Yard and Household Junk Fills in for Professional Models

As part of my preparation for a foreign trip which has been either delayed or canceled due to the difficulty of getting a visa for my wife, I improved my camera equipment. I got a better strap for my Canon 200D, and I got two zooms. A 10-18mm and an 18-135mm. I have been fooling with them. Might as well learn how to shoot, even if I have to do it in my yard for the time being.

The theory behind buying lenses for a 2017 camera which is not as good as my 2023 camera is that the 200D is lighter and would be less painful to lose than the new one. It will take excellent photos, even if the new camera might do somewhat better. Sometimes excellent is good enough.

I thought the wide lens would be good for indoor pictures in certain circumstances. You don’t always have the ability to back up far enough to take a scene in with a long lens, so you can lose shots. Someone questioned my choice, wondering why anyone would travel with a wide lens. I don’t know much about the subject, but it seems to me anyone who spends a lot on important trips would want versatility instead of falling back on a cell phone to take shots his camera’s only lens couldn’t handle.

I figured the longer zoom would be very, very versatile, so even if it didn’t give me the absolute best image quality, it would be a good choice for travel. Again, excellent can be okay.

As for what “best,” means, I don’t know. A lot of people are obsessed with super-sharp photos, and the zoom I turned down when I got the 18-135mm is sharp. It looks like a lot of lenses that aren’t considered very sharp these days are actually sharper than overly-picky people let on. Also, there is a program called Topaz that can improve the apparent sharpness of photos. I guess it’s a cheat, but then every digital camera is a big box of cheat.

There is a lot more to good photography than brutal sharpness, and sometimes you want a photo to be a little less forward-looking.

A lot of history’s best-loved photos aren’t extremely sharp.

I took a few shots with each lens. I’ll be trying to do more.

I really like photography, and I should have gotten more deeply into it 18 years ago, when I got my first real DSLR. Had I done that, I would have a huge collection of great photos now, and I would know more about creating great photos.

Here’s something weird: editing and looking at my own photos is extremely relaxing. I don’t know why. I can sit and stare at a photo I shot for a long time, feeling my blood pressure drop, even if the photo isn’t really good. This isn’t true of every photo I take, but it’s true of the ones that have some not-always-definable qualities I like.

I was desperate for things to shoot today. The light was fading when I started, and there wasn’t much out there. Or maybe I didn’t have the imagination to see what was out there. I took some shots of a few objects to see what the lens could do.

When I came in, I fiddled with editing software. I have started shooting raw files, which means my camera saves files just as it sees them. Ordinarily, cameras save in formats like jpg, which are actually pre-edited by the cameras to make them look better. A jpg may look nice, but when a jpg is created, you lose a lot of data, and that limits what you can do when you edit.

I wanted editing software so I could shoot raw, so I looked for advice, and I ended up getting Adobe Photoshop Elements. I don’t like it. The interface makes no sense at all, so I am constantly having to figure out how to do what I want to do.

Another problem: for some reason, Adobe’s program damages raw files as you edit. When you edit a text document, there is no permanent change until you save it. When you edit a photo with Photoshop, the file is changed, so you lose things. That’s annoying. There has to be some reason for it, but it sounds stupid to me.

Right now, I’m trying Affinity Photo 2, a competitor’s program. Unlike Photoshop, it can be bought. You can only rent Photoshop, and it costs $10 per month. Next year, it will probaby cost more. You can get Affinity Photo 2 a lot cheaper, paying only once.

My understanding is that Photoshop is better, but I’m not a pro, and I’m not doing extreme things. I crop and fiddle with color and sharpness and so on. I’m not trying to simulate psilocybin trips. I may end up buying Photo 2.

I think Adobe’s Lightroom would have been better than Photoshop. I made a good effort to find out what I needed, and Photoshop came out on top, but now I think I was wrong. Lightroom is supposed to be less powerful but easier to use, and it helps you organize photos. Lightroom is another rent-only program, so I am averse to trying it.

You know what they say. “You will own nothing, and you will be happy.” Yeah, and arbacht macht frei. Saying something stupid to people you want to control doesn’t make it true.

I like owning stuff.

I’ll put up a few photos I really like looking at. First, the 10-18mm zoom, and then the 18-135mm.

Here is a hat I bought in Cancun, along with a 2006 DSLR lens I haven’t been able to cleanse of cockatoo dust.

Don’t ask me why. I enjoy looking at it. The composition could be better, and the only story the photo tells is, “I needed to take a picture to test a lens,” but I still like it.

I took a shot of a tire inflator in my workshop. It’s sort of a macro shot, which is not what you should do with a wide lens, but it was there, so I took the picture. The detail is not too bad, considering. The shot you see is not as clear as the original, because I reduced the size a great deal so I could post it.

These shots were edited, painfully, with Photoshop.

While I was shooting with the 18-135mm, I found a few objects I could use. Once again, I acted like I had a macro lens. I shot a couple of magnolia blossoms. I edited the shots in Photo 2.

I didn’t think much of these photos when I took them. I was just trying to see what the lens would do. After I edited them, though, I found them oddly engrossing.

I boosted the color a little, and I increased “clarity,” which may be the same thing as sharpness for all I know. Jacking up clarity brought out the weird veiny features in the petals. If you bring them out too much, the blossoms start to look like something from a Frankenstein movie.

They don’t really look like they do in these photos, and I guess that’s what makes photography an art.

The lens I used is not supposed to create bokeh, the creamy blurriness you see in the background of the second shot, but I tried to create it, and I got it. Not sure how that happened.

I thought these shots would be terrible, because I wasn’t thinking much about composition and so on, but they’re much more pleasing than expected.

I’m going to try to get out there and shoot more stuff. I have a habit of shooting small things, because the big things I have around here aren’t that interesting. I need to try to make them interesting.

I think this is a great hobby for people who want to decorate their houses but don’t want to spend a lot on art. A good original photo, blown up to painting size, runs about $17, and it’s a lot more interesting than a cheesy Van Gogh print or a lithograph by some artist who never sold anything for more than $500 except maybe a lawnmower on Craigslist.

If you photograph people you care about, so much the better.

I don’t plan to put photos of the wife up here, but we have 4 huge photos of us on our walls, and there will be more. I also have shots of friends and their kids, as well as my pets.

This is not a hard hobby. It may be hard for me to create pictures other people like or respect, but I can take photos I like all day long.

Living on Charity

I feel so blessed.

Far from crowds. Far from turmoil. Best wife possible. Two prayer sessions a day, with my wife and the most wonderful God anyone could ask for. Funny little bird by my side watching me type. Excellent strong wheat ale from a recipe I wrote in 2004, improved by using Bergamot hops.

I hope everyone reading this gets close to God and receives the desires of their hearts.

Deserve’s Got Nothing to do With it

I am now 8 days into my experience as a passport bro whose wife has finally made it to the States.

“Passport bro” has a very loose definition. Fundamentally, it means any American man who passed up American women and married a foreigner, for any reason or combination of reasons. It’s a pejorative term, like “cradle-robber” (also me) and “gold digger.”

If you really want to make American women who don’t know anything about you furious, marry a woman who is younger or foreign. Many American women won’t care at all. The rest will hate you and your wife, as though you were personally responsible for the unfulfilled, much-deserved lives they and their awful friends, sisters, and mothers live.

Total strangers have said my wife was too young and pretty for me. WHOO HOO! I certainly hope so.

One lady who disapproves of us had a great husband she abused and abandoned, and she ended up bitter and alone. As an elderly, lonely leftist who will die single, she still feels qualified to offer marriage advice.

Come to think of it, a lot of female celebrities who tell young women what decisions to make are alone, miserable, whorish, addicted to drugs, and in some cases, mentally ill. “Don’t get married.” “Have kids out of wedlock.” “Make your sons wear dresses.” “Name your kids things like ‘Bronx’ and ‘Maddox.'”

Why do so many people take advice from individuals whose lives are dumpster fires?

Here’s something interesting: men don’t care at all about women marrying outside their countries. We don’t care about elderly women marrying younger, better-looking men, either, not that it happens much outside of Hollywood. We don’t care. We don’t think about it. Why the difference?

Women, on the other hand, get angry when they hear younger, prettier women they don’t know married old men they also don’t know and may not even want.

If any crabby single women I could never have married are reading, it was never a choice between you and someone prettier and younger. The choice was 1. someone I wanted or 2. being alone. If I were willing to marry someone who repelled me in order to avoid being alone, I’d have grandchildren by now.

A Jamaican girl I knew told me about rent-a-dreads. These are gigolos who roam the beaches of Jamaica. Single white women fly to Jamaica to find them, and they pay them for sex. I thought the story was funny, but I didn’t call the women predators or perverts, which is what many rejected women call passport bros.

I didn’t resent Jamaican man-whores for snapping up all the miserable middle-aged white women I didn’t want. Men generally don’t think that way. Black American men tend to be possessive of black women as a whole, but the rest of us are different.

Women are extremely hostile toward each other. That’s the problem. They are incredibly competitive for men and everything else. They have a zero-sum attitude. “What helps you hurts me.” This is why they can’t stand each other. It’s one of the weirdest aspects of human nature.

I’ve noticed that many women get upset when other women do well in any area of life. Women use this trait to torment each other.

I know a single woman who got upset when I mentioned Valentine’s Day and also when I spoke of a male friend who had a new romance. She let me know I was not to speak of these things. That was wild. If she had developed a wonderful relationship and gotten married, my friend and I would have been very happy about it.

Another person’s success isn’t your failure. If another person’s prayers are answered, yours may be answered, too.

I have an aunt who used to give my single sister endless, glowing updates on her grandchildren, all of whom are prodigies and superheroes, much like her son, who had to settle for one of the world’s worst law schools and went on to do mindless work as a low-level prosecutor who refers methheads to rehab all day. My understanding is that he is so lazy, he refused to do anything about the leaking roof on the house she gave him, so she had to have it replaced. Supposedly, she is willing the house to his kids instead of him because she thinks he won’t take care of it. He’s not the guy she held him out to be.

I never thought much about my aunt’s stories, but my sister told me she was telling them because she wanted to make the rest of us miserable. Women understand women. In my sister’s case, it seems to have worked.

When my aunt used to tell me whoppers about her grandchildren, all I thought was, “Wow, this is boring.”

Well, that’s not all I thought. I also thought, “How can she not know I don’t believe this stuff?”

Everyone in her family was the light of the world. Her son was a philosopher and the new Leibniz (a name he would have to look up). Her daughter was going to be Miss Kentucky. Her son-in-law could pick musical instruments up and play them without lessons. Her grandsons had x-ray vision, at least one could fly, and their fingerpainting had attracted the attention of the National Gallery and Livermore labs.

If I had to guess, these kids aren’t extremely bright. They’re probably smart; somewhere in the pleasant intelligence band most lawyers come from. I don’t know them, but I am qualified to guess because I know my aunt.

She told me her son had been admitted by the University of Michigan Law School (top 10), and then I found out it was WESTERN Michigan, AKA the Cooley Law School, generally held to be the single worst law school in the US. No exaggeration. It’s famous. Instead of the top 10, he was admitted to #199 out of 199.

If you can fog a mirror, you’re in. Michael Cohen is a Cooley grad.

If there had ever been any evidence these kids were brilliant or even just Mensa material, I would have heard about it. Early and often. She worked very hard to turn dubious anecdotes into proof of transcendent genius, so if an actual test score had popped up, it would be on a billboard.

She bragged about her daughter’s second husband, the anaesthesiologist. Turns out he’s really a NURSE. She took a respected profession that looks very good to most people and made it look like an utter failure the family was trying to hide. Thanks to my aunt, I never think of him as a accomplished nurse anaesthetist, which is how I would see him had she told the truth. I think of him as a guy who couldn’t get into medical school.

For years, I thought he was a doctor. My aunt used that word.

He’s probably a fantastic person, but his unpaid publicist is not doing him any favors.

She told me her daughter and the doctor lived in a historic mansion among millionaires. One day I was thinking about all the BS I had heard, so I got curious and looked them up. They have a very nice but ordinary house worth considerably less than a million. No NBA star will ever want it; I’ll put it that way. It would seem like a wonderful house to me, except I was expecting Mar-a-Lago.

Her second husband’s granddaughter managed to make it to the first round of one of those talent-search shows several years ago. My aunt got to sit in the audience, so her sans-microphone face was on TV for less than the length of a bull ride. She got to meet Jim Stafford or Shabba Doo or whoever it was that hosted the show. I, a person who hadn’t watched network TV regularly in maybe 15 years, got to hear about that. You would think the entire family had performed a Super Bowl halftime show. My best guess: the girl went back to singing in small bars, like 99% of professional pop musicians.

Let’s see. Just now, I managed to remember enough of her name to find her on Google. Her Instagram fan page has 45 followers. I think you get that many spam followers just for signing up. Last update: two years before coronavirus. So she quit. Well, that’s smart. A lot of stubborn people of modest gifts spend their autumn years playing in roadhouses. Maybe she went to college. And studied nursing. Another doctor in the making.

To get back on topic, men like women. Women like men. Men like men. Women can’t get along with women. This is why lesbians have the shortest, rockiest relationships of any group. It must be hard being a lesbian, because women want long relationships and security more than men, and lesbians fight like crazy and break up over and over.

I guess when there are two people in a relationship, and both give the cold shoulder at once, which is what many women do, it turns into a death spiral. A man will go to an angry woman and try to start a conversation. A woman will sulk behind a locked door until the sun dies.

I had an eccentric history teacher named Morgan Kelly, and he lied all the time, but he told us one thing that was true. He said the Chinese character for “woman” could mean different things. Used once, it meant “woman.” Used twice, it meant “quarrel.” Too funny. The web says modern Chinese people have stopped using the quarrel symbol, which shows the truth hit home in some quarters.

Many women lose their minds when men they used to be involved with date or get married, or even when they just go on with life and enjoy it.

I am enjoying life. I’m not doing it to torment anyone, though.

I say that as a joke, but it wouldn’t be funny if there weren’t some ugly truths behind it. There are people who live to brag, not to make themselves feel good, but to depress and humiliate others. If Americans were anything like the people they pretend to be on Facebook, we could legitimately be said to be the master race.

Now that I think about it, I guess I have hurt some people very badly with my few small successes in life. When something good happens to me, I never think, “This will really break so-and-so’s heart!” But some hearts must have been broken. It wouldn’t necessarily take much. It used to break my middle-aged sister’s heart when I rode in the front seat of the car instead of the back. Made her furious.

Envy is pretty bad. It’s Satan’s sin. “I will be like the most high.” He hates God for being above him. He hates us for being born later, being smaller, weaker, less beautiful, and less intelligent, and being promoted above him while he waits to roast and squeal in the lake of fire. People who are envious wish others ill and try to harm them when those they envy are blameless. Envy is the heart of leftism.

Life as a passport bro is good so far. It’s not like there are any big surprises. Before my wife arrived, we had spent around 6 weeks together abroad, and we had a practice of doing video chat twice a day.

If there is anything disappointing about our new arrangement, it’s that it feels like we have been living here together for decades. You would think we would both be ecstatic because we were finally together in our house, but it was more like a couple who had been married for 20 years came home after separate vacations.

Some changes are requiring mental adjustments. I can’t do everything I used to do. For example, I have been informed I get out of the car too fast. My routine is park, neutral, shut down, open door, jump out. I would guess this takes under two seconds. Now it’s neutral, shut down, stare at wife until makeup is done.

I am also not permitted to wear T-shirts with holes in them. I did not see that coming. And I have to keep an eye on the trash to see which treasured items the wife has thrown out. She threw out the boxes for some cameras and accessories, and I had to rescue them. She threw out my saddle soap!

I’m becoming my grandfather. My grandmother took some of his clothes and put them on a scarecrow, and he drove to the field and took them back down.

