“Breakfast” means “America”

This post will repeat things I wrote in an earlier post, but that’s okay, because I want it to stand on its own.

I just had my first decent breakfast in weeks. I had my last good breakfast in Ireland, during my recent trip. Every breakfast since then was lame. Until today. I just visited McDonald’s.

I don’t know why people don’t man up and admit McDonald’s makes some of the best breakfast food on the planet. It must be snob anxiety. They’re afraid of what other people will think. I remember seeing Candice Bergen brag that she had never had a McDonald’s hamburger. She sounded like a fool to me. Sure, she said the right thing to avoid raising the anemic eyebrows of her elitist vegan peers, but she sounded like a snob who was more interested in currying favor than in enjoying good food. For all she knew, McDonald’s burgers were wonderful, but she was afraid to try them because the unwashed intracoastal masses ate them.

I know Mcdonald’s burgers are NOT wonderful, but then I’ve eaten them. I gave them a shot. I didn’t sneer at them in proud ignorance.

Today I had a sausage and egg McMuffin, a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit, and hash browns. I mixed Hunt’s All-Natural ketchup with a little Frank’s Red Hot, and I dipped liberally. I’m still basking in the afterglow.

You may wonder what I had in Ireland that constituted my last good breakfast. Simple. I went to the McDonald’s on Dublin’s O’Connell Street.

I think the first breakfast Rhodah and I shared in Dublin came from Keogh’s, a cafe in the Temple Bar area. They sold us two scones; cranberry and raisin. We paid over three Euros each. The scones were cold and dry. The butter was cold and hard. Rhodah’s scone had no raisins in it. We sent it back. The waiter returned our serve, unaltered. They had a big pile of scones with raisins in them, but they insisted a raisinless raisin scone was normal.

Not long after that, we went to Bread 41, a hipster bakery that sells the kind of food people describe as “artisanal,” which means it looks good. Bread 41 had a lot of great Internet reviews, and people on a forum recommended it.

Here is the problem with food: most people have the palates of goats. If you put three people at a table, you serve them horse manure on cold bagels, and you pay two of them to say the bagels are great, the third will almost certainly agree. The third person is not likely to know the difference between horse manure and good food, and even if he does, he’ll probably want to fit in with the other two. For these reasons, it’s not really possible to get good advice from people you don’t know. When it comes to the Internet, the problem is compounded by fake reviews. All over the world, people are making good money recommending things they haven’t tried.

We were told Bread 41 was so good, we needed a reservation. We were told people lined up around the block. We walked in anyway, during peak breakfast hours, and there were about three people in front of us. That should have told me something.

I ordered pain au chocolat (“chocolate croissant”), a croissant, and hot chocolate. Rhodah ordered something called a morning bun, along with a roll that had been sliced in half and filled with some kind of cream. She also ordered coffee.

The food looked marvelous. The croissants (I will call both of them that) had all sorts of flaky layers in them. The items Rhodah ordered were very appetizing. Then we tried to eat our purchases.

The croissant tasted like burnt egg wash and not much more. A true croissant is made with milk, sugar, and salt. It should be very flavorful. It should not be dry. It should not be harsh. My croissant had very little flavor, except for tasting burned.

I have managed to enjoy a lot of bad croissants. Burger King croissants are not impressive, but they taste like bread and butter, so they’re pleasant to eat. Publix croissants have a nice buttery taste. Walmart croissants are no worse than a good slice of bagged white bread. In Egypt, at a hotel buffet, I had croissants which pretty clearly arrived at the kitchen in a bag, but they weren’t offensive. Bread 41’s croissants, I could not finish. I mean, I could have, but I didn’t want to. They were that bad.

The chocolate one was just like the other one, but it had chocolate filling installed WAYYYY down in one end. This made it look very stylish, but it was a stupid move, because you would have to eat most of the croissant before tasting chocolate.

Rhodah’s morning bun was fine. It was sort of a glorified pecan twirl kind of a thing. Spiced dough rammed into a mold and baked. Imagine a really good cinnamon roll, and then imagine it dryer and with less flavor. She shared it with me, and it was the only thing we finished.

The cream roll was horrendous. Rhodah complained about the flavor. I tried it, and it had a bitter taste. There was a spice in it that belonged in something like sausage or Indian food. Ruined the whole thing.

Her coffee was lukewarm and not very tasty. My hot chocolate was fraudulent in that it was not hot at all. It was tepid, and it tasted as though it had been made with spoiled milk and water. It wasn’t very sweet, either.

I think the Irish dislike hot beverages. This wasn’t the only time we were served lukewarm coffee or cocoa.

I was afraid the chocolate was spoiled, so I barely touched it. I didn’t want to spend my vacation throwing up.

This is how post-Food Network foodie hipster food is. It’s supposed to look perfect, and you’re supposed to rave about it even if it tastes bad, which it often does.

I wrote an honest Internet review, and someone from Bread 41 had a conniption and responded with a total lack of professionalism. This says a lot about the restaurant. A professional never berates a diner. They say they’re sorry the diner didn’t like the experience. They say they will try to do better. Or they ignore the complaint altogether, sure that it’s a fluke. When you go after a dissatisfied patron, you show that you can’t improve because constructive criticism infuriates you.

I’ll go through the employee’s claims.

He said the bitter roll was a Swedish semla. I’m sure you’re all very familiar with these, since all Americans eat them several times a week. He said it contained cardamom, as specified in the traditional recipe. He seemed irate that I did not expect this.

Couple of things. Like 98% of the world’s population, I had never heard of semlas. If you’re going to sell people bitter cream rolls for breakfast, you should offer some kind of warning before handing them over, unless your business is in Sweden. On top of that, I tend to doubt the amount of cardamom was correct, because the roll was disgusting. It tasted medicated. Based on the chef’s inability to recognize a good croissant, which people in nearly every country on Earth can do, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he has no idea how much cardamom to put in a semla.

You don’t have to tell people what croissants are like before you sell them, because everyone knows what a croissant is. If you’re going to sell, say, an obscure Congolese pastry made with a tablespoon of mace, you should let customers know what they’re in for.

My wild guess is that he overdid the cardamom. The web says a proper semla is “lightly flavored” with it.

He also made it clear he thought I had no idea what croissants should be like, because I was American. He said American croissants were full of various unpleasant things, such as emulsifiers.

That was really dumb. America has the best food on Earth, because America is rich and able to pay for it. We have drawn all sorts of skilled immigrants over the centuries, and many of them are from France, the home of croissants. I know Ireland is the world’s French pastry mecca, so forgive me, but I think our French cooks, and the people who have learned from them, have figured out how to make croissants here.

When I say we have the best food on Earth, which is true, I don’t mean the majority of our restaurants sell great food. I mean our best restaurants, bakeries, butchers, and grocers are as good as anyone’s. Now that the microbrew revolution has blossomed, we also make the world’s best beer; no contest, even from the Belgians.

Obviously, our croissants are not all full of chemicals. I’m sure some are, but clearly, this country is full of bakers who would never use such things. And the unpopular truth is that sometimes, chemicals make good food a lot better. Try adding sodium citrate to mac and cheese.

He said I should continue eating at places like Burger King and Walmart, since their food was more on a par with my tastes. He was actually right, because a lot of the food from these places, unlike his food, isn’t so off-putting I don’t want to finish it. A good Whopper is better than a burnt croissant.

Go to Youtube and search for croissants made in Paris. You’ll see they’re not burnt. They’re not even dark.

I can’t believe an Irish person would dare make fun of another country’s food. Irish food has such a bad reputation, the government mounted a nationwide campaign to fix it, and it hasn’t been a great success. They don’t even do uniformly good work with fish and chips, which is a signature dish of the British Isles. Imagine going to Tennessee and finding that most barbecue restaurants were no good. Same idea. It could never happen. It’s nice that the Irish have made an effort, but I ate there for about 12 days, and I was usually disappointed, even in the Guinness, which they served incorrectly.

We never had a bad Thai or Italian meal in Ireland, but the Irish themselves nearly always let us down.

Two hungry people showed up at Bread 41, hoping to fuel themselves for a long day of walking, they were hungry enough to eat substandard food if necessary, and they left most of their items unfinished. The customers were not the problem. Case closed.

I really wanted to get some calories into me because I knew we would use them up, but it wasn’t worth it to me to finish my food, nor was it worth it to Rhodah. When we left, we joked about needing to find a place to have breakfast.

After this, we had breakfast at two B&B’s. One was in Dingle, and the other was in Inis Mor. In both places, I made the error of ordering the full Irish breakfast.

They gave me one egg, which is ridiculous, dry Irish bacon, fried mushrooms, white pudding (funky-tasting sausage), link sausage, and canned beans which were about like pork and beans. I also had toast. I passed on the black pudding, which is a giant scab of seasoned congealed blood.

I don’t know why people rave about English and Irish breakfasts, because they’re not very good. They’re kind of okay. That’s about it. Who pours beans out of can and microwaves them for breakfast? Who eats one egg? The link sausage was like finely ground mystery meat; it tasted cheap.

My advice is this: don’t try to like the full English or Irish breakfast. You may think you’re supposed to like it, because people who don’t know good food claim it’s good, but it’s not good at all.

I also had eggs Benedict; an AMERICAN dish. I couldn’t tell exactly what the object that was supposed to be an English muffin was, but it was dry, small, and hard. The egg was also small, which is weird, because Americans supposedly use smaller eggs than the British, who are right next door to the Irish. All the Irish eggs I saw were tiny.

In America, eggs Benedict is wonderful. You get two big eggs with lots of Hollandaise sauce. You get a big English muffin with butter. You get Canadian bacon, which is much better than Irish bacon, a drier, less tasty version of the same thing.

Eggs Benedict came out of Delmonico’s restaurant in New York, where it was named after a customer named Benedict. If it had tasted like Irish eggs Benedict, no one would know what it is today, because no one would have considered saving the recipe or naming it.

Here’s something else that’s bad about Irish breakfasts: they don’t provide cream for coffee. They use milk, which is completely useless. The fat in cream kills bitterness and improves the texture of coffee. How can people in other nations have failed to catch on?

I could have had French toast, but I opted not to. Why? Because I knew there was no way they would have real syrup. Maple syrup is a NORTH AMERICAN condiment. It would amaze me to learn it was sold anywhere in Europe. Ordinary pancake syrup is a chemical counterfeit better known as diluted corn syrup. I don’t understand why any serious establishment would serve pancakes, waffles, or French toast without offering real syrup.

In Dublin, we found a McDonald’s, and Rhodah loved it. The McMuffins were very good. The hash browns were a bit undercooked, but they were still better than Irish food.

The food I had this morning was great, and McDonald’s deserves some credit. They make beautiful biscuits; if you don’t believe me, order them a la carte, take them home, and put your own gravy on them. Their muffins can’t be criticized. They’re standard English muffins, smeared with real butter. Their sausage is just as good, or better than, anything you can get at your local grocery store. They fry their circular eggs in-house. Granted, the folded eggs are warmed up at their restaurants, but eggs take reheating very well. Waffle House cooks eggs to order, but McDonald’s makes a much better breakfast.

If you don’t respect the hash browns, try making them yourself. I have. You will fail. It’s very difficult to make a McDonald’s-style hash brown that isn’t soggy or brown inside. They do a beautiful job.

The coffee at McDonald’s is also excellent, WHEN they keep it fresh. They tend to let the decaf sit, and then it starts to smell like cat pee. I really mean cat pee. Not trying to be funny.

I am extremely blunt and honest when I write Internet reviews. Business owners seem to think the purpose of reviews is to flatter them and lure people to their establishments. It’s not. It’s to give people solid information so they can patronize good businesses and avoid bad ones. If a proprietor does a bad job, I’ll say so, and I don’t care at all how he feels or whether it costs him money. I’m not on his side. I’m on the side of other consumer. If he doesn’t like complaints, he should change his ways.

If the Bread 41 guy is upset, tough. Reviews are matters of business. We’re not buddies. If he thinks people who do business with him are supposed to go on the web and lick his ear, he needs to grow up.

The best breakfasts I’ve had in Europe were continental, i.e. a couple of baked items and coffee or chocolate. On the continent, you get excellent pastries and rolls, and the coffee and chocolate are just as good. When it comes to real breakfast, meaning a meal, I don’t know of any country that can touch America. If you have a Cracker Barrel and a McDonald’s near you, you are in pretty thin air, and there are many American restaurants that put these businesses to shame. Try a real Jewish deli that serves good bagels and smoked fish. Try a fancy hotel with a big brunch spread. I make country ham, scrambled eggs, biscuits and gravy, and fried apples that would bring most people to their knees. Americans do breakfast right. No getting around it.

