Flag Down for Bringing a Walker on the Field

Someone on the web created a thread asking for unpopular opinions. When I saw it, I knew it was destiny. This is what I was made for.

I did quite a bit of writing. For one thing, I pointed out that pizza doesn’t go with beer. That must have made heads explode.

Pizza is acidic and a little sweet. It often contains oregano, a bitter herb. Obviously, you don’t pair that with a bitter beverage. Soft drinks and red wine go with pizza. Tea is acceptable. Beer? Insane.

I think people who drink beer with pizza are generally low-end beer drinkers who drink to get drunk. I think they must be people who drink really bad beer, chilled to the freezing point to kill the awful taste. People who drink stuff like Bud and Coors always drink it as cold as possible, and the reason is that when it warms up even a little, it tastes like seltzer with soap and a little sugar.

I think these people are likely to eat bad pizza from Papa John’s or Domino’s, and they just want something to wash it down and give them a buzz.

Beer goes with steak and rib roasts. It goes with Mexican food and seafood. It works with cheeseburgers and fries. Forcing it to get along with pizza is ill-advised at best. And nothing is worse than smelling other people’s beer-and-pizza burps while trying to eat.

If you think beer goes with everything, go eat an apple and chase it with a beer. It’s right up there with toothpaste and orange juice.

I also said Elvis was a lousy singer. It’s true. Elvis became famous because he caused girls with weak fathers to become sexually aroused. His early performances were basically riots, with little bacchantes fighting the ushers, tearing off their own underwear, and throwing it on the stage. People forget that. Today we make fun of people who call rock and roll the devil’s music, but it’s true. Any music that makes you throw your dirty underwear at people has some connection to hell.

Women still throw their dirty underwear at entertainers. It’s gross. They throw it at Justin Timberlake, for example. They throw it at the kind of guys who look like they take it home and put it on.

They should have men in Tyvek suits gather it and put it in medical waste bags. Someone could catch something.

Sinatra also mesmerized young tramps, but he was also an excellent singer whose style was innovative and unique. Jerry Lee Lewis was a much better singer than Elvis. Sam Cooke was far better. There were a lot of excellent male singers back in Elvis’s heyday. Nat King Cole. Eddie Arnold. Jim Reeves. Ray Price. Johnny Mathis. Ray Charles.

You can go into restaurants and bars today and still hear Sinatra recordings. Elvis? Not so much. It was never about the sound. It was about the pelvis.

I complained about sports worship. I said that if I wanted to watch overpaid illiterates work, I’d turn on The View.

I said I didn’t like it when people assumed I watched sports. People come up to me and try to make small talk about men I’ve never heard of, playing games I didn’t watch. “How about that Mahomes?” Who?

I pulled that name out of the air just now because I’ve seen it in headlines. I don’t know who he plays for or what his position is.

What if I went up to random men and said, “How about that Carl Friedrich Gauss? Is he the GOAT, or what?” He’s a fascinating guy. How can they not find him interesting? We wouldn’t have electronics or, well, any kind of serious technology without his discoveries.

Some guy responded and said I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

How thick can a person’s head be?

Me: I never watch football. It would be great if the stadium where the Super Bowl was played was obliterated by a meteor and replaced with a Buc-Ee’s.

Him: You must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

What?

This is completely typical of my experiences with sports fans. “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” They can’t believe a man who doesn’t watch sports can exist. It’s like they’re under a spell. And they are. Demons are filling their minds with absurdities.

It also bugs me when men with hurt feelings try to tell me how empty my life must be because I don’t watch sports. What possible reason could you have to be angry at me for not sharing all of your hobbies? Do I get mad at you for not knowing how to weld?

I look down on you, sure. But I don’t get angry.

Kidding.

Yeah, my life is empty. I love my wife, and I spend a lot of time having fun with her. I don’t turn the TV on as soon as I get on and ignore her while I fill the house with obnoxious crowd noises and pray I don’t lose my ill-informed, emotion-driven bets, which I didn’t tell her about. Oh, the emptiness.

I have all sorts of time for my interests, like prayer, cooking, shooting, writing, and using tools. I get to spend time with my pet. I get to sit in the recliner with my son on my chest and relax in an atmosphere of pure love.

Empty, empty, empty. It would be so much better to be outside a stadium, trying to dodge as kids try to spit on me on my way in. I’d really rather be paying $11 each for cups of extremely bad beer and then standing in a quarter-inch of other people’s urine in packed men’s rooms. I long to get caught up in post-game brawls where people fight to defend the reputations of spoiled young athletes who pay armed men to keep fans away from them.

If only I could spend 4 hours fighting traffic, trying to get home from a stadium after my team lost, avoiding eye contact with drunk road-ragers and praying I don’t get stopped at a DUI checkpoint.

To get average seats for my three-person family, I’d have to shell out almost $500. I would happily pay $100 to be allowed to stay home.

But I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

For $500, I can get my son a brand-new CZ 457 Scout in .22LR, and he can hand it down to his son. But no, I’d rather watch grown men play a game created to amuse children. When are the duck-duck-goose playoffs?

On a related note, I said Bill Burr was an idiot. A lot of men think he’s a genius and the world’s last straight shooter. A regular guy with a platform. Hello? It’s an act, and he’s an entertainer. If he were telling the truth, they wouldn’t call it an act.

Rock Hudson made romantic comedies with women. Just saying.

He’s not smart, and he’s not one of us. Normal men, I mean. He’s just another showbiz liberal, kissing the rings on the hands that feed him.

He has crippling TDS. Right after dozens of people died in the unnecessary LA fires, he appeared with another fool, Jimmy Kimmel, and made jokes about people who criticized California’s fire preparation and response. He ridiculed them. He stupidly asserted it wasn’t possible to put fires out with ocean water. He didn’t even think about the insensitivity of doing all this while bodies were literally still warm.

California and LA officials themselves have admitted they blew it. They admitted it in Donald Trump’s presence soon after Burr made an ass of himself. Talk about jokes aging badly.

