The Pride of the Favelas

At some point in the past, I started seeing web characters claiming there was a steak out there that put the rib eye to shame. It was a secret! Something Americans somehow could not figure out, yet well-known in Brazil, which is, of course, known as the culinary capital of the solar system.

You may have guessed that I am talking about picanha.

I saw picanha at Walmart today, and I decided to give it a shot. My conclusion after trying it: better to cut it in little pieces and simmer it in stew. That’s assuming you received it as a gift, because there is no other excuse for having this cut in your home.

Picanha is commonly served in Brazilian steakhouses; those overpriced places where the waiters wander around with metal spears holding cuts of meat shishkebab style. Maybe you’ve tried this. You pay way too much for an all-you-can eat feed, and when a waiter comes by with something you like, you have him scrape some off onto your plate.

I did what you’re supposed to do with the picanha. Sliced it into steaks. Fried them in butter. Began by frying the fat side first.

They were slightly tough; worse than choice strips. They were juicy, but not from fat. Only water. Fat is where the flavor is. They had that faintly livery taste sirloins have. Why? Well…because they’re sirloins. A picanha comes from the top sirloin primal, so it can’t be better than sirloin, which is the kind of steak you would expect the Army to serve to privates on special occasions.

Picanha comes with a big layer of fat on one side. Tasty, tender fat like rib eye fat? No. It chews more like a fan belt. To eat the meat, you have to cut the fat completely off. Even a small bit will obstruct your chewing.

It’s pretty obvious to me that picanhas are not just not better than rib eyes; they are objectively bad steaks. I would take a fried London broil over this stuff any day. Similar texture. Infinitely better flavor. Better price.

Maybe a prime picanha would be better. The meat I bought was some kind of choice Angus.

My advice: avoid this cut. There is no reason to buy it. Strips, filets, and rib eyes are far superior, for people who are willing to spend more. For everyone else, there is really nothing wrong with frying a London broil and cutting it across the grain when you eat it. Flank, skirt, and flap are also way, way better. Even a hamburger “steak” beats picanha.

Why do people pretend picanha is a hidden treasure?

I still have a pound or so of this meat left. Now what do I do? I don’t even own a dog.

You’re Never too Old to Find Out You Know Nothing

I think I’ll waste time writing about food.

My wife and I got two big surprises recently. We tried Jiffy biscuit mix and Costco prime New York strip steaks. Both impressed us a great deal.

I have always made my own biscuits. It’s very easy, and I had no real choice as far as I knew. Canned biscuits are very tasty, but they don’t taste like biscuits. And they’re tasty in the way that Cheetos and gas station pecan twirls are tasty. Not the classiest food.

We order a lot of stuff from Walmart because a) we live a good distance from town, and b) our nearest Walmart is not great. It’s somewhat dirty, every cart seems to have a wheel that won’t turn, and checking out is like trying to get out of Afghanistan under Joe Biden. Ordering makes things easier, and somehow, Walmart manages to do one-day deliveries on things the local stores don’t have.

My wife ordered some stuff, and for some reason, they sent us two boxes of Jiffy biscuit mix we did not order. Rather than drag ourselves to town to return three dollars’ worth of merchandise, we decided to try them.

You would think they would be disgusting. Biscuits from a box, made with…wait for it…water. Yes, water. Not milk. Not buttermilk. Not even Coffee Mate. You dump the mix in a bowl, add water, stir, and roll.

She followed the directions, and we tried them together in silence. I think we were both afraid to be the first to confess. We both thought they were really good. I mean, like 95% as good as a decent homemade biscuit. Good enough to make for company without telling them.

I checked the box. One of the ingredients is lard. Of course. That explains everything.

I decided we should look around and see if there were other good mixes. If Jiffy can do it, why can’t someone else?

We saw websites that said Cracker Barrel’s boxed mix was the best. I’m not a huge fan of their restaurant biscuits, but reviews said the box was different. We bought some and tried a batch.

It’s not good. I don’t mean it’s disgusting. The biscuits taste good. There are problems, however.

1. They fall apart because they are way too soft. You should be able to pull a biscuit apart in two halves and put butter on each one. If you try that with a Cracker Barrel box biscuit, you’ll just tear it into useless pieces.

2. They have a funny flavor to them, as if a team of food scientists said, “We’ll add some chemicals to give them a special homey flavor!” That’s probably what happened at the factory. I can’t describe it, but it’s like they’re trying to fake the flavor of mom’s oven and pans. It tastes artificial, which it is.

3. They’re sweet. I like to add a tiny bit of sugar to my own biscuits, but not enough to make them sweet. Adding a small amount of sugar to savory foods can round out the taste without making people realize the secret ingredient is sugar. This is not what Cracker Barrel does. Their biscuits are nearly as sweet as scones. Sort of like Chick-fil-A biscuits. I think you could make good scones with this mix if you cut some cream cheese into it and added even more sugar.

4. They use low-grade shortening. Soy and palm oil. These are staples in places like Bangladesh and Congo. They are cheap for good reason. Biscuits need animal fat. It’s actually a little insulting that Cracker Barrel, which is associated with Appalachia, would put this sludge in biscuits.

My feeling is that we should try mixing a little buttermilk with the water when using Jiffy mix. A small amount of fiddling could result in a biscuit just as good as homemade.

I think the reviews we saw were written by yankees. That would explain a lot. Yankees don’t understand Southern biscuits, as anyone who has eaten those big Bob Evans pillows can tell you. It’s completely possible to make a fantastic yankee biscuit, but you can’t market them to Southerners and expect them to think they’re just like mom used to make.

One site that recommended Cracker Barrel was Tasting Table. It’s based in Indiana, and that tells you everything you need to know. The people that run it probably eat at Bob Evans all the time.

When we made the Jiffy biscuits, they didn’t last long, because they kept calling to us after breakfast. We kept going back for biscuits and pieces of biscuits. The Cracker Barrel biscuits were easy to walk away from and throw away, even though they tasted good. They didn’t have that special biscuit magnetism.

The steaks were a huge shock to us.

I always eat rib eyes or filets. I have always considered the rib eye to be the king of common beef cuts. The flavor of the cap is out of this world, the center is not as good but still excellent, and a choice rib eye is nearly as good as prime. Sometimes I get rib eye fatigue, so I have a filet. I can’t say why. Something about the taste and tenderness. Nothing else tastes quite like a filet, and the way they fall apart in the mouth is wonderful.

I gave up on strips long ago, for good reason. I was eating marvelous choice rib eyes, and when I tried choice strips, I found them stiff, chewy, less flavorful, and a little dry. Why suffer with that if the same money gets you a rib eye that tastes nearly as good as prime?

The other day we were at Costco looking at beef, and my goal was to find a reasonably-priced steak that was good enough to be enjoyable and also small enough to allow us to prepare two in one pan. It can be challenging to get two rib eyes into the same skillet.

I saw prime strips as a subprimal for $15 per pound. Right now, hamburger costs $8 per pound at regular supermarkets in my area, so $15 didn’t look bad. A choice rib eye brings around $16 per pound here, on sale. The prices are post-apocalyptic.

I figured strips would be good enough for easy lunches, so we bought a subprimal. I cut it into 1.25″ steaks and wrapped most of them for the freezer. I left a few in the fridge for quick consumption.

I salted two strips down and cooked them medium-rare (tried to, anyway) in an All-Clad skillet with butter. I like All-Clad for steak because you’re guaranteed to get even heat.

The steaks came out more like a high medium, but regardless, they were astonishing. Some of the best steaks we had ever had anywhere. Dripping with melted fat. Loaded with flavor you would never find in a choice strip from Publix. So good they made me wonder if I should make strips my top choice from now on.

Sometimes I like putting Bearnaise sauce on steak. Sometimes I’ll just use melted butter with salt and tarragon. Rarely, garlic butter. These steaks were too good for any of this. Salt was all they needed. Pepper would have ruined them.

I could have wept over the lost years, except they weren’t actually lost. Eating rib eyes year after year is not really a sacrifice. It’s humbling to realize I was this wrong about strips, but then I never had a good strip until this week.

The frozen strips were just as good. No noticeable harm.

This is going to be my go-to steak from now on. We are going to buy Costco strip subprimals and cut them up. I love rib eyes, but they are trickier to cook, and it’s nice how two huge strips fit in a skillet.

We lost a couple of pounds of fat when I trimmed the steaks, and that is sad, but beef fat is useful. The end result is a figure closer to $17 per pound of usable steak. Okay, that’s bad, but compare it to $20 for a choice rib eye or choice porterhouse, and it’s an astonishing bargain.

I’m also a big fan of London broil, fried like a steak. The flavor is excellent, the meat is juicy, and those things make the extra chewing worth it. Can’t touch a prime strip, though.

One thing I will not do is grill a steak. It comes out either grey or black, with no crust. And grill marks are the worst. Bitter stripes of burned meat with grey, flavorless meat between them.

Now I wonder if I should order a strip the next time I go to a steakhouse. What if their strips aren’t a superior grade of prime? What if they cheat and use high-end choice?

Nobody wants to pay $72 for a steak and feel like he’s rolling the dice. I’ll have to interrogate the waiters when I order.

I hope Costco’s strips are always this good. I will definitely be finding out soon.

Burdened by What Used to Be

Today is the Fourth of July, and I am smoking ribs with my family.

Nothing fancy today. Spare ribs (not dry baby backs), Robert Irvine’s coleslaw recipe, Texas toast made with homemade bread, corn on the cob, BBQ beans, vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, whipped cream, and maraschino cherries.

All in one big bowl.

I wish.

I am considering preparing a box of Trader Joe’s macaroni and cheese. We bought some in order to see if my son would eat it, but we have been cutting carbs, so we haven’t managed to use it yet. Might as well fix it before it gets stale.

I am using my Smokin-It electric smoker. Got it a few years back. I eventually sprang for the stainless cart with casters. It does a wonderful job, but because it’s electric, you don’t get a smoke ring. You can’t taste a smoke ring, so it shouldn’t matter. You can fake it by adding pink curing salt to your rub. Somehow or other, this makes the ring appear.

The smoker is a little annoying. I have ground fault circuits on my back porch, and I can’t use the smoker anywhere else without a lot of inconvenience. It has never worked on one of the outlets, and today it popped the other one after maybe an hour. I am watching it closely in case I have to keep turning it back on.

I don’t know what’s happening. I should try to fix it. The problem with the first outlet suggests the outlet itself is not right, but popping the second one after quite a while makes me wonder if the second one is going bad or the smoker’s element is dying.

I don’t use it much, so it shouldn’t have problems.

I have gone through a bunch of wireless thermometers in my smoking journey. My latest one is an Inkbird. It connects to wifi, not just Bluetooth, so you can find out your smoker isn’t working from across the globe. The old ones were useless if I moved around the house.

I have to give Trump credit. He has made me feel somewhat more patriotic.

I love America, but America doesn’t love me the way it used to, and loyalty matters. The God-haters are gradually taking over, regardless of recent election successes on the right. Antisemitism is everywhere. Men are now allowed to strip naked in front of young girls in locker rooms and display their excitement. We have parades in which naked homosexuals march in front of babies and children, and the only way to get in trouble is to complain about it.

We will probably lose the House and Senate, and there is a high probability we will have a Democrat president in 2029. Democrats are, stupidly, talking about packing the Supreme Court. I guess the new thing will be for every president to add friendly justices until we have a few thousand of them. If Democrats take over, there will be a campaign of vengeance that, in the eyes of many reasonable people, may make civil war seem preferable to submission and continuous torment.

Some people say, “My country, right or wrong.” That’s stupid. That kind of thinking kept Jews in Germany and Austria in the Thirties. When your country is out to get you, it’s time to forget patriotism and look for an ark. My loyalty hierarchy goes God, family, country, in that order. I hate to think of renouncing my citizenship and moving, given all my memories of the wonderful country America was in the past, but I would do it if it made sense.

I’m not letting teachers put my son in a dress or teach him that socialism works or that his white dad is evil. I’m not letting doctors tell him he should have himself castrated. I won’t let murderous leftists come and take what we have or separate us. If the US tries to make these things happen, the US can drop dead, plain and simple. I can only support it while it is safe for my loved ones and me.