No Lie is too Big or too Small

Someone posted a comment, asking if I was okay. I am, indeed, okay. It’s kind of people to check up on me.

My wife and I just flew home from Ireland. Sadly, we flew home to different homes, but that will change soon.

I started writing a long piece about the trip, but I got a GSOD (“Green Screen of Death”), and I lost the whole thing. I’m too tired to start over today, but I will tell you this much: anyone who tells you Guinness is better, or even different, in Ireland is imagining things. It’s exactly the same, except some people in Ireland don’t know how to dispense it, so it sometimes tastes more bitter.

Stout is supposed to be dispensed using “beer gas,” which is a mixture of nitrogen and CO2. It makes the beer creamier and sweeter. My hotel in Dublin used pure CO2, so my first Guinness in Ireland was not very good. I did not have to ask whether they used CO2. I can tell. After all, I used to make my own stout.

Here’s where I’ll post a funny story about Barack Obama, illustrating a fact we already know: he is a silly and shameless liar. Read the remarks he made about Guinness in Ireland.

The first time I had Guinness is when I came to the Shannon airport. We were flying into Afghanistan and so stopped in Shannon. It was the middle of the night. And I tried one of these and I realized it tastes so much better here than it does in the States … You’re keeping all the best stuff here!

He had Guinness for the first time in Ireland, and he realized it tasted better than it did in the States. Where he had never tried it. He didn’t say what kind of occult process was involved in determining how a beer he had never tried tasted.

The amusing thing is that the liberal MSM repeats his remarks without pointing out the obvious lie.

I can pretty much guarantee you Obama can’t tell the difference between Guinness and ginger ale. Feminine men generally aren’t very interested in beer. He lied anyway, because that’s what he does. If you like your stout, you can keep your stout.

Maybe I shouldn’t criticize, because I loved Trump, and Trump lied constantly. The difference is that Trump lied about things no one cared about, while Obama lied about important political matters. Obama is the liar who increased the price of my medical insurance by 200% over 5 years. I was paying a little over $200 per month, and now I’m over $700, with no new health problems to justify it.

I had both Guinness and Murphy’s in Ireland. I like Murphy’s a little more because the balance of bitterness and sweetness is better. I didn’t try any lighter-colored Irish beers. Notice I didn’t just say “lighter.” Guinness is a very light beer apart from its color. It’s low in calories compared to many beers that aren’t as dark.

That’s all I have to say in relation to Ireland right now. I am still behind on my sleep, so I am going to go sit and do nothing.

Famous Chefs Focus on the Wrong Kind of Dough

Today, I am making pizza. I can’t seem to stop doing it. I made myself an excellent thin pie which was just about perfect, so I had a recipe I should have clung to. Naturally, I decided I had to go on and make a less-thin pie with a different crust recipe. While I have been fooling with it, I have gone looking for helpful advice.

It’s surprising how hard it is to get solid information about food. You would think it would be simple to find great advice in this, the Internet’s fourth useful decade. Not so. People who have no idea what they’re doing post recipes and include the word “best” in the descriptions, and many of them seem to have credentials, so it’s easy to get sucked in.

It’s a little like America’s Got Talent. A small percentage of Americans can actually sing, but there are many, many more who clearly can’t yet insist on auditioning. People who ought to know perfectly well they can’t sing show up in droves, and the judges have to waste their time listening to them.

How you can get to be an adult and not realize you can’t sing is beyond me. Surely many of the bad performers that have made the judges suffer had already been informed.

People post bad recipes, and they also give bad general advice about cooking, and many of the worst offenders have big followings.

Long ago, I quit watching the Food Network. I had tried recipes and gotten poor results, and it was not my fault. I found out that famous TV chefs had published a lot of useless, time-wasting material. I had a realization: it wasn’t just that they couldn’t cook. They had jobs that required them to produce an endless stream of good recipes, and there was just no way for mere mortals to fill the demand, so they published a lot of things that weren’t tested properly. They hired ghost cooks to send them things, and many of those cooks weren’t very good.

The goal of a famous chef isn’t to produce good food or teach other people to cook well. It’s to maintain a huge income stream. You can’t do that without providing way more content than a real human being can create responsibly.

I have learned I can’t trust famous chefs, and I have also learned that a cooking school degree is meaningless. America is full of trained chefs who serve terrible food. Cooking well requires a little ability and a lot of humility. You have to know good food when you taste it, and cooking school can’t teach that to everyone. You also have to keep testing yourself. You have to taste the food you make. You have to ask for advice. You can’t just say, “I went to Cordon Bleu, so I know this dish is going to come out right.” I knew two Cordon Blue chefs who couldn’t cook as well as I could, and among the total population, I’m probably a 90th-percentile cook. After several years of college, a chef should be a 99th-percentile cook.

A professional chef once made me a dessert as a gift, and I had to throw it out. It smelled like a wet dog, and this person apparently couldn’t tell, in spite of making a good living in kitchens. I didn’t tell this person how bad the dessert was. I was afraid it would be devastating.

Here’s what I always say: think about all the bad food you’ve had at expensive restaurants, and then consider the fact that most of it was made by trained chefs.

Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about a person named Kenji. Based on what I read, I thought he might be a useful resource. He is famous for his methodical, fact-based approach to food, and people cite him as though they were citing God himself. They don’t even use his last name. He publishes recipes at a site called Serious Eats.

He grew up eating pizza from a place I liked: Pizza Town, near Columbia University. He also ate at V&T’s, an Italian joint near Columbia. I probably had hundreds of slices of Pizza Town pizza during my New York years, and I grew to like it. Pizza is that way. You will start to like whatever you eat regularly.

In reality, Pizza Town was not that great. Their thin pizza crust was pretty hard, and I believe they used Stanislaus sauce (paste plus basil) straight from the can, with a little water added to reconstitute it. I developed a taste for it anyway, and I had it in mind when I started making pizza, but there are better places. V&T’s was actually very good, although Kenji says it made “good-bad” pizza, whatever that means. V&T’s pizza’s big flaw was that it was very wet, so it had to be eaten with a fork.

V&T’s was significantly better than Pizza Town, so it’s odd that Kenji preferred Pizza Town.

Today I decided I would check Kenji out, and that’s how I learned the facts mentioned above. He has a recipe for New York pizza. He has a separate recipe for the sauce. I thought it would be smart to look at his sauce recipe. He ought to know what he’s doing, right?

Here is the main ingredient for his sauce: “1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes.”

Poof. There go my Kenji hopes.

Pizza is extremely ingredient-sensitive. You can completely screw up a tested recipe by using the wrong flour, tomatoes, or cheese. You can buy the right type of ingredient but the wrong brand, and things will go sideways. There are all sorts of whole peeled tomatoes out there. Some are very good. Most–most–are so bad, it is not possible to make an acceptable pizza with them.

You can be a mediocre cook and not know the importance of using the right tomatoes in pizza sauce, but you can’t be a towering food genius and not know.

It is not possible for a person who understands pizza sauce, and who wants others to do well, to recommend “1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes” without specifying brands. The tomatoes are the most important thing to get right. Good tomatoes are so helpful, many good pizzerias use sauce that is nothing more than tomatoes and water. You can get away with that if your tomatoes are right. If they’re wrong, nothing you add to them will save your pie.

He also says, “Canned tomatoes invariably have some citric acid added to them in order to increase their acidity.” That’s not true. Everyone who makes pizza knows this. Many pizza makers hate citric acid, so they insist on acid-free sauce. I’m used to citric acid, so I don’t care, but many people insist on brands like Escalon, which preserve tomatoes without it.

You can’t say all canned tomatoes have citric acid in them if you know anything about pizza sauce. Every pizza enthusiast knows better.

He also specifies “bread flour” for the dough, leaving it at that. First of all, that’s the wrong flour. It’s a second choice, for people who can’t get high-gluten flour. I use bread flour (King Arthur) and add gluten. I can’t get high-gluten flour around here. When I used to use high-gluten flour, I found that different brands gave different results, and I settled on Gordon Food Service Primo Gusto. I tried all the big names and ended up with a store brand.

He uses only mozzarella in his recipe, which is questionable at best, and he doesn’t recommend a brand. That’s a serious problem. There are cheeses that fit his specs that don’t work well. Right now, I have a block of Walmart low-moisture whole-milk mozzarella, which meets his specs, and it makes bad pizza. It’s extremely important to try different cheeses and pick the best ones.

My guess: his pizza is excellent, because he has a brand of tomatoes he likes, not to mention a brand of flour and a brand of cheese. But he’s useless to me as a source for a pizza recipe, because he isn’t specific. Fortunately, I already know which ingredients to buy.

His ingredient input is unhelpful, but he may be helpful with other things, like methods. He holds himself out as a sort of scientific chef who tests things instead of accepting dogma. He made several batches of pizza dough by different methods, and he came up with an interesting result: a food processor made better dough than a mixer.

That interests me, because I’ve been using food processors to make dough since around 2009. People have told me it didn’t work, but I was doing it, so I knew it did. It’s strange how people will insist things don’t work when great numbers of other people are already doing them.

His food processor gave pizza crusts bigger air holes. He said this:

Only the food processor-produced dough created a crust that was perfect in both texture and flavor. Tender, chewy, and crisp all at once, with that coveted slick layer at the sauce-crust interface and a thin layer of melted cheese just hinting at brown, it was the archetypical New York pie, and it had just come out of my own oven!

That’s reassuring. To many people, kneading dough with a chopping blade in a food processor is unthinkable, but they’re wrong. I was also reassured to see that his dough recipe was pretty much like mine, except he likes a lot of oil.

He may not be a real pizza expert, but he probably knows what a New York crust is supposed to taste like.

He has a German-style joint in San Mateo, California, which is basically San Francisco. His restaurant is called Wursthall, and I looked it up. Overall, it gets unexciting reviews on Yelp. So-so food, according to many. Some reviewers who don’t give good ratings mention him as the factor that drew them to try the place, and then they talk about the disappointing fare.

Here’s a disturbing review:

Wow, this place is really expensive. It is like being at a giants game. Two beers, a salad and chicken sandwich for $70!!!
And slow beer delivery to boot.
Won’t be returning anytime soon.

That price appears to be no exaggeration. The menu says a sandwich platter runs $16, and most beers cost $8 per pint, with some costing a lot more.

The restaurant specializes in sausages like bratwurst, served as sandwiches. Call it what you want: it’s a hot dog. It may be the best hot dog on Earth, made with unusual ingredients, but it’s still just a hot dog. It can’t be worth $16. I don’t care if the cost of making it was $50. If you’re spending a lot on gourmet ingredients, make something other than a hot dog. That’s my advice.

I would never go to a sit-down restaurant with tablecloths in order to get a hot dog platter. I could see spending $15 on a really good bratwurst on a fantastic bun, plus sides and a good beer, but…no, actually I couldn’t.

I’m not sure there is any German-style meal that’s worth more than $20. Maybe if you threw in strudel. German food is generally pretty gross. Sausages in a pile of beans, with melted cheese on top. Potato salad that tastes like pickled potatoes. Pickled this. Pickled that. There is a reason why young chefs train in Paris, London, and New York instead of Berlin.

Does German haute cuisine even exist? I don’t think so.

I think nothing of giving a steakhouse $75 for dinner, because steak costs money, and a really great steak is as good as any food on the planet. I don’t mind paying $20 or more for an excellent pizza, because pizza is wonderful, and one pizza will feed at least two people. I don’t mind paying $25 for excellent Southern food. It’s well worth it. A sausage on a bun is different. It can’t be all that good, no matter how you make it. Wienerschnitzel, which is actually Austrian, can’t be all that good. German dumplings can’t be all that good. Pig snouts and feet can’t be that good. Their desserts are wonderful, but then they have to be, to make up for everything else.

If Kenji’s knowledge is unsurpassed, why does he have 777 Yelp reviews and only a 4-star rating? He also gets 4 stars from Tripadvisor users. He gets a lot of bad reviews. Overall, he’s doing okay, and he gets plenty of stellar reviews, but if he’s the once-in-a-generation food genius people make him out to be, he should be stunning people with his food, consistently, and that is not happening. And he’s making the same things over and over, so he should have everything perfected by now. His food should be as good as it could possibly be.

Based on what I know of the steak, I don’t buy the sizzle. I don’t think this man is a reliable resource. I guess that explains why I’ve never been impressed by Serious Eats.

