Sorry, Rocket

They say no good deed goes unpunished, and while this expression is not quite Biblical, it is often proven true.

Last night, I walked into my bedroom, which has sliding glass doors. I looked out through the glass, and what did I see? A miserable, stinking raccoon in MY yard.

I guess it was 25 feet away. It must have seen me through the glass, but it didn’t seem disturbed. Maybe raccoons are too stupid to understand windows.

It was on the small side, and a weaker person might have described it as cute.

I looked at the bolt-action rifle in .204 Ruger lying on my bed (I have a good explanation), and I had the obvious thoughts. I could slip on some earmuffs, open the door a bit, turn on the scope (I have a good explanation), wait for it to boot, and send the coon to coon heaven. Alternatively, I could sneak around the side of the house.

I was tired. I didn’t know what to do with a dead coon. I felt funny about killing a little one. I waved my hand a few times, the coon realized I was not furniture, and he ran off.

This morning I got up and saw that he had disturbed some blackberry briars in pots. One of them is not looking too good now. This is how I am repaid for my mercy.

My new policy: death to all coons regardless of age, size, or how much they remind me of Disney films.

I had a pet coon for about a week when I was a kid. I had to feed it with a bottle. The person who sold it to me told me to rub its belly with a warm cloth to aid digestion. My mother took it to a vet while I was at school, for the usual raccoon checkup, and he told her to get rid of it ASAP. Coons can carry rabies without showing symptoms, and they get mean when they grow up.

That was the end of my coon-keeping days. By the time school let out, the coon had been returned for a refund.

He was very cute. He had little black hands that were cool to the touch and looked like expensive gloves. He waddled when he was full of milk. His distant relations here on the farm are cute, too, but they still have to die.

I haven’t thought much about disposing of coons, possums, armadillos, and coyotes. You can toss a squirrel a good distance from your house and forget about it, but bigger animals stink, and friends show up for the funeral and free meal. I went online and asked around, and the consensus seems to be that tossing is still the way to go. Just increase the distance. Because carcasses attract other varmints, they can lead to more kills and fewer varmint problems.

My grandmother ate coons. She fixed one for my dad and my grandfather, and my dad said that by the time he finished chewing a bite, it was as big as a lampshade. Apparently it just expanded without falling apart. He was not a fan.

She also ate possums and groundhogs. I’m trying to think of an animal she would not eat.

I don’t really see myself eating coons. Also, my understanding is that the pelts are no good this far south. I could see preserving a coon tail for the amusement value.

I’m going to come up with a coon game plan. I think I’ll just use my carry gun if I see one far from the house. If I see one in the yard, I’ll go for the .17 HMR. If I decide to set up a blind and shoot them, I’ll use the .204 Ruger and the computerized night scope with the built-in video camera. At the very least, I’ll keep the tail to freak out visitors, and if I’m feeling really ambitious, I’ll try to cook part of the beast.

There. Plan made.

I could use the 16-gauge with #6 shot or the Saiga-12 with law enforcement loads, but I really like rifled projectiles.

I just got a new stainless barrel for my carry 10mm. Midway USA had a sale. I could not resist. I paid $79, which is a steal. It should be better for shooting lead, and it provides better case support for hot rounds. The tradeoff is that it may be pickier about ammunition. Glock chambers are loose and relatively short, so cases feed easily. Not sure if I should use the new barrel when I carry. I want the gun to feed. That’s for sure. But all my defensive ammunition is test-chambered. I think. It ought to run.

I felt bad about shooting a youngster, but then when it ran off, I felt bad about not looking after my property. Coons are bad news, just like rats. I should have blasted it.

I’m too sweet for my own good. That’s my problem.

I apologize to all red-blooded American males who don’t wear Capri pants or skinny jeans. I have let all of you down.

Asphalt Looks Better Every Day

Winter was very disappointing. Where I live, the daily highs should be below 80 from November through March, and there should be a lot of days below 70. This year, we got plenty of roasting-hot days in the 90-degree neighborhood. When that happens, you feel cheated, because while summer can trespass on winter and ruin it, there is no possibility we will have cold days in the summer to make up for it.

Now that temperatures are high and we’re getting occasional rain, the grass has started growing. The lawnmower and I are resuming our romance.

Today the mower would not start. I got a click, and that was it. I put a charger on the battery and went to brush the pool.

When I finished brushing the pool, I tried the mower again. It ran. I mowed most of the yard, and then I got off the mower to move a branch. My mower has a seat switch on it that turns the engine off when I get off, but I bypassed it because it’s unbearable. Because the engine was still running when I got off to grab the branch, I disengaged the PTO so the blades would stop spinning.

When I got back on the mower, the PTO would not reengage. I could still ride the mower, but I couldn’t cut anything.

I guess this is what happens when you mow as rarely as I have been mowing.

I almost shut the mower down to look it over, but it occurred to me that it might not start, and I was at least 100 yards from the area where I park it. I drove it back to its spot and shut it down. Of course, it would not start again. I got idiot lights but no starter, no PTO, and no headlights.

I did what I always do. I checked Internet forums. I found a wide array of problems and solutions.

I found out oxidation could cause the mower to act this way. My battery cables had some kind of hard oxide inside the terminals. I had to remove it with a Dumore grinder and carbide burr. I lost my battery brush, which would have done the job in 10 seconds, so this is what I had to resort to.

I let the mower charge while I had lunch, and when I tried the key again, it worked.

I can never decide whether this mower is junk or not. It’s impossible to work on, and it seems much more complicated than it needs to be. It’s full of engineering errors. On the other hand, I believe it’s 28 years old, and it should run for another 20. The John Deere 430 is hard to kill. It’s way too easy to shut down, but it’s hard to kill.

I was unhappy about the failure to start, because I had a special task in mind for today. I wanted to go to the pasture and cut a bunch of weeds that were in an area where I wanted to shoot.

I shoot into a berm made from sand taken from a pond. On one side of the berm, there are no trees within 100 yards. On the other side, there is a nice wooded area, which is exactly where I want to be when I shoot on hot days. Between the wooded area and the berm, there are blackberry and beautyberry bushes. Today I attacked the beautyberries while trying to spare as many blackberry briars as I could. Blackberries are useful. Beautyberries are pathetic. People eat them, but I think they’re trying to prove something. They don’t taste good.

I found that the beautyberry bushes were not easy to remove with a mower. They fold over so low the blades don’t make good contact. But with persistence, I improved my view of the berm a great deal. I suppose I’ll have to attach the bush hog to the tractor and do it right. Either that or I’ll have to use the brush blade on my gas weed eater.

How much do you want to bet the weed eater starts after several months of idleness? Ethanol gas makes it very difficult to keep machinery running here. Even treated ethanol-free gas lets me down a lot.

