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.

What do I Really Want?

It’s a beautiful day. Overcast and threatening to rain. It’s beautiful because I’m on my own farm, far from Miami, closer to God than ever, considering going outside to shoot squirrels.

I just made buckwheat pancakes with dark maple syrup. Wonderful. If you don’t feel loved after a plate full of buckwheat pancakes and a big mug of ginger tea with half and half, you don’t have both oars in the water.

Oddly, while I’m enjoying the sensation, I’m thinking about weapons.

The rapture has not come. I am still here. The Antichrist’s left-wing troops are still moving toward pogrom-style persecution involving bringing mob violence to the suburbs and farms. I need to be prepared.

What’s the answer? Do nothing and accept martyrdom when the enraged millennials arrive? That’s not a crazy option. I don’t like the idea of killing unsaved people, even if the alternative is being killed. Another option is to be armed as well as I reasonably can. If I do that, I can respond with a show of strength, or with violence, if needed. If God shows me the better way is to sit on the porch and wait to have my throat cut, I can still do that even if I’m armed.

I’ve thought about night vision and thermal optics. If you can fight in the dark, you can literally massacre overconfident nighttime home invaders. Yesterday I wrote about ordering an infrared illuminator for a night vision scope which I already own. The purpose of the illuminator and scope is to help me shoot things like coons and coyotes. Maybe pigs. But anything that will help you shoot an animal at night will also help you defend yourself from nocturnal murder gangs.

I keep researching the alternatives. It looks like night equipment for hunters is not necessarily the same as night equipment for the defense of life and property.

There are two kinds of nighttime optics. Night vision and thermal. A night vision optic uses infrared light, which is always present, to give you a picture a lot like a black and white TV. My understanding is that night vision optics come in two flavors: relatively inexpensive jobs that rely on illuminators, and pricey units that don’t need them.

The step in price between the two types is pretty big. I bought my night vision scope, which works okay, for about $600 in 2017 or 2018. A military-style night vision monocular will run about $3500. Why? Because it works much better.

Defensive shooters generally don’t use night vision scopes. They put monoculars on their helmets. The monoculars are mounted so they can swing down for use or up out of the way. Instead of using your scope to show you what’s happening, you use your monocular to look through your scope. Instead of an IR illuminator, you use an IR laser. It lights up the bad guy, you see it through your monocular and scope, and you plug him. He has no idea what’s happening, because he can’t see the laser beam.

I believe this is right. Not positive.

Finding the bad guy (so you can use your scope to shoot him) is different, if I have my facts right. A defensive shooter would want a second monocular next to the first one, with thermal circuitry. You locate bad guys with thermal, which is easier, because they light up like hot pokers, and then you use night vision to take them down.

This is all very different from what I am currently contemplating. I expect to be able to use my night vision scope and illuminator, coupled with a thermal monocular for scanning. Compared to a rig with two monoculars, I believe my equipment would be harder to use in a defensive situation. I would be able to use night vision for shooting, but a scope isn’t as good as a monocular for looking around to see what’s happening near you.

What if they show up during the day?

In the daytime, a thermal monocular would still be helpful because it lights up human beings. The night vision scope works in daylight, so it would be useful, too. I would not need night vision to see what was happening around me, so I would not need a monocular for that. I don’t think a night vision monocular would be useful during the day. It wouldn’t show me anything I couldn’t see by other means.

Actually, it would let me use an IR laser, but it still seems like a bad idea.

I feel like I should get a thermal monocular no matter what. If I want to hunt critters when it’s dark, or I want to be able to spot them more easily during the day, a quality thermal monocular is the way to go. Sadly, they are not cheap. The $500 ones are fine for watching your dog run around in your backyard, but you have to blow a lot more to get something that works well enough to trust for defensive use.

Would I ever get a night vision monocular? I guess it depends on how bad things get. I can’t say $3500 is a high price for safety, but I’ve already taken pretty substantial measures.