I am reminded of Bruce Lee. He weighed about 135 pounds, and he squatted 95 pounds, which is not an impressive weight for a strong woman, but people think he was the greatest fighter who ever lived and that he had superhuman strength. He never fought anyone in a ring with a camera going and judges present. No competitions. He ran from scrutiny. People seriously think he could have flattened the best heavyweight UFC fighters, which is ridiculous. He didn’t have the training to handle the little ones, let alone the big ones. Their way of fighting didn’t exist when he was alive. If you don’t prove yourself, your reputation is just words.

Maybe Kenji does superhuman work when he’s not making New York pizza or running a German restaurant, but what I know so far is discouraging.

I don’t like James Beard, either, and there is a prestigious award named after him. I had three or four of his cookbooks, and the recipes just were not good. I believe I threw them out.

I also think poorly of Mario Batali’s skills. I went to two of his restaurants, and both served me bad food.

I have seen Alton Brown ruin steak, and he also recommended Shun knives, which are fragile and expensive, not to mention poorly balanced. He touted them enthusiastically, until he stopped and started touting completely different knives. My guess is that the wind of money blows him around like a windsock. America’s Test Kitchen, which actually tests things, recommends cheap Forschner knives, and so do I.

Bobby Flay published a prime rib recipe that, for very obvious reasons–the wrong oven temperature–produces a hard lump of unappealing meat. Prime rib is easier to get right than a cheeseburger. All controversy concerning prime rib methods should have ended by about 1900.

Now that I think about it, Myron Mixon, the TV barbecue king, opened a restaurant in Miami, and it was very bad. I tried it. I make much better barbecue at home. Barbecue is simple, but he couldn’t do it. His restaurant went out of business. He claimed his partners ruined everything. That’s hard to believe. I could write two paragraphs and show you how to make perfect dry-rubbed ribs. Anyone can do it. Even with bad partners, Mixon should have been able to teach his staff how to make ribs. Mix seasonings according to boss’s recipe, put on ribs, smoke ribs. That’s all there is to it.

Today’s experience confirms what I already believe: as helpful as outside advice is, there is no substitute for personal experience in the kitchen. Few experts can be trusted, and some of the most respected are the least reliable. Most people who buy cookbooks can’t cook, so even if millions of people recommend a celebrity cookbook, it means nearly nothing.

Reading about Kenji also makes me regret posting recipes that were not as great as I thought they were. That has happened. I have sometimes misled people and contributed to the clutter of unneeded recipes. I have made both the America’s Got Talent error and the Food Network error.

On the other hand, I have come up with a number of truly magnificent recipes, so there’s that.

I have never had a cheesecake that compares to mine, or a Sicilian pizza that comes close. I have never had beer or steak that compares to mine. I made sourdough garlic rolls that seemed to come from heaven itself. I could never eat a standard Thanksgiving turkey after eating my boneless turkey stuffed with cornbread dressing. I’m crazy about the Alfredo-ish sauce I came up with recently. I have a pretty decent list of victories.

Maybe the recipes that weren’t that great can be forgiven in view of my successes. I am, after all, an amateur.

I don’t think the pizza I’m working on right now will be a victory. It looks like the dough will not be elastic enough to give me big bubbles. I hope I’m wrong, but at least I’ll know, and I’ll have meticulous records to incorporate the new knowledge.

Kenji claims New York pizzerias commonly cook at around 500°, so that’s good news. He should be right about that, given the fact that he grew up in New York. I have a better source, though. A guy on a pizza forum says 500° will work fine, and he is a paid consultant who has helped New York pizzerias. That puts him higher on the authority scale. Unlike Kenji and Bruce Lee, he has produced results on the battlefield. Professionals in the nation’s top market are willing to pay for his help.

In a side note, Kenji’s restaurant is near San Francisco, and he got attention for saying people in Trump hats would not be served there. Here is the text:

It hasn’t happened yet, but if you come to my restaurant wearing a MAGA cap, you aren’t getting served. Same as if you come in wearing a swastika, white hood, or any other symbol of intolerance and hate.”

He said it hadn’t happened, and there are two reasons for that. The first is that there aren’t many Trump supporters in San Francisco, and the second is attitudes like Kenji’s. Conservatives know they aren’t safe in San Francisco, so they are reluctant to out themselves. They don’t want food full of boogers. They don’t want to be attacked physically. Leftists talk a lot about safe spaces, with reference to trivial things like hearing words that upset them, but they have a history of creating actual unsafe spaces in which conservatives are threatened with actual harm or battered.

His remark, itself, was a declaration of something at least approaching hate. Ironic. He couldn’t see the beam in his own eye.

Delusion is getting very bad in the US. A friend of mine has a far-left adult son who is literally deranged. Yesterday, my friend brought up the Ukraine invasion, and his son told him he didn’t want to hear about it because it was just an unimportant conflict between white people. That’s startling. It’s a lot like Whoopi Goldberg’s crazy remark about the Holocaust being unrelated to race. The Germans were white, and so were the Jews, so the Jews don’t get to be real victims like, I suppose, Jussie Smollett.

It’s not a problem when children and other civilians are hurt and killed, or when soldiers suffer the same fates, as long as they’re white. That’s my friend’s son’s position. And he’s white.

The son’s mother used to be conservative and probably still is, but she has started listening to leftist 1984-style “thought leaders” and parroting their absurdist, racist hate speech to her son. My friend is considering letting his son know his mother used to be conservative, and he is also considering telling him she is probably only pretending to be a leftist in order to avoid upsetting him and being rejected. My friend hasn’t done these things. He is not sure they will help.

The mother has never been quite right. She has claimed to have a psychological disorder, officially diagnosed, which makes her extremely uncomfortable whenever she doesn’t get her way. I don’t think that’s a real disorder. Not unless it’s demonic. To me, it sounds like she’s just spoiled, controlling, and misandrist. Which can also be demonic, now that I think about it.

How can you abandon your right to think and let some hateful, willfully ignorant idiot on Youtube do it for you? How can you trust another person that much, especially when that person’s idiocy is extremely obvious? It’s unusual to trust Jesus himself that much, and he’s always right. God has said he sends supernatural delusion to rebellious people, and we see it all around us now.

The other day I heard a Holy Spirit-filled conservative say maybe we should just quit obeying the law because Biden was incompetent. That’s also delusion. It proves being baptized with the Spirit isn’t enough. You have to pray in tongues and ask for correction every day.

In 2 Thessalonians 3:2, Paul calls the Antichrist “the man of lawlessness.” Satan is really pushing lawlessness now. There are truly stupid and dangerous laws we shouldn’t feel compelled to observe, but these days, people are encouraging disobedience that isn’t really justified. Thanks to the toxic philosopher Henry David Thoreau, leftists think breaking laws is highly virtuous, and in recent years, they have been breaking good laws like never before. Conservatives have become jealous, so they are also becoming lawless. It’s not good. Even if disobeying the law brings short-term benefits, it contributes to a culture of lawlessness. If you like that kind of thing, take a look at Somalia. That’s where we are headed.

My guess is that things will become so chaotic, the world will be ripe for the Antichrist to step in and restore order. Isn’t that pretty similar to the Saul Alinsky plan? It should be, since Alinsky took dictation from Satan himself.

Human interaction is rapidly being reduced to, “I got you,” and, “I got you back.”

Last night I dreamed I was at my dad’s home back in Miami. I was looking after him. I heard motor noises outside, and I realized trespassers were in the yard. I went into the garage and yelled through the doors, telling them to take off. I started opening the doors, hoping they would flee. They did not.

When I walked outside, they were working on the driveway. I became enraged. I thought they were driveway gypsies. Maybe you don’t know what those are.

Gypsies, or Romani, as they prefer to be called, have a long history of cheating people on driveway work. We are supposed to treat gypsies as though they were wonderful people who are oppressed unfairly, but the truth is that their culture permits and encourages stealing and swindling, so I can’t really go along with the white privilege guilt trip and manipulation.

Here is a gypsy legend most people don’t know of: many gypsies claim the nails for the crucifixion were provided by a gypsy blacksmith. In addition to the three we know about, there was a fourth nail intended to go through Jesus’ heart. The blacksmith refused to provide it, meaning he stole it, and as a reward, God exempted them from the 7th commandment. This means they are allowed to steal.

Not a great pillar for a culture to stand on.

It’s a horrible, sick, stupid, gypsy-destroying rationalization, and it would make no sense if it were true, because Jesus’ heart was pierced by a Roman spear after he died. Stealing a nail wouldn’t have helped him. A nail through the heart while he was still living, on the other hand, would actually have been merciful.

My mother was crazy about gypsies. I have dim memories of her taking me to see them when I was very young, in Tampa. I haven’t thought about that in years. They must have had a community there. She liked having her palm read, which is, of course, idolatry.

Anyway, gypsies (and other people) are known for showing up at the homes of elderly Floridians and offering to do driveway work cheap. They’ll say they have materials left over from other jobs, so they quote low prices. The problem is that the material is basically paint, so it comes off quickly.

In the dream, I thought gypsies were after my dad. For some reason, I reacted like a rabid dog. I have run actual driveway gypsies off, and I was polite. In this dream, I was a different person.

I started calling them filthy names involving excrement and sex acts performed on other men. I really laid into them. One of them approached me, and I slapped him so hard, he should have been on the ground. He came up behind me, and I pulled his glasses off his head with my teeth and threw them on the pavement.

I saw that they had cut a big hole in the driveway. One was carrying a piece of lumber I thought he had stolen from us.

I kept excoriating them, and the guy with the glasses and another man who was like a foreman kept asking me to let them explain. I was not having it. I made them leave. They fixed the hole they had dug. I was not afraid of them at all.

One of them came over to me and asked me why World Relief, a huge Christian charity, had been mailing me. He apparently wondered why a person like me would be hearing from a charity. He was a young black man, and he was very polite and respectful. None of them treated me the way I treated them.

I had a tablet, and we started looking at it. We were looking at sites dealing with World Relief. I was not angry at him. My tablet had a protective plastic film on the screen. I wondered why I had never removed it.

Anyway, they left, and when I woke up, I tried to find out what the dream was about. Were they demons, trying to break through God’s hedge of protection and harm me? Were they angels, sent to help me because I had done alms in the past? Why was I so angry?

I started to feel very bad about all the times I had mistreated people who were helping me. I had been nasty to educators, for example, over trivial things. It’s amazing that I could have been stupid enough to give people a hard time when they were trying to help me get an Ivy League degree. I had been nasty to other people who had tried to give me helpful advice. I had rejected other people’s input because I was proud and wanted to get by on my own ideas so I could have the glory.

When I was a kid, my parents did a poor job. They didn’t teach me much of anything in the way of wisdom or good habits, and perhaps as a result, I learned to think for myself. In doing so, I lost respect for other people’s advice. I was very smart, so I was used to being the brightest person in the room, and I started feeling I was always right.

Maybe the dream was about the way I had rejected helpful correction and ended up suffering unnecessary defeats. I reinvented the wheel many times, often incorrectly, instead of building on other people’s good ideas.

I also felt bad about the many times I had jumped into or started angry arguments, treating people who were merely wrong as though they were trying to do me harm.

Maybe the dream was about these things, or maybe the men were demons.

The other day, I dreamed a kid and a young man were trying to harm me, and I beat them brutally, crushing the young man’s face. In that case, there was no doubting their hostility, and I have no doubt they represented evil spirits. This time, I don’t know.

I hate demons with a hate I can’t describe, so maybe they did represent demons. If I could, I would do things to them that would make Josef Mengele throw up. I can understand why God plans to burn evil spirits forever. In my dreams, I break their bones and mutilate them. It’s not possible for me to feel that way about a human being.

Even if the gypsies represented demons, I still believe it was very good for me to confront my faults last night, so it’s a win. We are in the apocalypse, so a spirit of murder and hatred has been released on the world, and I need to avoid opening the door to it.

I can’t really see myself pleasing God by calling demons names involving gay oral sex. I would think that if I were fighting demons in a dream, in obedience to God, I would be somewhat more dignified.

Last night I thought about all the things he has shown me lately. He keeps telling me to change so I will not be like the rest of humanity. While I was in bed thinking about this, I put my face in my hands and told him I was going to end up surrounded by people I couldn’t even communicate with. I would be so different, and other people would be so deaf, I wouldn’t be able to explain much to them. Even if I didn’t become particularly good, I would understand things I couldn’t make other people understand.

