Exodus Begins

I am now the proud owner of a bouncing baby fiancee. I am even allowed to use her real first name on my blog.

That’s a picture of me and Rhodah at some heathen temple or other. We spent 9 whole days and two half-days in Egypt, satisfying the requirements of the American fiancee visa program, not to mention our own desire to see each other in person.

I think the photo was shot at Luxor, but I’m not sure. Our Guide Ahmed (no, the other Ahmed) shot it and sent it to me, so it comes up out of sequence with the photos I shot.

I know a summary will be more interesting than a long description of the trip, so here it is: we had a magnificent time. The weather was unbearably hot. We both got colds. The food was usually bad. We were sleep-deprived nearly every day. Doesn’t matter. In person, we get along exactly the way we get along in video chats, and that’s what counts. I have zero misgivings about inviting this woman to share my life.

We met at Cairo International. Her flight arrived shortly before mine, so she was waiting for me with our guides. We had private guides for the whole trip. It was expensive, but it was the right way to go. We never had to find ways to get to and from airports and hotels. We had expert advice on everything, including getting PCR tests before leaving for home. We were spared a lot of hard work.

We booked our flights to and from Egypt and our main hotel ourselves. After that, we left everything to a company called Emo Tours. Every penny was well spent. They handled everything professionally, and we were allowed to focus more on each other than on the difficulties of travel.

We spent two days in Giza at a pleasant hotel with views of the pyramids. Of course, we toured the pyramids and the Egyptian Museum, along with other local sights. Then we flew to Aswan and joined a Nile cruise Emo Tours booked for us. For four days, we never had to worry about food or activities. Everything was provided for us. They even did our laundry in about three hours. After the cruise, we chose to spend two more days in the hotel in Giza, doing nothing whatsoever. This was the best part of the trip. I highly recommend scheduling idle days during foreign trips. Otherwise, you start to feel like a UPS package, being hauled from this place to that with no time to think.

I suppose I should give my impressions of travel in Egypt.

First of all, I was very glad to find that the Egyptians were extremely friendly, even when we weren’t doing business with them. They were very polite. They almost always tried to be helpful. Most spoke English.

After 911 and all the friction America has had with Muslim jihadists, I felt my attitude toward Muslims and Arabs was way too negative. I was glad to see that my experiences with Egyptians took the edge off that. The Bible says God loves Egypt, and it says the Egyptians will be brothers with the Jews and Assyrians. No matter how many problems come to us through jihadis, God’s perspective is the one that matters.

In Isaiah 19, God refers to Egypt as “my people” and Israel as “my inheritance.” Obviously, God does not hate Egypt.

After landing in Egypt, we were driven from the airport to Giza, and it takes an hour or so. Cairo has a poor highway infrastructure. The president of Egypt is building modern highways, so there are some nice exceptions, but generally, you will find yourself moving slowly among drivers who appear to be trying to kill themselves.

Egyptians have no regard for lane markings, and they routinely drive with their cars less than a foot apart. Virtually all cars in Cairo have body damage. Drivers also honk the horn constantly, to the point where they have developed a Morse-like language that includes insults, questions, greetings, and expressions of gratitude. There are very few traffic lights. People just jam into intersections and negotiate.

You will see interesting sights on the road. I saw one toddler in a van, propped up so she could lean out an open window and enjoy the breeze. I saw a man driving with his tiny daughter on his lap. I saw scooters zipping around in heavy traffic with three men on them. People hang off the steps of moving buses. Women sit behind their husbands on scooters, riding sidesaddle without a care in the world.

The bottom line is that it’s a very bad idea to rent a car in Egypt, even if you’re used to driving in a place like Miami.

On the way to the hotel, we saw countless half-finished apartment buildings with bare rebar sticking out of their uppermost stories. They generally had no window glass. I was not able to get a good explanation for their state of incompletion. Maybe the Egyptians build them one brick at a time, as money becomes available.

It looked as thought some people had arrived in the area and started building a city, and then they ran off suddenly.

I saw some bizarre sights, such as an incomplete apartment building with an excavator on the roof. Who puts an excavator on a roof? How did they get it up there?

I don’t have a lot of complaints about the hotel. It was reasonably clean, everything worked, the toilets had bidets, and we had a good view of the pyramids. The restaurant was acceptable. The neighborhood was a mess, however. Streets were torn up everywhere. More of the president’s projects.

Our hotel had a sliding steel gate and a guard booth. Whenever we entered in a vehicle, they made it stop outside, and a sniffer dog walked around it before it was allowed in. We went through this in more than one place. They also had a metal detector with a conveyor-belt x-ray machine. I don’t know exactly what they’re expecting, but they are obviously determined not to let tourists get blown up.

Tourist attractions had barriers set up, and armed police were everywhere. We went through too many checkpoints to remember.

We found Giza to be a difficult neighborhood to live in. In the hotel, we were fine, but walking around the streets was not easy. The Egyptians had built strange sidewalks. First of all, they were maybe 10″ higher than the street, so there was a lot of stepping up and stepping down. Second, they were incomplete. There were many places where you could walk down a sidewalk for a long distance and then find the sidewalk ended for no reason, making it necessary for you to walk in the street among moving cars. Taking a walk in Giza didn’t make sense. Exploring required a vehicle, and for that, you had to pay a driver. Then the driver would probably take you where he wanted to go, not where you wanted to go. They were always promoting businesses.

In Athens or Paris, you can step out of your hotel, walk down the sidewalk, and take your pick of restaurants and shops. Not so in Giza. Walking a block was a difficult project, and there were very few businesses you would want to visit.

The sidewalks and streets were filthy. No matter where I was, I always smelled one kind of poop or another. There was litter everywhere. We saw an Egyptian open his car door just so he could throw a fast food wrapper in the street.

Giza, like much of Egypt, was full of construction rubble. When they performed demolition, they didn’t clear the mess away. They just learned to walk around the piles. In Egypt, there are piles of concrete and stone that have obviously been in place for years.

They say open-toed shoes don’t work in Egypt. This is true. By the end of the day, your feet would be caked with filth.

For us, the answer to the Giza problem was to eat at the hotel. As long as we had food, nothing else mattered.

Our tours started the day after we arrived. First, we went to the pyramids. A guide named Osama ran the show. He had our driver take us to the pyramid area, and we saw the two biggest pyramids up close. We felt we should not visit without going inside one, so we paid for an upgrade.

At the base of the biggest pyramid, accurately named the Great Pyramid, we found a sort of shed and some Arabs. One tore our tickets, and we were shown the angled tunnel that led into the King’s Chamber, deep inside the rock.

For reasons unknown to me, the rectangular tunnel is about one meter high, and it penetrates the pyramid at a steep downward angle. There are no stairs; just a wooden floor with slats running across it every foot or so to keep people from sliding.

An Egyptian volunteered to go with us. I didn’t particularly enjoy climbing down into the hole while hunched over and holding a heavy backpack I was not willing to leave with strangers. Rhodah was unburdened, so she was able to walk into the pyramid quickly.

After a certain distance, we reached a small chamber with more headroom, and then we had to exit the chamber on the other side, into another cramped tunnel angled upward. At the end, we came out in the King’s Chamber, which was just a room with a big, empty sarcophagus.

The man who came with us persuaded me to pose for pictures, but Rhodah wanted none of it. She had barely entered when she said she was leaving. I posed for a couple of shots and then followed her. Of course, I had to tip the Egyptian even though he had not made a deal with me.

Rhodah seemed uncomfortable as we made our way to the next attraction, which was a camel ride (her idea). We drove to an area where a bunch of tired-looking camels were lying in the sand waiting for tourists. By this time, the air was very hot, and there was a strong, constant wind. The wind picked up the powerful smell of camel poop and urine, not to mention the pungent odor of whatever the drivers were eating. It was not a smell one would strive to reproduce in one’s home for purposes of nostalgia.

The camel drivers had a tent set up, and Rhodah asked if she could sit in the shade for a bit. The drivers were very courteous and invited us both to sit and have tea. I declined, but she sat down. After a minute or so, she asked to walk back to the car. She was not feeling good, so she wanted to skip the ride. I, of course, had no excuse for not riding a camel, so they put me on one, and up it went.

You board a camel from the left, using a single stirrup to give you purchase. You hold onto a saddle horn once you’re seated. They tell you to lean back. Why? Because the camel’s rear goes up first, and if you lean back, you’re less likely to fall off toward the front. Just when you’re used to struggling not to fall forward, the camel’s front end comes up, and you have to hang on so you don’t fall off the back.

When the camel is standing, your behind is probably 7 feet off the ground. When it walks, it sways violently. I had to hang onto the horn very firmly, and I also squeezed the camel’s body with my legs. I wondered how anyone could sit one of these things in a race.

We made our way to the car, and somehow I managed to resist offers for more camel time.

This was my second time, being offered a ride on a camel. The first came in 1984. I was in Jerusalem, traveling with a Dutch girl, and for five dollars, they let her pose for photos on a camel. When my turn came, I told her and the driver to forget it. I have never had any desire at all to ride a camel, and I have only ridden horses, which smell a great deal less foul, under tremendous social pressure.

When Rhodah said she wanted to ride camels, I agreed to it because I wanted her to enjoy the trip, but my camel enthusiasm was still where it had been 37 years earlier. I should have refused to get on, since there was no point in doing it alone, but the guides had gone to the trouble to set it up, and the drivers needed money, so I took one for the team.

This was my last animal-riding event. I will never get on another camel, horse, donkey, mule, or elephant (don’t ask) again. People get offended when you say you don’t want to ride horses. It’s almost always women who get upset. They seem to be hardwired for horse riding, and they don’t seem to understand people who don’t have the gene. They seem to think you, too, secretly crave horse rides, and they appear to believe you will have a breakthrough and experience ecstasy once you’re up there plodding around.

I guess it’s like dancing. Women always think men will love dancing if they just do it enough. Not true. Love of dancing requires certain wiring which is almost always present in the female nervous system and generally absent in heterosexual males. I don’t love dancing any more than I love doing deep-knee bends or jumping jacks. I never think, “It would be great to get up and dance right now,” and I never have, even when extremely drunk. Doesn’t matter whether I’m in a crowd or alone. I just don’t feel the desire.

A famous song says, “Dance like nobody’s watching.” When nobody’s watching, I generally sit in a recliner.

The only times I’ve enjoyed dancing, I’ve enjoyed it because it let me share moments with women, or because I was deliberately making a fool of myself after drinking enough liquor to make me throw up later. Sometimes I make a small celebratory movement when a really good pizza comes out of the oven, but that’s about it.

To get back to riding horses, it’s just not for me. You’re too far off the ground, you’re on something which is nearly useless for carrying anything but a rider, it has no roof and no air conditioning, the only speed choices are way too slow and dangerously fast, and if you opt for fast, you’re pretty much asking for paralysis or a fractured skull if anything goes wrong. And sometimes horses don’t like their riders. My utility cart has never gotten angry at me or tried to bite me. I can put two people and a bunch of cargo in the cart, I can ride in comfort, and I don’t have to worry about breaking my pelvis if I hit an armadillo hole.

The whole horse-versus-machine debate was resolved for good when the Polish cavalry went up against German tanks. In 2021, a horse is a luxury, not a useful tool, and a luxury isn’t a luxury unless you like it.

Rhodah has no interest in dancing, which is one more reason why we suit each other. I don’t think she cares for riding camels, either. She just wanted to be able to say she had done it.

It’s a relief to know I have a woman who will never become bitter because I never dance with her. Some women seem to need dancing, the way a dog needs to be walked. Rhodah doesn’t even want to dance at our wedding. Tell me that isn’t a sign from heaven.

It’s wonderful, not having a bridezilla. There will be no “destination wedding,” requiring the guests and ourselves to spend six figures in order to create an event that looks good on Instagram and then ages poorly as the marriage quickly deteriorates. We will not be flying her relations over from Africa at 10 grand a pop so they can watch a one-hour event. There will be no hot air balloons or orchestras. We will not pay Jennifer Lopez to do a set.

In our hearts, we feel as though we’ve been married for years, so the purpose of a wedding will be to get legal and religous sanction for expanding our activities into all areas of matrimonial business. The wedding won’t be intended to make other people feel poor or to focus an unhealthy level of fleeting attention on the bride. While planning, we won’t find ourselves saying things like, “It has to be perfect.” We won’t get matching tattoos in Chinese. There will be no viral video of groomsmen and bridesmaids doing a dance routine. We’re just going to say, “Thank God that’s over. Now we can really live like man and wife.”

We have joked that two minutes after exchanging vows, we’ll shout, “Thank you for coming. GET OUT!”

Weddings are unimportant. Marriages are what matter.

You will put your heart into the one that really matters to you.

So, back to the camels. When my camel and I got to the car, Rhodah was saying she wanted to cancel the rest of the day.

We started talking, and I learned that something had happened to her in the tomb. She had felt that something wanted to kill her. She felt she couldn’t get air, so she ran back out. Even outside, she felt there wasn’t enough air. She wondered if she needed to go to a hospital, but she didn’t tell me that right away.

I wondered if she was experiencing claustrophobia. Before going into the pyramid, I wondered if I would become claustrophobic, myself. She said she didn’t have claustrophobia. She felt as if something were trying to take her air.

I said it sounded like a demonic attack, and she agreed. Something in the tomb didn’t like her.

The attack endangered the remainder of the trip. We had booked a Nile cruise, and the guides told us the weather in the cruise area was considerably hotter than it was in Cairo. We were headed for a place where highs were hitting 114°, and Rhodah didn’t know if she would feel she could breathe.

Our response was to have a prayer session and cast things out. Afterward, everything was fine, and the cruise was back on like Donkey Kong. It was a big relief, because I didn’t want to sit in a hotel in Giza for 9 days.

After this, we made a point of battling any spirits associated with the Satanic ruins we visited. We had no more problems, and Rhodah enjoyed visiting several more holes formerly occupied by pharaohs. We canceled the second half of our activities on the day she was attacked, but other than that, we were fine.

The next day, we visited the Egyptian Museum and Old Cairo, including a bazaar.