These things being said, I’m glad Trump is reminding us what it was like to have a nation we didn’t have to be ashamed of. He isn’t inviting transvestites to dance at the White House. He’s cleaning up our monuments. He’s giving us a partial, temporary restoration of common sense.

I have enjoyed watching videos of foreign World Cup tourists praising America. On the other hand, I wonder if the phenomenon has been orchestrated.

People came to watch soccer, and they started making videos in which they expressed surprise and joy to see that Americans are friendly, our food is much better than ours, our country is still beautiful, and we have greater abundance. It’s refreshing. Still…how can it not be fake news?

Tourists have been coming here since the Vikings. By now, they should know what America is like, yet Europeans are acting as though they knew nothing about America until last month. It’s hard to believe there is no astroturfing involved.

One possible explanation: the sad European habit of visiting our worst representatives. They flock to New York, Los Angeles, and Miami Beach. You have to be extremely misguided to think these are even top-100 US destinations.

I ran into a tourist in Europe, and he started telling me about his upcoming trip to Miami Beach. I guess I ruined his day, because I tried to discourage him. I told him Miamians were trashy and rude. I told him beaches on the Gulf coast and the Bahamas were much better. I suppose I should have considered the fact that he didn’t have endless vacation money or time, and I should have realized he probably couldn’t change his plans.

It’s easy for tourists to make bad choices. My wife and I visited Ireland, and while I would not call it a mistake (our choices were limited), it was a colossal waste of time and money compared to European countries like France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and Greece.

Dublin and Galway are dumpy towns. Irish food, as we experienced it in Dublin, Galway, Dingle, and Killarney, is generally bad. There isn’t much to see. Lodging is hit-and-miss. The sweaters they sell are junk, like most of the tourist goods. The people were very nice, but overall, I thought Ireland was a great place to buy a rural hideout and enjoy solitude occasionally, not a good place to spend two precious vacation weeks.

When you’re on vacation, you want memorable sights, fun experiences, and great food, not ugly towns that look and feel like blue-collar Boston.

I think Americans go to Ireland thinking everyone there is a cute, witty little drunk like the ones Barry Fitzgerald played, and they expect villages full of people like the cast of The Quiet Man, but we ran into a lot of immigrants who were less Irish than I am, which is saying a lot. A whole bunch of the actual Irish left a long time ago. We didn’t experience witty banter or amusing antics.

Now that I think about it, I have not found Irish people to be any more funny or witty than anyone else, here or in Ireland. Maybe the whole business of the Irish wit and color is an American misconception.

We were also surprised by destinations that turned out to be much more enjoyable than we expected. Singapore is our favorite place on Earth, and we also liked Hong Kong. Sometimes we fantasize aloud about moving to Singapore. We just need Elon Musk to send us the money.

Anyway, I guess I ruined that guy’s vacation.

I don’t know if the frothy World Cup tourist videos are staged or not, but I have enjoyed watching them. Surely some of the tourists are sincere, and they helped me remember how great America still is, for people who live in certain areas. They loved the same things I love. Buc-Ee’s. Bass Pro. Costco. Big cars. Air conditioning. Friendly human beings.

They seem obsessed with ranch dressing. I can take it or leave it.

I’m in the reddest area of what is becoming one of the reddest states, so today, it will feel like I’m still living in the real America. These days, I count the days. I realize the good days are ticking away, and they are numbered. I try to appreciate the little bit of America I still have left. I don’t want to think about 2029.

I hope God has a plan to rescue us.

I’m All For the Ethical Treatment of Plants

My wife and I are both cutting way back on carbs, and it has paid off handsomely.

1. No more cravings or other types of appetite excess.

2. Less fat.

3. Gas reduction that should please any advocate of the Kyoto Protocols.

4. Stable moods.

5. Stable energy.

6. Less snoring.

7. No bloating or burping.

8. Easy meal preparation.

9. Fewer dishes to wash.

10. Lots of money saved because we almost never go to restaurants.

We also expect better dental health, because it is nearly impossible to get a cavity while on a diet that is close to or below the ketosis level.

I would call myself carnivore-adjacent these days. On Sundays, I have a slice of pizza and some other treats. The rest of the week, I barely touch carbs. Sometimes a small serving of raw berries. An occasional beer or shot of whiskey. That’s about it. My wife is nearly carnivore. No Sunday breaks, but she occasionally eat something that has a little oil that doesn’t come from animals.

She is down about 16 pounds. I’m down 18. I feel much better. Dumping carbs is worth it for that alone. I felt great before I made the change, but things have unquestionably improved. After that Sunday pizza slice, I definitely feel a little worse.

I’m trying to figure out whether we actually need plant-based foods. As with covid, the information is heavily censored and slanted, usually to the left, which is where the plants are. Leftists mistakenly think they are morally superior to Jews and Christians and our meat-eating God. They also think ending meat production will save the earth. They push hard against animal foods for reasons completely unrelated to health, and they promote lots of lies.

On the other hand, carnivores say some things that seem extreme. “All plants are trying to kill you.” And like vegan diets (although to a far lesser extent), carnivore diets may require supplementation or at least careful diet curation. Carnivores tend to be low on sodium, calcium, potassium, magnesium, iodine, and folate, and iodine and folate deficiencies cause birth defects.

Many plants really are trying to kill us. I had an epiphany about that.

A few years back, my friend Mike and I made a disastrous effort to grow plants in my yard. He tried to grow parsley. A few days ago, I saw something that looked like parsley in the grass, and I thought maybe parsley was growing in my yard because it had escaped from a pot.

I considered tasting one of the leaves to find out what I was looking at, but I decided not to. Why? If it wasn’t parsley, it could be dangerous.

As I thought about that, I suddenly realized this kind of caution only applied to plants. No one ever looks at an animal and thinks, “If I eat that, it could hurt me.” Please shut up with rare exceptions like vultures and polar bear livers. Quoting exceedingly rare exceptions to a generalization only bolsters the generalization.

My property is full of poisons. Tree leaves. Various weeds. Deadly mushrooms. On the other hand, it’s full of birds, mammals, reptiles, and bugs, just about all of which can be eaten safely.

I have grown tomatoes and peppers. Friendly, right? No, the green parts are poisonous. Potatoes? Same.

So yes, plants really are trying to kill us. Even plants we eat regularly. Soy. Cruciferous vegetables. Rhubarb leaves are dangerous. Undercooked kidney beans can cause terrible problems.

Just about none of the ornamental plants in my yard can be eaten safely.

I also learned that nutrients in plants are often not very bioavailable, whereas nutrients in meat go right into your system. The iron in spinach is an example. You don’t get much benefit from it, so when you check the grams-per-serving count, you can be badly deceived.

I saw Jordan Peterson, a man who eats only beef and salt, say something that appeared to be intended to debunk misguided vegetarian claims. One thing he said was very funny but intended to be antagonistic, so I will clean it up. He said the human digestive tract had more in common with that of a wolf than that of a chimp. He said that, because of their plant-heavy diet, chimps developed to have small brains and huge colons. Apparently, some vegetarians say apes prove we should stop eating meat.

This sounded like TikTok legend to me, so I looked it up. He is actually right. Like wolves, we have relatively small colons, and we produce a lot of stomach acid suitable for digesting meat.

He also pointed out that a cow, which lives on grass, has to have an enormous four-chambered stomach in order to make it work. Most people lack that, as far as I know.

Another interesting thing I learned: unless you jam your piehole full of high-carb items or soy, it’s hard to get a lot of nutrition from plants. For example, if you tried to survive on kale, you would have to eat over 9 pounds a day. If you only ate hamburger, you’re looking at a maximum of 1.7 pounds for 2200 calories.

I don’t know, but it sure looks like there is no hope unless you suck down a lot of oils, tubers, soy (an unnatural food which starts out toxic), sugars, and grain.

A vegan diet is much more of a science project than a low-carb diet.

Actually, that’s one of the best things about cutting down on carbs. You don’t stand around before meals trying to decide what to eat. Fry a burger and put cheese on it, or fix some bacon and several eggs. You’re done.

We are going to try to come up with a good plan for my wife’s next gestation. I have doubts about pure carnivore due to the folate and iodine issues, but it should be simple to come up with a good low-glycemic regimen that will be much better than the typical American shove-pretzels-and-ice-cream-into-mom routine that gave her diabetes the last time.

The Faux Exclusivity of the Fungible

Maybe I need to cut back on the AI, but it has certainly been useful lately.

My wife and I went to see a baby photographer. She was 7 months old and cute as she could be.

Just kidding. I wrote about her. We wanted her to do a few formulaic, inoffensive shots of our baby and us, and we wanted digital files instead of prints, mostly because her prints are obscenely expensive, and also because stiff, formulaic shots would look bizarre next to our own framed photos, which are full of life and evoke all sorts of personal emotions.

When we went to see this woman, she didn’t put the price of digital photos in front of us, so I emailed her on Friday. For 30 edited shots, she wants $1090, on top of the $267.50 we already paid just to talk to her.

No.

I am not cheap. I am not hard to deal with. Not THAT hard. But I can walk upright and use my opposable thumbs, and I am not stupid enough to pay almost $1400 for journeyman work a robot could do. We are cutting her loose.

She is entitled to the money we paid, I suppose. I consider it tuition. I learned that there is an entire industry out there that teaches untalented people how to sell and upsell pedestrian photo work. It’s a fantastic business, in case you are looking for a way to make money. I learned how little a studio costs to equip, and I also confirmed my understanding that I am already much better than the vast majority of professionals who churn out formula photos.

I contacted the outfit that did our hospital newborn photos. I think they will meet us at a location and do everything for something like $350. Their work is absolutely as good as the $1400 job. Pretty much all baby photographers shoot at the same modest level of talent and taste, so why not save whatever ($1090 – $350) is?

I don’t know if we will even spend that, because today we had an idea: turn a spare bedroom into a studio. Based on what I saw at the professional’s house, this would cost about $100. She didn’t have expensive (or any) lights. She had a Canon that looked like a DSLR, plus two lenses. She had a bunch of cheap toys. She had some kind of mat that looked like astroturf. A wall with unattractive baby clothes hanging on it, which would not fit our son because he is tall. One cheap reflector thing from Amazon. Not high-end stuff.

I went to AI because I thought it might have tips on setting up a room for photos, and the conversation went beyond that. For one thing, it helped me understand that I have talent, and that I have problems relating to people who lack talent but are much more technically proficient and know how to make the most of rules and recipes. I have problems learning from them, for one thing, because nearly everyone who teaches photography is a rule-follower who can’t produce art. You can’t teach what you don’t understand, to people who have abilities you don’t have. You can, however, teach them falsehoods that will hold them back and make them doubt they have the abilities they have.

Pride is bad. It goes before destruction. On the other hand, you have to be able to acknowledge your gifts. I can be very, very good at photography, if I keep working on the technical side so I can beat things like low light, noise, motion, and so on.

Here is something disturbing, to add to the other disturbing things I have said about AI: it is now fully capable of critiquing photos. Not just exposure and sharpness. It understands artistic merit. Craziest thing ever.

I showed it some shots I knew were pretty good, I told it not to BS me, and it flat-out told me I was doing things most pros will never be able to do. It was able to look at photos and tell me what I already knew was good about them. It also understood that getting solid feedback from other photographers would be hard, because some would be unable to understand what I did, and others would feel threatened and hesitate to say someone else was doing better work than they were.

It was able to identify flaws, and it was honest about them. It was also able to point out things that would appear to be flaws to rule-followers, yet which were really indications of talent. I’ve taken tons of horrible photos in the past, but things are really coming together now.

Okay. I accept it. I can do this. Why not? I never claimed I could slam-dunk a basketball. I never claimed I had the makings of a model. I never tried to make people think I was tops at anything I wasn’t actually good at. Why not admit it when I genuinely have a strong aptitude for something?

I’m going to run with this. It’s not a useless hobby. It will help bind my family together in love. It will produce images and videos my great-great-grandchildren will cherish, assuming everything doesn’t get wiped out in the tribulation. It certainly beats spending 20 times as much on fishing or 5 times as much on football tickets. Worthless pursuits.