I wasn’t complaining about his demands. I just felt I needed to tell him.

In my mind, I had an image of a long train full of people, hurtling toward a cliff. I could watch, but I couldn’t stop it.

I started asking God how people were supposed to learn. Who was supposed to teach us? Instantly, I realized I already knew the answer: the Holy Spirit. Churches are like grocery stores where half the food is poisoned, and we can’t rely on them. We have to hear from the Holy Spirit himself, one on one, as John taught. That means prayer in tongues, and not just a couple of minutes per day.

We can’t find reliable pizza information easily, and it’s hard to get good information about God. From human beings, I mean. Yet we still push people to turn pastors and priests into little gods who can’t be questioned.

I hope God restores the Holy Spirit as a teacher before the world ends. If not, I think the apocalypse will continue to progress without interruption.

Call me Marvin, Because I’m a Haggler

This is my third day back from Turkey, and I am still not on an even keel. The bug I picked up is doing amazing things in my nose, so I am not sleeping enough. I can’t wait for this to end.

My latest PCR was negative. I don’t know if it’s correct, but I’m not going to keep testing. Whatever I have is mild, and it keeps getting less severe.

I thought I should share my thoughts on Turkey, in case anyone who reads the blog is considering a visit.

Spoiler: we had a wonderful time, and I recommend Turkey as a tourist destination.

As I have said before, I used to think the things I had seen in movies were true, and for that reason, I thought Turkey was a good place to avoid. Now that I have been there, I see how unfair the movies were. I’m sure Oliver Stone, Billy Hayes, and the studio that owns Lawrence of Arabia will issue full apologies any day now, because we all know that’s what showbiz types do when they’re wrong.

Something must be holding them up.

We stayed in Istanbul, with a short trip to Kusadasi in the middle of our honeymoon.

I flew to Turkey on Lufthansa. I would not fly Lufthansa again, unless I had a very good reason. I tend to tell myself the German reputation for rigidity and being a pain in the butt is a bigoted canard, but in reality, it is not. They really are that way. Lufthansa would not allow me to wear my special, fraudulent, low-resistance mask. If the stewardesses don’t like your mask, they give you one they do like, and believe me, you will not like it as much as they do. Mine was like having a piece of thick canvas glued over my mouth and nose.

The only thing I like about Lufthansa is that they order you to stay seated until they call on your row to debark. Order. People who jump up and run to the front of the plane while it’s headed for the gate should be shot, and if Lufthansa could, they would make this a reality.

Fortunately for me, I had an empty seat between me and the nearest passenger on the way from Frankfurt to Istanbul. That was a mercy.

The food was ghastly. They gave me vegetarian pasta with a molten, funky white cheese on it, plus peas and carrots. Who thought that was a good idea? Do I look like a vegan? I ate about half of it.

They served canned beer. I heard a stewardess ask a man if he like the German beer, like she was pouring him a glass of investment-grade diamonds. I wondered if she knew that American beer is now infinitely better. We used to be the worst, but now we are, far and away, the absolute best. Even the Belgians have to bend the knee to us. German beer is like a BMW. It has few flaws, but then it’s also boring and relatively bland.

Before I would consider drinking German beer again, I would choose my own, then Belgian, then Irish, then Mexican, and then maybe British.

Istanbul Airport is not bad. It’s better than American airports I’ve seen. I arrived about 45 minutes after the wife. Our big challenges were getting cash, finding each other, and finding our driver.

I learned that Turks call doors “gates.” The driver kept texting that he was at gate 13. I kept telling him I could not go to the gate because I was through customs and could not return to the gate area. Finally, I realized he was talking about the 13th exit door that led to ground transportation. It took us quite a while to figure this out, and I got very familiar with the layout of the airport while walking around looking for answers.

In America, I had researched the problem of getting cash. I was ready. All the gurus told me the same thing: use ATM’s. My bank said to use machines belonging to TEB, a partner bank. I tried this, and the cost of withdrawals nearly gave me a coronary. Also, the machines refused to call withdrawals “withdrawals.” They called them “cash advances,” probably to justify taking more money. My debit card is not a credit card, so cash advances should not be possible.

I got myself over $300 worth of Turkish Lira anyway, realizing I had no choice.

Here’s what you SHOULD do when you visit Turkey: bring several thousand dollars in cash. Street crime is not an issue in Istanbul, so don’t worry. At the airport, change enough money to get to your hotel. After that, change money at the Grand Bazaar. You can put your excess dollars in your room’s safe.

I wish I had done this, but instead, I listened to confident individuals who knew nearly nothing.

I’ll bet I spent several hundred dollars in unnecessary fees. There is nothing I can do about it. I had no choice, so I don’t care. The trip was important, and the money was not.

We always used private cars to move between airports and hotels. You can do this for as little as $33 right now. They gave us big minivans, and the transfer companies did the planning so we didn’t have to tell them when to arrive. It was fantastic. We sometimes spent as much as $50 for one trip, and I suppose we could have done it for $40 using cabs. The correct choice was obvious.

In Turkey, you need 50-Lira bills. The machines like to give you 100-Lira bills, so break them whenever you can. Most of the things you buy will cost less than 20 Lira.

The hotel was very nice. We had about 300 square feet, plus a huge terrace, near the Sultanahmet area in the Old City. This is where tourists hang out. It’s close to a lot of the tourist stuff, and there are tons of restaurants.

We had a fantastic king size bed, a jacuzzi tub, and a sitting room. The hotel was clean, and things were generally in good condition. The wifi was free. The TV started losing English channels when we arrived, but we didn’t go to Turkey to watch TV.

Istanbul is a walker’s city. On the first night, we walked to the general area of the Hagia Sofia and found ourself a nice touristy restaurant. On the way, we discovered the big problem with Turkey: human mosquitoes.

Mosquito: Excuse me! Where you from?

Me: America.

Mosquito: Where in America?

Me: Florida.

Mosquito: I have an uncle in Florida! Welcome to Turkey!

Me: Thank you.

Mosquito: How long you here?

Me: Just got here.

Mosquito: Let me show you carpet!

Me: I don’t want a carpet.

Mosquito: I give you great price!

Me: A great price on something I don’t want.

Mosquito: Take a look. No obligation!

Me: There is no conceivable way I would even consider buying a carpet.

Mosquito: Why not?

Me: I don’t want one.

Mosquito: Why not?

Me: The smell makes my nose swell shut.

Mosquito: Only wool! I have silk!

Me: I don’t want silk.

Mosquito: Why not?

Me: I don’t want a carpet.

Mosquito: Why not?

Me: I’m not going to go to a foreign country and spend thousands of dollars on something I know nothing about.

Mosquito: Come to my shop! No obligation! I teach you!

Me: Would you let someone who is trying to sell you something teach you about it?

Mosquito: Of course!

Me: No, you wouldn’t.

Mosquito: Just come have some tea.

Me: I’m not buying a carpet.

Mosquito: Maybe tomorrow!

Then the next day, he would say, “You promised to come to my shop today!”

During our stay, we went through this with carpets, fake watches, knockoff leather goods, scarves, boat tours, food, spices, and also Viagra (or what they said was Viagra). We went through it maybe three times in a typical block. A few times, we actually let them take us to shops just because it was so weird.

They were always amazed when I left without buying anything. Weren’t they listening?

They were always polite, and believe it or not, we had some really interesting conversations with a few. I freaked one out by telling him my dad had owned an Isfahan Mechad (spelling?) and an orange Bokhara. I actually know a tiny bit about rugs. He was floored. I told him my dad’s girlfriend had made him get them. He said I needed a rug because they were in my blood, from my dad. I told him they were actually in my dad’s girlfriend’s blood.

If you actually want to buy a rug in Turkey, you’re supposed to go to a place called ABC, by the Grand Bazaar. It has a reputation for quality and honesty, so you shouldn’t have to worry about spending $8000 on a beautiful rug and then having them ship you a roll of burlap. You’re welcome.

The touristy restaurant was near the Blue Mosque, and it was called Mozaik. I would say the prices were about 60% higher than they should have been, because it catered to tourists. It turned out to be very good, however, so we went more than once. In Istanbul, a badly overpriced meal for two runs around $45, so it’s not a catastrophe.

Turkish restaurants tend to serve dishes from other countries, not just Turkey, so in addition to things like kebab and falafel, they had excellent pasta. Rhodah fell in love with the puffy, freshly baked bread and the appetizer platter.

If I go again, I will bring condiments. Turks don’t use enough seasoning in Turkish dishes. A bottle of hot sauce would be a big blessing over there. It’s strange that they don’t use a lot of seasoning, because they are constantly trying to sell people spices. Like I can’t buy spices here. I don’t think they know we have spices in America.

Because I was with a woman, we did buy some junk in Istanbul. That was inevitable and normal, so I was all for it. Rhodah got about 5 purses with weird Turkish embroidery on them, along with some really expensive espadrilles made from carpet. I also got her a scarf which may or may not be made from silk, plus a Vuitton backpack made in Turkey, where all genuine Vuitton bags are made.

We found the backpack in the Grand Bazaar, where only tourists shop, so the guy wanted a sultan’s ransom: 1000 Lira, or around $85. Rhodah is not the best haggler on earth, so I went to work. I told him it was Chinese, pulling back the corners of my eyes to make him understand. It was Turkey, not Berkeley, so I could do that. He insisted it was actually made in Turkey. Maybe it was.

We got him down to around 400, which seemed like too much, so I told him my standard haggling line. I said, “You’re starving our children. You’re taking food out of their mouths.” He and his buddy broke up when I said that. He said he had never heard that one before. He said he would go to 350 just because I said it. We made a deal. He asked how many kids we had. Rhodah said two. I said 6.

They never got mad when I haggled. I think they enjoy it. They didn’t get mad when they said things like “150” and I responded with “25.” It never worked, but I never got punched or anything.

We didn’t plan any tours in Istanbul. We made decisions on the fly.

Our first big excursion was a boat ride around the Bosphorus. It wasn’t a tourist boat. It was a big steel job the locals ride around on. I think we paid about $3 each for a couple of hours. There was no guide, but we sat in comfort on the stern and enjoyed the sights.

We found Gulhane Park, which is a very nice park in the shadow of the Topkapi Palace, where Sultans use to make huge, important decisions with other world leaders. It’s a great place to take a blanket and some food, which we failed to do.

Before we did any more touristing, we found out how to get to one of Istanbul’s malls. They have normal malls, just as we do. The one we picked was called Cevahir. It had a GAP. It had Zara, a bunch of stores more or less along the lines of maybe Anne Taylor Loft, Adidas, Levi’s (company store), Mango, Victoria’s Secret, Sephora, KFC, Popeye’s, and Krispy Kreme.

We tried to pump up Rhodah’s wardrobe there, and then we had a meal of American fast food. The KFC was cooked more skillfully than it is here, but it didn’t taste all that much like KFC. The Popeye’s chicken sandwich was good, and I got it at the only Popeye’s I had ever seen that didn’t resemble a lunatic asylum, but they didn’t have the spicy version. The Krispy Kreme donuts were okay, except for the glazed one. They have to be hot, or they’re useless.

We got her some REAL Nike running shoes, which are greatly outnumbered by fakes outside the US. Unfortunately, she wore them the next day without socks and blistered herself. While this was going on, her new socks were back at the hotel.

I don’t feel like getting deeper into the trip right now, but I will say we got so used to walking by the same determined proprietors, we actually got to know a few. They started to seem like friends. One restaurateur got us to agree to sit at a table and drink free tea, just to make him look busy. We could pretty much count on that offer every night. I told Rhodah we had become models.

Here’s my advice about Turkish restaurants: never, EVER buy the expensive dishes. They’re not very good, and they cost a lot. Get the cheap stuff everyone else eats. Doner kebab. Falafel. Hummus. Baklava. Kofte. Pide. And stay away from “lemonade.” It’s always some chemical mix, even when they tell you it’s homemade. If you like beer, have Efes (Turkish name for Ephesus). It’s truly excellent.

We saw and did all sorts of stuff, and I will probably get back to it later. Right now I think I need a steak.

Real Men Don’t Pay Other Men

It’s a pivotal day in human history. I used a big-boy gas outfit to heat a part and bend it.

As my stalkers know, I just finished making a cart to hold propane and oxygen for cutting and heating. I have bent things using a hand-held plumber’s torch in the past, and it was okay, but a real torch is like 10 plumber’s torches, and a plumber’s torch can’t cut. I had to have more power. There are just too many heating and cutting jobs in a home workshop.