My wife threw out some jeans that had bleach spots on them. Who does that?

My beloved queen-sized mattress is on the way out. It’s from Costco. It’s perfect for me. It’s a joy. Back in my fornication days, I never had problems sharing a queen-sized mattress. Now, I am told it’s way too small. Yeah; trying staying on your side. How about that? That’s what I’ll tell her. One of these days.

I fixed a beautiful stuffed turkey on Thursday, and she refused to eat the stuffing. Some kind of mental block I don’t comprehend. I had not been aware that stuffing phobias existed.

You would think affluent people would be more likely to have food phobias because they would be sheltered, but it seems the opposite is true. I’ve noticed that people who grew up poor are more likely to have hangups about food. I dated a girl who could not eat anything resembling a sausage, and she also refused to go near Chinese food.

My master bath was very clean before my wife got here, except the shower needed a good application of scum remover in some areas. She’s in there now anyway, sterilizing the whole room.

On the up side, I don’t do dishes or laundry any more. PASSPORT BRO FOR LIFE!

Also, she is willing to get a recliner couch. That’s every man’s dream. I think they’re a little tacky, but when you sit on one, you forget about all that. I don’t think I would be able to make myself buy one if I lived here alone, because I would think, “God gave you this nice house, and you put a recliner couch in the living room.” But if she’s for it, I think I can forgive myself.

We went to three furniture stores yesterday, primarily to look for a kitchen table that isn’t available at Home Depot. I would guess we saw 200 recliners. I was shocked. I have a couple of recliners already. I got my dad a cheap Chinese lift recliner when he was dealing with dementia, and I got a big Barcalounger for the upstairs rec room. I looked around my area before going online, but all I saw was a disappointing La-Z-Boy store. I didn’t check the regular furniture stores. That’s when I found out how popular recliners are here.

We laugh all the time. We are getting a lot of prayer in. She gets along with Marvin. Things are going to be okay. The rest of my life may be very trying for envious people.

Plus the End of Candace Owens

In case anyone is wondering how my life is going now that my wife is a resident of the United States, I am here to let you know. Exactly what you would expect is happening. She is in the process of throwing out everything I hold dear.

Slight exaggeration.

Today, she pulled all the drawers out of my awful dresser, and she has been using a HEPA-filter vacuum to suck the dust out of the dresser itself. The contents of the dresser are all over the room. Hope there was nothing incriminating in there.

We went to a ritzy restaurant as soon as we got away from the airport. Of course, I am referring to White Castle. I thought she might be too tired after around 40 hours of traveling, but she insisted. Sadly, it turned out she didn’t like it as much Shake Shack, so we failed to knock off our bag of 10 cheese sliders.

I did my part.

A friend of mine needed a place to stop on a trip to Miami with his kids. His grandmother raised him, and he was on the way to her funeral. They met my wife on the way back. I made pizza both times.

The kids cleaned up my downstairs. I have no idea why they enjoy doing that, but I don’t exactly discourage it.

My wife is finally caught up on sleep, and this is why she is going over the house. I am trying to look involved. I changed the P-traps under two sinks. They were leaking. The character who installed them used something that looked like a combination of plumber’s putty and pipe dope. Here’s what you’re supposed to apply: nothing. I put a little Teflon grease on the threads, though.

I believe he used a pipe wrench to tighten the joints. They’re supposed to be hand-tight. They were torn up, and I had to exert myself to get them off.

I also took one of the horrible Chinese casters off Marvin’s cage and checked the threads. I have 4 much-better casters on the way. If we’re going to fix up the house, we have to fix Marv’s house as well.

We have Thanksgiving supplies laid in, and I am making cornbread for dressing. I’m making a lot of bacon because I need 3/4 of a cup of grease.

She has been tearing strips of bacon in tiny bits and eating them one at a time. Why do women do that? I told her she knew she was going to eat the whole strip, so she should quit fooling herself. She said, “You’re so vicious.” Then she ate more.

Our plan is to fix the bedroom, living room, and kitchen before anything else. My adored queen size mattress may be exiled to a guest room.

We’ll have to hit Orlando soon, because that’s where the real stores are. I hope the spending tsunami starts to abate by New Year’s.

I have been reading the news. It looks like Candace Owens has decided to murder her own career. Is it admirable, because she’s saying what she thinks is true, regardless of the cost, or is it just ridiculous, because she hasn’t spent two minutes verifying the things she says before buying herself a one-way ticket back to nowhere?

She seems to think Israel is an apartheid state, and she made an ambiguous remark about genocide which seemed to be intended to justify criticisms of Israel.

She said something nutty. She said Jerusalem’s Arab Quarter was the place where Arabs were “allowed to live.” Really insane. As a whole lot of other commentators have remarked since she made her claim, Arabs can live wherever they want in Israel. They hold Knesset seats They serve in the IDF.

The Arab Quarter is pretty small. It holds a small percentage of Israel’s Arabs. This is not classified information. How could an otherwise-bright woman fail to check this out before tying an anvil to her leg and diving into the Ann Coulter abyss?

By “Ann Coulter abyss,” I mean the hole where smart pundits go when they go off the rails publicly.

Owens appears to think the Arab-Jewish conflict is a spat between two peoples, each of which has major legitimate grievances. She seems to think Israeli’s Jews are foreign oppressors who showed up one day and decided to throw Israel’s bona fide historical occupants out, and she doesn’t seem to have any idea how differently Jews and Arabs in the Middle East have treated each other.

Every adult in the US should read a recent article about the rapes that have occurred since October 7. Muslims have raped girls, women, and old ladies repeatedly in more than one orifice. They have broken pelvises. While one victim was being gang-raped, a Muslim sliced her breast off and took it around for others to play with. One Israeli was raped standing up, and while the Muslim was still inside her, he shot her through the skull.

You can go online and see at least one Jewish captive with huge blood stains on the back of her pants and between her legs.

Close your eyes and try as hard as you can to picture Jews doing this.

Yes, Jews have killed civilians. While trying as hard as possible not to. On the other hand, they haven’t deliberately set fire to living babies. I doubt you will be able to find any stories about Jews cutting babies out of women and beheading them while their umbilical cords still tied them to their mothers, but at least one Muslim did that during the terrorist raid.

Antisemitic Muslims are not like Jews. They have equalled the barbarism of the Nazis and the imperialist Japanese.

I keep calling them “Muslims,” not “Hamas,” because their religion is what caused all this. Islam is a religion of murder, torture, rape, slavery, theft, and pillage. It encourages its adherents to do the kinds of things we have seen them do this year.

If Hamas itself were the big problem, we wouldn’t have a slew of other Muslim terrorist groups, and Hamas would not win elections in Gaza by overwhelming margins.

Islam got its start as a protection racket. It’s a shame people don’t know this. Look it up. Mohammed’s new religion was going nowhere, but one day he decided to tell Muslims they were free to raid the towns of infidels and do pretty much what they just did in Israel. People converted not because God opened their eyes and confirmed Mohammed’s ravings, but because they were terrified of their terrorist neighbors, and also because they wanted to be able to do to others what Muslims had done to them.

On October 7, many Muslims celebrated their religion’s origins.

I have never hopped on the Candace Owens bandwagon. I’m relieved I can say that. I saw her saying things I thought were immature and obnoxious, and after that, I didn’t really care whether she was right on the issues. I saw her as a person I did’t want to endorse wholeheartedly. I liked some things she said, but that was as far as it went.

I don’t see politicians or self-anointed pundits as our saviors. It is often enjoyable to see them put leftists in their places, but conservatism per se is not what the world needs. It needs the unity that comes from the Holy Spirit. Conservatism isn’t the answer to our problems. Holy-Spirit-led Christianity is the answer to our problems, and conservatism is just an essential and natural by-product.

Here is one thing I like about watching Candace Owens out herself: it shows how blind intelligent people can be. Conservatives keep telling themselves that if they out-argue and out-meme the facially idiotic left, eventually enough people will come to their senses to bring us victory in the voting booth. It’s not true. If brains and logic mattered that much, nearly all Jews would believe Yeshua was the Messiah and God.

People are subject to supernatural blindness. Only the Holy Spirit can enable you to know the truth. If you’re not full of the Holy Spirit, you’re full of other spirits, and they deceive. They may give you part of the truth, plus some toxic adulterants, but overall, you will be blind.

Candace Owens doesn’t know the Holy Spirit, so in spite of her intelligence and general knowledge, she believes things so stupid a 5-year-old can debunk them in two minutes.

We are swimming in a sea of demonic deception, and only a tiny number of us are hearing the truth from the Holy Spirit.

Ben Shapiro and David Horowitz are done with Candace Owens. They think she’s ridiculous. She is, but so are they. They can’t figure out who their Messiah is. Who is more blind?

Maybe she got her ideas from other black people. No one is willing to talk about the huge problem of black antisemitism. Who knows what Owens heard from her parents and grandparents when she was young? She used to be a leftist. Maybe she hasn’t rejected all the mythology and libel.

The deception is going to get worse, and it will be everywhere. People need to understand this. You can argue and meme all you want. You might as well try to describe sunshine to a rock.

I Want That Glow

In 2021, my pet cockatoo, Maynard, died at the age of 30. It was very unpleasant for me. It’s bad losing a dog after 12 or so years. Imagine a dog you had for 30 years, and then imagine it talked to you every day and smothered you with obsessive affection. Then imagine making a series of mistakes resulting in its unnecessary death.

Since he died, I have seen him in several dreams. In the first one, he clambered onto me, and he was radiant. He seemed to be smiling. It’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t owned a parrot, because parrots have rigid beaks, but it’s very obvious when a parrot is happy. They really look like they’re smiling.

I held him and kissed him, and then he was gone. The dream was sad but wonderful. I felt I had closure.

The day he died, he seemed to be okay until evening. Then I saw him breathing with his beak open. He was under the care of a local vet who turned out to be totally incompetent. I rushed him to the University of Florida. They took him into an exam room and refused to let me in because of leftist covid hysteria. Then the vet called my cell phone and told me Maynard was dead. He had been in the room for maybe 5 minutes. He didn’t ask me to go to the room. He didn’t bring Maynard out. I never saw Maynard again. The girl at the cash register charged me hundreds of dollars, and they suggested an extremely expensive necropsy and an expensive method of disposal, and I rejected both.

That was it. I left his body and travel cage at the animal hospital and drove home alone, and there I was faced with one living parrot and Maynard’s empty cage, complete with bird toys and unfinished food and water.

In the dream, he glowed with love and joy. I felt forgiven.

I have seen him in other dreams. Always happy.

Last night, I found one of his wing feathers in my living room under a book. I felt like I had found a gold Rolex. When a parrot is alive and well, you don’t think about saving a few feathers. A while later, I heard Maynard’s voice, asking me what I was doing. It was Marvin, my grey, imitating him. Marv sounds exactly like him. He hasn’t imitated him much lately.

Marvin appears to have a supernatural ability to pick up on people’s thoughts and emotions. For example, when I think something is funny, he laughs before I do. He even does this when we’re not in the same room and his view is blocked. He does it when I’m on long calls with my wife. It’s shocking when it happens. Last night, Maynard was on my mind, and Marvin imitated him.

I’m always happy when he imitates Maynard. I miss Maynard’s voice. I wish I could do things over.

After Marv did his imitation, I wanted more. I put some videos of Maynard on Youtube many years ago, using accounts I no longer have access to. I tried to find a video. I managed to find one, but it wasn’t very good. It was short, and he didn’t say anything. It was still nice to see him.

All this makes me wonder: would God send a pet into a person’s dreams to bring comfort and closure?

People think pets cease to exist when they die, because heaven isn’t for animals, but that’s not consistent with scripture. The Bible mentions a white horse Jesus rides in the spirit realm. A horse you ride is a pet. It also mentions supernatural creatures with animals’ faces. Animals can’t sin, so they have no guilt. It makes no sense to destroy them when they die, especially when so many of them do so much for us while they’re alive.

I think I’ll see my pets again, and I think my failures as an owner will be forgotten. I believe Maynard is with God, and I expect to be with him again.

In 2020, my young friend Travis was shot accidentally, and he died alone in a hospital room. He was there for a month, and they wouldn’t even let him receive cards. At first, they said his injuries weren’t life-threatening, but he got worse and died anyway. Toward the end, I saw him in a dream. He came to see me, and he glowed just like Maynard did. He had a huge smile on his face, but he couldn’t talk. He looked like he knew something good I didn’t know. My feeling is that he was rescued from the world, and he wanted me to know my turn was coming soon.

Last night I felt as though finding Maynard’s feather and hearing Marv imitate him were warnings that I would be with Maynard soon.

Every day when Rhodah and I pray together, I pray that God will rapture his children soon, and I ask him to help us to recognize the season when he will come. Christians like to harp about no one knowing the day or hour, but Jesus clearly expected us to know the general time of our rescue. I’m wondering if yesterday’s experiences were an answer to our prayers.

I feel very alienated from the human race. People are extremely vile now, and it is impossible break through their impudence and help them avoid hell and the tribulation. People are like pigs, which walk around staring at the ground, thinking about food. They’re like rats, which focus on filling their holes with things they can eat. They’re like monkeys, which spend their time stealing and fighting. Talking to them is about like walking to the fence outside my house and trying to teach the cattle.

I love getting revelation from God, but at the same time, when I get revelation, it makes me sad, because I know nearly no one will let me share it with them. I can tell Rhodah and one or two other people, and that’s all. I have a Youtube viewer who agrees with me, and there are a couple of blog readers I hear from, but as for the rest of the world, it’s pearls before swine, all day, every day. It’s particularly bad with Christians because they get ahold of some bad doctrine and decide they know everything.

I don’t think I’m going to die. I think I’m going to leave, and all of my supernatural experiences are preparation.

I can’t describe my gratitude for my isolation from the world. I look at the web, and I see how worldly people live. They have no dignity now. People will not permit it. The government will not permit it. Satan’s children play a tune, and even Christians have to dance and smile. Wave the white flag. Use the pronouns. You want to keep your job?

Christians who didn’t prepare are stuck in bad situations.

I see stories about people being attacked by criminals in places like Chicago and New York. How different my world is. I carry a gun and a knife everywhere. Even to the bank. I don’t have a local prosecutor trying to lock good people up for self-defense. No one is setting criminals free for George Soros here. And yes, he really does bankroll such attorneys. It’s not a myth.

If someone starts kicking my front door, I can display a rifle with 31 rounds in it, and if he doesn’t quit, I can fire. If I’m at a gas station, and someone tries to rob me, I can shoot. At least at this stage of the apocalypse, I don’t have to worry that a mob will pull me out of my car and beat me to death. I have a governor that got a law passed to protect mob victims who use their own cars to defend themselves. In Florida, it’s a crime to be part of a mob that deliberately intimidates people.

People are nice here. We open doors for each other. We yield the right of way when we don’t have to. My neighbors came onto my property without permission once. So they could cut and move a tree that blocked my driveway. I got my septic tank pumped this week, and when the young man who gave me the bill left, he said, “God bless you.”

Leftists are against God, and they love telling the world how hateful Christians and conservatives are. Meanwhile, in their cities, they’re afraid to leave their homes at night. They’re afraid to use ATM’s. They can’t get out of their cars in their cities unless they’re in certain small areas that are relatively safe. They riot. They abuse each other. Here, where there are Trump signs everywhere, people are kind and gentle. Black people are comfortable around white people. That’s tough to get used to after Miami. Seems like everyone in Miami is racist. Cubans against all blacks. Blacks against Cubans and whites. Black people treated me very differently in Miami.

Who is doing things right? If the God-haters are as miserable and angry as they are, and we’re at peace and full of love, who is right?

I told Rhodah it reminded me of the story of Lazarus and the rich man. They were in the underworld, dead, and Lazarus the beggar was with Abraham, in a pleasant place, waiting to be taken to heaven. The rich man, who had no name any more, was in a place of torment. He could see Lazarus, but there was a great gulf between them, and no one could cross it.