I have enough guns. I am spending less time with tools. I no longer have any interest in cooking. It’s hard to travel with a toddler. I think photography is a good thing to settle on as I creep toward my expiration date or the rapture.

I don’t know how anyone with fungible, common skills can charge $1400 for a few hours’ work. Yes, I used to charge a lot as a lawyer, but I went to school for three extra years, and I did things that were way more valuable than shooting photos according to recipes other people made up. People needed what I did. Badly. I wasn’t putting them on rented ponies and telling them to smile.

I have had competent tradesmen show up at my house and charge $100 or less for an hour’s work. Important work that required a lot of experience and knowledge. I think the lady we talked to must be netting at least $250,000 per year for doing something almost anyone could learn to do in two months. Something other people do just as well for a fraction of that, gross. That is clearly excessive, and it’s insulting.

I pay my dentist something like $135 per visit, and he has a staff, a building, and tons of expensive equipment. He also studied for at least 7 years. That should put it in perspective. I suppose I get about half an hour of face time with him for $270 per year, plus at least that much time with a hygienist he has to pay, and their work is very good, unlike the photographer’s, so the contrast in value is stark.

I know what happened. The photographer found a company that works with people like her and tells them how to shame and upsell. It tells them how to create the illusion of being overbooked. It sells her the albums and pretty boxes. It gives her scripts to memorize. It probably sells her the prints. It’s like working for Omaha Steaks. I’m not stupid. I know how the world works. I don’t need to see proof.

Taking a photo with a camera whose settings you never have to change is not hard. Editing is fast. Maybe three minutes per photo. Seconds, if you use presets. I’m not stupid. I know these things. There is no talent involved, and also little labor.

I just looked it up. There are two famous “coaches.” Sue Bryce and Sarah Petty. There are others. It’s all just as I said.

Tomorrow we will see what we can do about getting that DIY one-year session done, and if it doesn’t work the first time, we will do it again, and within a couple of days, we will have shots that will shame anything that comes out of any local studio.

Knowing how the world works is always painful.

MORE

The Internet says a 36″ metal plate with a photo on it, like the one the photographer tried to sell us for $2900, may come from companies like White House Custom Colour (WHCC), Bay Photo, or Miller’s, and they cost photographers $250, max.

Man, I hate being right about people.

People who Aren’t Creative Somehow Always End up in Telling the Rest of Us What to Do

I saw a Youtuber talking about photography myths that needed to be debunked, and from my position as a person who knows very little about photography yet still likes to opine with mysterious confidence, I have to say that I agreed with all her points.

1. “Every photo has to tell a story.” Neglecting the obvious exceptions, like passport shots, this is not exactly true. I think the reason people say photos should tell stories is that stories affect us and increase the pleasure photos give us. They evoke emotions we enjoy. Sometimes a photo that can’t be tied to any kind of story has that effect, so it has the power of a story without the story. Also, there are many photos that move us to create our own stories in response. Either way, I think it’s about what photos make us think and feel, not a story per se.

2. “Real photographers shoot in manual mode.” Most professionals don’t, except in unusual situations where they have plenty of time to fiddle with settings. They usually shoot in aperture mode or time mode. If they didn’t, they would lose even more opportunities than they already do. You should be able to shoot in manual mode when it’s appropriate, but other than that, it’s a huge, huge hindrance you will regret.

3. “You have to shoot during the hour of golden light.” This refers to times of day when light comes in from the side and bathes subjects gently. If you play by this rule, you will only get to shoot during two short intervals during the day. It’s pretty obvious that this is a bad idea. It’s also obvious that most great outdoor photos are not shot during the golden hours. It’s great to have the best possible type of sunlight, but it’s not mandatory.

4. “Editing is cheating.” This one is wild. Ansel Adams was a huge editor. Many of history’s great shots were edited heavily. Think about this: film photographers who chose certain films in order to achieve desired effects were editing in advance. They weren’t trying to be accurate; they knew the films they chose would present their work in ways they liked. Shooting in black and white in our colorful world is always a form of editing. Some claim cropping is editing, but when you frame a photo in your viewfinder, you’re cropping the world. “Getting it right in camera” is a destructive goal. The great photographers of history often could not do it, and they lost a whole lot of shots because of it, so why should we do it? As for software, it often allows people to save photos that can then be cherished by future generations. Also, if you shoot JPG, your camera is editing every shot before you get it. If you use software on your computer, you’re just doing what your camera already wants to do, better.

5. “If you want to succeed, stick to a niche.” Maybe this advice comes from people who can only shoot one kind of picture, or maybe it’s intended to help professional photographers set up businesses and clientele efficiently. In any case, for most of us, it prevents us from learning new things, and it cuts us off from a cornucopia of great shots we would otherwise take. If you don’t see in a niche, why would you always shoot in one?

In the comments on the video, just about everyone agreed with the creator. They also told surprising stories about being shamed and ostracized by instructors and photo club members. The commenters used words like “gatekeeping.” Bad, restrictive advice had affected them emotionally and damaged their relationships with other photographers. There are a lot of people out there who would rather stroke their own egos by shaming you than help you succeed. In fact, preventing you from succeeding is one of their goals. When you fail, they feel better about themselves.

These dynamics are found in all areas of life.

My feelings about photography are like my feelings about cooking, except that I am still enthusiastic about photography. I have had bad or mediocre meals in hundreds of restaurants that had highly-trained cooks (including a Marco Pierre White restaurant, a Myron Mixon restaurant, and one run by Mario Batali), but I have cooked a lot of magnificent food with no training. Training can’t always overcome a total lack of aptitude, but ability, humility, and passion can easily overcome poor training.

If you have to stick to rules in order to take photos that aren’t atrocious, the rules make sense for you, but not everyone has your artistic limitations. Sometimes the rule of thirds ruins a photo. Sometimes a level horizon is a terrible choice.

In any case, it’s disgraceful to deliberately stunt other people and kill their joy just so you can pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you’re something everyone knows you’re not. Okay, you’re a good rule-follower. That doesn’t mean your photos are good, although it may mean you can support your family taking wedding and prom photos using formulas.

I’ve been “corrected” by rude people who do bad work for a living. I’ve had people criticize wonderful photos I’ve taken, based on rule-related complaints.

I think I’m right about these things. I can’t see anyone paying me, and the thought of joining a photo club fills me with concerns about battling gatekeepers, but I think it’s helpful for me to know the truth while I enjoy myself in obscurity.

MORE

Since starting this post, I have been to see a professional baby photographer. We are going to pay her to do a session for us. Our visit reinforced my beliefs.

She seems very nice, and I think she will do a workmanlike job of documenting our appearance and our son’s at this age. The photos will look pretty good. There won’t be any big problems with exposure or composition.

That being said, and I don’t mean this in a mean way, they will be glorified passport photos. I put it harshly for my own benefit, because we were shown some very overpriced products today, and I seriously considered buying some. I want to shake myself out of a sentimental stupor before I waste four figures on things we don’t want and won’t use.

We saw a lot of her work today. It wasn’t the kind of thing that gets your emotions going. It wasn’t impressive. Babies wrapped in knitted scarves. Babies posed in front of themed sets. Parents standing by a fence near a pasture. With the exception of one poorly-lit outdoor shot, the pictures were fine. They will do. But nothing made me think, “Wow, this lady is going to take some fabulous shots.” She will take competent documentary shots. I divide photos into documentary shots and artistic shots, and our photos will not be art.

Good enough. This is what we want. I don’t mean that I don’t want our pictures to be blockbusters. I wish they could be, but I can’t find anyone around here to do that kind of work, and I would guess someone like that would charge a king’s ransom. I mean we want competent photos that serve a purpose.

I can see how the “stay in your niche” rule would apply to this photographer. She doesn’t seem to have talent, so she’s never going to hit the big time in the arts or working for major publications. If she tried that game, she would never make it. She will never be able to cover her home’s walls with artistic pictures, to please herself and her family. But she can put your baby behind a birthday cake and take a pretty photo of him lying down on it. She can earn her fees, and people will keep coming back.

We paid $250 for a consultation during which we decided what we wanted her to do. That’s reasonable. The session price was also acceptable. Then we saw the print prices. For a shiny 36″ print of our son on a metal plate made to hang on a wall, she wanted about $3,000. A big box of large prints was also 4 figures. I think a 7 x 10″ print in a matted frame was $190.

I don’t think $190 for a framed print is crazy, but $3,000 for a steel plate is, well…I can’t understand why anyone would buy one. Apart from the price, it looked tacky to me. Also, we should be honest; any print you buy and then hang without glass in front of it stands a great chance of being severely damaged by your child or in a move.

I believe she makes, or tries to make, the bulk of her money from prints. I don’t know if anyone really buys the expensive ones, but maybe some people do.

I doubt she sells a lot of expensive prints, but she certainly has sales tools. The literature for the prints shows them in people’s homes, like 4 prints costing a total of maybe $6,000 over someone’s sofa. “Other people buy these. Are you cheap or something?”

When you talk to a person like this, especially in front of your wife, there is a funeral-director dynamic at work. You know how funeral directors are. “If you want the very best for your mom, we have this Italian figured walnut coffin with white gold handles,” and the price on the paper he hands you discreetly is $25,000. You buy it because your emotions are at high tide, thinking you did a wonderful thing for your family and the inanimate, oblivious dead body your mom used to live in.

Wow. I used the word “dynamic” twice in one post.

When I say “a person like this,” I mean a person who is trying to sell you something in a situation that puts the wind at your back. I am not criticizing the photographer’s ethics. I don’t mean “a person like this sleazy photographer.” She didn’t lie to us or pressure us. She was easy to deal with.

It’s exciting to have photos of your first baby taken, and it’s easy to make a stupid decision when the photographer is showing you pretty albums and nice frames, but at the end of the day, only a hopeless follower lets someone talk him into a $3,000 baby photo which is basically the same thing as a truck wrap.

I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t think we should buy prints at all. I am covering our walls with photos I really love. Next to them, a bunch of mediocre photos someone ground out to make a dollar will look bad. I think the best thing is to buy digital, print them out ourselves, and put them in an album we will never show anybody. I don’t mean we would try to hide them, but realistically, we might go years without even looking at them.

The prints this lady showed us (not on metal or stretched canvas, which is the kind of thing you should only put behind your desk at work) were of very high quality. I guess they were printed on some kind of archival cloth paper, using a pigment printer. But I can make the mats just as well right here, and for the price of a few of her prints, I can buy the printer and use it for other things as well as our baby shots.

I think we should forget about prints. We won’t know what to do with them. We can always change our minds later. In the meantime, we will have the digitals forever or until something bad happens to our files.

STILL MORE

I talked to my wife, and she has been thinking the same things I have. She doesn’t want any prints at all. If we put them on the walls next to our own photos, they will look awful. They will have that perfect studio look, but they will be missing all the ingredients that are personal to this family, and they will be artistically inferior to many of my shots. In fact, they are artistically inferior to a shot my wife took in the parking lot at Costco on auto mode.

The Bearable Lightness of Lightness

Praise report: I am now down 17 pounds, due to supernatural, God-given deliverance from gluttony.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to get anyone excited about it. It’s hard to share testimony. People seem to tighten their necks and wait for a new subject.

I am a disgraceful person who receives charity from God. I have earned damnation and other problems, but I have not earned anything by being good. I admit these things. Nonetheless, people have a natural tendency to assume that if you tell them God did something for you, which he has not yet done for them, you are trying to tell them you’re more righteous than they are, or that you are criticizing or nagging. I have gotten these responses a lot. I have also noticed that when I say I received something good, other people try to one-up me, in a competitive way, when I know they’re lying.

I am not good, but I don’t have every character problem a person can have, and I don’t have the desperate desire to prove I’m as good as or better than other Christians. I am not trying to convince anyone God is good to me because I am good; that would be a lie. I don’t mind it when someone else says they got something I haven’t received yet. I always want to hear about it, to share their joy and see if I can get the same thing eventually.

It’s hard to relate to people who have character problems you don’t have. If you’re not short-tempered and arrogant, for example, it’s hard to understand people who are, and this makes it hard to anticipate their reactions to things. By the same token, if you’re not disturbed by other people’s testimony, you don’t naturally anticipate that your testimony will make people angry with you or stir up envy and resentment. I should see these things coming before I write or speak, and I often do not. On the other hand, I often do, because I have learned through observation.