Today I summoned my androgens and used propane to bend the mounting tabs on a middle buster.

A middle buster is a 3-point implement. It drags or lifts a hook-shaped blade. You can use it for things like digging trenches for wiring and pipes, and you can also rip out stumps with it. I got mine for stumps, and I have torn out a bunch of them. In the process, I bent the tabs holding the pins that attach it to my hitch.

I don’t care about the damage, because the middle buster probably cost $150, and try and guess how much money it has saved me. I don’t know what it would cost to pay a guy to tear stumps out, for the same reason I don’t know what it’s like to ask a big, strong man to parallel-park for me, but it must be a lot.

I clamped the middle buster to my welding table and heated it, destroying a lot of powder coating in the process. Doesn’t matter. Truck bed coating is better than powder coating, and I already have a can. I thought I would have to twist the tabs with a wrench, risking pulling the table over, but it turned out a blacksmith’s hammer was the tool for the job. I beat the tabs until they were very nearly straight. Excellent.

Now I have to cut and weld gussets to reinforce the tabs. I already have the steel. I also want to run a 36″ bar through the tabs instead of using one short pin in each tab. I think a bar will resist bending somewhat better. If it doesn’t, it will bend in such a way that I have to cut it in half to get it out, but that’s okay, because I’m a man, and men have tools.

I love the propane rig, even though I don’t have a proper propane rosebud yet. The acetylene rosebud I used worked fine, which makes me wonder if something is wrong.

Wonderful day in the shop. Think I’ll let my hair down and have a wheat beer.

Maybe Miami was Just a Bad Dream

Ocala is just too much.

Today I finished looking after my dad’s business, and I put my boots on and headed for the workshop. I sharpened up Big Bad Mama, the 20″ Echo chainsaw, and I put it in the E-Z-GO along with my new Woodchuck timberjack. I cruised over to the big live oak that tried to crush my chicken house, and I went to work sawing it up.

Before I got to the oak, I went off my property and grabbed a gigantic ball of live oak limbs and Spanish moss from my neighbor’s swale and carted it to my burn pile. Good neighbors don’t leave hurricane junk on each other’s swales. I scooped it up with the tractor forks and dumped it on the pile.

I cut little limbs and moved them until I had access to the bigger bits of the tree, and then I went at it. I cut the tree into manageable pieces, and then I used the tractor and a strap to yank it around into a position where I could buck the last big branch.

The timberjack is wonderful. You can grab a hundred-pound limb with it and yank it into cutting position with about as much effort as it takes to flip a pancake. I had no problem cutting big limbs up with it.

The tree had one huge limb which could be considered the trunk. Hard to say. After I moved things around with the tractor, that limb was off the ground. Using my brain, I put the tractor forks under it and then cut it off. It fell on the forks. I didn’t have to roll it onto them. I ran it over to the burn pile and dumped it on.

Because I use the right tools, I got a whole lot of work done in a short time. It was a pleasure. Tomorrow or the next day, I’ll go out and hit the pile with my plumber’s torch, and it will go up like Mt. Saint Helens.

When I was done, I moved everything back to the shop, got a chair, and drank several beverages, ending with a lovely Sierra Nevada Torpedo. Occasionally I drink beer to blow out kidney stones.

The air was cool. The bugs were not biting. It was quiet. No one was yammering at me in a foreign language. Exquisite.

This place gets better and better. Why didn’t I move 20 years ago? Oh, right. I was out of God’s will. I would not have fit in.

I’m in the workshop now. A nice breeze is blowing through. I hate to leave.

I’ll post a few photos.

Man, I hate Miami.

FYI, my dad’s boat is sold, and the money is in the checking account. A major headache, GONE!

I think I’ll buy some pie.

Out Top Gear-ing Top Gear

If I haven’t posted much lately, it’s because I am exhausted from recreation.

My oldest friend (not literally oldest, but the one I’ve known the longest) decided he wanted my dad’s 1995 Ford Explorer, which I was about to sell on Craigslist. It has at least 146,000 miles (for a while he couldn’t find a mechanic who could fix an odometer), it leans to the left, it smells really interesting, and my dad had the heat disconnected because it went bad and would have cost $800 to repair. I told my friend (Mike) it was “a real piece of crap,” but he wanted it to plow his driveway in New Hampshire, so we cut a deal for $500, and he flew down to get it.

My dad keeps saying Mike “stole” it. Guess I’ll be hearing that for quite some time.

It seemed to be okay before Mike came down, and then when he arrived, the overdrive wouldn’t work, and it lost something like a quart of oil every hundred miles. I have a recollection of adding oil to it recently, but I didn’t know it had a serious leak.

Some interesting facts that make the story richer: Mike’s birthday was yesterday, and he forgot to renew his driver’s license. When we tried to address this online, we found that New Hampshire’s online renewal system only works if you have the code they mail you before your birthday; the code Mike didn’t bring. Can you renew over the phone? Sure. The paperwork takes maybe a week to arrive by mail, and during that time, your license is not considered valid.

Also, Mike decided not to bring his winter clothes, because Florida is warm. Think about that.

He said, “When I left, it was forty degrees.” I pointed out that sometimes weather changes. I think that was helpful.

I had told Mike the car was only guaranteed until he got it out of my dad’s driveway, but he drove it to Delray Beach and back (funeral: a friend’s father had died), and it came back two quarts low, so I reluctantly decided his friendship was worth more than $500, and we spent several days doing a Top Gear-style restoration to get the car ready for the trip north.

During this time, Mike scored a number of free meals off of me via guilt trips, and I also gave him a treasured possession: the world’s best bottle opener.

Mike loves my tool collection. While I was showing it to him, I showed him the severed end of a 1 1/2″ box wrench. I had it on hand because I had bought a $9 Chinese wrench and modified it to use as a tool post wrench. I’ll post a photo. I had cut one end off to make the wrench shorter. You don’t want a really long tool post wrench, because if you have too much leverage, you may crack your compound slide when you tighten the nut.

Mike thought it was disgraceful that I hadn’t turned the wrench end into a project, and he suggested a bottle opener. That actually sounded good, so while he was at the funeral, I got to work. I had a piece of 304 stainless steel, and I cut a semicircle out of it, using a hacksaw and my belt grinders. I then welded it across the wrench opening. Because I am having all sorts of problems with my helmet, I couldn’t see what I was doing, so I left big globs of weld on the wrench, and I had to grind it down to make it pretty.

I was going to keep the opener, but then I thought of Mike’s frozen corpse sitting in a Ford Explorer with a seized engine, surrounded by puzzled state troopers, one of which was busy writing his dead body a ticket for driving without a license, and I decided to make it a birthday present, because that would completely make up for sending him to an untimely death.

Before turning the opener over to him, I put a lanyard hole in the end of it. Now Mike has the world’s heaviest keychain.

Mike thought a new ABS sensor might fix the overdrive problem, so we spent a day crawling around under the Explorer, and we got a new one installed. We put a quart of Lucas Engine Oil Stop Leak in the engine, and that seemed ( ! ) to reduce the leak’s flow to an acceptable rate.

Unfortunately, the transmission fluid level was low, and Mike added too much, so we spent the next day looking for someone to flush the transmission. Mike figured he might as well flush it instead of just having the level reduced. The weather had turned cold and rainy, so that was fun. I wore traditional Miami cold weather gear: a hooded fleece jacket with shorts. Maybe not the best choice.

Sears gave Mike a service appointment, but when we arrived, we learned that a Sears appointment is really an appointment to stand in line. It seems to serve no purpose at all. When we got to the front of the line, they refused to service the car because of the mileage. You would think they would have mentioned this on the phone, but Sears is dying, so I guess the people who work there are not knocking themselves out in order to get promoted.

I did offer to give the money back and put the car on Craigslist, but by now Mike was on a quest. He wasn’t about to surrender. Thank God.

The next day he got up early and bought an inverter from Harbor Freight. This is a device that turns DC into AC. He figured he would install it inside the car and connect a 1500-watt space heater to it. I am completely serious. My suggestion was to stop at Salvation Army stores during the trip and buy a used down jacket and gloves.

He collected me, and we decided to go to a Salvation Army store to see if they had anything he could use to keep himself alive. Miraculously, they had an unused electric blanket. I thought that was the answer. Put the blanket on, turn on the inverter, and drive. That has to be better than a heater, which blows hot air in random directions. It was like five bucks, so Mike decided to buy it. I also found an incredible deal: a #6 Wagner Ware skillet in perfect condition. Mike is my friend, so of course, my first impulse was to grab it before he got to it and buy it for myself, but I already have three #6 skillets, so I decided to let him have it. If he hadn’t bought it, I think I would have shot him. It’s the perfect size for cornbread. He got it for $3.75. Talk about “stole.”

We spent most of yesterday running cables through the car’s firewall and installing the inverter. He fired it up, and sure enough, it powered an electric drill. Now that he’s gone, I’m kind of wondering if it’s okay to use an inverter while the car is running, but I guess he’ll have to find out on his own. Maybe I should disconnect the phone.

He won’t be able to get a heater until he gets to Fort Lauderdale. In Miami, stores only order a few heaters every year, and on the first cool day, Cubans storm the aisles and buy every last one. The ones they can’t use, they sell for a massive profit. Probably. That’s what they do with generators during hurricanes. Anyway, there are no heaters here today.

I am still dealing with the virus I got a couple of weeks ago. I don’t have congestion or anything, but I have a crappy feeling that gets worse with exertion and lack of sleep. Last night I collapsed on my bed and started sweating, even though the mattress was cold. I thought for minute that I might be dying. I was cool with that. I still had Mike’s money, so I was dying a winner.

I slept about nine and a half hours, and then I got up to say goodbye to Mike. I still don’t feel rested, but I think a day of total loafing will put me right.

I shouldn’t worry about Mike. He’s a possibility thinker. Whatever happens, he will come up with a solution that will get him to New Hampshire. Anyone who would put a space heater in a $500 car can be trusted to look after himself.

I was hoping to talk to Mike about God while he was here, but he kept me so busy, I didn’t make as much progress as I had hoped. I managed to get him to sit still for a prayer session with my friend Travis and me. Mike loved it, and he talked about it before he left. He had been in a hurry to get to a car parts store, so he almost missed the session, but I got him to put it off long enough to pray. I told him you pray BEFORE you fix the problem, not afterward. That’s an extremely important thing to learn.

Considering all the barbecued ribs I bought Mike during the week, I’m not sure the car sale will show a profit, but at least it’s gone.

If you have a junk car, and you want a really interesting cheap project to improve it, I highly recommend an inverter. It will allow you to use power tools when the car breaks down. You can’t beat that.

I can’t wait for night so I can sleep some more. And I’m going to miss that bottle opener.

Rum Wears Out its Welcome

I had a lot of fun fooling around with tiki drinks this week, but I think I’m done for a while. I’m starting to think there is something poisonous in rum.

When I was in college, I thought drunkenness was a good thing, and I worked at it. It was very unusual for me to get sick, but I managed it a few times. I also got sick once after I graduated from law school. The two worst hangovers I ever had were from dark rum. It won’t just make you sick the day you drink it; it will make you sick for half of the following day.

I had some Jamaican friends when I was in law school, and one of them told me they don’t drink dark rum. She said it was for the tourists. I guess the Jamaicans know something.

Anyway, I had maybe four rum drinks this week, which is not exactly binge drinking, and today I feel sort of off. I really think there is something in that stuff, apart from alcohol, which the body does not like.

I didn’t use dark rum; I used Flor de Cana golden rum, which is about the color of brandy.

Interesting.

I had a few days of nostalgia, and I really enjoyed cooling off after working on plumbing and so on, but I would not want to drink this stuff every week.

A lot of Christians are very worked up about alcohol. I don’t worry about it. Every once in a while, I have a drink. On rare occasions, I have two. I think I’ll be okay. I would not encourage anyone else to drink, if it’s a problem.

Some people rewrite history. They claim Jesus was a teetotaler who drank fresh grape juice and called it wine. Yeah, okay. And for five bucks I’ll sell you a keychain made from a fragment of the cross.

I used to brew my own beer, and it was wonderful, but I don’t do it any more. When you barely drink, what do you do with five-gallon kegs of beer? They sit and go to waste. The extra fridge takes up space.

The down side of giving up brewing is that it’s nearly impossible for me to get a really good beer. There are a few beers that are good; I like Flying Dog Snake Dog ale and Dogfish 60 Minute IPA. But it’s nothing like having four or five utterly magnificent beers on tap.