Burr says he–“HE”–doesn’t get tired of winning football games. He supports the Patriots, and he uses the words “I” and “we” when he talks about them. “I don’t get tired of winning.” “We won.”

If Bill Burr is still capable of running 40 yards, he would probably do it in a minute and a half. On the field, he would move like Joe Biden trying to find his way off a stage. You could measure his vertical leap with a feeler gauge. His most likely tool for stopping an NFL pass is his forehead. Who is “we”?

You know those videos of drunken fans rushing onto football fields, careening around at 6 mph, and then having angry players turn them into Tex-Avery-style murals? That’s what a Bill Burr NFL cameo would look like, except maybe he would keep his shirt on. They would peel him off the turf like a fruit roll-up and bury him in a map tube.

If Bill Burr played in a game, he wouldn’t sit on the bench. They’d bring in a hospital bed and a bag with a zipper on it.

Bill Burr has never “won” a game. The people who win are paid to be there. If you have to pay, you’re not part of “we.”

Ticket Taker: Ticket, please.

Bill Burr: Ticket? I have to get in! We’re playing today!

Ticket Taker: Okay, pops. Ticket and DNR.

Burr says he feels bad for days when “WE” lose. Seriously? I don’t mean to be insensitive, but if the plane carrying the New England Patriots flew into a bus carrying the Kansas City Chiefs, I would be fine. I would be very sorry to see it happen, I would feel bad for everyone who knew them, and I would probably pray for their loved ones, but 15 minutes later, I’d probably be watching Paul Harrell videos on Youtube.

If your emotional wellbeing depends on how well a bunch of total strangers play a game you stink at, you need an intervention, because your life is devoid of meaningful pursuits. Burr felt jolly and sassy after dozens of people died in fires caused by incompetence, so maybe something in his head needs to be adjusted.

Some people got annoyed with me, but that just proved I was doing it right. If they wanted me to make them happy, they should have posted a popular opinion thread.

Taking the Gas Out of Gaslighters

My buddy Mike sent me some interesting photos on December 31. His son works in Manhattan, and while his son was at work, a man showed up on a balcony below his office and set up a sniper rifle. Here it is.

At first, I thought the photo was more interesting than it later turned out to be. I thought Mike’s son’s building was locked down due to a terrorist situation. Then I realized the rifle belonged to a cop. Mike sent me a video, and it featured a burly guy in black clothing with big white letters on the back.

If you were dancing, getting drunk, and doing drugs in Times Square when the ball came down, you were surrounded by guys with precision rifles.

I thought this was interesting, so I went to a community of shooters and asked if they could identify the gun. I have a precision rifle, so it was natural for me to be interested. You could call my gun a sniper rifle if you wanted. Professional snipers use precision rifles, just like shooting hobbyists. Military snipers didn’t always use them. They used to use deer rifles that were nicely set up to maximize accuracy.

I don’t know if it’s correct to say our military still uses deer rifles. The Marines use a modified .308 rifle based on the Remington 700–a deer rifle–and you can buy a heavy-barreled 700 in .308 for $690. The Marine designation for its rifle is M40A5.

A company called Georgia Precision sells the M40A5 for about $6500 without a scope. Do Marine rifles come from Georgia Precision, or are there a bunch of companies selling different M40A5’s? Not sure. I saw an Internet forum post which suggests the Marines build their own rifles.

The McMillan stock they use runs about $1400, and the aftermarket barrel probably costs something similar, including customization.

Do you need to spend that kind of money to get a super-accurate .308? No. But not every custom part is intended to improve accuracy, and the military can afford frills.

How much of the money is, basically, wasted? No idea. I’ll bet a lot of it is.

The Marines use a barrel made by a company named Schneider. So Schneider must make unbelievably accurate rifles on one else can match? No.

I don’t know why the Marines use .308. It’s an obsolescent (not obsolete) cartridge that loses velocity quickly. It drops below supersonic speed at around 800 yards, and when that happens, the bullet jiggles in flight, and it degrades accuracy. A 6.5 Creedmoor round is supersonic to about 1400 yards. It’s a more modern cartridge, designed with better technology.

When I took my precision rifle course, an instructor said my .308 had a trajectory like a mortar. The bullet goes up, slows down, and comes down, creating a path that looks like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

All rifle bullets do this, but a .308’s arch is a lot shorter and steeper than a 6.5 Creedmoor’s arch.

A bullet that slows down and drops fast is a pain to shoot accurately a long way out. When you do precision shooting, you have to know how much your bullet will drop over distance so you will know exactly how high it will be when it gets to your target. A short arch means the bullet’s path will be more nearly vertical far away. That means it will drop a lot more over a given distance out there. You have to have a good accurate range figure, because the round is less forgiving than a flat-shooting round.

The .308 delivers somewhat more energy to a person or deer at 200 yards than 6.5 Creedmoor, but farther out, the 6.5 delivers more energy because it’s moving faster. Because it wasn’t designed during the Truman administration.

I don’t know why any sniper would use a .308. Tradition, maybe? I don’t know any Marine armorers, so maybe I’ll never know. Maybe they have a great reason. It can’t be the increased energy at short ranges. A 6.5 Creedmoor will kill a moose just fine, so there is no reason to think a .308 is needed to kill a person. And there are a bunch of other cartridges that are better than 6.5 Creedmoor.

It’s not because a .308 rifle can use spare ammo from machine guns when things get bad. You can’t hit anything with machine gun ammo. I have tried.

If the .308 didn’t exist today, no one would invent it, because the technology is so backward. It would be like inventing a black and white TV with 13 channels.

The .308 was invented 73 years ago. Penicillin was about 11 years old. The transistor was just being made available to the public. The only intelligent life that had been to space was a few perverted beings that liked to abduct guys out of bass boats in Mississippi and probe their unmentionable parts. There were no satellites.