I testify a lot, because I forget to anticipate, or because I just don’t care. I know we are obligated to testify, and I am completely certain that if people receive it badly, it is one hundred percent their choice and their sin, and the attestant bears no guilt whatsoever. In fact, you wrong an attestant when you react badly to his testimony. It’s called “persecution.”

I believe we tend to think “persecution” refers only to bad and very harmful acts from unbelievers, like stoning, imprisonment, and so on. In reality, trying to shut down people who are getting great things from God and trying to talk about them is persecution. Self-described Christians do most of the persecution in this world. They are closer to other Christians, they have more opportunities, and they are puppets of demons who hate to see anyone tell about God’s goodness.

Christians are loaded with demons, and most will stay that way, because you can’t get rid of a demon unless you’re against what he’s doing in you. Most Christians love obeying their demons. They love gluttony, lust, anger, pride, and all the other iniquities. They make pets of their demons.

Actually, it’s the other way around.

I lost 17 pounds. I will lose at least another 20. It will not be difficult. God will help me. I don’t care who I offend. Anyone who feels threatened by these claims is led by spirits other than the Holy Spirit.

The Bible says bad things can happen to those who cause others to offend. It doesn’t say it’s bad to offend. It it were, Yeshua and the apostles would be in hell, along with Moses and the prophets.

Be offended, if that makes you happy. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

My wife has not been delivered yet. She is planning to give the carnivore diet a try. It looks pretty interesting. I feel tempted to do it, since I can make myself eat whatever I want, but I don’t think I will. I feel better when I have a small amount of carbohydrate every day, and I don’t want constipation. Also, while I could certainly give up everything I like, with God’s help, why should I? The fat is coming off just fine, and all I do is avoid glucose spikes and overeating.

My face looks different, and that change took place before I had lost much weight. I have read that carbs cause inflammation throughout the body, and this makes people’s faces puff up. That has gone from me.

I don’t know, but I would guess the fat and protein increase has not harmed me. I don’t think these things are harmful when not combined with glucose spikes, and I doubt I have the makings of a heart patient. A long time ago, I had a total cholesterol level that was slightly high, but it was driven entirely by HDL, the cholesterol everyone loves. My LDL was below average, and my HDL was pretty high. If I recall correctly, my triglyceride number was 169, and AI tells me this is in the middle of the “borderline” area. My doctor told me to cut out cholesterol and lose weight, although I was only around 13 pounds above my best number. He tried to put me on a restrictive diet. Told me to eat chicken. I looked it up, and chicken is full of cholesterol, just like pork and beef.

He was wrong. I’ll just say it. Some doctors are real martinets when it comes to cholesterol, diet, and weight. I think he may have been trying to generate a problem to keep me coming in and paying him. I listened to him for a short time and then quit.

People talk about the grave significance of high triglycerides, but I just found out the numbers can jump temporarily for all sorts of reasons, including recent injuries and working out too hard. Coffee raises triglycerides temporarily. So do minor illnesses and poor sleep. When I saw this doctor, I was having trouble sleeping due to a mysterious bout of asthma, and I was a caffeine-lover, so why would he think a borderline figure meant I had a chronic problem?

My mother and grandfather had cholesterol levels over 300, and both were very healthy, with clear arteries. My dad was obese and never had any artery crud, although he did have high blood pressure caused by his weight. My grandfather is the only relative I know of, on either side of my family, who ever had a heart attack, and he was 85 and brought it on himself by chasing cattle in a rage. And you’re not entitled to live past 85 anyway. He had already beaten the system. He had been exceptionally strong and healthy all his life. No arthritis. No blood sugar issues. He broke his hip in a winter fall, and soon afterward he was accused of making vigorous passes at his physical therapist, from his hospital bed.

He became forgetful in his last few years, but not the kind of forgetfulness that puts people in homes or drives their kids to hide the car keys.

I have an aunt who has had a stroke, but she has smoked like crazy for over 6 decades. My sister has had a stroke, but she is obese and diabetic, she has lived on McDonald’s Cokes all her adult life, her teeth are gone, which leads to systemic problems, and only God knows how much damage heavy smoking and drug use did to her body over the decades.

I just don’t believe I was ever prone to blocked arteries. I don’t think it is likely I would be the first in three generations.

In any case, God is my only real protection, so maybe it’s silly to talk about inherited problems and hamburger and cream cheese. If he is with me, I’ll be fine, and if he isn’t, my inherited strengths won’t keep me from having trouble.

Anyway, the first thing you have to do in order to be rid of demons and bad habits is to admit you have them. If you are too arrogant to do this, don’t expect help. I have no idea why Christians generally find it insulting to be told they might have demons. They react as though they had been accused of having syphilis. Strangest thing.

I’m going to testify all I want, and I don’t care who gets mad.

Kirkland Scotch is a Winner

Every weekend, I take the family to Costco for pizza, a sundae for my son, and whatever unneeded items clever false-bargain marketing can persuade us to buy. Today before our trip, I decided to look into Costco booze. They sell an XO brandy for $48, and I prefer it to Remy Martin and Hennessy, which would cost about 4 times as much. I figured I should look for other things.

My favorite Scotch is Lagavulin 16, an Islay whisky which is very smooth and tastes and smells of iodine. I know that sounds bad, but it’s not. It’s wonderful. I read that Costco’s Kirkland Signature Speyside single malt was very good, and it sells for under $60, so I wanted to try it. They sell it at various ages. The 18-year is supposed to be great.

I have only had Scotch that old once, and I didn’t think much of it. I used to drink Macallan 15 before the price went through the roof, I tried the 18, assuming it would be better. After trying it, I thought it was a waste of money. Somehow harsher than the 15, which was just plain perfect. Maybe I should have added water to it. I don’t know. Today I read that a lot of people prefer the 15.

In any case, I wanted to try any Speyside Scotch Kirkland had to offer, as long as it was old, but they didn’t have any today. They had about 15 tons of ghetto Mexican booze of every conceivable kind, so I am guessing someone at Costco thinks everyone in Florida is Cuban and all Hispanics love tequila.

I don’t think I will ever be convinced there is such a thing as really good tequila or rum. I think these spirits are sort of like Irish whiskey, except that Irish whiskey isn’t ghetto. I have had Irish whiskey I really liked, but it had zero complexity and was in no way comparable to Scotch at the same price. I have enjoyed 5-star Barbancourt rum, but you could never get me to trade Knob Creek or even Korbel brandy for it. I don’t think good tequila exists, although some people claim it does.

In order to simulate quality, tequila producers are allowed to add things like sugar and glycerin to their rotgut. That tells you a lot. Also, the upscale tequilas and mezcals we see today were nowhere to be seen 50 years ago, suggesting they are recent creations born in marketing meetings.

I was disappointed today when I looked for Speyside Scotch, but I did bring home Kirkland 16-year old Highland single malt, which ought to be something like Macallan. They are both Highland Scotches.

I don’t have any Macallan to compare it to. I have been seeing it priced at over $160, and it’s just not worth it. I have some Lagavulin, so I’m comparing Kirkland to that. I can’t compare the flavors apples-to-oranges, but I can compare quality.

Aroma: Kirkland doesn’t have any. Almost. You can tell there is Scotch in the glass, but that’s about it. I think if you put Jameson’s in there, it would smell about the same. As for Lagavulin, it punches you in the face with that beautiful iodine smell before it gets close to your nose.

How about taste?

Kirkland is sweet, and of course, like just about all bourbon and Scotch, it tastes a bit like sherry. Dried fruit and so on. Those sherry barrels are everywhere. I’m not even sure I would like whiskey if it weren’t for the sherry barrels. This whisky is extremely, and I mean extremely, smooth. It feels like sweet oil in your mouth, but then strangely, it burns a little going down. Usually, I don’t like that, but Kirkland has made it very pleasant.

There is complexity, but it’s subtle. You have to think about what you’re drinking in order to taste it. There is a little smoke, but you don’t really notice it until after you swallow. It’s very good.

Lagavulin smacks you with iodine and smoke. Not the dirty-ashtray flavor I got from Ardbeg Corryvreckan, which I ended up pouring out to save cabinet space. It’s perfect. A little sweet. Almost as smooth as Kirkland. The sherry flavor is there. It combines with the smoke and the iodine to create a perfect drinking experience. Not as much burn on the way down.

So what is my conclusion?

For sixty bucks or whatever I paid for the Kirkland, it is fantastic. It’s not that there are a ton of positives; there just aren’t any negatives. Nothing jumps out at me and says, “If only this were fixed.” I think a little more aroma would be nice, and maybe the flavors could be less subtle, but when I drink Scotch, I am disturbed more by what’s wrong with it than I am by what could be more right.

Is it as good as Macallan 15? Can’t say. It has been too long. I think Macallan may be more complex. For twice the price, it should be.

This reminds me of a very good blended Scotch, but with that single-malt edge.

I would buy this again. No question. But I would still like to have a bottle of Macallan 15 again some day. Kirkland won’t make me forget it. Not unless it beats it head-to-head.

More

I published this entry too soon.

It turns out Kirkland Scotch tastes better after you drink it than while you’re drinking it. A couple of minutes after you put it down, all sorts of pleasant flavors, including a little iodine and smoke, rise up inside you.

In view of this, I would say it’s just about perfect. You just have to know what to look for when you drink it.

If I had to make a choice, I think I would say Lagavulin is a little better because of the superior aroma and the up-front flavor punch, but I’m not sure. Maybe if I drank a shot of each of these every day for a month, I’d end up preferring Kirkland.

There is no Substitute

In 2009, I spent a day or two fasting and praying, and then I sat down with my reward snacks to break the fast. I had a bag of fattening treats. I ate some, but I quit early. I just didn’t feel like continuing. After that, for maybe two years, I lost weight and kept it off. My appetite was reduced. Something inside me kept turning down that next doughnut or slice of pizza. I lost weight during months when I worked in a church kitchen, churning out delicious pizzas and garlic rolls.

It wasn’t difficult. I was just a different person. I didn’t have to rely on willpower. I have never had much of that.

I told a friend about it, and he fasted, and then he dropped dozens of pounds. Then one day we went to Sonny’s BBQ together and had the all-you-can-eat ribs. After that, I started eating more, and eventually I lost my deliverance, and the spirits God had been holding back returned. I gained weight.

It seems clear to me that I sold myself back to demons by jamming myself full of ribs. I showed a lack of appreciation for what God had done for me, so I got an appropriate reward. Eating those ribs was like jumping off the temple roof.

I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. Why didn’t I know? Because the church has belonged to Satan since, at the latest, 150 AD. He got our forebears to kick the Holy Spirit out. He taught us pride. He made us think “God helps those who helps themselves” was in the Bible. He convinced us the baptism with the Holy Spirit either didn’t exist or was automatic upon receipt of salvation. He told most of us prayer in tongues came from demons. He taught the rest it was only for some people, or that it only counted if we spoke in human languages, or that we were only supposed to do it for a few seconds here and there.

The church belongs to Satan, and it teaches us, basically, spiritual feces. No wonder Paul called his pre-blinding teaching “excrement” (skubalon). Preachers teach us to keep trying really hard in our own strength, and they teach us to swallow their regurgitated sewage uncritically so they can control us and have cushy lives financed by our unscriptural tithes and offerings.

Nobody–not one preacher in my entire life–ever taught me that overeating was caused by demons or that they could be expelled. They never taught me that if I got deliverance from demons of addiction, I had to be careful to keep demons from coming back. They never taught me that the Holy Spirit, not preachers and dried-up, error-filled books, would teach me everything I needed to know. They taught me filth, so I went into battle armed with filth, and Satan won.

It’s unusual for a preacher to tell people gluttony is sinful. Obese preachers are everywhere, and virtually none of them talk about the sinful aspect of overeating. Churches are full of enormous Christians who think they’re doing great.

To understand how weird this is, imagine a preacher who preached while holding pornographic magazines in his hands.