I really like hunting and shooting, but that doesn’t mean I want to live in a world where I need to use my equipment and skills on human beings. I know people who live in total harmony and brotherhood right now. They’ve already left the earth. How hard should I work to delay my arrival in their company?

In all likelihood, I will never get a serious night vision monocular. I don’t think I value this life enough to make the expenditure and aggravation worth it.

Rodents Win the Day

In case anyone is wondering, smoked squirrel is pretty good.

I went out today for another day of rodent eradication. I didn’t want to deal with open sights, so I took my Savage A22 with a Nikon Prostaff II Rimfire.

I also decided to take my squirrel call. It’s from a company calle Primos. It’s a rubber bulb and a tube with a reed. You squeeze it, and it makes noises that are supposed to sound like squirrels.

The folding backpack chair has turned out to be a good tool, so I took it with me and set it in a likely place. After maybe 15 minutes, I decided to try the call. I made a number of noises that I intended to sound like the examples I had heard on the web. I got no response at all, Truthfully, I think the call is a joke. It’s supposed to say, “I’m a squirrel! I’m a squirrel! I’m eating tasty nuts!” I think it really says, “I’m a gullible hunter! I like fried squirrel brains!”

I didn’t see a single squirrel in that area. I did hear an owl, however. It set up behind me and hooted like crazy. Then some other type of bird of prey swooped in with a critter dangling from its beak and perched between me and the trees I was watching. I couldn’t see it well enough to identify it. The bird, I mean.

Here is my genius guess: squirrels aren’t anxious to come out and play while owls are screaming nearby and other birds are tearing up freshly killed mice or rats.

I moved farther in, and in my next spot, I saw a couple of squirrels and watched them for a very long time. If I had had a shotgun, they would be in the fridge right now, but they didn’t present safe .22 shots. I came home with nothing, except some old Nehi and Heinz ketchup bottles I found.

The day was not a total loss. I got to hunt, I learned more about what not to do, and I smoked the squirrel I shot yesterday. I brined it all night with baking soda, and today I put a little rub on it and threw it in the smoker with some St. Louis ribs. The ribs are still going, but I ate the squirrel.

The verdict? Lots of potential. The flavor was really excellent. It was dry, though, so I think it needs to be greased at least twice while it smokes, and it should be sealed in foil after an hour or so to keep the steam in. It also seems to need a lot more salt than pork.

Smoking will work, and it’s less aggravation than frying. I have a new go-to squirrel method.

I like hunting from a chair, but I think it would be worth it to get one that swivels. Squirrels can’t be counted on to pop up in front of you, and if one appears to the rear or far to one side, a stationary chair is a problem. I would need to find one that swivels quietly, though. And it would have to be light.

A wheelchair would be perfect. The big wheels would work in my woods, and I could turn it in place.

I live in an area where used wheelchairs probably sell for 10 bucks.

I plan to get in as many hunting days as possible while the season is open. I may put one of my squirrel feeders in the woods. There is no point in playing fair.

In other news, I have a big infrared illuminator on the way. This is an infrared flashlight you can attach to a scope or rifle. The purpose is to allow me to use my night vision scope. It came with an illuminator, but everyone says the stock illuminator is useless.

If I can get the scope and illuminator to work reasonably well, it may be time to bite the bullet and get a very expensive thermal monocular. This would allow me to sit outside at night, scan for coons and coyotes, and blow them to varmint perdition. The thermal monocular would also be good for security, assuming I’m still here on earth when angry statists start prancing into the well-armed meat grinder that is rural America. It’s a bizarre yet highly likely future scenario. If it happens, they will show up armed with laser pointers, pink hats, loud music, and bottles of their own drug-test-failing urine. A few may have cheap AR-15’s they don’t really know how to use. They would be met with $7000 thermal scopes and .338 Lapua. Then, of course, there would be the dogs.

Out west, they would be in really serious trouble. Because of the geography, a lot of westerners who don’t think of themselves as snipers, militia nuts, or precision shooters routinely take game from hundreds of yards away. This is normal out there, so hitting a fat elementary school teacher armed with a Kel-Tec full of .380 FMJ, while he’s 200 yards away, at your gate, still getting out of his mom’s Prius, would not be challenging.

