EUREKA

Aside from the day I “met” my wife (online) or the day we married–no, wait–aside from the day I accepted salvation, the day I received the baptism with the Holy Spirit, AND the days I “met” and married my wife (bases covered now), today is the most triumphant day of my life. I stuck it to the greenies by modifying my old-fashioned eco-hostile washing machine to make the inlet valve easier to clean, and I made the best thin pizza I have ever had.

I got myself a Maytag Commercial washer from Lowe’s last year. It would have been better to get a sister model from another vendor, because the Lowe’s job has a shorter warranty, but I needed a washer fast, and Lowe’s was ready. I got the washer because my old clothes-fermenting Samsung washer was making new noises.

The people who used to own this house weren’t cheap, so they got very expensive laundry machines. Unfortunately, they bought them after Uncle Sam (more like Aunt Sam or maybe Uncle Rupaul) ruined washers with stupid environmentalist rules. Newer washers use too little water, and they never dry out, so they make clothing stink with mildew. There is no remedy for this. If you’ve ever stood next to someone and assumed he smelled like mildew because he was a filthy person, you were almost certainly wrong. Everyone who uses a greenie machine smells like mildew on warm days.

My Samsung started making noise, and I leapt for joy, because I was awaiting the day when I would have an excuse to junk it. I didn’t even consider having it repaired. I had already done my research. Speed Queen used to make good washers, but they stopped. Maytag was the best option.

The Maytag will do a load of clothes in 27 minutes instead of the 90 minutes the Samsung needed, and it only has minimal electronics, so I don’t have to worry about trying to buy a discontinued computer in the future. It uses tons of water, and it dries out between uses. It’s the best.

Problem: the inlet screens were not removable.

Washers typically have hot and cold water inlets in the back, and these inlets are almost always fitted with internal plastic screens you can pull out and clean. This keeps rocks out of your clothing. I can’t believe tiny rocks will damage clothes, and I doubt they hurt washers, since washing machine instructions never say, “Don’t put muddy clothes in machine.” The screens are there, however, so you have to live with them.

My water has a lot of rocks in it, so every few months, the washer starts making scary sounds. Then it quits. The first time this happened, I thought it was broken. No. It was just whining.

I saw that the inlet screens were full of crud, so I tried to pull one out. It would not budge. I couldn’t get it out with pliers. Turning it didn’t help. It wasn’t screwed in. It was a permanent fixture.

Things like this remind me that every engineering class has a bottom 5%.

To clean the screens, I had to pull the washer out into the room, remove the hoses, and use things like an old toothbrush. Unacceptable.

I didn’t want to butcher the original valve. Some day I may need warranty service, and I don’t want the lonely Maytag guy to look at my modified valve, tell me I’ve been a bad boy, and refuse to work on the machine. I decided it was worth it to buy a whole new valve assembly. I forget what it cost. Probably around $60.

I also bought some removable screens made for other washers. You can find them on Amazon. I got 4 for about $7.

I took the new valve and ripped the screens out of it. I shoved new ones in. They fit perfectly. I was ready. I stored the valve assembly in the laundry room and waited for the day when the washer started whining again. Today is that day.

In order to get the old valve out, I had to take the control panel off the machine. That was impossible, because it was held on with special Torx screws that require bits with cavities in the ends. Tamper-proof screws, because, as everyone knows, repairing your own belongings is TAMPERING. I gave up and called Maytag.

Are you high? Do you really think I don’t have a huge supply of tamper-proof bits? Did you seriously fall for that? I got the bits out, took the washer apart, slapped the new valve in there so it looked OEM, stored the old valve, and washed my clothes.

The next time the rocks build up, I can remove a hose, pull a screen out, rinse it in the sink, reverse the procedure, and go back to making pizza or whatever. If the washer develops any other problems during the warranty period, I’ll put the old valve back in before the repair guy arrives.

Is it wrong to play warranty tricks on Maytag? Sometimes. If I had a CNC shop, and I decided to make my own souped-up washer transmission, and it ruined the machine, it would be wrong to put the old transmission back in and pretend it had always been in there. Inlet screens are different. The screens I put in do the same job the old ones did, only better. It will be impossible for them to harm the machine. It would be unfair for Maytag to use inlet screens as an excuse to cheat me out of warranty work.

Corporations play that game sometimes. Some won’t touch a product that has been opened by a consumer. That’s just plain evil, so I don’t feel bound to cooperate.

I only have a three-year warranty, and I probably won’t get to use it, so I don’t think my subterfuge will ever come into play in a repair situation. I still think the money I spent on the new valve was well worth it. A non-warranty repair on a major part could cost a great deal. Also, inlet valves go bad often, and now I have a replacement valve ready to go.

As for pizza, today I had the best thin pizza ever, from any source, anywhere. I am done searching. I’m sure I will continue tinkering, but the recipe I used is recorded and stored, and unless a miracle happens and I manage to improve it, I will use it until I die.

The best thing about it is that it didn’t take a day or more to prepare. People claim you have to let dough ferment for over a day, preferably in a refrigerator. I did that a few days back, and today’s pizza, which rose over about 4 hours, was better. The texture and flavor were magnificent. It puffed up nicely. It had big bubbles, which I like. It browned beautifully. I literally start to drift into a dream state when I close my eyes and remember how it tasted.

I used the last recipe I posted here. I made the dough with cold water to slow down the rise, and I proofed it at 75° on my kitchen counter, on a pan, under a glass bowl to reduce evaporation. It took around 4 hours, not 24. I suppose it could be 2% better if Gordon Ramsay moved in and worked on it for a month, but I have never eaten its equal.

For cheese, I used about 3 ounces of Boar’s Head low-moisture, whole milk mozzarella from the Publix deli, sliced, combined with Sargento thin-sliced provolone. I put the provolone on top because it doesn’t burn easily. Anyone can find these cheeses or their equivalents. No Internet orders or road trips needed.

Walmart sells LMWM mozzarella in blocks for $3.68 per pound. I plan to try it. Boar’s Head costs $10 per pound, which is impossible to justify based on the manufacturer’s cost. If other companies can sell it for less than half that price, Boar’s Head has to be overpriced.

I plan to get a piece of steel for pizza. People say steel is better than a pizza stone. A good pizza steel only costs $139 on the web, so why not?

You believed that? You really thought I would pay that? I’m going to my metal dealer. I’ll bet I can get a 15″ square of 3/8″ plate for under $25.

I don’t know what kind of tool-illiterate leggings-wearing morphodite would pay $140 for a piece of steel plate, but he isn’t me.

It must seem silly for a grown man to get so excited about pizza, but I have been trying to get to this point for decades. I summited the Sicilian pizza mountain 12 years ago, but I was never completely certain my thin pizza was perfect until today. It was good. No restaurant I knew could touch it. But it wasn’t my dream New-York-style pie.

This must be how Edison felt when he stumbled on tungsten.

The only thing left for me to perfect is fried chicken. I have no other food Everests to conquer. There are innumerable things I don’t know how to cook, but then I don’t want to cook them. I know how to make everything I want.

Except chicken.

Pizza is unbelievably difficult. An ideal pizza you picture in your mind is an extremely elusive target. When you make recipe changes you are sure will work, they will often move you further away from your goal. It’s maddening. The really annoying thing about it is that once you get your recipe dialed in, making it over and over is simple. The execution is a joke. The search for the recipe is what crushes your soul.

I ate an entire 12″ pizza earlier, and I want to make another one right now, even though I’m not hungry. I want to relive my victory. I’m not going to do it, but I want to.

I bought two pounds of cheese today. I may have to chain myself to something.

My Greens are Greener Than Your Greens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It gets on my nerves.

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

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

It’s genius.

Obvious genius.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No More Fungal Bungling

It’s impossible for me to quit fooling with my recipe for thin pizza. My Sicilian is like the pizza they eat in heaven, but I have never truly nailed thin pizza down. Today I really dialed the crust in, and I made an excellent sauce using grocery store tomato products.

It turned out I had been using way too much yeast. Like by a factor of 12. I believe this is the reason my thin pizza sometimes had an unwanted taste that reminded me of cardboard.

I have been experimenting a lot lately, and as of this morning, I thought I was very close. I made a pizza today with some new adjustments, and it was so good, I had to make a second one to see if I could do even better. I succeeded.

CRUST INGREDIENTS

180 g flour (I used King Arthur bread flour.)
115 g water
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. instant yeast
1 tsp. cheap olive oil

Put everything but the oil and water in a food processor with a chopping blade. Process to mix. Heat the water to something like 110° and process it in, just until everything is blended well. The dry stuff may stick to the walls of the bowl. You can use a silicone spatula to shove it back down so you can blend it in. Let the dough sit in the processor for 10 minutes. Add the oil and give the dough maybe another 30 seconds. You just want to turn it into a nice wet dough.

It will be hard to handle, so put a thin coat of olive oil on your hands before picking it up. Make a ball. Put it on a lightly oiled dish. Cover it with a glass bowl so you can see it rise, making sure the bowl is big enough for expansion without touching the dough. Let it rise at 75°-85° for about one hour and 15 minutes. You want the dough nice and loose.

While you’re doing all this, you should be heating your oven and pizza stone to 500°. Hotter might be better. I’m limited to 500°. You can use a laser thermometer to check the temperature of the stone. My stone gets up to around 530°, probably because it’s down close to the heat. I like to put a metal object like the grate from a broiling pan on a rack above the pizza to keep heat from browning the top too much.

Tear off two 14″ long sheets of nonstick foil. Join them by folding so you get a wide sheet 14″ long. Cut off the excess so you have a 14″ square.

Toss the dough. You should get a pizza around 12″-13″ in circumference. I like to leave a big lip on the outside, with a center maybe 1/16″ thick.

Spread the dough on the foil. Add your sauce and cheese and use a pizza peel to transfer the whole operation to the stone. The foil will make sure it’s easy to assemble and handle the pizza, and it will keep it from sticking to the stone. Pull the foil out after three minutes. Cook the pizza for about 9 more.

You can get enough sauce for a bunch of pizzas from two cans of tomato products.

SAUCE INGREDIENTS

1 can Cento peeled San Marzanos (contains basil leaves)
1/2 can Muir Glen paste
1 tbsp. garlic
2 tsp. oregano
1/2 tsp. salt
3 tbsp. sugar
1 tbsp. oil
1/2 cup water

Unfortunately, the garlic and oregano measurements are guesses.

You just process this stuff until it has a uniform texture.

This might be better with only half a can of paste. It’s a little sweet, but I wouldn’t go with less that 2.5 tablespoons of sugar.

As for the cheese, my inventory was low, so I had to use 5 slices of Sargento provolone and one slice of Sargento Mozzarella. The pizza was excellent, but I think in the future I should go with 8 ounces of provolone instead of my usual 12 ounces of mixed cheese. If you substitute a little sharp cheddar, it will add some zing.

I sprinkled oregano on the pie before baking.

After it was done, I put it on an aluminum pan, waited 5 minutes, and cut it with a wheel. If I had had company, I would have cut it a little sooner so it would stay hot longer.

I don’t think there is any point in trying to improve this crust, but I probably will anyway. I may reduce the yeast to 1/4 teaspoon. The crust might be better if it started out cool and rose overnight in the fridge, but I like pizza on demand.

I used to use Cento “Italian style” tomatoes, but I can’t find them any more. I like them better than real San Marzanos. I don’t use organic San Marzanos.

If the crust is too chewy for you, I suppose doubling the oil will tame it. I like a real old-fashioned rim you can give your dog for a toy.

Adding a little pepper to the crust will give it more flavor, oddly resembling cherries.