People like me live in the same world with BLM and Antifa nuts. We share the world with men in dresses. We’re in the same general area, but our experiences are so different, we might as well be on different planets.

God’s people have peace and victory. We have real love, not fake love. We aren’t afraid of death. We are confident we’ll be taken care of. We want to help others. Satan’s children live in fear and selfishness. They are cruel. They’re terrified. They’ve been known to wear masks while alone in their cars. They feel cheated, and they think the way to be prosperous and safe is to harm other people. They want to harm us by taking the things with which God has blessed us.

When we look at the world, we see a place that will end soon, and we expect to go to a better place. When they look at the world, they see increased crowding, an environment they believe is about to fail us, pollution that will never end, energy problems that can’t be solved, and a planet that has to be maintained and improved at any cost, because they have no hope of finding any other home. They think this is all there is. To me, the global warming hysteria is a crazy joke not to be taken seriously, but they actually believe billions will die soon if we keep using plastic bags. Imagine being that insane.

I can’t put myself in their shoes. I can’t imagine thinking this world is all there is. What’s it like to have a panic attack because someone else used a styrofoam cup? It’s beyond my powers of conception.

I see Greta Thunberg as what she is: a spoiled, mentally ill, hysterical, controlling, abusive, conceited, attention-loving, science-illiterate girl who needs to shut up and respect her elders. They see her as a savior! She’s out of her mind!

I felt God’s grief last night and this morning. He grieves because of the tribulation. He has no desire to see people suffer like that, but it has to be done. He reminded me that it’s not just a curse. It’s also a blessing. “Tribulation” means using a tool to separate grain from its husk. Many people will be harvested to heaven during the tribulation. We have to focus on that and not dwell on the self-inflicted fate of the others.

I’m disappointed every time a month passes and the rapture still hasn’t come. I can’t wait for it. The irredeemable and near-irredeemable will be stuck here, free to claw and hack at each other without restraint, but I hope to get two great blessings: 1) to be free from their kind forever, and 2) to be with God, who is love, peace, joy, and perfect protection.

Compared to heaven, this entire world is a ghetto and a death camp. It’s as if heaven were Switzerland, the earth were Detroit, and hell, which is part of Earth, were Auschwitz. Except hell is worse than Auschwitz.

We Pay Hollywood to Poison Us

I keep asking God to wake me up so I am no longer so jaded I think circumstances in this world are normal. It appears he is listening.

The other day, I watched an Amazon show called Reacher. I should not have done this.

The show is based on the Jack Reacher novels. Jack Reacher is an imaginary and impossible retired Army major who is the best at absolutely everything. If you have seen the two Jack Reacher movies featuring Tom Cruise, you know what I mean. He’s the best precision rifle shot. He can beat up 5 men at once. He has the deductive skills of Sherlock Holmes.

He’s a revenge hero, about like a Steven Seagal character, only somewhat less silly. All of the novels and movies, and the Amazon series, start the same way. Somebody really obnoxious does some extremely cruel, infuriating things, Reacher gets caught up in it, and eventually, he kills a bunch of people in sadistic ways.

I have been trying to limit my intake of entertainment containing violence, but I felt it was okay to see the TV show. It was not good for me. Don’t read further unless you like spoilers.

One of the early episodes featured a man who had been nailed to a wall, naked, and castrated. They showed the corpse without warning, fully exposed. Eventually, Reacher did the obligatory thing and fornicated with a deputy who was helping him, and she popped into the scene with her breasts exposed. It was completely gratuitous. Another man was burned alive after killing his own father by cutting his throat clear through the windpipe.

Before I watched the show, I had started looking at Game of Thrones clips on Youtube, out of curiosity. If you haven’t seen this show, you’re in for a disgusting experience. It’s about a storybook world full of things like giants and dragons. The main characters are nobles who do unbelievably gross things to each other. They torture and mutilate each other on camera, and there are a lot of gruesome deaths. It’s not The Waltons.

When I saw the clips, I marveled at what was passing for prime time entertainment in America. When I was born, married TV couples had to sleep in twin beds, and injured characters never looked all that bad, even when they were dead. Now shows contain bits of pornography, and characters slice people up on camera.

I felt bad after watching Reacher and the Game of Thrones clips. I had no good excuse for watching.

Last night, I had a strange dream. I was driving a big, powerful vehicle something like a fighter jet with no wings. For some reason, I was Scottish. No idea what that was about. I was at something resembling a gas station, and I needed to put water in the vehicle’s tank. It didn’t seem to require gas or jet fuel. There was a tank of water beside the vehicle, and it had no top. I used a soup can to scoop water out of the tank and pour it into the vehicle.

My parrot Marvin was with me. He was a sort of helper. He was eagerly climbing in and out of the vehicle’s pipes, trying to inspect and put everything right. He was concerned about something. He stood on the ground beside a pipe and drew my attention to it, and it coughed out a small spray of blood.

I looked at the water I was trying to scoop up, and nasty things were floating in it. I saw dead leaves and a dead lizard. The water itself was clear, but a lot of stuff had found its way into it.

I found myself trying to scoop up the junk and dump it on the ground so I could get at the clean water. I started complaining to a lady who provided the water. She was English, and she worked for an Englishman who wasn’t there. She didn’t care about my problems.

I woke up. It was about 4 a.m. My wife and I both tend to wake up and pray at about this time.

When I woke up, I thought about Derek Prince. He is the English evangelist from whom I learned to prophesy at will. I started asking myself whether he had been wrong.

Water represents the flow of the Holy Spirit, and powered vehicles represent God’s grace. I thought maybe bad teaching had contaminated the gifts of the Spirit. Maybe Prince’s teaching was wrong, I was letting demons prophesy through me, and this was blocking God’s power in me.

I asked God to show me the truth, and I mentioned the verse in which Paul told us to covet prophecy. He said it was better than tongues. I knew people were supposed to prophesy, but was I doing it right?

I turned on the TV and watched Derek Prince’s video. He cited 1 Corinthians several times. He claimed Paul said we could all prophesy. Here is 1 Corinthians 14:31: “For ye may all prophesy one by one, that all may learn, and all may be comforted.”

I thought about that. “May” and “can” mean two different things. I wondered if Prince had gotten them confused. Did God really tell us we had the power to prophesy, or merely permission to do it if we could?

I went to the Greek. It uses the word “dynasthe,” which is related to “dynamis,” which is where we get “dynamite.” It means “are capable.” Paul said, “You are all able to prophesy one by one.”

That seems pretty clear. It is undeniable that God wants us all to desire prophesy and to try to develop it, and it certainly looks like he has said we have the ability.

The word translated “prophesy” is “propheteuein,” and it literally means “prophesy,” which means to speak the words of God, including revealing future events.

I don’t believe Derek Prince was wrong. There is too much evidence that he was right.

Then I thought about Mount Hermon, at the north end of Israel. Its Hebrew name is Ba’al Hermon, or “Lord of the Curse.” There is some argument as to whether this interpretation is correct, but it makes sense. Enoch said it was the place where Satan and the rebel angels came down and bound each other by a mutual curse. They planned to have sex with women, and they swore loyalty to each other.

Mount Hermon’s snows are one of the three main sources of the Jordan. At the bottom of the mountain, there is a place called Caesarea Philippi. It was dedicated to evil. There is a spring there, and the water that comes from it turns into a stream that feeds the Jordan.

The spring is quiet now, but it used to be very vigorous and turbulent. Pagans used to throw dead animals into it after they were sacrificed. They defiled the Jordan this way. The Jordan has supernatural significance. It feeds the Sea of Galilee, which symbolizes the earth in the Bible. The fish in the Sea of Galilee represent humanity. The Jordan emerges from the south end of the Sea of Galilee and goes through the desert to the Dead Sea, which contains no fish and represents the lake of fire.

It seemed to me that my dream was about defiling myself with things like secular entertainment, news, and combat sports. The living water comes to me clean and clear, like the snow of Mount Hermon. Then I combine it with worldly filth by allowing corrupting images and sounds into my mind.

I saw an image in my mind. I saw storefronts owned by Satan. In the stores, his underling spirits sat, waiting for customers. When people walked in, the spirits waited on them, loading them up with goods. No charge. Not up front, anyway.

If you don’t go into a store, the spirit that runs it can’t come out and drag you in. You give them permission to work in you when you walk in the door. I think I’ve been doing this.

I made a list of things I felt God wanted me to give up or greatly reduce: social media, fiction, news, anything to do with violence or fighting, everything related to the occult, and all types of input intended to be erotic.

I don’t think it’s possible to cut the news out of your life entirely. You will occasionally pick things up whether you want them or not. You can minimize it, though. As for social media, I’m already done with it, except for Youtube, which seems to have a purpose. I don’t need to watch violence or occult material, so these things aren’t problems. Abandoning fiction will be a little hard, but in the end, it’s all foolishness, and the people who run the fiction industry hate Jesus, so I should know better than to let them influence me.

Erotic entertainment is clearly evil and unnecessary. I don’t think any Christian disputes that.

Day before yesterday, before I had the dream, I decided to fast from news. Now I’m avoiding everything on the list. Fiction is the biggest challenge. I feel like I’m in withdrawal, as though something wanted me to rent a movie.

Hollywood is extremely evil. It’s a shame Christians don’t talk about this more. It’s a hive of homosexuality, even among male celebrities most of us think are straight. It pumps out material hostile to Jesus, white people, men, America, and the church. It promotes pride, cruelty, racism, and violence. It glorifies Satanic religions such as Buddhism and witchcraft. It’s remarkable that we continue paying Hollywood to direct its sewage pipes into our living rooms.

We should be able to look at the lives of entertainers and realize they have nothing good to tell us. How many are on drugs? How many have fallen so far they had to go to rehab repeatedly? How many have died from drug overdoses and suicide? How many are extremely promiscuous? How many have sexually-perverted children? It’s strange that we admire people who have failed at life and who are generally going to hell.

I think that if Moses could come to Earth, walk into a typical American’s house, and turn on the TV, he would stalk out in about three minutes, asking for forgiveness and wondering why God hadn’t incinerated the entire family.

We shouldn’t be angry at show business people, but we shouldn’t admire them or buy their product, either.

As I have said before, I believe the rapture is a process, not just a sudden event. I believe the people who will be taken in the event will be those who have already been raptured internally and removed from the company of irredeemable people.

The whole concept of rapture is interesting to me. The other day it occurred to me that the first rapture we know of took place when God raptured himself away from Adam and Eve.

I plan to keep prophesying, and I will continue to try to reduce the flow of worldly pus and excrement that pollutes my life.

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.

My Greens are Greener Than Your Greens

It’s amazing how stupid people are. Unfortunately, I am a person, so my generalization applies to me.

When I was a kid, there was no such thing as a plastic trash bag. People put their trash in paper grocery bags that leaked and tore. Garbage was disgusting. You would simply throw your bags into your rusty galvanized can, and it would rot and ooze until pickup day. The cans stank even when they were empty. Indoor cans also stank and had to be washed out. It’s not like that today. I have indoor cans that have never been washed, thanks to plastic bags. They still look and smell new, apart from the holes my pets have chewed in them.

Digression: I use the words “trash” and “garbage” interchangeably, because the dictionary gives pretty much identical definitions for them. A lot of people think “trash” means dry stuff like paper, but Mr. Webster disagrees.

It’s sort of remarkable that the human race didn’t start using plastic as its default material for trash bags until I was out of diapers. In patent law, one of the requirements for a new patent is that the invention must be “nonobvious,” and that means it’s not obvious to “one skilled in the art.” The use of plastic for trash bags should have been obvious to everyone, not just bag manufacturers. Plastic bags already existed. For some reason, the little wires in people’s heads didn’t touch, and we were deprived of a great boon for a disgracefully long time.

The Internet says plastic bags were first used for institutional trash in 1950, and Glad introduced plastic trash bags to the public in 1966. They took a surprisingly long time to catch on. Paper bags were commonly used during the first few years of the next decade.

We didn’t have trash bags, but we did have Baggies. These were thin polyethylene bags for food storage. People put them in lunchboxes and so on. They came with little wire ties because the bags didn’t have zipper closures on them. Baggies, or a similar product, were introduced in 1957, so why did consumer trash bags take so long?

When zipper bags came out, the writing was on the wall for Baggies. When I go to the store, I can’t find Baggies. I guess they were discontinued long ago.

I have bought zipper bags for decades. I don’t like them. They’re small and expensive, and the zippers often fail. The zippers are stiff, so the zipper end of a bag always has to be relatively straight. You can’t gather it up.

Really cheap people wash them and reuse them, but who wants to do that? It comes across like a mental disorder, and the bags take forever to dry. Said the guy who actually tried it.

I used to walk around in grocery stores, lamenting the absence of Baggies, pushing a cart containing produce I had stuffed in bags that were almost exactly like Baggies. Again, the little wires failed to make contact.

I started eating salads for breakfast recently, and that means I had to deal with lettuce. I ended up with a storage problem.

It all began with concerns about washing lettuce. I wondered if it was really necessary. I doubted restaurants did it. Washing lettuce is time-consuming, and in the end, you get wet lettuce which is hard to dry.

I checked the web to learn whether washing lettuce was actually important, and I read some disgusting stuff. Evidently, it really is important. Things like sand, bugs, worms, frogs, and fecal bacteria are found on vegetables, even if the packaging says, “Pre-washed.”

As if it were necessary, I am reminded why I have no respect for vegetarians. They love telling us they’re “eating clean” and that meat makes us sick. They also have a big bias against cooked food. Guess what? Frog poop isn’t clean, but a nice steak is. Bacteria can’t do much to the inside of a steak, because it takes them weeks to get there. Microbes can’t do much to people who eat cooked food, because cooking kills germs. Their precious salads kill lots of people every year! Have you ever noticed that nearly all germ-related food recalls involve vegetables?

Okay, that’s not totally true. Ground beef gets a few recalls. But it’s worth the risk, because it’s meat!

You can use a device called a salad spinner. It’s basically a spinning colander in a bowl. You spin your greens and hope the water goes out through the holes. I started looking for a salad spinner. I could not find one that didn’t get awful reviews. They break. They warp in the dishwasher. They’re useless.

OXO used to make a good one, but of course, they quit and replaced it with one that falls apart.

Until I figure out what to do about a salad spinner, I will be rinsing lettuce in the sink and standing the leaves up in a colander to dry. Then I have to store the ones I don’t eat right away. That involves bags.

I can use gallon zip bags at a minimum of about 13 cents each. Okay, I admit it. This adds up to maybe $12 per year, so I can probaby swing it, but it still annoyed me. The bags are not as versatile as a produce bag, they hold a lot less, and I can get produce bags for three cents each.

Needless to say, I just ordered 700 produce bags off Ebay.

“Wow, an eccentric saved himself $7 per year. Why should I care?” I’ll tell you why.

I have a big roll of Costco plastic wrap. It’s useful for covering bowls, but that’s about it. When you wrap things like cheese and bread, it’s a pain to use. It clings to itself and wads up, and you can never open it up so you can use its full length and width. It’s narrow, so it can be hard to get it to cover a dish or bowl well without using several wraps.

It gets on my nerves.

A big ol’ produce bag will hold a fairly large dish or bowl. You can just shove it in there. The bag won’t stick to itself, either.

“The bag won’t close!” Sure it will. If whatever you put in it is under a certain size, you can tie an overhand knot in the open end of the bag. If it’s bigger, you can rest the bag on top of the open end, closing it.

It’s genius.

Obvious genius.

I can also use a produce bag to line the bottom of Marv’s pooping basket. I have a big basket for him, and he sits on the handle when he has to poop. When I’m lucky. I used to put newspapers in the bottom, but I quit subscribing. A three-cent bag will do the job fine.