I hate coons and coyotes, for obvious reasons. I don’t hate bobcats, but I probably should. I should also hate armadillos, because they dig dangerous holes. My farm isn’t the ideal location for a deer or turkey hunter, but there are still lots of things you can pop at night with specialized equipment, and in doing so, you would prepare yourself well for the day when Soros-sponsored buses full of goons show up to pick on what they think are soft targets.

Here’s to the day when all of God’s children have been removed to a place where everyone bathes in love and lives in harmony. Hope I get there before the entitlement posses start patrolling.

Dinner Destroyed by Transcription Error

You’re never too old to learn something obvious.

This week, I got a craving for kung pao chicken. I have yet to find decent Chinese food in my area. I learned how to make my own kung pao chicken last year. I have a bunch of non-perishable ingredients on hand. Yesterday I bought chicken and some vegetables, and today I cooked.

It’s a big, big job. Something you don’t want to do every week. I cut up green onions, ginger, chicken, and so on. I minced garlic. I measured stuff out. One of my ingredients was Sichuan peppers. I bought them last year, but I didn’t use them. I figured peppers were peppers, so I used something else.

Today I looked at my ingredient list, and it called for three tablespoons of Sichuan peppers. I decided to use the real thing. I thought they smelled odd, but I figured the Chinese knew what they were doing. I ground some up and added three tablespoons to my sauce.

When I tried to eat the food, it was disgusting. My tongue got numb. I put the whole batch down the garbage disposal. I thought the Chinese had poisoned me, the way they poisoned American pets with melamine and the way they poisoned American houses with bad drywall. I wondered if I would die. I decided that if I lived, I would take the rest of the peppers to the health department and rat out the Chinese grocer, who probably didn’t know she was selling tainted merchandise.

Then I looked at my computer, and I learned two things. Sichuan peppers are not peppers, and I was supposed to use three teaspoons, not three tablespoons.

Sichuan peppers are also called Sichuan peppercorns. They have a chemical in them that causes numbness, especially if you eat three times as much as you should.

Now my dinner is in the septic tank, and I am full of pecan twirls. I had to eat something.

In other news, I feel like I know what to do about getting a new welding table. I have been thinking about buying a factory-made table, but I have also been thinking about saving money by building my own. I just built a 4-foot-square shooting bench from steel tubing, and it’s nearly the same thing as a welding bench, so I know I can do the job. Before I built the bench, I was afraid of the welding job, and once that fear was put to rest, I was only put off by the difficulty of buying steel for the table top.

You can’t just go to the mall and ask for a 12-square-foot piece of 3/8″ steel with a precision-ground surface. People who live in the Rust Belt are lucky (in one way, anyhow) because they are surrounded by businesses that sell tools and materials. If I lived in Pittsburgh, I could probably walk out of my house and throw a rock and hit a place that sold steel for welding tables. Florida is different.

Today, through the magic of Google, I located a business that sells precision-ground plate. It’s in Tampa, 90 minutes away. I emailed and asked if they could help me. Haven’t heard back yet.

This is not the only encouraging information I got. I learned that the density of steel is 0.292 pounds per cubic inch, so the type of top I’m thinking of buying would weigh 188 pounds. Before doing the calculation, I had no idea what a decent table top would weigh, so I was afraid I’d be trying to work with a monumental object. I can deal with 188 pounds. For that matter, I could go up to 1/2″ steel and deal with 250 pounds. Drilling fixturing holes would remove something like 58 pounds from a 3/8″ table and 76 pounds from a 1/2″ table.

The steel for the frame would come in at maybe 100 pounds, which is not bad at all. It wouldn’t be like I was buying a gigantic piece of metalworking equipment I could never take with me if I moved. It would be more like buying a rolling toolbox.

