly for a grown man to get so excited about pizza, but I have been trying to get to this point for decades. I summited the Sicilian pizza mountain 12 years ago, but I was never completely certain my thin pizza was perfect until today. It was good. No restaurant I knew could touch it. But it wasn’t my dream New-York-style pie.

This must be how Edison felt when he stumbled on tungsten.

The only thing left for me to perfect is fried chicken. I have no other food Everests to conquer. There are innumerable things I don’t know how to cook, but then I don’t want to cook them. I know how to make everything I want.

Except chicken.

Pizza is unbelievably difficult. An ideal pizza you picture in your mind is an extremely elusive target. When you make recipe changes you are sure will work, they will often move you further away from your goal. It’s maddening. The really annoying thing about it is that once you get your recipe dialed in, making it over and over is simple. The execution is a joke. The search for the recipe is what crushes your soul.

I ate an entire 12″ pizza earlier, and I want to make another one right now, even though I’m not hungry. I want to relive my victory. I’m not going to do it, but I want to.

I bought two pounds of cheese today. I may have to chain myself to something.

Plastic is Manly

Am I a bad husband? When I make major decisions, do I thoughtlessly forget the fact that I am no longer single?

Every once in a while, I start to say, “I’m single, so…” I’m well aware that I am not single, but after so many years on the shelf, and with a wife who is still stuck in a foreign country, I sometimes forget the proper mindset.

Last week, I did it again. I ordered new steak knives without showing them to the wife.

Back when I lived in Austin, and I was a physics TA, I got some steak knives for my apartment. They were Henckels knives from some store or other. Probably Bed, Bath & Beyond. They were serrated stainless knives with extremely tough handles that looked like wood yet didn’t go all snowflaky in the dishwasher. They worked fine for about 25 years, but some of them disappeared during that time.

Why do steak knives disappear? They do it to everyone. Where do they go? I think it sometimes happens because idiot relatives grab them and use them as screwdrivers and paint scrapers. Other than that, I can’t figure it out.

Between my dad and me, we had three or four knives when we moved to the Ocala area. It wasn’t a big problem, because we didn’t have gatherings that required a lot of knives. I got sick of it, though, so I decided to go to Ebay and see if I could find loose knives to match my old ones. I figured there would be new knives all over the place at reasonable prices. Even if the knives had been discontinued, surely there would be new old stock.

Boy, was I wrong. New ones did not exist, and old ones were selling for Sabatier prices. Okay, not Sabatier prices. But they were so dear, it looked like I would be better off getting a new set.

No problem, right? I went to Cook’s Illustrated, figuring I would buy whatever they recommended. They’re pretty reliable.

Guess what? They recommend a set of Victorinox knives that sell for $167. And they have wooden handles, so forget the dishwasher.

If they had wooden handles, I wouldn’t pay $167 for a set of lightsabers. I have a $200 knife that has been wrapped in newspaper since I left Miami. Wooden handle. I’m not washing that by hand. I will probably never use it again.

I should frame it to remind me of my own bad judgment.

Here is what Victorinox says on Amazon:

Victorinox Swiss Army recommends washing all knives by hand. For best results, hand wash your knives with a soapy cloth and dry immediately.

While Fibrox Pro knives are dishwasher safe, we recommend hand washing as dishwashers are designed to spray water at a relatively high pressure, which can jostle the silverware and cause the knives to collide, dulling the edge.

That’s what they recommend. I recommend they find another sucker to buy their knives. What am I? Niles Crane? I may be a snob, but I’m not insane, and I don’t have an illegal to wash my knives for me.

I finally found a cheaper set I liked, and it happens to be made by Victorinox, the company that also made some of my cheap Fibrox-handled chef knives. I paid $68 for 6 knives. I know I should have bought 8, but I was too cheap. I figured that if I…WE…ever needed 8, we could give the old, dull Henckels knives to the guests who were most likely to cut themselves.

I went with straight edges. Why? Because serrated edges are for women and other people who can’t sharpen a knife. Serrations make really dull knives cut well enough to satisfy most people. I don’t want them. Have you ever cut a steak with a sharp knife? It’s bliss. It just falls off onto your fork, and you don’t have to saw and rock the table back and forth.

Here is the part the wife may not like: the knives have black Fibrox handles. Plastic, in other words. They look like they came from Big Lots.

I don’t think she’ll care. When I asked her what her favorite food was, she said “meat.” She didn’t narrow it down any more than that. Meat. All meat. Any meat. She even eats hippopotamuses. As a person who will soon be eating meat in my house, not to mention washing dishes, I think she will love these knives. If not, I can always get the wooden ones and use the plastic ones when I’m alone.

So, what to do with the old knives? Nothing, right? They’re for the kids’ table.

I couldn’t leave them alone. While I was admiring the newly-arrived set, I had to do something about the old ones.

The old knives were only sharpened on one side. To a knife person who isn’t a sushi chef, this is on a par with vandalism. I guess it made the knives easier to manufacture. I don’t think Henckels expected anyone to sharpen them. I believe the idea was that undiscerning customers would buy them and use them until they lost a certain number. Then they would be replaced.

At first, I tried to sharpen them on one side, just like Henckels. I used two diamond hones; coarse and fine. It was very slow work. I reshaped the bevel on one knife with many strokes, and then I touched up the back side to get rid of the burr. I wasn’t satisfied at all. The knife was pretty sharp, but it didn’t make me completely happy, and I still had two to go. After working on the second knife for too long a time, I changed tactics.

I have a Smith’s PP1 sharpener. This is a desperation gadget for hopeless unskilled people, but it works pretty well for kitchen knives. It has coarse carbide cutters in one notch, and the other notch holds fine ceramic stones.

I ran the knife through it a few times, and I got an edge, but it wasn’t great. Even after following up with a leather strop saturated with 1-micron diamond spray, it was disappointing.

I found that the final answer was to make a crude edge using the Smith’s tool and then follow up with the hones. This worked quickly, and it gave me reasonably refined edges that shaved hairs. The serrated areas wouldn’t shave, but they were sharp again.

This is now my official steak knife sharpening method. The hones are fast and easy to use. You just have to be willing to learn to do it right. You can push your knives away from you on the top of the hones and then on the bottom, in order to get both bevels, or you can push on the top, turn the knives over, and pull toward you. You have to learn how to hold the knives at a fixed angle on both strokes.

You may not get a really symmetrical set of bevels, but that doesn’t matter. They’ll be close enough. The only hard part will be establishing your characteristic bevels in the first place. Factory bevels may be very symmetrical, and they may also have angles that differ from the ones you want to apply by hand. It may take a long time to grind the bevels down they match your angles. After that, resharpening a knife will take about 20 seconds. It’s so fast, you can do it every time you take a knife out.

I’m going with this method. It works.

The other day, I bought a KME sharpening system for my carry knives. It’s wonderful. It provides a beautiful edge that rips through anything. It’s not right for everything, though.

Carry knives are made from super steels which take forever to dull and aren’t easy to sharpen, and it’s natural to want a perfect edge on a carry knife, so it’s okay if it takes a while to sharpen one. Kitchen knives are different. A kitchen knife that will pop little hairs off the backs of your fingers is plenty sharp for any kitchen job. Also, kitchen knives get dull faster than carry knives, so using a KMA sharpener, which takes a while to set up, is completely impractical.

Now I have 6 new steak knives with razor-like factory edges, plus three old knives that, while not as keen, are sharper than they have ever been before

The problem will be to convince my guests to be careful.

Almost no one expects knives to be sharp. Only a small percentage of knife owners have any idea how to sharpen a knife, and when it comes to women, that percentage is close to zero. They’re used to bad knives in their own houses, so when you hand them sharp knives, they tend to be careless. They also lean into them, because they’re used to forcing dull blades through food.

Women will actually get angry at you for sharpening knives. Many women think it’s irresponsible and unsafe to sharpen a knife correctly. It’s sad.

It’s really mens’ fault. A man sharpens his wife’s knives.

A long time ago, my Aunt Jean asked for a big knife while working on a holiday meal. I let her use a huge Forschner butcher knife with a great edge. I told her several times to be extremely careful. I warned her that it was sharper than knives she was used to. Only a few minutes passed before I saw her with a paper towel wrapped around her hand.

I don’t want people to come to my house and maim themselves over shared meals. It ruins the atmosphere.

I think my sharpening technology is as good as it will never need to be. I have a CBN-wheel bench grinder for things like hoes and woodworking tools. I have two belt grinders for axes and similar tools. I have chainsaw files. I have the KME for carry knives. I have diamond hones for kitchen knives. I have the strop and diamond spray for all my knives. I have big DMT diamond stones for filling in the gaps. I am set. You can do better, but you don’t really need to.

I am building the kitchen up again. Not all that long ago, I stepped back from cooking because it was related to gluttony, but now I have a wife to think about, and she should have a well-equipped food workshop, even if I do a lot of the cooking.

Yesterday, I unboxed a new toaster oven. It’s a Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro. It’s a smart oven with a fan in it. It does air frying, which is good for routine weekday vegetable sides. It has all sorts of programs. It reheats, proofs dough, keeps food warm at realistic temperatures (unlike a big oven), and can even handle a turkey or rib roast.

My big oven is pretty bad. It probably came with the house. The thermal fuse blows every time I use the self-cleaning cycle, the display has gone so dim I can barely see it, and the convection setting doesn’t air-fry. I found a new one for $1100, but I have been too cheap to spring for it. It also takes 15 minutes to preheat, whereas the new hotness takes three. I spent $400 on it, which is a ton, but I think it will be worth it, because it appears I will only be using the big oven for maybe 10% of my oven jobs.

People complain about the difficulty of cleaning this oven, but I have an ace in the hole. I have a steam cleaner. Not many people know it, but a steam cleaner will dissolve baked-on crud in a hurry, with no chemicals or abrasives. Also, I’m not the kind of person who cleans ovens a lot. I’m not going to feel bad if my new oven looks like someone uses it.

I can’t fix a new entree until I get rid of the chicken I made two days ago, so all I can do for now is reheat. The new oven is performing beautifully. It seems to be a revolutionary change for my kitchen. The reheating feature, all by itself, is huge. My big oven is impractical for reheating, the conventional microwave I got to accommodate my dad’s dementia makes food rubbery and limp, and the little microwave with convection features is a much better at microwaving than convection.

When you’re single…married but temporarily living alone…you have to reheat a lot or throw out a great deal of food. You can’t eat everything you make in a single day, so you eat a lot of leftovers.

I almost wish I hadn’t thrown out my dad’s old Popeil rotisserie. Crude product that it was, it worked like crazy. When you move, you have to prioritize, and the rotisserie seemed like a good candidate for the garbage pile. My friend Mike has one, and he can’t believe I threw ours out. When I told him, he sounded close to tears.

Oh, my God. I thought Ronco had stopped selling the oven. I see a new one on Amazon. Should I? Should I? I can always get another kitchen cart. Oh, man. This is good news.

You may be inclined to assume the late Ron Popeil would never sell a decent product, purely as a matter of principal, but that isn’t true. His dad was very shifty, but Ron made some good stuff. The rotisserie lasts forever and makes excellent food. Ron himself worked on it, determining that 6 turns per minute were ideal.

The oven is sort of primitive, but the food is undeniably great. It’s strange that my dad, who could not cook, bought one, but I have to say that the things he made with it were shockingly tasty.

It’s not that easy to clean, but as I said, I have a steam cleaner. Nothing is hard to clean when you have a steam cleaner.