I believe I can finally relax and get over the stress of being 90 minutes from the nearest source of my favorite ingredients. My area has really good pizza, but I can’t get anything as good as what I made today.

In Heaven as it Was on Earth

I hope everyone had a great Christmas.

I am physically separated from my wife, but we spent a long time together using video chat. I have great friends, so we had presents to open and people to message and chat with. Even though we were both technically alone, we had a holiday of love and warmth, and we were encouraged by the knowledge that we would probably get together for good soon.

On Christmas Day, I had a wonderful revelation about Christmas.

I realize December 25 probably isn’t the date of Jesus’ birth, and I have heard all the overthought arguments against celebrating Christmas. Some of them aren’t true. For example, it isn’t true that we got Christmas from the pagan holiday Saturnalia. I don’t think Christmas trees honor the devil. There are plenty of real problems with our modern traditions without making up new ones.

Christmas is imperfect, but it’s still very important. We need to acknowledge Jesus as a nation and as families. The fact that most people think Christmas is about elves and going into debt doesn’t mean you and I can’t do it right.

When I was a kid, my life was miserable. My dad was a wife-beater who drank too much. My mother was a defeated pessimist who failed to introduce her kids to God. My sister was a jealous, sadistic sociopath who resented my existence. Our house was a depressing place of fear and dreary expectations. Nonetheless, I loved Christmas, because we used to visit my mother’s parents in Kentucky. They were wealthy, they had a big house, they always decorated, I got to see my aunts, uncles, and cousins, and I was their favorite grandchild. Kentucky was a place of escape for me. The impression it made in my heart was overly idealistic. It wasn’t hard for Kentucky to look like heaven after what I went through in Florida.

We always had lots of presents and two big dinners. We got to play with great toys. Sometimes there was snow, so we could ride a sled.

It was very comforting to feel I belonged to a loving family. Every branch of the family was somewhat dysfunctional, but at Christmastime, we all came together to form a much more pleasant-looking whole.

On Christmas Day, I started thinking about the passage where the Bible says that through the Holy Spirit, we cry out, “Abba, Father!”, to God. “Abba” is a Hebrew word, and it’s an affectionate term meaning “father.”

Sometimes preachers talk about it, saying it means “daddy.” Personally, I never called my dad that. It always seemed childish to me. It was okay for girls, but “mommy” and “daddy” sounded awful coming from boys. I called my parents “Mom” and “Dad.”

I could never call God “Daddy,” because it would be insincere and make me feel uncomfortable, but I can call him “Dad.” There is no one else here to answer to that now.

I decided to make a special effort to use “Dad” in my prayers. The Bible says Spirit-led Christians are literally the children of God, so we shouldn’t be reluctant to call him what he is.

I had tried this in the past with limited results, but doing it on Christmas day, I felt a real connection. I got a stronger revelation of who I am; what my identity is and what my rights and privileges are. It gave me a sensation of belonging.

It made me think of those Christmases in Kentucky. We gathered at the home of a wealthy, powerful male figure, and we enjoyed his generosity and the warm oasis he provided for us. I can’t speak for everyone else, but I felt that special connection only family members feel. If you’ve ever felt you could show up at your grandparents’ house or an uncle’s house uninvited and unannounced, use your own key to get in, raid the fridge, make long-distance calls from the phone, and move into the guest room, you know what I mean. I felt we were more than separate individuals. We were woven together so none of us had to face the world with only our own strength.

People who say they have seen heaven tell us there are countless radiant beings around the throne of God, inside walls and gates of pearls and precious stones, looking at their father and praising and thanking him with love pouring from everyone, in every direction.

This Christmas, in my heart, I realized what we experienced in Kentucky was a picture of what residents of heaven enjoy every day. It made me feel warm and safe. I was in my big house all by myself, my grandparents were dead, my aunts and cousins generally were no longer interested in relationships with me, my wife was nearly 8,000 miles away, but I had the same basic feeling I used to get in my grandparent’s family room as the kids tore wrapping paper off presents.

Now that I think about it, my house, more than any of my aunts’ or male cousin’s houses, is like my grandfather’s house. I have no kids, but I have brothers and sisters my father in heaven gave me, and I have two godchildren and a bunch of other kids who care about me. They are always welcome to visit. They are safe here, to relax and enjoy each other’s company.

When I was young, I had the feeling I was my grandfather’s son. My dad had this feeling, too, but he would never have said it. He knew his bad behavior had made it impossible for me to look up to him the way I looked up to my grandfather, and when he got older, he developed the habit of saying “your father” when he really meant my mom’s dad.

In my heart, I felt my dad was a problem, not an asset. He was just someone I had to manage and humor in order to avoid problems. My grandfather was different. I was proud to be his grandson. Everywhere we went, people gathered around us to talk to him. Men wanted his counsel and his help. Women wished they were married to him. With my dad, it was different. When I walked around our neighborhood, I knew everyone there had seen police cars outside our house, and maybe they had seen him half-dressed, taunting the police because they knew he couldn’t be arrested for public drunkenness or disturbing the peace as long as he didn’t leave his doorway. I knew the other dads bought their wives and children more things than my dad bought for us, and no one was afraid when those men entered a room. My dad was not very violent with me, but because of the way he had treated my mother in front of me, I couldn’t help being scared of him.

My dad became a loving, doting, Christian father during the last years of his life, but things were different when I was young.

My grandfather didn’t have any boys. He had 4 girls, and he made considerable effort to get the same things from them he would have gotten from sons. He tried to interest two of them in the outdoors, which didn’t work. He sent my mother to law school, where she promptly selected a fiance, got married, and quit. His first male grandchild was older than I was, but my mother was his favorite daughter, so the first male didn’t get the bond I got. I was the one. The next male that arrived was a terror the adults fantasized about slapping, so among the first 4 children, I looked pretty good, and my position was safe.

Now that I’m an adult, I feel I am more of an heir to my grandfather than the others. I didn’t inherit any more wealth than they did, but my place among the people close to me is more like his.

My life is largely shaped by my experiences with him. The pleasure I got from being with him shaped my desires. Like him, I love the country. I live on a farm. He had cattle; I have cattle, although the ones on my farm belong to a tenant. I have tractors because he used to set me on the fender of a Massey-Ferguson and let me ride while he raked and mowed. He used to put me in the driver’s seat and let me drive while he shouted instructions. I love guns because he and I shot and hunted together, and like him, I have a gun room in my house.

I think of myself as someone who turned out barren, but I am more of a patriarch than my 4 male cousins, all of whom had kids. Like my grandfather, I participate in other people’s upkeep. He let my divorced aunt live on one of his farms rent-free for years. He bought cars for his daughter. He paid my sister’s high school tuition even though my dad was wealthy. He gave my mother money to invest. One of his sons-in-law was a hateful, black-hearted drunk who was very hard to like, but my grandfather invested a lot of money trying to keep his car dealership open. He gave his grandchildren calves and paid them the proceeds when they were auctioned. When I was a kid, sometimes he would slip me a fifty when no one was looking. He loved doing things like that. He never expected me to do anything for him.

When I got married, it never occurred to me that my wife should work. I would have been ashamed to let her do that. She doesn’t pay for anything. Yesterday, a cousin who still talks to me said that was remarkable. I was surprised. I had always assumed people would look down on me if I let Rhodah look after herself in Zambia.

When I call her every day, I love hearing her tell me she has spent her day relaxing. That’s exactly what I want to hear. She should shop, cook nice food, read the Bible, pray, minister to others, drive around to see people, and watch good teaching. She should enjoy the home she lives in by herself. The less work she does, the better I like it. I don’t think my male cousins have that attitude. Two are divorced, and I believe the wives of the other two work. The cousin who was surprised I supported my wife is divorced, and her husband abandoned her son. I have another female cousin who seems to have done better. Her first husband was man of good intentions, and I hear complimentary things about the man she married after he died.

Sometimes when I ask my wife what she has been doing all day, she grins and says, “Sitting!” I always tell her I hope she didn’t overexert herself.

I think it’s okay to say I do things for my wife. Jesus cautioned us against telling others about our charitable deeds, but supporting your wife isn’t alms. It’s the fulfillment of an obligation. Bragging about doing things for your wife is like bragging that you brush your teeth. No one should be impressed.

When my mother and father got married, my grandfather bought them a new DeSoto. It was extremely ugly. It was grey with an orange roof. He paid to have the paint improved. He put a red roof on it! At least he tried. Of course, he paid for the wedding, including my dad’s clothes. He rarely drank, but he had a few drinks at the wedding, and before my parents drove off, he took all the money in his pockets, which would have been a lot, and he made them take it for their honeymoon.

That’s the kind of person I want to be.

Maybe God gave me my grandfather and made me a little like him so I would understand what it felt like to be the patriarch. To be a patriarch is to be like God. It’s a very good thing to provide abundance, safety, and shelter. It’s good to overcome the selfishness of my youth so it can’t disgrace me in my old age.

When we are together in heaven, it won’t be like being in church. When I used to go to church, I liked the people around me, but the bonds weren’t that strong. Many of them were hypocrites who didn’t really belong to God’s family. Most of them didn’t know me. When I stood among them during services, it was not much different from standing among total strangers. In heaven, we will feel a family bond like the one I felt in my grandparents’ house as we stuffed ourselves and opened presents. It will be a family reunion, very literally.

Sometimes I have been concerned, and occasionally resentful, about the demands people have made on me. It has annoyed me to hear new requests from people who weren’t making much effort to fix their lives. I believe that feeling is evil, and I try not to cling to that mindset. I always tell Rhodah it’s much better to be the one who gives than the one who takes, because if people are coming to you for help, it means you have, and they don’t. You are more blessed than they are. Rhodah feels the same way.

I can see why leftists, who hate the principles of God’s kingdom, hate Christmas and work so hard to erase it from the public’s culture. Their father is Satan, and Satan doesn’t want us to know we can be a family. He doesn’t want us to love patriarchy, because God is a father, and men who worship God correctly are patriarchs. He doesn’t want us to see the parallel between Christmas togetherness and the unity and love we will one day feel, assembled around the throne Satan will never again see.

Satan’s children want us to be a family, too; the fear-driven, self-centered, ruthless children of the global government and the Internet. He wants to hide the breast and give us a pacifier dipped in poison.

If my revelation from God helps you, then let it be my Christmas present to you. You have 364 days to prepare to receive the benefit.

But You Will Never Forget It

Over the last week, I’ve implemented a strange new way of honoring and remembering my late father. I bought a Ronco Showtime rotisserie oven and fixed a pork roast.

My dad was not a good cook. I’m not sure, but the feeling I always had in my youth was that he figured any man who cooked had to be a flamer.

I can’t recall ever seeing him cook anything before my mother died. I saw him carry boxes of Cheez-Its into the living room and eat directly from them. I saw him open packages of lunchmeat, grab handfuls, and put them in his mouth. I saw him eat raw hot dog. He didn’t cook. He didn’t even barbecue.

At some point in his old age, he developed an interest in infomercials. It seemed like he was more curious than he had been when he was young. I think he wanted to see if the crazy things they sold really worked. He ordered a few things. It is for this reason that I have personally had the opportunity to handle Mighty Putty.

I think the Showtime oven was his most surprising buy, because of his lack of interest in cooking. It startled me. Apart from the surprise, I thought he had been swindled.

As everyone knows, Ronco was named for Ron Popeil, the TV huckster. What people may not know is that Ronco had nothing to do with the original Popeil company, which belonged to his dad, Sam Popeil. In fact, it was a competing company. Sam and Ron were bitter rivals. They were estranged.