I already use big cheap bags to line his cage. They’re fantastic. So much cleaner and easier to handle than paper. Every day, he gets a new bag. His poop tray stays clean.

I bought the cheap bags for him, but now I use them for trash.

I found that trash bags ran around a quarter apiece, which is ridiculous. We buy very tough bags when we don’t really need them. If you’re a lazy sack of manure, and you only take your trash out once a week, okay, maybe you need a strong bag. You’ll want something tough so you can crush the trash every day with your shoe to make room, and while the trash is sitting in your kitchen, it will rot and feed roaches, ants, and mice. If you’re a clean person, you’ll remove all the edible garbage from the inside of your house every night, and you’ll get rid of it before it causes problems. You only need your bags to hold a reasonable amount of trash, and they don’t have to hold it very long.

I buy 30-gallon bags for 10 cents each. They’re wonderful. A truck just pulled up and dropped 1500 of them on my porch.

I was an idiot to buy Hefty bags. They’re for suckers. There’s a reason why you never see them at malls, stadiums, and so on. Their crews use cheap bags like mine.

I can still use zip bags and plastic wrap for certain purposes, but basically, I have switched over.

If I still lived in Coral Gables, where the nutbars have banned economical, environmentally sound plastic grocery bags, I would buy a stack of those bags and take them to the store with me. I would drop them in front of the cashier and say, “You encourage people to bring their own bags. Eat your words, baby.”

There is a ban on providing plastic bags for customers. There is no ban on customer-owned plastic.

I may get a couple of rolls of mid-size produce bags, between my trash bags and the produce bags I just ordered.

Of course, I feel bad about filling landfills with so much plastic. It probably adds up to half a pound per month. Clearly a crisis. I’m sure it would be a lot better to use several pounds of paper bags which never degrade once they’re covered with fresh trash. Your greenie virtue-signaling bags will still be intact when your great-great-grandchildren are in assisted living. Then there’s the environmental damage associated with the paper industry.

Don’t think about it. Listen to great geniuses like Jessica Alba and Whoopi Goldberg. How can they be wrong if they’re famous?

In Which Your Host Fails Yet Again to Heed Proverbs 26:4

From time to time, I have written things about Massad Ayoob’s really bad legal advice. He is a non-attorney and freelance writer who worked as a part-time cop in a town containing several times fewer people than a college basketball stadium. He has also worked as an expert witness from time to time, and many people consider him an authority on firearms tactics.

Mr. Ayoob is not a ballistician, gunsmith, engineer, physician, military veteran, or lawyer. He didn’t have gunfights with criminals when he was a cop; if he had, we would never have heard the end of it. Far as I can determine, his education is limited to a bachelor’s degree.

A number of people have given me hell for criticizing the Great Ayoob because he makes videos and writes articles in which he pretends to understand the law. He may be a true expert on protecting yourself with a gun, but he has no business talking about legal matters. He did an inept analysis of the Zimmerman case, and he has also coached people on the things they should say to the police after a shooting. Real attorneys coach them on what they should not say, which is…anything. Ayoob tells people to say nasty things about the deceased and claim innocence, and these are real stupid ideas.

An Internet commenter has accused Ayoob of propagating “Fuddlore” on the web. That is funny. I almost never type this, but LOL.

One thing that bugged me about this man’s uninformed, intractable defenders was that they often claimed he was a legal expert because he had testified in court cases as an expert witness. An expert witness is legally barred from testifying about the law. In a court, attorneys try to tell the judge what the law is (because often, he has no idea), and he makes all rulings of law. No witness gets to butt in. If Matlock himself were giving testimony in a case, and he tried to talk about the law, he would be interrupted and told to knock it off.

You don’t have to be a big brain to be an expert witness. If you go to sites listing the areas in which expert witnesses offer to testify, you will find they list things like marijuana cultivation. In South Florida, a portly local personality and famous fishing captain named Bouncer Smith has worked as an expert. He used to be the voice of the fishing hotline, which I called from time to time for tips on catching dolphin and sailfish. He got in trouble once for refusing to move his boat to help a man who was nearby, drowning. Hey, he had paying customers.

Imagine his expert testimony.

Plaintiff’s Counsel: Dr. Bouncer, let’s say it’s 10 a.m., mid-June, two to four-foot seas, a nice weedline but no birds working, nice color change, sunny, and you’re in 1200 feet of water off Haulover Beach with a heading of 172°. Finger mullet on a bead rig, or a staggered spread of Dolphin Jrs.?

Dr. Bouncer: That’s a trick question! No one uses a bead rig with finger mullet!

Defense Counsel: Bastard!

Would you hire Captain Bouncer to represent you in a divorce?

I looked up some things Ayoob allegedly said about his experience as a witness, and I found them pretty silly, not to mention impossible to believe.

Ayoob said he was a witness in a “court” case involving Christine Hansen, a disgruntled FBI agent, and other members of her class. He said, “I testified. The court listened.”

The obvious implications here are 1) there was a court case, 2) Ayoob testified in court, and 3) the court delivered an order implementing changes based on Ayoob’s remarks.

Today I learned that none of those things are true. There was no court. That’s the thread you pull to unravel the sweater.

Ayoob calls the case Christine Hansen et. al., v. Federal Bureau of Investigation. I used to try to look it up, and I couldn’t find it anywhere. I couldn’t understand why. You can find any federal case online, as long as an opinion was published. Today I found out there was no court, therefore no court case, therefore no Ayoob in-court testimony.

What actually happened, then? Hansen felt women were facing discrimination from the FBI, so she filed an EEOC complaint. Ayoob talked to the EEOC, which is the farthest thing from a court. The EEOC took Hansen’s side to some extent, and it supposedly made recommendations. The DOJ, which owns the FBI, had a special officer named Squire Padgett issue an internal opinion, and in that opinion, he agreed with the EEOC on a number of points, but not all. The DOJ made some changes based on the EEOC’s “recommendations.”

I use quotation marks because I have worked with the EEOC, and I don’t recall seeing them issue recommendations. They make findings and tell people they can sue. Maybe they do make recommendations. It has been a long time, and I have forgotten a lot of what I knew. Making recommendations would carry zero legal weight and add work (the civil servant’s kryptonite), so it would be pointless.

In certain types of employment cases, a plaintiff can’t run out and sue an employer right off the bat. Federal law requires the filing of an EEOC complaint, and after the EEOC makes its findings, it issues a right to sue letter. Then you go to federal court, and the actual case begins. If the EEOC takes too long to issue the letter, you can go to court without it.

The EEOC is kind of a joke. Forcing attorneys to work with it is almost a harassment tactic. They can’t stop lawsuits from going forward. All their investigations do is waste people’s time and money. Lawyers (plaintiffs’ lawyers, anyway) want to get into court and get their money. They are not interested in kissing and making up before the EEOC.

The EEOC has “investigators.” Unless the ones I know about are unusual, they don’t really do anything. I had an investigator call me, an attorney with a clear agenda, asking for facts. This made it unnecessary for this person to get out of a comfortable chair and do real work, and that was probably the goal.

I am amazed to see that Ayoob says he “testified.” I didn’t know the EEOC had hearings with witnesses, and I was an employment lawyer. Maybe I once knew and forgot. I don’t recall having a hearing in any of my cases. The web says they have examiners who function as administrative judges, so the EEOC is apparently like the National Labor Relations Board and the Florida Public Employee Relations Commission.

An administrative hearing is not court, so talking to the EEOC is not court testimony, and your words would presumably be inadmissible hearsay in a court anyway. I believe a court would expect you to show up to testify again. I can’t think of an applicable hearsay exception offhand. I don’t think Ayoob knows the definition of hearsay or how courts feel about it.

Thinking the EEOC is a court would be proof one doesn’t know much about the legal system.

Before my first visit to the EEOC, my dad told me what to expect. He let me know I was in for a laugh. When I arrived, I saw exactly what he described. Big, pleasant women padding around in houseshoes. The office was more like their apartment than a place of business. They had made it downright homey. It was like a slumber party at Oprah’s house.

Walking into a federal courtroom is a lot different. After you show the marshals you’re not armed, you go into a big, cold room where people’s lives are completely destroyed every day, and you wait with armed bailiffs and whoever else works there. You turn your cell phone off, and you check it and recheck it, because God forbid it should ring while Judge Thanos is talking. He may confiscate it and give it to a homeless shelter, and if he’s really nuts, you may get fined or held in contempt. There is no refrigerator with grandchildren’s drawings on it. There are no cookies. Forget about wearing houseshoes.

I can’t find the Hansen documents online. I could look them up somewhere with additional effort, but it would be a pain. What I know, I found in news articles.

The FBI has had problems with female agents, including their physical weakness and their unwillingness or inability to learn how to shoot a 10mm pistol. The FBI’s experts recommended the 10mm in the wake of the famous Miami shootout, which suggested their existing firearms weren’t too good. Female agents and near-men said it was too much for them, so, famously or infamously, the 10mm was cut down for girls and sissies, and the .40 S&W was created.

Anyway, Hansen and the gals complained about a number of things including transfers, assignments, and being weeded out through difficult-for-ladies firearms requirements. They probably complained about sexual harassment, too, because every big organization has a harassment problem.

Obviously, Ayoob couldn’t testify as an expert about everything, so it is extremely unlikely that he was asked about anything other than firearms. No one wants to know what Massad Ayoob thinks about punitive reassignments.

The DOJ’s man, Padgett, supposedly agreed with some or all of the EEOC’s recommendations. Hansen is quoted as saying she was not going to appeal the DOJ’s decision. It was good enough for her.

Did Ayoob persuade Padgett? Maybe, but maybe his input wasn’t needed. Government employers are not known for standing up to feminists. My best guess is that the DOJ planned to buckle from the word “go.” It was the Carter/Reagan era, and times were changing fast. The FBI may have been in the wrong on some issues, the government definitely didn’t want the limitless financial exposure of a trial, and the DOJ probably wanted to score PR points with the public.

If I went outside on a cloudy day and yelled “RAIN!!!”, and then it rained, it wouldn’t mean the clouds listened to me.

I don’t think it would.

The gals got some money, some FBI policies were changed, and the case never went to court. This is what is known as an out-of-court settlement, not a verdict.

Ayoob later made it look like he was very brave to testify, saying something about how he was told (by unnamed persons) his career would be over if he did. This, I do not believe. Maybe a bartender told him that. Maybe his wife told him. Maybe a bored federal prosecutor in a courthouse elevator said it as a prank. No professional would have said it with any seriousness.

No one cares what expert witnesses do. It is understood that they will show up and say whatever their clients want them to, to the greatest extent possible without having their pants, on the witness stand, actually burst into flames. No one ever leaves a courtroom and whispers, “That accountant is DEAD.”

It’s also unclear what repercussions Ayoob expected. Surely he didn’t expect a rendition to a CIA safe house stocked with rubber hoses and, maybe, a VCR and a shelf full of Mork and Mindy tapes.

Actually, that last part might not work on Ayoob, but it would definitely work on me. I would roll on my own mother to avoid hearing Robin Williams say “shazbat” again.

It has been suggested to me that Ayoob might have feared that law enforcement agencies and prosecutors would never hire him to testify again. The problem with that idea is that in criminal cases, he was a defense witness, and the government is not in the defense business. If he really testified in lots of criminal cases, he did so for defendants, against LEO’s and DA’s. If he testified in civil cases involving the government, he worked as a plaintiff’s witness, and the government is not in the business of suing itself.

Look, the government doesn’t need to pay self-taught magazine writers for expert testimony. They generally use people they already employ. People like Dr. Michael Baden and Dr. Martin Fackler. People like “Dr. Lak” in the OJ farce. They don’t have to pay these people insane expert witness fees; they’re already on salary. And they have lots of degrees.

If you’ve seen any criminal cases involving forensic experts, you’ve probably noticed the government’s witnesses were government employees. There must be exceptions, but the government probably never hired Ayoob, and I’m sure it wasn’t making his monthly nut. No DA ever said, “Send the pathologist from Johns Hopkins home! We found a guy who writes for Guns & Ammo!”

The government couldn’t retaliate by refusing to hire him again, because it never hired him to begin with, except to write speeding tickets in New Hampshire. It couldn’t tell lawyers not to hire him, either. First, it would be free advertisement for Ayoob. Second, lawyers would’t pay any attention to the FBI’s requests. Third, there would be ethical problems which would guarantee Ayoob more free advertising. “Hire the man who got 10 prosecutors disbarred!”

It makes no sense to say Ayoob was afraid of offending LEO’s and their pals. He has buddied around with that exact crowd his whole life. It’s strange, but he seems very popular with them even though he has tried to help free people, probably including guilty ones, they strove to imprison.

I don’t know how effective Ayoob was, but all over the US, really good expert witnesses make prosecutors and cops like like morons every day, they never turn up floating in canals or scattered around wood chippers, and they don’t get blackballed. No one cares.

Retaliating against an expert who testified in an EEOC hearing would be like hiring a hitman because you lost a nursing home shuffleboard tournament. “I’ll teach YOU to wax your pucks!!!”

It’s inconceivable to me that he was worried at all. If he was, he was deluded. I think he just wants people to think he’s a hero who took on the MAN and risked it all, when in reality, he was doing what thousands of expert witnesses do every day. Anyone who works in a town with 4 or 5 police officers, puts two bars on each side of his collar, and calls himself Captain Ayoob has to be eyed critically.

From now on, I’m Captain Steve, heading my farm’s private police force. I live alone with Marvin the parrot, so he’s my lieutenant. That makes the wife Officer Rhodah. I won’t tell her Marvin outranks her. I wonder if there is any way I could locate and buy Inspector Clouseau’s Silver Hornet.

Captain? What am I thinking? General. Generalissimo. Generalissimo Esteban.

You’re all errand boys sent by grocery clerks to collect bills.

The more I learn about this guy, the less impressed I am. His legal advice is crazy wrong. I used to think he was a useful source of information on defending myself, but now I question even that. I have read two of his books, and the information in them seemed basic, intuitive, and unproven. Anyone could write 300 pages of his best guesses and call it a treatise. There are zillions of real cops and veterans out there who have actually used firearms successfully, so why would I listen to a guy who has no real-world resume? A good Grand Theft Auto player probably knows more about the subject.

You don’t have to be John von Neumann to come up with good ideas for dealing with burglars.

Let me write a treatise right here, off the top of my head.

Don’t open the door to strangers. Get a camera system and identify everyone who comes to your house. If someone enters your house, lock yourself in a bedroom, call the police, and get your gun ready. If someone enters your yard, stay indoors, call the police, watch from a safe place, and get your gun ready. Do not go outside unless you like being bitten by dogs and shot full of .40 S&W.

Being a he-man sounds exciting, but the cops will do it for nothing, and you get to stay inside, alive, with your cocoa. If someone kills a burglar and gets charged with a crime, it won’t be you. You’ll be safe at home, watching him get the Chauvin treatment on TV. Never engage or even make your presence known unless you have no choice. If you can do it, run away and conceal yourself on another property until the cops arrive.

Use a rifle with a big magazine for home defense. If you use a pistol, you may shoot yourself, you’re likely to miss the burglar, and if you hit him, he may keep right on coming. A good rifle will shred his organs. If you’re really serious, get night vision and kill the lights.

Don’t use a shotgun. They hold too few rounds. If you use a shotgun anyway, use a semiauto. Pumps are unreliable, and they are slow for repeat shots.

Keep your cell phone charged all the time. Keep it on you. Keep shoes, a jacket, a flashlight, and ear protection beside your bed.

Use a pocket holster for concealed carry. Other holsters are very hard to draw from, and they can get you killed. A pocket holster is fast and safe, and you can put your hands in your pockets when confronted without letting anyone know you’re already holding your gun. Carry as much ammunition as you can stand to. No one ever walked away from a gunfight complaining about having too much ammo.