I guarantee you, you can get a Remington 700 that is just as accurate as the Marine version for way, way less than $6500. Maybe it will weigh more or not have wifi or something, but it will shoot fine, and given the short useful range of the .308, it will never need to shoot better than maybe 0.75 MOA. One MOA is 10.5″ at 1000 yards. How wide is a person?

Remington rifle: $650. Timney trigger: $250. New barrel: $500. Precision chassis (stock): $400. Bipod: $100-$250. Ballpark figures. Under $2000. Good scope (Vortex Viper): $1000. Rings: $150.

You don’t actually need the precision chassis, but it looks neat.

What are we at? $3050? Have my 3,000 university math credits paid off?

I think I have something like $2700 in my precision rifle, and I can promise you it will shoot 0.5 MOA with the right ammo and shooter, because I shoot close to that with crap off the shelf, and I am not a great shot.

You know what? Boys like their toys. It’s a blast, customizing, well, nearly anything and getting it just the way you want it. The Marines are boys, just like the rest of us.

As King Lear said when his daughter tried to tell him she couldn’t keep his drunken entourage in her palace, “O, reason not the need!”

To get back to the sniper photo, I asked some forum people if they knew what it was. It turns out the NYPD bought (or was given for publicity) Sako Trg M10 sniper rifles, which sell for about $12,000 without accessories. This is a 14.6-pound gun, and apparently, the NYPD went for .308.

Sako is Finnish, so yay for supporting US jobs.

I asked if anyone knew why the NYPD used this gun when Chris Kyle managed to get by with a TAC-338 which you can buy for $6500.

The TAC-338 uses a real sniper round which stays supersonic out to maybe 1500 yards and can be useful farther out.

The best answers I got involved politics. Basically, the NYPD does not care what it spends, and if it fails to spend whatever it gets in a given year, it gets less the next year, so it tries to spend up to its allotment.

I believe this is the correct explanation, because it comports with my understanding of human nature and blue states.

Anyway, I got a few unbelievably stupid answers. One guy called me a Fudd, which is a nasty name for a person who thinks the Second Amendment only applies to things like hunting shotguns. His answer contained zero useful information. He wanted to know how I had been on the forum for 4 years without knowing exactly why the NYPD needed a $12,000 rifle.

The answer was dumb for multiple reasons. First of all, they do not need the rifle. They could do the same job with an RPR from Bass Pro. Second, since they do not need the rifle, it is not possible for the justification for the rifle to appear anywhere on the forum. Third, who sits and memorizes every post on an Internet forum for 4 years? Fourth, his answer was rude, and he was a bully. I put him in his place and left him there.

Another guy said I had posted a dumbass thread. Another bully. I trimmed him down to size as well. A whole bunch of other users–knowledgeable people including former snipers–had responded with useful posts full of great information. A bunch of them agreed with me. I asked him if they were dumbasses.

I was called a whiner, by someone who has no idea what whining is. Whining means exaggerated, useless complaining. I didn’t complain. I pointed out problems with the arguments supporting the Sako purchase. That makes me a hater, not a whiner, right?

The Internet is a big playpen for jerks and bullies, and forums can be really trying. And certain interests draw unusually snotty people. Firearms. Bodybuilding. Christianity. Fishing. Electronics. Professional machinists are so rude they’re barely human. Hobby machinists are in the middle along with homebrewers. Welders are really nice. Foodies are Nazis. Not regular guys who like barbecue and pizza; they’re okay. I mean people who call themselves foodies and worship Food Network windbags who can’t really cook. Photography people are okay.

It’s funny, but bodybuilding draws bullies, but bodybuilders can’t actually fight. Fighting is a skill. It also requires cardio fitness, which many bodybuilders don’t have because they’re on drugs and don’t do cardio. There are bodybuilders who get tired climbing stairs. A lot of guys pump up show muscles in order to push other guys around, but actual martial artists who could pummel them easily are less obnoxious.

Bodybuilders aren’t even that strong. The kind of lifting they do produces big muscles that don’t do as much as smaller powerlifter muscles.

There is a skinny guy on Youtube who goes to gyms and humiliates drugged-up bodybuilders, tossing their weights around and saying how light they are.

Nineteenth-century-pistol guru Massad Ayoob is a forum guy, and he’s pretty obnoxious. Goes into panic/attack mode when anyone shows him up, which is not hard to do, or, more accurately, hard not to do. He has set himself up so many times. He got me banned from The High Road for disagreeing with him in a thread he was not even part of. Must have sent a note to his pals the mods: “I HAVE BEEN BLASPHEMED!”

Christian forums are awful. The Catholic forums are full of Catholics telling each other all Protestants go to hell. Protestant forums are full of people telling each other they’ll pray God helps them with their errors, when they really mean they hope they go to hell.

You literally have to treat electronics people like mental patients who could have full-blown slobbering-and-head-banging crises if you say the wrong thing. You can’t think of them as human beings. You have to act like you’re trying to extract data from bombs without setting them off. Like you’re playing Operation, with no funny bone.

Reddit is swarming with moderators who have no interest in moderating. They live to delete useful posts and lecture people. “Stand in awe of my deletion powers, mortal! Nanna, get me more Hot Pockets! And shove more Funyuns in them!”

In any case, I think I know why New York City spent a king’s ransom on rifles that work no better than Bass Pro merchandise.

People should be nice to each other. We should be patient. It makes life so much better. If you’re going to be hostile to someone, you should have a very good reason.

When people are nice to you, it gives you a lift. Sometimes I remember nice things people said to me decades ago, and the memories still give me strength. I remember nasty things people said and did, and I realize they still drag me down. It’s funny that I attached so much weight to remarks made by inferior people who were little better than chimps and who failed at life.

When you’re nice, you form attachments to people, and you go on to be helpful to each other in life. Snotty people push others away and end up fending for themselves unless they can control others.

God put us here to help each other. It would be wonderful if more people realized that instead of seeing humanity as a muy thai bag to use to vent their baseless cruelty.

