Disturbing Dispatch from Kamalia

Aging actor Dave Bautista has made a career of putting on clingy briefs and performing a fake, somewhat homoerotic wrestling act with other big guys who were not athletic enough to be make it in actual sports. You know what wrestling is like. They put their faces between each other’s legs. They hug each other tight and lie on top of each other. They have to shower each other’s fluids off their bodies.

In order to do this, Bautista took illegal drugs for years. Either that, or he just magically went from a normal weight of maybe 200 pounds to over 300, just by eating lots of chicken and lifting weights. No one else in the history of the world has been able to do this, as photos of pre-steroid professional bodybuilders show, but maybe Dave is the first.

No, he took drugs.

Call it my opinion. Sure.

Anyone involved with natural bodybuilding will tell you you’re not going to put on more than 25 pounds of natural muscle in a year, and you’re not going from 200 to 300 without drugs. A 200-pound man with an exceptional physique will have about 90 pounds of muscle, and he would have to more than double that to hit 300. It does not happen naturally.

He says he is now down to 240. He has really shriveled. I would guess he’s closer to 210, but wrestlers always lie about their size, as he did when he was in the ring. He has a great physique for a man in late middle age who doesn’t take drugs, but he’s not impressive. He’s in the same league as a typical high school basketball player who has been lifting weights for three months.

He gave interviews talking about his struggle to lose weight. That amazes me.

“No matter how tired I am today, I am NOT going to go shoot up with performance-enhancing drugs.”

He appeared in interviews and tried to convince interviewers he had just been fat. Please. Fat with a six-pack and a chest 15″ bigger than his waist.

I don’t think anyone ever looked at Bautista’s enormous steroid muscles and bulging veins and thought, “Man, what a tub.”

Here’s why he quit using drugs: he had to. You can’t keep taking high doses of gym drugs into your sixties and expect to live long. When was the last time you saw Arnold Schwarzenegger with his shirt off? There is a reason. Look up the things prolonged drug use does to bodybuilders.

Now Bautista has made a campaign ad. It was styled as a comedy sketch, but it’s clearly an ad. Leftist men are generally less masculine than conservative men, and it’s something leftist women complain about a lot. It’s not something that can be disputed.

Until pretty recently, I thought that, while effeminate men are definitely more likely to be leftists, the “soy boy” thing was exaggerated. But the more I see, the more I think it’s not that far from the truth.

When you look at Antifa assault videos, it’s hard not to notice all the long, spindly limbs and 34″ chests. There are a lot of them.

Kamala Harris is unpopular with men, and that even extends to black men, whom you would expect to give her blind support. So Bautista made an ad in which he does weird exercises, including hitting a tire with a hammer, while using the popular term for women’s private parts to describe Donald Trump. The idea appears to be that a guy who used to get overly intimate with other men for money, while wearing briefs and flexing drug muscles, is more manly than Donald Trump.

Just to compare:

1. Bautista pretended to fight other men in fake, choreographed matches with predetermined outcomes while using drugs because his natural muscles were too small to get him the job, and claiming to be at least two inches taller than he really was, and

2. Donald Trump got shot in the ear with an AR-15, and when the Secret Service tried to remove him from the stage, and he had blood running down his face, and there was no way to know whether more shots were coming, he refused to leave, forced his face out into the open, pumped his fist, and yelled, “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!”

Meanwhile, a man near Trump had his brains blown all over his family by another round, and three other men were shot and survived.

Which one proved he was a real man?

Here are a couple of photos so you can decide which person you think is more of a man:

There’s Trump, shot, bloody, and insisting on exposing himself to more fire so he can encourage and comfort his base. And there is Bautista, crossdressing in a pantsuit, a low-cut top, and pearls. Without his steroid muscles. He will probably continue to shrink. Drug muscles don’t vanish entirely overnight.

A cruel Internet commenter said, “He looks like if Jeff goldblum and RuPaul had a 60-year-old baby.” Another said he looked like a gay realtor.

Bautista made the video with the help of Jimmy Kimmel, one of worst TDS sufferers on television. Kimmel has decided to be the voice of outraged decency, which is pretty strange, given his history as second banana on The Man Show, which featured a segment called “Girls on Trampolines” and skits in which Kimmel appeared in blackface as basketball player Karl Malone.

In the trampoline segments, women wearing things like bathing suits and just plain underwear jumped high in the air and spread their legs at the cameras.

The Malone skits mocked Malone as an ignorant black ghetto figure with a subnormal IQ. Not that there could have been any racist intent.

Here is Kimmel doing the kind of thing the liberal press has been helping him to bury for the last 21 years:

That’s about 50 times worse than the act that got Al Franken kicked out of the Senate. I think Franken should have gotten off with an apology, but what Kimmel did may amount to a sex offense.

What would you do if you caught him doing that to your mother?

Where is the outraged decency? Where are the tears and remorse? Aren’t liberal celebrities supposed to vanish into rehab after doing things like this? Shouldn’t he have come back and said, “This is not who I am”?

He drank a lot of beer on the show, so maybe he doesn’t remember doing this. Surely the explanation isn’t hypocrisy.

Kamala herself made an ad that featured the kind of men leftists think are masculine. She wants to prove real men support her.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. A morbidly obese guy feeding chickens and saying he eats carburetors. A scrawny old homeless-looking person with his sleeves torn off, standing near someone else’s motorcycle and tool cart for XY cred. A man who is pretty clearly gay but seated on the tailgate of a pickup truck, proving he loves the ladies.

Actually, the carburetor guy also seems gay. He has a strong lisp, which is something you don’t see a lot in straights.

Two of the guys say they drink single-barrel bourbon, neat. I don’t get that at all. There are probably 500,000 homosexual men in America who lisp and prance, can’t throw a ball or lift a suitcase, and drink over a fifth of hard liquor a day. When I was a kid, the old Irish lady who lived next door to me used to turn up tumblers of pure vodka and empty them.

She could throw a ball, though. Even when drunk.

Why would Democrats equate manliness with drinking hard liquor? Are they in the eighth grade or what? They remind me of my friends and me, in high school, counting the beers we drank between classes. We were not manly. We were little idiots.

Maybe Kamala is manly. She slurs her words all the time. My personal opinion is that they’re covering up a serious drinking problem. If not, maybe she has a neurological disease.

The stuff about motorcycles and carburetors seems like the sort of thing Democrats usually call sexist. Can’t women fix carburetors and motorcycles?

Today my wife and I saw two huge lesbians on Harleys, blasting up Highway 475 in matching T-shirts. Really loud pipes. I guess they’re manly enough to vote for Kamala.

I notice the Kamalians didn’t bring guns into the mix. Some shrill lady on the diverse writing team with no straight white males must have vetoed that.

Anyway, Bautista is nuts, and I suspect he it will not be long before he outs himself. He has married twice and had kids, but you can’t wear an outfit like that unless something is amiss. Or someone is a miss.

Is There Anything it Can’t do?

The last couple of days have been pretty good.

Milton came through, we spent a day without power, it came back on, and since then I’ve been cleaning up the yard.

My tractor has been out of commission for a long time due to a problem that prevented it from starting. I researched it for months. I asked for advice from all sorts of people who know tractors. I got conflicting information. Nothing worked.

I was going to send the tractor to the dealership, but then we had the Europe trip, and we had three storms go by. And we both got covid.

A day or two back, I found I could get the tractor to start with some effort. It’s a pain, but it will run. Since then I’ve been moving trees and limbs.

Last year, I finally learned how to make chainsaws run reliably. I may be the only person on Earth who knows how. I spent years listening to bad advice from people who were supposed to know the truth, and it did not help much.

I have a bunch of gas saws, and I have run three in the last couple of days. All started and ran, on treated no-ethanol gas 5 months old. I have this thing licked.

My lead saw was an Echo CS-590, which is a homeowner-grade saw you can get at Home Depot. I paid $400, which is maybe half what a pro saw would have cost. I kept screwing it up because I got so much bad information. Last year, I invested in a Husqvarna 562XP, which is a real pro saw. It has electronics in it that supposedly reduce or eliminate carb adjustments.

I got good information on maintaining saws at about the same time I got the Husqvarna. I modified the Echo to make it run like a pro saw. It’s a monster now. But I’m glad I got the Husqvarna, because anyone who has a farm needs two big saws. One could need repairs. Also, the Husqvarna has a 25″ bar, which is 5″ longer than the Echo’s bar. On this property, you need a 25″ bar, but there are times when 20″ is more convenient, so now I’m all set.

I wonder how many other people in this entire county know how to maintain and use saws correctly. I would guess nearly all are arborists. I took the Echo to an authorized repair guy who didn’t know.

Milton dropped a large oak across my driveway. I would say this tree was around 20″ thick at chest height, and it may have been 80 feet tall. As noted in an earlier post, my neighbor showed up after the storm, cut the tree in two places, and moved it out of the driveway with a forestry grapple. That still left me with two big collections of debris to disentangle, cut to sizes a tractor could carry, and move. A tree service would probably have charged over $1500.

I took a little homeowner-grade Jonsered/Husqvarna with a 16″ bar and did a lot of cutting. I moved a lot of distracting junk to my pasture. Today I used the Husqvarna to cut the tree’s trunk in sections. I also cut up a 16″-thick oak Hurricane Helene left caught in some other trees.