I’ve seen smallish welding tables that weigh 400 or more pounds. I didn’t want to deal with that. Now I’m inclined to think they’re overbuilt. Men who like tools have a weakness for things that are too heavy. They think you can’t have strength or rigidity without lots of iron. This isn’t even close to true. It’s pretty much what the Soviets used to think, and it’s why they built machinery that was way too heavy. It’s poor engineering, based on ignorance.

I’m no engineer, but I used to be a bad physicist, and I can look at a table of figures and tell you don’t need a 300-pound frame to hold up a small welding table. The tubing I used for my bench will deflect 1/16″ if you hang 500 pounds from the end of a 4-foot stretch. That’s assuming you only use one tube, the weight is all on one point at the end, there is no thick steel plate attached to it to add rigidity, and there are no struts or legs under it to resist deflection. Add a few companion elements to your tube and refrain from putting tiny 500-pound objects at one end of it, and you should get, essentially, no deflection.

I should be able to use the exact same 2″-square tubing I used for my bench. I think it would be better to use 1″ by 3″, though, with the long sides oriented vertically. The vertical parts of the tubes would be the parts that resisted deflection, so a 1″ by 3″ tube would be a lot more rigid. It would also fit nicely between the fixturing holes on the table top. I would want 5/8″ holes on 2″ centers, so a 1″ tube would fit between holes without obstructing them.

Based on figures I’ve seen from overpriced online metal dealers, I may be able to get a 1/2″ ground plate for around $400 if I pick it up myself. The tubing would run another $100, and then I’d need paint and about $50 worth of casters. So $550, plus $30 for an annular cutter and the price of renting a magnetic drill press long enough to put holes in the plate.

It sort of looks like I could have a really neat table for maybe $700, along with bragging rights because I designed and built it. Compare that to $2000+ for a factory table.

If only I had a big welding table to build my welding table on.

Anyway, things are looking good. I have not been poisoned, and I may be able to create a nice welding table at a reasonable price. Hope your day has gone well.

Ribs and Rifles

My friend Mike is visiting. We’ve had quite a day.

We went to Core Rifle Systems to pick up some ammo he ordered, and it turned out they had Hornady ELD-M 140-grain match ammo, which was better than what he had asked for. We arranged a switch, and now he’s all set for the weekend. We plan to get his new rifle running.

We also hit Rural King, where, unbelievably, they were selling Norma match ammo at a Rural King price. He snapped up several boxes.

Before running our errand, we stuck two racks of ribs in the smoker. Mike was the first person to fix decent ribs for me, about 30 years ago, and he inspired me to get my new smoker. This week, I was only able to get baby backs and trimmed St. Louis ribs. No full racks of spare ribs. I decided to make one rack of each type and do a comparison. We also had macaroni and cheese, barbecue beans with smoked sausage, and Texas toast made with homemade bread.

This was a good opportunity for me to compare baby backs to St. Louis ribs. I’ve never been a fan of baby backs. They’re small, dry, and expensive. That’s what I believed, but I decided to give them a fresh chance anyway. Turned out I was right. They’re worthless. The St. Louis ribs were nearly perfect, but the baby backs were on the dry side and had a lot less flavor.

I don’t know why people eat baby backs. Ignorance, I guess.

I have finally produced what I think is nearly perfect macaroni and cheese. How did I do it? Predictably enough, by correcting Alton Brown. The more I know about cooking, the less I think of him.

When I created my old recipe, I used Brown’s recipe, along with at least one other, as a starting point. The dish was good, but I felt it could be better. I thought the cheese could be smoother and cheesier.

Brown says to put cheese, panko bread crumbs, and butter atop macaroni and cheese and bake it. This is a bad idea. It tends to make the cheese separate. You don’t want to overheat macaroni and cheese. Baking it is not a good move.

Here’s what I did. I made the noodles. I made the sauce using cheese, half and half, butter, starch, an egg yolk, and sodium citrate, among other things. It was silky-smooth. I did not boil it.

I put the noodles in the microwave and nuked them until they were blistering hot, and then I stirred them into the sauce. This way, I got hot macaroni and cheese without boiling. I put the crust ingredients on top and broiled them. This gave me a perfect crust without heating the rest of the dish too much.