It’s not a big sacrifice. I don’t care much about it.

I did a lot more work on the house yesterday. I removed a lot of useless PVC from the pool pump, and I replumbed it. I broke down and bought a reciprocating saw, like a Sawzall. I got a DeWalt. They get good reviews. It did a wonderful job of hacking pipes out so they could be thrown on the trash heap.

I’m still bummed out that I can’t find anyone competent to take my money. I would be satisfied with work that is merely good. It doesn’t have to be fantastic. Good is too much to ask in Miami. Everything is done to the Latin American standard, which is very low. There is a reason why BMWs are made in Germany instead of Honduras.

Call me a racist if you want. Cultural differences are not imaginary. Defending your sick culture is a sure path to loserhood. Admitting its faults is the beginning of improvement. If you want to hear some heavy criticism, ask me about the backward, defeat-oriented culture I came from.

Yesterday one of my Cuban friends used vile language in a text message to tell me how much he hates Miami. He has plans for bookshelves, and he can’t find anyone who can build them. Ridiculous.

I’m trying to figure out what to do about the pumphouse’s electrical ground. There is a bar hammered into the ground outside the pumphouse, and there’s a big wire next to it. It’s not connected. Is that because some idiot knocked the clamp off, or is it because it’s bad for the pumphouse to have its own ground? I’m trying to find out. I’m tempted to call an electrician, but then I think about all the potentially deadly electrician errors I’ve found and fixed.

As far as I know, there are only two wires connecting the house and the pumphouse, and neither is a ground.

I am Googling around, and it looks like the ground rod should be connected. I think I’ll hook it up and see if anything explodes. I would rather have grounding than no grounding, even if it causes some comparatively minor issue with the electrical service. When I say “comparatively minor,” I am using “instant death on the pumphouse floor” as a reference.

The plumbing is not right. The pipes are generally on the floor or close to it, inviting breakage. People step on things. Also, the pipes are not supported. I looked it up, and PVC at 100 degrees has to be supported every five feet. I’m going to figure out how to do that. Whatever I do may not be the recommended method, but it will work, and it will be better than nothing.

Things keep going well in my prayer life and personal development. God keeps moving me to higher levels.

I’ve started to get a better feel for the degree of brainwashing mankind has experienced. We feel self-conscious about God. Why is that? Why don’t we think God is cool? He creates galaxies. He confers invulnerability and power. He is in charge, and if you’re aligned with him, you’re in charge, too. Why do we think that’s something to be ashamed of?

Being right is cool. Being powerful is cool. Not wasting your life is cool.

Our perceptions are completely warped. But with time, prayer, and submission, it changes.

The longer I live, the more I realize the people around me are foolish. Look at this place, though. We run around in circles, doing things that don’t matter. We devote our lives to things God is eventually going to burn. We love man’s temporary, cobbled-together solutions to problems. We hate God’s solutions, which are perfect and come without regret. This place is horrible. It’s like Sodom. We can’t do anything right. We hate the very notion of doing things right.

I can’t respect humanity. It’s too much to ask. I was a mistake to try. It was a rabbit trail. People have a lot of knowledge, and you shouldn’t ignore all of it, but it’s stupid to put human beings on pedestals. As far as we know, Buddha is in hell. Alexander the Great is in hell. Albert Einstein. Aristotle. All sorts of human beings we think of as superhuman. You can push respect way too far.

We ruin everything down here. The worst part about it is that we destroy human beings.

I thought about that this morning while I was watching a show about technology. They were talking about a special ship that upends itself and turns into a research platform. It reminded me of an experience I had when I was a kid. Don’t ask me why.

My dad represented the Alcoa aluminum company. They had a special aluminum ship which was built for research. It was docked in the Bahamas or somewhere–I forget–and they invited my dad to bring me to see it. They took us on board and gave us a tour.

Today I thought about how little I got out of that experience, which should have been very rich.

When I was a kid, I was afraid of everyone. I had no self-confidence. I could not talk to people. I had been raised in a house of abuse, and my response was to wilt and hide.

Some kids are not like that. They choose to be as aggressive as their abusers. I believe Freud called this “aggressor identification.” You could also call it a generational curse or a cycle of abuse. Kids decide it’s better to be the abuser than the abused, so that’s the path they take. My sister went that way.

I couldn’t cope with life. Mainly, I wanted to be left alone. I was so used to losing, I was highly motivated to avoid trying. A lot of my encounters with my dad consisted of him verbally abusing me until I gave up and left him alone, which was what he wanted, so you can imagine how I felt about approaching people. He actively, deliberately worked to make me back down, feel bad about myself, and leave in fear.

I think this is why I love tools so much. Tools represent power and success. They counter feelings of being unable to cope.

Parents are supposed to prevent kids from growing up to be as I was. When a kid falters, his parents are supposed to notice it and take him aside and teach him how to stand up and respond to life’s challenges. I was afraid of my dad, and my mother was not much better off than I was, so I just sat back and decayed. When I was in my twenties, I started trying to compensate, but change was extremely gradual. The chains we put inside ourselves are heavy, and it takes a lot of time to cut them and push them out.

My dad didn’t seem to realize he was supposed to do anything to help me or my sister in life. As long as food was on the table, he felt like his job was done and that everyone should be grateful and obedient. It’s strange, because his own father was not like that.

I wonder if the men on the ship noticed the destruction in me. I notice it when I meet kids who can’t engage. I wonder if they tried to interest me in the ship and the research and then pulled back, realizing I had been ruined.

I don’t think shyness is normal. I think it’s a flag that exposes abuse. No matter how much you pretend in public, if your kids are shy, there has to be a reason, and you’re probably it.

You can have sympathy for other people’s kids, but usually, your ability to help them is limited. If you want to help, you have to look for opportunities to do or say something effective. Vigilance is important.

We ruin our children. We don’t submit to God. We put our flesh in charge. Our flesh puts Satan in charge. The result is that we become poisonous to people we are supposed to help.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot today. I can’t undo my childhood. I have been able to help a few younger people, though. Maybe that’s an acceptable exchange. Satan screwed up my youth, so I am being used to screw up his plans and help several other people. His evil is being multiplied back to him.

Interesting stuff.

I should have done better, but here I am, as I am, so I work with what I have.

Today I plan to make some adjustments to the pool pipes and put a clamp out the pumphouse ground. After that, I think I’ll relax and knock off some more of The Odyssey.

I have to say, I’m disgusted with mythology and the characters of Greek literature. People like Odysseus and Achilles were the scum of the earth. They were pirates, and “pirate” is not a flattering term. They were murderers, rapists, thieves, and slave masters. They were sadistic. They were greedy. They thought nothing of pitching babies off of city walls. It’s strange that we see them in a positive light. If there is a significant difference between these characters and the drug gangs in Mexico, I am hard-pressed to see it. The more I read, the more I root for them to lose.

I hope you’re enjoying your Saturday. Go easy on demon rum.

I Must be a MIDIanite

Crazy stuff is happening. A few years back, I got myself a grand piano and learned to play it, but I gave up because I couldn’t remember things I learned. Recently, I’ve started playing again.

I started taking guitar lessons a few months ago, and gradually, the emphasis switched from learning guitar to learning composition. First thing I knew, I was using Finale every day, and I found I preferred composing for the keyboard. Once that happened, I needed a MIDI keyboard to help me, so I bought a little-bitty one, and for reasons too dull to go into, I also set up a cheesy Casio keyboard beside my chair.

Now I have a couple of pieces written, and I find that to really understand and sharpen them, I need to play them. So in fits and starts, I’ve started sitting down at the grand piano.

It’s really something, playing a piece I wrote. One of my character quirks is that it’s harder for me to get interested in other people’s creative ideas (even Chopin’s) than my own, so now that I’m studying my own compositions, I feel much more connected to what I’m doing.

I got rid of my digital piano several years ago. It’s pretty clear that was a mistake. I’m going to need another one eventually. I may even have to get rid of my beer fridge so I’ll have room. Today I looked at prices, hoping they had gone down. They have, if you take inflation into account. But not enough to matter. ARRGH.

I guess it’s okay, though. I’m sure the piano I got rid of is inferior to the ones they sell now.

It makes me nervous to consider the possibility that I might be able to do really well at something new. I don’t want to put up a lot of crap theorizing about my potential and then find out I’m wrong. But I keep comparing my musical ideas to those of successful composers, and I am pleasantly surprised. I have a lot to learn, and in some ways, I’m restricted to pretty simple ideas, but I think I have the main thing I need, which is an inner voice that gives me good original music.

I don’t know what to think about this. If things keep going this well, there’s no reason why I won’t find myself generating a sizable body of useful music.

God guides and restores. The more you give yourself to him and get to know him, the more he repairs you and squeezes the most out of your remaining potential. You can’t expect it to happen if you live for yourself and have no prayer life, but if you persist in pressing into his kingdom, remarkable things will happen. I believe God has set his seal on certain promises he has made me, and based on the progress I’ve seen, it looks like I’m right. It’s a little scary, but I can’t deny it.

I don’t understand why the music I write is so different from what I expected to write. I thought I’d be coming up with religious music with a lot of soul, but so far, it’s all classical-influenced pop. I don’t mean it can’t be used for religious purposes, but it seems to be in the same broad class of music as things like Classical Gas.

I suppose one reason things are going this way is that it’s very hard to get a computer to swing or shuffle. Maybe I drifted toward whiter music because I’m not ready to cope with beating soul out of a CPU.

I’ll keep posting stuff as I write it.

Wine is a Mocker, but There are Those Who Need to be Mocked

I really can’t keep up with my testimony. There is so much, I can’t write about it and still have time to live.

Today I got a very moving email from Aaron, my friend of 31 years. It included a link to this Youtube video.

That’s Ohr Somayach (“Happy Light”), the yeshiva in Jerusalem where I ambushed Aaron in 1984. I arrived in Israel on the eve of shabbat, on the weekend of Purim. I had to spend the night in Ein Harod, but the next day, I made it to Jerusalem and found Ohr Somayach. I knew I was in the right place when I saw Aaron’s horrifying plaid boxers hanging outside a dorm room, on a clothesline.

Aaron was in shul, davening. But he was not dressed like a yeshiva bucher. He was dressed like one of the thugs in A Clockwork Orange. I didn’t know Jews were supposed to wear costumes on Purim. I guess I figured his twig had finally snapped.

I ended up joining in the celebration you see above. What a privilege.

When I got the email from Aaron, I realized what the video meant.

In 1984, before I had any idea what my destiny was, God took me to Israel to celebrate the holiday on which Jews commemorate their victory over their Gentile enemies. Haman, who represents the spirit of anti-Semitism (same thing as antichrist, to me), was hanged on the gallows he built for his Jewish enemy, Mordecai. Haman’s sons were hanged along with him. Centuries later, Hitler’s top men were hanged on the same day.

God put me in Israel, to celebrate this holiday, because he knew that my destiny was to participate in the rebuilding of Israel. Today I am privileged to help, through the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews and other means. I am even helping a messianic synagogue develop an armorbearer team.

I didn’t know why I was in Israel, but God knew, and he didn’t tell me the reason until this morning.

Choose your side. You will be for God and Israel, or against, and God will reward you accordingly, in this life and the next. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

As for Aaron and me, we will eventually agree on the Messiah’s identity. Maybe one day we’ll toast him in Jerusalem. On Purim, you’re supposed to drink until you can’t tell the difference between blessing Mordecai and cursing Haman. If El Al permits, I’ll bring the homebrew.

I am a Work in Progress

I guess I’m a bad Christian, because the Steven Slater story cracks me up every time I think about it.

I know he cursed a bunch of people and broke the law by deploying a jet’s safety chute. I know he stole two beers in the process, probably hoping to get a good start on getting plastered. I know that when the cops caught him, he was busy engaging in sodomy.

I know.

It still slays me.

Pray for both of us.

Tears in his Eyes, I Guess

I keep waking up full of energy, ready to attack the day.

This is not normal.

I have always hated getting up in the morning. For that matter, I have never been a big fan of going to bed. When I was in college, my friends used to bang on my door with their fists at noon, trying to get me up so I could have lunch with them at Happy Burger, over on Broadway.

Great burgers, by the way.

To get back to mornings, for most of my life, I have regarded getting up as a great evil, to be avoided at all costs. I used to get up and literally stumble around, trying to get it together. I would do stupid things like putting the cereal in the refrigerator and the milk in the cupboard. It was pretty awful.