Guess it’s time to take my new rifle out and see what it will do.

The Christmas Beverage Situation is Well in Hand

Google’s search now features AI, which I define as “artificial idiot.” I Googled “Christmas Ale,” and Mr. AI decided to give me his unwanted opinion.

He said it was a dark ale, often flavored with spices, hopped with things like Centennial and Amarillo. The usual Northwestern culprits.

There is a body called the BJCP that defines beer styles. I don’t think they have recognized Christmas Ale as one of them. But I could be wrong.

Well, guess what. I checked. They have a category called “Christmas/Winter Specialty Beer.” “A stronger, spiced beer that often has a rich body and warming finish suggesting a good accompaniment for the cold winter season.”

I don’t put spices in my beers. You can get a dizzying array of flavors from different yeasts, hops, and grains. I think people who jump straight to spices are trying to compensate for an inability to work with the basics.

My own (first) Christmas ale, extremely loosely based on heavy ales made by fat drunken monks in Belgium, is now ready to drink. I brewed on November 15, and today is December 19. It’s a very young beer, especially for a strong ale, but it’s ready to go.

I could have started drinking this earlier. It fermented in something like three days, and it tasted fine from the start.

I put it in my garage keezer and chilled it to 35°. I pumped it up to 3.3 volumes of CO2, which is very fizzy. When I say 3.3 volumes, I mean that if you forced all the CO2 out of one unit of beer, you would get 3.3 units of gas. Liters or whatever. I have no idea what temperature this applies to.

Tonight I made the huge mistake of using a normal-sized glass to hold my first finished serving. This beer has around 12.75% alcohol by volume, which is a little stronger than average. For wine.

It’s truly wonderful. A little dark fruit flavor, like a fruitcake. Some coconut, banana, and pineapple from the yeast and hops I chose. Sweet, but the sweetness is balanced by the CO2 and hop bitterness. Nice and bubbly. The head is beautiful and takes a while to go away.

The alcohol content may seem high, but in the winter, people like a little alcohol. It adds some heat to the beer. You feel it after you drink it.

I thought this beer would be way too sweet, but it isn’t. It has settled into a nice groove now that it’s cold and full of gas.

Going forward, it will be important for me to remember to use small glasses when I serve this beer. At the moment, I can’t feel my hands all that well.

For me, the purpose of brewing is not to get drunk. It’s to make very pleasant beverages that suit my taste better than what I can buy in stores. I think next time, I’ll use a 9-ounce nonic glass.

My second Christmas ale, which I brewed because I had no confidence in this one, is taking a while to ferment. I should be able to drink it in about 4 days if all goes well.

After this, it’s time to go back to replenishing my everyday beers. I can’t drink this heavy stuff all the time. I’ll end up on a transplant list.

Want to see a Reindeer Stagger?

I felt like I needed to brew a special ale for Christmas, so I started with my Happy Halfwit wheat ale and added things to make it darker and give it some raisiny flavor, like a liquid fruitcake. It fermented in about three days, and my brew software thinks it’s 12.8% alcohol, which is kind of a lot. Most wines are a little weaker.

I wanted a high ABV, because this was intended to be a one-serving beer, but this is more than I bargained for.

I tried samples during fermentation, and I was disappointed. It was too sweet, and the Sabro hops and Abbaye yeast made it taste like a pina colada. It tasted good, but it was not what I was after. I thought I would have to throw it out, but I chilled and gassed it anyway, just to find out.

Yesterday, I brewed a new version which has more bitterness, different hops, and less alcohol. I had the old one sitting at 35° and 3.3 volumes of gas. Today I tried a sample. A small one.

It’s magnificent. It’s still sweet, but the added gas and chilling add balance. CO2 adds carbonic acid to beer, and carbonic acid must have a sharp, acidic taste, because that’s the difference between seltzer and water.

Now I’m stuck with two batches of ale and only one Christmas. But it should last until next year. Really strong beers benefit from aging.

The newer beer should be fermented out by…let’s see…Thursday. That’s how fast it is. I guess the wheat kicks the yeast into high gear. Wheat beers ferment quickly.

This is not a session beer. Obviously. One pint, and you are done for the evening, unless you actually want to make a fool of yourself. I don’t think I’ll ever pour an entire pint for myself.

I need to quit making heavy beers for a while. There is no reason for a sane person to have three of them on tap, and that’s the number I currently have. I’ll get back to the old favorites.

I wonder why most strong beers are bad, given that any amateur can brew a good one. When I was in high school and even less mature than I am now, I got excited about Carlsberg Elephant, because people claimed the alcohol level was 10%. In reality, it was 7.2%, but it was still pretty strong.

It’s nasty. It gets good reviews from consumers, but I think that must be frat boys who think it’s good because it’s strong and doesn’t taste so bad they can’t gag it down. It barely tastes like beer. It has no balance. It has a musky smell. Maybe it arrives in the US skunked because of the green bottles.

How come Carlsberg brews a gross 7.2% beer, but I brew fantastic beers that are much stronger? They need to send their people to Belgium to try some strong beers that actually taste good.

I’ll think about all this while I sit on the couch and wait to feel ready to drive.

The Appliance no Home is Complete Without

I used my new deep fryer again today. I made the same things I made poorly two days ago: fried chicken and hush puppies. I also made slaw using Robert Irvine’s recipe, but of course, I changed it slightly. I’ll post my version, but his is available online.

INGREDIENTS
1 bag Publix coleslaw mix
1 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1-1/2 teaspoons celery seed
1/4 cup sugar
Salt and pepper if desired

This works great, but the amount of sauce is a little excessive for one bag of slaw, so it would be best to hold some back and add more later if needed.

This time, everything came out very well. My wife liked the chicken better than I did. She asked how we were supposed to enjoy fried chicken from restaurants after tonight. She said it was the best fried chicken she had had in the US.