I am researching, and it looks like the new Ronco company is not the same as the old one. People are complaining that the new ovens turn at 4 RPM instead of 6, and that is not good. I found a new-looking original-Ronco oven on Craigslist and made an offer.

Being a handy person, I could conceivably take the gearmotor out of a new oven and put a faster one in, but I am not anxious to bet on it.

Guess I better warm up some chicken.

Oil Change for Car I Clearly Don’t Need

Is there any reason why we Americans shouldn’t go ahead and glue ourselves to our couches?

My car thinks I need an oil change, so it’s nagging me. I have 10,000-mile oil and a 20,000-mile filter, so I know the car is upset about nothing, but I decided to get oil and a filter today anyway. Did I go to the auto parts store? No.

I looked around the web to find a well-reviewed filter. Then I looked at Youtube reviews to confirm that Wal-Mart oil was just as good as the expensive stuff. Then I went to Wal-Mart’s site to see if they had the oil in stock. Then I went to an auto parts site to look for a filter and see if they could beat Wal-Mart on oil. Then I went back to Wal-Mart’s site, which reminded me I had bought a filter there last time. The same one that had the good reviews.

I put my cheap synthetic oil in my cart with my filter, just to keep track of them so I could do a screenshot before going to Wal-Mart. Then noticed the site was offering free curbside pickup. For a second, I felt ashamed, but I got over it somehow. I decided to check out with curbside pickup.

When I got to the checkout page, it said I was $3.49 below the free shipping threshold.

Free shipping? What would it cost me to drive to Wal-Mart? I thought a minute. About four bucks, during Joe Biden’s pre-tribulation oil panic. If I bought a product in the four-dollar range, it would be mostly free. Sort of.

I needed shampoo. I looked for it. I buy it in big jugs. One just went empty today. Wal-Mart said it cost more than $3.49.

BAM. Shampoo in cart.

Now Wal-Mart is going to bring me my oil, my filters, and the shampoo I expected to have to go get, all at Wal-Mart prices.

Is there some way I can get the UPS guy to bring it in the house and put it in my hand? Maybe he could change my oil. Perhaps he could apply pressure to my diaphragm and breathe for me, too.

It reminds me of the old joke about the neighbor who watched a rich lady move into the house next door. A mover came along, wheeling the lady’s son on a handtruck. The neighbor said, “Poor kid! Can’t he walk?” The lady said, “Yes, but thank God he doesn’t have to!”

I should buy enough oil for 10 more changes. If I don’t, prices will go up and I’ll probably spend the same amount on the next change. Assuming I can afford enough gas to get me through the next change interval.

Saturn Munches on his Wokiee Babies

I turned my PC on just now, and I saw Microsoft’s annoying daily photo and question. A question of my own popped into my mind. How long will I continue to have this?

This morning I read that an army of sexually confused people and their supporters were terrorizing a leftist professor in England. Her crime: claiming that “some” so-called trans people, who still had male parts, were actually men. Which, of course, they are, except the word “some” is not helpful.

Human beings all over the world acknowledge that the fundamental purpose of a university is to discover and disseminate truth, and because human beings aren’t sure what the truth is, it is universally accepted that people at universities should be allowed to present their opinions, regardless of what they are, as long as they don’t do things like advocating genocide and so forth.

Actually, I believe people are allowed to advocate genocide, as long as they’re Muslims and they’re advocating the destruction of the Jews.

Anyway, university people claim the right to debate is sacred, but we all know it isn’t. When Christians and conservatives show up to speak on campuses, it’s common for them to be driven out and physically attacked, and often, their appearances are canceled for the “safety” of the precious snowflakes their correct ideas might bruise.

The gender-blender patrol is determined to deplatform the lady professor in question, on top of getting her fired, and she’s a leftist! Increasingly, the left is eating its own. The only ones who will be spared will be the most-left, leftiest leftists. Then I guess they’ll eat each other, too.

It was Stalin who had Trotsky murdered, wasn’t it? Saved capitalists the trouble.

It reminds me of a battle royale. If you’re not a wrestling fan, you may not know what that is. A wrestling promoter will put maybe 20 wrestlers in a ring and tell them to throw each other out onto the concrete. In the end, the wrestler that remains is the winner. Who, on the left, is worthy of the prize? How far left can you get?

We like to say there is a political spectrum, like the color spectrum and the tone spectrum. When you go past the color violet, you get into the ultraviolet band, and supposedly, if you could see it, it would start to look red, because the spectrum would repeat. When you go past G on the scale, you hit a new A, and the scale starts over. Is there a weird, primal form of conservatism to the left of left? Maybe the leftmost leftists will start looking like Pat Boone and Charlton Heston.

Diversity is now thoughtcrime. The whole basis of the pro-diversity movement has been called into question. We have been told repeatedly that diversity brings strength, but leftists clearly don’t believe that, because they are trying to increase their strength by doing away with it.

Without realizing it, they have promoted and then denied a Darwinian sort of theory. In the theory of evolution, genetic diversity is important, because when new selection pressures, like diseases, arise, populations that are genetically too similar can’t fight back. Supposedly, you need a variant or mutant or whatever that can resist, in order to preserve the species. Leftists love to tell us diversity is strength, because a country that contains different types of people will have a wider variety of tools, including ideas, to help it survive.

Now they’re telling us diversity is bad. We need a purebred intelligentsia in which every member can be counted on to respond to every stimulus and challenge in exactly the same way, like the genetically similar banana trees all over the planet which are currently disappearing because they can’t respond to a certain fungus.

It’s a bizarre spectacle.

What does genetic diversity really do? Does it preserve species, or does it do away with huge swaths of them in favor of a few special groups?

Incidentally, I don’t believe in diversity. Diversity is weakness. The strongest society is one that adopts the correct ethos, universally. Unity is strength. The only powerful nation is the family of God, and when that family works correctly, there is zero debate, and there are no opinions, only facts. This is why God and his children will always win in the end. My problem with the left’s orthodoxy isn’t that it stifles debate. It’s that it stifles the wrong people; the ones who have the right ideas.

I don’t think diversity of thought is good, but the left’s sick, cruel orthodoxy is still hypocritical and worthy of comment.

I’m using a donated operating system. Microsoft gave us Windows 10 because it figured it would use it to make so much money off of us, it would be more profitable to give it away. Windows 10 was created by people who, generally, would be happy to see me tied to a post and shot in the head. They are happy to tolerate people like me while we increase their wealth and power, but they long for a world free of dissidents who get in the way of their plan to turn man into a big colonial organism that loves perversion and electric cars and hates coal and Christianity.

Whenever Microsoft wants, it can turn off my Windows machines. It can force fatal updates. I compute at their sufferance. How long will it be until they flip the switch?

If you’re like me, they’ll flip your switch, too, even if you have Unix, Android, or Apple. If they can’t brick your computer and phone, they’ll block you from the web. It will happen. Get ready. Right now, we’re useful, like a host organism the parasites aren’t done eating. When they decide the cake isn’t worth the candle, we’ll be discarded.

In the future, a person who isn’t on the web will barely exist. They will be worse than untouchables.

I just remembered something from Orwell: “unperson.” An unperson was an individual who had been disempowered, captured, and killed by the state. Unpeople were also erased from all records. They didn’t just stop existing. They had never existed at all.

That’s us, before too long.

I keep repeating it: one of the biggest Biblical curses is to have your name and memory forgotten. Orthodox Jews call Jesus “Yeshu,” which is a made up name. It’s a series of Hebrew letters that stand for a phrase that mean, “May his name and memory be blotted out forever.”

Leftists work for Satan, and they want to remove the memory of Christians and Jews from the world. It’s an old theme. God wants to purify the world of people who serve Satan.

Look what Psalm 9 says:

Thou hast rebuked the heathen, thou hast destroyed the wicked, thou hast put out their name for ever and ever.

O thou enemy, destructions are come to a perpetual end: and thou hast destroyed cities; their memorial is perished with them.

But the Lord shall endure for ever: he hath prepared his throne for judgment.

When you to go hell, God doesn’t just put you in flames, in the hands of tormenting spirits. He takes away your name. This is probably why Satan is generally called “Satan” instead of his given name. “Satan” just means “adversary.”

You can see it in the story of Lazarus the beggar, which was true. Jesus never called it a parable. Take a look.

There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day:

And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores,

And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.

And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried;

And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.

And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.

But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.

And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.

Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father’s house:

For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.

Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.

And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.

And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.

Lazarus was a real person, and even in death, he had a name. Abraham, though dead, had a name. Moses had a name. What about the rich man in hell? No name. “A certain rich man.” What about his brothers? No names. The prophets weren’t named, but they were too numerous to list.

Abraham called the rich man “son,” to show he was Jewish and that being Jewish was not a guarantee of salvation.

Interesting digression: Abraham said that if the brothers didn’t listen to Moses and the prophets, who talked about Jesus incessantly, they wouldn’t believe one who returned from the dead. This was proven later, in John 11. Jesus resurrected a man named Lazarus, and instead of listening to Lazarus or taking the miracle as a warning, the Jews in charge of the temple conspired to murder Jesus.

We’re all sitting on virtual thin ice, counting on our enemies to continue enabling us. We feel secure, like rich Jews in Germany in 1930. We think our enemies will never cancel us because we’re too useful and too numerous, and because America isn’t like that. We’ll find out we’re wrong, just like the many famous people the social giants have already crippled. When they want, they’ll be able to get rid of us in days, if not minutes, and they’ll do it with eagerness and no hesitation. They probably have lists.

Being deplatformed is a big deal in terms of a person’s power in the natural world. Look what it did to Trump. No one listens to him any more. Few people know how he feels about current events. Random people with Twitter and Facebook accounts reach thousands or millions, but Trump sits in his social media dungeon, coming out periodically for ineffective visits with people like Sean Hannity. He’s like a prisoner in a penitentiary, telling his visitors to pass notes for him.

George Takei is more powerful than Trump, when it comes to shaping opinions.

George Takei is a horrible, bottom-tier actor. Had it not been for Star Trek, which allowed him to become rich, he would have ended up waiting tables or selling real estate. He has nothing important to say. He’s not particularly smart. Still, because of Facebook, he has a bigger voice than our last president.

This morning I watched a few minutes of an Adam Savage video. He was touring the preserved shop of his dead coworker Grant Imahara. He was wearing a shirt that had “#justicenerd” printed on it. That ended whatever pleasure I got from his channel.

I looked the tag up, and it’s about approval-craving nerdy people grandstanding for “social justice.” Presumably, Savage will be fist-pumping when people like me are rounded up by leftist goons. I like watching Youtube partly because it’s an escape from the Beast’s politics, but he even pops up in tool videos. It will be hard to enjoy watching Adam Savage, knowing he hates me.

It’s too bad Christians can’t unplug and go away right now instead of waiting, but where would you go, and what would you do? You would have to pay all your bills using the mail. You would have to go to your bank in person every week. You would have to call or visit people every time you needed to communicate with them. In many areas, people are required to have computers in order for their children to participate in public schooling. What would your kids do? And shopping would be a nightmare. Imagine being limited to the tiny selection of overpriced things local businesses sell.

It would be like having no phone in 1990.

Maybe the Mark of the Beast will be proof you’re entitled to Internet access. That would make a lot of sense. It’s definitely not a vaccine or a tracking chip.