The museum was wonderful. King Tut’s stuff was there, and we saw a lot of other artifacts related to other prominent Egyptians. Our guide explained things to us. As we made our way around, we saw that ideas found in the Old Testament were not exclusive to Judaism.

We saw a throne belonging to Tutankhamen. It wasn’t for his use in life. It was to be included in his death goods, to be used in the afterlife. Pretty sad. A person who rejected Yahweh thought he would still have a throne and a bunch of golden treasures after his death.

There was a box in front of the throne, maybe four inches high and as deep and wide as a welcome mat. It was blue, with gold figures of men on it. The figures represented Tut’s enemies. This shows that the ancient Jews were not alone in believing their God would make their enemies their footstool. The box in front of the throne was for Tut’s feet.

I’ve also seen this concept expressed in modern times. Saddam Hussein created a mural of Bush I’s face, set into the floor of a hotel. The idea was that people’s shoes would touch his face all day. In the Muslim world, having someone show you the bottom of their shoe or throw a shoe at you is a great insult. It’s clearly related to the idea of using enemies as footstools.

We saw works depicting judgment. The ancient Egyptians believed their hearts would be weighed before their supreme “god,” Osiris. If their hearts were too heavy, they would be eaten by an evil baboon “god.” If not, they went on to become Osiris himself.

In Christianity, we become part of God if we receive salvation, and God says he looks on the heart. What ruins a man’s heart? The flesh. Our flesh is a lot like a baboon. Humans who remain undeveloped are just like monkeys, and monkeys are violent and selfish. Figuratively, you could say that if you let your flesh corrupt you and prevent you from being saved, a monkey has eaten your heart.

The cruise was very pleasant. We flew south from Cairo to Aswan, and that’s where we boarded the ship. Big Nile cruise ships are all about the same. They have several decks. The staterooms have twin beds and individual bathrooms with showers and tubs. Every ship has a big cafeteria where meals are served buffet-style, three times a day. Food is included in the cost of tickets. The cruise companies move from Aswan toward Luxor, dropping people periodically for excursions.

Knowing we had restraint, we used a single room with two beds. It was very comfortable, and everything was clean. The cleaning staff was funny. When they replaced the towels, they turned them into sculptures. One day you might get a towel crocodile, and the next, it might be a towel elephant with a rider.

The food was very good. Not phenomenal, but fine for our purposes. Every day, the dishes changed. They had a salad and dessert table, a row of entrees and sides, a large display of breads, and a daily soup. Beverages cost extra, but they were not expensive. The buffet was a good way to get familiar with a large number of dishes.

Early on, we learned we had enemies. There were people who would attack the desserts early, taking all the best stuff. I told Rhodah there were a bunch of fat German women, whom I never actually saw, going in commando-style. I said something she still keeps quoting: “Buffets bring out the worst in people.”

We resolved to be on time for meals from then on. I also decided we would collect food for all three courses at once, instead of waiting until we ate the previous courses. This way, we were nailing the good desserts while our enemies were still cramming entrees down quickly in hopes of finishing them in time for a sneak dessert attack.

We had no more problems. We cackled about our defeated foes.

The fruit and vegetables were excellent in Egypt. Unlike Americans, they don’t pick everything, and expect you to eat it, green. The tomatoes were better than anything I’ve had in America since my grandmother died. Her tomatoes were perfect.

I think our worst choice was the decision to visit Abu Simbel. This is a temple complex that was moved when the Aswan Dam was built. The Dam created Lake Naser, which rose and covered a lot of ancient sites. Abu Simbel, along with some other sites, was cut up and moved to higher ground.

The problem with Abu Simbel is that the drive to see it was three hours long, through open desert with no cell signals. It just isn’t worth it. We could have spent six hours, plus the time we spent at the complex, enjoying each other’s company. Instead we were crammed into a Hyundai Elantra, and I was behind a driver who kept his seat pushed back nearly all the way.

We spent four days on the cruise, and we had the same guide, Ahmed, the whole time. Ahmed is a young man with a master’s in archaeology. Like the other people in the area around Aswan, he’s a Nubian. That mean’s he’s mostly black. He informed us he was the King of the Nubians, so that’s how I referred to him from then on.

We saw a number of American black women while we were in Nubia. Ghetto “scholars” have convinced a lot of American blacks ancient Egyptians were black geniuses, so American blacks visit Egypt to see their accomplishments. Sadly, what they believe is not true. The Egyptians who did all the important things were olive-skinned caucasians, and later on, Greeks took over. Cleopatra was a Greek. She wasn’t Egyptian at all.

I read about DNA analysis involving Egypt, and it appears the modern Egyptians in the Cairo area are about 20% black, and that percentage comes from recent centuries. In the past, they were whiter.

Another thing critical race theorists may not like: the Egyptian temples tourists go to see were built by white Greeks. They are reconstructions and reproductions. We saw almost no temples built by Egyptians.

When the Greeks ruled Egypt, they wanted the locals on their side, so they built temples honoring Isis and all the others. The reason the temples look so good is that Greeks created them. I guess it’s probably also why they all look alike.

Egypt is full of people trying to sell souvenirs and cheap clothes. In Nubia, they have learned how to sell things to black women. They call them “cousin.” They approach, saying, “Sister! Sister!” They did this to Rhodah over and over. They thought she was an American.

Apparently, black American women are known for certain behaviors in Egypt. Our guide took pictures of us, and he seemed to be encouraging Rhodah to pose in certain ways that emphasized her rear end. Later, he admitted black American women do that kind of thing all the time. He was not happy about it, but he was willing to go along with it in order to make more money.

Nubians have a reputation for friendliness and gentleness. I found this to be well-deserved. As nice as the Egyptians in Cairo were, the Nubians had them beat.

Exploring Nubia was a little tough for me because I was sick. My nose started running a day or two after I got to Egypt. I thought I might have the kung flu, in spite of my vaccination. I never got very ill, but I felt feverish and dehydrated. Naturally, during this time, I had to do a tremendous amount of walking in the burning sun, in strong dry winds, with temperatures over 110°.

Rhodah and I fought the illness supernaturally, but she caught a little of it, too.

I felt differently depending on where I was. In the Cairo area, I felt weighed down. I thought it was a supernatural thing. I always feel heavy in Miami, which is a cursed city full of people who provoke God. In Nubia, I felt a lot lighter, but I still had to drink a lot of water and put up with feeling hot inside.

At some point during all this, I proposed. The proposal suited our natures. In Egypt, you can’t have a fancy proposal. You can’t dress up and go to a nice restaurant. You can’t hire mariachis or a skywriter. You pretty much have to spit it out and move on. One evening, I waited for a quiet moment, told Rhodah how I felt about her, which she already knew, and asked if she would marry me. Of course, she said she would. We knew what we were going to do, months ago.

For various practical reasons, I gave her one of my mother’s rings, which neither of us likes. She knew this was coming; we had a plan. Now that I’m in the States, I can go ahead and get a better ring I already chose.

I also gave her the matching watch, heavy and made from solid gold. Of course, it doesn’t fit. We plan to have it melted down and turned into something else.

During our last two days of rest at our Giza hotel, we got PCR tests. I had a feeling we were going to test positive. I was okay with it. Staying in Egypt with Rhodah until we tested negative sounded great to me. We both passed, though. I wondered whether the Egyptians were delivering false negatives just to keep tourism booming.

Rhodah’s plane landed in Zambia a couple of hours ago, so now we’re about to get to work on her American visa. We hope it comes through reasonably quickly. If not, we will just have to meet overseas a few more times.

Greece, Israel, and Italy are opening up. We’re going to start getting visas for Rhoda. I don’t need one because I’m American.

I expect things to go well. This relationship was put together while we were submitting to God, and besides, we’re crazy about each other.

As for Egypt, I can say a few things.

1. It’s not a beautiful country, although people think it is. It’s sand and rocks. Some deserts have natural beauty. Not the one in Egypt.

2. Egypt has a lot of potential. They just need to change their culture. There is too much emotion, and they don’t put much emphasis on rules and order. They work hard, but they don’t have focus, and they don’t seem to plan. They need to clean up their cities. They need to stop leaving garbage everywhere. They need to get rid of the piles of construction debris.

3. The summer weather is abominable. A guide told us to go after October. It won’t rain, but it won’t be 114°, either.

4. Private guides are the way to go. They don’t cost all that much, and you will have a very hard time without them. For one thing, you’ll have to get through a lot of security checkpoints.

5. Street crime is not bad, and they don’t hate Americans, so don’t assume everything you have will be stolen or that you will be beaten up.

6. Absolutely everyone in Egypt expects a tip. I actually met the president of Egypt briefly, and I had to give him 10 Egyptian pounds for running the country so well. Unless I’m kidding. Anyway, you will want to have tons of small notes (50 pounds or less) for tipping, and you can forget about using a public toilet if you can’t come up with 5 pounds. You don’t have to tip during a cruise, but when it’s over, they will expect the equivalent of $32 in an envelope, to be shared by employees. That’s for a short cruise.

7. Cairo’s airport is useless. There is nothing to do while you wait. Also, you can’t check your bag and then go back out to the terminal to eat. Once your bag is checked, you have to stay in the area where the gates are. There are lounges, but they are not good.

8. The restaurants stink. I don’t think this is universally true. I think the problem is that guides take people to bad restaurants where they get kickbacks. If you complain, you can get them to take you to better places. The food is similar to Arab food in other places, but it seems like other Arabs cook somewhat better than Egyptians. Egypt has a unique dish called koshary, and you should try it. It’s pasta and rice, covered with a bunch of other stuff. You add vinegar and hot sauce to it. Very nice.

9. You will be mobbed all day by people wanting to sell you things. They’re like biting flies. Smile a lot, say complimentary things, and keep walking. Do not let them hand you anything. If they manage to drape something over you, take it off gently and set it down somewhere.

10. Haggling is everywhere, and it gets tiresome. Asking prices are insanely high. Don’t be surprised if a 700-pound item goes down to 100. Personally, I was okay with being overcharged somewhat, because these people are starving due to the coronavirus hysteria. Rhodah and I practically had Egypt to ourselves.

We bought a certain amount of junk, but we avoided all the stuff with ancient religious symbols on it. We told the guides and merchants over and over: Christians don’t put idols in their houses. Of course, nominal Christian merchants insisted we were wrong, and we really offended a lot of people, but that’s their problem.

11. Don’t go into the Great Pyramid. It’s very unpleasant, and there is nothing to see. Tut’s tomb is also pretty weak, but at least there are murals. Tut died young, and they didn’t have a big tomb ready. His tomb is like a one-car garage.

That’s it. Maybe I will write more later.

Plus Praise Report

Today (May 26) during our first daily prayer session, “Rebecca” and I talked about cooking.

The subject came up while we were discussing Derek Prince, the English evangelist. We both enjoy his teaching videos and books. We have been watching his videos on marriage.

I watched a video about the duties of a wife. A lot of what he said seemed right, but I noticed a couple of things. He didn’t have much to say about sex and attraction, and he seemed to be buffaloed concerning the topic of submission.

No teacher is perfect. I recommend Prince to people all the time, but I have one reservation about him. Although he married twice, he seems feminine.

What this makes me wonder is whether he is a good judge of a woman’s duties in marriage.

Like many Christians, he seems skittish about the subject of female submission. He refers to the scripture in Ephesians that says Christians should submit to each other, without reference to sex.

Here it is:

And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit;

Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord;

Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ;

Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.

For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;

That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word,

That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.

As you can see, the part about submitting to each other is a general admonition aimed at Christians as a whole. The part about wives is specifically directed to them, and it is followed by, “the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.”

Is Jesus supposed to submit to us? Do I even have to answer that?

We only know of one example of Jesus submitting to another believer. He allowed John the Baptist to baptize him, and John, knowing Jesus was in authority over him, questioned it.

Here is the exchange:

But John forbad him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?

And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered him.

After the baptism, John lost followers to Jesus, and John was glad. He knew Jesus was his head.

Here is what Peter said:

Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives;

While they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear.

Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel;

But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.

For after this manner in the old time the holy women also, who trusted in God, adorned themselves, being in subjection unto their own husbands:

Even as Sara obeyed Abraham, calling him lord: whose daughters ye are, as long as ye do well, and are not afraid with any amazement.

Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.

Obviously, wives are supposed to submit to husbands, and the reverse is not true.

Some people think female submission is a curse, but that’s wrong. Eve’s status as a helper, created “for the man,” was established BEFORE God cursed the earth.

When the curse was pronounced, God said, “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Does this mean having the husband rule was a curse? No. Adam already had rule over Eve, and he failed to meet his obligation.

“Thy desire shall be to thy husband” means, “You will want to rule your husband.” You can look that up. God told Cain sin’s desire was to him, using the same idiom. When God added, “he shall rule over thee,” he was completing the curse: “You will be ruled over by one you want to rule.” Being ruled by a husband is not a curse unless you think you should be ruling him. If you love and trust your husband, being ruled over him is a blessing.

It works the same way with God. We are used to authorities who are corrupt, stupid, weak, and toxic, so it’s hard to accept the idea of being an unquestioning slave to God. If we had never known useless authorities, the idea of slavery to God would be just fine with us, and we would pursue it out of self-interest.

Eve, a drug-abusing feminist witch, brought her punishment on herself. She wanted to be greater than Adam and God. God was the perfect protector and provider, but she chose her own path, which was a path of forced subordination to someone she could not fully trust.

I mentioned Prince’s erroneous teaching to Rebecca, and she didn’t like it one bit. She said, “A creature with two heads is a monster.” That sums it up.

Modern men are terrified of feminists, so male Christians duck and dodge when it comes to submission. No wonder men are so effeminate and inclined to homosexuality now. We would rather please girlfriends and wives than God, so we become like them, not him.

There is a huge problem with femininity among black men in America. People think they’re the most masculine men, but there is actually an epidemic of black male femininity. Many only look masculine.