When I went back in the house, bleeding and covered with grease and sawdust, I told my wife it was a good thing she hadn’t married a Democrat. She said, “Don’t even say that.”

I didn’t mean a Teamster or an ironworker. I meant the kind of Democrat whose pores weep estrogen. Like the pansy in the old pajamas-and-cocoa Obamacare ad. Like the skinny-jeans-wearing waifs who get pummeled when disrupting other people’s rallies.

Compared to men from the World War Two generation, I’m practically a girl, but I can fabricate, machine, shoot, run a tractor, buck trees, make ammunition, shoot sub-MOA, smoke ribs, make beer, and do lots of car, mower, and tractor repairs.

I’m very good at interior painting. I don’t mind killing annoying animals. I have stomped on mice instead of taking them to therapy and trying to rehome them. I’ve shot a bunch of squirrels from inside my home. I know how to fish for everything from snapper to marlin. I can run a yacht or open fisherman 200 miles to Eleuthera with no help, and I’ve done both. I can keep a marine diesel running. I have a basic knowledge of electronics, and I have built a bunch of electronic devices.

I can also practice law.

If my wife had married a boy-band-looking liberal, they would be equally helpless. She would be able to do all the woman stuff, but he wouldn’t be able to do man stuff or woman stuff. Hot yoga and sitting in a cubicle. That would be all he could do.

I had to make a 50-amp San Francisco adaptor for my generator on Thursday. A San Francisco adaptor is male-to-male. I went to Lowe’s and asked for 6/3 cord. The Lowe’s guy and I started having a conversation. Maybe they didn’t have 6/3. Would 8/3 be okay? Well, I wasn’t sure my generator could break 30 amps, so 8/3 was fine. I didn’t have to ask him what kind of cord a generator uses. I didn’t have to ask what 8/3 was.

He didn’t explain anything to me. He seemed to know there was no reason to. Men in this area can do things, except for some of the snowbirds.

Came home, took apart two cords I had made for 220-volt tools, put the plugs on the 8/3 cord, and we were in business.

Two new plugs are on the way from Amazon.

I am sure leftists will eventually start swarming homes all over America, killing and looting. They’ve done that in every revolution. But should we all be scared of them?

In percentage terms, there aren’t many tough leftists. There are a lot of leftists who can throw bottles of pee at the police, and many of them can rob and kill unarmed people with stolen plastic 9mm pistols, but how many can deal with a conservative who can shoot and has multiple weapons, modified to suit his needs, for various uses?

Even gang members don’t train, and they are generally stupid.

Kyle Rittenhouse was a chubby, out-of-shape high school kid with a cheap AR-15, and he obliterated three leftists as they and a big crowd tried to lynch him. He killed a child molester (raped 5 boys) who had been in prison and gotten a reputation for fighting. He blew the bicep off a criminal who charged him, committing assault, with an illegal pistol in hand. He killed some idiot criminal who tried to bash his skull in with a skateboard. He scared the rest of the lynch mob off. Rittenhouse was extremely effective, and his two armed assailants, as well as the unidentified person who shot at him early in the incident, were incompetent and useless.

I just don’t think you can sit around smoking dope all day and apologizing for your maleness and expect to be a real factor in physical confrontations with armed people.

If my wife had married a vegan yoga boy, they would have to live in an apartment or on a very small lot. They would have to live somewhere where there was little for men to do.

Man stuff is fun. Burning things and blowing things up are fun. Steel-toed boots are fun. Shooting is fun. Catching fish and cutting them up is fun. Welding, machining, running heavy equipment, and bucking trees are fun. How could anyone prefer wearing a man bun, carrying a murse, and spending his time going from one moronic activist meeting to another?

Good knives are fun. Concealed carry is fun.

God is masculine, and he was right to make men masculine. The sex roles he created work. People who accept them enthusiastically are fulfilled.

I feel like buying another rifle.

Tomorrow I have to finish moving trees and limbs. Then I have to replace my diesel yard tractor’s exhaust pipe, cut off the muffler I made for the old one, and weld it onto the new one.

I’m glad God didn’t let me become a sissy.

Now I can Rest

A longtime reader asked if I was okay. I am definitely okay. It’s nice to know people think about my welfare.

My wife and I were traveling. I don’t like to blog while traveling. At least not in ways that show I’m not home. The reason should be obvious.

I should have continued to blog as though I were home, to obscure things more effectively, but the trip was exhausting. We went to Switzerland and Italy. We went up and down mountains, and then we tromped around the Vatican and sites from imperial Rome. Then, of course, we got covid, as we generally do on our expensive trips. Mexico, where a hotel suite goes for $100 per day? No problem. Lucerne, where they charge you $7 for a glass of tap water? Covid.

The virus seems to lurk in ambush in the very best destinations. Everyone in Italy was coughing, and it wasn’t merely because every Italian over the age of three smokes.

I’ll bet no one is sick in destinations like Miami and Somalia.

I failed to bring ivermectin with us. It always seems to help dramatically, but it doesn’t work from 4500 miles away. I took a big hit when I got home. Can’t hurt, and like I always say, I definitely don’t have worms.

Of course, I felt much, much, much better after about two hours. Anecdotal? Unscientific? Whatever. The difference is like day and night, whether or not it’s the ivermectin. I will keep using it, because maybe it’s actually doing something.

I am not kidding about the tap water. I think I saw it as low as two Swiss Francs in one place, and the maximum was 6.5.

TAP…water. Which is available for nothing, not just in hotel rooms, but also from numerous outdoor fountains, the safety of which is something the Swiss are very proud of.

Hooray. Your tap water isn’t full of dysentery. You’re as sophisticated as Bulgaria.

A bar where I used to hang out when I was 16 sells cheeseburger platters for 28 Swiss Francs without a drink.

I really admire the Swiss, but there is no way to explain a $33 cheeseburger or a $7 glass of tap water without mentioning greed. I don’t care how bad the exchange rate is. I suspect they have realized they will always have more tourists than they can handle well, so they are jacking prices up in order to get people who are more upscale. Maybe they’re trying to thin out the Chinese.

There are many bad tourists among the mainland Chinese. Many are rude and aggressive, they let their kids poop in public, sometimes the adults poop in public, and they do horrific things in public toilets other people have to use. Check out this sign from the train station in Wengen:

I’m not sure, but the bottom row may be for people from places like Greece, where toilet pipes are often too narrow to swallow paper.

The covid isn’t really bad. I prefer it to a cold, because covid doesn’t give me much in the way of throat problems, and I can breathe through my nose most of the time. We did feel some weakness on a day when we needed to climb steps.

My short take: Lucerne is a lot of fun, but you will pay a steep price. Also, the food in Lucern is not very good. We went to the Bernese Oberland after Lucerne, and the food was bad there, too.

I don’t mean it was so bad you wouldn’t want to eat it, although that was sometimes true. I mean it seems like the Swiss have no idea what other people mean when they say food “tastes good.” We got things that were bland, and, in some cases, a little gross.

It’s no fun paying $100 for an unappetizing meal for two. Over and over.

Our hotel in Wengen was generally good, but they priced a smallish load of laundry at 150 Swiss Francs. The owner, a very nice lady, felt sorry for us and reduced our bill to 75. It pays to dress poor. In Rome, a bigger load, in the tourist district, would cost 25 Euros, and a Euro is about the same size as a Swiss Franc right now.

The mountains in Switzerland were spectacular. You look at them and can’t believe they’re real. We went up Pilatus, Rigi, the Schilthorn, and the Jungfrau.

I eventually cut way back on shooting photos and videos. Every 10 minutes, there’s a sight that knocks you off your feet. After a while, you get tired of taking the camera out, removing the lens cover, et cetera et cetera.

If you want to see something amazing, go to Lauterbrunnen, take the train to Wengen, and look back at Lauterbrunnen as you leave. Get ready to pinch yourself.

Here is my message about Rome: go in the winter. We didn’t have that option. There is nothing in Rome you can’t enjoy in cold weather, and the crowds are much smaller. The Vatican was like the subway in Hong Kong in terms of crowding, not to mention covid transmission. The Colosseum was also pretty bad.

Another warning: don’t buy tours from outfits like Viator. We did it because we didn’t know if it was safe not to, and we thought the Swiss, who were handling our Schengen visa request, would want to see booked activities.

Tour companies buy government-issued site tickets and resell them. We paid $333 for Vatican tickets that appear to cost 40 Euros when you get them from the source.

What about the guides? They’re experts! You need a guide!

You really don’t. One of our tours had 22 people. Way too many. The guide kept getting away from us. The audio quality on the earbuds they gave us was terrible. We couldn’t stop and enjoy anything. You can find yourself a guided tour on Youtube and use it with your phone. We did this for the Forum, and it was better than having a guide.

You’re not going to become an expert on anything just by spending three hours with a human being, so don’t worry that you’re missing something by using Youtube. You’re not. Think about this: real scholars put tour videos on Youtube.

We used electronic guides at the Pantheon, and they were great.

No tips expected.