It’s magnificent. Couldn’t be much better.

I used 12 ounces of cheese and 8 dry ounces of noodles. This doesn’t include the top crust.

It was great having Mike in the kitchen, because when I needed help with something, I didn’t have to explain it, do it for him, or do it over. And he knows good food when he tastes it. Most people don’t.

We were talking about the microwave. I said I didn’t like using it when I cooked for guests. He said he always used it to cook for guests, because they couldn’t tell the difference.

He has a point.

If we ever recover from dinner, we’ll get some guns ready for tomorrow. We plan to do a rimfire invasion in the pasture.

Yesterday we shot .22 pistols. Mike was concerned about his skills, but we set up around 50 feet from the 6″ steel targets, and he had no problems. I had to explain that most people would have a hard time hitting a 6″ target from 7 yards. Tomorrow we’ll probably start with .22 rifles and move on to .17 HMR.

I suggest never eating baby back ribs, and be careful about listening to Alton Brown. He’s entertaining, but sometimes I wonder if he can cook at all.

I don’t want to get back into cooking heavily, but when I cook things I already know how to make, I might as well do it right.

Hope your Black Friday went well.

Insert Clever 20/20 Vision Reference Here

I continue to marvel at the dual realities that exist in America.

For a long time, I’ve been writing about the alternate reality the children of darkness live in. Covid has made it much more obvious. Leftists and other enemies of God live in terror, locked in their houses, obsessing on masks and other things that don’t really do much to halt the spread of disease. They’re scared to death of a mild respiratory disease that does what other mild respiratory diseases do: it kills a tiny percentage of the people it infects, generally taking those who were in poor health and likely to die soon regardless.

I can understand why an octogenarian would worry, but young people are wearing masks when they mow their yards.

It’s amazing that we killed off old people with bad policies instead of protecting the easily-identified groups who were really vulnerable. Liberal governors sent the sick into old folks homes, pretty much guaranteeing the enormous loss of life we saw in the Northeast. What Cuomo did is pretty similar to the Inuit practice of exposing old people in winter to kill them, except the Inuits knew what they were doing.

Today I read about smallpox. Its fatality rate was about 30%, and people who got it died slowly, in agony, covered with extremely painful sores that made them feel like they were on fire whenever they moved. That’s what real plagues are like, but half of America is sacrificing its liberty and prosperity in the vain hope of avoiding a disease that kills something like one in 1000 victims.

Antichristians have more shortages than God’s children. People in major cities went without meat for months while people like me were buying it on sale. Generally, antichristians have fewer firearms, and they have had not been able to come anywhere near matching the abundance of ammunition Christians had on hand when the crisis started. Christian areas have fewer economic problems, too.

Today I can’t help thinking about the two realities. Toilet paper and antiseptic wipes are disappearing again in blue areas. Here, toilet paper is not hard to get, and antiseptic wipes are on sale. I saw canisters of wipes selling for $2.98 at Walmart this week, and I bought Lysol wipes for $4.98 later. Try buying them on Amazon or Ebay. Expect to pay nearly $30.

Here’s something crazy: local Walmarts are full of wipes, but Walmart’s website will not sell them. You have to go in and get them yourself. This means people in blue areas, where Walmarts have no wipes, can’t get them at all!

I have enough toilet paper and paper towels to get me through the better part of a year. I had ample supplies at the beginning of last week, and I picked up a little more when I heard the insanity was starting again. I never did without paper goods during the last wave of craziness, and I expect to do fine this time, too.

I wouldn’t have stocked up at all, but I know that fear of shortages causes shortages. Once one lemming goes over the cliff, the rest will follow. Even here, things are tightening up somewhat, and I have to get involved simply to insure that my supply won’t end up in someone else’s 1000-roll stockpile.

When my mother talked about old men from the country who were plainspoken and unsophisticated, she would say they were “rough as cobs.” The toilet paper shortage made me think about that. Now I know what the expression means. Hope I never have to experience it.