When I get my shooting lane cleared, I’ll move my targets. I’ll be shooting from east to west instead of the other way around. Right now, I shoot toward a highway. It’s totally safe, but I would feel better shooting toward the big lot full of trees to the west of my land.

My pasture is dish-shaped, so even without the berm, from either direction, I am shooting toward the ground. That’s a nice feature.

I don’t know how people driving on the road would feel if they knew a guy was shooting a 10mm pistol in their general direction, but then they do 70 with cars coming toward them in the left lane at the same speed, and they don’t freak out about that.

Maybe I should have a policy of restricting shooting to experienced shooters. I will never fire a round over the berm, but women and kids do amazing things with firearms.

I feel as though my enthusiasm for life is returning, 9 days after my personal tragedy. I let a lot of things go while Travis was in the hospital, and my motivation was even worse after he died. I seem to be getting more done now.

As I have written before, I believe joy, as used in the Bible, means something other than ordinary happiness. I believe it’s connected with results and expectations. For example, the Bible says, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” That describes a type of happiness which is related to relief. The word “rejoice” comes from “joy,” and it’s always connected to an event. Something hoped for happens, or something dreadful ends, and people rejoice.

The Bible says, “The joy of the Lord is our strength.” That’s literally true. If you have joy, you expect good things to happen. It gives you motivation to keep going and get things done.

Depression is the absence of joy. It’s discouragement. This is why depressed people kill themselves. They don’t expect things to change for the better.

I had been expecting to rejoice when Travis left the hospital. Instead, joy was taken from me, and I didn’t have the strength to do all the things I should have done.

It may seem strange to get this upset by the death of a friend. I may not have written enough about Travis to give people an understanding of how close we were. I would feel bad if any of my friends died, but Travis was like a family member.

This morning I asked God for joy. It appears it worked. I got the pool in order and mowed the yard, and had the lawn tractor behaved, I would have gotten more done.

I’m coming back to life, and I guess most of the world feels the same way. COVID-19 is going away. Leftists are unhappy about it, because they think the disease will put Biden in the White House, but it’s happening. People are going to work. We can’t play hooky forever.

Leftists say there will be a huge second wave. If that’s true, where is it? Right now, the epidemic is disappearing in places that reopened, and areas that are locked down continue to have problems. Reopened areas are not getting second waves, but locked-down areas seem to be prolonging the first one.

If there’s going to be a second wave, why hasn’t China had one?

Right now, the main reason the numbers look as bad as they do is the local epidemic in Brazil. I don’t know if they got the bug later than the rest of us or what, but their figures are very bad. The numbers keep rising. The other major nations are doing great.

I am determined to keep cutting back on looking at the news, but I still see things. I saw that leftists were going after Trump for using hydroxychloroquine, the quinine substitute some countries use to treat covid. They’re furious at him for taking it. They keep citing studies which suggest it doesn’t work. They don’t seem interested in the opinions of competent doctors who think it does.

Why do they care what he takes? What possible reason could they have for objecting? These are the same people who think we should all be able to get marijuana prescriptions for anxiety. Not just marijuana, but cigarette marijuana which damages lungs and gives off secondhand smoke. They think drugs should be legalized. All except one, I guess.

They excoriated Trump for not wearing a mask. They wanted him to wear something they thought would protect him, even though they certainly did not want him to be protected. Now he’s doing something to protect himself, and they’re angry about that.

One of the great things about Trump is that he knows it makes no difference at all what he says or does. When he goes against the left, they pour vitriol over him. When he does what they want, the response is the same. The result: he pays no attention. He actually needles them to make it worse. Needling people is a vice, but it shows how little their raving bothers him. I think he enjoys it.

Trump gets annoyed in the short term, but you can tell he forgets all about it 15 minutes later. I guess that’s why his blood pressure is good.

Leftists are all over the web saying Trump lied when he said the White House physician gave him the drug. The physician had to write a note, correcting them. He took responsibility and endorsed the use of hydrochloroquinine in Trump’s case. I wonder what they’re saying now. They’re probably calling him a quack.

Maybe they’re saying the note is forged.

Watching Trump reminds me of my own experiences. God knew before I was born that I belonged to him. Whatever my faults were, I was not cut out to be a child of darkness. No matter how much I tried to fit into the body of Satan, I couldn’t do it. I was always rejected, trolled, and mistreated. I have often wondered why people constantly popped up to attack me. I didn’t always know my status as a child of God was the reason.

What Trump goes through is very similar. There is absolutely no way to make the people who hate him happy. They will never make peace, admit fault, or forgive.

Sooner or later, you have to quit worrying about being liked. Jesus never worried about it. He said incredibly harsh things to people. He was extremely rude. I don’t think Christians should make rudeness a goal, but we ought to be truthful. We should lead instead of following.

I just read a book by Anthony Bourdain, the chef who died by his own hand in France two years ago. Bourdain was a lover of the pleasures of the flesh.

He was a wonderful writer. His book is very entertaining.

As I read, the thing that struck me about Bourdain was that he was the perfect child of darkness. He was a complete follower. He accepted every vice you can think of. He devoured the corrupt ethos of the people around him like a starving dog on a bowl of chicken livers. I don’t think he ever had an original thought, and maybe that’s why he was not a great chef. Running a kitchen well is only part of being a great chef. You also have to be creative. Bourdain was not. He admitted he was a very ordinary chef.

His description of culinary professionals is revolting. According to him, big-city kitchens are full of sexual deviants, criminals, drug addicts, alcoholics, men who molest other men on the job, thieves, and liars. They are astonishingly nasty to each other. They hurl filthy insults at each other all day. They brutalize each other physically. They enjoy abusing and breaking each other.

Bourdain wrote about this atmosphere with tremendous enthusiasm. He couldn’t get enough of it. He savored it and wallowed in it. When he was a newcomer, he saw how vile older cooking professionals were, and instead of choosing another job, he was filled with drive to become like them. It’s as though they were father figures and he was trying to live up to their debased standard in order to prove something to himself.

He was like a kid who went to a “scared straight” program and thought, “THESE ARE MY PEOPLE!”, and did his best to go to prison.

He was a man of the earth. No doubt about it. He was programmed to go to hell. He was made for it. Hell fits him like a bespoke suit. He was Jewish, which means he was descended from Abraham, but he preferred the other side.

When I say hell fits him, I don’t mean he’s not likable. He is. But he lived like a joyous pig rolling in week-old garbage. I don’t think anything could have changed his attitude. Depravity and misery brought him pleasure. He could never have turned to God, because righteousness appalled him.

There are two families on earth, and only two, and every person belongs to one of them.

When people die, they go exactly where they belong. There is no injustice to it. God may not have created hell for people, but plenty of people fit in beautifully there.