The food was really nice, except for breakfast. I enjoyed Roman-style pizza. But Italian food is all there is. We saw one Italian restaurant after another. We didn’t see much else. Obviously, you can find other kinds of food in Rome, but you have to look. It’s not like New York, where you can find 8 nationalities on one block.

I never thought I could get tired of Italian food until this trip. By the end, I was so put off I went to McDonald’s, which is really bad in Rome, unless covid just made it taste that way.

The beer was disgusting. Like mouthwash. Very harsh. No body or sweetness to balance the hops. No aroma to speak of. No complexity.

More later, I would guess. Right now I am exhausted.

It’s Working

Here’s to traditional marriage. I think my wife will agree.

Today I decided to make a big step on making this property my own. Sometimes I’m intimidated because I can’t help thinking the original owners knew what they were doing when they made bad landscaping decisions. I am getting over that. Today I killed a magnolia and two bottlebrush trees.

It seems like I fix just about everything these days. My tractor’s poorly-situated steering cylinder started gushing oil, so I took it out, modified the frame (drilled and painted a big hole) to make it easier to remove next time, and took it to a hydraulic place for a rebuild. I would have rebuilt it myself, but there were problems identifying the parts. Now I have the numbers, because they were on the receipt.

I managed to bust the engine’s front cover while putting the cylinder back in, necessitating an expensive visit to the dealer, but at least I know how to deal with the cylinder in the future. And I painted up the new cover I bought, so it looks a lot better than the old one.

The house’s original owner had some horrible brush tines that were held on with chains and chunks of wood. I cut them in pieces and turned them into a quick-attach fork which is a thousand times as good. Welding, cutting, painting. Got it all done without help. No one else has a fork like this one. It’s fantastic.

I put a Pat’s quick attach set on my 3-point hitch, and it made it easy to switch attachments. Totally superior to the heavy, overpriced adaptors other people still, for unknown reasons, buy. I stuck a ballast box on the hitch, so now I have a compact ballast and a great brush fork to work together.

Today I went out and ripped my bottlebrush trees out because they were sick and planted two feet from my workshop. You never plant anything two feet from a building. Not even shrubs. The trees threatened to beat up the eaves during storms, and if they had been big trees, their roots would have threatened the foundation. They were in the way. Planting them was a bad choice. I pulled one out pretty easily with a chain and strap. The other one took more work, but now it’s on the burn pile. I plan to replace them with this: dirt. Or maybe two small shrubs with roots at least three feet out.

The magnolia was maybe 15 feet from the workshop and 10 feet from a water oak. It had to go. It had no future. It could have fallen on the shop. Every tree that poses a falling hazard is on the way out.

I am terrible at felling trees because I rarely have to do it. To gain practice, I tried to lean the magnolia away from the shop. When it started to move, I ran away like Sir Robin facing the Mad Chicken of Bristol, and the tree decided to stop falling. I decided brute force was the answer, as it so often is, so I chained it to the tractor and pulled it over.

I cut it in pieces and got rid of it, and now the cattle are snacking on magnolia leaves. I put glyphosate concentrate on the stumps.

When I came back in the house for breaks and to shower, my wife stared at me. I think she was starting to appreciate what I do around here. I was soaked in sweat. I had a mashed fingernail from a farm jack. I had a stick in my hair.

I had done maybe $1000 worth of work in around 3 hours. I base that on absurd quotes I’ve received for tree work. It was definitely work, but I enjoyed it. I have good tools, and my skills are adequate.

When I started taking off my work clothes, I was going to put them in the laundry room, but she told me to leave them where they were and let her know when I wanted food.

I showered, drew myself a Yard Boss Lager, put on my new glasses, sat in my new recliner, and relaxed.

My wife doesn’t know how to weld, cut metal, paint, fix chainsaws, cut trees, take a tractor apart, or operate tractor hydraulics. She can’t cut a tree. She has no idea who to call for a burn permit. She doesn’t know what one is. These things are not her problems. On the other hand, I don’t do laundry any more. I don’t wash dishes. I open drawers, and my ironed clothes are there. I open cupboards and see clean dishes.

It’s a pretty good system. God knew what he was doing when he designed it.

I got up yesterday, prayed, ate, dealt with a business lease for a rental property, fixed a cabinet door my wife had leaned on…I did all sorts of stuff. I can handle things that would leave metrosexual modern husbands in tears. I can drive a manual transmission. I can shoot, and it doesn’t bother me to kill cute animals that cause problems. I can make ammunition. I own taps and dies.

In return, my wife looks after wife stuff. She doesn’t compete with me and try to find an edge every day. She leaves the toilet seat up.

Satan has turned modern marriage into an endless competition. A series of selfish negotiations. It was never supposed to be like that. We were supposed to know and love our roles.

When you drive a car, the engine doesn’t decide it wants to be an air conditioner. The battery doesn’t decide it wants to be a transmission. The parts of a family should work together the same way.

Interestingly, in news related to old guys with rural properties, I have read that Tom Selleck is afraid he will have to sell his farm.

Tom Selleck must surely have a lot of money. He was in a very successful TV series 40 years ago, and he made a number of okay movies. He did a bunch of Hallmark movies. He has been in a CBS series for the last 14 years.

He lives on an avocado farm in Ventura County, California. Reports about the size of the farm vary, but it’s around 60 acres. He says he may have to sell if his series is cancelled, in order to have a good lifestyle until he dies.

How can that be true?

I looked it up. You can find the address on the web. He pays about $65,000 per year in property taxes. He may live another 15 years, so let’s say $1.5 million yet to pay, with numerical increases for inflation. Shouldn’t he be able to pay that?

His home is an avocado farm. Aren’t avocados expensive? Shouldn’t there be at least six figures of net income from that?

I decided to find out what John Travolta pays in my county. It’s about $27,000 per year. He has a smaller property, but on the other hand, the improvements are nuts. An incredible mansion that connects to a system of runways. He has carports with jets in them, at his house! One jet is a commercial airliner QANTAS used to own.

Travolta pays no state income tax, unless he has property in other states. He pays no county or city income tax. His property tax, during the same period during which Selleck will pay $1.5 million plus increases, will be about $400,000 with increases.

He can have all the guns he wants. He can keep an AK-47 in his car. If he shoots a criminal, our sheriff, Billy Woods, will probably take him to Dairy Queen.

He doesn’t have rolling blackouts. The power is always on.

I wonder what Tom Selleck is paying California, his county, and his municipality. And why is he there? He’s supposed to be conservative. My guess is that his wife won’t let him move. Or maybe he’s a RINO.

He could be in Tennessee or Florida right now. Or Idaho. Or Wyoming.

Zillow says his property is worth about $12 million, and Zillow is usually pretty accurate. Zillow thinks Travolta’s house is worth $3.5 million, which is very modest considering his wealth. The acreage is about a third of Selleck’s, which is still pretty good for a non-agricultural property.

If you don’t need runways, I guarantee you, you can get 60 acres here for what Travolta’s house is worth. With an agricultural exemption, your taxes will be around $16,000 per year.

You can have horses, cattle, goats, sheep, ostriches, emus, donkeys, or just about anything else you want. What you can’t have is California.

Selleck should not have a mortgage right now. Unless something is wrong, his home is paid for. He should be able to sell his ranch, pocket maybe $9,000,000 after capital gains, move to a better state, buy a better farm, and have well over $5,000,000 in additional retirement funds. He should have something saved up from his work. He should have the maximum Social Security benefit.

Maybe he just spends too much. When you’re 79, and you’re worried about your future, you ought to be able to rein in your spending and survive on a net worth of over $12 million. Even if all he has is a reverse mortgage, he should be able to fly business class to nice places every year and eat anything he wants.

If he moves in next door, I’ll be happy to help him and his wife find the best local barbecue.

You Will Dwell in a Land of Walmarts and Chick-fil-A’s

Life here continues to amaze.

My wife and I have been painting the inside of our house. Today we did some other things. We ordered bedroom furniture and had a fantastic Italian meal at a local restaurant run and staffed by Mexicans.

As we were walking into the furniture store to place our order, I told my wife furniture stores would look a whole lot different if there were no women. Mattresses, recliners and maybe some breakfast tables. That’s all we need.

We went with Amish furniture. This is a type of furniture which is popular these days. It looks very good without actually being made of quality wood. They use alder, a second-tier wood, and put wonderful finishes on it. Are the builders really Amish? Well, they clearly use a lot of power tools, so no.

I mean, they could be Amish. They could be like the Orthodox Jews who spend most of their time trying to figure out how to disobey God. “You can’t turn the heat on on the Sabbath!” “Okay, we’ll hire gentiles to do it!” “We can’t carry stuff on the Sabbath outside our homes!” “Okay, we’ll put a tiny wire around our area and pretend it’s an enclosure, which we’ll pretend is a home!”

Oh, boy. Why can’t they figure out a way to justify bacon?

Maybe the Amish have figured out how to run power tools while pretending they’re not running power tools.

Anyway, we are getting Amish furniture. Good wood is too expensive. I’m not blowing $10,000 on a bedroom.

We looked for used stuff, but there are some problems with that. My wife insists on a king size bed, and they were not popular back when ordinary people owned real furniture. Also, when things turn up, they tend to be huge and ostentatious. Like Oskar Schindler’s stolen bed in the movie.