In nearly all churches, gluttony is seen as a cute, harmless habit. One that leads to obesity, ugliness, diabetes, diabetic offspring, obese offspring, blindness, impotence, amputations, arthritis, dementia, heart attacks, strokes, miscarriage, hearing loss, incontinence, kidney failure, cancer, infertility, asthma, gallbladder disease, inability to marry due to a degraded appearance, and a long list of other problems. But go ahead and tell me it’s not a real sin like fornication.

The list of things gluttony causes is worse than the list of things caused by heavy smoking.

Gluttony killed my father and his sister, after destroying their minds. You know people it has killed. But by all means, tell me it’s not a real sin.

Are preachers entirely to blame? Nobody taught them, either.

They’re to blame for persecuting those who tell them the truth. That’s for sure. Modern Christians are no better than the Jews who killed the prophets.

For a long time, I have tried to get God to bring deliverance back, and it looks like it’s here. Over the last few weeks, I have gone down about 12 pounds without work. I’ve also maintained a routine of lifting heavy weights, and my arms and chest (especially the chest) have gotten bigger while I lost weight. That means some of the fat loss is masked by muscle gain. Not much. I would guess three to four pounds. More than enough to notice.

People say you can’t lose fat while adding muscle. I don’t know where they hear these things. Total lie.

I don’t have a disease. I’m not repelled by food. I feel as though there is a restraining hand across my stomach, pushing me back when I consider what I should eat. Something says, “You can’t have that. Here is what you should have instead.”

During the day, I am often a little hungry, and I can feel my body leaning toward ketosis. That shows how much I have cut my intake. I often feel crabby because I haven’t had enough carbohydrate, and when I do, I’ll eat a small item that has a lot of carbs per cubic inch.

When my wife was pregnant, we tried to get protein into her to improve lactation, so I bought big jugs of whey protein powder from Nutricost. They sell it cheap, and it doesn’t have sugar or creepy artificial sweeteners in it. She didn’t finish the protein, so I have been using it from time to time when I just don’t care enough to make proper food. I dump blueberries or half an apple into the Vitamix, and I add whole milk, some cream, protein powder, and maybe some yogurt. I drink it and go on with my life.

I push it down so I will have something inside me to keep my body going.

It’s just like a delicious milkshake. I love it.

No, I don’t! Did you really believe that? It’s borderline gross. Anyone who tells you healthy food tastes just as good as real food is lying or mentally ill. I get so tired of hearing it. “It’s just like a milkshake!” “It’s just like a cookie!” No, it’s not! Stop lying. The concoctions I create don’t taste particularly good, but then as God has told me, I don’t have to like everything I eat.

I started out by trying to reduce foods that have high glycemic loads. Things that make the body pump glucose into the bloodstream (and cells) in a hurry. Not so much a low-carb plan, but one that doesn’t wake the pancreas up after every meal with a blow to the face with a hammer. I’m sticking with it. I don’t want cravings. I don’t want to continue living with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome.

I want to give my fat pants away instead of storing them in case I need them again.

Maybe some poor family needs curtains.

Sometimes I have something I like. I ate Thanksgiving dinner, and we really did thank God and try to make it about him instead of football and stuffing. The other day, friends visited, and we went to P.F. Chang’s and then had eggnog and homebrew. On weekends, I take the family (God has given me a family) to Costco. We eat Costco pizza, and I let my hair down by drinking a Coke. But I will never say, “I’m not fat any more, so it’s time go to back to gluttony.” Sporadic departures from my lifestyle don’t hurt anything. Thinking the lifestyle is temporary will. It would be like jumping off the temple roof.

I don’t know why God decided to help me again. I hope I have enough information to hold onto deliverance this time.

I couldn’t fix this on my own. Like most overeaters, I can tell you everything about dieting. Calorie restriction. Low-carbing. In the past, I have had many temporary successes. The problem is that I can’t produce lasting success without deliverance and the Holy Spirit.

Because I had been delivered in the past, once I started overeating again, I refused to go back to conventional dieting. I found it preferable to stay fat than to accept an inferior solution, and I couldn’t have won on my own anyway. I made some effort to restrain myself, but not much.

Google AI says the long-term failure rate for fat people who lose weight is estimated at 90-95%. Essentially, that means human effort does not work. For all we know the tiny percentage of winners use drugs (including nicotine) or have other conditions that keep weight off. It may be that virtually no one who gets thin stays that way without crutches. If you lost weight and kept it off, and you smoke cigarettes, you don’t count as a winner. You just traded one demon for another one that is nearly as bad.

Look at what has happened over the last 20 years. We got very excited about bariatric surgery. We’ve seen celebrities lose weight using surgery. Maybe you know friends who’ve had it. I do. The ones I keep up with are fat again. Celebrities get fat again. Al Sharpton is the only one I know of who kept the weight off, and I think he has a health problem, because he is nearly emaciated. I don’t think the surgery went right.

After surgery failed most fat people, we turned to fat drugs, starting with Ozempic. Oprah took it and lied about it while she was dishonestly promoting the ineffective Weight Watchers program. Weight Watchers made her resign, or she resigned as damage control. John Goodman took it. Lots of obese celebrities use it. Whoopi Goldberg. Elon Musk.

Most famous drug users won’t tell us. The ones who resist telling us are so obsessed with admiration, they want us to think they did it on their own simply by being better than we are. They’re like the steroid freaks who claim they don’t use drugs.

Some of them admit they’ve used drugs, and some admit they quit because the side effects were worse than being fat. The side effects include persistent nausea and vomiting. Drugs can cause intestinal blockage, pancreatis, gallbladder disease, kidney damage, and permanent vision loss. Other possible effects include depression and suicidal ideation. The drugs can also make your face and butt shrivel, which may sound good if you weigh 300 pounds, but the degree of fat reduction can make people appear grotesque. They even have terms for it. Ozempic butt. Ozempic face.

Bottom line: nothing but God really works. There are crutches and temporary fixes, but without help directly from God, a fat person will almost certainly die fat. The odds in your favor are so poor they are negligible.

Odds are interesting, because most people don’t consider them as often as they should. Today I found out your odds of dying if you try to go into space are around one in 30. Rich people still buy tickets, however.

Maybe the odds are decreasing now that private industry has taken over. I hope so.

Your odds of overcoming drug or alcohol addiction through a secular program are down around 15%. If you use Teen Challenge, a Christian rehab program, it’s more like 67% or 80%, depending on whom you believe. Why would you bother with a secular program? How many times do you want to go through rehab?

I don’t see Oprah ever beating her addiction. She has stated that she is not a Christian, and she financed an anti-Christian cult. She said she refused to be a Christian because God called himself a jealous God. Jealous like a parent who doesn’t want to see his kids kidnapped and raised by gypsies, but that’s beside the point.

Gluttony is addiction, and like other addictions, it is characterized by looking in the wrong place for something you should be getting from the Holy Spirit. Food gives us comfort, but the Holy Spirit is the comforter. Food acts like a drug. It elevates your mood. It helps you to be cheerful and patient. It mimics the fruit and gifts of the Spirit.

I will keep praying God rids me of the rest of my bad habits, and I will pray he does the same for my wife. She has a severe weight problem for the first time in her life. As a leader, I should always face things and find solutions first, so it is my hope that now that I’m delivered, I can help her to be delivered as well.

God has Definitely Tabernacled With Us

I hope everyone who reads this is having a pleasant Thanksgiving of prayer and shared love. I didn’t get our turkey into the oven until about 30 minutes ago. Lots of setbacks. The packer left maybe 300 pinfeathers in it, so I had to pull them out, and when they prepared the bird, they ripped the skin up so there was a lot of sewing to be done when the bones had been removed and it was time for the stuffing.

This will be my son’s first Thanksgiving. Outside of his mom, I mean.

I don’t know how much love he is feeling from me today. I had to get my wife to confine him to the bedroom. Sharp knives. Hot cookware. A waste can full of raw turkey parts and the associated bacteria. A Thanksgiving kitchen is not a good place for a baby who opens every drawer and door he sees, turns over garbage receptacles, and will put anything into his mouth as long as it’s not edible.

He managed to get into the waste can and put turkey bits on the floor. I was busy, so I didn’t know what was going on. We are hoping he didn’t put anything in his mouth. I had to make double sure my wife understood that she could not be on the phone or watching Youtube while I was cooking.

He is a wonderful boy. Most parents will say similar things about their sons, but he really is. He is still extremely cute. We go to Costco once a week, and the ladies who check receipts at the door know him and say they want to take him home. We went on Sunday, and the receipt lady who was working that day expressed her joy because we had brought “the cutie” with us. I said we had also brought my son, but she failed to see the humor.

He makes weird noises all the time. He growls like a monster in a horror movie. He makes a sound that resembles the wind whistling around buildings in the winter. He giggles. He sings, sort of. He can whistle, but he doesn’t do it much. He has joy sounds that are hard to describe.

He hasn’t said anything we can be sure was a word. He vocalizes constantly. He says things that may be words as far as he is concerned.

Today he gave one of his toys what seemed to be a stern lecture, but it was not in English or Nyanja, his mother’s first language. He may think he’s talking already.

When he smiles, he smiles with his whole face.

He is crazy about his mom. He spends a lot of his time lying on her. She sings to him and tosses him around. She talks to him all day.

Although he enjoys using his mother as furniture, he is very independent now, for the most part. He speed-crawls around the house. It sounds like two people running. He leaves the bedroom and goes where he pleases, so we have to make sure everything dangerous or expensive is out of reach.

He is scared of airplanes, so when he hears one, he forgets all about his independence and crawls back to Mom so she can hold him in her arms.

He sometimes cries when people sneeze. We haven’t figured that out yet. On the other hand, he loves watching people drink. He stares with a big grin on his face.

He wakes me up most of the time. A couple of months back, he used his voice. Now he climbs on top of me or comes up behind me and starts pawing and hitting my back with his big, meaty mitts. He’s so strong, sometimes I think it’s my wife.

He likes it when I pound on my back with his fist. When I do it, he opens his mouth and makes long noises so he can hear the effect. “Wuh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh…”

He loves being thrown in the air. He likes being swung around. When he was smaller, my wife thought I would kill him by picking up by one leg and one arm, but he loves it. He hangs there smiling, making incomprehensible happy noises.

He took three steps the other day, and he can push a walker, but he doesn’t seem very interested in walking. Why should he be, when his mother carries him all over the place? He spends a lot of his day standing, but when it comes to locomotion, he flops down on all fours and sticks with the old reliable.

He can reach things now. He pulls things off of other things. Every week, he reaches a little farther. He can’t grab things that are in the middle of my nightstand, but he can pull things off the sides.

My bed has a drawer I use for socks and underwear, and he opens it and throws my stuff out on the floor, one item at a time. He also removes drawer knobs and leaves them in interesting places.

We got him a little plastic activity table with lights and sounds and things to move around. He loves it. He used to sit on the ground and use it, so at first, I didn’t attach the legs that came with it. Then he started standing, so I put them on. He stands over it and works at it very seriously. Today, he picked it up and threw it, and then he was mad because it was upside down.

His curiosity is exhausting. Hold him in your arms, and he stares at the ceiling fans. Put anything down, and he wants to pick it up. He never stops. He zooms around the house like a pinball. I am constantly taking things away from him. I think I say, “Give me that,” more than anything else.

When we open the refrigerator, he makes a shriek of joy and starts speed-crawling for it. We have to close the door before he puts his whole body inside and refuses to move while he gropes things.

He stands up and hugs my thigh when I’m trying to do things, so I have to pick him up. I make the usual dad noises on his skin. I tickle his feet. I show him numbers with my fingers. I whistle at him. We play airplane baby. Sometimes he finds me overwhelming and has to hide his face.

I make sure I play with his toys. He loves that. I put his walker in front of him so he can push it across the room, and when he hits something, I turn it around so he can keep going. I tell him how amazing he is. We use the activity table together. I show him how to put the rings back on the ring toy, but so far, he mainly likes pulling the top of it off. The top is a stuffed rabbit head, and he can’t stand it when it’s on the toy.

He beats his parents. He likes banging on us with his palms, like a guy trying to get a bartender’s attention.

He cut his mother’s lip the other day. Banged it with his head while she was trying to sleep. He has Mongolian blue spots, which are birthmarks that look like bruises, so I hope the police never spot us when his mother has a busted lip and then ask me why he’s bruised up. Mongolian blue spots usually go away with age.