Oddly, Satan’s children are eagerly working to produce a type of outcome God is working to produce reluctantly. In heaven, there will be no protests or sexual perversion. There will be no environmentalist extremists. There will be no one who doesn’t worship Jesus. There will be no socialism or feminism. The works of the children of darkness will not exist, and the children themselves will be locked away forever, without names, never mentioned. Without influence. Irrelevant. Like trees falling in a far-off forest.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural.

If there were an Uber I could call to take me to heaven, I would be on the phone right now. The world will never be any more hospitable to people like me than it is right now. Today is worse than January 1, and the next January 1 will be worse than today.

My New Perspective on Childhood Entertainment

Sometimes you realize something, and you can’t believe it took you decades. It’s so obvious, it’s shocking you missed it.

Here is what I realized last week. You remember the old Tom & Jerry cartoons? It finally dawned on me that Tom was the hero.

In case you’re so young you’ve never seen Tom & Jerry, possibly because your snowflake overlords had decided good cartoons were too violent/racist/sexist/fattist/speciesist/colorist/whatever, I can sum up the premise. Tom is a cat. Jerry is a mouse. Jerry lives in Tom’s house, and he regularly pops out of his little mouse apartment and wrecks everything. Tom, understandably, tries to kill him.

This is exactly what you’re supposed to do to a mouse. Mice are pests. They spread horrible diseases. They break into food containers and contaminate them so food has to be thrown out. They damage houses. They need to be killed.

A long time ago, I read a book or a story or something, and there was a scene in which a character stamped on a mouse. I thought that was shocking. I couldn’t believe a person could just put his foot down on a squirming mammal. Now I live in an area with mice, and so far this year, I have stamped on two of them. It’s the best way to kill them fast. My whole attitude toward mice has changed.

Maybe three weeks ago, I was sitting in my living room when I heard a noise. I looked toward the fireplace, and I saw a fat mouse flop off the screen and into the room. He took off. I couldn’t believe it. How, in 2021, could there still be a chimney not designed to keep mice out?

I put out the glue traps and poison I already had on hand, and I waited for success.

I had chosen the poison carefully. I picked bromethalin, a neurotoxin, in chunks of green mouse food.

In the old days, warfarin, an anticoagulant, was the mouse poison of choice. It made blood pour out of mice’s rear ends until they died. There were three problems with it. First, a mouse had to eat it for several days before it worked. Second, it was likely to poison anything that ate the dead mice. Third, many mice were immune to it. Their ancestors had developed resistance.

I didn’t want immune mutant mice wasting my time.

Bromethalin, supposedly, kills mice in one feeding. I read that immunity was not an issue, and I also read that if I threw a dead mouse out in the yard, it wouldn’t hurt whatever ate it.

My mouse ate the bait. He ate it for days. He throve on it. I kept thinking, “Tomorrow, he dies,” but it never happened.

I also set one of my old wooden Victor traps. I baited it with meat. I fixed it so the mouse absolutely had to pull on the trip mechanism. He tripped the trap, ate the meat, and retired, victorious.

He also stepped in at least two glue traps and shook them off. He dragged one most of the way down my stairs before freeing himself completely.

I got more serious. I bought Victor mouse baits with diphacinone, a newer anticoagulant. The mouse grabbed the little balls of bait and took them to various corners of the house for snacking. The poison didn’t seem to bother him.

I bought bigger glue traps, but the mouse would not go near them. They were white, which was supposedly to make it easier to see dead mice once they were trapped. Maybe the mouse preferred the black ones.

I got a bunch of small Catchmaster Gluee Louee traps. They were so useless, they didn’t even catch bugs.

I also bought two plastic Tomcat traps. These are nice because you can set them instantly with one hand. The trip mechanism has a little cup in the center, with a hinged platform around it. The mouse reaches into the cup for the food, he puts a foot on the platform, and the trap crushes his spine. That’s what the instructions said, anyway.

I put peanut butter in the cups and stuck balls of poison in the peanut butter for good measure. The mouse took the poison, ate the peanut butter, and laughed at me.

One day I decided to examine a trap carefully. I poked the trip mechanism over and over, and it was impossible to make the trap go off. I could not believe it. I had been feeding the mouse from what was, effectively, a safety feeder.

I started manipulating the trap, setting and resetting it, and for some reason, it started going off reliably. I had a pair of these traps, so I also worked on the second one. I baited them again, and the next day, I had a dead mouse with a broken neck.

Nice.

Why does the Tomcat company make traps that have to be broken in before they work? No clue here.

The mouse amazed me with its ability to defeat poisons. It reminded me of the death of Rasputin.

In case you don’t recall, on the night he died, Rasputin was fed a large quantity of cyanide-filled cakes, along with poisoned wine. He showed no ill effects at all. His attackers shot him in the chest and prepared to dispose of the body. He surprised them by coming back to life and leaping on them. He chased them until they shot him several more times. Then they bound his hands, wrapped him in cloth and threw him in a river. Some witnesses claimed that when the body was found, Rasputin’s hands were free, as if he had gotten them loose and started to work his way out of the cloth.

Rasputin has nothing on my late mouse.

I lost several pounds of beef jerky, along with most of a bag of diastatic malt powder and maybe 7 pounds of jasmine rice. The mouse didn’t eat much. He just made sure everything was defiled.

Yesterday, I had to go around the bottom floor of the house, cleaning out the corners where he liked to dine. I had to mop one staircase, too. I hope I won’t find any more surprises.

My recommendation is to be very serious and completely heartless with mice. It’s astonishing how much one mouse did to disrupt my house.

If I ever see a Tom & Jerry cartoon in the future, my sympathies will be completely with Tom. Now that I think about it, I wish Elmer Fudd had shot Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. They were annoying, and hunting is a virtuous, productive activity.

If you try those Tomcat traps, make sure you test them before you use them. Otherwise, your mice may die from gout and strokes before the traps themselves get them.

Thank God I Don’t Have a Bridezilla

What a day I’m having. I woke up before the sun was out, the only practical obligations I’ve attended to were feeding my pets and putting a pork roast in the oven, and I’ve been busy the rest of the time with ministry. I didn’t get to shower until after 1:00.

A friend is having terrible problems within his household. He spent several days in the hospital with coronavirus, and before he got home, someone in the family was tormenting him and threatening to tear the family apart.

I got some very disturbing calls before 8:00, and I did what I could. Afterward, I prayed that God would give the problem person whatever he had to give, and take away whatever had to be taken away, in order for that person’s mischief to end, and, if possible, to cause that person to change.

The next call I got was about that person. The individual had had a sudden coronavirus relapse and was bedridden with a fever. Suddenly, the bedridden person no longer had nearly as much power to beat down my friend, who is still not completely over his own illness.

I spent time praying and calling in others for prayer. I spent a good deal of time praying in tongues. I also had a prayer session with my friend, via phone.

These things ate up hours, and I also devoted time to “Rebecca,” my Zambian sweetheart. We shared testimony and prayed a lot.

While we were talking today, she abruptly announced that she wanted to quit school. She is right. There is no conceivable benefit to staying, and it interferes with our relationship and our prayer time. I said I would support her in her choice, whatever it turned out to be. Nothing is final yet.

She’s not really in “school.” She already has a law degree. She is studying for the bar exam, outside of the university.

My sense is that God wants us to move quickly, and I can see why that might be true. The world gets nuttier by the second. The Democrats are about to pack the Supreme Court, and all hell will break loose before long.

BREAK

We have had another video chat. We did our daily period of prayer, including intercession. While we were at work, Rebecca got a revelation about her plans. It’s official: we are going to get together as soon as we can, regardless of what school demands of her. If we can do it before her first round of tests ends, we will do it, and she will not take the tests.

This is a relief. Now we know where we stand.

We should get everything over with, quickly. I can’t even guess how weird the world will be in the fall. The Pentagon just admitted UFO’s are real, gun-grabbing is heating up, and Joe Rogan is in trouble for implying he doesn’t want to see nude pictures of a transsexual whose true sex I can’t even guess. It’s like the second half of Ghostbusters. How long will it be before we see dogs and cats living together?

Maybe I shouldn’t joke, but did you ever think it would be this crazy? It wouldn’t surprise me if Godzilla attacked tomorrow.

Israel is only allowing tourists in for guided tours now. Maybe we could join one and get into the country this summer, but it seems like a painful waste of about $12,000. A guided tour would drag us around to places we don’t want to visit. We would have to eat at restaurants that give them kickbacks instead of eating good food. I would rather rent a car and go where we want, saving a ton of money in the process.

I really don’t want to go to Dubai, but it’s the only alternative we have, short of a horrific trip to Zambia, three days of which would be spent in transit. Rebecca is all done with Zambia, and she doesn’t want me to visit. It appears to be a peaceful and prosperous country, but it also sounds dull. Not worth 72 hours of coach seats. She says she has no plans to go back for visits.

Dubai. Whatever. Let’s just make it Dubai. We’ll have falafel. I like falafel.

I am learning about engagement rings. Part of me resents a system that manipulates men to overspend on things that depreciate instantly. Another part reminds me that even if the system is sick, it’s a good thing to give a woman jewelry. I can’t complain if I’m being manipulated to do something I would want to do even if I were not being manipulated.

I have no idea what the markup on rings is, but I would be amazed if I didn’t get taken to the cleaner’s. There is no way around it. There are two times in life when you will be shamed into paying full retail on things that aren’t worth what they cost: when you get married, and when you die. Actually, you have to overpay when someone else dies. If it’s you, you won’t let the undertaker pressure you, but if it’s your wife, you’ll feel like you have to buy the $20,000 walnut coffin with gold-plated handles.

In 1994, my mother’s coffin cost $7000. I guess that model costs twice as much now.

In case anyone is interested, the average price for an engagement ring in my state is about $8900. I guess I sound cheap, or just male, but that figure surprised me. I mean, it’s not a motorcycle or a milling machine. And this is the AVERAGE figure, which means young people with very little money are spending this much. The typical American wedding starts with hiring prostitutes for a bachelor party, then you spend $25,000 on a one-day celebration of a narcissistic woman, then you have a $5,000 honeymoon, and then you spend two years paying off the debt instead of buying a home. If you have bridesmaids, they end up blowing maybe $2000 each. Piling on $8900 for a ring, plus whatever a wedding band costs, does not seem intelligent for the average couple.

I’m not poor. Am I supposed to spend $25,000? Expensive rings don’t look better; just bigger. It’s like putting a disco ball on a woman’s finger. A normal ring is tasteful and unostentatious. Princess Diana’s oversized, gaudy ring shouted, “BOW DOWN, PEASANT!”

A setting, which is just a ring without a stone, can easily run over $900. There might be $100 worth of gold in the ring, so where is the rest of the money going? It’s not going into skilled labor. The same skill and time go into making rings that sell for $50. Hmm.

Rebecca doesn’t like the idea of wearing two rings on one finger, so we will be doing things the traditional way, without a band.

I don’t want a wedding band for myself. I would lose it, I hate rings, and rings are very dangerous for people who like to use tools. Women don’t chase me–not women I would want–so it’s not like I need a ring to prevent adultery. If I were going to cheat, I would just take the ring off anyway. It’s silly for women to think rings keep their men safe. In reality, a wedding ring makes a man more attractive to sluts.

Aside from all that, rings on men are generally effeminate, except for class rings and perhaps Super Bowl rings. Necklaces raise a rebuttable presumption of homosexuality.

I was thinking I might buy a wedding band just so I could say I had one, but after that, I would put it in a drawer. I’ve never had a class ring, and I haven’t worn a watch in so long, I can’t remember the last time I left the house wearing one.