It’s sad, because you can get quality used furniture for much less than you would pay for new “Amish” furniture.

I don’t know why we can’t get good wood. Russia and China are giant reservoirs of hardwoods. I think. Maybe it’s just Russia.

Our bed will be made of dozens of tiny alder planks glued up into panels. The big trees are gone.

Without getting into TMI material, I will say we need a big bed because a certain person thrashes around all night and throws elbows.

We need a couple of couches. Looks like we’ll be paying at least $5K for those. I want reclining couches. I’ve thought it over. We will never have a hoity-toity Architectural Digest home because I refuse to be afraid of my own furnishings. I refuse to have furniture I’m afraid to sit on all day, with or without pizza and beverages. And we expect to have kids. I’m not stupid enough to put a kid on a $7000 couch.

Reclining couches are not all that chic, and they will clash with the traditional style of the house. Tough. We’re getting them.

I found out most reclining chairs and couches are built to fail in 5 years. The industry couch-stuffing standard is something called 1.8-pound foam. If you want a couch to last, you need 2.5-pound foam. We can pay $2500 for couches the manufacturer fully expects to be junk in 2029, or we can pay considerably more for couches that will make it to 2034.

If you buy a La-Z-Boy reclining couch, you have two options. The reasonably-priced one La-Z-Boy knows will collapse in a hurry, or the one that costs $500 more and lasts twice as long. La-Z-Boy isn’t very honest about it, but they do let people know they can “upgrade” their couches.

Their policy is a problem, because retailers other than La-Z-Boy appear to be unwilling to add the optional padding. Other retailers sell La-Z-Boy cheaper than La-Z-Boy, so if you want the padding, you probably have to go to a La-Z-Boy showroom and pay full retail, on top of shelling out for the foam they should give you by default.

Is La-Z-Boy a good brand? Not really, but there really aren’t many good brands. Companies that were great 5 years ago now sell Chinese junk. Oddly, there is now a Chinese company that sells excellent recliners. It’s called Hydeline. American companies ruined their reputations by selling Chinese garbage, and the Chinese themselves fixed the problem. Really nice.

Hooker. Bradington Young. Go ahead and tell me about the great company that made your recliner, thinking I don’t know about it. I’ve looked them all up. The wonderful chair you bought in 2015 is probably not available now. Best you can do is a copy full of flimsy foam.

I don’t really like Hydeline couches. They don’t look great, and they don’t come in fabric. I may give up and go with La-Z-Boy.

Fabric is actually better than leather. It costs less. It breathes. It’s more comfortable. It’s less likely to be destroyed by spills.

In the far past, leather was for peasants and fabric was for patricians. If you bought an expensive limousine, the driver sat on leather, out in the weather, and you sat inside on fabric. Look it up. Things have changed, and modern people have no idea they’re paying extra for servant trappings.

I’d like to have a leather chair and two fabric couches. Maybe we’ll find what we want.

I love our mattress. It’s a Novaform I got at Costco for my dad. When he died, I cleaned it to surgical standards, and now we use it. I want another foam mattress. They are fantastic. I would never have another pre-2000-technology mattress.

Foam mattresses don’t need box springs. I’m not actually sure why any mattress needs one, but anyway, I want a mattress that sits right on a wooden platform. Foam gives perfect support. It’s cool, which is nice in Florida. It comes with a cover you can take off and submerge in cleaning solution if something bad happens. And it’s cheap.

My mattress cost $500, and it’s still not too far from that. It has a 20-year warranty. I want one as much like it as possible.

At one time, I somehow ended up sleeping on a conventional Sealy mattress my mother had paid over $2000 for. I threw it out. It was like a concrete sidewalk. Never again. If I can get something better for about $500, and it will last 20 years, I’m all over it. If it doesn’t work out, and I can’t return it, I can buy a different $500 mattress the following year and not worry about it.

I like a nice mushy mattress. I don’t know how people sleep on hard ones. What I really like is a somewhat firm mattress with a layer of mushy stuff on top.

Today we went to Sam’s Club to look at their signature foam mattress. I figured we could lie on one so my wife could put it up against her princess genes to prevent her from finding problems with it after purchase. No such luck. Sam’s Club sells mattresses they won’t let you try. But they guarantee them. They must have a huge markup, like conventional mattresses. If they’re willing to pay you to take a nearly-new mattress to the dump and pay you for it, instead of letting you try it in the store, they can’t have paid more than 50 bucks for it.

We left without a mattress. We also went to TJ Maxx so my wife could look at 4,000 pairs of cheap shoes.

So that’s what we did today.

We drove home in the twilight on I-75. It was beautiful out. The temperature was 68 degrees. The sky was kind of a dark lavender above, with darker purple near the horizon. The trailers on the big trucks seemed to shine like silver tea services. The taillights gleamed like backlit rubies. Very odd. I commented on this to my wife, and she agreed.

I told her I had the feeling this area was like a farm where God raised people like livestock. Everything was provided for us. Life was easy. Lots of stores. Not much traffic. Enough good restaurants for a reasonable person. Great people.

She agreed. We are very sheltered.

We talked about our marriage. People told us things would get worse when we were together day after day, but the opposite happened. We had a little friction on a couple of our trips, but here, things go smoother and smoother with the passage of time. We enjoy each other more. We’re not just mates. We’re buddies.

We went home, and I looked at X and saw lunatics making death threats toward conservatives. I saw men trying to breastfeed. It was like spying on a planet where a virus had made everyone insane. I felt like Gulliver checking out the Yahoos.

People are hopeless and angry now. Their lives are falling apart. They’re waiting for civil war. Some look forward to it. They go home and watch violent movies and listen to ghetto whores singing about their vaginas. They go to work and get pushed around by perverts who insist they lie about their genders or get written up.

It’s different with us.

Prayer in tongues is what makes the difference. The more you do it, the more you will be aligned with God and others who pray in tongues. I wake up at night and hear my wife praying and singing in the master closet. I wake up in the morning and pray in tongues silently while she sleeps next to me. It works. God has graciously given us the ability to make ourselves do it.

I believe God moves people away from Yahoos as they draw closer to him. I believe he pushes people into lower circumstances as they move away. I think prisons are full of people who are far from God. They are moving toward hell, and prisons are about as close to hell as you can get while you’re alive.

I think God moves Spirit-filled, cooperative people to places like the county where I live. Maybe there is a nicer county we’ll be moved to if we keep cooperating. Eventually, we will be raptured to an even better place, or we will die and go to heaven. That’s how it looks to me.

I don’t believe people who are really close to God and highly informed live in defeat. The Bible says such people are blessed and victorious. How can you be victorious if you live in defeat?

I hear singing right now.

I’m not claiming we’re good people. There are no good people. We are rewarded for listening and cooperating, not for perfection.

Time to have a beer and see what the wife is up to. I hope God sees fit to keep us separated from the insanity.

They Will Definitely Work, and Not Kill Too Many People, if we Just Give Them One More Chance

I thought covid was over, but then I live in a pretty sane county in a pretty sane state (if you don’t count the blue areas).

I just saw some not-bright MSM journalists talking about the importance of the new boosters as well as news concerning the isolation period.

1. I feel sure the new boosters are just as effective, harmless, and necessary as the old ones.

2. “Isolation period”?

When the vaccines came out, I rejected the mRNA shots because people who seemed to know what they were talking about said they might be dangerous, and they were also new, as medical technology went. Turned out I was right. Otherwise-healthy people are dying left and right from cardiac arrest caused by mRNA shots, and the CDC admits it.

I was eager to take the conventional shots because I figured we knew how to make conventional vaccines, and I believed the people who said they would work. Wrong on both counts. They have been banned because they cause blood clots. Better than dropping dead, I guess.

The vaccines turned out to be ineffective at preventing covid, and when I got covid before getting a shot, it was mild, so I was never at risk of serious problems, unless you count the ones the shots cause. When I get covid now, I only know it for one reason: beer tastes bad for a few days. That’s the terrifying disease I risked my life and my wife’s life to prevent.

The shots do not work well. They are not very good at preventing severe symptoms or death. They do kill a certain number of people, and it really is true that most people who die from covid are vaccinated. Why are they still pushing them?

If it’s for the vulnerable, fine. For me, they serve no purpose, and they may do great harm.

As for the isolation period, I truly had no idea there was one. I remember that stuff from 2020, but I thought it was over with.

Here’s a huge problem with the isolation approach: while it may restrain a certain number of people who have obvious symptoms, it does nothing to discourage people who have no idea they’re sick, and at this point, that probably means a billion people at any given time.

I had covid last week. I had no idea until the beer tasted bad. I wandered around at will, spewing viruses willy-nilly. My wife’s sense of smell dropped off a few days back, and she had no other symptoms. She spread gigantic numbers of angry viruses before she had any idea what was going on. There are probably billions of people who get sick and never know it. How will keeping a few people home make a real difference in transmission rates?

“If it saves even one life, it’s worth it.” No, it isn’t. If that argument made sense, we would never build another bridge. On average, really big construction projects take more than one life each. Should we go live in ditches covered with sheets of cardboard?