As the decline of the world accelerates, we’re going to see huge numbers of people ganging up on God, Christians, Jews, and Israel. They will be more and more direct and bold in their attacks on God himself. We’re going to marvel at them, and many of us will feel that we have to do something. We’ll think something must be wrong because so many people are competing to get into hell. Nothing will be wrong. We’ll be seeing people who belong in hell, establishing their credentials.

I don’t mean we shouldn’t love them or hurt for them. I’m just saying we’ll be seeing something that makes perfect sense.

We’ll be seeing the Bourdain mindset, sweeping over multitudes.

That was quite a digression, but I won’t delete it.

I feel as if COVID-19 were a sorting mechanism, like a cream separator. It’s doing a great deal to divide people into pro-God and anti-God factions. I don’t think the world will be the same afterward. Some people think masks and social distancing will be the big changes. I don’t think so. I think covid is pushing many, many people into the arms of the Beast. It’s teaching them to cling to the government nipple, trust the state without reserve, and jettison their rights as though they were dirty diapers. It seems like far fewer people are being driven in the opposite direction.

I suspect the main changes will be in people’s attitudes toward governments, rights, God, and those who believe in God.

If we’re really getting close to the end, we should expect all the signs Jesus spoke of. We already have one very strong sign. He said it would be as the days of Lot and the days of Noah. Perversion and wickedness abounded in those days. Genesis said a homosexual rape mob in Sodom tried to violate two angels.

Luke 21 contains the description Jesus gave of the end times. It looks like a lot of the things that have to come to pass haven’t transpired yet. It looks like the rapture can’t come this week or this year, but next year can’t be ruled out.

Enough of that. I’m glad I’m feeling more like getting things done.

We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord

I have bad news. This afternoon, someone sent me an Instagram photo indicating that my friend Travis has died.

To a person who looks with the natural eye only, this is not shocking. Travis had been in intensive care for weeks following an accidental shooting which led to complications. To people who have felt great faith that Travis was going to be healed, it’s a major blow.

A year or two back, I listened to Derek Prince as he taught people to prophesy. I decided to try it. Paul tells us to covet prophecy, and he says it’s a better gift than tongues in some ways. God clearly wants us to do it. I started doing it once in a while, and then I made a point of doing it a lot every day.

I heard positive things. “I will build you up.” “None of the things you worry about will happen to you.” “My love will pour through you.” I rarely heard anything negative. That concerned me, because I knew from prayer in tongues that it was possible to get in the way of the Holy Spirit and add your own material. I prayed repeatedly for guidance. I had other people pray. I did not want to be a false prophet.

The other day, I heard myself saying Travis would be healed. Yesterday, someone who is very, very honest said God told her the same thing.

Look, it can still happen. He can still recover. As I said before, Lazarus stank when he was healed. He was dead and rotting. But generally, the dead stay dead.

I knew before this happened that if Travis died, I would have a major problem apart from the grief. I knew I would have to question what I thought I heard from God. That’s a big deal. I have been relying very strongly on what I thought was God’s voice for years. How much am I wrong about? What do I have left to hold onto?

You can’t sweep problems like this under the rug. Pretending things didn’t happen is not acceptable. You have to hold yourself accountable.

It’s as though I built several rooms onto my house, and one or more have to be torn down. I can’t entertain guests in a house that isn’t habitable. How can I talk to other people about God right now?

What can I tell the world about Travis?

He had a bad start. He got in trouble a lot when he was a kid.

He excelled in music when he was in elementary school. By the time I met him, he played 11 instruments well.

His Dad tried to raise him and his siblings well. His mother and father split, and his father deteriorated. He was isolated from the family.

I met Travis at Trinity Church in Miami. I believe he was 17. We were on the security team. We became unlikely friends. In prayer sessions behind closed doors, we talked about things the pastors didn’t want to hear about: prayer in tongues, casting out demons, confession, and transformation through the Holy Spirit. Travis got hooked, and he started to change.

He kept growing, and our friendship grew. I started making pizza for the church’s cafe, and Travis became my sous chef.

We knew the church was a mess. We both left. He came to the new church I joined. We left that one, too. We started spending a lot of time praying at my house. During one session, Travis had a vision of a woman he believed would be his wife. He never saw her face.

Travis was a teacher. He worked at a government-funded center, teaching ghetto kids music. He wanted black children to be successful and appreciated. That desire burned in him. He could not accept the way black people in America were living.

He was hurt over and over by the things that happened to young people he knew. He was frustrated with their parents, who wouldn’t drive them to lessons. Kids had unwanted babies. They got shot. One friend from church got caught driving a stolen Mercedes, and after the police handcuffed him, he jumped into a canal and drowned.

Travis wanted to see black people rise up and do well, and over and over, he was slapped in the face by deaths, illegitimate births, and incarcerations. It caused him tremendous pain. He could not let go.

He wanted to be the first member of his family to get a degree. He had started college at FAMU in Tallahassee, but he got caught up in a marching band scandal and left. I encouraged him to go to the University of Miami and audition, and one day, he went without telling me and got a full ride, less room and board.

He worked harder than any student I ever knew. He lived in rented rooms. He slept on people’s couches. He sometimes rode a bicycle 15 miles at night to get home from jobs. He was promised a car, but by the time he got it, it was in such bad shape it had to be scrapped. His cheap, wobbly secondhand bicycle was stolen by someone who must have been desperate as well as heartless. He had to scrounge up a new one. He never quit.

When I left Miami, I made him my house sitter until I sold the house. I told him he was the Fresh Prince of Coral Gables. He loved the peace and safety.

During his time there, I got baptized at a Last Reformation event. I told Travis about it, and he got so excited, he borrowed a car and drove to my house near Ocala to be baptized in my pool. He couldn’t submerge completely in my tub. It was 51 degrees out when he went into the pool. He drove up in a borrowed car, stayed one night, and drove back.

When the place finally sold, I was concerned about him, but he landed on his feet. He found a place near school. He struggled, but he didn’t live in the street.

When COVID-19 hit, he had a problem. He played gigs to make money, and the gigs were gone. We prayed over the phone. He said God would handle it.

He got a respiratory bug in March. He had a high fever and aches. I told him to get checked, but he stayed home. Some friends and I prayed, and his symptoms dropped off to nearly nothing overnight.

Travis got in contact with me a few times about a friend who wanted to get a firearm. He asked me for advice. I saw nothing odd about it. I suggested a Glock. A simple, reliable gun. I said I would consider .45 ACP if it were me. I probably mentioned .40 S&W.

On April 9, my phone rang. The caller ID named Travis, but the voice was someone else’s. The man on the other end said he was Travis’s friend. He said Travis had been shot accidentally. He stressed “accidentally.” I asked if they had called 911. Hoping for a break, I asked where Travis had been shot. The friend said, “in the chest region.” No break.

I could hear Travis in the background pleading with God. He wasn’t afraid to die. He just didn’t want to die that way, so soon. He said, “Not this way, God!” That was the last time I heard his voice. His friend hung up.