Get a Crimson trace pistol laser. They really work, and they require no brains to operate. They turn on automatically. Get a pistol with no manual safety, because you will forget to disengage a manual safety when you’re scared, and you will look like an idiot confidently pulling the trigger on a gun that won’t fire.

Keep a round in the chamber. You will never remember to rack the slide when you need to.

Learn to shoot well. A .22 short in the middle of the face can better than 10 9mm rounds in nonvital areas such as walls. Practice with whatever you choose to use.

Get bulletproof bedroom and closet doors with gun ports. Why not? Can’t hurt. Your walls won’t stop anything, so you might as well have something.

Carry a really big, really sharp knife. A machete would be good. A pointed sword is better. If you can’t hit the perp with your gun, you will need something else. The general rule with knife fights is that the long knife wins. This is why swords exist.

Buy a big, illegal laser pointer and the proper eye protection. You can blind your burglar from a good distance, and there will be no recoil or reloading to deal with.

Get three really big pit bulls or something similar. Before you shoot, turn them loose. Maybe you can prevent a gunfight, and they will be hell on destructive squirrels and coons.

If you’re the shooter, make someone else call the cops. Everything you say is admissible in court to put you away. You can deny anything someone else says, and it will also be hearsay, which may be excluded from evidence. Meanwhile, call your attorney. When your helper calls 911, they start recording while the phone is still ringing. Keep that in mind. Don’t say, “Remember the lies I told you to tell after I murdered this guy.” Actually, don’t use the advice in this paragraph. I’m not your attorney, and my legal advice may be wrong. See how I’m smarter than Massad Ayoob?

I just made all that stuff up, but it looks pretty good. Is it right? Am I an expert?

Should I write a book? Don’t think so.

Now that I seem to know what actually happened in the FBI case, I think I can rest.

Must be Nice to Have so Many Friends

Is it just me, or is the press doing its best to keep Alec Baldwin from being arrested?

When you see a celebrity in the news, you should never assume it just happened. It doesn’t work that way. Celebrities have publicity agents who call news outlets to plant stories. News outlets are constantly looking for content, and they don’t have the money or manpower to find enough on their own, so much of what you see comes to you via publicity agents.

Seems like every time I look at the news online, I see another story about Liz Hurley, a faded actress, putting on a bikini and posing provocatively. These stories aren’t news. Other celebrities put on bikinis every day, and we don’t see all of them on the web, because no one cares. Hurley’s career is just about over, so she is paying someone to send her photos around. Either that, or she does it herself.

Today I looked at Yahoo News and found 12 stories about actresses who were exposing themselves or drawing attention to their bodies. Journalists aren’t following these women around, hoping they’ll undress. The actresses start the ball rolling, and the journalists are contacted later.

What did we see in legitimate news stories right after Alec Baldwin shot his coworkers? Claims that he said he didn’t know the gun was loaded. Fair enough, but since then, a large number of stories that look very similar to each other have come out, saying he didn’t know the gun contained live ammunition.

A suspicious person would say media organizations called his publicist, or his publicist called them, and they ran with what the publicist told them.

We’re also seeing the phrase “prop gun” used over and over, as though a bullet had miraculously emerged from the barrel of a toy firearm. You can’t run someone through or cut them with a prop sword, because they’re blunt and dull; many are actually made from soft aluminum. You can’t shoot someone with a true prop gun, because they’re non-functional. Some are solid plastic. Baldwin didn’t use a “prop gun.” He used a plain old revolver that had been called into service as a prop. It’s remarkable that so many different copywriters are using the harmless-sounding phrase, “prop gun.” It can’t be coincidental.

It’s not a prop gun. It’s a gun that was used as a prop, or it’s a prop which is a gun. If Vin Diesel drove a Ferrari in a movie, no reporter would call it a “prop Ferrari.”

It’s actually quite weird that there is no such thing as a true, blank-firing prop gun. It would be simple to rechamber a gun so it wouldn’t accept SAAMI loads and then have a reloader make special blanks to fit it. Given the huge budget of a typical movie, spending a few grand per reusable firearm seem like a bargain. If a movie has a budget of 20 million dollars, doesn’t it make sense to spend, say, $10,000 modifying three pistols?

I don’t run Hollywood, though.

I think Baldwin is mounting a publicity drive, just as he surely has in the past to compete for awards and roles. I think he is under the mistaken impression that telling the world he didn’t know the gun was loaded will influence the police and prosecutor, who are not likely to care.

I think our liberal press wants to protect Baldwin, because he’s a zealous anti-Second-Amendment agitator, so they’re only too happy to take dictation.

Lay people have the idea that it’s smart to say things in your own defense after you commit a questionable act, but it’s not, because lay people generally don’t know whether they’re guilty or not. It’s completely possible to craft an excuse which is really a confession. Baldwin should be quiet and stop airing his excuses. He’s not helping himself, except possibly in the court of public opinion, which does not have the power to acquit him or protect him from civil liability.

It’s true that his efforts might serve to taint the body of potential jurors, but if a criminal case goes to court, the prosecutor will make a good effort to find people who aren’t contaminated, and he and the judge will make sure the jurors have good instructions which render Baldwin’s blame-shifting useless.

It’s sad to see big-time organizations publishing legal opinions from lawyers who don’t shoot or who are way out on the left. One paper quoted Ron Kuby, a famous far-left defense attorney who practices in New York City and used to be the partner of William Kunstler. Kuby backed Baldwin up. What would you expect? If you asked a young, clear-witted Rudy Giuliani the same questions, you would probably get a different answer. If Donald Trump shot someone accidentally, you might get a different answer from Kuby.

It’s this simple: the last person to touch the gun is the killer.

The last person to touch the gun is the killer.

The armor may be guilty of something. The assistant director may be guilty of something. Their guilt has no mitigating effect on Baldwin’s culpability.

Every gun person knows the person holding the gun has 100% responsibility for everything that happens. He’s responsible for checking to see if it’s loaded. He’s responsible for keeping it pointed in a safe direction. He’s responsible for keeping his finger off the trigger until he has to shoot. If there is a safety, he’s responsible for engaging it. You can’t blame the person who handed the gun to you. That person may bear some responsibility for his negligence, but if you shoot someone, you and only you are guilty of manslaughter or murder, and you’re guilty of the full-blown charge. Not murder lite. There is no such thing.

Here is the New Mexico Supreme Court’s statement of the elements of involuntary manslaughter; I stole it from another site:

All that it is necessary to establish for involuntary manslaughter by the use of a loaded firearm is that a defendant had in his hands a gun which at some time had been loaded and that he handled it, whether drunk, drinking or sober, without due caution and circumspection and that death resulted.

It’s not a hard offense to commit.

Yesterday, I listed a bunch of factors that make things look bad for Baldwin. Today, there is a new one in the news: people on the set used the revolver for shooting practice before Baldwin killed his cinematographer.

What possible reason could anyone on a movie set have for possessing live ammunition? It’s like they were hoping someone would get shot. And using the same gun for shooting and playing make-believe in a room full of vulnerable people on the same day…it beggars comprehension.

The news says Baldwin was practicing drawing the gun. That means he drew the gun, pointed it at the victim, and pulled the trigger. The gun is said to be a single-action revolver. If that’s true, he also had to pull back the hammer, because otherwise, the gun wouldn’t have been fired. The hammer is the safety.

To sum up, he accepted a loaded gun and didn’t check it. He pointed it at two people who should not have been in front of him. He cocked it. He put his finger on the trigger. He fired.

You can blame the armorer and assistant director all day, but Baldwin did at least 5 negligent things after they were out of the picture. If he knew the gun had been fired on the set, his negligence is even worse. It means he knew the likelihood there was ammunition in it was higher.

It looks like this to me:

1. The people who used the gun for target practice were negligent because they brought ammunition to a movie set and put it in a gun that was supposed to be used as a prop.

2. The armorer was negligent because she put a loaded gun on a cart she knew would be used to hold it for Baldwin.

3. The assistant director was negligent because he didn’t check the gun when he held it, and because he announced that it was safe.

4. Baldwin was negligent, for reasons mentioned above.

It will be a remarkable thing if no one is charged with a crime. Everyone on the location was depending on the armorer, the assistant director, and Baldwin to protect their lives, and all three of them appear to have failed.

It takes less than two seconds to open a revolver’s cylinder and look for cartridges. A revolver’s barrel has no chamber where an additional round can hide, and it has no box magazine to push new rounds in front of the firing pin.

I don’t want to see anyone charged, but it’s still irritating to see the obvious spin. I do believe it’s spin. I think it’s contrived and dishonest. I don’t think it’s just happening on its own.

The world is extremely unfair, and the press’s treatment of Baldwin seems like a great visual aid to prove it. You can’t trust human beings as far as you can throw them, and Satan looks after people who serve him, at least temporarily.

I’ve been praying for Baldwin to avoid conviction, largely because he’s not a likable person, and I think it’s important for me to pray for people I don’t like. Doesn’t mean I think someone else is to blame for what he did.

The worst things that can happen to Baldwin on the criminal side are an 18-month sentence and a $5000 fine, which make New Mexico sound like a fortunate place to have a tragic accident. I’m assuming there will be no separate charge for shooting the director, but if there were, the punishment would be less severe. A conviction won’t put Baldwin away for good or destroy his golden years, so at least there is that.

The thoughts I’ve had regarding the case seem to be in line with what many actual criminal lawyers say, so I feel relieved. I don’t think I’ve made a complete fool of myself by opining outside of my former fields or choosing not to do in-depth research.

Time to shift gears.

Yesterday I had some interesting experiences. I spent a lot of time with my parrot Marvin. Sometimes strange bird instincts can make him aloof or crabby, but yesterday he was very affectionate.

He loves it when I go to his cage and make the toys move. He likes to entertain at home, and he seems to enjoy thinking I like his toys as much as he does. I swung them around and let him attack them and wrestle with them and so on. I’m making a point of doing this daily.

Throughout the day, he kept demanding attention, so I spent a lot of time in front of the TV, rubbing his feathers. He shook and coughed up half-digested food. That’s how African greys show they’re overcome with emotion.

I thought about what we were doing, and I realized how important it was, even though he was just a bird.

Years ago, God told me he had created the universe for love. This is clearly true, because Jesus said the most important commandments were to love God and to love other people as we love ourselves. Love, not work, raising families, or obeying rules, is supposed to be the center of our lives.

My wife is 8,000 miles away. I don’t have kids. Right now, the only living being I can show love to in person is a bird. I have to make the most of that. If you don’t demonstrate affection often enough, you can get rusty and blocked. You can also forget your purpose.

I was aware of these things already. Before my other bird, Maynard, died, I was trying to show both birds that I loved them. It was important to me that they feel it. It wasn’t enough to just clean cages and serve food. I had to spend a lot of time touching them.

I knew love was important before yesterday, but now I have a fresh appreciation, and I am grateful for it.

Thinking about love and how I have felt it pour from God during his visits, I thought about the state of the world. Churches don’t teach love. They talk about it and fill the air with empty gas, but they’re more excited about money, obedience, appearances, and control.

The world at large is full of hate now. Hate is the red horseman of the apocalypse. A powerful spirit is at work in the world, driving us to detest each other, and it’s working.

Yesterday I learned that Facebook drives hate on purpose. That surprised me. I knew Facebook was evil, but I didn’t know how deep it ran.

I found out that Facebook promotes irritating material more strongly than other content. Facebook has little buttons accompanying content, and you can click and say you liked something or that it made you mad. Facebook gives content points based on clicks, and the more points something gets, the more people Facebook shows it to.

It turns out an angry click produces five points, but a “like” click only generates one.

Someone wanted it that way. Someone at Facebook sat down and decided it should be company policy to provoke people. A machine didn’t do it.

Facebook has devoured the world. It must have addicts in the billions. Imagine the evil influence its point system is exerting.

Facebook is just one part of the apparatus. People are tearing at each other all over the web, and they’re foaming at the mouth at protests.

The protest mentality is vile. Henry David Thoreau, leftist hero, has not helped humanity; he has helped it on its way to self-destruction. He advocated civil disobedience, and it has become so popular, people think it’s always okay to protest and break the law. It’s not. If you absolutely have to do things like that, it should be for a good reason. Your hurt feelings over people using pronouns you don’t like is not a good reason. Your non-articulated rage at undefined, usually imaginary fascism is not a good reason.

We protest over everything now, and many of us have decided “protest” means “riot,” which is like saying, “Bactine” is just like “amputation.” Leftists now openly say, “Rioting works.” No, it doesn’t. Getting in the habit of rioting is like buying a rabid dog to attack your neighbors. Sooner or later, it will do the same thing to you. You can achieve a short-term goal through rioting, but you will end up causing more harm than good. Young people aren’t smart enough to understand this, so rioting will probably increase and consume the world soon.

As Revelation 6 predicts, we live in a world of hate, lack, and pestilence. It’s fatiguing.

A lot of new rapture-dream videos are appearing on Youtube and Tiktok. I’ll tell you what people say in their dreams when they think they’ve left the earth for good. They don’t say, “Oh, no! I’ll never finish barber school!” They don’t say, “Send me back! Give me one more chance!” They thank God. They’re delirious with joy. They don’t want to come back. I understand. I can’t wait to go.

The world is now full of temptation, more than ever. Provocation is temptation. Sexualizing society is temptation. International tension is temptation. Coronavirus is a gold mine of temptation. People are beating each other in the streets over it.

People love it when they think they’ve left Earth, because they think they’re finally done with temptation. One of the big draws of the Messianic age is that Satan and his imps will be locked away, so there will be no army of demons tempting people. Imagine what that will be like.

It will be like the difference between my life in Miami and my life in Ocala, multiplied manyfold.

Why are people forced to live in a world packed with evil? Because God wants us to be tempted. It sounds awful, and we know God himself doesn’t tempt, but it’s true. Everyone has to face temptation. Jesus saw to it that he faced it.

In order for there to be judgment and salvation, there has to be temptation. This is why Satan will be released at the end of the Messianic age. The Bible says so. People who are born during the Messianic age won’t know what temptation is until Satan is released from his septic tank.

Temptation is getting to be more than we can take, and that’s a clue to where we are on God’s timeline. God says the tribulation will be “the hour of temptation that shall come upon all the world.” Things aren’t going great now, but they will be much worse in the near future. Suffering will increase, and people will be told the mark of the beast is the only relief.

China is having a covid outbreak. That’s a big deal. I wondered why China had been spared, given the horrible things that are done in China, routinely. Now I think it may be because China supplies so many things. If China had fallen apart in 2020, the supply chain would probably have gone down almost completely, and there would have been greater suffering than God wanted to permit at that time. Maybe he held China’s outbreak back until he was ready. Maybe we’re about to find out what empty shelves really look like.

Personally, I would like to see the pimple burst sooner than later. I am ready to leave, and I am tired of seeing ignorant, base, deluded people receive power to libel and harm people like me. I don’t want to be here when they rule over us the way they came to rule in places like Cuba and Cambodia.

I saw something in passing the other day. I saw depression characterized as “catastrophizing.” The idea is that you tell yourself things are going to be much worse than they really will be, and you get depressed. I thought that was interesting. I don’t get depressed on behalf of myself, but I expect catastrophic things for the world as a whole. I’m cheerful and full of energy, and I think my future is inexpressibly bright, but at the same time, my hopes for the world are destroyed. It’s like being depressed by proxy, only without the down feelings.

Some texts call the angels “watchers.” They have to stand by and witness the true catastrophes human beings bring on themselves. I feel like a watcher.

When you’re depressed, your expectations of catastrophe are delusional. When you’re a prophecy-believing Christian, they’re much more solid.

One interesting thing about showing Marv unrestrained love is that it makes him vulnerable. If we were a little reserved, he wouldn’t have very high expectations. The more we let loose, the more he gives in and trusts me, and the more he will expect from me every day.