I’ve got lots of rubbing alcohol, which I use to clean counters. I have more hand sanitizer than I know what to do with; I bought one type and then decided I liked another, so I stocked up on it, too. I have all kinds of wipes. I bought extra in case my cousin who lives in Illinois needs me to ship them.

I don’t think I can get Lysol spray unless I pay through the nose online, but then I never used it anyway. My cousin asked about it. Her mother is in ill health, and they go through a lot of cleaning products. Today at the grocery, I saw another spray which is full of the really nasty chemical in Lysol. I sent my cousin a photo and asked if she wanted me to get it for her.

Here’s a tip: Lysol is ethanol and quaternary ammonium. You can buy both separately under other brand names, and Home Depot sells spray bottles.

I’m making crisis food again. I have a batch of dried apples in the dehydrator, and beef slices for jerky are marinating in the fridge. My paranoia room is starting to overflow. I don’t think I’ll be here for the really hard times, but I may be wrong, and if I’m right, someone else will benefit from my efforts.

I could have done better on the ammunition front. There are some calibers I never expect to have to buy again, but others are different. Example: I didn’t get into 6.5mm Creedmoor until this year. I have what most people would consider a lot of 6.5, but I wouldn’t be comfortable maintaining what I would consider a normal routine of range trips with it.

Decent Creedmore ammunition still pops up from time to time, and I have materials to make 400 more rounds, so things could be worse. I should probably try to get a few dozen shotgun shells for squirrels. They’re not too hard to get.

Here’s a weird lesson. The traditional wisdom is that you should buy guns in common calibers so ammunition is easy to find. Forget that. I’ve taken on tons of ammo in unpopular calibers since the insanity started, at very good prices. You can get popular stuff cheaper during normal times, but when things go nuts, your 9mm and .22 weapons will starve. I think 6.5 cents per round is a good price for .22 ammo. Right now, people are selling the cheap stuff for 28.

Today I learned something disturbing. I am not storing jerky correctly. I found one piece in a bag with what could have been a thin patch of mold on it. I wasn’t sure. It could have been solidified fat. I did a responsible scientific test to find out. I ate it. It seemed okay. I hope it was. I’m not dead yet, and I’m not having visions. I started burrowing through my other bags, and I found one that definitely had serious mold. I couldn’t rationalize eating it, so I threw it out.

It didn’t occur to me that I should not be opening and closing bags randomly as my desire for jerky dictated. I should have left all the bags closed except for the one I was slowly emptying, and I should have put that one in the fridge.

Now all of my jerky is in the freezer while I take steps to save it.

I learned that I should use oxygen absorbers to slow spoilage down, so I ordered a bunch. I’m also going to move the meat to vacuum bags.

I plan to heat it before I move it. I read that mold and most mold spores die at 120°, so I’ll heat it past that point before storing it again.

I think the reason only one bag went funny is that I killed the bacteria and mold when I dehydrated the jerky. My dehydrator works at 155°. When I opened bags to take pieces out, I must have reintroduced mold and microbes.

It may be that I didn’t dry the meat enough. I’m not sure. It seems awfully dry. Dryer than many store brands.

I can move it to vacuum bags, freeze most of them, and leave one out to see what happens to it. I don’t really want my freezer jammed up with jerky, so if I can store it at room temperature, I will.

There are no problems with my dried apples yet, but I plan to add oxygen absorbers anyway. My grandmother just put hers in big jars and forgot about them, and they never spoiled. Her apples were somewhat drier than mine, though. I went by guidelines I found on the web.

Things are going well. It’s frustrating to hear about other people who are trapped in leftist strongholds where it’s like Soylent Green every day. I pray for God to reach people, but I don’t think there is much time left.

Taking Ecclesiastes 10:18 to Heart

I learned something useful today. Putting a small amount of ginger in beef jerky really improves it.

I made another batch yesterday, and while I was mixing the marinade, I thought about teriyaki. My best guess is that teriyaki jerky requires replacing all of the Worcestershire sauce with soy sauce, but for some reason, I stuck with half and half, and I added about a quarter of a teaspoon of ground ginger. I didn’t have fresh ginger.