About 10 people died during the construction of the Burj Khalifa. The number is considered so unremarkable, they haven’t even figured out and published the precise figure. Who would want to visit Dubai if there were nothing but sand dunes and camel poop? Imagine how many families live on income generated by the existence of the Burj Khalifa.

Here’s what I said when covid popped up: let’s keep the fat, sick, and old at home and leave everyone else alone to face the tiny, tiny risk of serious illness. That advice looks really good right now, because the fat, sick, and old are out there in Walmarts and restaurants, sitting next to asymptomatic people who have no idea they are spraying viruses in every direction.

When you have a bubble boy, you put the bubble around the boy, not the world.

I never cease to be shocked and disturbed by the poor mental faculties of journalists.

They’re like mynah birds. Or actors. They mimic intelligent beings beautifully, but it’s nothing more than mimicry.

Obvious limitations notwithstanding, they generally manage to be smug and condescending anyway.

Anyway, beer tastes good again, so I have that going for me.

Tough Saturday

Slow day today.

My old friend Mike is visiting. We have been providing him with a Florida base while he starts a new business and decides where he will finally live. He sold his home in New Hampshire in 2022.

My wife is starting a long fast. She thinks she will go 21 days. But there is a loophole. She only fasts until 6 p.m.

Mike likes ribs. She likes ribs. I have some ribs I need to get rid of while they still have some flavor. They are in the smoker right now. One rack of baby backs and one rack of real ribs.

I have avoided baby backs for years. They’re small. They seem dry and tough to me. They’re expensive. Spare ribs are big, juicy, delicious, tender, and cheap. I have never been able to see the appeal of baby backs. My feeling is that it’s a gimmick that appeals to women, who always seem to get suckered in by wrong food. Women eat filets instead of rib eyes. That’s all I need to say about that.

It’s small. It’s cute. It’s more expensive. It has less fat. It must be better! This is the kind of logic that drove my mother to pay $18 for one bar of soap in the 1980’s. So today, $100.

I saw baby backs on sale, so I grabbed two racks and froze them. I smoked a rack a while ago. They were okay, and that’s the nicest thing I can say.

I rejoined Sam’s Club a while ago, and they have good prices on never-frozen spare ribs, so I now have even less reason to buy baby backs.

Offering fresh spare ribs to Southerners at good prices is like setting corn out for deer. It’s not fair.

I asked some people what to do with baby backs. Some guy who swears they’re wonderful said to cook them until you’re between 192° and 194°. Go by temperature, not time.

I’m trying it, but it seems ridiculous. If one part of a rack of ribs is at 192°, another part could be at 185°. I’m using a probe thermometer anyway.

Truthfully, I think I should just smoke them until the wood is gone, wrap them in foil, and bake at 200° until edible.

My electric smoker doesn’t produce smoke rings in meat. I am trying to cheat by adding a tiny amount of pink curing salt to my rub, but you can’t taste a smoke ring, so it doesn’t matter.

I’m not making anything exciting to go with the ribs. Robert Irvine’s cole slaw recipe, with small changes. I think he uses too much sugar, and I am too lazy to go out and buy white wine vinegar. We’ll be having roasted Sam’s Club corn. I wrapped it in foil with salt and butter, and I’ll roast at 425°.

My wife might persuade me to make bread for Texas toast. She really hates American factory bread.

I finished making a new stout. I call it Steppe Brother imperial stout, but I may change the name. There are so many breweries now, the good, easy names are all taken. I considered “Moose and Squirrel.” Taken. I’m now thinking “Fearless Leader.” Crazy Ivan is taken. Tsar Bomba is taken. There is no point in even discussing Black Russian. Maybe I’ll call it KGB Boot Polish.

I took my dry stout recipe and increased everything but the water, and I used Kveik Lutra yeast. I took a sample from the fermenter yesterday, and it’s wonderful. Like a dark chocolate milkshake with some vodka hidden in it. I may increase the bitterness a little bit next time.

Most beers get all of their bitterness from hops, but dark beers get part of their bitterness from burned grain. If I make a change, I’ll have to decide which ingredient to increase.

I wonder if dark beers were invented by people who were low on hops.

Some guy on a forum is arguing with me, claiming dark beers don’t rely on roasted grain for bitterness. That’s silly. Burned grain is bitter, like roasted coffee. If you go to sites about brewing grain, you will see that they say dark grains impart bitterness.

Now I’m wondering if the sharp flavors from roasted barley are acidic, not bitter. Anyway, they balance sweetness.

You’re all caught up on the news from the Heavily Armed Gated North Florida Compound. I can only imagine your excitement.

New Recipe in the Can

Today is a brew day.

My last brew was an ale somewhat like an IPA. I ordinarily use a German Braumeister brewing machine, but I lost an O-ring, so while I wait for a new one (and possibly forever), I am doing brew-in-a-bag, or BIAB. This means I put a mesh bag in my kettle, heat water in it, dump in my grain, and mash in the bag. When it’s done, I pull the bag out and wring the wort out of it. Very simple.

I’m making an imperial stout.

Everyone knows what stout is. The “imperial” in “imperial stout” refers to the Russian imperial court.

For some reason I do not know, Russians used to buy British beer instead of brewing their own. They liked stout. Because beer had to be shipped a long way to get to Russia, the beer had to be tough enough to take the heat and bouncing without degrading. The British found that extremely strong, thick beers held up well. They made very strong stout and shipped it to Russia.

It’s an interesting beverage. It tends to be sweet. It has a ton of aroma from the roasted grains that make it dark, as well as the hops. In terms of alcohol, it’s around twice as strong as most beers. That’s a generalization. Some imperial stouts are a lot stronger.

The stout I’m trying to make is my own recipe. I took my recipe for ordinary stout, which is fantastic, and I simply increased the amounts of everything.

Some people advise brewers not to increase the hopping along with everything else, but others disagree. I asked for advice, and homebrewing celebrity Denny Conn, who is known for making heavy beers, was in favor of jacking everything up together.

I think that’s the right approach. In an experiment, you should limit the variables you change. If I increase everything, the stout may not be what I want, but it should be easy to figure out what I need to change. And it may be perfect without changes.

I’m using East Kent Goldings hops, which are very popular for stouts. I’m going to try Lutra Kveik yeast.

My understanding is that “kveik” means “quick” in Norwegian. Kveik comes from Norway. It’s a yeast that has traditionally been used by rural Norwegians. I guess if you pronounce “quick” like a Norwegian, it probably sounds like “kveik,” which, I am told, rhymes with “shake.” Lutra is just a strain of kveik.

Kveik is, indeed, quick. That’s one thing people like about it. You can make a beer in maybe three days. It also ferments cleanly at high temperatures, so you don’t get toxic heavy alcohols and fruit flavors. Brewers like to use kveik to make beers that are pretty much like traditional lagers. Lagers are generally fermented cold, and they take forever. Kveik lets brewers speed things up, and it obviates the need for fermenter cooling. A regular lager might ferment at 50, but Kveik goes up to 90.

I generally use a yeast called US-05 for stout, but it’s very slow. It’s supposed to be the yeast they use in Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, which is an okay but not really fantastic beer. US-05 is supposed to ferment cleanly at 68.

I am tired of waiting a long time for stouts, and since I’m not looking for yeast flavors, any clean-fermenting yeast will do. If kveik is what they say it is, it ought to be great.

People say you need a ton of yeast for heavy beers. I have only made one heavy beer, and it went like crazy using one packet of dry yeast. I didn’t rehydrate it. I just dumped it in the fermenter. It was done in maybe 4 days. The yeast I used is Abbaye, a yeast taken from Belgian ales. It seems to me that if one vigorous yeast will work in heavy beers without pampering, others will also work.

I think I’ll rehydrate the kveik, but that’s all the work I’m willing to do.

The ale I made a week ago is probably done. It went from 1.056 to 1.013. I fermented at 63 in hopes of reducing the banana flavors the yeast gives off, and I think it worked. The gas coming out of the keg doesn’t smell like bananas. Last night I moved it to 68 to speed things up and get it over with. My understanding is that fruity flavors develop at the beginning of fermentation, so raising the temperature should be safe now.

I used Crystal as my aroma hop. It usually smells spicy. This time, it smells citrusy, which it’s not supposed to do. The samples I took tasted great, however.

UPDATE

The stout turned out to be a job. It did not want to come through the bag. I had to squeeze it ruthlessly. Then I put it on an oven grate on a cooler and pour about half a gallon of hot water through it.

I found myself at 1.115 after the boil, so I had to add a lot of water. I got to 1.085. I believe I have right around 5 gallons.

Now I know how to deal with a big stout and my brewing bag, so next time, the job will go faster. It will also help if my wife doesn’t come in while I’m working and demand a trip to get barbecue.

The fermenting keg is full, and it’s in the pool, chilling. I plan to leave it outdoors tonight because the temperature will be good for fermentation. Maybe I’ll move it inside tomorrow.

I look forward to seeing what kveik can do. It would be neat to have a good imperial stout kegged and carbed in under a week.

Trust the Germans to Overcomplicate

I’m brewing today. I was not satisfied with the last batch of Disaster Management Ale I brewed, so I am replacing it.