In case anyone wants to try the recipe, I’ll post it, but I am still improving it, so I wouldn’t be in a rush to put it to the test. I felt it was too salty, and I think it still needs more heat.

BREADING INGREDIENTS:
1 cup flour
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon sage
1/2 teaspoon chipotle
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

This will get you through a 4-pound chicken, but just barely.

WASH INGREDIENTS:
2 eggs
3-4 teaspoons Frank’s Red Hot sauce or something similar
1 tablespoon beer
salt

I managed to find a 4-1/2-pound chicken, which is a midget by local standards. I am going to keep looking for 3-pound chickens. I was not able to find small chickens already cut up, and big chicken pieces are hard to fry well. I ended up cutting the breasts up because they were huge. Ideally, every piece of chicken should be the same size so everything cooks at the same speed and likes the same temperature.

I don’t cut chickens up well. I’ll keep working on it.

I did not listen to the insanity about frying at 350°. Maybe that works if you can find small chickens. I tried to stay below 330°, and the chicken cooked very nicely. No dark areas. No undercooked meat. The breading stayed on the chicken. The crust was similar to KFC extra crispy in texture and appearance.

I think I would do even better at 300°. Maybe lower, once the crust is set. My grandmother made good chicken, and she used to fry it on relatively high heat for 5 minutes and then cook it on lower heat for 20.

I used a Thermapen to check the internal temperature of each piece. They varied tremendously, so I think this was necessary.

I have always found that chicken fried at 350° burns on the outside before it cooks inside. As I have said before, I believe recipes that recommend 350° are intended for small cooking vessels. The people who write the recipes know that when you add chicken to a small pan, the temperature drops fast, so you end up cooking between 300° and 330°. When you have 4 gallons of hot oil and a propane burner, your oil temperature is not going to drop.

I dumped the raw chicken in a bowl. I salted it pretty generously and poured in a lot of Frank’s. I stirred everything up and left the chicken in the fridge while I worked on other things.

In retrospect, I think I should use a hotter sauce than Frank’s, because fried chicken somehow loses heat during the preparation and cooking processes.

I beat the eggs with a little beer. I didn’t taste beer in the final product, but I think eggs alone are too thick.

I dipped each piece in the eggs and then rolled it in flour. I lowered each piece into the hot oil individually to avoid having them hit the bottoms of the baskets while still raw. I was afraid they would stick if I did that. It happened last time.

I did not crowd the pieces. I believe I never had more than 4 pieces in a basket. I tried to group large and small pieces as well as I could, hoping all the pieces in each basket would be done at the same time. It didn’t work, but at least I didn’t mix wings and breasts. Having pieces of similar sizes made some difference, even if it wasn’t a perfect solution.

I cut the propane off at least twice. This machine will burn chicken very easily because it has a lot of power. You have to watch it.

In the past, I have double-breaded chicken, but this time I decided not to push it. It worked. One application of wash and flour worked great.

Day before yesterday, I used a Southern Living hush puppy recipe, and it was no good. The hush puppies had too much flour in them. They were doughy, like biscuits. They didn’t have enough onion flavor. They lacked salt and sweetness. They weren’t dark enough. The batter was too loose.

Today, I used much less flour, more onions, and more salt. I added a little beer to the buttermilk just for fun. The hush puppies were nearly perfect. Next time, more sugar, less salt, and stiffer batter. I plan to add the liquids a little bit at a time until I get what I want, instead of relying on a fixed amount called for by a recipe.

I don’t know why the people at Southern Living can’t make hush puppies. Maybe they’re like other magazines. Maybe they hire a lot of gay urban writers who only pretend to know their subjects.

INGREDIENTS

3/4 cup cornmeal mix (self-rising)
1/4 cup self-rising flour
1 tsp. salt
1 large egg
1/2 cup buttermilk
1-1/4 cups finely-chopped onion
1/2 tbsp. sugar

As noted above, I added a little beer to the buttermilk. I didn’t use the entire half-cup of liquid, but the batter was still looser than I liked. I ended up adding almost three tablespoons of meal.

I didn’t have self-rising flour, so I added 1/4 teaspoon of baking powder.

If you try this recipe, reduce the salt to 3/4 tsp. and increase the sugar to 2 teaspoons or so.

I used Martha White corn meal mix.

Do not use sweet onions. You never cook a Vidalia.

Even with too much salt and not enough sugar, these were dynamite. They tasted exactly like the taste you taste in your mind when you hear the phrase “hush puppies.” They browned better than the first batch because of the sugar.

I think they would be even better if I omitted the flour completely. Martha White mix already has some wheat flour in it.

I turned the heat up for the hush puppies. Small food needs more heat than big food, and hush puppies need to be darker than chicken. The fryer requires a certain amount of technique. You can’t just dump things in it without planning or watching and expect the best results. It’s not like making the same batch of fries 10,000 times at McDonald’s.

My conclusion is that the fryer is a winner. Everyone should have one. But frying is still a lot of work. I don’t have to wash a frying pot or filter and move oil, but I have to wash the baskets. Fried chicken involves a cutting board, a knife, a big bowl to hold the pieces before frying, a bowl for flour, and a bowl for egg wash. You also need tongs and a few other things. It’s not like a deep fryer is a toaster and you just pop your chicken pieces into it.

My wife wants to make fries in it. That should be nice. She makes them Zambian-style. Very thin and wide. They’re wonderful. Surprised me.

So that’s it. I can make good fried chicken now. My chicken will get better and better in the future. I have mastered hush puppies. On to the next challenge.

Maybe I’ll add a food photo later. I have a couple. They don’t look great, but they show that the food was fried nicely.

DC Struck by Sudden Shortage of Crack, Cheap Wine

The unthinkable has happened. Well, that’s wrong. It was definitely thinkable. A lot of us expected it. Joe Biden has pardoned his son, one-man crime wave Hunter Biden.

It’s very interesting from a political standpoint as well as a legal standpoint.

Let’s see. What crimes has Little Biden committed?