Here’s a story I’ve told before. I clerked for Jack Dominik, Sam Popeil’s intellectual property lawyer. Jack kept samples of inventions his clients had created. For example, he had Glugless Jugs. This is a big jug with an air line molded into it so the contents pour out continuously instead of in intermittent spurts. The Glugless Jug makes pouring pool chlorine much safer. For some reason, Jack actually gave me one. He was extremely eccentric.

Jack showed me his example of the Bionic Knife. This product came out in the Seventies. It was similar to a Ginsu except for a weird triangular saw handle, and it came in a case which unfolded to form a cutting board.

Why “the Bionic Knife”? Because when Sam invented it, Ron was dating Lindsay Wagner, TV’s Bionic Woman. Sam wanted to needle him.

Anyway, in the mind of the public, the Popeil name is associated with cheap, gimmicky products that don’t work. It is associated with fraud.

Is that fair? Yes. Jack Dominik told me what Sam told him about one of his ads. It showed a knife cutting through a nail and a boot. Popeil said the nail was made of lead, and the boot had been soaking in lye all night.

Sam Popeil was pretty shady, so anyone who flinches at the sound of the name Popeil can be forgiven. I thought the Showtime oven had to be a ripoff.

To make my suspicions worse, it came with a “flavor injector,” which was a giant syringe that inserted solid objects in meat. People were told to load it with things like garlic cloves and shoot them, whole, into roasts.

The sight of the newly-unboxed oven and flavor injector was jarring, but if you think that surprised me, you should have been there the first time my dad tried it. He got a recipe somewhere; probably included with the other things he bought. He shot garlic cloves into a big piece of pork. He followed the directions. When it was done, he invited me to try a piece.

You can guess how optimistic I was, but curiosity runs in families, so I tried it. It was excellent. Tender, juicy, and flavorful. The chunks of cooked garlic were a wonderful touch.

The original Showtime ovens (three sizes) really work, and the construction isn’t bad, either. They were made in Korea, not China or India or some other known source of disappointing garbage. The cases were sturdy sheet steel, nicely painted. The ovens use good-quality gearmotors to achieve the desired 6 RPM, which Ron Popeil said he personally chose after a lot of testing. When you put a Showtime on your counter, it won’t heat the material under it, so it’s safe for stone and wood.

One of the neatest, and funniest things about the Showtime is that the top of the oven is used for cooking vegetables. It gets really hot, so Ron Popeil, marketing genius, turned a burn hazard into a feature. He sold little trays for vegetables, so you can cook side dishes on top of your oven while your meat roasts. This actually works.

The metal parts that hold the food get very hot during cooking, so if you try to remove the food with your bare hands, you get blistered. Ron’s answer? He included a pair of cheap insulated gloves just thick enough to allow you to pull the food out and put it down before getting burned. Fortunately, I have a pair of silicone chef’s mitts which are much better.

Cleaning up is not bad. You clean the window, which comes out, the broiler pan that sits in the bottom of the machine to catch grease, the spits and spit holders, and maybe the heat reflector. A self-cleaning wall oven with a rotisserie would be simpler, but I’m not looking to drop $4000 any time soon.

Rotisserie cooking is better than cooking on a pan. When you cook with a rotisserie, the grease and sauce have a hard time falling off the food, so everything is basted continuously. The liquids keep pouring down the front side, keeping things moist until they bake into a delicious crust. Meat browns beautifully on all sides, and it doesn’t dry out because gravity drains the juice out of the upper parts. I haven’t Showtimed a turkey yet, but my buddy Mike does it all the time, and he says the breast meat is always perfect.

When my dad and I left Miami, I threw his Showtime out. I had no help with the move, and I was also taking care of my dad. The things I threw out and gave away were worth 4 figures, easily, but I had no choice.

My dad didn’t care, because he hadn’t used it in years. It’s not like I discarded his treasured possessions.

Sometimes it bothered me that I didn’t have a rotisserie any more. Mike rubbed it in during phone calls. What are friends for? He has two Showtimes.

I started thinking about the Showtime last week, but I didn’t think I could get one. I believed the company was kaput. Ron Popeil died in July, and he was retired at the time.

When I checked Amazon to see if any company still made a countertop rotisserie, I found that Ronco was still selling them. The company had been sold years earlier, and it had gone into bankruptcy, but it was back.

The new ovens got mixed reviews. I read two disappointing things about them: the steel (Chinese) was thin and flimsy, and the motors turned too slow. Unsatisfactory. If I was really going to do this, I was going to honor Ron by trusting his 6 RPM design. I actually looked into putting a faster gearmotor into a new machine, but I couldn’t find any acceptable motor deals.

I checked Ebay for used Showtimes, and I found a like-new oven. It looked like it had just left the Ronco warehouse. I made an offer, and I ended up paying about $70. When the oven arrived, I could see that it had never been used. It was spotless.

I decided to honor my dad by making a pork roast. I bought a bone-in shoulder roast and cut the bone out myself. I put salt and Accent on it and let it sit in the fridge for two days.

I planned to use my old recipe: apricot nectar, sage, and Marsala, reduced and applied as a glaze. Then I learned that coronavirus had somehow created a shortage of apricot nectar. Reluctantly, I used peach instead.

The proportions are 12 ounces nectar, 1.5 teaspoons sage, 1/2 cup sweet Marsala, half a teaspoon of salt, and as many cloves of crushed garlic as you like. Just boil it down to a thick syrup.

I tied the roast together, shoved it onto the spits, tied it again, covered it with syrup, and fired up the machine. One and a half hours later, I had the roast you see in the photos. I overcooked it a little. I went to 160° when I should have stopped at 145°.

Overcooked or not, it was wonderful. It was tender and juicy. The heat from the element charred the outside of the meat along with the sauce, and the charred stuff flavored the meat’s juices. You would think the black parts were ruined, but they were better than the rest of the roast.

The oven has two settings. One is closer to the element than the other. I used the far setting. Next time, I think I’ll finish the roast on the near setting to get more blackening.

I wish I could serve my dad a big slice.

Of course, I sent the wife pictures. She is looking forward to a continuous supply of roasted pork and beef.

After the novelty wears off, I’ll probably use the oven pretty rarely, but I’m glad I got it. There are times when there is no substitute, and it brings back memories of my old man. Also, Mike is moving to Florida, and he will be living with me for a while, so it will comfort him by reminding him of his natural habitat back in New Hampshire.

A cynical person would say I’m looking forward to having my own personal live-in rotisserie chef, but I’m not like that. Not me.

It would be interesting to do a small boneless turkey in the rotisserie. Might be impossible, because the legs and drumettes stick out after you stuff them.

My rotisserie mission is accomplished. On to the next challenge.

Let’s not Let 10,000 Dead Bodies Ruin a Good Grift

Let’s recap. What are the three hostile spirits that will be released before the tribulation? Death, famine, and murder. They cover a lot of ground. Death includes disease and wild animal attacks, for example.

What are we going through right now? A global pestilence, shortages, and an astounding outpouring of hatred and crime.

Today, newspapers (Is that term appropriate any more?) are reporting that 12 big American cities have record murder rates. Not records for this decade, century, or millennium. All-time records.

Let’s look at the list, which comes from the notorious right-wing smear outfit, ABC.

Albuquerque: 82
Austin: 60
Baton Rouge: 137
Columbus: 179
Indianapolis: 246
Louisville: 175
Portland: 72
Philadelphia: 523
Rochester: 71
St. Paul: 35
Toledo: 62
Tucson: 80

This is a misleading list, because it only includes all-time records. Chicago is leading the country right now with 753 murders, which, remarkably, is not a record. New York is at 443. It’s also misleading because the year isn’t over yet. We have about three weeks to go, and it’s looting season because Christmas is coming up. Finally, the list doesn’t include smaller, but still large, cities.

The New York Post notes that all of these cities have leftist mayors. That’s pretty shocking. Who would have guessed?

What they’re not telling you: for the most part, this is an epidemic of murders committed against black people. Most American homicides (a term which includes killings that are not murders) are committed by black people, and black people who murder overwhelmingly choose other blacks as their victims. Cities have big concentrations of black people. It’s also important to note that black women are more likely than anyone else to be murdered.

Oddly, no one is marching or painting streets over this. There is no movement called “Black Women Matter.” We have people wearing shirts that say, “All Cops are Bastards,” but we don’t see, “Civilians who Murder 10,000 Black People per Year are Bastards.” No one on the left cares much about black women or black murder victims in general. They’re just enjoying pushing the police around.

Fewer than 1 in 40 of the roughly 10,000 black homicide victims 2021 will produce will have been shot by the police, and nearly all of the police shootings will turn out to be justified, even in the eyes of black witnesses. Strangely, the police are perceived to be the problem.

Human beings are amazing. “Never mind the floods and landslides. My faucet is dripping.”

For some reason which is subject to debate, societal ills tend to hit black areas first and then spread to the rest of America. I think the spirit of murder will work this way. Americans are already filled with partisan hate, and leftists, in particular, are more than willing to rise up and kill the rest of us. The Internet is like a virtual hell, in which people vomit up their vilest expressions of loathing and cruelty, and when people let hate drive their speech, they are likely to let it drive their behavior later. I expect large armed skirmishes to start popping up before long, and after that, we can expect a state of guerrilla warfare, at least in cities and suburbs; every area near a leftist-dominated city. Leftists will form mobs to punish the “privileged,” and everyone else will respond in kind, having no choice.

I have been wondering why leftists congregate in cities, and I think it must be because life is so easy in cities. Cities hand everything to you. You have no yard to maintain, you never have to travel far to get food, and there are all sorts of people who dedicate their lives to helping you. In the country, you really have to know what you’re doing. No one is going to come take care of you.

Leftists feel everyone else owes them a lot, so it’s natural that they like cities.

I think there are more demons on earth than there were a few years back. If God has released three great spirits to hurt us, then those spirits have other spirits working for them. Demons spread delusion and anger, among other things. I think demons are what cause people to believe the facially absurd myths they subscribe to now. You can’t think a man is a woman without supernatural help. You can’t think a few unjustified police shootings are a big deal, while completely ignoring thousands of murders, unless something external has warped your perception.

I no longer have any doubt that the apocalypse has started. The Bible shows that it starts before the rapture and tribulation. The apocalypse is a process involving multiple events.

I don’t think hate and murder are going away. I am confident covid is here to stay as well, although the Omicron variant’s characteristics make me wonder if covid will continue to be a major threat to life. Maybe a worse disease will hit soon, or maybe there will be a much nastier variant of coronavirus.

Shortages are now routine, and they seem to jump out of nowhere to bite us. I have no reason to think they’ll get anything but worse.

Speaking of men who are alleged to be women, I read that a man on a women’s college swim team has been setting women’s world records. I guess I should grieve, but I can’t help finding it funny. You can’t grieve continuously. A guy named Lia Thomas, at an Ivy League school where everyone else swims slowly, is rewriting the books. He beat a competitor by 38 seconds, which is, I am sorry to say it, hilarious. He literally had time to get out of the pool, dry off, grab a Gatorade, take a seat, and watch the real girls finish the race.

This news is upsetting a lot of people, but I say may he go to the Olympics and sweep the golds in every event he can manage to participate in. Let’s not even stop with swimming. Let’s put him on the women’s track team. Let’s have him box. He might do really well. May others like him obliterate every women’s sports record. I look forward to a day when every women’s UFC competitor is a man, and actual women are afraid to compete.

Why would I say these things? Because the pimple needs to come to a head. Leftism bears putrid, diseased fruit, and society needs to see it. Also, I dislike spectator sports because they are destructive to Christianity. No one seems to understand the hostile relationship between spectator sports and Christianity, but it has a very long history. I’d love to see every spectator sport destroyed. More steroids! More cheating! More eunuchs! Let’s get this over with.