After that, the information dried up. No one answered his phone. I started accounts on Instagram and Facebook, hoping to alert his family. I found his brother and let him know. I thought the family would handle things.

I didn’t want to go online and say, “TRAVIS HAS BEEN SHOT.” I thought it would make his family panic. Now I wish I had done it. Maybe more people would have tried to help. I worked with some friends who tried to look after Travis’s affairs, and the family was not responsive. We didn’t hear from them for days. I assumed things were going well because the early report was that the injury was not life-threatening.

Travis lived out his final days in a remarkable state of isolation. There was no phone in his room. He was intubated at least part of the time. They didn’t give him a laptop so he could Skype. The hospital was so strict, they would not allow cards into the room. Recently, a nurse told Martha Travis had never had a visitor.

We knew very little about what was happening.

As far as I know, he didn’t die from a gunshot wound. He died from complications. He wasn’t getting oxygen. He had an infection. He was tested regularly for covid, but the tests were negative. Of course, the tests are not reliable. He may have had covid in March, and he may have relapsed after the shooting.

Would things have been different with better communication? I don’t know, but things were handled very badly.

I thought I could point to Travis as a success story. Someone whose life had successfully repaired, partly with my participation. I thought I would see his wife and children. I thought I would be at the wedding.

He’s in heaven. That’s for sure. If he had any issues with God, you can be sure he cleaned them up while he was alone in the hospital. You can say that makes him a success, but it’s not the kind of success I had in mind.

I thought God had given him to me as a sort of son, to make up for my failure to marry.

Now the crop is gone, and it’s late in the season.

Is it right to feel sorry for him? He has seen Jesus. He is perfect. He is happy. He is fulfilled. He is safe, forever. He’s with my dad. Surely they have talked today.

I suppose if I grieve, I’m really feeling sorry for myself, not Travis. He’s practically a god now.

Over the last few days, I’ve been telling God I would be happy to take Travis’s place. It didn’t matter to me. I enjoy life, but it’s not like I have a lot of meaningful irons in the fire (one less now), and I am not far from elderly.

Now I’m still here, he’s gone, his wife will have to marry someone else, and his kids will not be born. There will be no one to help his dad, who has MS and lives in a facility, unless God sends him a friend. His dad had been very bitter, but he had come around. He had started praying with Travis. He had started calling him often instead of shutting him out. Where does a 59-year-old man in a wheelchair go to replace a son like that?

Will anyone try to save Travis’s family now? Who else will care?

I spoke to my friend Freddly about the news. She’s a nurse in a management position, and she deals with dying people, including covid patients. She is very experienced. She says something is wrong. She says young men don’t just die suddenly, even when they’re intubated and connected to ECMO machines. She says that happens to the elderly. The nurses knew Martha had a special relationship with Travis. According to Freddly, they would have made sure Martha was informed had he taken a sudden turn for the worse. Even though she was not his wife, they would have seen to it that she had a chance to come to his bedside had they thought he was about to die. They didn’t do that. Two days running, they said there was no change, and there is no chance they were wrong. They told her he was in the same condition at 9:30 this morning. So what happened?

She said she wished she could look at his chart.

It’s good to have an expert to talk to, not that it does much good now.

I talked to a mutual friend today. He was on the Trinity Church security team with Travis and me. He wants to go to the funeral if there is one. My concern is that Trinity will be in charge. I don’t want to see people who used Travis using him as a tool to boost their profiles. I am also not excited about being among people he knew who let him down consistently. But on the other hand, it might be good to show up, welcome or not, and hold my head up and look them in the eye.

I don’t want to go to Miami. Not even for this. I don’t know how it will play out.

It was a great, great privilege to know Travis and to be of some assistance to him. I’m glad he’s out of harm’s reach now. He could not catch a break in this life. It seemed like it rained on him every day. He fought the curses of black life, and he still died like a black man who was still immersed in them. That’s all finished now. I will take the good with the bad.

I won’t get to see him stand at the altar, and I won’t get to hold his kids. I won’t have a third godchild or a boy named after me. That’s okay. We have a father who makes all things right, even if it has to wait until after the resurrection.

I look forward to seeing him again. Until then, I will remember how blessed I was to know him in this life.

A friend who led the armorbearer team at Trinity Church just did a final roll call for Travis via text message. His call sign was Bass Clef.

So that’s it. Travis didn’t sound off here, but he was present at a better roll call today. It won’t be that long before I sound off as well, and then all our troubles here on earth will be forgotten.

Hope Your Morning was This Good

Some good things are happening today. First, “Martha” texted and said my friend Travis is still with us, and his condition has not changed. As always, I call that a win. Finding out that he’s alive is great. Learning that he hasn’t gotten worse is icing on the cake. Now we’re just waiting to hear that he’s improving. If you’ve been praying, thanks.

I sent the news out today via text, and my friend Tina responded. I wrote about her the other day. She called me after reading about Travis on Instagram, and since then she has been part of the prayer team.

Today Tina received the news, and I also said I had been saying, “Travis is healed, and Jesus Christ is glorified.” She said this was confirmation of what the Lord had told her the day before. Naturally, I had to ask for more information, so she called.

I can’t recall everything she said, but I can hit the high points.

Yesterday, she spent time praying for Travis in the Spirit and with her understanding. She said the Lord told her her prayers were answered. She said he said Travis was going to be healed, and that he would be healed in such a way that the doctors and providers would know the healing didn’t come from their efforts.

She said God told her she didn’t have to ask for healing. She said he told her to command it and declare it done, so that’s what she has been doing.

I hadn’t told her what I was doing. Our choices were made independently.

She said God told her he was going to work on Travis’s family. That will be nice to see.

Tina is praying for God to help the providers do things they could never do without his help. I am agreeing.

Bonus: I put Tina in touch with Martha, and they hit it off. They are very similar. Two young black women of excellent character who are responsible and successful. Tina can help Martha get to know God. Martha and I texted for a very long time yesterday. I suppose God is drawing her to people who can give her a little guidance.

I had a real text storm today. My friends are really getting behind Travis.

In the midst of all this, I made myself biscuits and gravy. I forgot to halve the recipe, so I ate a little more than I should. The biscuits were wonderful. I keep tinkering with my recipe.

Here is what I did today:

INGREDIENTS

1-3/4 cups AP flour (not self-rising)
1/4 cup starch
2/3 cup milk
1-2 tsp. salt
4 tsp. baking powder (not soda)
2 tbsp. cold bacon grease
2 tbsp. hard butter
2 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. citric acid

I should increase the acid slightly, but these were wonderful.

Maybe I can wind down a little now. Who wants to clean my kitchen?

KNOCK IT OFF

I have decided to publish an edict. All inhabitants of earth must comply as of yesterday.