1. He appears to have been second-in-command in a Biden family bribery operation, selling his dad’s favors. It appears other relations, such as his aunt and at least one uncle, are involved. Little Biden was under investigation for lots of related stuff, including his alleged lobbying for Ukrainian firm Burisma, a company he began working for in April of 2014.

2. He lied on an FBI background check when buying a gun. That’s a felony. A jury convicted him.

3. He evaded federal income taxes.

4. He ignored a subpoena and refused to testify before Congress. Ordinarily, I would not take that seriously, but two Trump associates went to prison for the same thing. Of course, they were prosecuted under a different tier of the injustice system.

Am I missing anything? I hope I haven’t. It’s a very complicated story.

There is no point in going through the long list of Big Biden denials. They’re all over the web right now. Even leftists are posting them. They are shocked. Just as shocked as they were when they suddenly realized Big Biden was senile, after 4 years of falling down, shaking hands with imaginary people, and forgetting where he was.

Big Biden repeatedly, indisputably asserted that he would not pardon Little Biden, and his press flak did the same thing from the White House podium. I can’t wait to see her tell the White House Press Corps Biden never said he wouldn’t pardon Hunter.

Where is this woman going to get a job next year? At least Jen Psaki was reasonably bright. It’s hard to believe any media organization would hire this other one, but on the other hand…Don Lemon. The right complexion, sexual fetish, and political stance can outweigh cognitive and moral deficits.

Big Biden lied. Incredible! No one saw a thing like that coming! Because he has always been so honest in the past.

I saw a hilarious 20th-century video of Biden saying he was knocked out of the race for the presidency because he lied. He called himself a liar. He didn’t say he misspoke or whatever. If you haven’t seen it, it’s because the 21st-century press kept it quiet. Even Big Biden has admitted Big Biden lies.

He said it very casually. He seemed to think it was funny. It was like he was admitting he cut in line at Chipotle.

The scope of the pardon is enormous. It spans a decade, up to the day when Big Biden issued it. If we find out Little Biden robbed a bank or sold 10-year-old prostitutes to depraved oligarchs, he can’t be charged unless there is a way to turn his crimes into violations of state law.

Maybe Alvin Bragg could help us there. He’s exactly the kind of unethical prosecutor we would need.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that Big Biden’s pardon goes into effect retroactively just before Little Biden dove into Burisma.

The diary isn’t real, but we’ll imprison the lady who stole it anyway. The laptop isn’t real, but we’ll go after the people who publicized it anyway. The Burisma scandal isn’t real, but let’s pardon Hunter anyway.

It’s totally reasonable to pardon people who are clearly innocent. In Biden World.

So what’s happening here?

Little Biden had a sweetheart deal that would have spared him prison time, ending prosecution on the tax and gun charges, but the judge blew it up because she felt it was unfair and would have had the effect of a blanket pardon for unrelated future prosecutions. On the surface, it looks like a) the prosecutors were in cahoots with his defense team or b) the prosecutors were stupid and the defense team fooled them into writing Biden a lifetime pardon. Option b is completely plausible. The best and brightest generally do not go into government work.

Little Biden did not try to restructure the plea. Instead, he pleaded guilty. Why?

Let’s go ahead and be cynical.

By pleading guilty, he saved a ton of money in attorneys’ fees. Biden has very expensive representation. A second trial and two appeals would have cost him millions, in all likelihood. I don’t know why high-profile defendants hire such overpriced lawyers, but they do. Dealing with a sentencing should be much less work than a trial. Little or no research. No witness prep. No expert witnesses with huge fees. The list goes on.

Once he pleaded (not “pled”) guilty, all he had to do was sit back and wait to be pardoned.

Did he know he would be pardoned? Of course. He and the Big Guy had a deal. Otherwise, why plead guilty? It saved him money, but barring a pardon, it also assured he would go to prison.

Big Biden is one of the most notorious and shameless liars ever to stink up the Oval Office. Of course he lied, repeatedly, when he said he would not pardon Little Biden.

Trump would almost certainly have pardoned Little Biden. He is going to pardon a bunch of J6 martyrs, and he wants to be able to say he was as good to a political enemy’s son as he was to them. Even if they didn’t exist, he would still want to pardon Little Biden in order to appear magnanimous and get a distraction out of the way while putting his regime in place.

What about Kamala?

That’s a tough one.

I’m sure she originally planned to pardon Little Biden. She probably discussed it with Big Biden before he shuffled out of the race and used her to gut Barack Obama. It was probably a condition for his agreement to, for all practical purposes, appoint her as the Democratic candidate.

It appears that Biden sabotaged her repeatedly, however. I believe he appointed Kamala in order to prevent Barack Obama, who was in the process of knocking him out of the candidate spot for a second time, from installing his own protege, Chris Coons, who will now join Admiral Stockdale and Tim Kaine on the list of forgotten could-have-beens.

If Kamala had won, it would have been in spite of Big Biden. Maybe she would have backed out on a promise to pardon Little Biden. I doubt Big Biden was willing to take a chance.

I think Kamala was not a sure thing, and Biden did not want to give Trump a PR victory. I believe this is why he relieved himself all over his already-tainted legacy.

Is Hunter out of the woods now? Not yet.

There is some chance Trump’s DOJ will start to take the Biden family bribery operation seriously. If that happens, Hunter can be forced to testify. Thanks to Big Biden, he will not be able to refuse to answer questions. He can’t assert his Fifth Amendment rights because he can’t incriminate himself. He can, however, be imprisoned indefinitely for contempt of court for refusing to testify. He can also be imprisoned for perjury or lying to the FBI.

Sometimes prosecutors get people to testify against their accomplices by threatening them with prosecution. That won’t work on Hunter now. Another tool is immunity. They can give people immunity in order to strip them of Fifth Amendment protection. Big Biden just did that for future prosecutors.

What will the Bidens do now?