Where are the tennis eunuchs? Serena Williams needs to be exposed as a fraud. I guarantee you, there are male athletes out there who are willing to take hormones and drive her off the court. I want to see them get out there. What are they waiting for? They could become millionaires instead of settling for jobs as low-paid club pros. Castration can take you from mediocre male to world-class female, and no one can stop you if you want to do it. The courts will protect you. Fans will cheer you; even the ones who secretly feel sick to their stomachs. They will be too afraid not to.

There are no known pro tennis eunuchs on the tour now, but people my age recall one. His name is Renee Richards. He was a journeyman male pro in the 1950’s. Then he must have listened to too many Helen Reddy records, because he had himself castrated and started competing with female tennis pros.

You may think he proves eunuchs won’t ruin women’s tennis, because Renee Richards didn’t become a Wimbledon champion. Of course they will. Richards competed as a woman two decades after he competed as a man! He was over the hill, and he still made it to the women’s doubles final. He was ranked in the top 20 when he was middle-aged.

Richards himself now admits it isn’t fair for eunuchs to play women. He has said,””Having lived for the past 30 years, I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me. And so I’ve reconsidered my opinion.”

I can’t wait to see more men out there. The truth needs to be made clear.

In other news, I succumbed to temptation and got myself a used Ronco Showtime rotisserie oven. I found it on Ebay. It looks like it has never been turned on.

I couldn’t restrain myself. I started thinking about rib roasts. The one thing a non-rotating oven can’t seem to match is the crust a rotisserie puts on all sides of a roast. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like the $70 I’m betting is a reasonable risk.

I could have bought a new Showtime, but they just don’t sound good. They turn too slow, and people say they’re flimsy. The old ones are Korean, which says a lot for Ron Popeil, who could have gone Chinese right from the start. The South Koreans make wonderful things. The new ovens are from China, so no one should be surprised if there are issues.

I’ll probably use it about once a year, but it will be a good tool to have on those rare occasions when a rotisserie is the best option.

I think I can quit adding food equipment for a while. My kitchen isn’t perfect, but you can make nearly anything in it without wishing you had one more tool.

Thank God I don’t like high-temperature hipster pizza, which requires a special oven. If I did, one more expenditure would be imminent.

Plastic is Manly

Am I a bad husband? When I make major decisions, do I thoughtlessly forget the fact that I am no longer single?

Every once in a while, I start to say, “I’m single, so…” I’m well aware that I am not single, but after so many years on the shelf, and with a wife who is still stuck in a foreign country, I sometimes forget the proper mindset.

Last week, I did it again. I ordered new steak knives without showing them to the wife.

Back when I lived in Austin, and I was a physics TA, I got some steak knives for my apartment. They were Henckels knives from some store or other. Probably Bed, Bath & Beyond. They were serrated stainless knives with extremely tough handles that looked like wood yet didn’t go all snowflaky in the dishwasher. They worked fine for about 25 years, but some of them disappeared during that time.

Why do steak knives disappear? They do it to everyone. Where do they go? I think it sometimes happens because idiot relatives grab them and use them as screwdrivers and paint scrapers. Other than that, I can’t figure it out.

Between my dad and me, we had three or four knives when we moved to the Ocala area. It wasn’t a big problem, because we didn’t have gatherings that required a lot of knives. I got sick of it, though, so I decided to go to Ebay and see if I could find loose knives to match my old ones. I figured there would be new knives all over the place at reasonable prices. Even if the knives had been discontinued, surely there would be new old stock.

Boy, was I wrong. New ones did not exist, and old ones were selling for Sabatier prices. Okay, not Sabatier prices. But they were so dear, it looked like I would be better off getting a new set.

No problem, right? I went to Cook’s Illustrated, figuring I would buy whatever they recommended. They’re pretty reliable.

Guess what? They recommend a set of Victorinox knives that sell for $167. And they have wooden handles, so forget the dishwasher.

If they had wooden handles, I wouldn’t pay $167 for a set of lightsabers. I have a $200 knife that has been wrapped in newspaper since I left Miami. Wooden handle. I’m not washing that by hand. I will probably never use it again.

I should frame it to remind me of my own bad judgment.

Here is what Victorinox says on Amazon:

Victorinox Swiss Army recommends washing all knives by hand. For best results, hand wash your knives with a soapy cloth and dry immediately.

While Fibrox Pro knives are dishwasher safe, we recommend hand washing as dishwashers are designed to spray water at a relatively high pressure, which can jostle the silverware and cause the knives to collide, dulling the edge.

That’s what they recommend. I recommend they find another sucker to buy their knives. What am I? Niles Crane? I may be a snob, but I’m not insane, and I don’t have an illegal to wash my knives for me.

I finally found a cheaper set I liked, and it happens to be made by Victorinox, the company that also made some of my cheap Fibrox-handled chef knives. I paid $68 for 6 knives. I know I should have bought 8, but I was too cheap. I figured that if I…WE…ever needed 8, we could give the old, dull Henckels knives to the guests who were most likely to cut themselves.

I went with straight edges. Why? Because serrated edges are for women and other people who can’t sharpen a knife. Serrations make really dull knives cut well enough to satisfy most people. I don’t want them. Have you ever cut a steak with a sharp knife? It’s bliss. It just falls off onto your fork, and you don’t have to saw and rock the table back and forth.

Here is the part the wife may not like: the knives have black Fibrox handles. Plastic, in other words. They look like they came from Big Lots.

I don’t think she’ll care. When I asked her what her favorite food was, she said “meat.” She didn’t narrow it down any more than that. Meat. All meat. Any meat. She even eats hippopotamuses. As a person who will soon be eating meat in my house, not to mention washing dishes, I think she will love these knives. If not, I can always get the wooden ones and use the plastic ones when I’m alone.

So, what to do with the old knives? Nothing, right? They’re for the kids’ table.

I couldn’t leave them alone. While I was admiring the newly-arrived set, I had to do something about the old ones.

The old knives were only sharpened on one side. To a knife person who isn’t a sushi chef, this is on a par with vandalism. I guess it made the knives easier to manufacture. I don’t think Henckels expected anyone to sharpen them. I believe the idea was that undiscerning customers would buy them and use them until they lost a certain number. Then they would be replaced.

At first, I tried to sharpen them on one side, just like Henckels. I used two diamond hones; coarse and fine. It was very slow work. I reshaped the bevel on one knife with many strokes, and then I touched up the back side to get rid of the burr. I wasn’t satisfied at all. The knife was pretty sharp, but it didn’t make me completely happy, and I still had two to go. After working on the second knife for too long a time, I changed tactics.

I have a Smith’s PP1 sharpener. This is a desperation gadget for hopeless unskilled people, but it works pretty well for kitchen knives. It has coarse carbide cutters in one notch, and the other notch holds fine ceramic stones.

I ran the knife through it a few times, and I got an edge, but it wasn’t great. Even after following up with a leather strop saturated with 1-micron diamond spray, it was disappointing.

I found that the final answer was to make a crude edge using the Smith’s tool and then follow up with the hones. This worked quickly, and it gave me reasonably refined edges that shaved hairs. The serrated areas wouldn’t shave, but they were sharp again.

This is now my official steak knife sharpening method. The hones are fast and easy to use. You just have to be willing to learn to do it right. You can push your knives away from you on the top of the hones and then on the bottom, in order to get both bevels, or you can push on the top, turn the knives over, and pull toward you. You have to learn how to hold the knives at a fixed angle on both strokes.

You may not get a really symmetrical set of bevels, but that doesn’t matter. They’ll be close enough. The only hard part will be establishing your characteristic bevels in the first place. Factory bevels may be very symmetrical, and they may also have angles that differ from the ones you want to apply by hand. It may take a long time to grind the bevels down they match your angles. After that, resharpening a knife will take about 20 seconds. It’s so fast, you can do it every time you take a knife out.

I’m going with this method. It works.

The other day, I bought a KME sharpening system for my carry knives. It’s wonderful. It provides a beautiful edge that rips through anything. It’s not right for everything, though.

Carry knives are made from super steels which take forever to dull and aren’t easy to sharpen, and it’s natural to want a perfect edge on a carry knife, so it’s okay if it takes a while to sharpen one. Kitchen knives are different. A kitchen knife that will pop little hairs off the backs of your fingers is plenty sharp for any kitchen job. Also, kitchen knives get dull faster than carry knives, so using a KMA sharpener, which takes a while to set up, is completely impractical.

Now I have 6 new steak knives with razor-like factory edges, plus three old knives that, while not as keen, are sharper than they have ever been before

The problem will be to convince my guests to be careful.

Almost no one expects knives to be sharp. Only a small percentage of knife owners have any idea how to sharpen a knife, and when it comes to women, that percentage is close to zero. They’re used to bad knives in their own houses, so when you hand them sharp knives, they tend to be careless. They also lean into them, because they’re used to forcing dull blades through food.

Women will actually get angry at you for sharpening knives. Many women think it’s irresponsible and unsafe to sharpen a knife correctly. It’s sad.

It’s really mens’ fault. A man sharpens his wife’s knives.

A long time ago, my Aunt Jean asked for a big knife while working on a holiday meal. I let her use a huge Forschner butcher knife with a great edge. I told her several times to be extremely careful. I warned her that it was sharper than knives she was used to. Only a few minutes passed before I saw her with a paper towel wrapped around her hand.

I don’t want people to come to my house and maim themselves over shared meals. It ruins the atmosphere.

I think my sharpening technology is as good as it will never need to be. I have a CBN-wheel bench grinder for things like hoes and woodworking tools. I have two belt grinders for axes and similar tools. I have chainsaw files. I have the KME for carry knives. I have diamond hones for kitchen knives. I have the strop and diamond spray for all my knives. I have big DMT diamond stones for filling in the gaps. I am set. You can do better, but you don’t really need to.

I am building the kitchen up again. Not all that long ago, I stepped back from cooking because it was related to gluttony, but now I have a wife to think about, and she should have a well-equipped food workshop, even if I do a lot of the cooking.

Yesterday, I unboxed a new toaster oven. It’s a Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro. It’s a smart oven with a fan in it. It does air frying, which is good for routine weekday vegetable sides. It has all sorts of programs. It reheats, proofs dough, keeps food warm at realistic temperatures (unlike a big oven), and can even handle a turkey or rib roast.

My big oven is pretty bad. It probably came with the house. The thermal fuse blows every time I use the self-cleaning cycle, the display has gone so dim I can barely see it, and the convection setting doesn’t air-fry. I found a new one for $1100, but I have been too cheap to spring for it. It also takes 15 minutes to preheat, whereas the new hotness takes three. I spent $400 on it, which is a ton, but I think it will be worth it, because it appears I will only be using the big oven for maybe 10% of my oven jobs.

People complain about the difficulty of cleaning this oven, but I have an ace in the hole. I have a steam cleaner. Not many people know it, but a steam cleaner will dissolve baked-on crud in a hurry, with no chemicals or abrasives. Also, I’m not the kind of person who cleans ovens a lot. I’m not going to feel bad if my new oven looks like someone uses it.

I can’t fix a new entree until I get rid of the chicken I made two days ago, so all I can do for now is reheat. The new oven is performing beautifully. It seems to be a revolutionary change for my kitchen. The reheating feature, all by itself, is huge. My big oven is impractical for reheating, the conventional microwave I got to accommodate my dad’s dementia makes food rubbery and limp, and the little microwave with convection features is a much better at microwaving than convection.

When you’re single…married but temporarily living alone…you have to reheat a lot or throw out a great deal of food. You can’t eat everything you make in a single day, so you eat a lot of leftovers.