Women run many black households. Men are pursued and prized, like princesses in fairy tales. Black men tend to dress more like women than whites and Asians. They wear bright colors and daring outfits. They are more likely to wear colorful shoes and gobs of jewelry. They have a higher rate of homosexuality; the concept of “being on the down low” is well-known among blacks, but most white people don’t even know what it is. The majority of black American men impregnate women and then leave them to be de facto fathers of their children. Black women are providers and protectors in America.

Black women are well aware of the problem of effeminacy among black men. You can go to Youtube and watch them analyze it with extraordinary insight. It’s the reason some black women are turning to white men. They are tired of feeling they are not allowed to be feminine.

You may not believe black men are more likely to be homosexual, but it’s true. Consider the AIDS rate, which is higher among black men. It’s nearly impossible for a man to get AIDS from sex with a woman; look it up. And not enough black men are using intravenous drugs to explain the disparity.

White men are headed the same way. Whenever a bad idea takes over among black Americans, white Americans latch onto it and make it their own.

Black Americans already have feminism, in that they have female-dominated families and women who are much more successful and educated than men, as well as passive men who depend on them for income. They also have a sky-high abortion rate, an extremely low marriage rate, and an epidemic of attractive, successful, childless spinsters. Look at the future of white Americans who love feminism.

Jewish and Latin households also have major problems with matriarchy. It’s common for Jewish men to be terrified of their wives and mothers.

Derek Prince was born in 1915, and he was still intimidated by feminism. Makes you wonder what chance the rest of us have. The answer is that we need the Holy Spirit. One of his prime purposes is to negate the power of peer pressure. Peer pressure is the main tool of the Spirit of Antichrist.

We were talking about this today, and I noted that men have a way of taking over female pursuits. Men make better hairdressers, interior decorators, wedding planners, and clothing designers than women. Now castrated men are also turning out to be better “female” athletes. Rebecca added cooking to the conversation.

That got me thinking. I cook, and men are unquestionably more talented in the kitchen. Maybe it’s a bad idea for me to cook. I have to cook because I live alone, but should I continue when I’m married?

I thought about cooking in the Bible. I knew Sarah cooked for Abraham, on demand. I knew Rebecca (Isaac’s wife, not my Rebecca) cooked for Jacob, to get Esau’s blessing for him. Mary and Martha served food, and Lazarus did not. On the other hand, a pharaoh released a butler from prison but executed a baker.

I looked at the Bible a little later, and I saw that Gideon and Jacob both cooked. I haven’t seen any indication that God disapproved. What should I conclude?

Maybe the best thing is to turn the kitchen over to Rebecca in the future. I can show her what I know and take my hands off. Maybe I’ll just cook on special occasions.

I don’t have any other feminine pursuits. I can’t sew or knit. I hate musicals. I don’t have a lot of interest in furnishing a house. Kenny G. gives me indigestion.

I suppose if Rebecca rules the kitchen, it will make our lives go more smoothly. She is horrified by my ideas about kitchen decoration (none) and equipment (institutional). To me, the perfect kitchen is a room with stainless steel walls and a tile floor with a drain. I would have a garden hose hanging on one wall if I could. Not homey, but man, would it produce.

A kitchen is a kind of workshop, so I think of it as a place that should be practical and filled with good tools. It’s hard to reconcile that with female notions of domesticity.

Rebecca is not a hotshot cook right now, but I can turn her into one, fast.

If she has to trust me, I suppose I have to trust her as well.

In other news, I have a praise report.

When Rebecca and I pray, I pray for God to give us favor with people. The word says that when a man’s ways please God, God will make even his enemies to be at peace with him. In a time of increasing persecution, I want government employees and everyone else who seems to have power over us to be blind to anything that could cause friction with us, and I want God to move them to help us instead. We are going to be working on immigration, among other things, and we will need God’s help to get Satan’s children on our side.

Yesterday, my food processor stopped working. It made a horrible noise while I was making pizza. Somehow, I got the wrong idea. I thought it had gears in it.

I opened it up with difficulty, and I saw that everything inside was fine. Then it occurred to me to check the blade. It was damaged, so it was letting the processor’s shaft spin inside the hub.

I had destroyed four caps that covered screws in the top of the machine, and I had also damaged the plastic cover on the shaft.

I should add that before I got into the machine, I got so discouraged I started shopping for a new machine. It looks like all the new ones except Robot Coupe (very expensive) have issues. I nearly blew $230 on a machine recommended by America’s Test Kitchen.

I ordered the cheapest used blade I could find, and it came in at around $20. I saw that a shaft cover cost around the same amount. Then I noticed that someone on the web said he had gotten a new shaft cover (“sheath”) for a few dollars from Cuisinart. It wasn’t listed on their website.

After 9 p.m., I called Cuisinart, expecting to hear that they weren’t open for business. I got a very nice lady who didn’t seem to understand the mechanics of the processor. I explained things patiently, and finally, she found the part. She said she would complete the order and send it. I said I needed to know the price. She said she would send it for nothing!

I decided to see what a new blade cost. She said she wasn’t sure. She thought it was around $8.50. She could check and put it on the same order.

After a few minutes, she told me it was on the way. I asked about payment information. She said there was no charge!

On the web, new ones cost at least $40.

I damaged two parts of the machine, and she covered it for nothing. I canceled the Ebay sheath order.

How about that? Total favor, and the lady could not have been nicer. Told me to have a great week and so on. I saved at least $35.

As for the caps on top of the machine, I filled the holes with silicone caulk. Done.

When the new stuff arrives, I’ll pound the new sheath onto the shaft, and I’ll be in business again. Until then, if I need to make dough, I can do it by hand or use one of my stand mixers.

The old sheath still works. It’s just chewed up from me working on it. I could probably restore the blade by pouring epoxy into the hub. Anyway, I have a different blade for dough if I really need it. I don’t know if it will work for small batches, but it might.

That’s about it for today. Sufficient unto the day are the blessings thereof.

Another Institution Crumbles Under the Weight of its Own Wokeness

It’s interesting how the Antichrist’s children are poking their noses into every aspect of life.

In case you didn’t know, Epicurious no longer helps people with beef. You can’t post a new beef recipe, for example. Why? Cows are just too flatulent. Their rearward outbursts are an existential threat to mankind because they supposedly cause global warming. That means no prime rib for you.

It’s bad enough that Amazon recommends horrible victimhood-mentality movies and books I would never read even at the point of a gun. It’s bad enough that Yelp encourages people to accuse restaurateurs of racism. Now I’m a bad person because I like cheeseburgers.

When did it become appropriate to inject leftism into everything we do? When did it become a great idea for businesses to insult, falsely accuse, shame, and offend half of their customers?

Here’s a crazy idea: if you have a business website, how about concentrating on making your customers happy and fulfilling their desires instead of preaching to them? Am I out of line here? Let’s say I want to buy a pair of shoes online. Is it okay if a shoe website is only about shoes, or do I have to read about my imaginary privilege and be told I’m the source of all the world’s problems?

Am I really supposed to base my principles on things millennial marketing majors scribble on retail sites? These kids can’t do anything but Facebook and text. They know nothing about the world. I might as well go outside and seek advice from squirrels.

The Antichrist offers a filthy alternative righteousness. Remember, “anti” doesn’t just mean “against”; it means “instead of.” Satan wants his son to be the new Jesus. What did Jesus’ father do? He set up a temple which was basically a barbecue facility. All day, animals went in to be cooked. Their throats were cut. Their hides and hooves were removed. Blood went everywhere. Then the priests cooked them over flames. The smell in the temple’s neighborhood must have been wonderful.

Satan saw an opportunity. He could out-righteous Yahweh. Killing is mean, right? Fantastic. The blood shed and meat consumption at the temple left the door open for Satan to introduce the worship of animals and even plants. “We’re nicer than God, so we’re better!”

Now we’re being pushed to accept the false notion that killing animals for food is evil. This, not global warming, is why Epicurious went off the rails. Spirits are pushing a sick vegan agenda, and cattle are easy targets because raising them takes a lot of resources.

Jesus himself ate meat, he helped people net fish which later suffocated, and he ordered Peter to catch a fish with a hook. He also wrote the Jewish law, prior to his incarnation. He ordered the Jews to kill and eat animals. A vegetarian Jew was an apostate, under the laws Jesus himself wrote. Eating the Passover lamb was mandatory. Sacrifices were mandatory. Writing Torah scrolls on animal hide was mandatory. Wearing tefillin was mandatory. Judaism was always an animal-killing, meat-eating religion. Abraham made his covenant with God by killing several animals and laying their dressed bodies on the ground.

Cain behaved like a vegetarian, refusing to slaughter animals for God, and he was vile. He was the first murderer. Just like the Antichrist’s children, he had a victim complex and an alternative version of righteousness.

People think they know better than God now, when it comes to meat. Western women are among the biggest offenders. In the past, we rightly dismissed self-righteous vegetarians as fringe eccentrics. As their power grows, they are becoming more and more controlling.

It’s amazing how nuts and once-powerless groups are putting sane people to flight these days. Favor is gone from groups that used to be protected by God. They’re like Samson without his hair.

People need to get as close to God as possible. He still offers favor and protection to people who are close to him, but nominal Christians are wide open to attack. On the other side, Satan is giving all sorts of favor to his servants.

Epicurious was doing poorly anyway. In the past, I found it a valuable resource, because it stood out in a sea of websites full of recipes written by hacks. I have found it unreliable in recent years, so I suppose it wasn’t going to be helpful with beef regardless of whether it posted recipes. Still, the notion of “canceling” beef is repugnant. Milk products are also in the crosshairs. Imagine the things we could lose. Steaks. Roasts. Burgers. Cheese. Ice cream. Butter. Yoghurt. Buttermilk biscuits.

I guess we’ll have to sit around eating salads. Raw plant foods are major vectors for food-borne infections, so we have that to look forward to.

It seems like America’s Test Kitchen is also deteriorating. When I saw them fry chicken with overcooked areas on both sides, I knew something was badly wrong. A friend thinks ATK jumped the shark when Christopher Kimball was forced out. I am going to look at his new project to see if he has maintained his standards.

Is Bon Appetit any good? I wonder.

In related news, I had a huge breakthrough with garlic rolls.

Not long ago, I decided to make dough using a poolish (“poo-LEESH”). The word is French, and it means “Polish.” Somehow the Poles were connected with the use of pre-ferments in dough. A pre-ferment (usually spelled without the hyphen) is a mix of flour, water, and microorganisms. You can make a preferment by mixing water and flour one-to-one and leaving them on your counter overnight to fester.

I found that poolishes made my dough better, but to use one, you have to start at least 6 hours before you want to toss your pizza crust or form your loaf.

A day or two back, I had an idea. Part of the reason a poolish works is that the water really gets into the flour, changing the texture of the bread. What if I made dough using boiling water?

When you mix starches with really hot water, they become gelatinized. You can see this in sauces made with corn starch. You can also see it in the texture of boiled oatmeal. I thought partially gelatinized flour might make better dough.

I measured out flour, water, salt, and diastatic malt extract as though making a poolish. Then I boiled the water in the microwave and stirred it into the mixture. I threw it in the food processor, let it cool enough so it wouldn’t kill the yeast, and processed it with additional ingredients to make dough.

It was excellent. The pizza and rolls had a ton of flavor. The texture was beautiful. The only issue I noticed was that the dough rose slowly, but that may have been because I left my yeast out of the fridge a couple of nights. Maybe it got tired.

Today I made 6 garlic rolls, and they seemed to come from heaven itself. Magnificent. I ate them for lunch while video-chatting with the Zambian yam. I must have annoyed her tremendously. I kept groaning with pleasure. I kept it up for at least half an hour after the last roll was gone.

I made the garlic sauce or topping or whatever by blending several big cloves of garlic in olive oil and then nuking the mixture to cook it. I added a little butter. When I ate the rolls, I untied them and dipped the strands in the sauce. I also added cheap parmesan cheese from a jar. Wonderful. Of course, fresh cheese would have been even better.

Instead of adding boiling water to about half the flour, I used it for nearly all of it.

When I tied the rolls, I rolled the dough into sticks and twisted them first so they looked like screws. This improved the shape and appearance of the rolls. I dipped the sticks in oil before tying them to make sure the strands wouldn’t stick to each other. A real garlic knot can be untied. If you can’t untie it, it’s inferior.

You can do other things. You can use three thin sticks instead of one big one.

I’m still feeling the afterglow.

It wasn’t beef, but man, it was good.

Yukon Keep These Potatoes

Things are still going great with my Zambian sweetheart, “Rebecca.” We are still struggling with the question of whether she should continue studying for the Zambian bar exam. We keep getting what seem to be indications that it’s not God’s will. Prayers for his guidance would be appreciated.

There are only two reasons for her to continue. First, there is the possibility that we won’t work out, which seems highly unlikely, and second, it’s generally not a good idea to quit big projects you’ve started. If she quits and something miraculous happens that splits us up, I can easily fund a return trip to Zambia and a new period of study, but she would lose some time.

In other news, I bought a deep fryer. I’m not sure it was a good idea. I am tired of having problems frying things. My chicken has been performing poorly.

In the old days, the portable fryer market was gloomy. They had things like the Fry Baby, and not much more. The Fry Baby is a small electrified bucket that holds oil. They now make a Fry Pappy. It’s bigger, and the reviews are not good. One problem: you have to fry everything at 375 degrees.

Now you can get a machine that will sit on your countertop and fry 2.5 pounds of food per batch. You can get models that have preset modes for various foods. One model, made by Breville, has a special two-part mode for twice-fried fries. Do you trust a stranger to tell your fryer how to make fries? I don’t. My Instant Pot does a great job with rice, however.

The Breville gets a lot of bad reviews because of build quality, so I don’t want it.

I decided to try a T-Fal. Their machine comes apart so you can put various pieces in the dishwasher. It has a big basket which is easy to handle. It also has a filtering mode. After you fry, it filters the fat and stores it in a container which is part of the fryer.

Today I watched some videos about fryers, and I also caught an America’s Test Kitchen video about frying chicken “like the pros.” I thought they did a surprisingly bad job. They used a Dutch oven with a clip-on thermometer, and they fried the chicken right on the bottom of the pot. It came out with dark areas in the areas that hit bottom. I don’t need a fancy kitchen and a staff of professionals to tell me how to burn chicken.