Sometimes we hold back from involving ourselves with others because we don’t think we can follow through. Life is uncertain, and one person may have many creatures who are attached to him and expect him to keep coming through. Nobody wants to adopt a puppy a month before starting military service. No one with cancer would want to adopt a desperate orphan. Once you engage with someone, you have to accept the commitment. It’s intimidating.

I have wondered if I made my pets love me too much. I tried to do the right thing by engaging with them, but maybe I made them miss me more when I wasn’t available. Birds pull their feathers out when they’re lonely, and Maynard sometimes pulled his feathers more when I was giving him more attention.

I try to make my wife feel as loved as possible, and I won’t stop out of fear, but I’m aware that the more passionately we love each other, the more pain we will suffer if one of us is taken away.

One of the nice things about heaven is that no one will die or move away. Commitment in heaven won’t put anyone at risk.

I watched a couple of movies this week. They are part of a series. They’re about a divorced police chief.

In the first movie, he moves across the country, and his old dog starts refusing food. Soon, the cop finds out the dog is sick and has to be put down. In other installments, there are other dogs.

We’re supposed to feel sorry for the cop because he’s a stand-up guy who cares about others and goes above and beyond the call of duty to help them. We’re supposed to feel bad when his dog dies. He puts off euthanasia because he can’t face it. His love for the dog is too intense.

The thing that made me marvel is this: throughout the series, he barely touches the dogs. You never see moments of shared happiness or affection. What dog lover keeps a distance? That’s for cat people. Cat owners get cats in order to avoid intimacy. Dogs are effusive with their love.

I enjoyed the movies a lot, but I don’t see why the protagonist was so reserved. It makes no sense to me. It was a strange way to portray love. The dogs were miserable. The owner was miserable. They lived in the same house. There was nothing to prevent them from being close, but the man sat in a chair, and the dog lay on the floor across the room, and that was about it.

I guess I’m rambling, but I look forward to heaven. This place is getting disgusting.

MORE

It’s amazing how no one listens to me. A story just came out, and here is what the DA looking at Baldwin’s case says:

Ms. Carmack-Altwies took issue with descriptions of the firearm used in the incident as “prop-gun,” saying that the terminology, which is used in some of the court documents related to the case, could give the misleading impression that it was not a real gun.

“It was a legit gun,” she said, without naming specifically what kind of firearm was used. “It was an antique-era appropriate gun.”

Sound familiar? Scroll up.

Not good new for Baldwin, but nothing is settled yet.

One More Appalling Threshold

I’m still not over gay Superman.

Ever since I heard about DC’s new Superman’s status as the sort of superhero who lets other men use his tortured orifices for sexual pleasure, I have been texting people, groaning aloud, and complaining to Marvin. How can you respect a superhero who has to have another man get off his back before saving you?

In remarkably timely related news, it looks like archaologists have found Sodom. I don’t mean Christian archaeologists with high school educations. I mean secular archaeologists who rely on traditional scientific methods.

In southern Jordan, to the northeast of the Dead Sea, there is a tel. A tel is a mound where a settlement used to be. The tel is named Tall el Hammam. Scientists have been working it over for a long time. They now say they believe it was bigger and more important than Jerusalem in its time, and they believe it was blown apart and melted in around 1650 BC, putting it in the temporal ballpark with the destruction of Sodom.

Their theory is that a meteor exploded above it, because the city got so hot, there is no other natural explanation. Clay and stone melted. The people of the Bronze Age couldn’t create that kind of heat.

I don’t know why the Bronze Age was called the Bronze Age, when steel was already being produced, but then I am to historians what Joy Behar is to political scientists.

Meteors are interesting because go off like bombs even though they’re made of things that aren’t explosive. They move really fast, and that causes them to blow up. Meteor craters are usually round, even though meteors don’t usually hit the earth head-on. They’re round because they blow up when they hit the earth. Their kinetic energy is so great, when they hit the earth, the energy suddenly turns into immense heat, so a lump of iron and nickel can go off like a cherry bomb.

Nearly all meteors burn up or explode in flight. Friction with the air can heat a meteor until it explodes. It is believed that the famous Tunguska blast of 1908 was caused by a big meteor that exploded before it could hit the ground in Siberia. It blew up with more energy than all but the biggest fission bombs, and it looks like whatever flattened Sodom was even bigger.

The scientists found debris over a wide area, including severed limbs without bodies. They think whatever hit Sodom destroyed some things with heat and others with explosive forces.

Is Tall el Hammam Sodom? The flippant answer to that question is, “No, it’s one of the dozens of other huge cities by the Dead Sea that were blown up and melted in the 17th century BC.” I think it’s Sodom. If not, where is Sodom, and why isn’t Tall el Hammam mentioned in the Bible? I’m going to go with it.

Gays like to say Sodom was only destroyed because the Sodomites were selfish. They like to say that when they’re not saying the Bible is nonsense, I mean. The truth is that homosexuality was a huge factor. Sodom was also destroyed because of greed, cruelty, and selfishness, but the final straw was the attempted rape of the angels by a gang of men, and later in the Bible, the term “sodomite” is used to mean “homosexual,” not “greedy, selfish, cruel person.” The Hebrews became greedy and selfish, but God never called them sodomites because of it. He called homosexuality an abomination. He never said that about greed or selfishness.

Did a meteor hit Sodom? I doubt it. I think it was just God’s power, perhaps wielded through angels. God doesn’t need meteors to get things done. He still does miracles, and they don’t involve obvious natural means. An event which has a natural cause is not a miracle. By definition, an miracle has to defy nature.

Joe Biden has turned America’s troops and diplomats into a legion of homosexuality conquistadors, we’re putting rainbow flags up in countries where same-sex romance is about as welcome as Ebola, Superman’s bodily openings are being used like a girl’s, and suddenly, the location of Sodom has been revealed, confirming the account in Genesis.

It must all be coincidence.

California just passed a law preventing toy stores from having separate aisles dedicated to boys and girls, and it’s also illegal to use pink and blue to distinguish the sexes. Did I fail to mention that? I should have thrown that in.

Over 10% of Americans have the misfortune to live in California, so when California passes a sick law involving products or retailing, companies that have to comply with it are likely to force California’s standards on the rest of us to reduce costs. I wonder if toy stores in relatively healthy states are going to start obeying California’s gendrification law.

It’s horrifying to think that flakes elected by Californians can rule over the rest of us, but it’s true, just as it’s true that extremist Muslim leaders changed the security rules for airline passengers the world over.

I can’t wait to see what happens next. The blessed get more and more blessed, which is wonderful to see, and the cursed get more and more cursed, which is, sadly, interesting because of morbid curiosity. The rapture will be the culmination of a centrifuging process. Nobody will remain where they are. Everyone will ascend or descend.

I can’t relax. I guess I will be wound up for the rest of the evening.

Get my Pod Ready

I talk to my parrot Marvin a lot, which only means I’m reciprocating. The other day, I found myself walking around the kitchen saying, “It’s really happening. The world is really ending.” He didn’t have much to say about it. He talks mostly about peanuts. But it was comforting to have a listener.

Marv’s new favorite thing to say is, “peanuts and bird.” I think the meaning is obvious. It’s like saying, “Pawn to queen five,” sort of. It’s a delivery request.

Can a pawn move to queen five? I don’t know. I don’t play chess.

I was talking to my wife this morning, and she was enjoying her new home in Zambia. Seems like she never gets out of the tub. I thought about the mild stress I had felt about setting her up over there. I want to be generous, but I don’t want to endanger our futures by overspending. The stress has melted away. I thought about that.

These days, I feel as though the funds I have were Monopoly money. I feel like it doesn’t matter what I spend, because we won’t be here long.

Remember The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Arthur Dent’s village was about to demolish his house, and he was very upset. His friend Ford Prefect took him to a pub while the bulldozer was sitting in his yard, waiting to start, and he ordered pints and peanuts for Arthur and himself. He told the bartender to serve them quickly because the world was going to end. At first, the bartender didn’t pay much attention, but he realized something was wrong when Ford left him two extravagant tips. Pounds were about to lose all their value, so why not spend them?

Douglas Adams is the best humorist I know of. A modern Voltaire. It’s a shame he was a proselytizing, belligerent atheist. I will never meet him. He dropped dead while still holding onto his pathological beliefs. When we are judged and the question of salvation is resolved, we won’t get any credit for good intentions or good works. Nice people who wrote funny books and rejected Jesus will go to hell.

Voltaire was an atheist, too. It’s one of the things that make people view him as progressive. He was an atheist before atheism was cool.

In Paris, there is a collection of tombs for famous people. It’s a sort of secular pantheon, and aptly, it’s in a building called the Pantheon. Victor Hugo is there. So is Marie Curie. They moved dead celebrities in, and Voltaire is one of them.

The Pantheon was originally a church, but it was commandeered for secular use. Fitting.

The Pantheon’s mausoleum is for people who are revered for their allegedly positive contributions to Western civilization. Voltaire’s encased body is there, still receiving the adulation of intellectuals. Where is Voltaire himself, though? Probably not receiving adulation. Very much the opposite. He is probably crying in hell, where his pride likely failed to follow him when he died two and a half centuries ago. Everyone is humiliated in hell, no matter how cocky they were up here. There are probably some people who keep spitting at God even from the pit, but my guess is that the majority spend their time crying, screaming, and begging with no dignity at all.

In November, they’re putting a plaque for Josephine Baker in the Pantheon. What are the odds she made it to heaven? She did a lot of things to help France during World War Two, and she was a civil rights activist. She also adopted poor children. It all sounds nice, but she was a famous stripper who was promiscuous with both sexes, and she didn’t do her good deeds in the name of God.

I guess she was the black Marlene Dietrich.

Atheists and even many Christians think God takes you to heaven for being good, but it’s completely untrue. You can do no end of nice things, but if you reject Jesus, you go to hell anyway. People who live altruistic lives while rejecting Jesus are like ectopic pregnancies. They are headed for problems. The entrance to heaven is like the birth canal, and there are no spiritual caesarians.

Guess I’m digressing. Or am I? The underlying theme hasn’t changed. The things we think are important here generally are not, and that becomes increasingly obvious as we get closer to our departures.

Yesterday, motivated by the shortages most people haven’t noticed yet, I went to Wal-Mart and Publix. I spent about $175 on things like beans, flour, protein bars, and canned meat. I replenished the disaster rations I’ve been carelessly eating.

Costo says paper towels are going to disappear again, but there are plenty here. I picked up 24 rolls. I noticed that Wal-mart’s selection of dried beans was pretty bad, and the big bags of rice I wanted to buy were not there. The rice in the main area was wiped out. They still had some big bags in the Hispanic region, but I passed them by. Products aimed at Hispanics tend to be low-quality.

I got some New York strips at acceptable prices. These days, $10 per pound is a good deal. It used to be the everyday price. I paid $9 and $10, at different stores.

I don’t like strips all that much, but they’re way better than nothing, and deals on choice rib eyes are rare.

I have a ton of oatmeal. When the rapture comes, it will not find me constipated. The oatmeal will counteract the rice, pasta, white bread, and Velveeta.

If they don’t take away our electricity, I will be fine for a few months of famine. Without electricity, I won’t have water or any way to cook food. I wish I lived in beautiful Tennessee, on a farm with springs, a gas well, and soil that grows things other than water oaks and weeds.

Are my acorns edible? I should check. They don’t sound appetizing. I think there is something you can do with them to render them useful, but I don’t know what it is. I have mountains of them.

WebMD says you can eat acorns if you pulverize them, soak them, and keep discarding the water until it’s colorless. Yay. Whee. Rapture me, please.

If famine outlasts my supplies, I would just as soon die as subsist on squirrels and crows. I think those would be my only fall-back staples once Sonny’s BBQ closes. Even Euell Gibbons would have a hard time finding wild food on my property.

Rhodah is nervous about Tennessee. She is afraid of racism. You can’t let other people tell you where to live, though, and my guess is that there are plenty of places in rural Tennessee where they are more concerned about people’s religious and political beliefs than they are about race. I would think there would be room for two charismatic Christian conservatives who showed up with thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Is it okay for a Christian to use lethal force in self-defense? It’s a question I revisit from time to time.

I had this thought the other day: Jesus told us to turn the other cheek if we were struck, but he didn’t say to stand still and let people stab us with swords. A slap on the cheek is not that big a deal, but other types of battery are. Even dangerous people who know a lot about fighting routinely counsel us to avoid fights and run away, but they don’t usually tell us to lie down and die.

There is a former Navy SEAL named Jocko Willink, and he looks exactly like his name sounds. His head, all by itself, looks like it could defeat a battalion. He is a scary-looking dude. The other day, I saw a little bit of a video in which he provided people with advice. He said that if someone punched him, his first choice would be to run away.

I kind of wonder if he was telling the truth, given the ease with which he could subdue most people, but I am relaying his advice accurately. He said fighting leads to a lot of problems, which is true. He and Jesus are in agreement when it comes to minor batteries. Would he let someone shoot him or his wife, though? Bet not.

I would appreciate it if someone who reads my blog would find Jocko Willink and punch him in the face, just to see how honest he is. I would do it myself, but my sinuses are bothering me, and you know how that is.

Jesus told the disciples to buy and carry swords. What for? He discouraged Peter from using a sword to save him from the murderous priests who had him tortured to death, but he let him whack one of their servants first. This happened on a special occasion. The priests had come, and it was important for Jesus to die. Would he have stopped Peter a week earlier, when a premature murder would have prevented the crucifixion?

The death of Jesus was necessary. My death by murder isn’t, as far as I can see. My blood has no value. It can’t save anyone. No one who eats my body can claim to have taken communion. Would Jesus have told Peter not to defend me?

Was it necessary for Paul to take beatings and stonings? Maybe Jesus would have preferred to see him use a sword to save himself. I wonder.

The apostles made a lot of mistakes. No one likes to talk about that. They had public arguments, so obviously, they weren’t right all the time.

Wow. Superman is a sodomite. I just found out after writing the last paragraph. DC Comics has a new Superman–the primary messiah substitute in American comics–who does it with dudes. Sorry about the abrupt transition.

Wow. Wow. What’s next? Deepfake John Wayne gay porn? James Bond has been fairly gay since Casino Royale, so there is no point in wondering about him. Maybe they’ll create a deepfake Eastwood character called Dainty Harry.

Yesterday, I started thinking about the long history of seemingly gay Bond villains. It startled me.

1. Dr. No. No. Although he was a single man who lived on an island with other men, so I could be wrong.

2. From Russia with Love. Robert Shaw’s Donald Grant was a bemuscled gym rat with bleached blond hair and a full-body winter tan, he appeared to be oiled in at least one scene, and he certainly liked tussling with other men. Not sure, though.

3. Goldfinger. Single man who favored shorts back when they raised eyebrows. Could be.

4. Thunderball. Emilio Largo lived on an island with men who spent a lot of time swimming together, he wore a shorty wetsuit, and he always had an incredible tan and perfectly coiffed salt and pepper hair. A possible.

5. You Only Live Twice. Blofeld…gay, gay, gay, gay GAY. A prim old man who sat around stroking a cat. Come on. He could have been Elton John’s dad.

6. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I don’t know. No one saw this movie.

7. Diamonds are Forever. Jimmy Dean was definitely straight, but Blofeld was still the uncle who always shows up for Thanksgiving dinner unaccompanied, drinks too much, and cries because everyone else gets pecan pie before he does.

8. Live and Let Die. Kananga seemed butch, but Geoffrey Holder made up for it in spades. He was the first Rupaul.

9. The Man With the Golden Gun. Christopher Lee was effeminate and dressed way too well to be straight. And he cried because an elephant died.