If Big Biden wants to kill the scandal permanently, he will have to pardon himself and every other individual involved in the family’s crimes. Alleged. He could also pardon everyone but himself, counting on the GOP to be unwilling to prosecute a former president.

Whatever Biden’s many faults are, he is very protective of his children. His DOJ got a woman imprisoned for the petty theft of his daughter’s diary. I don’t know whether his passion for nepotism extends sufficiently to other relatives to motivate him to pardon them.

It’s wild, seeing leftists scream about the pardon. They are very angry at Joe, but, predictably and incredibly, they have managed to turn Trump into the problem. Now Trump will pardon all the J6 defendants! The dangerous revolutionaries who pretty much took over the entire country by getting buzzed on cheap beer and throwing a halfhearted, weaponless, planless riot that lasted a couple of hours and resulted in no deaths except for the murder of an unarmed woman who tried to climb through a window.

If Batista had faced this kind of coup, Castro would have died in prison. This is the kind of revolution deposed tyrants wish they could have faced.

If the J6 defendants, and not Barack Obama, had staged a coup against Biden’s presidential campaign, he would have been on the ballot through November 5.

Trump was going to pardon the nonviolent J6 scapegoats anyway. No one should spend years or decades in prison for walking through the Capitol during a riot. Some of the J6 people are in prison for doing much less.

Is Joe Biden crazy and corrupt enough to pardon himself and his family? I guess he is. If he is willing to abandon all pretense of honesty and respect for the law in order to save Hunter from a year or two at a Club Fed, he is probably willing to go all the way.

I don’t care about Little Biden skating on the gun and tax charges, because rapists and murderers are acquitted every day, but the bribery thing is important. It needs to be fully exposed and investigated, regardless of whether he can be charged.

I don’t know whether Trump has the stomach for it. Guess we’ll find out.

Thank You, Drunk Monks

I am brewing again.

I took some time off for some reason I no longer remember. I’m not sure there was a reason. Laziness may have been involved.

Early this year, I stocked up on grain, hops, and yeast, but I let things slide. My house is full of brewing supplies. I had to get back at it.

I am out of wheat ale, and my amber/orange lager, Last Trump Lager (may be changed to Final Trump Lager) is definitely stale. My supply of Emergency Management Ale is dangerously low. My first imperial stout needs to be drunk and replaced with a recipe I like better.

Today I brewed my first batch of Happy Halfwit Christmas Ale.

My first heavy beer is called Happy Halfwit because it has a lot of wheat in it. It’s sort of like a Belgian ale. Belgians call their wheat beers witbiers. My beer’s grain bill is around 1/3 wheat, so I decided to call it Halfwit. Poetic license. No one would think Thirdwit was…witty.

About two years ago, when I started getting back into brewing, I bought a bunch of store beers to sharpen up my palate. I bought St. Bernardus Christmas Ale, from Belgium. I believe it’s a quadrupel, or what the BJCP calls a Strong Dark Belgian Ale.

When I first got the beer, I was not crazy about it. It had a coarseness to it. Too much funk, as I have said in an earlier post. I bought a 4-pack, and until today, I had two in the fridge.

It improved a great deal while I was debating throwing it out. The funkiness went away, and it became like Belgian beer Kool-Aid. Very easy to drink, but still complex.

Today I made something like a Belgian Dark Strong Ale, but I used a lot of wheat, while Belgian Dark Strong Ales are made with barley alone. Stunts like this make other homebrewers think I’m weird, but I really like the beers I make. They are my favorites.

It seems like all the great Belgian beers are made by monks. It’s like they spent the Dark Ages and the Renaissance doing nothing but lying around drunk. They didn’t stop with beer. They also invented a lot of well-known hard liquors. Supposedly, the European wine industry was developed by monks.

Why were they drunk all the time? Was life really that dull?

My brewing method is pretty slick now. I have it dialed in. I mash and boil in a 10-gallon pot straddling two stove burners. A mesh bag goes in the kettle to hold the grain. I strain the results and pour them into a 6-gallon stubby Torpedo keg, using a big saucepan. I put the keg in the pool so the wort chills fast. Then I pitch the yeast, add a valve to control the building CO2, and put the keg in a freezer with a Chinese temperature controller on it.

It’s really simple.

When I got back into brewing, I assumed other people had made a lot of progress with tools and methods, and I foolishly bought a computerized German machine that takes grain and turns it into wort. It was a stupid thing to do. I blew about a thousand dollars on something that should cost three hundred, and it was a pain to take apart and clean.

Now it’s just me, the kettle, and the bag. I spend about a third as much time cleaning and putting stuff away. And the beer is just as good.

I guess I shouldn’t make it sound like there has been no progress, because the kettle-and-bag method is relatively new. It’s called brew in a bag, or BIAB. But while it’s progress, it involves a setup more primitive than the one I started using in 2001.

There are guys out there using HERMS equipment. I’m not going to Google to find out what HERMS stands for, but it involves several huge stainless containers and at least one pump. I would quit brewing if I had to wash all that.

Here is the thing: men love gadgets. If we didn’t, women would be living in burrows and behind bushes. We love tinkering and engineering. When you get started brewing, it’s easy to fall in love with unnecessary machinery. You begin with the idea you’re going to make really good beer, and you end up trying to become a really good mechanic instead.

There are guys out there with big, shiny, three-vessel systems that take up their entire garages, and they could be using 1) a pot, and 2) a bag.

It’s not like BIAB is a compromise. BIAB people win prizes all the time.

I’ll just say it. You have to be stupid to buy a fancy brewing system. I know, because I bought one. I should sell it.

To a stupid person.

Okay, “stupid” is not the right word. But a person with knowledge and common sense would buy something else.

The beer I made today will probably ferment out in 4 days. I know this because ale I used as my starting point fermented out in three. This new one is a little heavier. I should be drinking it in 10 days or less.

So that’s nice.

In other news, our wonderful Lord has given me more revelation, and I should put it on the blog.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural. That’s the starting point. Look for symmetry, and you will save yourself a lot of time in the school of hard knocks. You will learn more quickly.