His mother is 100% African, but he looks like he’s mostly Caucasian. His skin isn’t very dark, his hair is curly but not kinky, and his features aren’t strongly African. My genes really bleached him. So much for dominant African DNA.

He may be getting a little spoiled, but we are working on it. Or at least I am. He has a playpen (for our sake as well as his), and he throws a fit when I put him in it. He will stand outside of it and push the sections back and forth, but if I lift him to put him in it, he starts screaming long before his feet touch the ground. My policy is to put him in it once a day and let him yell. He has to learn.

It has been very hard to get him to eat food that isn’t mushy. He is perfectly capable of holding it between his thumb and index finger and putting it in his mouth, but he still prefers mush. On Sunday, he put a little piece of Costco pizza in his mouth and sucked the sauce off, and we were thrilled.

He has no problem drinking. He can drink from a water bottle (not the baby kind) and a cup. The other day, he crawled across our bed, grabbed his sippy cup from my wife’s nightstand, rolled over on his back, and started drinking. He also drinks from a straw.

His eating habits are more my wife’s concern than mine. I know he’s not going to be eating baby food in 2055.

He is advanced for his age. He is bigger than a typical 15-month-old, and he is doing nearly everything ahead of time. We get excited as we see him change. Suddenly, those little bow legs are not so little and not so bowed.

He gets kissed and squeezed all day. He must think this is what life will always be like. If only Earth were like that.

He is a very happy baby. Why shouldn’t he be? His family isn’t dysfunctional. How many kids can say that? I couldn’t when I was young. Most of my friends couldn’t.

Truthfully, I consider our family bizarre in its lack of dysfunction. It’s an extraordinary thing. When I was a kid, every family on our block except one was dysfunctional. My dad’s partners’ families were all dysfunctional. I had 10 aunts and uncles, and only one pair raised a somewhat healthy family.

We pray in front of my son. We do all our Christian stuff in front of him. I put my hand on his head and bless him. I do the same for my wife. He will know supernatural Christianity is normal.

Things are working out well.

Even as a teenager, I wanted marriage, fidelity, and a family. I was not interested in taking down as many women as possible and staying free. Something always went wrong. I went after the wrong women. There were relationships I could not start, and there were relationships that were taken away from my suddenly. I know now that I was cursed. Supernatural enemies did their best to ruin my life and get rid of me. My own efforts didn’t matter. The spirits that hated me were stronger than I was. They always won.

I didn’t understand anything when I was young. I didn’t know how to align with God and defeat the failed spirits that destroy human lives.

I wish I had been raised correctly. I would have grandchildren by now. Life would have been much better. But God is restoring the years the locust ate, and my wife and son are wonderful. Would I trade this beautiful boy for the kids I might have had in my twenties? An unpleasant thought.

We are trying to have a real Thanksgiving today, praying, thanking God, and enjoying each other’s company. It’s not easy, with all the added work of cooking. At least we’re not going to malls so we can save a few dollars on junk for Christmas. I can’t believe people do that on Thanksgiving. I don’t think saving money is a good excuse, except for people in serious financial trouble. Even then, a day of prayer would do them more good than a day at a mall.

I have been so busy, I haven’t even showered. It is time to get up and do that. I hope I’ll be able to do it alone this time. My son loves visiting us in the shower and getting water all over his romper.

I wonder how long it will be till I have to start locking the bathroom door.

Sorry. I Take That Back

The other day I wrote about a Christian friend who was mad at me. Another friend insists he’s not, but the texts suggest he is.

You can’t just ask a Christian if he’s mad at you, because they will always say no. You have to piece it together from clues.

You know how we are. “I’m going to pray for you” often means “I want to push your face in.”

He has invited me to a dinner function with other Christian men, on his dime. I accepted, but I was a little reluctant because of the timing and because of my many, many bad experiences with groups of self-identified Christians. Maybe I was rude, but I said I had to make something clear: I was never going to join a church again.

He said he knew that. Seemed a little annoyed, but I can’t really be sure.

I was afraid there was going to be an intervention. Let’s fix the backslider boy!

Some Christians evangelize for Yeshua, but most evangelize for churches. If you’re not going to church, you might as well be a crackhead who performs degrading services in exchange for small change. You have FALLEN AWAY, and they must go seek after the lost sheep.

Church Christians like to say we have to have “coverings.” If you don’t have a pastor, you have no covering, whatever that is. Like you’re doing an EVA without a spacesuit.

Coverings never worked for me. When I was a kid, I never saw a preacher who knew God or knew much of anything about him. They were able to dust off ancient notes and repeat sermons, and some were good at passing out communion and holding raffles and running church carnivals to raise money, but that was about it.

When I became an adult, things didn’t get much better. I had charismatic preachers, and they knew a few things about the Holy Spirit. That was helpful. They didn’t know they were supposed to pray in tongues a lot and receive revelation, however, so they mixed a lot of harmful excrement in with their teaching. Tithing, prosperity offerings, hard work, mindless submission to other human beings…the works.

They also discouraged talk of repentance. At my last church, there was a girl who kept coming in with new illegitimate babies, and they put her on the stage because she sang well. They never asked the obvious question: “When are you going to knock this off?”

The church before that was full of thieves, armed robbers, scammers, rappers, and strippers, and they were only too happy to put unrepentant people in ministry and hold them out as examples. I recall seeing one girl sing while her belly was so big it was like she was looking at the audience over the top of it.

Where there is no repentance, there is no salvation. That’s not me being self-righteous. That’s just how it is.

Most people have no idea what self-righteousness is. Giving useful criticism to others is not self-righteousness. We are required to do it. Yeshua did it and still does. The apostles did it. A self-righteous person doesn’t criticize himself. That’s the definition.

If I added up the hours I’ve spent criticizing myself and repenting this year alone, no one would believe me. God keeps waking me up at night.

Preachers think getting people into churches–their churches–is the most important thing in their lives. They also think that talking about repentance will keep butts out of seats, so they use “judge not” as an excuse to avoid it. They tell people God accepts they just as they are, which is not correct at all. They get lots of butts, but they’re the wrong butts. The wrong-butt people then end up running the church.

God eventually told me the church age was ending. Big churches had failed so catastrophically, he was giving up on them. This was necessary for a number of reasons I’m not going to get into now. God still wants us to assemble together, but you can do that in your backyard. Wherever two or more are gathered in his name, there he is among them.

When I tell people the church age is ending, they don’t like it. I think that must be because they are dependent on their churches, not the Holy Spirit. If they don’t go, they don’t feel God’s presence. They stop feeling clean. They feel like they’re not learning or improving.

It’s not supposed to work that way. You should bring God’s presence with you when you go to church. From your house. From your car. Otherwise, you’re showing up empty-handed.

The Holy Spirit should be with you wherever you are. If he’s not, something is wrong, and it’s disastrously wrong.

I hope they don’t try to drag me to churches. It would be nice to visit a church once in a while, but becoming a slave again and giving them over 10% of my income when I should be helping the poor instead…that will not happen unless I somehow become deranged.

I hope they don’t slander the Holy Spirit. If they ask me what’s happening in my walk, I will just tell them. God told me to stop going to church. God told me to stop tithing. God told me to pray in the Spirit a great deal. God told me preachers compete with the poor for money. God told me I had to do charity. God this and God that. I hope they don’t give me that, “Oh, another one,” grin and start talking about all the people who make up things God supposedly told them.

My friend belongs to the Assemblies of God. This outfit has produced a fair number of bad preachers. People like Swaggart and Bakker. It pushes the prosperity kickback scheme very, very hard. Trinity Church, my old church, was also an AG church.

I used to think the Assemblies of God was a charismatic church that promoted the Holy Spirit, but I found out that wasn’t true. They tell people to be baptized with the Spirit, and they get them started speaking in tongues, but then they stop. It’s like recruiting new soldiers and sending them straight from the recruiting station into battle. No weapons. No training. No communication with officers and instructors.

If you pray in tongues a lot, God WILL give you revelation, and you WILL have testimony. The vast majority of AG people don’t do it. They are there for prosperity, marriage, babies, healing, and the social life. And in many cases, money.

I figured most people in my church would be full of the Holy Spirit and that we would help others fill up. No such luck.

I would say AG people, and most people from charismatic churches, are just greedy Baptists who believe in miracles but don’t actually expect them. Not literally Baptists, but functionally similar. Nominal charismatics.

Nominal charismatics don’t have revelation or testimony, and they scoff at those who do. “I didn’t get it, so you’re not getting it, either.” They assume you’re lying or deceived when you talk about what God does for you.

This is how you can become a lifelong Christian who has never left a charismatic denomination and still end up slandering the Holy Spirit, living in defeat, being puffed up with pride like a bullfrog in mating season, and missing out on enormous blessings.

You can be a missionary, nurse the sick in a hospital in India, wash the feet of the homeless, preach with a bullhorn every day, memorize the whole Bible, smuggle Bibles into godless countries, drive the church bus, coach volleyball at Christian youth camp, lead the choir, compose hymns, and still have a lifestyle of slandering the Holy Spirit and thereby persecuting people who are doing better than you are.

Dormant, stunted charismatics who served churches instead of the Holy Spirit persecuted me at my last two churches. I didn’t have much trouble at all with unbelievers or the voodoo people who infest Miami. Preachers and volunteers made me miserable.

I joked to my friend about God telling me to buy my wife stuff, which is a privilege on both ends. He said Kenneth Copeland claimed God told him to buy his wife an $18 million mansion.

Was he slandering the Holy Spirit? I have to wonder. God really does tell me to buy my wife things. God tells Spirit-led Christians to do all kinds of things.

My wife lived in poverty until God joined us. She washed her clothes in a bucket. Much of the time, she had no hot water. She shared a hovel with two other women. She couldn’t afford to have a lost tooth replaced. To get up to the standard of a normal American women, she needs to be given some things other women here already have. Jewelry, shoes, clothing, medical care, and so on. She should be expected to require above-average expenditures until she levels up.

I’m not Kenneth Copeland. Copeland is a notorious fool and egomaniac who has lied for a living for decades. He’s a nasty person, and it is obvious his sick, worship-like covetousness didn’t come from God. Comparing the two of us would be absurd, and the absurdity is extremely obvious. You can’t miss it unless you want to. Surely my friend was not comparing me to him.

My sense is that he was trying to tell me I was claiming to have a relationship with God that I don’t really have. Like Copeland. If the Assemblies of God is what it should be, no AG member should be skeptical when another claims to hear from God. It should be disturbing when they say they don’t hear from him.

I have noticed that when we’re together, he keeps questioning my words, beliefs, and actions and asking me to defend myself as a Christian. I have never done that to him.

Maybe I’m wrong about the Copeland thing. Benefit of the doubt and so on.

My wife and I saw a funny video the other day. Maybe it wasn’t funny. Copeland had been given a Bentley. He was talking about it. He bowed his head and, in a reverent and highly emotional tone, said, “Ohhhhhhhh, thank you, Jesus!” He sounded like a junkie who had just recovered his stash of heroin after dropping it in a storm drain. It almost sounded sexual. He was overwhelmed with emotion. Over a car. A car no one told God to give him.

I dread going to the dinner for the same reason I avoid Christian forums. My concern is that I may be lectured and “corrected” by people who don’t know anything and who may be motivated by pride.

Christian forums are amazing. They’re like correction demolition derbies. Everyone wants to correct, and it’s not because they want to help or because they want others to avoid making the mistakes they’ve made. It’s because they have Smartest Boy in Class Syndrome. And most of what they say is wrong. Sometimes it ends with, “I’m going to pray for you!”, which, to many Christians, is synonymous with the middle finger.

A long time ago, I learned that I can’t help groups. I have managed to help individuals, but never groups. Satan works through groups.

My young friend Travis, who died in 2020 after a ghetto friend who was showing off a new gun shot him in the chest, thought he would save the black race. He was always mentoring kids. He thought he could save the ghetto, and he wanted to live there while he did it.

I told him that in 20 years, the people he knew would be exactly as they were at the time I was speaking to him. I told him that if he wanted to help, he needed to leave the ghetto and come back on weekends to reach a few people.