Stop hoarding bread flour.

I still can’t get bread flour in my county. I can get all-purpose, which, of course, isn’t good for all purposes. I can get self-rising. I can get White Lily. I can get all types of corn meal. I haven’t seen bread flour in weeks, and yeast is also unavailable.

Why on earth are people hoarding bread flour and yeast? Who are they fooling? They’re not baking.

Here are some facts no one seems to think about.

1. White flour goes bad in a relatively short time, so unless you can freeze it in an airtight container, hoarding it is likely to lead to substandard bread.

2. Bread is readily available. Stores are packed with it.

3. Bread freezes beautifully.

I don’t have a real problem, because when I saw how things were going, I bought a bag of gluten. I add it to all-purpose flour, and that pretty much turns it into bread flour. Still, I am issuing my edict. I am tired of the nonsense.

I don’t know why corn meal is still available. You can get all the Martha White cornbread mix with Hot Rize your trunk can hold. I had this in mind yesterday when I bought bacon. It’s technically possible to make cornbread without bacon grease, but I hope it never comes to that. It would be disgusting and demoralizing.

People should be thinking about biscuits more than bread. Biscuits are better than bread. Wait! Hold your venom! I will make my case.

It only takes 20 minutes to make biscuits. Furthermore, biscuit recipes tend to be smaller than bread recipes, so you are less likely to make way too much and eat all of it at one sitting.

Not that I know anything about that.

Okay, yes, homemade bread is one of the greatest things ever, but the truth is that it’s too good to keep in your house on a daily basis. If you bake your own bread regularly, you’ll eat 1500 bread calories every day.

Of course, I had yeast before the hype…I mean “pandemic”…started. In fact, I had one more jar than I needed.

I keep laughing when I see how God provides for me. Today I had to make up a batch of my no-scrub shower spray. One of the ingredients is 6 ounces of Dawn dishwashing liquid. In the current hysteria, Dawn is seen as a miracle cure, for reasons I have not been able to determine. Maybe Oprah and Dr. Oz drink it. Most of the time, even here, a trip to the store to get Dawn will be fruitless.

I had about 4 ounces left in the kitchen bottle. Was I concerned? No, because I had a couple of bottles for the upstairs bathrooms, plus one huge jug in the workshop for the pressure washer. But I wondered…had God done it again? Was there ANOTHER bottle under the kitchen sink? I had to look.

There it was. Full. Waiting.

Speaking of Oprah, I kind of wonder when we’re going to start hearing celebrity hoarding stories. They have to exist. Celebrities are generally venal and self-absorbed. They think they’re gods with special importance to humanity, because we can’t get by without their naked Instagram photos and self-righteous Tweets. How did we survive before Chrissy Teigen started telling us what to do? She’s a trained model! Remember Leo DiCaprio flying around on private jets to fight global warming? The stories will come. I’m sure of it.

I had a dream about celebrities last night. I dreamed I was in some venue where Whitney Houston was singing. She was made up beautifully, and she was wearing some sort of partially transparent catsuit. She wasn’t on a stage. She was on a table, on all fours, with her head down near the table top. She was completely engrossed in herself and her singing. Her behind was considerably higher than her face. Her knees were pretty far apart.

Fans weren’t separated from her the way they were during her life. They were walking around the table. Some were touching her. Some were putting their hands between her buttocks, practically committing rape. She was oblivious. She was caught up in her fame and in getting what she had always hoped for: attention and admiration. She felt like a success.

She didn’t look happy. Her expression was like that of an extremely thirsty person who was drinking water. She looked desperate.

I think the dream came from God. It wasn’t a sex dream. It wasn’t exciting for me. I think it was about people who debase themselves in order to become famous. They think they’re in control, but in reality, they are like whores for countless uncaring strangers. They think they’re leaders, but they’re really the worst type of followers. They have no freedom.

Many famous people serve the Beast. The Beast speaks through the mob, and in order to stay on top, celebrities have to obey the mob. We’re in a time when the Beast is training the mob to be more responsive. Celebrities are a big part of it.

Haven’t they always been?

Whitney Houston is one of Satan’s masterpieces. She had everything, and she died naked in a bathtub, in a filthy hotel bathroom, full of drugs, surrounded by takers. She was rich, but she was married to a man who beat her. The Bible says God lifts people up above “the waters.” Whitney Houston drowned in 10 inches of water, on dry land.

Is it me, or are degrading celebrity deaths becoming more common? Michael Jackson, David Carradine, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Prince…seems like there is an increase, and on top of that, we are suddenly seeing male celebrities die naked from hanging, which suggests erotic asphyxiation. Not a flattering way to be remembered. Solo erotic asphyxiation is one of the most narcissistic, selfish, fleshly things a person can do in this life. When physical pleasure becomes that important to you, you have a problem.

The other day I learned that many gays are now injecting their genitals with meth and a Viagra-like drug called Trimix. Former Tallahassee mayor and failed gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum was found naked and unconscious at what appears to have been an injection party. Pleasure is nice, and a certain amount is harmless, but you shouldn’t trade your soul for it, especially in a subculture in which a man of 50 is considered too old to socialize with. Sooner or later, you will find yourself deprived of access to the things you built your life around.

I keep praying in tongues and trying to prophesy every day. I don’t want to be without guidance and correction. Look how crazy the world is getting. Without God, I will be as lost as anyone else.

I’ve been trying to figure T.B. Joshua out. He’s a Nigerian preacher I’ve written about. He prophesies a lot. It seems very clear that he is the real thing, but sometimes he and his ministry are disappointing. He said he saw “a woman winning” before the 2016 election, and when Clinton lost, he or his people took the video down. Then later he said he had actually seen the popular vote. Maybe his explanation was correct, but taking the video down was not.

Earlier this year, he said rain was falling in Wuhan, washing the epidemic away. Sure enough, afterward, the numbers in China dried up abruptly. But later he claimed the epidemic would end by March 27, and he didn’t limit it to China. Obviously, the epidemic got worse. Then the video containing the prophesy disappeared. Now they have a video saying he predicted that “the noise” of the epidemic would end, and they’re supporting it with a Forbes article claiming March 28 is the day the acceleration of the contagion rate changed instantly.

I think he’s a real prophet who does not always understand his own prophesies, and I think he is covering up when he gets things wrong. That’s unacceptable.

If it’s true, it confirms what I believe, which is that we aren’t supposed to depend on prophets. We are supposed to BE prophets, as Moses indicated and Joel confirmed.

I am trying to prophesy every day, but I’m not transcribing it and putting it here. I want to see how things come out. If I start to feel secure enough to share things with other people, I will. If I’m not sure, I shouldn’t be saying things that could mislead. My purpose isn’t to tell other people the future, anyway. It’s to connect them with God so he can tell them the future and whatever else they need to hear.