It made a big difference. I wouldn’t say it tastes gingery. It just has more zing to it. I think powdered ginger will actually work better than fresh, because it has a sharper flavor.

So that was nice.

I grabbed the wrong cut of meat by mistake. I wanted eye round, and I think I bought bottom round. Anyway, today, the surface of the jerky has oil on it. It’s not congealed fat. Just oil. They say you should use beef with as little fat as possible. This cut seems to have more fat than eye round. The danger of using fatty meat is that the fat will go rancid. Will that happen when the meat is still lean but slightly fattier than eye round? I don’t know, but it tastes better. I’ll keep an eye on it, and if it doesn’t go bad, maybe I’ll switch to this cut permanently.

I also got new gutters installed. This house had only one roof gutter when I moved here, and it was between the roof and the patio enclosure. There was no guttering over the garage, so big, fat raindrops fell directly on the driveway. They were starting to wear it away, and I couldn’t leave the doors open when it rained, because so much water splattered into the garage. I had them run guttering over both doors. Feeling smug about that.

There was also an issue over the front porch. The roof was designed in such a way that a huge amount of water was directed onto the porch roof when it rained. It caused some rot, and I had to spend a grand on repairs. Now there is some hope the new guttering will direct the rain elsewhere.

The strangest part of the roof design was the lack of guttering on the workshop roof. The rain fell straight onto the grass, in front of a concrete porch. The rain destroyed a strip of grass beside the concrete and washed out a lot of the dirt. I could not grow anything in front of the porch. Rain also threw dirt all over the concrete. Now I have a gutter that runs the length of the building, and I may go crazy and plant something in the ugly rut where the rain used to fall.

I don’t know what’s happening in the world, and that suits me very well. I have plenty of jobs to keep me busy. I don’t need to read fake news to kill time as well as my digestion. The election will have an outcome whether I read about it or not, and if the rapture comes, it won’t matter. It shouldn’t matter, regardless, because God looks after me very well.

It has occurred to me that readers may be confused because I say I feel like the rapture is upon us, but I also talk about planning for shortages, civil war, and so on. I’m writing about different possible futures. One involves me being here while leftists torch the country and force sane people to dig in and defend, and the other involves me being somewhere above, gleefully oblivious to everything that happens here. I keep feeling powerful indications that I won’t be here, but I have been wrong before.

Today I prayed God would see to it I never found myself in a situation in which I would truly need to use a firearm. I have asked for that before. I don’t want to be pulled down into the mire with the pigs. I don’t think Christians were put here to shoot people. I think when you find yourself in a situation like that, it means something has gone wrong in your relationship with God.

The ammunition situation has gotten even worse. I set up alerts so a search site would tell me when certain types of ammunition were available. This morning I got an alert, and when I checked before 8:30 a.m., the site was sold out. People are hovering by their computers, snapping ammunition up as soon as it appears. Either that, or George Soros has a bot doing it to keep patriots from getting cartridges. Of course, people have been storing up ammunition since the Obama years, so Soros and Bloomberg could bankrupt themselves and still fail to accomplish their goal.

I don’t really think billionaires are buying ammunition to cause problems, but it would make a great conspiracy theory.

I wonder what life in blue America is like. Hell, I suppose. Terrorism, lack, and irrational fear surrounding a mild disease. My cousin near Chicago still can’t buy disinfectant wipes, but they’re slashing them to $2.98 per can at my local Walmart, just to get rid of them. My cousin near Atlanta says they finally have meat in stores, although restaurants can’t get what they want because they’re last in line. My Illinois cousin is visiting my aunt in Kentucky, and she can’t get wipes there, either. Of course, Kentucky isn’t all that red. Not down deep, regardless of whom they voted for. They love government handouts too much.

There are two realities, and I’m very satisfied with mine. I have zero interest in experiencing or even witnessing the false, unnecessary reality of leftists.

If you think about it, the two-reality solution continues after death. It might as well start now.