10. The Spy Who Loved Me. Don’t remember. I couldn’t stand Roger Moore, who was, himself, a bit buoyant in his Ballys.

11. Moonraker. Michael Lonsdale’s Drax did not exactly ooze testosterone. I would not want him to be my son’s scoutmaster.

12. For Your Eyes Only. Honestly, I don’t remember this one, except that Bond had to fend off an amorous minor who was determined to get him to commit a felony with her.

13. Octopussy. The villain was Louis Jourdan. Draw your own conclusions.

14. A View to a Kill. Christopher Walken’s Zorin will remind you that Walken got his start as a dancer.

15. The Living Daylights. Timothy Dalton made us all miss George Lazenby. No idea what happened in this movie.

16. Goldeneye. Didn’t see it.

17. Tomorrow Never Dies. Didn’t see it, but Jonathan Pryce generally comes off as masculine in his other roles, in spite of being nearly English.

18. The World is not Enough. Robert Carlyle’s Renard had that “They always picked me last in gym class” feel, but he also had a crush on Sophie Marceau.

19. Die Another Day. Toby Stephens’ Gustav Graves and Pierce Brosnan seemed positively infatuated with each other. Their sweaty fencing match was like two storks doing a courtship dance.

The Craig films, or at least some of them, were fit to sit on the same DVD shelf as Gore Vidal’s sometimes-troubling Ben Hur. The gross Mads Mikkelsen rope scene, gay Q, Bond failing to close the deal with the tantalizing Moneypenny, Bond and Javier Bardem flirting, the return of tiny, Italian-slippered Blofeld, an aging Craig fighting Freddie Mercury…I’d have to say there were undercurrents.

Maybe they’ll rewrite our history books and put George Washington in bed with Thomas Jefferson. In the future, we’ll go past saying everyone is gay and every really admirable historical figure was gay. We’ll say everyone has always been gay. Children will wonder how we kept the race going.

We’ll have to transpose “surrogate” into hieroglyphics and cuneiform in carve it on obelisks and tablets. We can make some fake Dead Sea Scrolls, but to keep up with the times, we can see to it they’re discovered in Provincetown.

Superman is a homosexual. It was inevitable, but still. It’s terrible, but it’s impossible not to laugh a little. Who’s next? Winnie the Pooh? Tom Sawyer? Mickey Mouse? The Grinch? Well, Jim Carrey already went there.

If there is one thing that would make Lex Luthor go straight, this has to be it.

Everything around me is exploding in slow motion. It’s like the verse from the Revelation in which the stars fall from the sky.

I should buy a few more groceries and some batteries, and then maybe I’ll burn, “Come get me, Jesus,” into my lawn and sit outside hopefully in an Adirondack chair.

What fresh insanity will tomorrow bring? The question is chilling. I lack the imagination to guess.

Puppy-Skinner as Protagonist

It’s funny how little things can make big impressions.

Today I somehow saw the movie Cruella mentioned. I have seen the title before, but I never thought much about it. Disney gives me the creeps, and besides, I’m an adult. Today I thought about it, and I said something to the only other person present: Marvin the parrot. I said something like, “Don’t tell me. It’s about how Cruella de Vil is actually the victim.”

Why did I say that? Because we live in a time when people love evil and hate good. I’ve seen the evil-as-good theme pushed a number of times in movies, TV shows, and musical performances. I think it’s part of Satan’s Antichristian offensive.

In 1959, Disney made Sleeping Beauty. In that movie, the character Maleficent was a fairy, or demon, as Christians would call her. She is called “the Mistress of All Evil.” When Sleeping Beauty is born, Maleficent is not invited to her christening, but she shows up anyway and curses the princess. We all know the story. Maleficent should have been caught and burned. She was not the protagonist.

In 2014, Disney made an eponymous movie about Maleficent herself. In the 2014 film, she’s not evil at all. She’s a very sweet demon with ugly brown wings and nasty horns. If she’s not the villain, who is? The human race, of course. She falls in love with a man, and he amputates her wings so his dad can take over a forest. Nice. Disney combined so many elements of Satan’s agenda: humanity as a pest species, misandry, demons as victims, and nature as something more valuable than human beings.

Of course, Maleficent eventually defeats the prince who vivisected her. She’s the heroine of the story. The prince falls to his death because he continues trying to kill her. Because, you know, that’s how human males always are. They drive pickup trucks and eat factory veal, for crying out loud.

The name “Maleficent” means “doing harm.” Funny name for someone you’re supposed to admire.

After I spoke to Marv, who was not interested, I thought I should check Wikipedia for details about Cruella. Maybe I wasn’t being fair. Maybe I was judging things based purely on Trump-loving, Bible-clinging bias. I took a look.

No. I wasn’t unfair.

In case you don’t know, Cruella de Vil was the hateful antagonist of the cartoon 101 Dalmatians and its sequels. She was rich and vicious, and she wanted to cut 101 Dalmatian puppies up and wear their fur.

In the new movie, Cruella’s living stepmother is murdered by Cruella’s biological mother, using Dalmatians. The mother abandoned Cruella and handed her over to a servant to be murdered. The servant hid her instead and raised her. Eventually, the real mom finds out and commands a herd of Dalmatians to run the stepmom off a cliff.

It’s an amazing thing. We started out with innocent puppies who needed to be saved from a psychopathic narcissist, and now the puppies are killers and the psychopath is the heroine.

It’s as if Satan is making fun of us. We’re so crazy and blind, he’s filling our entertainment with blatant reversals of good and evil, knowing creatures created in God’s image will clap and cheer. I think Satan takes pleasure in making people who look like God applaud the very evil that destroys them.

How far off can the rapture be? How much deeper into insanity can we plunge?

I used to go in for virtue-reversal entertainment. I enjoyed TV shows centering around the character Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I got used to liking vampires and demons. I don’t know what I was thinking. I thought it was harmless fantasy, but a long time ago, God told me this: we become what we imitate. I’m glad I dropped that stuff.

Similar reversals took place in the Hannibal Lecter films. In the first movie, Lecter was a vile insect who needed to be murdered in his cell. Later, he became a tortured individual who generally killed people who really deserved it. He was full of rage because his little sister had been eaten by cannibals, so it was understandable if he was cranky.

The author of the Lecter books wrote that Lecter specialized in killing rude people, calling them “free-range rude.” How could anyone complain about that?

There was also a heroic TV serial killer named Dexter. He channeled his sickness for good, killing other criminals.

Antiheroes are the new heroes. I mean that in two ways. First, they’re obviously heroes in many, many modern works, so they are doing what heroes do. Second, they have become just as trite as heroes. There are only so many plots movies and books can have, and we started scraping the bottom of the barrel maybe 60 years ago. Writers were fatigued with actual heroes, because they had been done to death. They fell back on evil heroes to pump some new blood into the system. Now evil heroes are a bore, but writers can’t come up with anything further, so we are stuck with them.

Dad is a hitman who uses his ninja skills to rescue his kids from the Proud Boys. Uncle Bob is a closet vampire who saves the town from the Westboro Baptist Church. Mom is a hooker who kills a pedophile priest. Enough, already.

This weekend, a California teacher became famous for a) removing the American flag from her room because it made her uncomfortable, and b) telling kids they could pledge allegiance to the sodomy flag, which she had put in the room because it did NOT make her uncomfortable.

I can’t even guess what my parents would have done had they found out my school forced me to sit in a room with a flag celebrating men shoving their male organs into each other’s mouths and anuses. As for pledging allegiance to it, well, there might have been assault charges.

I think it will be far worse in a year, when leftists have even more clout. Sexual deviants were very polite and timid when they didn’t have power, but when they’re in charge, they are different. Ask any good-looking young man who has been in prison or served on a naval vessel. I suspect homosexuality will become the dominant preference very soon, and once that happens, no man’s rear end will be safe. I think we will soon see Sodom-style rape mobs. It has happened before. There is no reason why it can’t happen again, especially during the tribulation, when there will be nothing left on earth to mitigate evil.

The trend is already present. In Great Britain, male rape has increased by a factor of NINE since 1995. Of course, that only includes reported offenses. Many men keep their humiliation private. GQ, hardly a Christian publication, says that when a man joins the military, his chances of being raped increase by a factor of 10. Yearly rape figures for men in our armed services run between 10,000 and 20,000.

Strange how no one mentioned these things when gays were pushing for the right to serve.

Useful info for modern men: the right to use lethal force applies to rape victims. You can shoot, mutilate, burn, blind, or otherwise harm a potential rapist without committing a crime. Good thing to know if you have doubts about your coworkers, youth pastor, camp counselor, or scoutmaster.

I can’t even guess what bizarre movie remakes are in store for us. Independence Day with city-vaporizing extraterrestrials as the heroes? Schindler’s List with Hitler as the victim? Maybe they’ll remake Alien and call it Undocumented.

It is rapidly becoming impossible to parody Satan’s leftists, because reality is sillier, more absurd, and more evil than anything a writer can imagine.

Maybe we’ll see a remake of The Exorcist in which the priests and possessed girl are villains because the girl supports Trump and won’t get vaccinated, and the demon wants to join BLM and Stonewall.

I hope God takes us soon. This place is a mess.

Plus Indoor Hunting Adventures

Yesterday, I went squirrel hunting. In my living room.

Ordinarily, this type of activity takes place outdoors and during squirrel season, but this situation was a little different.

I was sitting with Marvin, watching Youtube, when I started hearing banging noises. It sounded like someone was outside vandalizing my air conditioner. I got up and looked, but I couldn’t see any problems. I considered grabbing a rifle.

The noises persisted, and eventually, I realized they were coming from the fireplace. I was not happy about this. A few days earlier, I had seen a fat mouse hop out of the fireplace and run out of the room. I had to put poison and traps out, and before long, the mouse had defiled $40 worth of magnificent beef jerky plus a big bag of rice. I think the mouse is dead now, because he definitely ate the poison, and the Internet says it’s lethal after one feeding. I hope this is true. I haven’t smelled dead mouse yet.

Hearing the noise in the fireplace, I was afraid the mouse’s family was dancing in the flue. I got a light and started poking around, and whenever I jiggled the flue, I heard something big jumping and scampering.

The flue got stuck, and when I applied a little too much force, it opened, and a stinking squirrel landed in the fireplace. I jumped back because I was not eager to be chewed up by a vicious rodent. The squirrel ran into a corner of the fireplace and hid behind my portable light.

I had a problem. There is no way a human being can catch a squirrel. If he had left the fireplace, he would have gone God knows where, and I would have had to share the house with a starving squirrel until he got too weak to hide. By then he probably would have destroyed half of my possessions, and poop would have been everywhere.

I prayed he would stay in place, and I went and got my useless, overpriced pellet rifle. I paid $500 for it, and I have shot it maybe twice. I figured a .22 would damage the fireplace after passing through the squirrel, so the pellet gun was the way to go.

Finding pellets held me up. Then I had to look for goggles in case I had a ricochet. Then the gun refused to cock. I finally got it done. I went to the fireplace, held the gun’s muzzle close to the squirrel, and blasted him. I was hoping to hit the upper body, but it’s not easy to aim a gun at something 8 inches away, especially when you have to work around a plastic light and a big grate.

Sadly, the squirrel did not die immediately. It ran out of the fireplace and into the kitchen. Then it ran to the stairs, started running upstairs, turned around, and went into my bedroom. It ran to the sliding doors, which were closed. Then it went in the bathroom through the east door.

I shut the bedroom door to keep it from going out into the house, I opened the sliding doors, and I went in the bathroom from the west door to see if I could chase the squirrel out. He was not in the bathroom, but I saw a big smear of blood on the floor.

As far as I can determine, he ran out the sliding doors, and I hope he is now dead. The plan was not to make the squirrel suffer. I just wanted him out of my life.

The big lesson I have learned here is that as a former Miamian, I need to learn about fireplace and chimney operation and maintenance. I don’t know how the mouse and squirrel got into the chimney, and I need to keep the flue shut tightly so anything that makes it into the chimney is prevented from entering the house.

I think one problem was that the flue was not closed properly. When it’s really closed, it’s hard to open. It sticks. A rodent could never pry it open. When I started fiddling with it yesterday, it was not closed well. There were little gaps through which I could see into the chimney.

Another problem: filthy creatures are able to enter the chimney from above. I have to go up on the roof and see what the problem is. Surely there is some kind of metal feature designed to keep animals out.

When the flue opened all the way yesterday, dirt and dead bugs fell out. I think maybe rodents have been catching bugs and eating them in the chimney.

I learned some things about rat poison. The one you want is called bromethalin.

Anticoagulants like warfarin (coumadin) have been popular for decades, but rodents develop resistance to them, and they have to eat a lot before the poisons kill them. Bromethalin is better. It’s a nervous system poison, and the rodents die after a single serving. A poisoned mouse may live for a couple of days and pollute your precious beef jerky before he croaks, but he will croak.

Another good thing: bromethalin will not poison predators. If you poison squirrels with it, they will poop it out before dying, so you don’t have to worry about killing hawks and owls that eat their bodies. Disadvantage: it won’t kill feral cats, coyotes, coons, or possums, either.

I have too many squirrels, and shooting them is inefficient. I have mice in my outbuilding. I can put bromethalin bait out and thin the herd, and it will benefit not only me, but all the birds of prey in the vicinity.

I’ll bet you can find a website that says bromethalin kills all sorts of desirable wildlife. That’s leftist nuts for you. They would spin fables about water if they thought it killed vermin.

Maybe I could maintain a bird feeder if I used bromethalin. I could put a poison station beneath it for the squirrels. I don’t think a bird would try to eat it. It comes in huge, hard chunks. Maybe there is a way to do it.

Tomcat is a brand of promethalin baits. You can get it at Home Depot.

In other news, the tribulation really does seem to be rumbling to life. It appears to be manifesting in the weather. Europe has been having crazy floods. I think I wrote about the European problems. Germans have been dying. Germans! When you read that it rained in India and a hundred or a thousand people died, it’s not surprising, because India is a backward country full of people who lack common sense. The Germans are different. They’re sharp, and they are very responsible. In order for a flood to kill Germans, it has to be truly exceptional.

China has had floods. Dams have burst.

It’s funny how people who dislike God seem to pick up on the approach of the end. Far-left extremist Maureen Dowd just published a column about the floods, entitled Apocalypse Right Now. Unfortunately, she sees the floods as proof conservatives cause all the world’s problems. She says the flooding was caused by global warming.

There is a huge problem with that argument, and it’s pretty obvious. Global warming is a slow process. It can’t happen in one year, between 2020 and 2021. If the globe is warming, and if it causes flooding in Europe, then we would have seen floods for a number of years. The floods wouldn’t just leap out and surprise us. There is no gradual trend of increased flooding in Europe. Had there been, Europeans would have been ready this year instead of getting caught totally unprepared.

Leftists love to point to any example of bad weather and blame capitalism. They did it after the active hurricane season of 2005. After that, we had a bunch of very quiet years. Where did global warming’s hurricane-stimulating effects go during those years? Same place the left’s hysterical claims went. They shut up when the evidence turned against them. They only listen to “the science” when it agrees with their economic and social justice theories.

When conservatives say cold weather proves global warming doesn’t exist, leftists love to say, “Weather isn’t climate.” This means “weather” describes short-term events, whereas “climate” describes conditions that change very slowly over many years. Maureen Dowd is doing exactly what leftists accuse us of doing. Europe had one rainy summer, and she says it proves her view of the climate, which just happens to go hand-in-hand with environmental extremism, the destruction of industry, redistribution of wealth from responsible countries to chaotic ones, and socialism, is correct.

The evidence for climate change is not good, and the evidence that mankind causes it is even worse, but that doesn’t prevent leftists from latching onto sporadic weather events and trying to use them to prove Karl Marx was right. Marx is their messiah. Christians do the same thing. We look at the world and try to prove events prove Jesus is God, and sometimes we go too far. One big difference, however, is that many of our efforts are supported by prophecy.