My feeling is that even if you’re prophesying for real, if you’re not experienced, you can end up taking over from God and saying things that aren’t correct. I don’t think the gift is enough. I think a little experience is necessary. We’ll see if I’m right.

Living by prophecy is like climbing a mountain one foothold at a time. Every time you speak about what you should do, you have to establish a new foothold and then jump onto it, abandoning the security of the old one. You need to know the footholds are solid.

That’s all I have. I need to go out and test a few rounds of defensive 10mm. I’m hoping to put an end to my search for a good, solid recipe.

Pandemic Logic at Work

I have to ask: are we having a meat shortage or not?

Last week, they told us meat was going to become a problem, fast. Whether or not it was true, I felt I had to get out there and try to blunt the effects of hoarding by picking up a few pounds of meat. I have learned that when people think something is in short supply, they will generally hog it and make it hard to find, whether or not it’s scarce.

Today I went to the grocery. My local Winn-Dixie had lots of beef on sale. They also had bacon on sale. I picked up two pounds. I’ve been making biscuits, and I will need bacon grease in the future.

I went to Publix, which is another chain. I was hoping to find real bread flour and yeast. I had no luck in the baking aisle. I checked on bacon. They were somewhat low, and there were little signs telling people not to hog it.

At Winn-Dixie, they were selling bacon two for one. At Publix, the signs said you should only take one package.

One store was trying to get rid of pork, and a store two or three miles away was trying to prevent a run. This is the way the panic has been. What’s unobtainable on one block is abundant on the next.

Smithfield is a big pork producer, and they have been named among the likely plant-closers. Smithfield bacon was on sale here today. Okay. That certainly makes sense.

Complicating things, the situation varies from state to state. My cousin lives near Chicago. She says they can’t get meat. She says you have to park across the street to get into Walmart for anything, and her son told her it would take hours to get inside the building. Those nice, generous Chicagoans. You have to admire them.

What’s the story? Is there no shortage? Is there a slight shortage? Is the shortage still a week or so away? Did Trump abort the shortage when he pressured the meat packers and gave them special status?

Why is it you can’t get into a Chicago-area Walmart while the one closest to me is packed with nearly everything and not crowded? They even sell toilet paper. There is a lot of empty space in the paper aisle, but you can get toilet paper. In Chicago, you pretty much have to use leaves.

I’m wondering if this epidemic is completely different for Christians and unbelievers. Are they suffering more than we are? I live in an area where chain stores play Christian music, and things are not bad at all.

I guess reality is always different for the blessed and the cursed. It was certainly different when the flood started and when God burned Sodom and Gomorrah. It was different when he struck Egypt with plagues and killed Pharaoh and his army.

I don’t think the meat shortage will amount to much, because Trump is on the case. Still, if you live in a godless area where people don’t care about each other, a perceived shortage can be worse than an actual shortage.

Maybe when the election comes, they will marvel at us because we haven’t turned on Trump. Maybe because their experience has been worse, they will assume we went through the same thing.

I did something fun today. I bought paper towels. I bought 6 big rolls of Bounty. Real paper towels. Not an off brand. Did I need them? Not really, but I’ll need them in a few weeks, and I figured it was okay to buy them because they were sitting on the shelf in mid-afternoon. I wouldn’t have done it at nine. I just felt that if I bought them, I would stop thinking about paper towels.

Maybe I shouldn’t have bought them. Hard to say.

I am considering getting masks. I have no idea how I’ll do it, so maybe it won’t happen. I think they will do nearly nothing to protect me, but they might help other people if I get C19 and don’t know it. I wonder if they’re available anywhere.

Amazon has some dubious listings that look fraudulent. And they want over four bucks each for disposable masks. Surely that’s not the normal price. Forget that. I’m not paying $4 every time I get out of the car.

I checked, and the regular price is around $1.20 per mask, if you buy 10. It’s a wonder no one is shooting price gougers.

Should I get cheap surgical masks instead?

At first, they told us masks were pointless. Then they told us N95 masks could protect us if fitted very carefully and disposed of after use. Now they’re telling us to wear nearly anything.

Forget it. If cheap is all I can get, I have a camo thing I bought for hunting. It will be just as good as a surgical mask, and I can wash it.

I want to get tested to see if I really did have C19 in January. It would be great to find that out. It would mean I am immune and in all likelihood, not contagious. Testing is still reserved for sick people, however, and going into a place where they are testing seems like the only really good way to catch C19 in this county.

I’m going to chronograph some ammunition and forget the whole business. I think June will be a very nice month.

The Evolution of Pistol Ammunition

It’s Sunday. Is that the proper day for confessing? I’m not Catholic. Anyway, I made biscuits again. They called out to me.

After getting my new PC set up, I moved on to a new project: 9mm reloading.

Why would anyone carry a 9mm when he has a 10mm? I started carrying it after my dad died. I had bought him a Glock 26 and a Crimson Trace sight. After he died, it was mine, and I liked carrying it because it had been his. I knew I was giving up stopping power, however. Another reason for carrying it was that I lacked faith in the Lasermax sight on the 10mm.

The other day it occurred to me that I had done nearly nothing to provide for top 9mm ammunition. I had a few magazines full of Cor-Bon hollowpoints, but that was it. I certainly did not have enough to allow practice with defensive rounds. Also, I knew that ammunition had improved a lot since I bought the pistol. If you go 5 years without reevaluating your ammunition, you may miss something important.

When I got my 10mm, 9mm and .40 S&W were not that great. Since then, things have improved to the point where .40 is so good, I almost wish I had my old Glock 22 back. Both calibers have gotten better. Maybe .40 is a better carry choice than 10mm now. Did I really type that? I’m cringing. But it might be true. Maybe the lower recoil and lighter ammunition make up for the lack of power.

A few years back, a site called Lucky Gunner opened. They sell ammunition. The owner actually sent me some ammunition for nothing. I shot it and wrote about it. I applaud this publicity tactic. I think Dan Wesson should send me some free 1911’s to review. Anyway, Lucky Gunner now has some very nice information for people evaluating ammunition. They have interactive charts featuring excellent graphic representations of gel tests. You can sort different rounds by things like expanded diameter and penetration.

I checked that out, and it sure looked like Remington 124-grain Golden Saber hollowpoints were the best choice. They opened up like crazy and penetrated a long way. Problem: it may be weeks or months before anyone can buy these things. I also considered Speer Gold Dots, which performed nearly as well.

Of course, I looked at other sources. The more I got into it, the more types of ammunition I came across. Coincidentally, during this time, I downloaded a book by the late Jim Cirillo, an NYPD officer who killed 11 men in gunfights. He is one of Massad Ayoob’s prominent sources. Ayoob, believe it or not, is not a gunfighter. He was a part-time cop in a sleepy town in New Hampshire. His work is wonderful, but he doesn’t write about shootings from experience. He could probably tell you a lot about writing parking tickets.