Usually, the people at ATK give great advice. Not sure what happened this time.

T-Fal’s machine looked good on Youtube, and the ATK video made me despair of frying chicken well in a plain old pot. That’s why I ordered the T-Fal. Now I’m not so sure. Since placing the order, I’ve learned some things.

I decided to make fries to see if I could do better than ATK. I looked for recipes online. I wanted to fry twice, the way you’re supposed to. Okay, technically, I wanted to blanch once and fry once. I kept seeing recipes calling for Yukon gold potatoes, which were all I had. I sliced some thin and blanched them in a pot with a thermometer, and then I chilled them.

For some reason, I have a stainless basket which can be used for frying. It has little bumps on the bottom to lift it off the bottom of the pot. I used it for blanching, and it worked very well.

It wasn’t much trouble at all, and I didn’t have to take a fancy machine apart for cleaning. Also, because I now have a dedicated grease-filtering storage canister, handling the oil was easy.

Sadly, the fries were not good. They tasted great, but Yukon Golds are not frying potatoes. Not as far as I can tell, anyway. The fries looked perfect, but they were limp, probably because they were low on starch compared to russets.

It looks like I got snookered by the Internet again. It’s full of recipes written by people who can’t cook at all.

I have made wonderful fries in the past. I always used russet potatoes. I have never had good results frying red potatoes or Yukons. I should have known better than to try Yukons today.

Sources on the web say the Russet Burbank is the top fry potato. I don’t know if the russets I can buy are Russet Burbanks, but I’m sure they will beat Yukon Golds.

To get back to equipment, I’m wondering why I should keep the fryer when I have a pretty good solution on hand already.

ATK’s chicken video got me thinking about Dutch ovens. Le Creuset makes the best, if reviewers are to be believed, but boy, are they expensive. Like $380 expensive for a big one. I’ve been resisting getting one. Today I learned they’re on sale for $250. It’s a manufacturer’s promotion. The big model is over $100 cheaper than the next size down.

I tried finding used Dutch ovens a while back, but it was a waste of time. If you want a Le Creuset cheap, you pretty much have to find it at a thrift shop or inherit it.

I just told Amazon to cancel the fryer, as I was writing this. There is no point in spending $120 on something you may not need. Making my bad fries gave me confidence in my frying ability, even if the potatoes let me down. Had I had russets, I would have had excellent fries, and the basket would have made them very easy to handle.

I think I should buy a Dutch oven and invest in some russet potatoes. I don’t actually need a Dutch oven for potatoes, but it will be useful for other things, and I don’t expect Le Creuset to keep the sale going forever.

Not too much is going on, apart from the above. Still waiting for the side effects from my Johnson & Johnson vaccine. I almost had a headache last night, and I felt sleepy, but then I had eaten a big bowl of garlic rolls, so what was I supposed to expect? I feel a little sleepy right now, but I just ate too many fries.

Great things are happening in my relationship with God, but I can’t talk about them here. I am willing to say I am being much more critical of (i.e. “realistic about”) about myself these days, and I am really trying to dedicate myself to God and get his blessings, starting with transformation, to flow. I still think the apocalypse is about to dawn. This is no time to be lukewarm or proud, and I have been both.

Nuptial Decisions Prove to be Above my Pay Grade

Day 26 of my online courtship has gone well. I made some excellent homemade bread. That’s unrelated to the courtship. It’s just one reason why the day has gone well.

INGREDIENTS

520 g bread flour
1.5 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. bread machine yeast
3 tbsp. sugar
4 tbsp. butter
310 g warm water

Throw the dry stuff in your food processor and blend until mixed. Add the water and blend until you get a coherent ball. After 10 minutes, blend the butter in. Add some salt to melted butter and grease a bread pan. Shape the dough into a loaf. Put the loaf in a pan and butter it. Allow to rise until it looks like a loaf should. Bake at 450 until the internal temperature hits about 195.

I also had a very good time interceding via video chat with my Zambian sweetheart. I have learned that intercession carries an unexpected benefit. You really need to tell people after you intercede, so they can agree with you and look for God’s answer. Because of this, intercession keeps you in touch with people.

We prayed for our relationship, and while I was speaking, I made a misstep. She suggested I pray for our children, and I was kind of stuck. It seems highly presumptuous for me to pray for our children as though they were definitely coming, because it’s like I’m assuming she will say yes if I propose. Also, I think a man is supposed to try to protect a woman from hasty decisions. Or at least he should pretend to.

Anyway, she was not all that happy with the disclaimers I inserted in my prayers, so I had to smooth all that over. She thought I sounded like I didn’t want to marry her or have children when, in fact, I was simply trying not to be an idiot.

Four weeks ago, I was completely prepared to get old and die with my tools and my smoker. Now I find myself plunged into a courtship process I know almost nothing about, so it’s not a huge surprise if there are occasional bumps in the road.

My feeling was that you shouldn’t play around with a woman by talking about marriage as though it were a done deal, prior to handing over the ring or at least proposing. Evidently, I was totally wrong about this, as men often are about nearly everything. Evidently the best course is to talk as though the church were already rented.

I don’t know how this works. It’s all trial and error.

I have written about my friends Diamond and Silk; two young Haitian ladies I got to know back when I was attending Trinity Church. I had a long conversation with Diamond today, and she provided a lot of helpful information concerning decisions she had made. A) I am, in fact, going to marry Rebecca. B) Diamond and Silk will be bridesmaids. C) They will wear pink dresses. D) Diamond’s daughter Carat will be the flower girl, at the age of three.

Thank goodness I don’t have to make any of those tough decisions. I’m not qualified.

I told Diamond to let me know the date of the ceremony so I could arrange to be there. Until then, all I have to do is hand over a grocery bag full of cash.

In case people still think I’m kidding about buying my wife, I will provide a link to Wikipedia’s article on the subject: LINK.

Here’s the annoying thing about the article: there is nothing in it about consumer protection. In the US, under the Uniform Commercial Code, goods sold typically carry an implied warranty of fitness for their purpose. It looks like I’m not getting one of those. What if Rebecca fails to serve her purpose? I don’t even get a partial refund.

I don’t get free repairs, either. She already had to have a cavity fixed. Shouldn’t I be able to bill that to the family?

Seems to me that Africa is behind the times. Here in America, every tool at Harbor Freight can be returned up to 90 days after purchase, but if my wife suffers some kind of mechanical failure, I will be left holding the bag. My understanding is that the price I pay for her will be consumed in riotous living in a matter of days, so even if the family wanted to compensate me, they would have nothing to offer except maybe some celebratory selfies.

I guess I’ll just have to bear the risk. Unless there is a Zambian firm that offers aftermarket wife warranties.

This is where it stands right now. It’s a touching story. Part true love. Part human trafficking.

I can’t wait to get her over here. I want to secure her within our borders before the next wave of coronavirus insanity reduces us all to traveling on foot.

I’ll be back with updates as Diamond provides them.

Dubai??

Today, having finished exploring the topic of whether I would have to use cattle to pay for my African bride, I did more travel research and tentatively concluded we would have to have our first date in Dubai.

As I told a friend earlier, I don’t know why I haven’t been offered a reality show.

Oh, wait. There is one reason. I believe in God and traditional morals. I don’t think the History Channel’s guilty, virtue-displaying white executives would want to give a show to a guy who says Sports Illustrated is wrong for trying to make normal (i.e. heterosexual) men lust after other men in women’s swimsuits.

I thought we could meet in Israel, but Israel is out of the office at the moment. I thought Sweden would work, because the Swedes didn’t lose their grip on reality when covid hit, but I am now seeing signs that Sweden is closed, too. The various websites contradict each other.

Dubai is not my idea of a great tourist destination. My understanding is that there are hot deserts there, rimmed by artificial land created via dredging, and that all you get to see there are skyscrapers, restaurants, and beaches. And my Zambian lady can’t swim.

It occurred to me today that it’s like Vegas without casinos.

Still, it should be interesting and very comfortable, and it’s not expensive. The food and hotels are supposed to be very good. She says KFC is much better in Dubai than Zambia. Zambians go there and then hit social media to talk about how good KFC is.

She says I can go to Zambia. They have a 14-day quarantine, but she says it’s not enforced. The reason? Zambia.

I still can’t believe Sports Illustrated is doing that. They’re trying to convince millions of men (actually, with current circulation figures, hundreds) that homosexuality is normal because some of them become aroused by photographs of men who have been surgically altered and Photoshopped to look like women. Sorry, leftists. It does not work that way. If a man is only attracted to other men when they look nearly exactly like women, he’s not a homosexual, and that becomes obvious when he finds out the truth and loses his lunch.

If you want to prove it’s normal for men to lust after other men in bathing suits, put Lebron James in the swimsuit issue. See how that goes.

The guys who see no problem with drag models, and who lecture the rest of us, are simply men who don’t realize they’re gay. If you know your partner is a man, and you can see the signs, and you’re fine with it, you’re a homosexual. Don’t tell the rest of us what we want.

My passport application is filed. No idea how long that will take. I have read that I can have Washington speed it up once I have tickets.

My lady has bar exams coming up, and she needs to buckle down in May in order to do well. That means if we miss an April launch window, we’re in trouble. If God wants us to get together, it will happen. I hope he does, because video chat is a very poor substitute for meeting in person.

I am not optimistic about the world’s immediate future, so I wonder if we should be waiting around. If travel becomes impossible after our date, how will we seal the deal? I think the apocalypse is starting, and if it is, then we will see more plagues, including plagues of war and lack, not just disease. Travel could become a real problem.

It’s not my job to fight the battles directly, though, so I won’t worry. I will maintain a good prayer life and expect help from above.

We still pray together every day, for a long time. We’re doing intercession, not just praying for ourselves. A friend of mine thinks spirits are infecting his house, so we are fighting for him. I’m sure he’s right. It’s tremendous, having a powerful partner to work with.

I made Miss Zambia’s picture my phone’s wallpaper. It keeps startling me. I’m used to seeing a photo of a horse, but now it’s an unusually beautiful woman, and I actually know her. I didn’t download a picture of Tyra Banks. Who would not look quite as good, to be honest.

I don’t know how things could get any stranger, but 2020 taught me not to rule anything out.

I Hate Retaking the Same Culinary Real Estate

I can’t figure out what happened to my fried chicken skills. The more I try to improve my chicken, the worse it gets.

Years ago, I wrote a recipe for spicy fried chicken. I wanted something better than Popeye’s. I saved a blog post in which I raved about the results. I said I had succeeded.

Was I wrong? I don’t see how that could happen. How can you be wrong about whether fried chicken is good? I have overestimated the quality of my food from time to time, but not when it comes to things this obvious.

Yesterday I gave chicken another shot. I cut way back on the seasoning I put in the flour, I marinated it in orange juice and hot sauce, and I fried it in peanut oil with a little olive oil added because I had overestimated my peanut oil stash.

I fried the chicken at the correct temperature. I drained it the way Bon Appetit says to, on a wire rack instead of paper towels. The breading came out oil-soaked and heavy.

Now I have about three-fourths of a chicken in the fridge, and I don’t really want to eat it.

I’m looking at my old recipe. I see some things I’m not doing now. First of all, my last batch of chicken was made using eggs to hold the flour on. Paula Deen recommends this. My old recipe and Gordon Ramsay say to use buttermilk and no eggs.

I guess Gordon Ramsay knows a couple of things. You can’t get Michelin stars purely through self-promotion, unless maybe he found a way to bribe Michelin’s anonymous judges. Maybe I should believe him.

I’ve seen Ramsay serve steak sliced, which is idiotic. That concerns me. Foodies are all convinced that steak should be served lukewarm and cut up just like mommy used to do. Ramsay may be a great chef, but he is also a foodie.

I don’t know whether Paula Deen can cook or not. She posted a chicken-frying video, and I watched it. She guessed about a lot of things. Guessed! After cooking professionally for what? Fifty years? And she sells fried chicken in her restaurant. How can she not know everything by now? If I went into her restaurant and trained as a cook for one hour, I would leave knowing the entire process. It’s not like studying for the MCAT’s.

I also made some bad mashed potatoes. I think my mistake was using a ricer. I used to make phenomenal mashed potatoes, and I used a masher and a mixer. People say not to use a mixer, because it makes potatoes gummy. That’s true, if you overdo it. You don’t have to overdo it, though.

Progress is not always progress.

I think I’m going to start buying the smallest amounts of chicken I can find, so I can experiment without wasting money and destroying the kitchen. It’s silly to cut up an entire bird when you’re not sure what will happen. I need to go back and try my old recipe.

My original recipe calls for frying the chicken in beef fat, the way KFC used to. When is America going to get over its ridiculous phobia of fat? Beef fat makes incredible chicken, not to mention French fries. McDonald’s used to dump 50-pound blocks of fat in its fryers. Then the food Nazis put an end to it.

At least they haven’t put an end to meat. They will, though. Count on it. Dairy products will also be canceled. Then cattle will go extinct.

Grocery stores will sell me fat if I ask for it. I don’t know if I want to go through the hassle of buying and rendering it, though. I don’t want to go back to being a hard core cooking hobbyist. I just want to be able to make a few things well.

I am still fooling around with online dating. My perception of the whole business keeps changing.

I already knew there were big differences between black women in Africa and America, and talking to them online has shown me how big the divide is. For one thing, African women are much more likely to admire Republican presidents. Here in the US, the Democrats poisoned blacks with the War on Poverty. It led to the destruction of the black family. It addicted generations to handouts and caused the majority of black Americans to develop a victim mentality based in racism and Marxism. Paradoxically, most American blacks came to view the party that was destroying them as its messiah. It seems things are different in Africa.

One lady I talked to called President Trump “his Excellency,” which I thought was funny. Another one says she liked the bit in my profile where I said the Democratic Party worked for Satan.

My profile makes it very clear I want nothing to do with non-Christians and leftists, and nearly all the women I hear from are from Africa. I have only heard from one American lady who had any interest in prayer in tongues or any knowledge of prophecy. I thought I was hearing from Africans because the sites I was using were full of scammers and poor people desperate to contact Americans, but that is not the case. There are many, many American women on the sites. They view my profile and hit the road. One of the sites tells me when anyone looks me over, so I know what’s happening.