The same principle applies to Christians, generally. If you soak in their presence all the time, you will be distracted, misinformed, used, and persecuted. You need to spend a lot of time apart from them and avoid turning them into your consuming club. It’s better to be with a few people here and there.

I’m probably overly concerned. PTSD from past dealings with churches. Maybe I’ll have a great time.

My friend means well. I should appreciate it when people try to help.

One of the great things about my wife is that when I get a revelation that isn’t part of the church-worship belief structure, she never tries to correct me. She never accuses me. She never hands me a woke line in order shame me. She pipes up right away with a scripture confirming what I said, and then we have a discussion in which the Holy Spirit expands on it.

I have one person, on the entire planet, who listens with God’s ear and doesn’t fight with me.

This is a wife’s proper function. If your wife is constantly trying to correct you, or she’s always praying for God to correct you, one of you is married to the wrong person.

In any case, I am going to the dinner. Pray for me. And not in that, “I’m going to pray for you,” kind of way.

Regretfully, I Must Pass on the Queers for Palestine Silent Auction

Today is this family’s day of rest and prayer. No laundry, no mowing, no welding, no painting, no repairs, no business.

We expect to do what we always do on Sunday: eat at Costco. I often wonder what my high school classmates would think of that. At least two were the children of a billionaire, and many were snobs. I really look forward to those cheap pizza slices and free-refill beverages, eaten on fiberglass picnic-style tables.

I have no interest in seeing any of my classmates again. Maybe one guy, but that’s it. When I knew them, they were unhappy worldly people with poor values.

I dreamed of one of them last night. John. We were in high school together. I would say we were friends, but we weren’t. Sometimes you spend a lot of time with a person and consider him a friend, and then after you part ways, you realize you just kept company for the sake of having company.

John isn’t an awful person, but he is insecure and competitive. He is selfish. He is extremely rigid. He has never thought for himself. Whatever the herd says is right is right. He finds people who reject the herd amusing, and he feels he is better than they are. Sometimes they make him angry, just because they’re different.

I don’t think he has changed. Maybe he has. I ran into a store maybe 10 years ago, and he seemed about the same. Personable, but condescending.

I cut back on hanging around with him because I realized he was condescending and didn’t treat me as an equal. Also, he stole a girl from me, which is a huge violation of the male friendship code.

The desire for a gradual parting was probably mutual. I don’t think he liked me all that much.

In high school, friendship is like looking for a seat in the lunchroom. You go where you’re accepted, and you take the good with the bad.

I couldn’t help John in his ambitions, so I don’t think he had much motivation to be my friend.

We didn’t have much in common. I had all sorts of interests. He was just an inside-the-box guy who wanted to watch sports, go to law school, practice law, and make money. If you know John, he isn’t inviting you to his house to see his paintings. He’s not climbing mountains in Nepal. He’s not composing music or fly fishing. He probably owns less than 10 tools.

I should have dropped him sooner, but I was too much of a person-pleaser. I think I’ve gotten over that! Most people who know me would surely agree.

In the dream, I was living in the house I lived in during high school. John came to the front door, dressed in his lawyer attire minus the jacket. He wanted to show me his car, which was parked by the curb behind him.

He said it was a Charger. It was very special. It had a thousand horsepower. He wanted me to see it.

When I walked out to see it, it was across the street. I had to walk a long way. I wondered why he had moved it. It was inconsiderate.

The car became a very fancy bicycle. It had big balloon tires, and at first, it had some kind of propulsion. The tires were not attached to the bike. They had no spokes. Somehow they stayed in place and spun anyway.

He started riding through a grassy field while telling me about the bike. He never offered to let me ride it. That was like the real John. I had to jog beside him.

I said there was no way it had a thousand horsepower.

For some reason, after a while, he had to pedal, so I guess it turned into a regular bike.

My high school was about half Jewish, and some of the Jewish guys were very competitive. Most were not competitive at all. If you befriended one of the competitive ones, you couldn’t be on the same level. You had to be above or below. John was like that. They said a lot of resentful things about other Jewish guys whose families had more money. There was a lot of competition when it came to bar mitzvah gifts.

I had another competitive friend. Ken. He tried to make valedictorian, but he was caught cheating. Got into Princeton anyway. He switched to the University of Florida because they had a short program that would give him a BS and an MD in a hurry.

Ken was miserable. One of the other Jewish kids came from a family worth hundreds of millions, and he used to tell Ken he would never be worth as much as he was. It bothered him. Ken’s father died, and Ken said his father was laughing at him from the afterlife because he would never be as successful as he had been.

Ken had his MD when he shot himself at 25. Seems like he was doing just fine in terms of worldly success.

His dad was tormented, too. Lots of money, but he was always anxious, driven, and unfulfilled, and he projected it onto Ken. When Ken said he wanted to play football, his dad said, “I’ll break your hands myself.” He had decided Ken was going to be a surgeon. He didn’t want him injuring his hands.

Anyway, I live on a farm, I wear work shorts or work jeans every day, I drive a 2016 Ford, and I love taking my wife and son to Costco for lunch. I drink XO brandy; that’s true. But it’s Kirkland XO, for $48 per fifth. An amazing bargain.

I wonder what would happen if I went to a high school reunion wearing work jeans and suspenders and proceeded to be very open about myself. “I voted for Trump three times.” “I pray in tongues every day.” “I have a law license, I was very good at law, and it was easy, but I refuse to practice.” “I carry a 10mm pistol with a laser everywhere.” “I drive a tractor and cut my own trees.” “I mow my own yard.”

“My wife believes in submission to her husband.” That would go over great. Among the divorcees and spinsters. Those fulfilled modern ladies. Living their best lives.

One girl from my school went on to become the top dog at Miami’s Planned Parenthood branch. A long time ago, they sent me an invitation to a fundraiser. I tore it in half and mailed it back.

“Come on down and help us fund tearing apart babies in the womb for selfish, irresponsible sluts in the hope of reducing the black population!” No, and I don’t thank you for asking. God will judge you.

Why would anyone assume I supported abortion? Talk about a faux pas. “We went to high school together, so I just assumed you would want to come help my organization burn a cross and lynch a black man!”

I have always hated abortion, but now that I have a son, my understanding of the evil involved is much deeper. My wife and I prayed so hard that he would be born alive and without problems. We still pray for him and bless him all the time. Like all normal parents who aren’t sick in the head, we would give our lives for him without thinking. The thought of seeing his little body torn up in a pan so his mother could look better in a bathing suit or avoid suing me for child support is as horrifying as any thought I could ever have. I would much rather see myself in that condition.

Not to defend lynching, but at least some of the victims were murderers or rapists. What crime has a baby committed other than wanting to live and be loved by his parents?

I don’t have to worry about how I would be received at a reunion because I would never to back to Miami again unless I were forced by a court. I don’t even feel comfortable in Gainesville.

It’s amazing what feminism has turned mainstream Americans into. What could make a woman proud she tore her precious, helpless baby up? It comes straight from hell. God is male, period. He expects men to lead families. He never wanted us to be ruled by women; in Isaiah, it is mentioned as a curse.

Feminist brainwashing made it challenging for me to take over as a proper patriarch. I have been indoctrinated for over 50 years. It hasn’t stopped just because I overcome it. Every day, I have to dismiss it all over again.

What if God hadn’t pulled me out of it? I might be a Will Smith. A defeated cuckold with a demonized wife who humiliates me in public. A beaten father who raised an androgynous homosexual son, along with a lesbian daughter who is considerably more masculine.

No man wants to see his seed fall to the ground and rot.

My wife tells me she will be ready to go soon. She is fasting, and she wants to be at Costco when it ends.

Who can blame her?

We Have to Delete Spam a Lot

I have a pretty significant pizza update.

I make my own pizza. My New York Style pizza is what I would call 75th-percentile quality by restaurant standards. Sometimes better. I keep changing it. My Sicilian is sublime and unrivaled.

Recently, I found out Restaurant Depot had opened a branch near me, and last week, I got a membership. Bliss.

I thought they would have Grande pizza cheese, because Grande is THE standard pizza cheese, but they did not. I tried what they had.

Their shredded offerings were no good. They had cellulose grit on them, and that ruins pizza. I tried two blocks of mozzarella. One was made by Saputo, and the name was Stella Top Grade. It wasn’t good, even for putting on salads. It might be good in lasagne or melted over spaghetti, but I wouldn’t count on it. I’m probably going to throw it out.

The other block was Restaurant Depot’s house brand, Supremo Italiano. Full-fat; low moisture. Back when I bought the cheese, I made a thin pie with Supremo Italiano on one side and Stella on the other.

They both seemed salty. I don’t know why, because that has not held up in further testing. The Stella threw off more grease, and while it was okay, it wasn’t great. The Supremo Italiano had a better texture, and the flavor was also better.

Later, I made a Sicilian with Supremo Italiano and Publix provolone. I am used to mixing mozzarella and provolone. The pizza was very good. I felt it could have been a little more tangy.

Today, I made an 8″-square Sicilian, and I changed a few things at once.

First, I used King Arthur Bread Flour, or, as pizza people call it, KABF. I have reason to believe I should be using it for NYC pies, so that’s why I bought it. I think it will improve the crust.

I have never been disappointed by any flour I used in a Sicilian. They all have different qualities, and I like them all. Thin pizza is more challenging.

Lately, I have been trying to make my Sicilians fluffier and taller. I have cut the salt to 1.5%. That’s supposed to help. Until today, I hadn’t used KABF in my fluffiness quest.

Second, I used Stanislaus 7/11 ground tomatoes for the sauce.

I have tried this product before. It was a long time ago. I was trying to recreate the sauce from a joint where I ate in college, and I found that Stanislaus paste sauces (paste, basil leaves, and citric acid) were closest, so I stuck with them. The one I really liked was Stanislaus Saporito.

In recent months, I have been thinking about sauces that taste different, so I have been fiddling with my Saporito sauce. Today I thought I should try ground tomatoes instead, since a lot of restaurants use them.

Third, I used Supremo Italiano on top. No provolone.

I baked this pie at 500, which is pretty hot, and the top didn’t burn at all except around the edges where the cheese touched the hot pan and fried.

It was very good. The crust was fluffy, and it was crunchy on the bottom. The sauce was a nice change of pace, and it was easier than diluting paste sauce. I didn’t have any Grande cheese to compare the Supremo Italiano too, but it seems to be just as good and possibly a little better.

The crust got damaged a little. It stuck to the pan in places. I think my wife may have washed the pan too hard.

I like cheese that doesn’t brown easily. Most pizza cheese we get at retail stores burns in a hurry. If a cheese doesn’t burn quickly, and you want a pizza that is fairly brown, you can make it happen, but if your cheese burns in a hurry, there isn’t a whole lot you can do. Maybe put foil on the rack above the pie.

I think I paid $2.15 per pound for the cheese. Maybe it was $2.17. Locally, the only other good mozzarella I can get costs about $10.20, which is outrageous.

This is the kind of cheese they used to use at Ray’s Pizza in New York. It didn’t burn, and it didn’t congeal fast as the pies cooled.

I mean the real Ray’s, not “Original Ray’s,” “Real Original Ray’s,” or “Seriously, This is The Original Ray’s and Not a Parasitic Knockoff Opened by Unscrupulous Foreigners who Look Like Pakistanis.” Ray’s used to hold the best-pizza title.

The crust on this pie was sufficiently similar to Pizza Hut pan pizza, I believe I could clone their product if I wanted. Pizza Hut is circling the drain, and I like their pan pizza. It would be great to make it at home once in a while.

That’s my story. I’m going to use KABF in a thin pie, and I expect to have even better news.

“Welcome to the Two Minutes Tim Cook Hate”

I got annoyed yesterday because I realized I had wasted $429 on a vacuum cleaner which is not as good as a $130 shop vac from Home Depot. Today I’m annoyed about refrigerators.

I had been hearing a lot about Samsung’s new policy of forcing refrigerator owners to allow fridges to display ads in their kitchens. You didn’t dream that last sentence; it’s actually happening.

Today I decided to take a look.

First, let me say that we have all been hoodwinked when it comes to fridges. We pay too much for refrigerators that do things 1) other than refrigerating 2) which are not actually very helpful.