I’m not putting him down. He seems like a huge resource, and his house is probably a very bad place for a home invader to visit. I’m just saying he’s not an experienced gunfighter.

Cirillo was part of a stakeout squad that existed for a brief period, after which it was dismantled by liberal bureaucrats who thought too many criminals were being shot. The group was producing more than one outlaw casualty per month, and the liberals in power, being liberals, thought this was a bad thing. By extension, this means they thought it was preferable to continue to allow innocent people to be raped, shot, and killed.

The squad was critized by foggy-headed members of the public who called it an assassination team.

An assassination is a murder, and it is typically committed against an unarmed person. Cirillo’s team hid in businesses that were experiencing repeated robberies. Armed men entered and threatened employees, the police drew on them and told them to surrender, and the armed men did bright things like charging them, shooting at them, shooting employees, and grabbing employees to use as hostages.

Cirillo’s book may change the way you think about self-defense. It emphasized a number of factors most of us don’t think about enough.

One thing the book emphasized was the utter stupidity and depravity of criminals. In story after story, criminals who were confronted by armed cops in superior numbers with better positions and cover decided to shoot instead of surrendering. If you’re not a complete moron, you’re probably not going around robbing drugstores, so perhaps their behavior should not surprise anyone.

One of the dumbest things gun enthusiasts say is that if you rack a pump shotgun (a dubious defense weapon), any criminal who hears it will fill his pants and run away. It doesn’t work that way. Many criminals are very stupid, and many do their work on drugs that make them impervious to fear. Cirillo’s experiences show that criminals often ignore danger, and they also show that some are not discouraged at all by being shot multiple times.

Cirillo and his team were attacked on one occasion, and they fired multiple rounds into the face of their assailant. While they were getting it together after the event, the “body” on the floor asked them to help him up. Every single round had traveled around his head under the skin without penetrating the skull. On another occasion, he shot a man in the head, and the man wasn’t seriously injured. The round literally bounced off.

That brings me to another thing Cirillo thought was important: good ammunition in a powerful caliber.

Cirillo knew of a number of criminals who were still dangerous after taking fire, and understandably, it bothered him. He set out to create a new round that would penetrate well and do maximum damage. He wanted it to go through things like skulls and windshields.

He created a number of different rounds. He patented at least one. He tested his ammunition on car bodies in order to simulate skulls. He was always looking for something that would go through a hard object even when fired from an angle. He didn’t want his bullets bouncing off of criminal’s skulls.

You can understand why he did these things. He knew that if a well-placed shot didn’t do the job, the next shot might be from the criminal’s gun, and it might work very well.

His ammunition didn’t go anywhere, but there are companies that make similar things now, and their products are very interesting.

The round that has caught my attention is the 65-grain copper Lehigh Xtreme Defender. It’s very easy to describe. Imagine a Philips screwdriver bit made from copper. That’s not quite right, but it’s not far off.

The idea is that the flutes of the spinning round will stir up the wet stuff inside the body and create a huge permanent wound channel. Generally, handgun rounds can’t create such a channel because they’re slow. The Xtreme Defender can be pumped up to 1800 fps, which is rifle territory.

The maker says it will go through things like windshields and still do its job. Also, because it’s not a hollowpoint, it may be legal in insane jurisdictions where hollowpoints are banned. Another likely advantage: it’s less likely to fail. Hollowpoints can clog with fabric and fail to expand. That shouldn’t happen with a fluted round.

Does it work? If so, is it worth taking a chance on these instead of tried-and-true conventional ammunition?

It’s amazing that hollowpoints are banned anywhere. “We want you to be able to defend yourself. Just don’t hurt anyone.” Even in liberal states, the authorities know that in a defense situation, you always shoot to kill. They just want you to fail.

The simple truth is that you want the most effective bullet there is. That’s the only thing that makes sense. If they sold bullets that made people explode, they would be perfectly suited to self-defense. The purpose of a bullet is to hurt someone so badly they are instantly rendered unable to harm you. Any bullet that gets you closer to that goal should be legal.

I am not qualified to tell you whether the ammunition works, but Paul Harrell is. He’s a gun nut and former military instructor who does very informative Youtube videos. His strategy is to use what he calls “the meat target.” It’s an old leather jacket, some cloth, a layer of ribs, a watermelon, another layer of ribs, more cloth, more leather, and a bunch of fleece blankets to act as a backstop. He believes the watermelon simulates lung tissue, and you can figure out what the other parts do.

Harrell hates what he calls “hyper” ammunition, which means anything beyond a hollowpoint. He has various objections which you can hear about in his videos.

The Lehigh Xtreme Defense is unquestionably hyper ammunition. Nonetheless, he was very impressed by what it did to his meat target. It pretty much wiped out the watermelon.

His objection is that the ammunition is slightly less accurate than plain old hollowpoints. He fired it from 10 yards, and he got a 5-round group that appeared to be a little over an inch in diameter.

That’s not terrible accuracy. I would guess the group was around 50% bigger than his control group, fired with Remington ammunition. At 20 yards, you would expect around 2.5 inches. Can you shoot that well with match ammunition and a rest? It would be very good shooting. If, like most people, you can’t keep your rounds in a 10-inch circle at 7 yards, you will never notice any accuracy problems with Xtreme Defense.

I think you have to consider recoil if you’re going to consider accuracy. If the recoil from the light bullets is a lot lower than it would be with standard ammo, the advantage in ease of fast target reacquisition might override a small difference in inherent accuracy.

I feel like this is a battle between two philosophies: the Cirillo philosophy and the Harrell philosophy.

Harrell has never been in a gunfight. He shot a man in the head because he appeared to be trying to kill Harrell and his wife, but that’s not a gunfight. You don’t bring a truck to a gunfight.

When you talk to people about defense ammunition, the same people who talk about shotgun racking will invariably say, “If you don’t use standard ammunition, you will be charged with murder, and the fact that you used special ammunition will be used against you.”

Here is my response to that: you can’t be charged with murder…if you’re dead. Dead is what Cirillo and his partners almost were the time they shot an armed criminal in the face without killing him. If their ammunition had actually worked, after the first head shot, they and the civilians around them would have been safe.

If you’re mortally wounded because your prosecutor-pleasing ammunition failed to incapacitate your assailant, will you feel better because you know you minimized the risk of a murder trial?

You can object and say hollowpoints work fine. They really don’t. Not often enough. They do a fabulous job on ballistic gel, but ballistic gel doesn’t wear jeans, a jacket, a shirt, or a belt. When real criminals get shot with hollowpoints moving at handgun speeds, the bullets fail frequently.

There is no EDC-suitable conventional handgun round that “works fine.” Every pistol round is a weak substitute for a rifle or a 12-gauge. They’re all compromises.