I almost wish I hadn’t thrown out my dad’s old Popeil rotisserie. Crude product that it was, it worked like crazy. When you move, you have to prioritize, and the rotisserie seemed like a good candidate for the garbage pile. My friend Mike has one, and he can’t believe I threw ours out. When I told him, he sounded close to tears.

Oh, my God. I thought Ronco had stopped selling the oven. I see a new one on Amazon. Should I? Should I? I can always get another kitchen cart. Oh, man. This is good news.

You may be inclined to assume the late Ron Popeil would never sell a decent product, purely as a matter of principal, but that isn’t true. His dad was very shifty, but Ron made some good stuff. The rotisserie lasts forever and makes excellent food. Ron himself worked on it, determining that 6 turns per minute were ideal.

The oven is sort of primitive, but the food is undeniably great. It’s strange that my dad, who could not cook, bought one, but I have to say that the things he made with it were shockingly tasty.

It’s not that easy to clean, but as I said, I have a steam cleaner. Nothing is hard to clean when you have a steam cleaner.

I am researching, and it looks like the new Ronco company is not the same as the old one. People are complaining that the new ovens turn at 4 RPM instead of 6, and that is not good. I found a new-looking original-Ronco oven on Craigslist and made an offer.

Being a handy person, I could conceivably take the gearmotor out of a new oven and put a faster one in, but I am not anxious to bet on it.

Guess I better warm up some chicken.

Heavenly White Bread for Bad Cooks

Yesterday I wrote a piece about British actor John Cleese, saying how disappointed I was in him. I used to think he was something more than a good comic actor, but gradually I realized he wasn’t a great screenwriter or a particularly witty or smart person. He tweeted something pretty asinine about the Rittenhouse case, and I felt like responding.

I took the piece down. I felt it was just too crabby.

Today I feel like making amends. I’ll post a recipe for the most delicious white bread imaginable. It’s very easy to make. I like it better than croissants, baguettes, and, well, anything. The recipe will produce a loaf of rich, moist bread you’ll have a hard time staying away from.

It’s similar to white bread I’ve made in the past, but it’s better.

INGREDIENTS

520 g bread flour
1.5 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. instant yeast
2 tbsp. sugar
4 tbsp. butter
310 g warm water
1/2 tsp. diastatic malt extract (Amazon)

Blend the dry things first in the food processor. Then blend in the water until the dough is well mixed. Maybe 20 seconds. Wait 10 minutes. Blend in butter (softening in advance will speed this up). Butter a bread pan after salting the butter.

Form a loaf and put it in the pan. Butter it with more salted butter. Bake about 30 minutes at 440°.

You will have to watch the top of the loaf. If it browns too fast, you can put something between the bread and the upper heating element.

I use steel nonstick pans. Nothing fancy.

The bread will come out with a delicious, salty, buttery crust. If you cut it while it’s too hot, you may crush the inside of it. It gets firmer as it cools. It’s best to use a very sharp serrated knife and move it back and forth very fast while you cut, making sure you’re cutting instead of pushing the knife down through the bread. Light pressure is key.

If you have no shame at all, make this bread and prepare a lot of preserves and soft butter. Eat it while it’s hot. It’s decadent. You can have it with hot chocolate or tea with lots of milk and sugar.

When it cools, it makes an excellent sandwich bread. It’s also a good foundation for Texas toast. You just salt a slice, dip both sides in garlic butter, and brown it in a skillet.

This bread is a godsend for bad bakers. It’s hard to mess up. If you can breathe, you can make this bread.

You will need a big, powerful food processor to mix this much dough. If that’s a problem, you can always use a mixer or your hands, but don’t knead it too much, because you’ll get tiny, uniform bubbles like the ones in Wonder Bread.

I ordered myself some miniature bread pans. I like homemade bread, but I can’t deal with big loaves. They sit on the counter and taunt me until I eat them. Small loaves are much less dangerous. I haven’t tried one yet, but I’m hoping they will be better than big loaves because of the high crust-to-insides ratio. I think this recipe would make better dinner rolls than anything I’ve tried, but I’m just guessing.

Thanksgiving for One

The unthinkable has happened. I will not have guests for Thanksgiving.

Ordinarily, friends show up for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but somehow it didn’t happen this year. One bunch moved to Georgia, and another is saddled with a difficult octogenarian who requires pampering and obedience. My friend Mike was going to come, but he decided to visit his son in New Jersey. Mike is distressed, because he usually cooks a feast, and he can’t do it this year. His son works in Manhattan and has a tiny, useless apartment kitchen.

Mike made reservations at a restaurant in Times Square. Today it occurred to him there would be a parade running through it. He is not happy.

Last week I was thinking I’d just make a turkey sandwich and be done with it. I was in the store yesterday, however, and the fiends who run the place had set out rib roasts for $10 per pound. These days, that’s actually a very good price.

Feeling myself a victim of entrapment, I bought the smallest rib roast in my long history of cooking beef. Two ribs. A little over 5 pounds.

I thought I would cut a steak off of it, freeze the steak, and roast the rest, but I was afraid a 3-pound rib roast wouldn’t cook correctly, so I’m fixing the whole thing.

The butchers did an excellent job of cutting the ribs off and reattaching them with twine. Usually, I do this myself. Today I took the roast out to apply salt, butter, and garlic, and I found myself asking if the ribs really needed to be tied back on.

Time for Google.

I read that a lot of people cook rib roasts without the ribs. They claim they’re just as good, and the big advantage is that you can use twine to force your roast into a rounder shape. The bonus here is that it will cook more evenly. I decided to give it a try. Cooking experiments are best left for solo meals. Never try anything new when you’re cooking for company. You will face-plant and ruin a memory.

While I was looking at the web, I came across an idea I had heard about earlier this year. People claim the things you put on the outside of meat before you cook it do no good.

If you go to Youtube, you can find at least one video of a person “proving” marinades don’t work. They marinate one piece of meat, leave the other one alone, cook both, cut the outside off the marinated piece, and have people compare the taste. People say they can’t tell the difference. The claim is that nothing soaks in farther than 2 mm.

I asked myself if I was wasting my time, applying salt, butter, and garlic days before cooking.

I decided to grease the roast as planned.

Why did I go against THE SCIENCE? First of all, as a Youtube dissident has pointed out, you don’t throw away the outside of meat when you cook it. Multiply 2 mm by two, and you get about 3/16″ of intensely flavored meat, accounting for both sides. That’s worth the effort of marinating or seasoning.

Second thing…salt penetrates. Anyone who has ever eaten ham knows this. I’ve eaten pieces taken from huge country hams, and they were salty all the way through. If salt didn’t penetrate, it would be impossible to cure a ham.

I don’t know if the garlic will improve the inside of the meat at all, but two days of absorbing salt should make a difference. The butter and garlic will add flavor to the outside of the meat, and they will run off and collect in the broiling pan, providing stuff I can use to make gravy.

I don’t know if it was a good idea to force the meat into a round shape. It’s supposed to cook more evenly, but do I want that? Chances are good I’m getting advice from people who don’t know good food when they eat it. It’s nice when a rib roast’s cap is a little more done. I don’t know if I’ll like it as much if there is pink meat right under the surface.

They say a roast with the ribs removed will give you a tasty salt crust all over the outside, whereas leaving the ribs on prevents one side from getting crusty. I fell for this, but now I wonder if it’s true. My roast will have one side facing down while it cooks. That doesn’t sound like a good way to put a crust on it. I’ll bet it’s not much better than it would have been with the ribs on.

I’ll miss stuffing. I’m thinking maybe I should make stuffing even though I have no turkey. There is no law that says stuffing is only for poultry.

I feel obligated to make a dessert, but I don’t think I will. My best dessert is cheesecake. It’s a lot of work, it’s a calorie supernova, and after the meal, I would have enough left over for a week, making for a very fat November.

I will miss my friends, but it should be nice to have an easy Thanksgiving. Ordinarily, I have to start cooking on Monday.

You, too, Can be a Spud Stud

I feel like writing about something less serious than the apocalypse. I’m trying not to read the news or focus so much on the impending destruction of mankind. I can’t help picking a few things up. I have been informed that Joe Biden is now less popular than shingles, and the Chinese suddenly have the ability to nuke all our cities at will. I’m not trying hard enough.

Every man knows the most painful experience you can have is to tell a friend he was right about something. I am now faced with that chore. My friend Mike showed me the best way to fix baked potatoes.

Everyone knows you can nuke a potato and get an okay result which is fine for dining alone in front of the TV. Not that I do that. Every day. You can also do what I used to do. I rubbed russet potatoes with olive oil and salt and baked them on the rack at 425°. You can also omit the salt if you like a dry jacket. This method works great.

Mike tried to tell me he used the microwave and a toaster oven in his recipe. Horrors. But I tried it anyway, because it was quick, and it looked like a step up from the microwave alone.

It’s very simple. You poke a few holes in your potato’s skin to prevent explosions. Then nuke it until it’s done. For a relatively large potato, I go around 7 minutes in my somewhat-strong oven. You can use a thermometer to find out how long your oven needs. The common wisdom is that the internal temperature should be about 210°.

Once your potato is cooked, throw it in the oven at the highest temperature for 3-5 minutes. This will fix the skin. Best I can do here is 500°.

I figured I was in for a compromise potato, but the first one I fixed was excellent. The jacket wasn’t limp or soggy. It tasted like it had been baked. The inside of the potato had a wonderful flavor and fluffy texture.

I was very surprised, but you can’t argue with empirical results, so now this is my default method for baking potatoes. It’s not just fast. It’s the best method I know.

I called Mike and faced the humiliation of telling him he was right, but then he is a food genius. Without his pizza knowledge, I would not be the man I am today.

As long as I’m writing about food, I just found out about a neat, inexpensive rolling pin. You won’t believe it. It’s a piece of PVC pipe. I’ll post the video where I learned about it.

My wooden rolling pin cracked because I put it in the dishwasher. I have a low tolerance for things that can’t take machine washing, so I didn’t care. I currently use a bizarre pin with a Teflon surface, and I have to wash it by hand because it’s all I have left and I don’t want to ruin it.

Today I went to Tigerchef.com to order something I needed, and in order to make the UPS charge more productive, I added a few other things. I started looking for a rolling pin, and then I decided to research. I saw the video, and I decided to try the pipe before buying anything.

I’m going to get some pipe and make two pins: a long one and a short one. I’ll use the lathe to smooth off the ends. We’ll see if they work. I don’t think PVC can take dishwasher temperatures, but I can find out by putting a scrap piece in the top rack. I may prefer hand-washing for the big pin anyway, because I don’t think the dishwasher can get the inside of a long pipe clean.

Maybe the potato method will be useful to you. I would suggest not criticizing until you try it.

Looks Like it Will be Beans and Rice Till Friday

I realized I had to start eating my old survival supplies in order to keep them from going to waste, so yesterday, I made myself a huge pot of red beans and rice. Let it suffice to say I am extremely pleased.

I took a chance on what is purportedly an Emeril recipe. I have nearly no faith in Emeril, for a number of reasons, but he ran the Commander’s Palace, so Cajun food shouldn’t be a challenge for him. After I got into the process, I realized the recipe was actually secondhand. Some lady who probably eats margarine posted it on the Internet, and she said she had made changes. When a woman makes a change in a recipe containing pork, it’s generally an indication that regurgitation is imminent. They’ll substitute turkey for pork or canola for butter. I decided to take a free hand, and things worked out great.

I had two pounds of dried beans to get rid of, so I had to make a big batch. When it was over, 24 ounces of andouille and two ham hocks were in the pot along with the beans. The main thing I did to make it work was adding dry white wine. It’s hard to think of a good excuse for preparing poultry or pork without wine.