Dowd’s irrational, facile column is evidence the tribulation may be near. Prophecy says God will release a spirit of murder into the world. Dowd is intolerant and irrational. She sees “them” (us) as the source of humanity’s problems, much as the Nazis saw the Jews, Gypsies, and Communists as wellsprings of humanity’s ills. Dehumanizing and demonizing other groups is the foundation of genocide, which is the purpose of the spirit God will release. You can’t have genocide until you make one group of people think of other groups as disposable, subhuman vermin.

I can provide a parallel. It would have been pretty hard to get me to embark on a squirrel genocide program, had experience not taught me they were bona fide pests with nearly no redeeming functions. These days, I find killing a squirrel rewarding, even if I’m put off by their suffering. Killing them is necessary and righteous, like killing roaches. I would be thrilled if grey squirrels went extinct this afternoon.

We’re seeing the spirit of murder in the left’s reaction to people who resist masks and vaccines. They often say they’re the reason coronavirus hasn’t been wiped out. They say they’re killing people, equating them with murderers. They’re taking steps to prevent resistors from buying, selling, traveling, speaking, and doing business. It’s very much like what the spirit of Antichrist did to the Jews of Europe. They were excluded from many jobs. They lost the right to disseminate their opinions, even by carrier pigeons, which they were forbidden to own. Eventually, they were segregated, concentrated, and exterminated, and the Nazis did this because they thought a day would come when they could say, “Finally, our problems are over.”

Of course, people who resist masks and vaccines are proxies for conservatives and Christians.

Conservatives and Christians generally don’t use carrier pigeons, but maybe we should start buying them, along with CB’s and ham radios. We are being tossed off the Internet every day.

If you listen to enraged leftists these days, you can sense that they feel like the Nazis did. They want to make us as though we did not exist. They want us to have no power of any kind. It’s not just obscure tweeters and commenters. Keith Olbermann, who had a popular television shows on popular networks, said Trump supporters should be arrested and prosecuted, and the mainstream left was fine with it. He called us “maggots,” which is exactly what Castro’s supporters called the innocent people they beat, robbed, enslaved, jailed, tortured, deported, and murdered in Cuba.

On the right, there appears to be a rising tide of kooky voices calling for civil war and blaming minorities for most of our ills. They are far fewer in number than leftist nuts, who have been dominant in leftist culture for a long time, but they’re here. These people also serve the Antichrist. Jesus never called for us to buy rifles and shoot our way out of our problems. He told the disciples to buy swords for the defense of individuals, but he never suggested organized armed resistance.

Over the last year, we have seen lack, disease, and hatred, which are symptoms of the arrival of the three horsemen. We have seen signs in the heavens. We haven’t seen earthquakes, which Jesus predicted, yet. Some Christians say earthquake activity has suddenly increased, but it isn’t true. Maybe we should consider increased activity a crucial sign. It would be easy to spot, and it would be unique in mankind’s history. We have had wars, plagues, and shortages ever since the world was created, but we haven’t had global outbreaks of earthquakes.

I keep feeling like I’m just waiting to leave. I can’t make myself feel that life will return to normal. I keep feeling that none of the earthly things I do are important. It’s as though I were in a burning building, waiting to be rescued, and I no longer needed to think about mopping floors or fixing plumbing leaks.

A guy I like to watch just put up a Youtube video about a dream a friend of his had. I watched, and at first, I wasn’t sure what to think. Then suddenly I felt I knew what the dream meant.

The friend dreamed a group of people were in a building, and they were high up, looking toward a city which resembled London. The city was being destroyed by an earthquake. As they watched, their own building moved toward the city.

A man showed up to lead people out of the building. Some followed. He took them up on a high ridge where there was snow and ice, and they walked toward a destination. The building went over a waterfall, into an abyss.

A similar ridge appeared nearby, and a woman was seen on the ridge, trying to take a quicker route to the same destination. She fell off and went into the abyss.

A man appeared via a flight of stairs. He climbed up to the first ridge and joined the rescued people. He said he had come from hell.

They learned their destination was Zion, the city of God.

I’ll tell you what I think God told me.

The city that resembled London was the carnal world. The isolated building was the location of the church. The destruction of London was the tribulation.

People who stayed in the building were carnal Christians. They kept their eyes on the carnal world, so they were sucked down with it. They were like people who live on social media sites; like Lot’s wife. She was still part of Sodom, so she stared at it with yearning, and she shared its fate.

The Christians who left were people who listen to the Holy Spirit and reject the Antichrist’s world. The man who led them was an evangelist. The ridge was Jesus. It was Jacob’s ladder, which is Jesus. A ladder is a type of stairway, and it’s a type of path, and Amos 9:6 says God builds his steps in the sky.

Jesus is a path. He called himself “the way” or “the road,” using the same word the Greeks use on street signs. The path is narrow. It’s easy to fall off, just as it’s easy to fall off a ridge. When you fall off a ridge, there is no way to go but down. It’s the same with Jesus. There are no lateral or upward moves.

The second ridge is an alternative route preferred by human beings. Any path but Jesus leads to hell. You can’t design your own Jesus. You can’t insist on a god who loves homosexuality, selfishness, and pride. The woman represents people who try to save themselves through the false messiahs of idolatry, including worship of self, man, and government. She’s a woman because women are the first to lead us into idolatry. Think of Eve, Jezebel, and Solomon’s wives. Men are supposed to lead, and the human race is supposed to be God’s submissive wife.

The man who came up from hell is a person who received salvation during the tribulation. Missing the rapture doesn’t condemn you to hell. You can still be saved, but you will wish you had listened sooner.

Zion is the new Jerusalem. It’s where the saved will go. It’s described in the Revelation.

This is what came to me, and I think it’s right.

I would love to say I hope I’m wrong, but I would only say that to comfort other people. I hope the rapture is close. This place is just too messed up to continue.

I used to tell God I was ready to go, but I wanted him to look after my dad and my pets. Then my dad died. Then one of my pets died. Marvin is okay; I hope God will take him along with the chosen. There seems to be no good reason to leave him here.

I used to feel bad because I might leave the earth unmarried. I felt a little cheated. I wanted to have the love of an attractive woman, chosen by God, before the end, and the pool of women who seemed available at my age looked more like a punishment than a reward. I’m just being honest.

I met a wonderful lady, much younger and more attractive than I had any reason to expect. We spent time together in Egypt. We did’t cross the line, but we shared love and deep affection. Then we married after we parted. Even if God harvests his crop before we get together again in person, I am content.

I have hope we will come back after the marriage of the lamb. The Bible suggests the raptured (not the resurrected) will return after Satan is imprisoned, to enjoy long lives on a blessed earth. That would be nice, but I will be thrilled to be anywhere where I don’t have to live amid curses, evil spirits, and toxic people.

Coronavirus Makes the World Very Small

I appreciate the kind words I received after writing about the unnecessary, preventable death of my gentle little friend Maynard. Thanks, everyone who left a comment.

Things are slowly getting better, but I have waves of grief when I’m not busy doing things. The life of an animal can’t be as important as the life of a person, but you can certainly love an animal more than a person and grieve harder when he dies. These things are particularly true when you know your errors helped cause the death.

Marvin, my other bird, doesn’t miss Maynard at all. Not one bit. They lived next to each other for 25 years, and Marvin didn’t bond with him in the slightest way. That’s a blessing. I wouldn’t want to see him pull his feathers out because he was lonely.

He likes certain people, so it’s surprising he never felt anything for Maynard. Nothing positive, I mean. When he was young, he assumed Maynard liked him, but Maynard bit him as a reward for his advances. I guess Marv took the hint. Maynard was originally very friendly to other birds, but my first African grey, Frank, was nasty to him and changed him.

Marvin actually seems happier now. His attachment to me seems stronger. He becomes very emotional when I take him out of the cage. I didn’t see that coming.

Bird maintenance is easier now. One cage to clean. One poop tray to empty. Two dishes to clean, instead of four. No looking at the clock when Marvin is out, to make sure I leave time for Maynard. Every time I notice these things, I feel sad.

I feel sad when I bless Marvin at night. I used to decree that God was ending his hatred of Maynard. I don’t have to do that now. When I pray for God’s protection over me and all I have, I don’t have to say, “Marvin and Maynard” any more. Just “Marvin.”

Maynard’s death was made more painful because I had spent a lot of time using the birds to help me project love into the world. I didn’t have a wife or kids, so I made a special effort to pour love into the birds, just to open up the channel. I would hold them against my face and focus love on them. I asked them if they felt loved. I guess they thought I was crazy. From being near God, I knew love poured from him, and I believed it should pour from us, too, so I didn’t hold back. That left me more open to grief.

Maynard was not one to resist affection. Sometimes I held him against my face as long as I could, just to see how long he would stand for it. He didn’t protest at all. I always gave in first. He was happy to be held and loved for as long as I could manage it.

I would say I feel somewhat worse than I did when my dad died. I’m not sure. If so, it’s probably because my dad made his own bed, I tried to do right by him, his death was expected, and we were together at the end so I could say what I wanted to say. Maynard died young, I wasn’t as good to him as I wanted to be, his death was mostly my fault, and he was killed in a locked room in a veterinary hospital, where he could not see, hear, or feel me.

So much for that.

Today I’m working on arranging my marriage. The coronavirus picture keeps changing. Suddenly, it’s possible for Rhodah and me to go to countries that were locking us out a week or two ago. To my surprise, I found that even places like France and Switzerland were available.

We were thinking of Iceland, but I ran into what seemed like a roadblock. “Stronghold” is the word that will pop into the minds of Christians.

To marry in Iceland, you have to produce proof you’re not married already. In many countries, it’s simple to get what is called a “no impediment” certificate. Rhodah already has one. In the US, the federal government does not provide them, and many states don’t offer them, either. It’s stupid, because marrying abroad is not very unusual.

I researched a lot, and the best information I found said Florida would not give me a certificate. I contacted Iceland, and although the people who corresponded with me responded at length, they were not that helpful. They didn’t answer the questions I actually asked. They told me what they thought I should know.

I can understand that. People from Northern Europe can be very rigid. It’s a fact of life. I’ve dealt with it before.

Iceland said it would accept documents from every state I’ve lived in since I was 18, saying a search had been performed, and that nothing had come up. Having lived in several states, I was not happy about this. I started looking at state websites and making calls.

It turns out New York will give me a document, even though their website clearly says it’s impossible. I also ordered one from another state. A third state doesn’t answer the phone, so I left a message.

Regrettably, I didn’t check Florida first. Their website is not great, but when I called, they directed me to a page where I was able to download a form ordering a certificate proving my single status.

This means the money I sent Texas was wasted. On top of that, they take up to 25 business days. Now I have to try to cancel. They even provide apostilles which are tailored to various countries.

I will ship the Florida application out today, and I should have my marriage-ready document in maybe 2 weeks.

Iceland is looking good.

Before I got help from Florida, I was looking for alternatives. Gibraltar’s website seemed to indicate that they would accept Rhodah as a tourist, and they would also let us marry using an affidavit from me, notarized in Gibraltar. I started planning a trip.

Gibraltar is too tiny to hold much interest, so I thought we might take trains up into Europe. We can go to Spain, France, and Switzerland right now, unless I’ve misunderstood things. Right now you can check different “authoritative” sites and get differing information on coronavirus restrictions. I thought we could hit Marseille and then spend some time in Lucerne, where I spent part of a summer when I was in high school.

The first time I visited Lucerne, I fell in love with a cheerleader named Debbie. She seemed to be on board briefly, and then she started running around with a guy who played football in Calera, Alabama. I thought the world had collapsed. I thought love was supposed to be forever.

Of course, this girl was wrong for me. There was no way she could have been a good wife. I was young, though, and no one had taught me anything at all about women and marriage. I really believed God would put a boy of 16 and a girl of 14 together for life.

I didn’t eat for 13 days. I lost weight. I didn’t move fast enough when the cheerleader’s roommate showed interest. On the night before we left Europe, she asked me to dance and planted her lips on mine. I flew home on a high note, but I wished I had done something instead of waiting.

Visiting Lucerne with my new wife would feel like a victory lap.

Today I learned that Gibraltar is not accepting Zambians after all. That kills my plan. Maybe we should marry in Iceland and then fly to the continent for our honeymoon. Iceland looks great, but I can’t imagine spending more than a few days there.

Missing Spain will be a bonus. I’ve heard enough Spanish for a lifetime, and there is something dark about Spanish and Hispanic culture. It has a similar feel to Muslim culture, which should not be a surprise, given that Spaniards and Hispanics have so much Arab blood.

Spain is bigger than it looks on a map, so getting out would have taken at least two days.

I was disappointed to learn that the trains in Europe had changed. I knew there were fast new trains in Europe, but I didn’t know how common they were. I had been hoping for comfortable cruising on the nice, old-fashioned trains I remembered from over 30 years ago. It looks like Star Trek trains are all over the place now. You zip along at 200 mph in a double-decker car.

I’m not interested in speed. I enjoy watching the countryside roll by. I liked stopping in little towns and leaning out the windows to buy food from vendors. I guess those days are ending, except maybe in America, which has a backward passenger rail system.

I suppose a person can drive in Europe. Maybe we could fly to Marseille and drive through the alps. The gasoline would probably cost hundreds of dollars.

Jeremy Clarkson says Switzerland is like hell for drivers. The speed limits on many roads are very low, and being the kind of people they are, the Swiss enforce them. It’s strange the Germans don’t have the same policy. Maybe the highway is the only place where Germans can cut loose. But for the Swiss speed limits, people like Clarkson would probably spend every weekend in the alps, driving Porsches into guard rails.

My two favorite hangouts in Lucerne–Fugi’s restaurant and Pickwick’s Pub–appear to be gone. Fugi’s had nice, fatty Swiss food, which I liked. Pickwick’s was where I learned to drink way too much beer, at the age of 16.

I have looked at restaurants online, in Lucerne and other European cities, and I have been disappointed. Many, many places are full of the same nouveau garbage they serve in America. Cold kale and blue corn soup with locally-sourced squid ears. News flash, Europeans: no one goes to your countries to eat pretentious food they can get at home. They want the food your parents ate. I’ll have to screen restaurants in advance in order to avoid being buried in Gordon-Ramsay-wannabee gastronomic science projects.

Food doesn’t actually have to be creative to be good. A rib eye steak, prepared correctly, is still as wonderful as it would have been in 1905. In fact, most restaurants prepare steaks and other simple foods badly, after centuries of practice. It’s still a big deal to walk into a restaurant and get a perfect steak, a fluffy baked potato, and a proper martini without disgusting olive juice in it. I’ll bet I would have to drive 90 miles to get that meal, unless I wanted to cook.

Update

It’s frustrating, trying to get solid information on travel, especially for Zambians, because no one really cares whether they get to go anywhere. I have three sources for information on Switzerland. One says Rhodah will have to quarantine for 7 days. That’s no good. Another, the official Swiss travel information site, claims she does not have to quarantine at all. My third source, the Swiss government, has not responded to the email I sent.

France doesn’t look good. One source says Rhodah would have to quarantine for a week. I would not. I’m not sure why a vaccinated Zambian has to be treated differently from a vaccinated American. We get the same shots. Is the delta variant more likely to accompany a Zambian? I don’t know.

I just found a claim that Iceland has a 5-day quarantine requirement, but it sort of looks like it only applies to unvaccinated people. I see indications that if you’re vaccinated, you only have to quarantine until you get the result of a post-flight test.

Maybe we can marry in Iceland and then fly to Switzerland so we can honeymoon in a more pleasant location. I’ll have to delay applying for proof that I’m single until I know where we’re going.

My friends Alonzo and Teri have announced that they want to come. That will make for an interesting trip. I never thought they would want to spend that much.

Anyway, God will get us married one way or another. Getting the answers is a challenge, but it’s a nice problem to have.