I have to be honest. I think a man of average means who spends more than a grand on a ring is a fool. He’s going to have to buy a home, feed a wife, pay to have kids…an extra $7900 would help a lot.

I wish I knew what people do in Dubai for fun. I looked at a site describing activities, and all I saw were Arabs in long robes, riding quads in the sand, driving four-by-fours in the sand…you can imagine. “Come to our modern new water park…in the sand!” “Come see our new skyscraper…in the sand!”

It must be better than it sounds.

Newlyweds wouldn’t need activities, but single Christian people do.

Spending money on a trip doesn’t bother me, because it doesn’t seem like a colossal waste. I’m fine with the ring, I’m fine with the trip, and I’m fine with the cost of the cows I have to use to buy the bride. I wouldn’t like spending the price of a new car on the wedding, but because Rebecca and I are both introverted, practical people, our wedding will not cost a lot.

Are we supposed to have a honeymoon, after going to Dubai? I guess so. I wouldn’t want to go overseas again during the same year. Where are people supposed to go in America? Vegas is out. It’s a focal point of sin and depravity.

I’m looking at suggested destinations. Beach, beach, beach, beach…really? I grew up in Florida, and Rebecca can’t swim. Forget beaches. Forget Hawaii. Forget the Bahamas; I’ve done the Bahamas to death. The other big option is ski vacations. Why do normal, unathletic people want to ski? My knees are in perfect condition, and I want to keep them. My dad’s former partner skied into a tree, and it slammed him right in the crotch, just like in the cartoons. His private parts were the crumple zone, and then the tree shattered his pelvis. No, thank you.

I think what honeymooners need is a really good hotel and some top-notch restaurants, but then I’m a Christian. A typical honeymooner got tired of having sex with his wife three years before they were married, so it’s no wonder they want to ski and go hang-gliding. It must be a real drag, arriving in the hotel and thinking the most exciting thing to do is to see what’s on cable. “Oh, honey! They have ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm!'”

This reminds me of a great story which is supposedly true. It comes from historian Stephen Ambrose. A flyer was being interviewed by an Army Air Corps psychiatrist. The shrink asked him how many times he had sex with his wife on their wedding night. The man was offended, but he mentioned a low figure. The shrink smiled and said, “I got my wife six times.” The flyer said, “Yes, but my wife was inexperienced.”

Hope I got the wording right.

If things go well, we will be together next month, and after that, it’s just a matter of getting a visa. Biden just responded to shaming by speeding up fiancee visas, so maybe we will be together this year in the United States instead of Dubai. I certainly hope so.

Dr. Seuss and my Continued Adventures in Online Dating

Someone pray for God to help me not to read the news. Satan’s kids have declared Dr. Seuss a dangerous racist, and he has been removed from a recommended reading list by Satan’s older brother, Hair-Sniffin’ Joe.

I STILL have two Dr. Seuss books, and I used to have a pair of One Fish Two Fish boxer shorts. What has become of the world?

I’m not saying Dr. Seuss was perfect. He taught generations of kids the Grinch, a quasi-hominid notable for its resemblance to Elizabeth Warren, was Jesus Christ. Actually, that’s big plus from the left’s point of view. They hate Jesus Christ even more than they hate Donald Trump. But his books did not promote racism or any other ism. Satan has done a marvelous job, turning mainstream Americans into bona fide lunatics, and you have to wonder who they will go after next.

If you want to go after someone, go after anyone who participated in a Grinch remake. Those people are cultural vandals.

It’s fitting that I use the word “vandals.” Weren’t the Vandals part of the horde that dismantled Rome and sent the world into the Dark Ages?

I don’t know. I didn’t major in history. I got a real degree in a subject you can use to get a job other than driving for Uber.

If you’re a history major, I’m not putting you down. I’m putting down the thing to which you devoted four years of your life and a big chunk of your parents’ life savings. You can get even the next time you bus my table at Red Lobster.

Perhaps we can find some common ground. We all look down on drama and communications majors (i.e. “journalists”).

“I paid $400,000 so you could do WHAT?”

Think about that. Parents could just give their kids the money in trust, in interest-bearing accounts. Much better idea.

A friend of mine says she’s not pushing her kids to go to college. Can’t argue. You need college for some things, but if you want to open a business and make real money, you should start in your teens. I told her this: they need to know the way to make money isn’t to be the guy who drives around in the truck, doing the work. Start out as that guy, buy more trucks, and send other people out to drive around while you get paid for their work.

God bless capitalism. There’s an ism I can get behind. To paraphrase the words of Chico Escuela, capitalism beeng berry berry goog to me; sank you berry moach.

If the Chico Escuela reference seems racist to you, don’t fret. Here’s another Garrett Morris performance which is more in line with the values of the cancel kids. In case you can’t here, he’s singing, “Gonna get me a shotgun, kill all the whiteys I see.” Sometimes I find myself singing this song in private moments.

Think how many tree-trimming trucks you could buy for $400,000.

Today is a slow day. I continue to receive applications from too-young alleged women in Africa on dating sites. I decided to delete all communications with my rejects. You have to clear the table before being served your next course. It’s surprisingly hard to delete Yahoo contacts. Yahoo makes people your contacts without warning you.

As mentioned previously, I exchanged a number of emails from a Kenyan lady. I “archived” her emails and my responses. Then I deleted them. Then I deleted them from the trash bin. Then I searched to make sure I had deleted them. Yahoo wouldn’t give up without a fight. It told me she was one of my “Top Contacts.”

I found out how hard it is to delete a Top Contact. You have to find them in your list of ALL contacts. You can’t delete them from your Top Contact list. And Internet people say Yahoo sends them emails to let them know they’ve been deleted. Ouch. That’s entirely unnecessary.

I think she and the others are completely gone from my throwaway Yahoo account. Don’t hold me to that.

I went to the dating sites and conducted a purge of non-viables. The Kenyan lady would not disappear. The site kept throwing her at me. She had viewed me! I had viewed her! I had favorited her! She had sent me a flirt! Then there was a fairly lengthy text exchange on the site.

I tried to get rid of this stuff, and it kept popping up. I went nuclear. I blocked her. She still popped up until I closed and reopened my browswer.

I wonder if women are going through this with me. Will I get charged with stalking because the Internet won’t let them out of my life?

Women really, really hate each other, and many a woman insists on pretending her current man has never been interested in anyone else. If God blesses me with someone, I don’t want her rooting through my old emails and having an estrogen conniption.

Somewhere out there, I guarantee you, there is a woman demanding that a man tell her who this tramp Siri is.

A person claiming to be a tall, gorgeous young woman from California contacted me a while back. I assumed it was some kind of error. Eventually, we got around to talking. Things went very slowly. Then it happened. Confirmation came. She asked for my name and number so she could text me. This was after maybe 4 online texts.

Scammers always try to drag you off the website so they’ll be outside the site’s jurisdiction.

I decided to give her both barrels. I said I only used the site, and I said I had learned that African scammers tried to take people elsewhere, notably Google Hangouts. Then I casually mentioned what I had learned about them. I said they were generally men, and I said some unflattering things about what they no doubt wanted other men to do to them.

Haven’t heard from her since.

I found a neat story about the scammers. They’re called “cafe boys” and “browsers” in their own nations. They’re extremely gross. They have sexual chats with lonely men. They say their webcams aren’t working, but they send dirty videos of the women they claim to be. The men send them money for plane tickets and so on. Eventually, the victims, called “clients,” get frustrated and insist on up-to-date photographs or videos. Then it’s time to move on.

I don’t think these boys realize they’re homosexuals. They think they’re playing a game. If you can stand to have sex chats with other men, and you look at their nude pictures and videos and try to give them satisfaction, you are a sodomite. No two ways about it.

Homosexuality is huge in Africa. It’s why AIDS was a plague in Africa and a small problem in America. Men don’t get AIDS from women. Magic Johnson is a homosexual. Either that, or he used to shoot up. Judging by his flaming-gay son, I would rule heroin out.

An Australian network did a documentary on the cafe boys, and I found it on Youtube. I plan to watch it today. It should be fascinating.

They go to demon worshipers and have them curse their victims. How about that? The documentary shows a lady in a crazy voodoo getup, performing ceremonies. The boys bring her pictures and so on. If you’ve been taken by one of these characters, you may be under weird voodoo curses, and if you’re not close to God, they may work.

They are clearly working on a lot of Australian men.

I wonder if my two profile pictures have been placed on this lady’s table and whether she has waved chicken feet at them and spat cheap liquor on them. Bad for her if she has. You can’t curse me, but if you try, you will curse yourself and your family.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that black people’s problems are caused mainly by witchcraft. The more I learn about black culture, including things the press, academics, and black people hide from us, the more amazed I am at the pervasiveness of witchcraft.

When Muddy Waters sang that he had a mojo hand and little John the conqueror root, he wasn’t kidding. He really had those things.

I saw a video by Thomas Sowell, in which he utterly crushed the claim that black people do poorly because of slavery. Among other things, he pointed out that the majority of black American kids in about 1960 grew up in two-parent homes. BOOM. There goes the myth that slavery killed black marriage. LBJ killed it. He also talked about the many, many white slaves who were held in America. Asians were also enslaved here. Only blacks continued to live cursed lives a century later. There has to be a reason, and slavery isn’t it.

It’s remarkable that I ended up talking to an African woman who was a serious Christian and who turned out to be completely legitimate in every way. I had proof, six ways from Sunday. Maybe she’s the only one.

It’s too bad she was a decoy and a trap, totally unsuitable for a real Christian man.

Maybe she’ll escape the prosperity gospel some day, and God will pair her up with somebody.

It’s very slow here. I keep feeling like I’m just waiting to be taken away. Guess I’ll go outside and finish my latest welding project. It will be satisfying to unite things successfully.

Recreation Wears me Out

I have been away from the keyboard because my best friend Mike is in town. When Mike is around, it’s like standing outside in the middle of a tornado. He is constantly coming up with things to do.

On this trip, he wants to learn to weld. He also wants to shoot guns, barbecue, scout properties for a second home, and possibly buy a storage container or a prefab steel house from China. Mike discovered China a number of years ago, so he is often on the phone with manufacturers, trying to get things made cheap.

He’s in town for a funeral, and he had his hip replaced a few weeks back, so you would think he would be taking it easy. Not happening.

Right now he’s visiting his nephew, so I’m getting a break.

He’s an unusual guest. Before he showed up, I changed the anode in the upstairs water heater, made sure I had sheets for him, and turned on one of the upstairs thermostats. I made sure the breaker for the heater was on. This morning, he said he had frozen all night, and he hadn’t had a shower. The hot water didn’t work, and the batteries in the thermostat were dead. I asked him why he didn’t tell me. He said he didn’t want to disturb me.

I went upstairs to check things out. The hot water worked fine. He just didn’t wait long enough to get it going. He had slept on a bed with no sheets. Yesterday, he assured me there were sheets in the upstairs linen closet. I expressed doubt. No, he was positive. Okay.

I had words of comfort when told me about his night. I said I had slept really well in a warm room with a big bed with clean sheets and an electric blanket, and I told him there was plenty of hot water in my bathroom.

I gave him sheets and a pillowcase, and I’m going to put new batteries in the thermostat. We’ll see how tonight goes.