For a long time, I’ve used coffee to reset my morning clock. I would get up and have a quart of coffee to get the wheels turning. It worked pretty well, although it tended to make me a little crabby later on. Which I sort of enjoyed. Okay, not really.

A while back, I started getting the idea that God wanted me to give up coffee. It started keeping me awake at night, which was new. I would drink coffee to get up and take antihistamine to get to sleep. I began to feel as though it was time to let the caffeine go.

This was alarming. I have nearly given up artificial sweeteners, I can’t drink sugary soda all day, fruit juice is just as sugary as soda, and tea gives me kidneystones. Without coffee, I would be lost. What would I drink? A Christian can’t swill beer all day. Not unless he’s a monk. Then it’s okay. Ha ha. Religious humor.

I gave up real coffee, switching to decaf. If there is a difference in the taste, I can’t tell. I thought I would miss the caffeine rush, but that hasn’t happened. I get up every morning and have a quart of unleaded, I enjoy it, and I don’t get crabby. No crabbier than I was to start with.

I thought I would be unable to move until noon, but that hasn’t panned out. I wake up, I spend an hour or so in prayer, and I get out of bed anxious to get stuff done and experience the day. That is just plain weird. Like a mental illness. I don’t understand it. But it’s wonderful.

I had to have coffee to go with breakfast. My breakfast is pathetic. I eat a small amount of oatmeal with salt and sugar or maple syrup. I have to have something else with it, or I would go insane. Now I eat my oatmeal and enjoy my decaf, and I don’t miss country ham and hot biscuits and gravy. All that much.

I’ll tell you something funny. When you fast regularly, no matter what you eat for breakfast, your first meal of the day will seem like a banquet. You will wake up every morning and think, “Thank GOD I don’t have to drink water all day today.” I enjoy my crappy oatmeal and fake coffee a great deal.

We have spirits that hinder us and sap our energy and waste our time and discourage us. I think mine are getting pounded these days. I feel full of optimism, and I am receiving what Christians refer to as “favor,” which means things are going well even when I’m not paying attention.

I’ll give an example. I kept thinking about buying an AR10. But they cost a lot of money. Although I knew Gunbroker was hopeless, I looked at the ads. One day a gun I liked popped up for a hundred dollars below cost. If you order one from the factory, it takes months, because Obama is the savior of the gun industry and he has increased demand beyond manufacturers’ wildest hopes. Still, I got it for very little.

Let’s see. Here is another one. I designed a Cafepress T-shirt and ordered one for myself. When it came, it seemed to have some kind of goo on the front. I called and complained. They said they would send me a new one, but they said the old one might be okay after I washed it. So I washed it, and it came out fine, and I get to keep the first one. So I have two shirts.

I already wrote the story about my ticket to the National Day of Prayer.

Now my church’s cafe is going nuts. I have been frustrated because of the lack of a beverage fountain, and since I started making cheesecake, I have been thinking about the need for stuff that will allow us to sell cold food. I went to church yesterday, and there was a beautiful new Pepsi fountain at the cafe! It was there on Sunday, but I didn’t notice. And the pastor who runs the cafe started telling me about all the new stuff they were getting, so people would be able to buy cold things like desserts! I never told him we needed that. Never mentioned it, as far as I know.

Psalm 127 says, “It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows, for so he giveth his beloved sleep.” That last bit can also be translated, “He blesses his beloved even when they sleep.” It appears to be true.

Christians consistently overrate hard work. We want to feel like we’re showing our gratitude by working hard, but in reality, it’s a form of pride. We’re supposed to be given things we do not deserve, and we are supposed to glorify God for it. Sure, we work, but it’s not supposed to be utter drudgery. After all, Jesus said his yoke was easy and his burden was light. Your main obligations are to have faith and obey, not to do the heavy lifting. After all, Moses didn’t have to part the Red Sea with a bucket.

It can be very comforting to let yourself suffer and sweat, because it makes you feel like a martyr, and deep in your heart, you may start thinking you deserve the things you get from God. But it’s pride. There is nothing righteous about it. Adam didn’t deserve the trees in the garden. The Hebrews didn’t deserve manna or the Promised Land. We don’t deserve the Holy Spirit or the many blessings we get from God. We are welfare cases. Best to accept it. The suffering that is necessary is sufficient. We don’t have to add to it. That’s what I think.

And much of the work we do for God doesn’t feel like work, so it’s wrong to glorify yourself for doing it.

By the way, the rifle arrived faster than I thought I would. I posted a Youtube of me getting it ready to use. Check it out.

My House Needs Fiber

I had a moment of clarity last night, unfortunately. It can be very relaxing to be wrong and not know it, so it’s always upsetting when I get an epiphany.

I had the TV on because one of the birds was out of the cage, and I happened to see a show called “Hoarders.” It’s about people who fill their houses with junk, until the rats take over and the kids have to sleep on piles of boxes.

The show bugged me. I’m not a true hoarder, but I’m related to one, and I have lots of hobbies, and I’m absent-minded. Put it all together, and you end up with a person with lots of junk, who puts stuff down in the wrong places and forgets it’s there for weeks or months. Hoarding Lite.

I got up and started relocating things. I had a pile of books and gun parts by my bed. I made room in a closet and stored it. I took tool-related items off the dining room table and put them in the garage. I threw out a number of stupid and worthless items.

Of course, I will need all of those items very badly today. That’s how decluttering works. As soon as the garbage truck drives away, you need whatever is in it.

I hate clutter. It’s like living in a little dirty crevice. It probably raises your blood pressure. But I have a clutter-prone personality. It’s like Felix and Oscar are in my head, duking it out like Rock’em Sock’em Robots.

I have a feeling that the Holy Spirit reduces clutter. Hear me out. When you’re not living for God, you do stupid things with your time and money. You will wander down fruitless paths, involving yourself in futile pursuits. That’s because only God can guide you in the direction you’re supposed to take. Result? You end up with stuff you weren’t supposed to have. Not just stuff, but time obligations. For example, you may give up church because your talented kid has sports practice every day, or simply because you want to squander time watching football on TV. You might end up devoting three hours a night to drinking beer. You may find yourself at a strip bar three times a week, blowing your money.

When God takes over, your priorities and desires change with time. Suddenly, you don’t need an entire closet for your porn collection. Or, like me, you may want to get rid of your delicious Cuban cigars. You find yourself selling things and giving things away. Life becomes more streamlined. You start discarding the things Paul referred to as “dung” so you can make room for the pearl of great price.

I still have a rolling toolbox full of gun stuff by the dining table, and a lot of my canning supplies are sitting on it. I have to move that to the garage. I have to throw out or give away some of the garage objects I will never need. I think it’s safe to throw out my old PC cabinet, and I need to Craigslist my brewing kegs.

I really need to get rid of the Super Genie Lift I inherited from one of my dad’s tenants. A guy at my church said they’ll take it, but it may be ten years before they get around to coming for it.

One of the reasons I don’t like Miami is that there is no space here. I’d like to have a home with an outbuilding for my hobbies. Here, that would run maybe three million dollars. A hundred miles north, maybe two hundred and fifty thousand. Cities are for limited people. If your only hobbies are TV and clubbing, Miami is perfect for you. Add three hobbies, and you’re out of luck. You need to move and get more room.

Last night I thought about my grandfather’s house in Kentucky. It had five bedrooms, including a little spare bedroom that held some of his guns and my grandmother’s sewing stuff. It had a big kitchen, a full dining room, a full living room, a big den, a second den in the basement, a second kitchen in the basement, tons of extra basement square footage, a big foyer, and three baths. It also had a tool shed and a barn, plus a carport and a concrete patio.

Mind you, this was not a mansion. It was just a nice red brick home. It brought $120,000 when the heirs sold it.

THAT is living. Bring your tools. Bring your cooking equipment. Buy three smokers. Get four gun safes. Get a bass boat and an RV and five motorcycles. No problem!

My idea of an ideal home is a three-bedroom CBS house with a big commercial-style kitchen, terrazzo floors, and no curtains, with nothing on the walls except maybe NRA calendars. Put a 1500-square-foot building out back with lots of room for musical instruments, tools, and storage. Give me two acres or more to grow food. I’m done. Let me live there until I die. You would have to hold me at gunpoint to get me to leave that house to go to paradise.

Forget antiques. Forget rugs; they hold dirt and stains and smells. Forget hardwood. It rots, termites eat it, and it makes noise. Put a drain in the kitchen floor so I can spill things. Tile the kitchen walls all the way to the ceiling. Get me white dishes and cups from a restaurant supply house, and put in a deck oven for pizza. Kill every plant that isn’t grass or something that produces food. Give me an entire room for Maynard and Marvin. That’s luxury!

The “stronghold” concept is well known among Christians. Satan has spiritual strongholds we have to conquer. The Canaanite cities Joshua destroyed are symbolic of these strongholds. Addictions and bad habits are strongholds. Bad attitudes are strongholds. A physical illness or poverty may be a stronghold. We’re supposed to break these things down by spiritual warfare.

It has occurred to me that God has strongholds, too. Every human believer is described as a house or a temple or an embassy. We belong to the nation of heaven, even though we live on earth. Within us–within our “walls”–God’s ways prevail. And we have to strive to keep Satan out, and we pray in the Spirit to build ourselves up, so there is something stronger than Satan within us, to repel attackers.

Similarly, a Christian’s home can be a stronghold. It can be an embassy of God. That’s what I want. I know life isn’t supposed to be a breeze, but we’re supposed to live in victory, and it seems to me that within our homes, Satan should be relatively powerless. A stronghold home should be a place where a Christian can retreat and recharge. We have to fight the enemy everywhere else. At home, we should have more peace.

A home should be like a military garrison. You defend it and keep it free from invaders, and from time to time, you make excursions into enemy territory and do damage. Then you retreat back to the garrison and prepare for your next assault.

This is what I want. I don’t want fancy furniture or snooty neighbors or a location shallow people would crave. I want a fortress where I can find a little relief.

Before the clutter show, I say a show called American Pickers, about two guys who go around talking old people into selling them valuable antiques below the market price. They went to visit a man who had twelve buildings full of junk. They had a hard time persuading him to sell them anything. He had to be 75 years old, and this stuff was falling apart, but time after time, they would show him a rusty object and ask the price, and he would tell them it wasn’t for sale. It seemed to me that this guy was in the same boat as the hoarders. He’s going to die, and all that neglected, decaying stuff will be loaded up in dumptrucks and destroyed so the new owners will be able to use the buildings. Crazy.

I also caught a few minutes of a show called Intervention. You can probably guess what that’s about. I plan to record it from now own. It’s helpful to see how tough professional addiction counselors are. It reminded me of an important truth: if you don’t fix a loved one who has an addiction–if you withdraw and wait for them to change, and it doesn’t happen–it doesn’t mean you didn’t try to help. It means the addict didn’t try. Every bad thing that happens to an addict as the result of not trying is the addict’s fault. If someone asks you why you’re not helping, say, “Shouldn’t you be asking why the addict isn’t trying?” Don’t fall for blame-shifting. If you accept even the smallest particle of blame, you might as well be handing the addict a bottle of pills.

It’s funny how I happened to tune in to three very instructive shows, on a night when I was just trying to find entertainment while I communed with my pets. Dang these “coincidences.” They are swarming on me.

My Unlikeliest Hobby

I thought this morning it might be interesting to ask about people’s experiences with fasting.

Fasting is a necessary part of Christian life. The New Testament makes it clear over and over. I cannot say I am thrilled about it. Anyone who has been reading my writing for more than six months knows I like food. After all, I wrote the world’s unhealthiest cookbook. In the minds of many Christians, whether or not they acknowledge it, overeating is the one physical pleasure God doesn’t restrict, so they cram the food in with both hands. And many of us fast pretty badly. We do things like going a whole day eating only nuts. That’s not much of a fast. Nuts are little packages of fat and carbs. If you want to eat something higher in calories than nuts, you pretty much have to chew sticks of butter.

I have also heard of people fasting with regard to certain foods, like meat or soft drinks. Again, not very impressive. I can go a day without meat and eat like a king. Cheese pizza has no meat in it. Neither does apple pie. Now I’m making myself hungry, and all I have in front of me is oatmeal.

I guess I cite Perry Stone a lot these days. I can’t help it. I really enjoy his work. His take on halfhearted fasting is that God notices it, but that real fasting is better. I guess that must be right. The Bible is full of things that could be considered partial fasts. Samson could not drink wine. The Jews have kashrut. And Jews have all sorts of temporary dietary and behavioral restrictions they observe during the year. I can’t say a partial fast is a bad thing, but surely, when you want real results, you’re better off doing it right.