Yesterday I heard from two young ladies who are all about prayer in tongues. One is in Kenya, and one is in Ghana. They are smart, serious women. Most women on dating sites have nearly nothing to say. “I like the beach.” “Animal lover.” “I love life and laughter.” Intelligent girls stand out. The contrast is stark.

Women tend to be ordinary (tautology), and ordinary women believe they need to convince men they agree with them about everything. They hide their own thoughts and feelings until the ring goes on. They don’t like to express their views. They try to find out what you think, and then they parrot it back. The goal isn’t to find someone who is compatible. It’s to put a figurine on a wedding cake and get money and kids.

When a woman says what she thinks or feels, it’s somewhat shocking, because it’s unusual. Generally, you can tell when she’s sincere, because she can back up what she says. A phony can’t do that. Anyone can say, “I’m conservative,” for example, but ask them why, and leftists can’t explain. When one woman proves she’s not playing, it makes you wonder why the rest don’t try it.

It’s not hard to tell when a woman just wants to immigrate. Everything you say is wonderful. You are the most handsome man on earth. All she wants is to sit at your feet and admire you.

I can’t be sure, but it seems like African women are more interested in playing a support role. The very idea is offensive to most American women. In America, you’re not “living your best life” unless both spouses have busy careers and the kids are raised by day-care workers or illegal alien nannies.

One thing that seems to unite black women in Africa and America is their lack of faith in their default dating pool. There is a big cultural difference between the sexes. You can see it reflected in the rates of educational accomplishments. In America, black women get about twice as many college degrees as black men, and I suppose the situation is similar in Africa. Many profiles I look at specifically exclude black men and state that the women are looking for white husbands.

White husbands are generally a mess, but it appears that we could be worse.

I’ve known a fair number of black women. Seems like stories of rape by family members and other black men are very common. The only white woman I know who claims to have been raped is a member of my own family, who makes things up as the mood strikes. I know of three men she has accused falsely. Activists claim well over half of black women have been sexually abused. They also say black women are three times more likely to be murdered, and over 90% of them know their killers. Black women are at a higher risk of being murdered than anyone else in America, and black men are doing nearly all of the killing.

I can see why I’m getting as much attention as I am.

One of the young ladies I talked to yesterday is in a bad situation. Her mother has meningioma, and the young lady has to take care of her alone. This includes things like changing diapers. The young lady is very small and fine-boned. I don’t know how she does it.

She lives in a rural area. I can tell she’s poor. She’s smart, but her English needs work.

I feel bad for her. I don’t think the differences between us would permit anything beyond friendship, but I wish I could put her in a guest house in my yard. She is on a website where useless men are trying to prey on her, her marital opportunities don’t look good at all, and yet she had the courage to contact me and risk rejection.

She hates the money gospel even though she needs money. She knows submission to God is what counts. She says other Christians are brainwashed.

I will have to disappoint her. I don’t look forward to it. Maybe we can stay in touch, and I can be of some help to her.

The other one is also smart, and she knows it. She says she is different from the others and that I will know it when I talk to her. She says she was excited when I said I could tell she was not like most women. I was excited, too. When you do online dating, it’s like you’re sifting through a mountain of rabbit poops, and every so often, you find a pearl.

I wish I could buy a big farm and put all the unappreciated women on it. Isn’t that what Jesus does, though? He lives in a world full of grass, trees, and rivers, and in that world, he has built homes for all of us; for the world’s rejects.

I suppose being an American and talking to women from backward countries is a lot like being God and talking to people on earth. And we will marry up, not down. It makes sense for women from places like Africa to marry men from the US.

The Bible is full of stories of women who married up. Sarah. Rebecca. Rachel. Solomon’s wives. Ruth. Esther. Who married down? Abigail. Her second husband had to kill her first husband, whose name meant “fool” in Hebrew.

Many people think men should marry up. That’s insane. It’s matriarchal. It’s for women who want to be their husbands’ mommies. It’s like going to war and putting a green buck private in charge of a division. Where do people get stupid ideas like that? My mother married down. It ended badly.

The bride of Christ should be a pattern for all other brides. We’re going to Jesus. He’s not coming to us. Forget this place. Like the online profiles say, I am willing to relocate.

These are my views on online dating today. I don’t know how they’ll change by the end of the week.

Recreation Wears me Out

I have been away from the keyboard because my best friend Mike is in town. When Mike is around, it’s like standing outside in the middle of a tornado. He is constantly coming up with things to do.

On this trip, he wants to learn to weld. He also wants to shoot guns, barbecue, scout properties for a second home, and possibly buy a storage container or a prefab steel house from China. Mike discovered China a number of years ago, so he is often on the phone with manufacturers, trying to get things made cheap.

He’s in town for a funeral, and he had his hip replaced a few weeks back, so you would think he would be taking it easy. Not happening.

Right now he’s visiting his nephew, so I’m getting a break.

He’s an unusual guest. Before he showed up, I changed the anode in the upstairs water heater, made sure I had sheets for him, and turned on one of the upstairs thermostats. I made sure the breaker for the heater was on. This morning, he said he had frozen all night, and he hadn’t had a shower. The hot water didn’t work, and the batteries in the thermostat were dead. I asked him why he didn’t tell me. He said he didn’t want to disturb me.

I went upstairs to check things out. The hot water worked fine. He just didn’t wait long enough to get it going. He had slept on a bed with no sheets. Yesterday, he assured me there were sheets in the upstairs linen closet. I expressed doubt. No, he was positive. Okay.

I had words of comfort when told me about his night. I said I had slept really well in a warm room with a big bed with clean sheets and an electric blanket, and I told him there was plenty of hot water in my bathroom.

I gave him sheets and a pillowcase, and I’m going to put new batteries in the thermostat. We’ll see how tonight goes.

This isn’t the worst problem he has had at my house. He stayed with me a long time ago, and he got a mild sunburn. I had some cold cream in my bathroom, so he rubbed it on his face, including his eyelids. What he did not know was that I had mixed capsaicin, the hot ingredient in peppers, into it. He didn’t ask. I had found that capsaicin worked for getting rid of little skin growths, so I made the cold cream concoction for that purpose. It turned out to be unsuitable for rubbing into one’s eyelids, and it wasn’t all that great for soothing sunburns.

He lives in New Hampshire, and he has had about enough. He loves this area, so he is thinking of spending about $25,000 on a small lot and plopping a shipping container on it. It’s a total Mike move.

Even though Mike is here, I am managing to do a little work on my new kitchen cart. One side of the steel frame is done, and I’m attaching crossmembers to connect to the other side I haven’t figured out what to do for wooden shelves yet.

I still want to build a woodworking bench. I’m making myself unpopular on various sites by criticizing existing benches. People are obsessed with “beefy” construction. Why use one pound of steel when 15 pounds will do?

I criticized a bench made by inventor Andrew Klein. It’s built like the Hoover Dam. I checked a table for engineers, and it looks like each leg of his bench will support over 50 tons, positioned upright and loaded concentrically. Am I a bad person for calling that bad engineering?

I have three-ton jackstands, and if you put four together, the bases would contain less steel in cross section than one of his bench legs.

Somebody tried to tell me you have to have “beefy” construction in order to do planing, chiseling, and sawing. I have a Black & Decker Workmate I can carry in one hand, and you can do all of those things on it, so how can it be that I need a 700-pound bench?

Engineering works. Why not use it?

I want to have a base held up on four 2″-square legs. I plan to splay them outward slightly because trapezoids resist flexing better than rectangles. Most people who weld legs on things are afraid to try to make anything but 90° angles, but when you make a box with lots of right angles, you’re building floppiness into it. If your plan was to make a heavy structure that flexed in spite of its great mass, you would definitely want right angles.

When you try to flex a trapezoid by pushing sideways on it, you compress one leg and put tension on the other. The leg under compression provides some resistance. When you try to collapse a rectangle, you don’t put compression or tension on either leg. They are happy to remain the same length while your project folds up.

When you put weight on a trapezoidal table, the weight tries to push the legs apart at the base. That’s easy to resist with light pieces of steel.

I can tie the legs together toward the bottom with thin steel members. I just need them to stand up to a good hard pull. I don’t know how hard you have to pull on 1″ angle iron to stretch it. Let’s see. The tensile strength of steel is around 70K psi, and 1″ angle iron has a cross section somewhere near 1 square inch, so let’s be cautious and say a strut takes about 20 tons of tension without stretching. That SHOULD do the trick.

Klein’s bench has splayed legs, but they’re not tied together at the bottom.

If I put angle iron around the base, I can use it to hold a plywood shelf. Klein’s bench has no storage space under it, unless you want to put things on the floor.

I’ll post the latest photo of the kitchen cart. I have a number of completed welds on it, and I also have a lot of tacks. I’m trying to get as much of it built as possible before completing the rest of the welds. The more structure you have before you finish your welds, the more steel you have holding everything in place and resisting warpage.

Depending on how much time I have tomorrow, I should be able to finish the steel frame and maybe even prime it. Then I have to think about shelves and paint.

It’s pretty sweet, being able to weld up projects that look good enough to go indoors. Anyone can weld a muffler on, but making a nice cart or chair takes knowledge and care.

Maybe some day I’ll be able to build something really important. Like a recliner.

Sometimes Evolution Goes Backward

My goddaughter had a birthday yesterday, so she and her family came to visit. Five kids, or, more accurately, four and one new adult. This gave me a good excuse to keep working with the fancy new ice cream machine. I made four flavors.

I have totally mastered cherry vanilla and butter pecan, and I have great confidence that my next batches of peach and Heath bar crunch will be perfect. It’s time to ask myself what other flavors I need to make before I stop building my ice cream armament. I don’t need a lot of flavors to be happy. As it is, I will never need to buy ice cream again unless I want a novelty like a Nutty Buddy or ice cream sandwich.

I used a bag of crushed Heath bars from the grocery store. This was a mistake. They’re worthless. They’re not just broken. They’re ground. The biggest pieces are like peas. If I do it again, I’ll buy bars and break them.

Based on Internet research saying most people prefer artificial vanilla to the real thing, I tried fake vanilla in one of my flavors. It was not terrible, but it wasn’t that good, either. Expensive vanilla is much, much better.

Here’s what I concluded: most people don’t know what tastes good. I knew that already, because Budweiser is the most popular beer in the country. The guy who is trying to replace Christopher Kimball at America’s Test Kitchen tried fake vanilla in a blind test, and he preferred it. That should have told me all I needed to know. Kimball was the spine that held the organization up. The new guy strikes me as a cooking school wonder who knows everything about food while lacking the ability to create or recognize success. Many of the bad meals you’ve had at restaurants were prepared by culinary school graduates, so it should never surprise anyone when a person with scary cooking credentials can’t cut it.

People worship James Beard, but his recipes aren’t good. The Joy of Cooking should be called The Joy of Indigestion. It’s the way of the world.

One of my guests suggested I try my hand at peppermint. That should be simple. Vanilla ice cream without the vanilla. Add crushed peppermint candy and mint extract.

I can’t eat chocolate without regretting it because of the caffeine and theobromine, but it is conceivable that I might eat it anyway from time to time in the future. I have an urge to try to duplicate Ben & Jerry’s Everything but the Kitchen Sink. It’s chocolate and vanilla ice cream with peanut butter cups and bits of toffee bars mixed in. An Internet search tells me it also contains white chocolate chunks and fudge-covered almonds. I don’t recall running into those items, but then when I eat ice cream, I don’t study it and take notes.

Making a mixed ice cream would be laborious. I would have to make two batches in chocolate and vanilla and combine them. Not sure I want to go through that for a product I don’t plan to eat.

The machine needs a rolling cart, so I blew $88 on steel. I bought 1″ square tubing with 1/8″ walls. I thought thick walls would make welding less risky. Welders can blow through tubing easily. When I saw the price and lifted the steel, I felt I should have gone with thinner tubing. I’m no engineer, so I made a mistake. It’s not a problem, though. I’ll just have a really strong cart I won’t want to lift.

The plan is to put three wooden shelves in it, and I’m going to use the casters that were left over when I put my smoker on a factory-made cart (which I should have built myself).

In related news, I keep wanting to make new workbenches. My old bench of all trades is extremely sturdy, but I built it before I knew anything. It has no wheels, it’s less than ideal for woodworking, and it should probably weigh 100 pounds less.

I finally bought real blades for my Powermatic 66 the other day, and it got me thinking about a woodworking bench. I started thinking about designs. Fresh from the success of building my steel and wood shooting bench I thought I should go against convention and make a woodworking bench with a welded base.

Woodworkers tend to be true believers, and that means they make everything out of wood. They are hostile to certain new ideas, and they really like bench designs that are hundreds of years old. One was created by a famous Frenchman named Roubo. Another one was designed by an Englishman named Nicholson. Actually, these guys may have simply passed on designs that were already traditional. I don’t know.

These benches are very heavy for two reasons, neither of which has anything to do with function. First, wood has a poor strength-to-weight ratio compared to metal, so it takes a lot to do the same job, and second, the people who designed them knew nothing about designing rigid structures.

A typical woodworking bench will have a solid top at least three inches thick. This gives you a nice, stiff surface to work on, and it allows you to make deep holes that will work with bench dogs and holdfasts.

A holdfast is a steel rod with a hook on one end. The hook has a flattened end. You put the other end of the holdfast in a hole and slide it down until the flat part rests on your project. Then you whack the holdfast and drive it into the hole until it wedges in there. It’s a great invention. Really holds things in place, and it’s quick to use. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well if your bench is thin.

A bench dog is a cylinder of wood that fits in the same holes holdfasts use. You can pull a bench dog up and rest a piece of wood against it while you work it. The dog will keep it from moving away from you. Again, you need deep holes.