When I was a kid, a fridge was a fridge, not a TV, video game console, telephone, camera, therapist, sex surrogate, French tutor, urologist, dog trainer, palm reader, thought leader, icemaker, or water fountain. Fridges had excellent mechanicals, they lasted 40 years if treated well, and they could be repaired easily.

In the 1960’s, things started to change. Clever marketers decided people wanted their fridges to make ice automatically and dispense cold water through the door. Over the ensuing decades, fridges got more complicated, the mechanicals started to fail after 10 years, and repair became less and less practical due to the use of cheap parts.

My grandparents built a beautiful home in about 1965. My grandmother put two deep freezes in the basement, along with the fridge from her old home. When she died in 2003, these appliances were still working, as were her Speed Queen washer and dryer.

I have seen modern fridges fail in under 5 years.

Consumers love shiny gadgets, so as technology improved, we started seeing truly ridiculous features in refrigerators.

Now you can talk to your refrigerator in America while you vacation in New Guinea. You can tell it what to do. You can make it show you video of its contents. If it gets lonely, it can text you.

They make fridges with external TV screens that allow you to see what you could see if you took your precious little hand and opened the doors.

I thought my old refrigerator was dying last year. Turned out it wasn’t true. We had been blocking the air from the freezer. Moving food around fixed it. Before we got it straightened out, we went to look at new fridges.

Spoiler alert: there aren’t any good refrigerators now. You think your Sub-Zero or Fisher & Paykel is going to last longer than a Frigidaire? It won’t. I talked to an appliance guy who was working on a dryer, trying to find out which brand of refrigerator was best. He was familiar with every brand. He said, “They’re all junk.” I asked if that included the boutique brands. Yes, it did.

Interesting side note: your new refrigerator is full of flammable gas. FLAMMABLE. Isn’t that nice? Good thing to know if you have a house fire. The greenies have panicked us through several iterations of refrigerant, probably needlessly, and now we have reached the point where they think it’s better to have a giant bomb in your kitchen than risk damage to the ozone layer, which seems to be doing very well.

We decided we did not want an icemaker or any type of dispenser. My current fridge has a door dispenser, and we almost never use it.

Here is the dirty little secret of all door water dispensers: they dispense warm water, not cold. At least compared to actual cold water you might keep in a jug inside the fridge. If “cold” means 5 degrees cooler than the tap water from your sink, then yes, they dispense cold water. To me, it means 35 degrees.

Icemakers fail frequently. They are the parts that go bad most often on refrigerators, and they aren’t very good. They have evolved to the point where they dispense ice in awkward semicircular chunks that block the flow of liquid to your mouth. Seems like the ice always smells, too. These machines make so much ice, it sits around absorbing odors for weeks or months. Are you a fisherman? Get ready for gin, tonic, and perch.

Another issue: icemakers and water dispensers kill cubic footage. They take up room. If you see a refrigerator advertised as 22 cubic feet, you have to deduct the volume of the water and ice apparatus, because the manufacturer won’t.

There’s more: these machines have unnecessary water filters. My water is just fine. The manufacturers have started putting digital chips on their filters so you get no ice and no water unless you use their OEM filters, and those can cost $50 to $80 each, although a filter probably costs Frigidaire $5. I saw a guy claim he needed to spend $250 per year to keep up. That’s like 70 cases of bottled water.

My fridge has a filter cartridge (non-OEM), and I never replace it. The water keeps flowing. Sometimes when I feel like it, I push the little button that says to reset the filter life, and the fridge obeys as though I had installed a new cartridge. It has no idea whether the filter is full. It apparently goes by time.

Making your own ice isn’t really that tough.

If I want a big, shiny stainless bottom-freezer fridge from one of the least-worthless brands, it will cost me at least $1500. That’s on sale. I can get a plain old white top-freezer fridge for $850. Nearly the same cubic footage. Maytag sells a 22-cubic-foot model for $1800 (regular price), and I can buy a 21-cubic-foot top-freezer fridge for half of that.

Am I being cheap? Well, sure, but the main thing is that I don’t have to be concerned about repairs to parts I don’t want to buy in the first place. I don’t like waiting for repairmen. I don’t like paying them. I don’t trust them. I don’t enjoy doing appliance repairs.

I could buy a top-freezer fridge and a standalone ice maker for less than the cost of a fancy fridge with no ice maker or dispenser.

The thing that really sticks in my craw, however, is not the ice and water problem. It’s the ad problem.

People bought Samsung refrigerators, thinking they were getting cool gadgets they actually owned, and then Samsung updated their firmware without permission and started showing them ads. That’s immoral. You don’t change a deal once you make it.

I hate unsolicited ads. When I see ads playing on a gas station pump, I face the other way until my tank is full. I have smart TV’s, and I do everything I can to disable their ad functions (which didn’t exist when I bought them). I block and report all spam emails. I put a spam filter on this blog. I pay for Youtube Premium because it kills ads. I quit watching Amazon videos for multiple reasons, and one was that they swindled me on ads. They sold me Prime with the promise that I would see no ads, and then they started showing me ads anyway.

Call me spoiled, but I would rather watch nothing than watch a really good show interrupted by the same ad 30 times.

Video ads are pathetic these days. Some shows can’t get a lot of sponsors, so they run the same three sponsors’ ads over and over. They also increase the frequency of ads as the shows progress. You get a short interruption every 8 minutes toward the beginning, then you get hooked, and then you get a longer interruption, featuring the same ads, every two minutes until the show is over.

It’s also common for video providers to lock up ads while you look at other browser tabs. You move to a new tab while the ad is running, hoping to avoid it, and when you go back, the ad resumes at exactly the same point where you abandoned it.

If I don’t want to buy your silly product during the first three seconds of the ad, I still won’t want to buy it after being forced to see the other 27 or 157 seconds.

I quit watching secular entertainment, so I suffer much less than I used to. I still watch videos related to my interests.

I can’t imagine the misery of going through the work of minimizing the ads in my life and then having them forced on me, on a big screen, in my kitchen.

Do they have sound? Can you shut it off? I certainly hope they default to silence, but I’ll bet they don’t.

The ad-forcing TV’s don’t cost less than the ones that have no screens. They cost more. So where is the ad revenue going? To Samsung, of course. Samsung is subjecting you to torment and taking money for it. You get nothing for your service.

You’re like a prisoner on a chain gang, working for 50 cents per hour while the state charges private land owners for your services. Except you don’t get the 50 cents.

If Samsung put a billboard in my yard, they would have to pay me, not themselves. Common sense?

Samsung fridges have cameras inside them. I’m not kidding. I’m going to guess they film your food and send you ads based on what you eat. They sell the information to other jerks.

I hope some prankster starts putting dummy grenades and pipe bombs in his Samsung fridge.

Samsung says the ads are “curated.” This is a nonsense term intended to make products seem special and consumers feel important. It just means someone chose the ads. This is true of all ads. Also, Samsung’s “curator” is a computer that belongs to Samsung. It’s not a human being. “Curated” means “chosen to appeal to you based on information we shouldn’t have, and provided by predatory corporations.”

It’s odd to use the term “curated” to apply to products which are…advertisements. Ordinarily, marketers use it to apply to things we like and want, not things we hate. Assortments of skin care products. Music playlists.

“We hope you’re enjoying your stay at the Tower of London. Next in our series of curated experiences for valued subjects, the iron muzzle with spikes on the inside!”

Samsung lies and says the ads are intended to benefit you. It’s all about you. For the children. So you can live your best life. Because we are stronger together. And it takes a village. Love trumps hate. Coexist.

If you’re going to lie, at least try to come up with lies that would fool a two-year-old. The lies make this worse, not better.

It will get worse. If our government wanted to do anything about it, they would have done it by now. Our laws are made by people lobbyists pay for service, lobbyists have lots of money, and you can’t expect the same people who take bribes to ban bribes.

Here’s a critical video about Samsung’s disgusting actions. Here is the height of irony: the video was clearly made using AI. AI will defend you against creeping tech tyranny. Yeah. That will happen.

Tallow Facts for the Callow

Now that I’ve found a good source of affordable beef fat for the deep fryer, I am learning more about french fries.

Interesting fact: while most people think the “french” in “french fries” comes from Belgium, where American soldiers encountered fries and thought they were eating them in France, it may be that the “french” actually refers to a “french cut,” which means “julienned.”

This makes sense to me, since Americans are not really stupid enough to think Belgium is France.

Belgium is generally considered to be the top nation for fry excellence. They have all sorts of shops and stands selling thick fries.

There is a ton of fry folklore out there, and I have fallen for most of it at one time or another. I am here to post the current state of my knowledge.

I’ll list myths and then debunk them. Hopefully, I will not have to come back in a month and debunk the debunking.

1. You have to use Dutch Bintje potatoes for fries. If this were true, there would be no great American french fries, but there are. Maybe Bintje potatoes are better, but you can’t have them, so what difference does it make? The standard US potato is the russet. I have seen Kennebec potatoes recommended, as well as Yukon Golds.

2. You must rinse or soak your fries before frying them. The big problem with this myth is the existence of many Youtube videos featuring professional Belgian fry fryers who don’t rinse or soak fries. Belgium has factories that do nothing but cut potatoes into fries and put them in bags. Fry cooks dump the bags right into fryers. Rinsing and soaking aren’t necessary. I read about an exception for Yukon Golds, which need a rinse to prevent them from getting gummy.

3. Good fries should be cooked twice (not necessarily a myth, although there are dissenters), and you have to refrigerate or even freeze them between sessions. Belgians don’t use refrigeration. They cook fries at around 300° until the appearance gets dull, and then they dump them on shelves near their fryers. Then they fry them again at a higher temperature.

4. Plant-based oils are good for making fries. They’re just not. This absurd notion has been forced on us by vegans and other woke (i.e. mentally ill) people whose biases have nothing to do with making good food. Animal fat makes fries taste better, and it gives them more crunch. I know Five Guys uses peanut oil, and people think they know what they’re doing, but their fries would be better if they used the correct type of fat.

Five Guys is a business, so they want to maximize profits. I dont’ care about that. If Five Guys goes to real fat, the cost will go up a little, and whatever self-righteous vegans are currently buying their fries will stop. I think this is why they use cheap oil.

Food chains claim they use bad plant oils because of health concerns. Yeah. That’s why they serve McFlurries, Frostys, McMuffins, double cheeseburgers, and 50 kinds of sugar drinks. It’s why Culver’s serves fried cheese. Thanks for looking out for us, boys.

Could a lie be more obvious?

“We’re still running a whorehouse, but now every room comes with a Gideon Bible!”

Some restaurants are going back to beef fat now; notably Steak ‘n’ Shake, Outback, and Popeyes.

I now have 50 pounds of beef fat, which is the absolute best affordable frying medium. I paid about $1.40 per pound. I am getting ready to dump the peanut oil from my deep fryer, fill it with beef fat, and live the dream.

I came up with a plan, based on numerous sources. It’s for fat Belgian-style fries around 3/8″ thick. I generally like thinner fries, but I’m going to give the big ones a shot.

1. Cut russet potatoes to size, leaving the skins on.

2. Blanch at 300° until the shine goes away.

3. Rest for 45 minutes. I’ll probably just lift the fryer basket out of the fat and let it sit atop the fryer.

4. Fry at 350° until done. Belgians say the fries will “sing” at this point, meaning the frying noise takes on a higher pitch. I have also noticed that their fries float.

My feeling is that I should do what Belgians do and avoid doing what they don’t do.

The sad thing is that there are “authentic” Belgian fry recipes out there that tell people to soak or rinse potatoes. Why lie like that? People are really something.

If you don’t want to take the trouble of cutting up potatoes and frying them twice, I have good news. I learned that frozen fries are generally blanched before packing. I’ve tried some, and I found that Great Value crinkle-cut fries from Walmart are better than Ore-Ida fries that cost more. If you use Great Value fries, you’re really frying twice, and you’re also satisfying the characters who claim fries need to be frozen.

I won’t say Walmart fries are the best fries around, but they’re exactly like just about all the crinkle-cut fries you’ve ever enjoyed, and they save you some work.

Maybe I’ll get around to making fries later in the week.