Ordinarily, I use a Braumeister 20-liter electric brewing machine, made in Germany. I bought it a year ago, when I went back to brewing. Today I’m doing BIAB, or “Brew In A Bag.”

When I started brewing in 2002, I did it the hard way, like everyone else. I mashed in a big pot. I moved the mash to an Igloo cooler with a screen in the bottom. I poured hot water over the mash to get all the sugar out. I moved the wort back to the pot to boil it. I used so many things, the cleaning was worse than the brewing.

I have no idea how I got the boiled wort into the fermenter. I think I picked up the 40-gallon pot with hot wort in it and poured, hoping for the best. I’m not sure.

When I started brewing again, I thought I’d take the easy way out, so I bought the Braumeister. It has a computer, a pump, and a heater. It does all the mashing and boiling for you, but you still have to lift the wet grain out before the boil, which is a pain.

I figured it had to be the best way, since it was the most expensive. I bought my machine used, but a new one runs $3,000. I paid less than a third of that.

A Braumeister is a stainless pot on legs with a heating element and a pump in it. The element and pump are connected to a computer in the bottom. There is a foot-wide stainless tube you stand up in the machine, in the water, and you dump your grain in it. The pump pushes the water through the grain continuously, and the computer keeps the heat where you want it.

It’s a real pain to wash, and you have to have a 220 circuit. It only works for beers under starting specific gravities of maybe 1.085. You have to play tricks on it to get that high.

I thought it would be great, and it works very well, but it has a lot of parts that have to be removed and washed every time I use it. On top of that, the Speidel company, which makes these machines, has a small presence in the US, and they do a poor job of supplying parts.

To brew in a bag, you need…a bag. You get a nylon bag that fits the inside of your pot. You put the bag in, with the mouth fastened to the rim of the pot. You heat water in the pot. You dump the grain in. You control the temperature however you can to mash it, and then you pull the bag out. You put an oven rack on top of the pot. You put the bag on the rack. It sits there and drains the wort back into the pot. You move the rack. You set the bag aside. Then you boil.

It’s a real cinch. That’s what I learned today.

When I was done brewing tonight, the kitchen was less messed up than it is when I make barbecue. Cleaning was quick and simple. I wish I had never fooled with the Braumeister.

Today I brewed Disaster Management Ale. It’s a lot like an IPA in terms of grain, but I use Nugget hops for bittering and Crystal for aroma. My understanding is that this combination is considered classic now, but I was using it 18 years ago.

This stuff should be ready to keg in a week. After that, I may make a stout, to prevent me from running out when the current keg dries up.

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.

Troll Poo on my Shoe

The Internet is like a beautiful bipolar girlfriend who also has borderline personality and perpetual PMS.

I have a problem with my well water; it may affect the quality of the beer I brew. I had the water tested, and it has 0.68 parts per million of iron in some form or other. This is something like a hundredth of the calcium level, but beer likes calcium and hates iron. I have read that iron levels above 0.1 are bad, and I’m around 7 times that.

I started trying to decide what to do. It’s not simple, and I overthink things anyway, so it’s a puzzle.

1. Buy distilled water. This will actually work, but I don’t like the thought of paying $30 for 5 gallons of beer instead of $20. I have a really great homebrew store, so my grain is very cheap. If I buy distilled water, I will have to buy chemicals to add to it, because beer needs certain chemicals normally present in tap water. I plan to get some of those chemicals anyway, and I already have one of them: salt. My well water needs a little salt, epsom salt, and gypsum. I could buy a still and make my own distilled water, but it would be slow, and it would take maybe 20 batches of beer to make it pay for itself.

2. Get a reverse osmosis (RO) filter. This will suck iron out of my water while not harming the other mineral levels all that much. It’s a can of worms, however. I would have to decide whether to mount it under my sink, turning that area into a bigger maintenance and repair nightmare than it is already, mounting it under my laundry room sink, where it will not be much use for anything but brewing, and having some kind of mobile filter I can put away. RO filters often break, and I don’t want to have water gushing out into my cabinets in the middle of the night or while I’m on vacation.

3. Brewtan B. I plan to try this first. It’s some kind of tannic acid product. It’s made for brewers. The maker claims 1/4 teaspoon in 5 gallons of beer will chelate enough iron to protect the beer from off tastes and other issues related to iron. They claim it will not chelate the good metals enough to cause trouble. You can only use it in beers that are supposed to be clear. It will interfere with the production of cloudy beers.

If I use Brewtan B or RO water, I will have to go through the aggravation of testing again. I will need to know what’s in water that has been treated with Brewtan B or filtered. With distilled water, I would know the water only contained minerals I added.

I thought about this yesterday, and I went to the laundry room to look at the cabinet under the utility sink. I wanted to see how much room I had. When I looked, I found a wet cabinet floor with places where the Chinese melamine film had disappeared. There was some swelling, and the sawdust and boogers the fake wood was made from were escaping into the cabinet, making a mess.

I found out the cheap modern plastic pipes were the problem. The genius who installed the sink appears to have put some kind of sticky substance on the joints, and I think he also used a big wrench to tighten the collars. You’re not supposed to do any of that. The joints should be clean and hand-tight.

I had to take the P trap out, clean off the pipes, reinstall them correctly, and clean the cabinet floor. Then I left the cabinet open to dry, and I put a stainless bowl on a folded towel under the P trap. It still leaks maybe 10 drops an hour, but it will be fine until I get pipes that haven’t been abused. It only leaks when I’m using the sink, so it probably doesn’t leak enough to overcome evaporation.

My cabinets are very nice, for modern cabinets. They have wood exteriors, and they look good. The sawdust-product sides, bottoms, and shelves are sad signs of the times, but the cabinets are what would be considered relatively high end. They would not be cheap to replace.

I now have a water-damaged cabinet floor, and the sawdust will continue to get loose and cause problems if I don’t seal it in. Also, I have zero protection from future leaks. I want to fix the floor so it’s tough and waterproof.

I thought I would get some epoxy paint made for garage floors, but I wasn’t sure it would work well in a sawdust-and-melamine cabinet, so I went to a home repair forum to ask what people thought.

Of course, the thing that always happens happened. I was pounced on by a keyboard-raging numbskull.

If you frequent forums or make comments on the web, you will run into keyboard-ragers all the time, and they will be boring as well as annoying, because the stupid things they say all fall into certain well-known categories. It’s like there is one predictable guy out there, making all the stupid remarks, trying to prove his mental superiority but succeeding only in publicizing a screaming case of Dunning-Kruger.

They’re too hostile to leave people alone. They’re too dishonest to admit it when they’re wrong. They’re too stupid to know it.

I got some good suggestions from helpful people, but one guy said I should just get a piece of 1/2″ plywood. He didn’t explain how this would help. I don’t think he understood the situation.

I explained that installing plywood would mean replacing the whole cabinet, and that would mean replacing all the cabinets, and I didn’t want to spend thousands.

This ought to be obvious to anyone. You can’t just turn three screws, remove the bottom from a modern cabinet, slide a new bottom in, and replace the screws. They’re not made to be disassembled.

If I put plywood in the cabinet, I would have to remove the sink, counter, and doors. I’d have to remove the drawers and sides of the cabinet. If, by some miracle, the bottom of the cabinet was still intact and could be removed in one piece, I would have to take it out, cut the plywood to fit, install the plywood, sand the plywood, and seal the plywood with some kind of plastic coating like the garage paint I described above. If I managed to put it all back together, I would then have a cabinet fit for Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber shack. It would be a monstrosity. I would have to remove it entirely and replace it. Then I’d need a new counter and wall cabinets to match. I’d have to paint the whole room.

It’s just a stupid idea. I was nice to the guy who offered it, but it was a really stupid idea, and it’s obviously stupid. This is a nice house. You don’t mend expensive cabinets with Home Depot plywood unless there is some way to conceal the repairs. That’s not possible in this case.

Epoxy paint would be invisible when the cabinet was closed, and it would look good when they were opened. It would look better than a new cabinet. A big slab of plywood would be right out there in view, making the house look like Jethro Bodine’s double-naught spy bachelor pad.

The keyboard-rager could not let it go. He asked how buying a cheap piece of plywood was like buying a new cabinet. Everyone else in the thread understood completely. It’s like saying, “Why would you repaint your car if all you need is a new clear coat?”

If you can’t understand why you would need to repaint the car, you should never try to tell anyone anything about body work, because you don’t know anything.

I think he understood, too, but keyboard-ragers have to do their thing. He wanted me to spend the day arguing with him, so he could dismiss a long series of proofs he was wrong, anoint himself victor, and congratulate himself on his imaginary brilliance.

I told him he was wasting everyone’s time, and I offered no explanation. I should have ignored him, but this stuff has a way of wearing on you.

He picked the wrong day. Earlier in the day, I actually thanked God for creating hell, because I was thinking of all the stupid, dishonest, arrogant, cruel people in the world. Like the people who lie about Israel and defend the Hamas baboons. There are millions or billions of people who are simply intolerable in the long term. I thanked God for creating hell so the rest of us would eventually get a break.