My beans are maybe two years old. I forgot to put the buy date on the bag. As a result, it took hours for them to get soft. I had to have a PBJ for dinner, but I made up for it this morning with a big serving of Cajun joy.

You don’t have to spend a lot of money to make good food. Well, actually, you do, during the Biden catastrophe. But you don’t have to spend a lot compared to what you would spend on things like steak and seafood, which used to be expensive but are now downright precious. If you can fix beans a few different ways, you can get good nutrition without being hammered too badly by Uncle Joe’s empty shelves.

I would say it’s best to use one whole cup of dry white wine per pound of dried beans. That sounds like a lot, but it seems like beans blunt the wine’s effect on the pork.

I should have a relatively pleasant couple of months after true famine sets in, getting creative with my prepper cache. After that, unless I’m raptured, it will be time to learn how to eat acorns.

In other news, the Alec Baldwin story continues to get more interesting.

I now think what happened to Baldwin was supernatural. I think God did him a favor by allowing him to be humbled so he can examine himself and receive salvation. It would be hard for random chance to explain all the bad things that happened to Baldwin simultaneously. Let’s see if I can list them all without checking the web.

1. He was producing the movie, so he has more responsibility than an actor would ordinarily have.

2. Hypocritically, for a self-righteous, vitriolic leftist, he hired non-union workers to fill spots vacated by disgruntled union members. This guarantees that many people who worked on the movie will try to make him look as bad as possible.

3. Prior to the shooting, there had been several gun mishaps, and there had been protests.

4. Instead of having the movie’s trained armorer declare the gun safe and hand it to him, he let an assistant director do it.

5. The assistant director has been subject to a lot of complaints. He is said to have expressed resentment over having to hold meetings about gun safety, and he is also said to have done a very poor job at those meetings. On top of all this, men and women who have worked with him have complained about inappropriate touching, which makes Baldwin look irresponsible for hiring him.

6. Forget the universal gun safety rules he disobeyed; he ignored a rule specific to moviemaking. You never point a live gun at a human being on a movie set. There are protocols. Baldwin knows about them. He violated one.

7. The person he killed has a husband and parents, so Baldwin has set himself up for wrongful death litigation from multiple plaintiffs, and prosecutors are sensitive to plaintiffs’ goading.

8. Baldwin has a history of condemning people who have shot others. Regarding a California police officer who shot a man who attacked him and grabbed at his gun belt, Baldwin said, “I wonder how it feels to wrongfully kill someone.”

Let me add that the movie Baldwin was making was to be about a boy sentenced to death for an accidental killing. That can’t be a coincidence.

At least one New Mexico criminal attorney has confirmed that Baldwin may be on the hook for a homicide charge. Under New Mexico law, it’s possible. That pretty much ends the debate over whether he can be charged. Now, the question is what the police and prosecutors will choose to do. A leftist prosecutor committed perjury to indict George Zimmerman, and a leftist prosecutor refused to charge the people who tried to murder Kyle Rittenhouse. A prosecutor has been indicted for failing to properly pursue charges in the Ahmed Arberry case. Prosecutors aren’t vending machines. They are as biased as anyone.

It would be bad enough for Baldwin if he had taken the gun directly from the armorer, on a peaceful set with no prior accidents, and killed a woman. It would be more typical of workplace accidents. His case is exceptional, though. Accidental shootings don’t usually have mountains of additional circumstances that make things worse for those at fault.

The only thing that could be worse for him would be if the prosecutor had voted for Trump.

Baldwin has not behaved well since the accident. He went to Twitter and posted a link to a story that said he had been told the gun was safe before he handled it. It was a desperation move. I’m sure his attorney didn’t advise it. He’s not taking responsibility. He’s throwing other people under the bus. Here’s what he should be saying: nothing. Maybe, “I am devastated by the accidental shooting which occurred on my set today.” Anything beyond that looks like denial of guilt and lack of remorse.

I’m not saying he should admit he’s responsible. Not until after jeopardy has passed. But he shouldn’t feed the public BS.

It doesn’t matter whether he was told the gun was safe. He was supposed to check it personally, regardless of who looked at it before he did. Even if you swallow his invalid argument at first, you have to admit that it was negligent to listen to an assistant director when there was an armorer on the set, especially after several other mishaps.

I’m not trying to condemn him. I just know how lay people think, and I know that if I don’t present things forcefully, people may come back in my comments and play amateur attorney, defending Baldwin with very poor arguments lawyers have already rejected.

I’m not writing about this story to pick on Baldwin, but to connect it to my own experiences. Last night I woke up and started confessing to God and asking for help to be a better Christian. I thought about all the bad things I had done, said, and felt. I thought about two things God had told me.

1. The concealment of a sin is worse than the sin itself.

2. An excuse is a lie.

I’ve done what Baldwin is doing, and worse. I could never begin to recall all the excuses I’ve made for myself.

I started thinking about Adam and Eve. Satan tempted Eve, Eve sinned, Eve tempted Adam, Adam sinned, God accused Adam and Eve, Adam blamed God and Eve, and Eve blamed Satan.

Then all the descendants of Adam and Eve were cursed, and we fight those curses to this very day.

God has also told me this: everything you bury, you also plant.

The sins and lies of Adam and Eve became the seeds that would eventually result in things like damnation and the tribulation, not to mention every evil man has ever experienced. Eve’s sin was a very small seed, but it turned into a tree that covered the world. No wonder God cursed women for what she did. No wonder he cursed Adam PRIMARILY for listening to the voice of his wife.

Until last night, I had never thought about this: Satan didn’t tempt Adam. Eve did. Adam wasn’t the first person to sin. Eve was. Adam didn’t blow it until he abandoned his role as leader and chose to be a feminist. Feminists like to say the world would be a better place if women ran everything, but the only time a woman ran the world, she led mankind into destruction.

Now we live in a time in which masculinity is considered toxic and we are told to let women and even children lead. No wonder the world is disintegrating. We’re living the curse of Isaiah 3. We’ll really feel the pain when Kamala Harris takes over for Biden. Female leadership leads to curses, period. It’s not what God commanded, and there are consequences.

Overwhelmingly, women are the ones who lead us into idolatry. Witchcraft, fortune-telling, astrology, crystals, yoga…you will probably never hear a woman say, “I was a Christian, but my husband convinced me to try Buddhism.” It’s almost always the other way around. There is a reason God requires men to lead.

Eve and Adam should not have sinned, but once they had, they should have confessed. God already knew everything. Baldwin shouldn’t be on Twitter showing he is not willing to be honest.

I don’t want him to be prosecuted. I would rather see him get away with it, just as you and I have gotten away with things. Putting him in prison for a mistake doesn’t seem to serve a valid purpose. But he should not blame others for what he did.

I’m not that concerned about his civil liability, since whatever he ends up paying will not be a significant percentage of his wealth. He’s probably worth several dozen million dollars, so whatever he pays probably won’t affect his lifestyle or those of his children.

I expect the assistant director to get obliterated. He’s a #MeToo magnet, he appears to have done the armorer’s job for her without justification, and he’s lower on the food chain than Baldwin, who will have moneyed interests pushing for his exoneration. The armorer might be okay if she can say she did everything right and the assistant director prevented her from doing her job. She will still have to explain the other accidents, though.

The assistant director, David Halls, has deleted his Twitter account, so we can’t see if he ever said unfortunate things about the use of firearms.

Personally, if I were working on a movie that had had three on-set gun accidents, I would quit. One is inexcusable, and two prove the moviemakers can’t be trusted. After a third, the insurers should cancel the production.

As for Biden and Harris, I see socialist Saturday Night Live has taken the gloves off. Last night, they did a sketch in which 2021 Biden talked to his 2013 self. They made fun of his unpopularity, his false teeth, and even his dementia. When Saturday Night Live turns on a leftist president, there isn’t much hope of redemption or spin. Maybe next time, they’ll do the right thing and hit him for the terrible problems he’s causing. They didn’t mention the Biden energy crisis, the Biden shipping crunch, or his enormous mandate lie. Things will probably be a lot worse in 2022, and Biden isn’t doing anything to prevent it. He’s doubling down on pathological policy.

Biden is turning out to be a replay of Carter, except that Carter still had his faculties. It’s very bad when dementia compounds incompetence and corruption.

Carter is said to have had a nervous breakdown in office. Older readers will remember. He knew the ship was sinking, and he couldn’t fix it. He was temporarily disabled by hemorrhoids, and that didn’t help his image. He knew the public despised him. There was no light at the end of the tunnel because he just wasn’t good at what he did. He has a gargantuan ego, but it wasn’t a thick enough rampart to protect him from crumbling. Biden is a monumental egotist, too. Will his baseless pride allow him to continue confronting the world with mock confidence, or will he fold up one morning and refuse to leave the bed?

I know how dementia and arrogance work together. Arrogant people who know they’re demented don’t admit it. A proud dementia patient can stand in his own excrement and insist you’re the one with the problem. Maybe Biden will go out clawing and accusing.

At his most recent town hall, Biden clenched his fists and held them in front of him for around 20 seconds while receiving a question. It was very odd. Internet commenters have pointed out that dementia patients are known to make this gesture. It indicates anxiety or confusion. I wonder if that’s what’s happening with the president. He also appears to be developing what is known as a “magnetic gait,” which is a dementia symptom in which the feet slide along the floor instead of being lifted.

I don’t know how the left’s lie machine will cope with Biden’s final implosion. My best guess is that they’ll pretend it’s something other than dementia until he has been out of office a long time. “Our overworked, beleaguered president has succumbed to exhaustion.” Maybe they’ll hypothesize that his aneurysm problems have led to delayed issues. They’ll never admit the obvious. They’ll never say they voted for a man they knew was senile because they hated Trump more than they cared about a strong America.

My friend Mike has a golf buddy who used to play with a Trump hater. The Trump hater told the buddy he didn’t care if America was destroyed as long as Trump wasn’t president. I think that attitude is common.

Wake me Up When They Start Injecting Faces

Today I saw people on Youtube talking about the Satanic nature of the coronavirus vaccines. They are convinced vaccination is the mark of the beast. It’s pretty obviously not. Where does the delusion come from?

The Bible says the beast–the man called the Antichrist–will appear. Then the world gets the mark. You can’t have the mark of the beast with no beast. The Bible says people will receive the mark in their foreheads or right arms. I got vaccinated in my left arm. The shots don’t leave marks, so how can they be marks? Science has no way of telling whether you’ve had the shot, so how can your grocery store or Home Depot tell if you’ve had it when they’re deciding whom to allow to shop? You could display your vaccine card, but it’s not a mark.

People are worried that vaccines somehow let the government track their movements electronically. Oddly, some of them use smartphones to air this concern. If you have a smartphone, Joe Biden already knows where you are. What about the sensors and cameras that line our streets? What about the doorbell and security cameras that are connected to the web? What about the facial recognition software that knows when you go to the mall or a concert?

Wait…are there still concerts?

The vaccinations are not the mark of the beast. Accept it. The present is bad enough without making problems up.

I saw a lady saying she had a dream about people who got the shot. She saw a Spirit-led friend who had gotten it. The friend said she thought God had shown her it was okay. Then she attacked her friend who was dreaming the dream. This dream is supposed to be evidence that the shots are transforming people into enemies of God.

Not every dream is from God. I once dreamed I had a big harem of teenaged girls. God didn’t send that. Sounds more Muslim than Christian.