At some point during the last millennium, engineers discovered the torsion box. This is a fancy term for a hollow box with supporting members inside it. You build a lattice of crossmembers and then enclose it in two sheets of material like plywood. What you get is a box which is very strong for its weight, and it’s easy to make it flat by sizing the internal members accurately. Many wooden doors are torsion boxes. Nobody wants a door that weighs 200 pounds.

A guy named Paulk designed a bench top which is a torsion box. It’s pretty neat. The top and bottom are several inches apart, and he put holes in the sides of the box so he could reach in and put tools inside it. That feature alone makes the design brilliant. When I first started thinking about building a new bench, I thought I would glue two-by-fours together side by side and make a thick top. Now I realize that was stupid. I want a torsion box.

Problem: how do you put deep holes in a torsion box? The top and bottom may be an inch thick, but there is air between them. I would want holes with wood around them all the way down.

I thought about it last night. Here’s what you do: you add internal members with holes drilled through them. You only need a couple of rows of holes, so you can add two extra members just for drilling them. The holes would weaken the members, so drilling through members that need to be solid would be bad, but adding extra members wouldn’t hurt anything. In fact, you wouldn’t need members running all the way across the bench. You could use cubes of wood.

Problem solved.

What about making holes in the sides of the bench for access to the storage space? Making holes like that in wood is a pain. Why not use steel?

Make yourself a steel frame from tubing. Put plywood on the top and bottom, screwed in for easy replacement. Instead of a few little holes for access, you could have three sides of the bench wide open. One end would have to be covered by an end vise, and part of one side would be blocked by a vise on the front, but other than that. you would have tons of access for storage and cleaning.

Put the box together. Weld up a rolling base. Attach the base to the wood of the box, not the welded base. Install vises. Done.

Any woodworker who is reading this must be screeching by now.

Would the bench top be too flexible to make a good surface for pounding? First of all, why would you be pounding? Woodworking doesn’t require that. Second, many people already use benches with relatively thin tops, and they are doing fine.

I saw a neat bench on Adam Savage’s Youtube channel. A guy named Andrew Klein gave it to him. Klein works for Magswitch, and he also has a side business.

I was awestruck by the bench. It has a base with four legs made from what looks like 5″ steel tubing with 1/2″ walls. The top is two slabs of hardwood that appear to be 4″ thick. It has two geared twin-screw vises Klein makes and sells. The dogs have steel shafts, and the holes contain magnets so the dogs stay up when you raise them.

The more I looked at the bench, though, the more I thought I saw bad engineering.

I don’t know what the bench weighs. Maybe 500 pounds? Savage was happy about that, but overbuilding is one of the best-known hallmarks of bad engineering. I know; I’ve done it. Weight means increased material, production, and shipping costs. It means increased difficulty in handling finished products. It means waste. It’s a clumsy way of handling problems you can’t address properly because you’re not a good engineer.

If you ever read a welding textbook, you’ll learn that one of the main things that drive the study of weldments is a desire to reduce weight. People who don’t know anything about engineering love to talk about how “beefy” their tools are. It’s like bragging that your car has solid tires made of steel. It’s a demonstration of ignorance. I’m no engineer, but even I know these things. You don’t have to be a Georgia Tech grad to get this far.

The bench has no wheels. That’s insane. I say that as the guilty creator of a bench with no wheels. Why would you make an extremely heavy tool you can’t move without a forklift? Smart shop owners put everything they can on wheels. The more you can move things around, the smaller and less expensive your shop can be without sacrificing comfort or much convenience.

What about the magnetic dogs? At first, I thought they were cool. Then I thought about Paul Sellers. He’s a British woodworker who is very big on Youtube. He’s a real expert. His dogs are bits of scrap wood with springs he makes from coat hangers. I have some I made myself. They work great, so why drive yourself nuts with rare earth magnets?

Now, the vises. They are beautiful, and the cost is very reasonable. They are probably a little better than competing vises from companies like Veritas. Veritas uses bicycle chains to connect and synchronize the screws on its vises, while Klein uses gears, and gears are sturdier and don’t need adjustment. Klein’s vises have transmissions so you can shift into high gear and move them fast.

I thought the vises were neat. Then I asked myself: “How are they significantly better than what I have right now?”

I made a Moxon vise for my bench. It’s a long block of maple with two holes in it. Two long Acme screws run through it, and there are handwheels to turn the screws. I can put longer and wider objects in it than will fit in most factory vises. I can put things in it that reach down to the floor; nothing gets in the way. I can fasten it on objects that are tapered because the screws aren’t synchronized. It doesn’t have a speed mode, the way the Klein vises do, but I have never felt I needed that. If I really want that feature, I can create it using half-nuts.

The Veritas vise is also very good, and unlike Klein’s boutique vise, it’s available. I don’t have to wait for a guy to make it in his basement.

The bench top…beautiful. Tombstone-thick maple with a glossy finish. But what is the purpose of all that weight? Answer: to make Adam Savage feel good. If loving your tool is your goal, buy what you like, but what if you just want to make things?

Savage has already put a big sheet of leather on the bench to protect it, and that shows how shortsighted the design is. A bench is like a pair of boots or gloves. You’re not supposed to protect it. You’re supposed to protect the work. A bench shouldn’t be sanded with 400 grit and finished with 10 coats of polyurethane. It should be bare wood. Imagine fussing with a giant sheet of cowhide every time you use a workbench. Ridiculous.

I made a shooting bench from 2″ steel tubing, a few screws, and some pressure-treated two-by-sixes. You could literally rest a car on it. If it weren’t for the two pneumatic tires on one end, you could never wiggle it at all by using tools on it. It’s way overbuilt. It probably weighs 150 pounds now that the wood is dry. I can lift one end of it and roll it 50 yards by myself. I do it all the time. I should have made it even lighter.

If I made a woodworking bench from the same tubing, it would be just as sturdy. Each leg might weigh 7 pounds. What do the legs on Savage’s bench weigh? Maybe 10 times that? For no reason.

I can use 2″ tubing for the base of my bench. I can put a caster on each corner. I can add feet that lower with screws when the bench is where I want it, so it won’t move when I push on a hand plane. It will feel like the Rock of Gibraltar, I’ll be able to move it unaided, I’ll have a ton of handy storage, and when the top gets beaten up, it will take me half an hour to put a new one on.

I can throw two Veritas vises on it, or I can buy two Moxon parts kits (because I am tired of making the parts). No need to wait for vises with transmissions. Done. Bang. Next problem, please.

I looked into leg vises. Long story short: no. Twin-screw vises are better.

Isn’t it bad to have screws in the top of a woodworking bench? No. Why would it be bad? Don’t plane the screws. Don’t chisel them. Countersink them a little to keep them out of your way. No problem.

I can make one bench for wood and another one for general use. I can put my old bench on the burn pile, using the tractor. If I move, my new benches will roll onto a truck.

I really don’t see the point in reverting to Fred Flintstone design policies. It seems to me that a half-ton woodworking bench is like a big sign saying, “I reject every intelligent thing man has learned since 500 A.D.”

I kind of wonder if I need a wood bench at all. Why not use a welding table? I have thought about buying a real fixturing table made from 1/4″ or 3/8″ plate. It’s a steel torsion box. They’re very popular. Why couldn’t I do woodworking on it? Mounting vises would be interesting, to say the least, but there is no reason why you can’t make wooden projects on a steel table.

Something to think about.

Speaking of Fred Flintstone, I saw a video about Nick Offerman. He’s the actor who played Ron Swanson on TV. Swanson is a hilarious caricature of an old-fashioned libertarian, whereas Offerman is your standard Hollywood liberal with full-blown Trump Derangement Syndrome. After watching Swanson, Offerman is a big disappointment. He’s a gun control nut.

I’ll post a video of Ron Swanson just for fun.

Anyway, Offerman is a woodworker. He has a beautiful shop. You can see it in videos. When you look at his setup, you wonder what kind of furniture he makes. It must be cleverly designed and painstakingly crafted.

Well, not so much. He makes Flintstone furniture. I’ll post a photo.

You may think it looks nice. Well, sure. God designed it. Nick Offerman voted absent.

This is a style of furniture which is very popular now. You take thick slabs that could be used to make a lot of quality furniture, and instead of coming up with a real design, you run them through a jointer, fasten them together crudely, slap some Danish oil on them, and call it art. Funny thing: it’s the opposite of art. “Art” means something which has been transformed by the mind of man.

The crude furniture people make now reminds me of the increasing use of the word “rustic” in cooking. You’ve seen it. A “rustic” pizza is a pizza that looks like a kitchen accident because it was made by an unskilled person. “Rustic” means “crudely made due to lack of skill.” Offerman’s table is definitely rustic, although it may be a superficial rusticity. He can probably do a lot better. I hope he can.

I have zero skills, yet given a big enough planer, I could make this table in an afternoon. In gluing extremely thick pieces of wood together, I would waste many pounds of wood which could have been turned into genuine pieces of craftsmanship.

If there is anything good about this style, it’s that it preserves thick slabs of valuable wood until the furniture can be demolished and the wood used in better projects.

Here’s a modern chair made by a guy named Maloof. It’s from the Smithsonian’s collection. Not really my thing, but it’s graceful, skillfully crafted, and pleasing to the eye. Compare it to Fred and Barney’s table, above.

The chair serves to remind us of the difference between art and copping out.

Offerman, like Klein and Savage, has fallen prey to the beefy bug. Instead of a graceful table with a design that required human input, he created a crude device useful mainly for rupturing disks. If God thought like these guys, birds would be unable to fly. A chicken would weigh 40 pounds. All fish would be bottom dwellers. The weight of their bones would glue them to the seabed.

Birds have air inside their bones to reduce weight, but many birds are extremely strong. The other day I saw a video of a cockatoo which probably weighed two pounds, lifting a pumpkin and throwing it off a kitchen counter. That’s not rustic. That’s engineering.

What purpose did Offerman serve here? He didn’t design anything. He found something that occurred under the random influences of nature and presented it nearly as-is. He’s not a maker. He’s a finder.

Offerman’s type of furniture is known as “live edge.” I don’t know why they call it that. The wood is dead. Maybe they didn’t want to call it “rustic edge.”

The idea is that the outermost part of the wood isn’t cut away. You would think it makes every piece of furniture unique, but in reality, it makes them all look the same. Go to Google Images and look up “live edge furniture.” It’s like a giant Offerman exhibit, but he didn’t make any of the pieces.

Live edge woodworkers are fungible. One’s work is just like another’s. There is no need for any particular live edge woodworker to exist. Any other member of the crew can step in and finish his work exactly as he would have.

I could swear I hear Ayn Rand shouting at me.

Mr. Maloof is a real woodworker. Nick Offerman is just a guy who stacks slabs.

Nick Offerman is funny, but he’s not on my list of most-admired people. His Trump issues are disturbing, and he nearly ruined Lagavulin whisky for me. It has been my favorite whisky for many years, because it’s the best whisky there is. Offerman’s Swanson character came alone and started drinking it, and now I feel like I should hide my bottle. Remember how you wanted to hide your cowboy boots after Urban Cowboy came out? Same thing. My guess is that Offerman didn’t know what Lagavulin was until he read about it in a script.

I don’t know if I’ll make a new bench or not, but at least I was saved from the beefy bug. An afternoon of Googling did that for me.

It’s time to go blast some squirrels. They smoke up pretty good. It’s fun being a lot more like Ron Swanson than Nick Offerman will ever be.

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Ready for an whale-choking dose of irony? I just learned that the TV character Ron Swanson designed the Maloof chair pictured above. The exact same chair.

I was looking at clips of Ron Swanson in action, and I came across one in which a lady tried to license a chair design Swanson had created. When they showed the chair, I was stunned. I’ll post a photo.

What are the odds?

Does Maloof know a fictional person is taking credit for his talent?

I don’t watch the show, so there is now way I could have seen Ron with the chair in the past. I found the Maloof chair by Googling “chair” along with “Smithsonian,” figuring the Smithsonian probably had a collection of historic furniture.

If ever you needed evidence that Nick Offerman is inferior to his broadcast persona, look no further.

I checked Offerman’s website and found that not all of his furniture is Flintstone tribute material, so it appears that if he ever got his head straight he could conceivably improve his work and successfully ascend the Swanson Pyramid of Greatness.

Fauxcahontas Wants your Wampum

Yesterday I made my second batch of butter pecan ice cream, and it was pretty bad. Things went well, however. By making bad ice cream, I learned how to make excellent ice cream.

My first batch of butter pecan was very, very good, but it didn’t have as much flavor as I wanted. I saw recipes calling for brown sugar, and I doubted them, so I used white sugar. I paid the price. I decided to keep looking at recipes to find out if brown sugar really was what I needed.

In the process, I found a recipe from…I almost typed “jackass”…from a pro, and it said to steep the pecans in hot milk to add pecan flavor to the ice cream. I tried this, and I also used brown sugar. I decided to use more salt than I used in my first batch. It just seemed like the thing to do.

The pecans were soggy and the ice cream was too salty. Instead of frozen bliss, I tasted rubbery defeat.

I know what to do. No steeping, brown sugar, and less salt. Today I expect to make a pan of butter pecan the angels would gladly fall in order to taste.

My fried chicken experiments continue to go poorly. It seems like it’s just not possible to make really good fried chicken from skinless chicken. I don’t like skinless chicken, and I consider it a spineless concession to the neurotic feminization of cookery, but thanks to the skin-haters, finding a chicken under three pounds is impossible. When chickens get bigger than that, they are not worth frying.

I don’t know why it’s so hard to get chicken right when I get such spectacular results with other foods. Chicken seems to hate me.

Maybe I should pressure-cook big, inappropriate pieces of chicken until they’re done and then fry them.

I continue to wonder what’s going to happen to the world. I feel as though humanity has stampeded off a cliff, and I’m the only one left behind. I have a real Omega Man complex, only without the desire to turn a machine gun on the neighbors. I feel like what goes on in the world has very little to do with me.

I know many others are in the same boat, but I don’t know them or interact with them, so it’s as if they don’t exist.

Ordinarily I don’t get lonely or bored, but things are different now. I feel like I’ve been separated from the world and I’m killing time in the landing zone while I wait for the chopper.