I don’t know if the keyboard-rager lives in a converted chicken coop or what, but he seriously wanted me to write an essay explaining why you don’t use plywood to make a new bottom for an expensive cabinet. I refused to engage. I had a surface I could restore and improve pretty easily. If I went insane and tried to replace it with plywood, I would have a major eyesore, and it would have to be sealed up, just like the surface I have now.

The Internet is as frustrating as the world that created it. The more you engage, the more abuse you have to swallow, for no good reason at all.

Nobody defended the keyboard-rager, even though he has been on the forum longer than I have. That shows what they thought of him. Traditionally, Internet forum members have always attacked newer guys, regardless of who was right. When they let the newer guy win, it means they already think the other guy is a jerk.

I use forums all the time to get good information and save myself research. Sometimes I have good experiences, but every once in a while, I rattle a troll’s cage simply by walking by. One of the great things about heaven is that there will be no Internet there and no trolls.

I learned some good stuff from the forum. They now make silicone mats you can put under sinks. They have vertical edges so a mat will hold a couple of gallons of water if there’s a leak. Some have little gadgets on the front sides that let water run out onto the floor outside the cabinet. This lets you know you have a problem. It’s supposed to keep the water off the bottom of the cabinet, but I don’t think it will work, because it will run down the side of the mat and go under it. Depends on the geometry of the little hole where the water is supposed to come out. It has to project past the bottom of the cabinet without interfering with the door.

Anyway, a silicone mat will probably take care of nearly all leaks your sink develops. The problem, other than the poor protection from really big leaks, is that they start at about $20. I would need 8 of them, I think.

At present, I think it’s a bad idea. I could order a mat and see what it’s like.

Independently, I and a forum guy came up with a great idea: vinyl flooring. It’s easier than applying epoxy. You cut a sheet of vinyl to fit the cabinet perfectly. You stick it to the bottom of the cabinet with 3M 77. You use silicone to seal the corners where the vinyl meets the sides of the cabinet. When water leaks, it can’t get into the sides. It will run out the front, onto the floor. The vinyl will look great and last for eternity. I use vinyl flooring to hold up heavy, oily CA-sized lathe tooling, and it looks new after maybe 10 years.

I think I should put vinyl under all my sinks, and I should also put it in my drawers and on my shelves. I could do the whole house for maybe $150. Beats the snot out of shelf paper, which is worthless and a scam. Home Depot sells vinyl for a dollar a square foot.

Epoxy would work. I’m sure of it. But it would be a pain to apply.

But for the brewing water problem, my sink would still be leaking, so it wasn’t just a curse. I got a blessing out of it.

I have some Brewtan B on the way. Hoping for the best.

My Palate is Being Microaggressed

My wife is still not here. My latest beer, however, is in the keg and ready to party. I call it Wheat Privilege Ale. I keep it at 17 psi and 35 degrees, so it should contain around 3.22 volumes of CO2, meaning it’s pretty fizzy but not as fizzy as pop.

Guess I didn’t pay enough attention to making sure the phone’s camera was focused.

This is a cloudy wheat beer I came up with in around 2005. I started out with Amarillo hops, which provide a lemony flavor. This latest batch uses a new hop: Bergamot. It is named for the bergamot, a weird citrus fruit used to flavor Earl Grey tea and give scent to candles.

The names of many, if not all, hops are capitalized. I think some are even patented.

It is common for hops to taste and smell like citrus. A long time ago, the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company made a splash with Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, an amber ale brewed with Cascade hops, which are said to provide grapefruit flavors and aromas. Cascade hops became very popular with professional and amateur brewers. Now there are other citrusy hops. Some examples: Mandarina Bavaria, Amarillo, Centennial, Lotus, and Citra. Bergamot must be pretty new because it’s hard to find information from people who have used it.

To me, Amarillo hops are lemony and Centennials lean toward orange. I decided to try Bergamot because some people said the orange or tangerine flavor was really heavy.

Wheat beer is great on its own, but it also takes additions well. Germans put raspberry syrup in finished weissbier. They also put some other syrup in it. Don’t know much about it. It’s green. Belgians put orange peel in their cloudy wheat beer during the brewing process. I figured it would be better to find a hop to give me oranges.

This beer seems to have a tangeriney scent and flavor, with a little hint of zest from the rind.

I really like it, but I just bought some Citra and Mandarina Bavaria hops for future experiments.

I wonder what would happen if I put a little tangerine juice in this beer.

Well, I just got up and tried it. Really nice. Ordinarily, I think it’s kind of effeminate to put stuff in beer, but wheat is its own little world.

It’s like a beer mimosa. I guess I put an ounce and a half of juice in 16 ounces of beer, and it’s superb.

Now I’m going to feel like I can’t drink this beer unless I have tangerines.

This one is going to go great with food. It will pair with anything. I could even drink this with pizza, and I hate beer with tomato sauce.

I received a water test report today. A company called Ward Labs sends people bottles and prepaid labels, and they email reports. I found out I have almost no sulphate or magnesium. Other than that, things are okay. It turns out my water is well-suited to stouts, which I could have guessed, because my stout is what they drink in heaven. It’s not perfect for light-colored lagers, but I can buy a couple of chemicals and fix it.

I would like to learn more about beer, but I’m only one person, and I can only go through so many kegs per year at my leisurely pace. I have 6 recipes I really like, and I only have space for 5 serving kegs. I want to keep at least 4 of my favorites on tap at all times, so that doesn’t leave much room for R&D.

First world problems. Everyone should have them.

Bliss in a Glass

Thought I would put up a representative photo of my new fake Belgian ale, which I call Happy Halfwit. Sadly, a considerable portion of the head broke down before I got the shot.

This is truly amazing beer. It has a perfect balance of malt flavor, yeast esters, CO2 tingle, alcohol heat, and the weird aromas and flavors that come from Sabro hops. My brew software thinks it has a bitterness level of 33 IBU’s, which is fairly strong, but I used crystal malt to give it unfermentable sugar for sweetness, so it’s almost a dessert beer. Maybe it is a dessert beer. I could see drinking this with hot apple pie and vanilla ice cream.

I call it Happy Halfwit because the grain bill is around 37% wheat. Belgians call wheat beer “witbier” because apparently they stubbornly insist on speaking some foreign language or other. Why does everyone have to be a smartass?

The software thinks the alcohol level is 8.6%, which is fairly high. Bud comes in at 5.5%. Bud is stronger than people think, and it has to be, because if it were not, no one would buy it and gag it down.

Guinness claims 4.2%.

I got the weird glass in the picture just for heavy beers. It’s called a tulip glass because the profile is sort of like a tulip shape. The stem is supposed to help you swirl the beer to get aroma moving, and it prevents you from warming the beer with your hand. Not quite sure why the glass is so wide, but I know a wide glass will produce more aroma, since aroma is related to surface area. The glass curves in at the top to shape the head. I like a lot of head on strong ales and stouts.

You can use a brandy snifter for smaller doses. The glass in the photo holds about 16 ounces. I brewed this beer to hold a decent head, so you may really get 12 ounces once the foam is gone. That’s all you need when the beer is strong. When you drink 12 ounces of this, your face feels warm.

I serve most beers with around 12 psi of CO2. This is about like the bottle of, say, Heineken you get at a convenience store. Strong ales like more gas. I have this one at about 20.

Beer fizziness is measured in volumes. One volume means you dissolve one liter of CO2 in one liter of liquid. As I understand it, volumes are a better guide to beer fizz than pressure, because the pressure in a keg of beer will vary with the temperature. Gas tends to come out of liquid as the temperature goes up. To get the same fizziness at a higher temperatures, you need more pressure.

To have a fizzy beer that tingles your tongue, you want the CO2 to be in the beer, not the foam, when you have the beer in your glass. Obviously, you want some foam, but you have to make sure the CO2 is divided correctly between foam and beer.

It’s possible to have a glass of nearly-flat beer with a huge head on it, and it’s really disappointing.

I keep all my beers at 35 degrees because I don’t want 5 beer freezers in my kitchen. To get enough fizz from Happy Halfwit at 35, I go to 20 psi to get about 3.5 volumes of CO2. That’s a lot. A typical lager might be served at 2.5 volumes, which is around 10 psi at 35 degrees.

More than you wanted to know.

Anyway, it came out great. Not sure why it’s so dark, but this is how it looked the first time I brewed it, so not a surprise.

This one came out perfect. I can imagine making changes for fun, but this beer tastes exactly as I hoped it would.

I have an idea for a darker beer that tastes almost like a fruitcake. Like raisins and dates and cloves.

I kegged my weaker wheat beer, Wheat Privilege Ale, today. Looking forward to enjoying it over the winter. I drank a little today even though it’s still slightly flat. It’s beautiful. It could stand a little more hop flavor, but a magnificent brew. I set it to 17 psi.

Happy Halfwit is really, really nice. I’m afraid it will discourage me from writing new recipes for heavy beers.

Just Give her That Green Card

In case anyone is wondering, my wife is still in Africa.

She had her visa interview week before last, and they asked for more evidence that we were really married. We emailed it the same day, but it arrived after working hours because of the time difference. They told us they needed 5 working days. I thought this meant they would finish last week, but we now think they don’t count the day they first see the stuff in their email box. So we should be seeing a response tomorrow, by God’s grace.