I think human beings will end up with global passes, and the pass will be the mark. It makes more sense. People are already using vaccination status to prevent others from traveling, buying, and working. If the pandemic gets bad enough, there will suddenly be a “need” for a standardized pass used the world over. For the children, as always. People who push it will wrap themselves in clouds of virtue, and they will shame everyone who disagrees, just as virus fascists do right now.

“Virus fascist” is an accurate term. Fascism is authoritarianism, and regardless of whether draconian measures are right or not, they are authoritarian.

Maybe the aversion to the shots comes from God. The shots aren’t the beast’s marks, but they are being used to train us so we will welcome the mark. Maybe God is using fear of vaccination to prepare people to resist the mark when it comes.

This morning, I was thinking about the causes of the crisis the world is enduring. I found myself trying to list them. Then I scolded myself. When God judges nations, the causes are always the same. Idolatry, sexual perversion, lying, cruelty, and selfishness.

There is very strong evidence that the pandemic’s local severity is tied closely to governmental promotion of sexual perversion. I keep watching Australia and New Zealand, because they seem like test cases. They have moved heaven and earth, imposing unbearable, unsustainable measures to keep covid out. They’re also perversion havens. If things go well in these countries, it will seem to indicate that perversion is not really a big factor in the global crisis.

Today I checked both countries, and numbers are going up. In Australia, the genie really seems to be out of the bottle. The graph looks like the Burj Khalifa. New Zealand also has a very sharp spike, but in absolute terms, it’s tiny. I’m going to keep watching.

The UK, which is arguably the place where effeminacy first went mainstream among influential post-Christian Western men, is doing badly in spite of harsh government responses. They are planning on cracking down again, even after vaccinating a whole bunch of people. Russia is also going back into panic mode.

Why aren’t the vaccines working better? The UK looks like it’s doing worse than it did last year, when it did very badly indeed. The peaks aren’t as high, but they are very high, and they are broad. How can that happen, in a nation which is a leading oppressor and vaccinator? The vaccination rate is 68%. Even if the vaccines aren’t great, shouldn’t they cut the infection numbers by maybe 50%? Where is the decrease? Is the current crisis what covid looks like WITH a big decrease?

Is the delta variant the problem? Last year they told us covid was incredibly contagious, which appears to have been a huge exaggeration, because (if you believe official figures) it spread much more slowly than a typical flu. Maybe things would have been much, much worse had we had the delta variant from the start. I can only guess.

As for official figures, the CDC says the flu hits one billion people in a typical year, and we are told the two-year-old covid pandemic still hasn’t hit 250 million. Believe what you will. Everyone else does.

Over 10% of UK residents have been diagnosed with covid, so the actual figure must be a lot higher, but it’s not slowing down. Shots and recoveries aren’t getting the job done. How can that happen?

From a Biblical perspective, things don’t look good at all. The Bible predicts pestilence before the end, and it says the tribulation will affect the whole world. I didn’t realize until a few days ago that there had only been one other pandemic in history. I mean real pandemics, not typical flu epidemics, the plague, syphilis, the common cold, or AIDS. A real pandemic has to hit every nation, it has to cause big problems, it has to happen within a short time, and it can’t be something you have to work hard to catch.

The Spanish flu and coronavirus are the only real pandemics history has recorded, but only coronavirus is accompanied by other problems predicted in the Revelation.

I still expect things to get worse. Right now, my feeling is that coronavirus will continue to defy vaccines and countermeasures, and that we will see numbers a lot worse than the ones we have seen so far. I think it will never go away until Jesus returns to rule.

My guess, which is just a guess, is that the world will get used to seeing pundits on TV, saying they have no idea why coronavirus keeps beating science.

If this happens, hostility between pro-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers will get worse, contributing to another of the three main plagues of the apocalypse: hatred.

I saw something amazing on Youtube. About a month ago, there was a vaccine-mandate protest in France. People were walking around holding signs and making noise. Suddenly, a large gang of men armed with long poles dashed out into the frame and started beating the protestors. They were not cops. They were not soldiers. Some ordinary French citizens were so afraid of death and so furious at people who didn’t want a shot, they beat them with deadly weapons, knowing they would be filmed.

I can understand governments beating people, because that’s what they do. Secular government is a curse, and it manifests in government brutality. But why would private citizens get so enraged about a vaccination that they would organize, buy big sticks, and try to inflict serious, permanent injuries on strangers who were simply standing around complaining?

You can blind someone with a blow from a stick. You can emasculate and cripple people. You can destroy hearing. You can destroy mental faculties and motor functions. Hitting people with sticks is not a small aggression. It’s not like throwing pies.

It’s remarkable that NBC posted the stick video. Usually, you have to look for a fringe channel to learn about the mandate crisis.

The MSM appears to be working to hide mandate protests. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Very large crowds have assembled all over the planet, and to watch the news, you would have no idea it was happening. You would think Fox would be breaking the picket line, but it’s not. Fox is headquartered in New York, where people fear death and think Christianity is funny. Fox’s people aren’t conceited liberal elites, but they’re still conceited elites.

It’s as though the godless media elites in New York, Los Angeles, and London had a conference call and decided mandates were too important to cover fairly. I don’t think that happened, but things wouldn’t look any different if it had.

Youtube started pushing a channel on my feed. It was full of protests. A day or two ago, it vanished. I had to search for it. When you search for “coronavirus protest,” Youtube’s search suggests topics it should know you’re not looking for. When it finally delivers, it seems to do so grudgingly, and it provides videos that are weeks or months old, ignoring the protests that are happening right now. Can that possibly be coincidence? It sure looks like some Pokemon-playing millennial who knows better than we do nudged the algorithm.

It’s very unfortunate that the most misguided, arrogant, unempathetic people on earth think they know better than Christians and have power to rule society and control the flow of information.

I am concerned about myself. I don’t think I will ever experience lack again, and I don’t believe I will die from a disease or be murdered in a riot or for my cans of milk and corned beef. I am concerned that I’m not sufficiently sanctified. There are things about myself that I still need to correct, and I have not taken them seriously enough. Time will run out on me if I don’t watch it.

I keep working to stop ridiculing people. I am trying to stamp out what remains of the habit of heartless humor. I’m trying to stop getting angry about things. I have to let go of role models who are either in hell or on the way there. Even men my age have role models, whether they admit it or not.

I believe holding doors open for ungodly influences allows spirits to come in and drive me to sin, and sin can prevent people from being saved or raptured. I don’t want to be here the day after the rapture, waiting for strangers to kill me for my rice and flour, or just for being white or having a nice house.

When your ship gets torpedoed and you’re trying to stay afloat until you’re rescued, you throw the things that make you sink overboard. It’s that simple. When the horn blows, I want out of this place.

Next: a Table Saw

It’s important to marry a woman who has things in common with you. Rhodah and I agree on Christian doctrine and conservative politics, so the big-ticket items are covered. As a bonus, she also likes things like meat, knives, and guns. She even likes my waterproof Keen hiking shoes. Suffering with woman shoes while I walked all over Egypt and Turkey in comfort made an impression on her.

Guns are legal in Zambia, where people are still somewhat sane and remain able to tell the difference between 1) a woman and 2) a male head case in a dress. We have discussed the possibility of getting her a firearm, but we haven’t done anything about it.

I did get her a knife, however. She won’t be able to handle it until we’re together again, because shipping things to Zambia is like shipping things to Neptune. I suggested a Spyderco Manix 2 with CMP SPY17 steel, which is supposedly about like S35VN, only cooler because it was made especially for Spyderco.

There are steels that hold an edge better, but they are harder to sharpen. I don’t see Rhodah becoming a sharpening expert any time soon, so I thought I should make things relatively easy. As much as it pains me, I’m giving her a pull-through sharpener with carbide and ceramic guides. It will not win any contests, but her knife will stay sharper than 98% of the knives within a 10-mile radius of her house.

When I picked the knife out, I was happy to see that it had a pretty blue handle. I knew that would help with the sale. She confirmed that it was “cute,” and we were in business.

I made the mistake of saying I could make a belt sheath for it, so now I have to do that.

When the knife arrived, I liked it so much I was extremely jealous, so I ordered a sister knife in M390 steel, which is harder. It’s not here yet.

The Smith Pocket Pal sharpener I ordered has been tested on a stubborn Forschner kitchen knife, and it put a very good edge on it. It looks rough, but it will cut just fine.

I decided to get a real sharpener for myself. I have hones and diamond stones, and they work, but a modern sharpener will give you nearly exactly the edge you want, all the way down a curved blade, without the need for a lot of skill or youth-grade eyesight.

You can blow well over a thousand dollars on a knife sharpener if you have no life whatsoever and give your knives the names of female anime characters, but it looks like you can do very, very well for two hundred bucks. A company called KME makes a gadget which will put a beautiful edge on knives up to 10″ long. I ordered one. True nerds like them a great deal, and that’s good enough for me.

I hope it works out.

I told my buddy Mike about it, and he said he only sharpens his knives on one side. I had to sit down. I shook for a while. He said it saved time.

Maybe he’s onto something. Sushi chefs use knives sharpened on one side, and they do a fine job. Sharpening one side of a knife takes no skill, and as Mike says, it’s fast.

The big knock on Mike’s system is that it can make it hard to make a straight cut.

MAC, a Japanese manufacturer, recommends a big bevel on one side of the knife and a tiny one on the other. They claim it makes it easier to make thin slices, and it doesn’t make the blade drift. That’s interesting. I might have to try that. I could get another chef knife.

Mike didn’t come up with his system after years of study under Hattori Hanzo. He was just too lazy to learn how to sharpen a knife. What if it turns out laziness has worked out better than work?

I usually use a Mundial santoku with a plastic NSF grip. I think I paid $18. This is what real chefs use when they’re not on TV, by the way. A restaurant will hire a company, and the company will come around every so often with a bunch of sharpened Forschner or Mundial knives with thin stainless blades, and they’ll take the restaurant’s dull knives away to be restored. I know some chefs have knife rolls full of overpriced, impractical Wusthofs and Globals, but you’re probably not going to see 35 greasy Wusthofs if you barge into the kitchen at Morton’s on a busy Saturday night. I have never worked in a commercial kitchen, but I’ll bet expensive knives are only seen in the hands of prima donnas.

The Mundial sharpens to a razor edge in about 5 seconds, it loves the dishwasher, it’s springy, and it can’t rust. If you gave me a big, heavy Sabatier that cost $200, I would thank you, put it in a drawer, and keep using the Mundial.

I’m going to spend $15 on another Mundial and sharpen it the MAC way. It will be an interesting experiment. If it doesn’t work, I’ll have one more chef’s knife. If it does, it could revolutionize my sharpening practices.

I would have to come up with a good lie to tell Mike, though.

Knives are so much better than they were when I was a kid, it’s a wonder anyone still has a knife more than 40 years old. Edges last way longer, handles don’t disintegrate, corrosion is no longer an issue, and most pocket knives now have locks to keep them from closing and severing finger tendons. Old knives look really, really bad compared to new ones.

Today I saw a video from a guy who knew T.B. Joshua. His name is Mfon Tommy. He says Joshua’s last message to the disciples was, “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Jesus said this on the night he prayed in the garden, and after he said it, he went away and returned to find the disciples were sleeping and ignoring his warning.

I thought this was all very interesting. Jesus left, and he will come back. He will come back to rapture certain Christians, he will depart for 7 years, and he will return a second time to rule the earth.

While he is gone, the world will undergo a period of suffering called the tribulation. In the Revelation, Jesus called it “the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth.”

It may be that Joshua was warning the world about what was about to come. You don’t want to be here during the tribulation. The government will inflict all sorts of suffering on you to make you take the mark of the beast. The beast mindset is already setting in. Governments are destroying liberty and crushing protestors all over the world.