This isn’t the worst problem he has had at my house. He stayed with me a long time ago, and he got a mild sunburn. I had some cold cream in my bathroom, so he rubbed it on his face, including his eyelids. What he did not know was that I had mixed capsaicin, the hot ingredient in peppers, into it. He didn’t ask. I had found that capsaicin worked for getting rid of little skin growths, so I made the cold cream concoction for that purpose. It turned out to be unsuitable for rubbing into one’s eyelids, and it wasn’t all that great for soothing sunburns.

He lives in New Hampshire, and he has had about enough. He loves this area, so he is thinking of spending about $25,000 on a small lot and plopping a shipping container on it. It’s a total Mike move.

Even though Mike is here, I am managing to do a little work on my new kitchen cart. One side of the steel frame is done, and I’m attaching crossmembers to connect to the other side I haven’t figured out what to do for wooden shelves yet.

I still want to build a woodworking bench. I’m making myself unpopular on various sites by criticizing existing benches. People are obsessed with “beefy” construction. Why use one pound of steel when 15 pounds will do?

I criticized a bench made by inventor Andrew Klein. It’s built like the Hoover Dam. I checked a table for engineers, and it looks like each leg of his bench will support over 50 tons, positioned upright and loaded concentrically. Am I a bad person for calling that bad engineering?

I have three-ton jackstands, and if you put four together, the bases would contain less steel in cross section than one of his bench legs.

Somebody tried to tell me you have to have “beefy” construction in order to do planing, chiseling, and sawing. I have a Black & Decker Workmate I can carry in one hand, and you can do all of those things on it, so how can it be that I need a 700-pound bench?

Engineering works. Why not use it?

I want to have a base held up on four 2″-square legs. I plan to splay them outward slightly because trapezoids resist flexing better than rectangles. Most people who weld legs on things are afraid to try to make anything but 90° angles, but when you make a box with lots of right angles, you’re building floppiness into it. If your plan was to make a heavy structure that flexed in spite of its great mass, you would definitely want right angles.

When you try to flex a trapezoid by pushing sideways on it, you compress one leg and put tension on the other. The leg under compression provides some resistance. When you try to collapse a rectangle, you don’t put compression or tension on either leg. They are happy to remain the same length while your project folds up.

When you put weight on a trapezoidal table, the weight tries to push the legs apart at the base. That’s easy to resist with light pieces of steel.

I can tie the legs together toward the bottom with thin steel members. I just need them to stand up to a good hard pull. I don’t know how hard you have to pull on 1″ angle iron to stretch it. Let’s see. The tensile strength of steel is around 70K psi, and 1″ angle iron has a cross section somewhere near 1 square inch, so let’s be cautious and say a strut takes about 20 tons of tension without stretching. That SHOULD do the trick.

Klein’s bench has splayed legs, but they’re not tied together at the bottom.

If I put angle iron around the base, I can use it to hold a plywood shelf. Klein’s bench has no storage space under it, unless you want to put things on the floor.

I’ll post the latest photo of the kitchen cart. I have a number of completed welds on it, and I also have a lot of tacks. I’m trying to get as much of it built as possible before completing the rest of the welds. The more structure you have before you finish your welds, the more steel you have holding everything in place and resisting warpage.

Depending on how much time I have tomorrow, I should be able to finish the steel frame and maybe even prime it. Then I have to think about shelves and paint.

It’s pretty sweet, being able to weld up projects that look good enough to go indoors. Anyone can weld a muffler on, but making a nice cart or chair takes knowledge and care.

Maybe some day I’ll be able to build something really important. Like a recliner.

Sometimes Evolution Goes Backward

My goddaughter had a birthday yesterday, so she and her family came to visit. Five kids, or, more accurately, four and one new adult. This gave me a good excuse to keep working with the fancy new ice cream machine. I made four flavors.

I have totally mastered cherry vanilla and butter pecan, and I have great confidence that my next batches of peach and Heath bar crunch will be perfect. It’s time to ask myself what other flavors I need to make before I stop building my ice cream armament. I don’t need a lot of flavors to be happy. As it is, I will never need to buy ice cream again unless I want a novelty like a Nutty Buddy or ice cream sandwich.

I used a bag of crushed Heath bars from the grocery store. This was a mistake. They’re worthless. They’re not just broken. They’re ground. The biggest pieces are like peas. If I do it again, I’ll buy bars and break them.

Based on Internet research saying most people prefer artificial vanilla to the real thing, I tried fake vanilla in one of my flavors. It was not terrible, but it wasn’t that good, either. Expensive vanilla is much, much better.

Here’s what I concluded: most people don’t know what tastes good. I knew that already, because Budweiser is the most popular beer in the country. The guy who is trying to replace Christopher Kimball at America’s Test Kitchen tried fake vanilla in a blind test, and he preferred it. That should have told me all I needed to know. Kimball was the spine that held the organization up. The new guy strikes me as a cooking school wonder who knows everything about food while lacking the ability to create or recognize success. Many of the bad meals you’ve had at restaurants were prepared by culinary school graduates, so it should never surprise anyone when a person with scary cooking credentials can’t cut it.

People worship James Beard, but his recipes aren’t good. The Joy of Cooking should be called The Joy of Indigestion. It’s the way of the world.

One of my guests suggested I try my hand at peppermint. That should be simple. Vanilla ice cream without the vanilla. Add crushed peppermint candy and mint extract.

I can’t eat chocolate without regretting it because of the caffeine and theobromine, but it is conceivable that I might eat it anyway from time to time in the future. I have an urge to try to duplicate Ben & Jerry’s Everything but the Kitchen Sink. It’s chocolate and vanilla ice cream with peanut butter cups and bits of toffee bars mixed in. An Internet search tells me it also contains white chocolate chunks and fudge-covered almonds. I don’t recall running into those items, but then when I eat ice cream, I don’t study it and take notes.

Making a mixed ice cream would be laborious. I would have to make two batches in chocolate and vanilla and combine them. Not sure I want to go through that for a product I don’t plan to eat.

The machine needs a rolling cart, so I blew $88 on steel. I bought 1″ square tubing with 1/8″ walls. I thought thick walls would make welding less risky. Welders can blow through tubing easily. When I saw the price and lifted the steel, I felt I should have gone with thinner tubing. I’m no engineer, so I made a mistake. It’s not a problem, though. I’ll just have a really strong cart I won’t want to lift.

The plan is to put three wooden shelves in it, and I’m going to use the casters that were left over when I put my smoker on a factory-made cart (which I should have built myself).

In related news, I keep wanting to make new workbenches. My old bench of all trades is extremely sturdy, but I built it before I knew anything. It has no wheels, it’s less than ideal for woodworking, and it should probably weigh 100 pounds less.

I finally bought real blades for my Powermatic 66 the other day, and it got me thinking about a woodworking bench. I started thinking about designs. Fresh from the success of building my steel and wood shooting bench I thought I should go against convention and make a woodworking bench with a welded base.

Woodworkers tend to be true believers, and that means they make everything out of wood. They are hostile to certain new ideas, and they really like bench designs that are hundreds of years old. One was created by a famous Frenchman named Roubo. Another one was designed by an Englishman named Nicholson. Actually, these guys may have simply passed on designs that were already traditional. I don’t know.

These benches are very heavy for two reasons, neither of which has anything to do with function. First, wood has a poor strength-to-weight ratio compared to metal, so it takes a lot to do the same job, and second, the people who designed them knew nothing about designing rigid structures.

A typical woodworking bench will have a solid top at least three inches thick. This gives you a nice, stiff surface to work on, and it allows you to make deep holes that will work with bench dogs and holdfasts.

A holdfast is a steel rod with a hook on one end. The hook has a flattened end. You put the other end of the holdfast in a hole and slide it down until the flat part rests on your project. Then you whack the holdfast and drive it into the hole until it wedges in there. It’s a great invention. Really holds things in place, and it’s quick to use. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well if your bench is thin.

A bench dog is a cylinder of wood that fits in the same holes holdfasts use. You can pull a bench dog up and rest a piece of wood against it while you work it. The dog will keep it from moving away from you. Again, you need deep holes.

At some point during the last millennium, engineers discovered the torsion box. This is a fancy term for a hollow box with supporting members inside it. You build a lattice of crossmembers and then enclose it in two sheets of material like plywood. What you get is a box which is very strong for its weight, and it’s easy to make it flat by sizing the internal members accurately. Many wooden doors are torsion boxes. Nobody wants a door that weighs 200 pounds.

A guy named Paulk designed a bench top which is a torsion box. It’s pretty neat. The top and bottom are several inches apart, and he put holes in the sides of the box so he could reach in and put tools inside it. That feature alone makes the design brilliant. When I first started thinking about building a new bench, I thought I would glue two-by-fours together side by side and make a thick top. Now I realize that was stupid. I want a torsion box.

Problem: how do you put deep holes in a torsion box? The top and bottom may be an inch thick, but there is air between them. I would want holes with wood around them all the way down.

I thought about it last night. Here’s what you do: you add internal members with holes drilled through them. You only need a couple of rows of holes, so you can add two extra members just for drilling them. The holes would weaken the members, so drilling through members that need to be solid would be bad, but adding extra members wouldn’t hurt anything. In fact, you wouldn’t need members running all the way across the bench. You could use cubes of wood.

Problem solved.

What about making holes in the sides of the bench for access to the storage space? Making holes like that in wood is a pain. Why not use steel?

Make yourself a steel frame from tubing. Put plywood on the top and bottom, screwed in for easy replacement. Instead of a few little holes for access, you could have three sides of the bench wide open. One end would have to be covered by an end vise, and part of one side would be blocked by a vise on the front, but other than that. you would have tons of access for storage and cleaning.

Put the box together. Weld up a rolling base. Attach the base to the wood of the box, not the welded base. Install vises. Done.

Any woodworker who is reading this must be screeching by now.

Would the bench top be too flexible to make a good surface for pounding? First of all, why would you be pounding? Woodworking doesn’t require that. Second, many people already use benches with relatively thin tops, and they are doing fine.

I saw a neat bench on Adam Savage’s Youtube channel. A guy named Andrew Klein gave it to him. Klein works for Magswitch, and he also has a side business.

I was awestruck by the bench. It has a base with four legs made from what looks like 5″ steel tubing with 1/2″ walls. The top is two slabs of hardwood that appear to be 4″ thick. It has two geared twin-screw vises Klein makes and sells. The dogs have steel shafts, and the holes contain magnets so the dogs stay up when you raise them.

The more I looked at the bench, though, the more I thought I saw bad engineering.

I don’t know what the bench weighs. Maybe 500 pounds? Savage was happy about that, but overbuilding is one of the best-known hallmarks of bad engineering. I know; I’ve done it. Weight means increased material, production, and shipping costs. It means increased difficulty in handling finished products. It means waste. It’s a clumsy way of handling problems you can’t address properly because you’re not a good engineer.

If you ever read a welding textbook, you’ll learn that one of the main things that drive the study of weldments is a desire to reduce weight. People who don’t know anything about engineering love to talk about how “beefy” their tools are. It’s like bragging that your car has solid tires made of steel. It’s a demonstration of ignorance. I’m no engineer, but even I know these things. You don’t have to be a Georgia Tech grad to get this far.

The bench has no wheels. That’s insane. I say that as the guilty creator of a bench with no wheels. Why would you make an extremely heavy tool you can’t move without a forklift? Smart shop owners put everything they can on wheels. The more you can move things around, the smaller and less expensive your shop can be without sacrificing comfort or much convenience.

What about the magnetic dogs? At first, I thought they were cool. Then I thought about Paul Sellers. He’s a British woodworker who is very big on Youtube. He’s a real expert. His dogs are bits of scrap wood with springs he makes from coat hangers. I have some I made myself. They work great, so why drive yourself nuts with rare earth magnets?