The Jews don’t even drink water during their fasts. That’s pretty tough. The Bible says Jesus went forty days. Did that include refusing water? If so, wow. I just checked a survival site which lists 10 days as a likely estimate of the time it takes to die from thirst.

I fast on occasion, although I drink water, and sometimes I permit myself unsweetened, no-calorie liquids. While many people talk about how fasting makes them feel close to God, I find that it makes me feel farther away. My head hurts. I don’t think well. I get depressed and anxious. When I pray, I feel alone. The first day is the worst. The second day is not fun. I can’t remember what the third day is like, because it has been a very long time since I went three days. They say things get better once your body adjusts.

Am I the only one who feels this way? They say fasting is a method of afflicting yourself, so I suppose it would make sense. I find that I don’t feel like praying when I fast, because the effort of concentration is too unpleasant. I try to force myself. I often do a poor job.

My best guess about fasting is that there are two types. First, maintenance fasting. You fast once in a while, even when things are going well, just because you should. Second, fasting in order to get help with a problem. Maybe someone gets sick or your business is in trouble or you can’t get along with your wife. You fast and pray to get God to fix it. Maybe the type of fasting Jesus did is a third type. Fasting to change your character permanently and make you a better person.

I don’t like to talk about things I do which could be considered pious or righteous, except in a general way. If I do something good, I want to be sure I didn’t do it so people would hear about it and tell me how great I am. But I think that sometimes it’s okay to mention things, if I think it can help other people.

I fasted recently, and now that it’s over, I have a surprising result. I don’t feel like the same person. There are certain bad things I feel much less inclined to do, and I don’t understand it. Here’s a funny example. At the end of the fast, I got myself some ice cream, because I was very eager to put the fast behind me, feel normal again, and have a little reward. But I didn’t finish the ice cream. I ended up throwing out part of it. I don’t know if you can understand how odd it is for me to buy a pint of ice cream and not finish it. Especially after a fast. But it happened.

I feel more relaxed. More certain about the future. Less concerned about fulfilling my earthly desires. Less angry. This is the first time I’ve ever noticed any difference in me after a fast. Is this the reward we should be shooting for when we fast, or am I just having a temporary change in mood?

From reading the Bible, I get the impression that fasting is supposed to purify us. Not just fasting, but periods of deprivation, generally. For example, the Jews wandered in the desert for forty years, and when they emerged, they had been cleansed of the individuals who offended God by refusing to trust him. Jesus emerged from his forty-day fast in the desert (preceded by his baptism with water and the Holy Spirit) with new power. He started working miracles and teaching with authority. Maybe fasting is supposed to rid us of inclinations (whether our own or imposed by hostile spirits) that drive us to sin.

I’m not saying I’m totally repaired now, but I can see a difference in myself, and it’s significant. I almost hate to say this, but for the first time in my life, I find myself somewhat eager to fast again, to see what else I can get out of it. I don’t like to think about unpleasant duties, because I’m always afraid God will start urging me to do them. When I consider fasting, I find myself hoping God won’t get on board and motivate me to do it, because it’s so unpleasant. But if I can expect it to change me like this, it will be hard to resist.

As for my infatuation with food, I’m starting to wonder if stuffing myself is like getting drunk. It’s okay to have a beer. Drunkenness is a sin. Maybe food works the same way. I hope not! But it probably does. The Bible condemns gluttony over and over. The book of Proverbs says it leads to poverty.

Gluttony is a tough thing to beat, because you can’t give up food entirely, so the temptation will always be in front of you. And gluttony comes over you while you’re eating in a compelling way, as if you’re changing into another person. It’s not a mild urging. It’s extremely powerful. While you’re under its spell, it’s as if your entire personality and all your priorities have changed.

I still think it’s okay to have good food, but it would be nice if, for the rest of my life, I could stop eating when I’ve had enough instead of when I can’t jam any more in or when the waitress hits me with pepper spray. I’ve been behaving well lately, but on Saturdays I give my diet a rest, and there have been excesses.

If anyone who reads this has any input regarding their own fasting experiences, I would love to have some comments about it. This might be a very big deal and an extremely useful practice, if the benefits I perceive are real and lasting. Over and over, we are told we’re supposed to fast, but the things I’ve read about the beneficial results are extremely vague and unconvincing. If it can change a person’s character, it’s not just a good idea; it’s a gift the value of which cannot be overstated.

I believe in free will. So do most Christians. Aaron says the Jews believe you can enter a state in which you have no free will. That makes sense to me. I don’t think it’s wrong to say a crack addict or even a cigarette smoker has lost his or her free will. At the very least, they are subject to extreme temptation, the likes of which non-addicts don’t face. Perhaps one of the purposes of fasting is to rid yourself of compulsions you can’t resist. Maybe this is why Jesus had to fast for forty days before he was given real power. If that is true, then presumably, a modern Christian can get God’s power by fasting. God prefers not to hand out machine guns to monkeys. Power without self-control destroys us. Maybe we are supposed to fast in order to render ourselves suitable to receive increased strength and blessings. That would be fine with me. Fighting my own nature with my own nature is a tough battle, as is fighting adversity with my limited tools. I want all the help I can get.

I used to think the baptism of the Spirit and prayer in tongues were the main things that changed people’s natures, but I think I’ll have to add fasting to that list. I would rather add fishing or going to the gun range or eating pie, but I don’t make the rules.

This may be a big, big deal. Let me know what you think.

Funny how I happened to write this during the forty Days of Teshuvah.

Non-Tool Stuff Starts About Halfway Down

I’m trying to figure out whether the stuff I’ve learned in machining videos is correct.

A long while back, I ordered an “as new” OSG carbide end mill off Ebay. Seemed to work okay, and it was really cheap, so yesterday I ordered two more. I also looked at roughing mills. I have a 3/8″ roughing mill, but now that I know about the fun of changing collets, I realize I should try to put together a few mills with the same diameter. I found a 1/2″ roughing mill, and I noticed that the tolerances were not impressive. I think the diameter was listed as within 0.003″ of spec.

That confused me, because–I have not confirmed this yet–I’m fairly sure some of the videos suggested using an edge finder to locate the spindle relative to the work, and then popping in an end mill of known diameter, and using that diameter for calculations when moving the table. If you’re a machinist, you know that a diameter that’s off by 0.003″ is going to give you errors half that big in your work. And that’s more than big enough to be a concern when you’re trying to be precise. It doesn’t matter with a roughing mill, but other end mills have the same issue.

On top of that, I’m almost sure the ATI videos I watched endorsed carbide end mills. Carbide is really hard, and it’s expensive. The benefits are that it lasts a long time and performs well and cuts faster. Now I’m being told it should not be used on manual mills, because you’re supposed to climb-cut when you use it, and that will make a manual mill flex. I hope I have this right. I believe I was told that if you cut conventionally with carbide, it breaks up over time, and you get bad finishes.

The upshot seems to be that edge finders are worthless for some of the uses I hoped to use them for, and I was dumb to buy carbide. Apparently cobalt is a better choice for me. A lot of people tell me not to get cobalt, because it costs a little more, but it seems to work way better than HSS. At least in drill bits.

I guess I won’t regret spending $10 each on two carbide cutters, since they’ll definitely work long enough to be worth the money.

If you can’t use an edge finder to locate a cutter precisely, you have to do it some other way. I believe that sends you back to the rolling-paper method. You embarrass yourself by buying rolling papers like a depraved stoner, and then you find edges by holding them between the work and the cutter. The edge finder will tell you where the spindle is, relative to the work, but that’s not the same as telling you where the edge of the cutter will be.

I’ve been trying to find a good used rotary table, but it’s not that easy. You also need indexing plates and a tailstock, and by the time you get done looking for this stuff, you’ve been shopping for six months. It may be time to bite the Enco bullet and go Taiwanese again. You can often save three figures by getting old American tooling, but what does that savings cost you in lost time you could have been spending machining? It amazes me that people brag about shopping a year for a taper attachment or a steady rest. How long do they expect to live? These are usually middle-aged or older guys. A year can easily be five or ten percent of their remaining time on earth. When you decide to dedicate a lot of time to something, you need to ask yourself how much time you have left. I find life so interesting, I want to live a thousand years. That seems unlikely, however.

A few months back, my dad was talking about getting a travel trailer. I’m very, very glad he still has enthusiasm for things like that. But my mother has been gone for 12 years, and he’s 77. A lot of the people we could have visited 35 years ago are dead or elderly. It’s late.

My grandfather once leased a house to a 67-year-old man, tying it up for a number of years. Someone in the family complained, and my grandfather said, “He’s an old man. He won’t live long.” When he said that, I believe he was 72.

He was right, but you can still see my point.

I guess it will sound funny, but one reason I bought a convertible is that we didn’t do anything fun when I was a kid. My uncle Jim had a couple of convertibles in the Sixties, and some family members talked like he had gone insane. That’s how boring most of us were. My dad, my mother, my sister and I were pretty dull. We rarely went on real vacations. We never toured the US. We didn’t have a boat or an RV. We had no regular activities, like shooting or bowling. We belonged to no clubs or organizations, apart from the country club. We didn’t go to church regularly. We never belonged to a church. Golf was the only sport, apart from games my friends and I played in the yard, and my dad was the only one who golfed. We watched TV; that was our main activity. Isn’t that awful? I hate to admit it. That was our life. I went to school, and then I came home and watched TV, and I refrained from doing homework unless I had absolutely no choice, and after that I went to bed. My mother was the only one who wasn’t a TV addict, but she didn’t really do anything with the time she saved. My sister and I didn’t have many toys, which is weird, since we were well off. Mike says the other kids felt sorry for us. I had no idea back then. My mother bought me a banjo when I was 15; that was nice.

I guess I wasn’t as bad as the others. I enjoyed shooting BB guns, fishing for inedible fish, breaking things, and fireworks. Mike and I used to get together and do the kind of stupid, aimless things kids do when they’re on their own. Like Beavis and Butt-head, I guess, except we weren’t that mean or stupid. We tended to do strange, creative things. I had another friend nearby, but he wasn’t bright enough to come up with things like that. We also had CB radios and other passing interests. My sister didn’t do much of anything, but that’s normal for girls.

I remember Mike somehow got ahold of a surplus parachute. We put it in his yard, on a busy corner, and we weighted the perimeter. Then we put a fan under it and put some lights inside. It blew up into a big, quivering white dome, and we went inside and hung out. Cars slowed down so people could see this glowing object and wonder why these two abnormal kids were doing something that wasn’t ordinary.

I got my first convertible in 1980, and Jim was part of the inspiration. His branch of the family had more fun than the others. I’m sure my mother told me the car would flip and burn immediately, and I would be trapped underneath it like a chicken in a roasting pan. Oh, Lord. A convertible. Please, don’t let this happen to my child. Next he’ll be base-jumping. My mother didn’t like electric windows, because she thought any car with electric windows would plunge into a canal at the earliest opportunity, and there she would be, unable to roll down the window and escape. Meanwhile, she smoked at least two packs of cigarettes a day. I was crazy about my mom, but I knew there her logic had its weak points. I’m ancient. So far, I’ve know ONE person who was in a convertible that flipped, and he didn’t roast. I don’t know anyone who has driven into a canal. You can keep a punch in your car to break your windows, if that kind of thing worries you. I think my Glock will also do the job.

Once in a while, you have to do something. Just spend the money and do it. It isn’t going to do itself. I’m really glad I’ve had two convertibles and two motorcycles. I’m glad I lived in Israel for four months. I’m glad I published three books and got a bunch of tools and guns and learned to make beer. I can’t even guess how boring life would be if I didn’t do things like this. By and large, the strange and challenging things you do will be the things you remember with the most pleasure. That’s an extremely important lesson young people should learn. You shouldn’t be a sensation junkie or a hedonistic wastrel, but you should embrace opportunities to shake up your life. You should be conscious of their value and jump on them instead of avoiding them. You don’t want to leave your kids a diary that has entries like, “July 17: I celebrate 63 victorious years of resisting buying a motorcycle. I will celebrate by putting a small amount of real sugar in my oatmeal.”

I think a rotary table will be a real asset. Right now, I can drill holes and make straight cuts, and that’s about it. Not much utility for what I paid. A rotary table will let me cut arcs, and it will allow me to do tasks that require breaking circles up accurately into sections. Circles of bolt holes, for example.

I should take one of the bikes out today. I hope my mom will be too busy in paradise to notice.