The word says, “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will.” We remember this in prayer. Consulate employees are not kings, but the principle applies.

My wife is nervous because she has been rejected so many times by other countries. It’s not the same thing, however. America is legally obligated to take her, and I have the right and the means to burden the system by pursuing legal remedies if the consulate blows it. They’re going to let her in. They want this application out of their pipeline. People in government jobs love getting problems off their desks.

It’s not like applying for a tourist visa to Italy, where they lie to you and verbally abuse you at the embassy and then go back on their word, knowing there is no accountability.

They wanted more proof I had been supporting her. Not hard to supply. They already had bank documents from her end. They wanted to see what I received from my bank, so I sent examples. Barring contributions from a new husband, it would be hard to explain how an unemployed woman went from living in poverty to owning a car and living in a nice rental house almost overnight, and the foreign trips would also be unlikely in the extreme without help, but they want to be sure.

They also wanted to check into the type of wedding we had. We were married online by the only county in the US that will marry a citizen to a foreign national who isn’t present in America. The embassy lady was not familiar with Zoom marriages, which is surprising, since they became very popular during the pandemic. It’s weird, but it’s 100% binding in every state.

The lady was very nice and seemed to have no doubts. I’m sure she can tell the difference between scammers and bona fide applicants, having seen many of both.

I am hoping I won’t have to buy a weekend ticket. The choices are limited, they cost more, and flights are crowded. We would really like to move her out by Thursday.

I think I’m fairly well prepared on this end. I bought 4 containers of Haagen-Dazs, and I have frozen ribs plus a beef rib roast. I have a set of large creme brulee dishes, too.

Thanksgiving will be upon us very quickly, so we will have to get ready. I’m thinking boneless turkey with cornbread stuffing and gravy, as always. Mashed potatoes with tons of garlic and butter. Cranberry relish. Yams blended with pineapple, butter, and brown sugar, with pecans on top glazed with more butter and brown sugar. One pecan pie. One pumpkin pie. Some other stuff.

The local Publix had BOGO Miracle Whip this week, so we are all set for turkey sandwiches.

I don’t know if I will be able to make her understand that you don’t eat creme brulee on Thanksgiving.

We are still planning to hit White Castle on the day she arrives.

I don’t know if her relatives fully understand their situation. They are less resourceful than she is, and she has helped them with a lot of their problems. She’s about to leave them behind, so she is having to tell them to get it together. I don’t know what will become of them. Because she will be here, her ability to help will be curtailed.

She may never see any of them again. Getting them tourist visas is impossible, and I’m not shelling out 5 figures to bring them over anyway. I have no desire at all to go to Zambia, and I don’t think my wife does, either. She’s not all that close to her siblings. Her mother and father died many years ago, the family has been shaken up, and there are age differences.

She put me on the phone with 4 of my new nephews the other day. I can’t remember their ages, but I think they’re all under 10. They asked all sorts of questions. They seemed to think they would be coming to visit. Even if it was realistic to expect us to fund a $20,000 excursion, which it isn’t, Uncle Sam would not let them come. I didn’t explain this to them. They are too young to understand. Sad.

It’s frustrating having very poor in-laws who aren’t very capable. My wife is not much like them. She gets stuff done.

She’ll have to get a Florida phone number, so a lot of relations and acquaintances who now have her number will not have it in a month. She is looking forward to the peace.

While I wait, I fiddle with trivial endeavors. Today I kegged a wheat beer, and I made it with a new hop: bergamot. Supposed to have a lot of orange flavor.

Very happy with the name I came up with.

I hope I have something good to write tomorrow night.

Hamas Fans Protest Jewish Occupation of Manhattan

I’m brewing (wheat ale with bergamot hops), so I have to hang around indoors for a while. Might as well write.

We have a new thing in America. Jews cowering in terror in a university library in a major city while antisemites threaten them with big sticks, combined with an inability to get uniformed police to show up.

At first, the story was that the police refused to come, but now we are being told there were plainclothes detectives in the library.

A person called Chief of Patrol John Chell said, “There was no direct threats.”

The police must not be hearing the same things law students hear. When I was in law school, I was told that threatening a person with a weapon, while you were close enough to use it, was assault. A crime. If you look at video of the incident, you can see a moron with two big sticks, banging them together while staring at students protected only by glass and two doors the police say were not locked.

I know a little bit about Florida law. Here, if you make me mad while I’m driving, and I pick up my gun and hold it so you can see it, I commit a felony that carries a lot of prison time. I guess brandishing weapons that can easily crush skulls is no problem in New York.

People keep saying you can disagree with things Israel does without being antisemitic, and that is true. Protestors like to claim they’re against Israel, not Jews. If that’s the case, why did this herd of mouth-breathers go to NEW YORK and threaten AMERICAN Jews?

I’ll set the question apart in its own sentence.

If you’re against Israel but you have nothing against Jews, why wave weapons at Jews who are not Israelis, 5600 miles from Israel?

This happened in New York, a place where Jews feel safe. After Israel, New York has more Jews than any place. Jews love New York. Many identify with it more than they do with Israel. This happened in what may be the favorite city of more Jews than any other. More than Jerusalem. And our government did nothing.

University president Laura Sparks, clearly a crazy lady, called the event a “peaceful protest.” Waving big sticks at defenseless minority members is now a peaceful activity. Try it at a Biden press conference and see if the Secret Service thinks it’s peaceful.

Sparks comes from the same wacky leftist segment of society that says words are violence. So words are violence, but big sticks aren’t. If I remind Dylan Mulvaney he’s a man, it’s a crime of violence, but if I wave a big stick at an elderly rabbi, it’s expression. It’s beautiful. It’s “my truth.”

Here you see the political suicide of Jews at work. They chose this. They are overwhelmingly leftist. They helped create a climate of antisemitism in the world, by supporting leftism. They helped make New York City what it is. A lot of them are still marching with the pro-Hamas nuts.

They helped create a city where a person who behaves more like an ape than a human being can threaten them with weapons, but they can be imprisoned for carrying firearms. And most of them want nothing to do with firearms to begin with. They think the state will protect them. Like all the other gentile governments that have been so loyal to them.

Yesterday I read that a poll said 48% of younger Americans support Hamas over Israel, and 26% think ending the Jewish state and giving it to Arabs is the way to solve the problem. This is what happens when you embrace leftism. It infects future generations. How can American Jews be leftists? It’s astounding.

The good news is that American Jews will vote conservative, overwhelmingly, in the future. They’ve come to their senses.

No, they haven’t! They’re going to keep feeding the hand that bites them. Some will come around, but generally, they’ll continue assisting in their own destruction and punishing their friends.

My wife and I intercede for Israel and the Jews every day, but because a lot depends on their cooperation, I have extremely low expectations. I expect a majority of Jews to go down with the leftist ship, while loudly defending their stubbornness.

I think we’re seeing the Thirties all over again, and the windows of escape are slamming shut, after precious few people used them.

Because things are getting so weird, I’m considering going back to keeping a rifle in the car, along with several loaded magazines. It’s legal, and these days, it’s smarter than ever. This is an era of mob crime, and mob crimes call for rifles and lots of ammunition, as lynching victim Kyle Rittenhouse could tell you.

I’m trying to catch up on AK technology. I would never rely on an AR-pattern gun for self-defense, except as an emergency backup. AR’s are not reliable, period, and they are inferior for use at distances typical for self-defense. If you’re shooting at people beyond the range where an AK-47 is sufficiently accurate, you’re almost certainly trying to commit murder. It would be pretty unusual to find yourself in a situation where you reasonably feared great bodily harm from someone that far away.

It would be good to have a short folding AK in the car. They have new variants now, though, and it’s confusing. They have a thing called an AK-103. My understanding is that it takes optics better.

In recent years, it became possible to put a rear stock on an AK pistol without committing a crime. That would be great for a vehicle gun. Sadly, Biden ordered the ATF to ban “pistol braces” on unregistered AK pistols. He says they’re short-barreled rifles, which have to be registered. Common sense says he’s right, but legally, he’s wrong. It’s bizarre.

A case is going through the federal courts, addressing the pistol brace question. There is already an injunction that prevents the ATF from going after certain owners of braced pistols. It looks like the ATF is going to lose, big time. We’re not there yet, however.

I want no part of the coming violence, but I would also prefer not to be dragged out of my car and beaten to death, and I would like to be able to protect my wife instead of crying and shaking and wondering why the government hasn’t sent anyone to help us. A lot of Jews have suffered that fate recently, and many would have been fine–and able to kill terrorists–had they been armed instead of relying on an unrealistic conception of their government’s abilities.

Look what happens in a world where people reject Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. You have to buy products made to harm other human beings, or you have to choose to risk martyrdom.

If people were praying in the Spirit every day, God would fill them with his thoughts, emotions, and desires, and he would rid them of the Satanic excrement that drives them now. If two people are aligned with God, they are also aligned with each other. It’s axiomatic. This is why Yeshua is called the Prince of Peace. He owns it. There is no other source.

Unfortunately, Islamists and Jews believe Christianity is idolatry, and leftists prefer self-worship, government-worship, and paganism, so the situation will continue to deteriorate.