Now, the vises. They are beautiful, and the cost is very reasonable. They are probably a little better than competing vises from companies like Veritas. Veritas uses bicycle chains to connect and synchronize the screws on its vises, while Klein uses gears, and gears are sturdier and don’t need adjustment. Klein’s vises have transmissions so you can shift into high gear and move them fast.

I thought the vises were neat. Then I asked myself: “How are they significantly better than what I have right now?”

I made a Moxon vise for my bench. It’s a long block of maple with two holes in it. Two long Acme screws run through it, and there are handwheels to turn the screws. I can put longer and wider objects in it than will fit in most factory vises. I can put things in it that reach down to the floor; nothing gets in the way. I can fasten it on objects that are tapered because the screws aren’t synchronized. It doesn’t have a speed mode, the way the Klein vises do, but I have never felt I needed that. If I really want that feature, I can create it using half-nuts.

The Veritas vise is also very good, and unlike Klein’s boutique vise, it’s available. I don’t have to wait for a guy to make it in his basement.

The bench top…beautiful. Tombstone-thick maple with a glossy finish. But what is the purpose of all that weight? Answer: to make Adam Savage feel good. If loving your tool is your goal, buy what you like, but what if you just want to make things?

Savage has already put a big sheet of leather on the bench to protect it, and that shows how shortsighted the design is. A bench is like a pair of boots or gloves. You’re not supposed to protect it. You’re supposed to protect the work. A bench shouldn’t be sanded with 400 grit and finished with 10 coats of polyurethane. It should be bare wood. Imagine fussing with a giant sheet of cowhide every time you use a workbench. Ridiculous.

I made a shooting bench from 2″ steel tubing, a few screws, and some pressure-treated two-by-sixes. You could literally rest a car on it. If it weren’t for the two pneumatic tires on one end, you could never wiggle it at all by using tools on it. It’s way overbuilt. It probably weighs 150 pounds now that the wood is dry. I can lift one end of it and roll it 50 yards by myself. I do it all the time. I should have made it even lighter.

If I made a woodworking bench from the same tubing, it would be just as sturdy. Each leg might weigh 7 pounds. What do the legs on Savage’s bench weigh? Maybe 10 times that? For no reason.

I can use 2″ tubing for the base of my bench. I can put a caster on each corner. I can add feet that lower with screws when the bench is where I want it, so it won’t move when I push on a hand plane. It will feel like the Rock of Gibraltar, I’ll be able to move it unaided, I’ll have a ton of handy storage, and when the top gets beaten up, it will take me half an hour to put a new one on.

I can throw two Veritas vises on it, or I can buy two Moxon parts kits (because I am tired of making the parts). No need to wait for vises with transmissions. Done. Bang. Next problem, please.

I looked into leg vises. Long story short: no. Twin-screw vises are better.

Isn’t it bad to have screws in the top of a woodworking bench? No. Why would it be bad? Don’t plane the screws. Don’t chisel them. Countersink them a little to keep them out of your way. No problem.

I can make one bench for wood and another one for general use. I can put my old bench on the burn pile, using the tractor. If I move, my new benches will roll onto a truck.

I really don’t see the point in reverting to Fred Flintstone design policies. It seems to me that a half-ton woodworking bench is like a big sign saying, “I reject every intelligent thing man has learned since 500 A.D.”

I kind of wonder if I need a wood bench at all. Why not use a welding table? I have thought about buying a real fixturing table made from 1/4″ or 3/8″ plate. It’s a steel torsion box. They’re very popular. Why couldn’t I do woodworking on it? Mounting vises would be interesting, to say the least, but there is no reason why you can’t make wooden projects on a steel table.

Something to think about.

Speaking of Fred Flintstone, I saw a video about Nick Offerman. He’s the actor who played Ron Swanson on TV. Swanson is a hilarious caricature of an old-fashioned libertarian, whereas Offerman is your standard Hollywood liberal with full-blown Trump Derangement Syndrome. After watching Swanson, Offerman is a big disappointment. He’s a gun control nut.

I’ll post a video of Ron Swanson just for fun.

Anyway, Offerman is a woodworker. He has a beautiful shop. You can see it in videos. When you look at his setup, you wonder what kind of furniture he makes. It must be cleverly designed and painstakingly crafted.

Well, not so much. He makes Flintstone furniture. I’ll post a photo.

You may think it looks nice. Well, sure. God designed it. Nick Offerman voted absent.

This is a style of furniture which is very popular now. You take thick slabs that could be used to make a lot of quality furniture, and instead of coming up with a real design, you run them through a jointer, fasten them together crudely, slap some Danish oil on them, and call it art. Funny thing: it’s the opposite of art. “Art” means something which has been transformed by the mind of man.

The crude furniture people make now reminds me of the increasing use of the word “rustic” in cooking. You’ve seen it. A “rustic” pizza is a pizza that looks like a kitchen accident because it was made by an unskilled person. “Rustic” means “crudely made due to lack of skill.” Offerman’s table is definitely rustic, although it may be a superficial rusticity. He can probably do a lot better. I hope he can.

I have zero skills, yet given a big enough planer, I could make this table in an afternoon. In gluing extremely thick pieces of wood together, I would waste many pounds of wood which could have been turned into genuine pieces of craftsmanship.

If there is anything good about this style, it’s that it preserves thick slabs of valuable wood until the furniture can be demolished and the wood used in better projects.

Here’s a modern chair made by a guy named Maloof. It’s from the Smithsonian’s collection. Not really my thing, but it’s graceful, skillfully crafted, and pleasing to the eye. Compare it to Fred and Barney’s table, above.

The chair serves to remind us of the difference between art and copping out.

Offerman, like Klein and Savage, has fallen prey to the beefy bug. Instead of a graceful table with a design that required human input, he created a crude device useful mainly for rupturing disks. If God thought like these guys, birds would be unable to fly. A chicken would weigh 40 pounds. All fish would be bottom dwellers. The weight of their bones would glue them to the seabed.

Birds have air inside their bones to reduce weight, but many birds are extremely strong. The other day I saw a video of a cockatoo which probably weighed two pounds, lifting a pumpkin and throwing it off a kitchen counter. That’s not rustic. That’s engineering.

What purpose did Offerman serve here? He didn’t design anything. He found something that occurred under the random influences of nature and presented it nearly as-is. He’s not a maker. He’s a finder.

Offerman’s type of furniture is known as “live edge.” I don’t know why they call it that. The wood is dead. Maybe they didn’t want to call it “rustic edge.”

The idea is that the outermost part of the wood isn’t cut away. You would think it makes every piece of furniture unique, but in reality, it makes them all look the same. Go to Google Images and look up “live edge furniture.” It’s like a giant Offerman exhibit, but he didn’t make any of the pieces.

Live edge woodworkers are fungible. One’s work is just like another’s. There is no need for any particular live edge woodworker to exist. Any other member of the crew can step in and finish his work exactly as he would have.

I could swear I hear Ayn Rand shouting at me.

Mr. Maloof is a real woodworker. Nick Offerman is just a guy who stacks slabs.

Nick Offerman is funny, but he’s not on my list of most-admired people. His Trump issues are disturbing, and he nearly ruined Lagavulin whisky for me. It has been my favorite whisky for many years, because it’s the best whisky there is. Offerman’s Swanson character came alone and started drinking it, and now I feel like I should hide my bottle. Remember how you wanted to hide your cowboy boots after Urban Cowboy came out? Same thing. My guess is that Offerman didn’t know what Lagavulin was until he read about it in a script.

I don’t know if I’ll make a new bench or not, but at least I was saved from the beefy bug. An afternoon of Googling did that for me.

It’s time to go blast some squirrels. They smoke up pretty good. It’s fun being a lot more like Ron Swanson than Nick Offerman will ever be.

MORE

Ready for an whale-choking dose of irony? I just learned that the TV character Ron Swanson designed the Maloof chair pictured above. The exact same chair.

I was looking at clips of Ron Swanson in action, and I came across one in which a lady tried to license a chair design Swanson had created. When they showed the chair, I was stunned. I’ll post a photo.

What are the odds?

Does Maloof know a fictional person is taking credit for his talent?

I don’t watch the show, so there is now way I could have seen Ron with the chair in the past. I found the Maloof chair by Googling “chair” along with “Smithsonian,” figuring the Smithsonian probably had a collection of historic furniture.

If ever you needed evidence that Nick Offerman is inferior to his broadcast persona, look no further.

I checked Offerman’s website and found that not all of his furniture is Flintstone tribute material, so it appears that if he ever got his head straight he could conceivably improve his work and successfully ascend the Swanson Pyramid of Greatness.

Wonder What the Cool Kids are Up to

For around 9 years, I have been watching a popular Youtube machinist. He has gotten caught up in patriotism. He now begins every video with the Pledge of Allegiance, which I skip, and he puts out a lot of products with flags on them. He divorced his wife last year, and I have to wonder if it had to do with Trump and patriotism.

In a recent video, he said he was moving to MeWe and Rumble.

MeWe is a Facebook clone that does less to invade privacy and suppress freedom of expression. Rumble is a Youtube clone that has a similar philosophy.

As I have said many times, I am not impressed with alternative social media sites. They never seem to attract many people, and they will all eventually be shut down by the government or leftist-controlled corporations. Nonetheless, I felt a sudden impulse to follow this guy. Now I have two MeWe friends, and he’s one of them.

I checked out MeWe’s offerings, thinking I might find groups that would put me together with people with similar inclinations and beliefs. I was underwhelmed. Facebook groups have lots of members. MeWe groups’ member counts display numbers like 74 and 199. I reach more people than that right here, and Internet forums are on a completely different level.

Still, I joined a machining group, along with a Christian singles group, a hunting group, and so on.

The singles group is at around 200 members. It’s not exactly dead, but it barely moves. The same day I joined, an unattractive woman started messaging me. I’m not trying to be nasty. Just factual. There was just no way I could ever go near this lady.

Maybe many singles, including me, are holding out for people who are more attractive than they are.

I don’t feel bad about rejecting ugly women, regardless of how I look. Women and men have different wiring, for one thing. After all, Cher married Sonny Bono, and Sophia Loren married Carlo Ponti. Also, if I give up points for looks, what about the points the woman gives up? I’m not going to meet a suitable woman who is as smart as I am, for example. I am not likely to meet someone who is as well off as I am. I can’t expect every woman to match my knowledge, education, talents, or skills. I don’t write women off because they’re not my equals in every area.

It’s okay for me to avoid women who repel me physically. I’m not actually required by law to endure romance and physical contact with them.

The machining group is fairly lively, and it seems clear the members are generally conservative. That’s normal for machinists and other people who use traditional tools. Millennials are effeminate, left-leaning, and less likely to use things like torches and cabinet table saws. They go for 3D printing and desktop CNC, and they call themselves “makers,” which is typically pretentious.

I joined a Christian end times group. It’s generating pedantic posts, carnal arguments based on everything except the Holy Spirit’s guidance, and conspiracy theories. One very active guy appears to be an anti-Semite. He puts up memes criticizing Israel and circumcision. Not sure what circumcision has to do with the rapture, but he is really sore about it. He put up a meme claiming NATO had destroyed Libya’s amazing irrigation network with “nuclear bombs” made with depleted uranium. As everyone knows, depleted uranium is the kind you can’t use in bombs.