I make ice cream. This is what fills my days, along with shooting and squirrel hunting.

I try not to look at the news, but sometimes I do. Yesterday I saw that Elizabeth Warren is trying to get a wealth tax through congress. Who predicted that? Don’t hurt yourself trying to find the answer. It was me.

Income taxes and other taxes are bad, but wealth taxes are the supreme taxation evil. When they tax your income and your purchases, you still have some hope of retiring and dying in comfort. When they come for what you already paid tax on, the world crumbles under your feet and you have to consider unthinkable futures such as one in which you share a big, dirty room with other paupers in a government-run assisted living facility.

Warren is going after the “ultra-rich,” of course. When you pass totalitarian measures, you have to start by attacking segments of the population who have very few votes. She wants to take 2% of what they have. So if you have a billion-dollar net worth, kiss $20 million goodbye, in cash, in addition to the death tax your kids will have to pay. If you have to close your business or borrow to keep it going, so sorry. Not all billionaires have a lot of cash.

What happens if inflation makes us all “ultra-rich”? What if everyone is a billionaire in 5 years?

The Germans used to use wheelbarrows full of paper money to buy groceries because little things cost millions of marks.

It will be amusing to see how leftist tycoons react. I can’t lie. I hope I can prevent myself from reading about it. Nearly all wealthy leftists are hypocrites. They will not like the sensation when the tiger they fed bites their hands and chews off their fingers. It’s not at all like the gentle kissing of their posteriors which they have become used to.

Redistribution of land is already underway in some places. California has passed laws against single-family zoning. If things go as planned–think about this–Barbra Streisand’s neighbors should be able to build poverty apartments a few feet from the walls of her estate. It’s impossible for me not to find the prospect amusing. What will leftist elites in walled compounds do when their friends start building low-income housing right next door in order to enhance their social credit? I wonder how Cher will take it when rap music is hammering at her windows at three a.m., furniture and rotten garbage start piling up on her swales, and ladders start popping up on her walls in the middle of the night.

Bel Air and Beverly Hills could become gang territories. Stars might have to go to Ralph’s and Bulgari in armed convoys. I welcome it. I want to see if it will change their minds. But I know it won’t, because they’re ensnared in demonic insanity.

I think some leftist star will build a housing project behind his or her home. I think someone will want to perform a major wokeness display. Probably a star who lives somewhere else but maintains a California house.

Here’s something I’ve noticed about unsuccessful cultures like mine: in unsuccessful cultures, educated people who do well and obey the law are expected to pal around with illiterates and criminals. I’m from Eastern Kentucky, and people there are expected to associate with everyone, regardless of their social station. Black people are the same way. Maybe it’s a supernatural curse, and we’re starting to see it applied to mainstream white Americans.

It’s not a good thing. No one should be proud, but people who are cursed tend to be infectious. Their curses tend to spread. It’s best to associate with blessed people.

I feel as though America is already dead and the scavengers and worms have started to eat the body.

It makes perfect sense. What happened to Jerusalem when it abandoned God? The walls were torn down, men of quality were killed, their sons were taken away and castrated, women were raped, wealth was confiscated, and outsiders moved in and ran things. Biden is dissolving our borders, cursed people are gaining more access to blessed people and their wealth, and the types of people who built America are being persecuted and disempowered.

As for the rapture, what happens when a body dies? Its spirit–the thing that gave it life–goes elsewhere.

I will be surprised if Warren gets her way, because I guarantee you, enraged rich people have been berating their paid-for legislators ever since she opened her trap. Leftist hypocrites are surely squawking the loudest.

I will be surprised, but then I was surprised to see she had the gall to propose the law in the first place. I was surprised when Biden won. I was surprised when we lost the Senate. How can it be that I’m always surprised to see things happen when they’re completely consistent with what I predict?

I hope the law passes. I want to see how the rich react, and I want to see what Congress does. I may learn that I’m an alarmist, or I may find out things are going as I thought they would.

I should get started on the ice cream. I really think it will work this time.

On, Dasher!

Today I’m working on a new batch of cherry vanilla ice cream, even though I still have a lot left over from yesterday. I’m going to see if I can get the old batch into a container for storage.

The only complaint I had about yesterday’s ice cream was that the fruit froze hard. I saw that Internet people suggested soaking fruit in vodka. I didn’t want my cherries to taste like vodka, though. I decided to try cherry Heering, which is a liqueur.

Sadly, the liquor store closest to me does not sell cherry Heering. I opted to buy cheap vodka and grenadine syrup. I mixed them up with a lot of sugar and soaked sliced cherries overnight.

I already have ice cream in the machine. The drained cherries are waiting to jump in.

Hope this works.

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The ice cream is done, and I have tried it. I tried two bowls, in fact.

It is the most amazing ice cream in the universe. I had no idea ice cream could be this good.

The texture is smooth and creamy. The flavor is perfect. The cherry chunks are soft and not frozen at all.

I have summited the ice cream Everest. Now I don’t know what to do with my new superpower.

Why did God give me a gift for cooking? I almost never cook for anyone. I live alone. I tried cooking for a church, and they ran me out.

Guess I’ll come up with some more flavors. I was thinking it would be good to make strawberry with some sort of crumbly, crunchy stuff added. I can’t do chocolate because chocolate keeps me awake.

My next project will be peach.

Oh, no. I just realized I can make Heath bar ice cream. Sayonara, Ben & Jerry!

Mask Your Rebellion with Fake PPE

The new ice cream maker arrived today, and I wasted no time in breaking it in. I went to the store and bought frozen peaches, cherries, and strawberries. I decided to make cherry vanilla ice cream, because the hassle of making strawberry appeared to be greater.

I rooted around the web until I found a site that looked good. There are some simple rules you can follow when looking for good information about food. Here are some warning signs to keep you away from fakers who don’t know how to cook.

1. You see “foodnetwork” or “cooks.com” in the URL.

2. Alton Brown is mentioned somewhere on the page. In a favorable way.

3. You spot the phrases “vegan,” “egg-free,” “healthy,” or “gluten-free.”

4. The person who runs the site is a woman. This isn’t always a bad sign, but men generally do a better job.

I found a recipe for vanilla ice cream somewhere. Maybe it was Martha Stewart’s site. I don’t recall. I looked it over, and it seemed credible, so I copied it and, of course, changed it before I even gave it a chance. I removed a lot of steps that seemed to be a waste of time. It said to cook the custard before putting it in the machine. Hassle. Hassle.

I’ll post the ingredients I used.

INGREDIENTS

2 cups milk
2 cups heavy cream
6 yolks
lots of frozen dark cherries
4 oz. Karo lite corn syrup (bought by accident)
3/4 cup sugar
2 tsp. real vanilla extract
1 tbsp. starch
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. almond extract

Why starch? I read that even good cooks use things like guar gum and carageenan to get the very best texture. I don’t have those things. I stirred the starch into half a cup of milk, nuked it to boil it, and combined the result with the other ingredients. It must work, because the texture was straight from heaven.

I used corn syrup because it’s supposed to improve the texture. I didn’t realize it was the “lite” version when I bought it. I’m going to throw the remainder out and get the real thing. Everyone hates corn syrup and blames it for mankind’s ills, but it’s supposed to be better for ice cream than sugar.

I didn’t cook anything. Salmonella doesn’t scare me. I’m a man. I’m too old to be impressed by diarrhea.

I sliced the cherries and mixed them up with sugar, hoping to sweeten them and prevent them from freezing hard. I mixed all the other ingredients, threw them in the machine, and turned it on. Twenty minutes later, the ice cream was done. It was as hard as it was ever going to get without turning off the motor. I added the cherries, let the machine blend them in, and scraped the whole mess into a bread pan I had chilled in the freezer.

When you freeze ice cream, you don’t want a cylindrical container. You want a long, flat pan that will chill the ice cream faster.

Was the ice cream good? It was astounding. It had flaws, but it was still magnificent. The cherries were too hard and not sweet enough. Also, I didn’t use enough cherries. Other than that, it was ecstasy.

The recipe I prepared was a little too big for the machine, so I ended up having to leave maybe 10 ounces out. I need to rescale everything. Maybe I should go metric to make it easy.

The machine lives up to the hype. It’s fast. The ice cream’s ice crystals aren’t perceptible.

I think next time I’ll slice the cherries very thin, and I may soak them in a mixture of sugar, salt, and cherry Heering. The liqueur shouldn’t hurt the taste, and alcohol is used to prevent fruit from freezing hard in ice cream. If I give the cherries a day to soak, maybe they won’t get hard, and they’ll be sweeter.

The machine is easy to use, and it’s not too hard to clean up. It’s probably the best machine you can get for under a grand. The next step up is the Lello Musso Polo 5030 at $1200, and the expert I rely on says it’s not much better. Commercial machines start at a much higher price, and they make dozens of liters of ice cream. I think I did about as well as I reasonably could.

I feel like the end of the world is upon us. I might as well have decent ice cream.

In other news, I went to Zazzle.com, which is now censoring designs suggesting there may have been a wee bit of election fraud, and I designed some masks for myself. I’m also going to get some fake masks elsewhere. There is now a wide selection of “breathable” masks which don’t filter the air at all yet do get science-challenged people off your back in grocery stores. They offer the same level of protection as real masks (virtually none) plus a great deal more comfort.

What good is a apocalypse if we can’t have fun with it?

Will 2021 be my Best Year Yet?

I always say there is symmetry in the supernatural, and it’s 100 percent true. The reason I know it must be divine revelation. God has apostles, Satan has witches. God has a body composed of human beings who will rise to be with him in paradise, and Satan has a body which will descend to be with him in agony and humiliation. God has Jesus. Satan has the Antichrist. God has the Holy Spirit. Satan has the Internet and cell phones. You could make a very long list of analogs.

Last year, Satan’s children were thrown into a state of fear, lack, illness, and misplaced,culpable homicidal rage. I, on the other hand, had a beautiful, peaceful year which seemed to indicate a permanent change.

Is it possible that people who listen to God had an anti-2020, and that it will continue?

I’m sitting here wondering what I’m supposed to do. Coronavirus seems like a glue that holds things in place. You can’t go to church, and evangelists are treated like criminals if they try to hold revivals. Social opportunities are drastically restricted. It looks like it’s a very bad time for forming new relationships or starting new projects. The government is descending into true insanity.

The feeling I get is that if you didn’t have it together before the pandemic, you’re probably not going to get it together now.

I like a TV show called Forged in Fire. They take groups of knifemakers and turn them loose with tools. The contestants get limited time periods in which to make knives designed for certain purposes.

Most of the contestants just aren’t very good at using tools. It’s a little disturbing to watch them display their lack of knowledge. Their lack of preparation makes things hard for them, and that means drama. Also, the judges of the show add very difficult challenges to their work. The pressure of doing difficult work while watching a clock adds suspense to the show.

At the end of every time period, the host tells everyone time is up, and he commands them to stop what they’re doing and put down their tools. Whatever they’ve made up to that point is what they have to present to the judges. It doesn’t matter how bad it is.

You can see the parallel. I feel like our work on earth is pretty much done, and that we won’t be able to do much more. It’s just a feeling. I’m not saying I’m sure the feeling is a reliable indicator of mankind’s status with regard to God. I’m just saying it feels as though it were.

What do I do now? I don’t get to pray with people any more. I have no one to help out financially. I can’t go to church. It’s not realistic to travel to revivals and meetings, as I used to. These days, I pray a lot, I try to be improved by God, I look after my earthly responsibilities, I blog and put other material on the web, and I play. I make things with my tools, I shoot, and so on. That’s about it.

I don’t seem to reach anyone new any more. The people who thought they knew better than I did still feel that way, and they will never change. I’m not meeting anyone new.

It’s like the school day is over and I’m waiting for my mom to pick me up. Heaven is a place of rest and pleasure. I seem to be in a place of rest and pleasure now, and it wasn’t something I could have planned or worked for. This is why I wonder if God is giving people who are close to him pleasant times to mirror the miserable times people who ignore him are experiencing.

It really does look like Revelation 22:

He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still.

And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.

The weird thing about coronavirus is that it’s a very minor plague, yet it has still been extremely effective in keeping us away from each other. Masks and lockdowns don’t work, and if you get sick, you’re nearly certain to have nothing more than a brief, minor illness, yet the irrational, authoritarian bars to free association remain in place and are being strengthened.

It doesn’t make sense. Things that don’t make sense have supernatural origins. We’re not being kept away from each other by politicians. We’re being kept away from each other by spirits that influence politicians. Are they evil spirits? Is it God and his ministering spirits, forcing us to stand down? I don’t know. I just know it comes from the supernatural realm.

Day before yesterday, the final scene from the 1959 film On the Beach popped up in my Youtube recommendations. I took a look at it. In case you don’t know, it’s about a nuclear war. In the movie, the northern hemisphere is blanketed in radioactive air, and everyone there is dead. The movie’s characters are in Australia, waiting to see whether the radiation will kill them, too. I’ve written about this movie before.

The characters try to continue their lives. A dissipated middle-aged lady tries to start a romance so she won’t die alone. The crew of an American submarine tries to find survivors in the northern hemisphere. People go to the beach. They have parties. None of it works. The romance fails, the sub finds no indications of human life, and the radiation starts moving south through Australia, killing people as it goes.

At the end of the movie, the streets are empty. Everyone is at home, taking taxpayer-funded poison in order to avoid dying from radiation sickness. The buildings are there. The man-made objects required for normal life are there. The sun is still rising every day. It’s all for naught. Everything has been abandoned, and nature will eventually destroy it. War has turned every single one of man’s treasured accomplishments into vanity.

The movie portrays Christianity as a security blanket for the fearful. The Salvation Army maintains an outdoor station in front of a public building, and people flock to the building’s steps to be comforted. At the very end of the movie, the steps are deserted, and in a clumsy attempt at anti-military propaganda, the filmmakers show the Salvation Army’s banner, which is swaying in the breeze. It says, “There is still time…brother.”

Nuclear apocalypse movies used to be very, very popular, and leftists manipulated by foreign communists who couldn’t afford to keep up in the arms race used to agitate about disarmament all the time. Now no one seems to have any interest in the subject. The bombs are still there, but leftists have decided to move on, for no apparent reason. The weather, white people, and Confederate flags are the fashionable threats now.