Pride is horrible. I have written about this. It goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit goes before a fall. Self-confidence is poison.

I have also said that God showed me that pride is a fence we build to protect our iniquities. We don’t like to listen or change, so we make excuses and dig our heels in. We protect our bad habits and delusions as though they were our children, because we think we know better than everyone else.

Pride is also a fence we build to keep God away. The Bible makes this clear. It says he is close to the humble but far from the proud.

If we build a fence to keep correction out, and it keeps God away, who is it bringing near? Evil spirits. Symmetry.

Here is revelation: by the symmetry of the supernatural, humility is a fence we build to keep destruction and evil spirits away. It’s a fence that surrounds God and ourselves, keeping him close to us.

Humility is actually power and victory. No one ever teaches this. They don’t know. They’re too busy telling us to work hard, grin while we are abused and defeated, and give them money to buy more jets.

If you’re humble, God will be close to you, so he will keep evil spirits far off, and he will bless you in every way.

Think of this: in the Old Testament, who saw God? One person, as far as we know. Maybe Adam saw him before the fall, but Moses is the only person we can say saw him, for sure.

What quality did Moses have?

No one was more humble than Moses. Look it up. The Bible says it.

I didn’t see the connection until God showed it to me yesterday.

Moses was close to God. Moses was given so much power and authority, he was able to stroll up to the ruler of Egypt and tell him off.

The one thing that Moses did that got him in trouble with God was an act of pride. God told him to speak to a rock and make water come out, and Moses struck the rock instead, making it look like human strength solved the problem. For this, Moses was kept out of Israel.

We tend to think of humility as something that makes us weak. We think it empowers others to abuse us. But it’s actually the entrance to the strong fortress the Bible keeps telling us about. It’s safety and power.

I wish I had known this a long time ago.

I hope this is useful to you. Now I’ll finish this beer and go to bed.

Home Brewery Roars Back to Life

This was written on November 25.

It’s brew day minus one. I’m making Happy Halfwit Christmas Ale tomorrow.

I make a heavy ale called Happy Halfwit, and it’s magnificent. It contains a huge amount of wheat, which is weird for a heavy ale. I use Abbaye yeast, which was supposedly derived from Chimay dregs. This ale is sweet and very strong. Absolutely perfect. And it gets better with time. I made my last batch in January, and it’s at least as good as it ever was.

Almost two years ago, I got myself some St. Bernardus Christmas Ale, from Belgium. It’s dark and pretty heavy. It’s considered a quadrupel (spelled “quadrupel”), which means it’s what Americans call a “Strong Dark Belgian Ale.” It comes in at 10% alcohol, according to the Sint Bernardus (spelled “Sint Bernardus”) brewery.

I like this ale, but it has some funk to it. Belgians do weird things with beer, and sometimes their beer has smells and flavors people have compared to horse sweat and manure. I tried a Belgian-inspired ale made in America, and it made me think of Carnation Milk that had been in the can for 30 years, multiplied by 5.

I am trying to make a dark ale with little or no funk. If it has some banana overtones, which Abbaye sometimes produces, that’s fine, as long as they’re not overwhelming.

I’m using Special B malt as an ingredient. People tell me I’m using too much, but then they also claim I’m crazy to use Sabro hops, which are known to make beer taste a little bit like a pina colada. They say the malt will make the beer taste like prune juice. They may be right, but I already have the grain, and I can’t separate the Special B out. I’m going to go with it and change it next time if I need to.

I’m making a yeast starter. That means I’m taking a little packet of expensive yeast, mixing it with a malt extract solution, and letting the yeast multiply overnight. The idea is to overwhelm the beer and any microbes that might survive the brewing process. A starter is supposed to guarantee fermentation will go all the way, and it reduces the likelihood of infection by stray germs.

I am shooting for an original (prefermentation) specific gravity of 1.092, which is very heavy. Specific gravity is a ratio. It’s the density of the beer compared to the density of water. A lot of beers come in at around 1.040. Mine are generally around 1.055. A figure of 1.092 means there will be a lot of work for the yeast to do.

Sometimes, for reasons only yeast knows, yeast gives up, and then you’re stuck with beer that isn’t quite beer. I want to avoid that.

My new ale should come in at about 10% alcohol, which is perfect for cold nights by the fire. Not that I get much in the way of cold nights, but still.

I should be able to finish brewing tomorrow. Then I’ll stick the beer in a dedicated fridge at a fixed temperature. After that, I plan to make some of my favorite amber ale, and I need to replace my Last Trump lager, which is getting old.

I’ve been drinking my Steppe Brother Imperial Stout. I made it a long time ago, and I found it too sweet. I increased the carbonation level, and that added carbonic acid to the beer. Carbonic acid gives club soda its sharp flavor.

Here’s a photo of this beer in a miniature pint glass.

I like the beer now, and I’ve realized it’s not a failure. It’s a fantastic beer. It’s just sweeter than I intended when I wrote the recipe. I have grain for a new version, so I’ll be making that soon.

Other people who really like sweet beer would love this stout. If you can stand milk stout, which contains no milk but is full of unfermentable lactose, this beer will seem dry to you.

Imperial stout is a style the British exported to Russia. It was made very strong and dark. The intention was to make a beer that could survive an ocean crossing, supposedly. If you want to taste a perfect Imperial Stout, by a 4-pack of Old Rasputin, by North Coast Brewing.

After making my own imperial, I contacted North Coast, and they suggested I crank up the bitterness in my beer, so I’ll be doing that, going up to 76 IBU’s with Citra hops. As you might guess, they have a citrusy flavor.

My first batch of Steppe Brother fermented out in three days, which is crazy. I used a psycho yeast called Kveik Lutra. Kveik yeasts come from Norway or Sweden or something, and they are turbocharged. I got good results the first time around, so I’ll be using Lutra again.

Hoping to have a nice festive beverage available by Christmas.

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.