He claims women hate circumcision, and that it ruins sex for them by causing all sorts of problems. I’m no sex doctor, but even I know that’s nonsense.

I’ll just exit that group right now. Here goes.

Done.

I have a grand total of two contacts. I am trying to make a point of calling them contacts instead of friends. This morning, I thought I should make an effort to make new contacts. Then I realized I didn’t want to know any of these people.

That is an obstacle.

Not only is it unrewarding to initiate relationships with people you don’t want to know; it’s a little unethical. Why get their hopes up?

Rumble looks somewhat better. If you post a popular video, it may get thousands of views. Not dozens.

Should I start putting videos on Rumble? No. It takes hours for me to upload a Youtube video. I’m not willing to multiply that by two. I fully accept the fact that my Youtube account will be deleted eventually. I don’t care. Sometimes I consider deleting it myself. Also, Rumble itself will surely be taken down before too long, so what would I gain?

Actually, I might drop Youtube and use Rumble exclusively. I’m going to be removed from the web either way, and I might draw a better class of people.

My Christian Mingle account’s remaining time is dwindling. This morning while I was praying, I thought about one more hurdle that makes connecting with Christian women difficult: the serious ones always want to be your mom. They want to lecture and correct. You know what? Biblical marriage is not an equal partnership. The man is required to lead, especially in spiritual matters. No woman is going to scold me for doing what God put me here to do. If you don’t think God will lead you through me, why would you want me in the first place?

Why would I want someone who will not listen to me and who objects every time I do something helpful? I already have parrots for that.

Feminism is really toxic. It has infected Christians very deeply. I’m not sure I know what a correct Christian marriage looks like. I’ve never seen one.

This morning I asked God to tell me what to do and to make things work out, whether for marriage or remaining alone and unharried. I felt a huge burst of faith run through me. I couldn’t form words until it was over. Hoping for the best. It will be good to settle on one side of the question or the other.

Christian Mingle’s software matched me with a new lady yesterday, and we started chatting. She was the first one to write anything. Asked if we could communicate without expectations (be still, my heart), and I said it depended on whether she was a real American woman or the 9000th African scammer I had dealt with. She said she was a real American woman, but after that, she stopped responding. Is she a scammer or just an entitled princess who can’t handle honesty? Or is she just too busy to talk right now? A princess is just as useless as a scammer.

Yes. You’re past 50 and you look it, your online description is lackluster, you have kids I do not want to raise, and still, I’m going to chase you around with a glass slipper and tell you you’re the pinnacle of God’s creation. I don’t think so. We are not Farm Boy and Princess Buttercup. If things go far better than the odds suggest, we might settle for each other, try to hide our disappointment, and be Harry and Sally. Best-case scenario.

I thought she might be a real woman because her profile isn’t all that appealing. The less attractive a woman is, the more likely she is to be bona fide. But maybe highly skilled scammers hack the accounts of women who aren’t high on the food chain, knowing men don’t trust overtures from beautiful young ladies.

It’s not going to go anywhere, regardless of the truth. She’s not for me. I only responded because I thought it might be a thrill to talk to a human being who isn’t a criminal.

If she turns out to be a man from Africa, it will be a harsh statement about Christian Mingle. When even the wicked stepsisters are mirages, things are pretty bad. It’s like picking fruit out of a dumpster and finding out it’s made of wax.

It is truly amazing that Christian Mingle continues to exist and receive payments from hopeful people, given that it does nothing whatsoever to screen out the scammers who make up maybe 95% of the members.

I guess their business model relies heavily on Africans. Companies charge people in poor countries less for the same goods and services than they charge people in the USA, so scammers are probably paying only a few dollars per month, yet because they are numerous and extremely loyal, they may provide the majority of Christian Mingle’s revenue.

Christian Mingle knows where their members really are. It’s simple to determine that automatically. They just don’t care.

I think I’ll leave the Christian singles MeWe group. I’ve literally had more fun at wakes. It’s like a mixer at an assisted living facility.

Done.

I’m not going to worry about marriage or being driven off the Internet. I’m not going to lie awake wondering what the children of darkness will do to us next. God told me all my problems are caused by lack of prayer, so I am praying more, and one of the things I ask for is help to pray more. God has taken extraordinary care of me so far, and I’m sure things will continue to get even better.

Will 2021 be my Best Year Yet?

I always say there is symmetry in the supernatural, and it’s 100 percent true. The reason I know it must be divine revelation. God has apostles, Satan has witches. God has a body composed of human beings who will rise to be with him in paradise, and Satan has a body which will descend to be with him in agony and humiliation. God has Jesus. Satan has the Antichrist. God has the Holy Spirit. Satan has the Internet and cell phones. You could make a very long list of analogs.

Last year, Satan’s children were thrown into a state of fear, lack, illness, and misplaced,culpable homicidal rage. I, on the other hand, had a beautiful, peaceful year which seemed to indicate a permanent change.

Is it possible that people who listen to God had an anti-2020, and that it will continue?

I’m sitting here wondering what I’m supposed to do. Coronavirus seems like a glue that holds things in place. You can’t go to church, and evangelists are treated like criminals if they try to hold revivals. Social opportunities are drastically restricted. It looks like it’s a very bad time for forming new relationships or starting new projects. The government is descending into true insanity.

The feeling I get is that if you didn’t have it together before the pandemic, you’re probably not going to get it together now.

I like a TV show called Forged in Fire. They take groups of knifemakers and turn them loose with tools. The contestants get limited time periods in which to make knives designed for certain purposes.

Most of the contestants just aren’t very good at using tools. It’s a little disturbing to watch them display their lack of knowledge. Their lack of preparation makes things hard for them, and that means drama. Also, the judges of the show add very difficult challenges to their work. The pressure of doing difficult work while watching a clock adds suspense to the show.

At the end of every time period, the host tells everyone time is up, and he commands them to stop what they’re doing and put down their tools. Whatever they’ve made up to that point is what they have to present to the judges. It doesn’t matter how bad it is.

You can see the parallel. I feel like our work on earth is pretty much done, and that we won’t be able to do much more. It’s just a feeling. I’m not saying I’m sure the feeling is a reliable indicator of mankind’s status with regard to God. I’m just saying it feels as though it were.

What do I do now? I don’t get to pray with people any more. I have no one to help out financially. I can’t go to church. It’s not realistic to travel to revivals and meetings, as I used to. These days, I pray a lot, I try to be improved by God, I look after my earthly responsibilities, I blog and put other material on the web, and I play. I make things with my tools, I shoot, and so on. That’s about it.

I don’t seem to reach anyone new any more. The people who thought they knew better than I did still feel that way, and they will never change. I’m not meeting anyone new.

It’s like the school day is over and I’m waiting for my mom to pick me up. Heaven is a place of rest and pleasure. I seem to be in a place of rest and pleasure now, and it wasn’t something I could have planned or worked for. This is why I wonder if God is giving people who are close to him pleasant times to mirror the miserable times people who ignore him are experiencing.

It really does look like Revelation 22:

He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still.

And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.

The weird thing about coronavirus is that it’s a very minor plague, yet it has still been extremely effective in keeping us away from each other. Masks and lockdowns don’t work, and if you get sick, you’re nearly certain to have nothing more than a brief, minor illness, yet the irrational, authoritarian bars to free association remain in place and are being strengthened.

It doesn’t make sense. Things that don’t make sense have supernatural origins. We’re not being kept away from each other by politicians. We’re being kept away from each other by spirits that influence politicians. Are they evil spirits? Is it God and his ministering spirits, forcing us to stand down? I don’t know. I just know it comes from the supernatural realm.

Day before yesterday, the final scene from the 1959 film On the Beach popped up in my Youtube recommendations. I took a look at it. In case you don’t know, it’s about a nuclear war. In the movie, the northern hemisphere is blanketed in radioactive air, and everyone there is dead. The movie’s characters are in Australia, waiting to see whether the radiation will kill them, too. I’ve written about this movie before.

The characters try to continue their lives. A dissipated middle-aged lady tries to start a romance so she won’t die alone. The crew of an American submarine tries to find survivors in the northern hemisphere. People go to the beach. They have parties. None of it works. The romance fails, the sub finds no indications of human life, and the radiation starts moving south through Australia, killing people as it goes.

At the end of the movie, the streets are empty. Everyone is at home, taking taxpayer-funded poison in order to avoid dying from radiation sickness. The buildings are there. The man-made objects required for normal life are there. The sun is still rising every day. It’s all for naught. Everything has been abandoned, and nature will eventually destroy it. War has turned every single one of man’s treasured accomplishments into vanity.

The movie portrays Christianity as a security blanket for the fearful. The Salvation Army maintains an outdoor station in front of a public building, and people flock to the building’s steps to be comforted. At the very end of the movie, the steps are deserted, and in a clumsy attempt at anti-military propaganda, the filmmakers show the Salvation Army’s banner, which is swaying in the breeze. It says, “There is still time…brother.”

Nuclear apocalypse movies used to be very, very popular, and leftists manipulated by foreign communists who couldn’t afford to keep up in the arms race used to agitate about disarmament all the time. Now no one seems to have any interest in the subject. The bombs are still there, but leftists have decided to move on, for no apparent reason. The weather, white people, and Confederate flags are the fashionable threats now.

The scenes reminded me of what we’ve been seeing for the last year. Projects abandoned. Businesses needlessly destroyed. In some places, we’ve seen empty streets. We’ve seen many empty malls and stores. I am told that in Miami, people now do whatever they want on the roads (even more than they used to). They drive at furious speeds and completely ignore the traffic laws. Something inside them is telling them obeying the law doesn’t matter any more.

We’re not sitting at home committing suicide, but we are not the active, hopeful people we were in 2019, and it appears that leftist hysteria will continue tightening the shackles. We elected a befuddled old egotist who was unintelligent to begin with, and he is firing off misguided executive orders as though he were being paid by the pound. He seems determined to control us, which is not surprising from a man who has a long history of bullying.

If things continue to get better for me as the centrifuging of society continues, how should I feel about it? I didn’t earn it. I earned the opposite, through sin and arrogance. Someone else bought all this for me with his flesh and blood. All I did was listen and admit I was wrong.

People who are far nicer than I am have had it much worse, and I think that will continue. Christianity was never about being nice. You can be nice while your entire life is an insult to God. Christianity is about being transformed by the Holy Spirit and submitting to him. It’s about listening and being honest. Emotional people who let their hearts rule them are always very dishonest. They hate the truth.

One of the worst things the Bible says about people is that they did what was right in their own eyes. Notice: it doesn’t say they did things they thought were wrong. They had opinions about what was right, and they obeyed their consciences. When the Bible says someone did what was right in his own eyes, it’s a judgment that precedes punishment. People who make up their own ideas about right are wrong are what the Bible calls “workers of iniquity.” They are called “lawless,” even though they obey their own rules. The only law that has any validity is the law of the Holy Spirit. It’s what he tells us to do, moment by moment. You can’t make a fixed list of his laws, because they change. Fixed laws are inferior. They were provided under the old covenant, but they generated evil results because of their lack of flexibility.

I’m not the nicest or kindest person around, but I will still make it when nicer people fail and go to hell for ignoring God. Is it fair? Of course it’s fair. If Jesus wants to be murdered and then give his inheritance to bad people, he has every right to do it. What I get isn’t stolen. It was all paid for. Just not by me.

Leftism is all about taking blessings from people God favors and giving them to people who are cursed because they don’t listen to him. Leftists hate God’s ways. They can’t understand that it’s right for God to treat me better than a politically correct individual who thinks he knows better than God.