The scenes reminded me of what we’ve been seeing for the last year. Projects abandoned. Businesses needlessly destroyed. In some places, we’ve seen empty streets. We’ve seen many empty malls and stores. I am told that in Miami, people now do whatever they want on the roads (even more than they used to). They drive at furious speeds and completely ignore the traffic laws. Something inside them is telling them obeying the law doesn’t matter any more.

We’re not sitting at home committing suicide, but we are not the active, hopeful people we were in 2019, and it appears that leftist hysteria will continue tightening the shackles. We elected a befuddled old egotist who was unintelligent to begin with, and he is firing off misguided executive orders as though he were being paid by the pound. He seems determined to control us, which is not surprising from a man who has a long history of bullying.

If things continue to get better for me as the centrifuging of society continues, how should I feel about it? I didn’t earn it. I earned the opposite, through sin and arrogance. Someone else bought all this for me with his flesh and blood. All I did was listen and admit I was wrong.

People who are far nicer than I am have had it much worse, and I think that will continue. Christianity was never about being nice. You can be nice while your entire life is an insult to God. Christianity is about being transformed by the Holy Spirit and submitting to him. It’s about listening and being honest. Emotional people who let their hearts rule them are always very dishonest. They hate the truth.

One of the worst things the Bible says about people is that they did what was right in their own eyes. Notice: it doesn’t say they did things they thought were wrong. They had opinions about what was right, and they obeyed their consciences. When the Bible says someone did what was right in his own eyes, it’s a judgment that precedes punishment. People who make up their own ideas about right are wrong are what the Bible calls “workers of iniquity.” They are called “lawless,” even though they obey their own rules. The only law that has any validity is the law of the Holy Spirit. It’s what he tells us to do, moment by moment. You can’t make a fixed list of his laws, because they change. Fixed laws are inferior. They were provided under the old covenant, but they generated evil results because of their lack of flexibility.

I’m not the nicest or kindest person around, but I will still make it when nicer people fail and go to hell for ignoring God. Is it fair? Of course it’s fair. If Jesus wants to be murdered and then give his inheritance to bad people, he has every right to do it. What I get isn’t stolen. It was all paid for. Just not by me.

Leftism is all about taking blessings from people God favors and giving them to people who are cursed because they don’t listen to him. Leftists hate God’s ways. They can’t understand that it’s right for God to treat me better than a politically correct individual who thinks he knows better than God.

For a long time, my impression has been that I would continue to have a better and better life, and that the only real unpleasantness I might have to face would be ostracism (“cancellation”) and death by murder. I’ve felt that the biggest drag on my happiness would be my inability to get other people to listen so they could do well. I have concluded that even the most blessed person on earth will have to suffer from watching other people fail. When someone you know abandons God, lives in misery, and goes to hell, you have to accept the fact that it doesn’t mean you’re not blessed. No matter how much it hurts, you have to realize it didn’t happen to you.

The other day, I was thinking about blessings and what a blessed life should be like. I was unhappy because I knew America was finished, and that we brought it all on ourselves. We could turn and be healed at any time, but we won’t, because we think we know everything. I asked myself: should a Christian ever be unhappy? Then I remembered the shortest verse of the Bible: “Jesus wept.”

If I have a pleasant life and then go to heaven, and every other person on earth suffers and goes to hell, and I suffer from seeing what happens to them, I am very, very blessed. There are some forms of suffering that spare no one.

Day before yesterday, I listened to my friend Mike, who is the worst influence since the GOP let liberal journalists convince it John McCain and Mitt Romney were surefure winners. I’m kidding about Mike, but whenever I have a crazy idea, he tells me to go for it. I foolishly admitted I had been considering getting a very expensive ice cream maker. An hour or two later, my order was in. Why do I talk to him?

This is the kind of thing I concern myself with these days. Toys. Pleasant pastimes. I’m also dedicating myself heavily to prayer, but that’s about it. If there were anything else left to do, wouldn’t God have shown me and helped me get going?

Mike just had a hip replaced, and he quit a job that was killing him. He started a company with a bunch of carnal people, and they gradually pushed him out, which was what I expected. I told him he could come down here to recuperate. He loves this area. He says he wants to get deeply into prayer. He said he wants to play for a while. He used the same word that had been going through my mind.

I have been fooling around with a Christian dating site, but given my view of the world, I wonder if there is any point. I don’t think there is time to build much of a life with anyone. I would be happy to have someone attractive who shares my views and doesn’t want to be alone with the end comes. I wonder if my attitude will make me so unappealing nothing will come of my efforts. I don’t seem to have anything to be concerned about, though, because nearly all of the women I talk to are really foreign scammers. They’re like a hedge of thistles that wall me in, and things like that have supernatural origins. Maybe God is telling me to be content with things as they are.

I look forward to seeing how things pan out, regardless of whether I’m right about things. I want to know what’s happening and get accustomed to it.

One Step Closer to Heaven

Today I got back to work on my fried chicken recipe, and I made some good progress. I have had a lot of frustration with chicken dishes, and frying things is not my long suit, so it would make me very happy to get fried chicken working correctly before I die.

I made fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and gravy.

The chicken breading was very tasty. Almost where I need it to be. Here’s the breading ingredient list:

INGREDIENTS
1 cup flour
1 tbsp. salt
5 tbsp. white pepper
1 tbsp. chipotle powder
3 tsp. garlic powder
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. turmeric
3 tsp. ginger

I used beaten eggs to make the breading stick. I see a lot of Internet people coating chicken which has been dried with paper towels, but it hasn’t worked for me.

I have quit trying to find scent-free lard. Today I used refined coconut oil. My buddy Mike told me about it. The coconut smell has been removed, so what you end up with is a lot like quality lard. I bought a jar at Winn-Dixie, and I decided to reserve it for frying things like chicken. I’ll keep pouring it back in the jar after I use it, until it develops problems.

The white pepper in the recipe has to be reduced. White pepper smells a little bit like a dog, so if you overdo it, your food has the same smell. I’m going to cut it severely with black pepper. I think I’ll also reduce the chipotle a little. The salt needs to be increased slightly, too.

I had to use boneless chicken because no one sells genuine frying chickens near me. A fryer shouldn’t be bigger than three pounds. Chicken pieces that are too thick just don’t work.

I thought I was cutting the chicken thin today, but I need to be merciless next time. Nothing more than half an inch thick, period.

I quit using a fancy marinade. I used orange juice, lots of salt, and fresh garlic. I think it’s sufficient.

I don’t believe all the people who say to fry chicken at 350°. It always burns. I shot for 300-325°, and it worked very well. I used a thermometer probe dangling in the skillet.

The next effort should be excellent. After that, I may try doing something with a mixture of corn flour and wheat flour. Something not too far from corn dog batter.

Sooner or later, this will work. Then I’ll spite the world by taking the recipe with me to heaven.

As for potatoes, I’m all done boiling them. It’s too easy to make them grainy. From now on, I’ll bake them and then mash them. It’s less work than boiling, anyway.

Squirrel Tactics Evolve With Experience

Today was a productive day of squirrel hunting education.

This was my third outing this season, and I’m already picking things up.

1. Take a chair and sit still. Don’t stalk, and don’t bother with a blind.

2. Make sure you sit in the shade, because you will be unhappy if the sun starts warming up your back and you can’t move because you don’t want to spook anything.

3. Position yourself so there are no trees close to you. If they’re too close, they cut off a lot of potential field of fire, and squirrels will mysteriously find their way into the blocked areas.

4. Take a pistol so you can shoot wounded squirrels in the head.

5. Don’t leave a dead or dying squirrel lying on the ground to attract other squirrels, and don’t shoot another squirrel before you pick it up. Go get it. Squirrels can revive and scamper into hollow logs and knotholes, never to be seen again. Then they suffer, and you don’t get your squirrels.

6. Put the sun at your back.

I am pretty sure I shot three squirrels today. I say “pretty sure” because only one came home with me. I’m starting to question a lot of things I’ve been taught.

First, I’m wondering if rifles have any place in squirrel hunting.

Based on what I’ve been seeing, it looks like you can shoot a squirrel right through the chest with a rifle and still lose it. Unless you shoot them in the head, they may stay alive long enough to cause problems. They can climb and get stuck in tree crotches, or they can hide in other places before they expire.

I saw a squirrel on a tree trunk today, maybe 15 feet up. I would guess it was 40 yards off. I popped it, and it climbed up the tree at a fairly slow pace for a squirrel. It appears that this is a sign that you’ve hit the target. When squirrels aren’t wounded, they move very quickly. Anyway, I never saw the squirrel again. I guess its dead body is still in the tree.

I shot another squirrel, and it ran around in circles and then stopped. I saw another one to my right, so I delayed going to get the first one. I nailed the second one, and it tried to climb a nearby tree as though groggy.

I got up to get the first one, and I couldn’t find it. I went to look for the second one, and I couldn’t find it, either. I never did find it. It was alive long enough to hide too well.

I resumed looking for the other one, and suddenly, it leapt up from the leaves and tried to run off. I had not shot it cleanly enough to kill it right away. It ran into a hollow tree. I had to go get a chainsaw, open up the tree, scare the squirrel out, and finish it with a pistol. It’s in the sink now, brining, minus two legs.

This is not the way I want things to go. I need to be more efficient and humane.

I have seen lots of men claim they use .22 rifles and shoot squirrels in the head. Call me skeptical. Yes, I’m sure that if you shoot at 20 squirrels, you will hit some in the head and kill them instantly. I do not believe anyone can consistently do it, unless they’re shooting from under 50 feet. It’s easy to shoot into an area the size of a squirrel’s head from 100 feet when your target is inanimate and you’re using a rest. It’s much harder when you have no rest and you’re pressed for time because the squirrel may take off. I think the men who say they’re doing it are liars. It’s that simple. I’m a good shot, and I can’t do it.

If a guy shoots at 50 squirrels and hits two in the head, he will probably forget about the 48 he missed or wounded and tell everyone how easy head shots are.

Today I saw a guy claim he hunted squirrels with a 1911, which could be trusted to put shots into something like 2″ at 75 feet. No one on earth has ever been able to shoot a typical 1911 that well, offhand. I doubt it’s possible for professional marksmen to do it from rests. People will say anything when they know no one can check.

So what’s the answer? I can think of some possibilities.

1. Use a shotgun. This is what my grandfather told me to do. He said that when you shoot a squirrel with a .22, it may fall into a crotch and stay there. He said a shotgun would knock it down. There is more to it, though. It’s pretty hard to miss a squirrel with a shotgun, and they usually kill right away. Also, I would be able to take many more shots, because shotgun pellets won’t travel long distances and injure my neighbors. With a .22, I can only shoot when I’m absolutely sure the bullets can’t leave my property.

2. Wait for shots under 50 feet and make sure I get head shots. This would pretty much kill the whole effort. I would be lucky to get two squirrels a week.

3. Use segmented bullets that fall apart and wound squirrels worse. This may be a good idea, but I would have to check to see how accurate they are. I happen to have some.

4. Use my .17 HMR. With V-Max bullets, it will tear a squirrel up a lot worse than a .22, so wounded squirrels would be less of a problem. The down side is that the meat would be messed up.

It’s amazing how much BS you can pick up from hunters. I’ve been told it’s not necessary to hit squirrels in order to kill them. People say they “bark” squirrels. The idea is that you shoot the tree next to a squirrel, and the stuff the bullet knocks loose from the tree knocks the squirrel out. I’ve shot near squirrels, and I’ve shot clean through them, hitting the bark on the way out. I have never seen a squirrel get “barked.” Maybe it’s a fable hunters like to tell as a joke, like the one about snipe hunting.

I hate to resort to a shotgun. It makes killing squirrels more like shoveling snow than hunting. It’s barely a sport. But if it reduces suffering, maybe I should consider it.

Today I tried a surefire, easy, super-quick method of squirrel cleaning I saw on Youtube. You cut above the squirrel’s anus, through the tail. You slit the skin a little bit to either side of the anus. Then you put your boot on the squirrel’s tail and yank on the hind feet. Supposedly, the squirrel will slide out of the top half of its skin. The hide will tear conveniently, and you’ll be left with a dead squirrel wearing fur pants which are easy to pull off.

It didn’t work for me at all. The hair came off the tail long before the hide even thought about coming off the squirrel. The tail kept sliding out from under my heel, even on concrete. The squirrel I cleaned today was pretty big. Maybe his hide was unusually tough. Anyway, the method doesn’t impress me.

I can’t find my commercial chicken shears. I need them to cut critters up the belly and sever their sternums. I had to use Home Depot scissors today, and it wasn’t efficient.

My problems with lost squirrels make a thermal monocular look like a good idea. One of their purposes is to locate wounded prey.

Things will get better, and I’ll do a nicer job in the future. In the meantime, it’s wonderful to get out there and feel like part of nature. Men who don’t hunt are incomplete. I’m glad I was raised with a good attitude toward it. I’m glad my mother didn’t turn me into a snowflake who is so feminized, he puts spiders on paper plates and transfers them outside instead of stepping on them the way a man should. Self-righteous sissies who are ignorant about wildlife management are multiplying like mold in America. It will be very sad when Americans have to stop teaching their kids to hunt.

I’m glad I took up hunting squirrels. I had hoped to shoot hogs and deer on my farm, and it’s disappointing that they don’t come here, but squirrel hunting is very worthwhile. Any idiot can hit a deer. Hitting a squirrel is much harder. Most deer are killed at distances under 100 yards, and a deer is about a dozen times as wide as a squirrel, so hitting a squirrel at 25 feet is like shooting a deer 100 yards off. Also, squirrels move a lot, and they don’t stand conveniently on the ground. They’re also harder to spot, and rimfire rifles are less accurate than good deer guns. I think what I’m doing takes a lot more skill than using a 1-MOA gun to shoot a motionless animal the size of a pony.

If only they had more meat on them. A squirrel thigh the size of a deer’s would make a magnificent feast.