Rhodah had a rapture dream last night. She had written a book, and she had to pay a man 500 units of some currency in order to have it published. When she gave him the money, he grabbed her and took her to heaven using an escalator. When she arrived, she met people who had died. Some were people she expected to be saved, but some were pleasant surprises.

Her sister and her sister’s new baby, who was still a baby in the dream, were also raptured.

Rhodah said there was a division between the dead and the raptured. They could talk, but they couldn’t merge.

Rhodah hates escalators. It’s something we disagree about. I took a smug satisfaction in the presence of the escalators.

My understanding of the rapture is that the dead will rise first and stay in heaven. The living who are worthy will go to heaven for 7 years, for the marriage supper of the lamb. Then they’ll have to return. One would expect the dead and the raptured to be separated in heaven.

Jesus is a raptured person. He went to heaven in his flesh body. It makes sense that we would be like him. The Bible says the rapture is a harvest, accomplished with a sickle, and elsewhere, it calls Jesus the firstfruit of the harvest. He is the first of many. He will return to live on earth, so the raptured should return as well.

Was the dream prophetic? Rhodah’s nephew is a few weeks old, and he will only be a baby for another year and a few months.

The book seems to be her testimony. She needs to get it out there. Maybe she needs a blog.

Pest Control Season Opens

The first squirrel of the season has been ushered across the river Styx.

In reality, I didn’t usher him anywhere. He is lying dead in my front yard, where I shot him.

I’m glad I know how to skin and cook squirrels, because we may be headed for unbelievably hard times, but I don’t plan to eat any more squirrels unless I have to or they start growing a lot bigger. It’s too much work for three ounces of meat. My new policy is to leave them to rot.

Killing animals should serve a purpose. In the case of a squirrel, the animal’s death is its own justification. They ate the fuel gauge on my garden tractor, they ate a lot of my peaches, they chew on my lawn furniture, and they are currently eating my expensive aluminum gate. Also, one got into my living room. The life of every squirrel on my property, present and future, has been forfeited, exactly like the lives of mice, roaches, mosquitoes, rattlesnakes, coons, spiders, armadillos, and any traveling salesman who has the guts to scale my fence.

Hunting season started a few days back. I don’t really hunt. It has been too hot, and I haven’t felt like it. I walk around carelessly, carrying a rifle, hoping something that needs killing makes a mistake.

I stalked two other squirrels during my walk today, but I hesitated to shoot, and they took off. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to kill them cleanly. I don’t know why I care. I don’t care about killing mice cleanly.

The squirrel that met its end was in my front yard, as I looped back to the house. It climbed up a palm and shook its tail at me, which I took to be an insult. Sadly for the squirrel, the palm has a very thick trunk, so there was no possibility of firing a shot off the property if I missed him.

I didn’t drop him quickly. I was using a scope and shooting from maybe 30 feet, and the shot went through his upper front leg, which means I missed his heart by maybe three fourths of an inch. It’s hard to use a scope up close unless you practice, which I don’t. I had to chase him around and blast him a few more times when he stopped moving.

I would like to start using a shotgun. It’s not good to shoot an animal 4 or 5 times, even if it is a squirrel. I like using a scope, but they just don’t work for me at short distances. You have to put a .22 through the center of a squirrel’s head or chest in order to kill him quickly, and that is not easy when you’re thinking about the distance between the scope and the barrel and how close you are to the squirrel.

Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to get acceptable deals on 16 gauge ammunition, and I only have a few boxes. I can get the wrong stuff for about 68 cents per shot. The 12 gauge picture is somewhat better, but my only 12-gauge is not exactly a squirrel gun. Maybe in our dystopian present, with the possibility of starvation looming, it would be smart to get a 12-gauge hunting shotgun and some shells for birds and squirrels.

It’s liberating to give up on cleaning squirrels. I don’t have to deal with the stink and the mess now. I just kick the dead squirrel out where other animals will see it, and I’m done.

A shotgun would improve things a lot. In addition to killing more squirrels, I wouldn’t have to spend time stalking slowly or standing still. When I stand still, the bugs catch up with me. With a shotgun, I’d be able to blast away at any squirrel I see, as long as it was not directly between me and a neighbor’s property, so I wouldn’t have to wait for special opportunities.

By walking faster, I’d get bitten less and exercise more, and maybe I’d also see and terminate more squirrels.

Maybe I’ll grab a new shotgun. Better to have and not need…

Tomorrow I’ll try a different .22 anyway. Maybe the Marlin and I just don’t get along.

Your Christmas is in a Container in Long Beach

I don’t want to depend on preachers, but I like seeing good ones at work, and they are few these days. T.B. Joshua is dead, hateful, intolerant lovers of sexual abomination got him removed from Youtube, and his church has been torn apart by selfish disciples. I still watch Mark Hemans, but he doesn’t seem to have any useful information about the times we live in. I watch an obscure Christian in Scotland, too.

Today I’m watching a man who calls himself Wiseman Daniel. He worked under T.B. Joshua, doing the same things Joshua did. He left and started his own church. Unlike some other people who started out at the Synagogue Church of all Nations, Daniel left on good terms, and I haven’t been able to find any stories about scandal or corruption.

I think Joshua is the one who put the title “Wiseman” on Daniel. He had more than one person at SCOAN who held that office.

I enjoy watching him. He goes up to people and tells them the secrets of their lives, and he helps them get out from under curses. This is what Jesus did. What percentage of preachers are doing it? I have never seen a preacher or other Christian at any of my churches do it.

I haven’t seen him ask for money or pimp the money gospel.

If you work miracles that help people, and if you free them from demons and curses, they are going to give you money or at least try. You don’t have to beg.

Today I learned a bit more about the shortages in America. China is now officially the biggest exporter of goods on Earth. One country, controlled by savages who are planning to go to war with us soon. That’s who has the most control over the flow of needed goods into our country. How about that?

About 40% of the cargo ships that enter the US go through Long Beach and Los Angeles. There are no viable substitute ports. California is a God-hating state controlled by delusional lovers of socialism and sodomy, and its officials can choke the rest of us off at will. Even if the Chinese behave, we still have to hope our enemies in California are merciful.

California has insane rules on the unloading of ships. They favor unions, and they won’t let independent truckers in. Biden is paying truckers to stay home and eat potato chips, and this makes things even worse. America’s waters are full of goods we need, but we can’t touch them. They’re like presents mommy put on top of the refrigerator until Christmas.

One of the worst ways to be cursed is to have what you need and be unable to use it. You can see this in the Bible. It refers to men who have wives only other men sleep with, for example. It’s God’s punishment for depriving him of our faithfulness. Here we are, able to choose God and live in fidelity with him, but we deprive him while we fornicate with evil spirits and the government.

America has oil, food, and all sorts of natural resources. We have a huge labor pool. We even have merchandise, a few miles offshore. We just can’t get decent access to any of these blessings. We cursed God and deprived him, so he returned the favor.

Here’s something God told me: the way God treats us is a reflection on us, not him.

You can read the Bible yourself and see that the above sentence is correct. It’s a principle expressed over and over in the Bible, in different ways.

We are not victims. We caused all our own problems. We are still causing them. We are provoking worse punishments, so the future will be more unpleasant than the present.

Biden says the shortages are good. He says they prove we’re prosperous. He says we are buying things up because we have money. Not true, and of course, he knows it. Affluence isn’t pushing gas to $4 per gallon. It’s not causing Chinese factories and coal mines to close. It’s not trapping cargo ships at anchorage or drying up supplies of things like beans and rice. It didn’t kill the wind that provided England with electricity.

Biden is a prodigious, unhesitant, and unrepentant liar, and he is probably lying because he doesn’t want to offend union bosses or the California politicians they own. Also, conventional wisdom says Americans will vote against an incumbent if they think our economy is bad, and Biden is aware of this.

In Zambia, they say, “America has no president.” That’s close to true.

The shortages haven’t hit very hard yet. What will Biden say when we’re back in July of 2020? “It’s great that people can’t buy eggs. Eggs are bad for you. Meat causes global warming. It’s high time we started eating less.”

It will be hard for leftists to put a positive spin on running out of fruits and vegetables. They practically worship them. They are, after all, the children of Cain.

I think America is a sinking ship, and it’s no fun being on a sinking ship, even if you know you’ll be rescued. You know you’ll have to watch most of your companions drown. I’ll take it, though. Jesus said we would always have the poor with us. We will also have the damned with us. Their numbers can be reduced, but they will always be in the majority. I’m glad I have an assurance I can be saved.

I believe Jesus is the white horseman of the apocalypse, and that horseman carries a bow, which is a weapon that can only be used against one person at a time. The white horseman can’t shoot a nation. He can only choose individuals.

In the Old Testament, God talked about nations a lot. This nation will prosper. That nation will starve. He even allowed a few Jewish priests to atone for the sins of all of Israel and Judea. The New Testament is different. It’s about individuals. Jesus said he would pit fathers against sons, for example. He will take one or two people out of a family and leave the rest to die in their rebellion and pride. He still works that way. One person in a house will be raptured. The rest, who fought with that person and thought him a fool, will wake up in the tribulation and start begging to die.

The red horseman is murder and war. One person can’t have a war, but two nations can. The black horseman is famine. One person can’t have a famine, but a nation can. The green horseman is pestilence. One person can’t have a plague, but a nation can.

The white horseman is a man of conquest, according to the Bible. Conquest is the capture of people or land that belongs to another leader. Satan is the god of this world, according to Jesus. People are born belonging to Satan. Every person who is saved is an object of conquest.

War isn’t always conquest. There have been wars in which neither side wanted to rule the other.

I expect rapturees to be like the folks who were recently airlifted out of Afghanistan. A few will leave this mess behind, and the rest, who rightfully belong here under Satan’s power, will remain on Earth.

The people who were taken from South Vietnam and Afghanistan were traitors, like Christians. They turned on the dominant factions in their countries and helped outsiders. Satan is the ruler of Earth, and real Christians are all guilty of treason. When Jesus takes us away, it will be to give us political asylum.

The vax and passport protests are hitting very unexpected places now. The Netherlands and Austria are involved. They’re protesting in Israel and Long Island; not exactly Trump territory. A city in Germany has banned unvaccinated people from grocery stores. Sound familiar?

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

What is it that is telling people who don’t know God to resist mandates and passports? It’s not reason. It has to be supernatural.

I seriously believe the vax passports are going to evolve into the mark of the beast. Watching eager, broken-spirited people scan their passports into brand-new machines outside of ordinary office buildings is chilling. Soylent Green is here. Today. Suddenly. And this is just the sharp end of the nail. This is the trailer. The movie will be like Hollywood’s most sensational dreams of upheaval and despair.

I wonder when the shortages will become real to an America that doesn’t want to listen. People dismiss the news because they can still buy things. They treat the news as though it were coming from Alex Jones. It’s not, though. It’s the MSM. Even Biden has acknowledged that the problem exists.

Will God turn things around before Christmas and hold the black horseman back? If he did, it would just convince skeptics normal life was about to resume.

Worldly people are convinced global warming is real, in spite of overwhelming evidence that it’s either trivial or nonexistent, yet they expect shortages, hate, and disease to go away all by themselves in the near future, for no good reason.

I wish God would get it over with. It’s like squeezing a big, painful pimple that won’t burst. I would like to see an end to the tension and delusion. I don’t want to wish the tribulation on anyone, but most people are already doomed to experience it, and millions will presumably be saved once they feel its sting. I’m not wishing damnation on people.

I want out of this place. I want my wife out. I don’t want to have kids during this age. I don’t want to ever see a child of ours wearing a mask.