For a long time, my impression has been that I would continue to have a better and better life, and that the only real unpleasantness I might have to face would be ostracism (“cancellation”) and death by murder. I’ve felt that the biggest drag on my happiness would be my inability to get other people to listen so they could do well. I have concluded that even the most blessed person on earth will have to suffer from watching other people fail. When someone you know abandons God, lives in misery, and goes to hell, you have to accept the fact that it doesn’t mean you’re not blessed. No matter how much it hurts, you have to realize it didn’t happen to you.

The other day, I was thinking about blessings and what a blessed life should be like. I was unhappy because I knew America was finished, and that we brought it all on ourselves. We could turn and be healed at any time, but we won’t, because we think we know everything. I asked myself: should a Christian ever be unhappy? Then I remembered the shortest verse of the Bible: “Jesus wept.”

If I have a pleasant life and then go to heaven, and every other person on earth suffers and goes to hell, and I suffer from seeing what happens to them, I am very, very blessed. There are some forms of suffering that spare no one.

Day before yesterday, I listened to my friend Mike, who is the worst influence since the GOP let liberal journalists convince it John McCain and Mitt Romney were surefure winners. I’m kidding about Mike, but whenever I have a crazy idea, he tells me to go for it. I foolishly admitted I had been considering getting a very expensive ice cream maker. An hour or two later, my order was in. Why do I talk to him?

This is the kind of thing I concern myself with these days. Toys. Pleasant pastimes. I’m also dedicating myself heavily to prayer, but that’s about it. If there were anything else left to do, wouldn’t God have shown me and helped me get going?

Mike just had a hip replaced, and he quit a job that was killing him. He started a company with a bunch of carnal people, and they gradually pushed him out, which was what I expected. I told him he could come down here to recuperate. He loves this area. He says he wants to get deeply into prayer. He said he wants to play for a while. He used the same word that had been going through my mind.

I have been fooling around with a Christian dating site, but given my view of the world, I wonder if there is any point. I don’t think there is time to build much of a life with anyone. I would be happy to have someone attractive who shares my views and doesn’t want to be alone with the end comes. I wonder if my attitude will make me so unappealing nothing will come of my efforts. I don’t seem to have anything to be concerned about, though, because nearly all of the women I talk to are really foreign scammers. They’re like a hedge of thistles that wall me in, and things like that have supernatural origins. Maybe God is telling me to be content with things as they are.

I look forward to seeing how things pan out, regardless of whether I’m right about things. I want to know what’s happening and get accustomed to it.

Better Than Biscuits and Mustard

What do you do when you have a small steel part you want to blue? You get out your Birchwood-Casey Super Blue and paint it up, right?

That’s what I used to do. Today I decided to try oil-bluing for the first time.

What is oil bluing? Funny you should ask. It’s an old, simple way to blue and even case-harden parts. If your part is hardenable steel, oil-bluing may harden it all the way through, because it’s basically the same thing as heating and quenching. If you harden a part that shouldn’t be hard, you’ll have to anneal it later.

I modified my friend Mike’s Marlin Model 60 stock to accept a real sling stud, not one of those stupid things that clamp to the barrel. In order to make the modification work, I had to grind a dome nut down to about 0.180″ thick. In this case, a dome nut is a little nut that goes inside a gun stock. The stud’s screw goes through it. There is very little room inside the Model 60 for a nut, so you have to make your nut smaller in order for it to fit. You also have to use a 3/8″ Forstner bit to drill out a cavity inside your stock, and it has to be deep enough for the nut to rest in it without protruding.

Grinding the nut took the bluing off one side, and I wanted to replace it, even though the nut would be hidden.

I found some Kubota conventional motor oil in the workshop. I would never use this stuff because I like synthetic. I poured some in a soup bowl and put it on my kitchen counter. It’s great to be single. I took a little wire and ran it through the nut so I could use the wire to hold it. I heated the nut until it was red hot. I dropped the hot nut into the oil, and I was done.

The nut is blued, I didn’t have to buy Super Blue, and the job is finished.

Buffing it would have made it even better. I don’t want the buffer throwing hard-to-find nuts all over the workshop, however.

Incidentally, if you want to do this modification to your Model 60, here’s how you find out if your nut and screw clear the magazine tube, which will sit on top of the cavity the nut sits in. You use an ohmmeter. If the screw or nut touches the magazine, the resistance between the screw or nut and the magazine will be nearly zero. If not, it will be infinite. If it’s not infinite, make the hole deeper or grind the metal parts until you get zero.

You’re welcome.

The gun is much improved now. Mike owes me.

Today I read that a product called Nu-Blue, from Stockdoc.com, looks and protects better than the other quick bluing products. Don’t know if it’s true. Some guy tested a bunch of products.

Anode You’d Want to Read About This

It’s amazing how little normal homeowners know about the pitfalls of home maintenance.

I probably discovered water heater anodes last year, far into middle age, and I am not a stupid person. I wonder how many of my readers know about them.

Your water heater has a long metal rod in it, and the purpose is to prevent the tank from rusting. The rod corrodes, and the hope is that the tank will not. The rod is called a sacrificial anode. You can also find them on boat hulls and engines. If you don’t replace your anode regularly, you may come home to a rusty flood and no hot water.

I don’t know if there is a standard length for anodes. Mine is something like a yard long. Anodes are attached to threaded fittings at one end. The fittings go into female fittings at the tops of water tanks, and the anodes hang down in the water. The upper fitting on my rod has a hex at the top, and it’s 1-1/16″ in size.

Your anode is said to have a lifespan of 3-5 years, depending on the breaks. Soft water eats them faster.

If you’re mechanically inclined, maybe you’re already starting to see what a fun project checking an anode can be.

To get to my anode, I had to remove a plastic cap on top of my water heater. Then I had to dig out and dispose of a considerable amount of foam insulation. When they make water heaters, they’re too busy to put temporary dams around anode fittings when they shoot the foam in. They just fill the whole area up.

I had to use a screwdriver to dig the foam out so I could get to the hex, and when I was done, I had crumbs everywhere. I had to use a vacuum to get rid of all of them, because otherwise, they could have fallen into the tank. From there, I have no idea where they would have gone. I had to drain some water out of the tank to remove the anode, and for all I know, the mouth of the output tube was exposed so it could suck crumbs up and send them into my plumbing.

Here’s what Rheem, the company that made my water heater, says you should do. Turn off the power to the water heater. Open a hot water faucet in the house. Drain a couple of gallons out of the tank through the fitting on the bottom. Dig the foam out of the anode access hole. Put a wrench with a breaker bar on the hex fitting. Remove the anode. Check it. If it’s not looking good, replace it. If it’s okay, but it back in. Use 6 wraps of Teflon tape on the threads.

Obviously, one wonders why Rheem doesn’t put Teflon tape on the threads when they install the rods.

They have a Youtube video in which a well-groomed, chipper plumbing professional replaces an anode in about 20 seconds. He doesn’t mention vacuuming up crumbs. You don’t get to see him grunting while shoving on a breaker bar. They might as well have hired Betty White.

Once I had my foam out of the way, I put a socket with a 4-foot breaker bar on the hex and pushed. Here’s what happened: the water heater turned. The hex wasn’t having any of it. No movement whatsoever. Because Rheem didn’t put Teflon tape on it. The way they tell us to.

If I had kept pushing, I would have broken the PVC pipes going in and out of the water heater. What about having a friend hold the tank? Well, he would have to weigh about 400 pounds. The best I can do around here is a lady who probably checks in at around 125.

Funny; the video guy’s water heater didn’t get up and move like mine did.

Call me a cynic, but what if Rheem didn’t really want you to change your anode? What if they wanted you to give up and just buy a new water heater every 5 years? That would make their policy of over-torquing Teflon-free hex fittings a brilliant move.

Not suggesting anything, of course.

Rheem didn’t count on me and my tools. They didn’t see me coming.

I took my Harbor Freight hydraulic cart and put my portable compressor on it. I borrowed a short air hose from my air-powered hydraulic press/finger brake. I got out my impact wrench. Not driver. Wrench.

I rolled the compressor to the garage, put an impact socket on the hex, and blasted away until the crud on the seized threads broke and the hex came shooting up out of its prison.

HA. In your FACE, Rheem.

The anode didn’t look bad. I’ll bet I get three more years out of it. I put it back.

I wrapped it with 6 layers of Teflon tape, and I torqued it to the ridiculous figure Rheem supposedly recommends, which would be about right for putting lug nuts on aluminum rims.

Are you crazy? No I didn’t. I got some anti-seize and applied it to the threads. I tightened the hex with an ordinary socket wrench until it seemed reasonably tight but not likely to be hard to remove next January when I check the anode again. Assuming the rapture doesn’t save me from that job. I turned the water on and watched the hex carefully, and of course, no water came out. Why would it? Water fittings don’t have to be nearly as tight as air fittings, and I have installed tons of air fittings. They don’t have to be torqued down to the point where you burst a blood vessel in your head while turning the wrench, and water fittings require still less torque. I don’t care what Rheem says.

Was it safe to use anti-seize instead of Teflon? Who cares? Over the course of my life, as a result of lubricating that fitting, I will probably ingest an amount of anti-seize so tiny you would need an electron microscope to see it. I don’t sit around drinking hot water from the tap. I could have greased it with Ebola and plutonium and it probably wouldn’t have mattered. On top of that, I Googled, and all sorts of professionals say to use anti-seize. I haven’t seen any class actions yet.

Anti-seize is the correct thing to use when joining dissimilar metals with threads. I doubt Teflon is approved for that. Whether it is or not, I don’t trust it the way I trust anti-seize.

My other water heater is upstairs. There is no way in hell I’m going to carry my compressor up there. I’m not stupid enough to carry 75 pounds up a stairway. Harbor Freight sells a 100-foot air hose for about $11. Guess what I’m going to buy.

I was blessed, by the way. My downstairs water heater was installed in a closet with a 10-foot ceiling. What about yours? How much clearance will you have when you try to take your yard-long rod out of your heater? My bet: NOT ENOUGH. Why didn’t the video guy try to take a rod out of a water heater in a closet with an 8-foot or lower ceiling? Didn’t want to mess up his mani/pedi. That’s my guess.

The sissy.

“Sissy” is a forbidden word these days, so I try to use it a lot.

I would have loved to see him cutting his filthy, rusty, slimy anode in half with a sawzall after removing everything from the closet. That would have been precious.

I really don’t think they want you to change your anode. If they did, they would have made it easier.

When your anode goes bad, if you have a low ceiling or a shelf above your water heater, you’re going to have to find some way to cut or bend the anode to get it out. Then what do you do to get the new one in? I know the answer. They make jointed anodes that look like strings of sausages. You’ll have to buy one unless you want to cut a hole in your roof.

You’re going to have a hard time getting your old anode out if you don’t have an impact wrench. My wrench will instantly spin off fasteners a breaker bar won’t budge, and I had to hold it on my hex fitting for quite a while before it moved it.

Let me suggest something. Maybe it will work. When you buy your next water heater, because you couldn’t get the anode out of your old one, take the anode out of the new one. It should be much easier than removing it after a year of corrosion. Apply anti-seize and reinstall it. Maybe this will make it possible to get it out when you need to. If you have a low ceiling, put a jointed anode in before you install the water heater.

I’m just guessing, but I don’t see how these tactics can hurt.

I’m holy and anointed and all, but I still feel like punching someone at Rheem. If they cared at all, this job would be much easier.