Whether an idiot tries to charge you with murder after a justified shooting depends a lot on the circumstances and where you live. It’s not all about the gun or the bullet. Where I live, they would probably give me a medal for shooting a burglar. In order to get in trouble for a shooting which is clearly justified, you pretty much have to live in a liberal-dominated area, you have to shoot a black attacker who doesn’t have a gun, or you have to live in Florida and be the source of so much bigoted and uninformed public outcry that a dishonest governor persuades a disgraceful prosecutor like Angela Corey to perjure herself in order to get your case into court.

Paul Harrell was prosecuted, but appearances were not what caused his problem. He lived in a liberal state. He shot an unarmed man who was driving a truck around his campsite, which provided room for a prosecutor to ask if the shooting was necessary.

He killed his assailant with a deer rifle, so it’s not like he had a Desert Eagle with a red dot scope and leering skulls engraved all over it.

He shot a man who wasn’t using a gun, in a type of situation that probably didn’t sound too solid to jurors. I don’t think he would have been any worse off if he had used a highly modified AR-15 with “Trump Commemorative Edition” stamped on the side.

I’m sure scary-looking ammunition has caused problems for some survivors, but I think the odds of this happening are low. Life isn’t Matlock. Generally, the way things panned out is pretty obvious. The odds that a criminal who is not incapacitated will continue to attack are unacceptably high, as are the odds that a well-placed hollowpoint will fail to incapacitate.

Another thing I keep hearing: you shouldn’t use handloads for self-defense.

I’m not sure I agree. I’m thinking about it.

Factory ammunition is generally less consistent than handloads. That’s just a fact. It’s less accurate, and it sometimes fails to go off. On the other hand, if you get sloppy, it’s easy to make handloads that have the wrong amount of powder in them, that won’t chamber, or that will not extract without being pounded out.

Let’s see.

You can weigh the powder you put in every round. That solves the charge problem, and it’s something manufacturers can’t do. As for chambering issues, you can chamber every round and eject it before carrying it for defense. If it chambers once, it will chamber again.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to test factory ammo this way. I’ve never seen anyone recommend it, but it’s obvious.

Do you want to trust yourself or a big machine in the Hornady factory, where there is zero possibility that every round will be inspected? I don’t think trusting yourself is a bad idea. Now that I think about it, Cirillo’s squad loaded ammo.

It seems obvious to me that all that matters is whether you handload carefully. If not, buy your ammo at Cabela’s. If you’re careful, why would you trust yourself less than strangers?

Companies that make ammunition charge a great deal more for defensive ammunition, and as far as I can tell, the prices are not in line with the increased price of the bullets, which are the only components that are different from those in target ammo.

Let me check.

Federal 124-grain HST in 9mm. Perfect. I found it for…seriously…$40.50 a box. If you add up the price of components for reloading with new brass, you get something like 50 cents per round. That’s $25. I’m talking about retail, so what is the wholesale cost? Maybe $15? You would think they could put the bullets together and sell them at a price that would put them on shelves for less than $40.50.

The lowest cost for Federal FMJ is around 24 cents, or $12 per box, retail.

Whether or not the markup is reasonable, you can make practice HST with used casings (free) for around $15 per box, and you can make carry rounds with new brass, if fired brass scares you, for $25.

Lower prices = more practice ammunition = better preparation.

Lehigh bullets are very expensive. There is no lead in them, so it’s all copper, and they are machined, not swaged or whatever. On the up side, unlike many brands of bullet, they are available.

I may try some. For that matter, I might try the 10mm version. Hollow points of all calibers fail.

You have to wonder if we’re headed for a future in which powerful, large-bore rounds are actually worse choices than 9mm or even .380. The Lehigh Defender in .380 appears to be pretty nasty.

I don’t know if what I wrote is correct or helpful, but it’s what I’m thinking about today. I’m sure commenters will have thoughts of their own.

Lock Down Flavor with These Biscuits

I feel like blessing the world with a recipe.

Today I got up and saw how great the weather was, and I thought about all the things God does for me, and I decided to make biscuits.

I think no explanation is needed.

I didn’t have buttermilk. I decided to play around with what I had. I made 7 biscuits around 2″ in diameter. You can scale the recipe up. It’s big enough for two reasonable people.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup biscuit flour
2/3 cup milk
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. cold butter
1 tbsp. cold bacon grease
1/4 tsp. citric acid – I am guessing here. You might start with 1/8 tsp.

Naturally, I had citric acid in my kitchen. This is me we’re talking about. I didn’t have buttermilk, but citric acid is sour, so I used it.

You mix the dry stuff and then cut in the fat. Make sure it doesn’t melt. Mix in the milk, holding some back so you can sneak up on the right amount without making the dough too wet. Roll and fold the dough 4 times, using flour to keep it from sticking to things. I roll the dough out to about 5/8″ high before cutting the biscuits.

Put the biscuits next to each other on the pan, grease the tops, and bake at 450.

I don’t trust Alton Brown, for very good reasons, but he can’t always be wrong, and says to put biscuits close to each other to make them rise higher. I don’t know if it worked, but it didn’t hurt.

I was concerned that the citric acid might make the biscuits heavy or tough, because citric acid is an emulsifier, but they were fine. Very nice. The hint of acidity made the biscuits much better than usual. I think I shouldn’t bother buying buttermilk any more. Citric acid gives me better results. Maybe I could use buttermilk and a smaller dose of acid.

I ate the biscuits with gravy made with country ham fat and bacon grease.

These were tremendous. I’m glad I only made 7.

UPDATE

I made the biscuits again. I believe you need a good solid 1/4 teaspoon of citric acid per cup of flour.

A Nation Turns its Lonely Eyes to You

I feel like I got sucked in by the mainstream media. It wouldn’t be the first time.

This week, I read that we were going to have meat shortages. Tyson Foods, a huge meat company, put out an irresponsible self-congratulatory ad about plant closings and future supply problems. If you read the ad, you’ll see that it’s a lot like the disturbing “We’re here for you” emails we’ve been receiving since March. You know what I mean. “During this difficult time, we want to know that In-N-Out Burger is committed to customer and employee safety, and we promise that we will be here to help you for the duration.”

I’m not seriously suggesting In-N-Out Burger sent an email like that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I got annoying messages from McDonald’s and other businesses that couldn’t have done anything to help me in this or any other conceivable universe or fanciful paradigm.

It would have been more honest to sent messages like, “Here at Cinnabon, we understand that a national crisis and the accompanying hysteria provide us with a special opportunity to grandstand and raise our profile without actually doing anything else anyone can discern.”

I used to save my COVID-19-virtue-signal emails so I could marvel at them in the future, but I started deleting them. There are just too many. They never stop coming. Some companies refuse to stop sending new ones.

By the way, are you tired of the “health workers are heroes” nonsense that’s going around? Health workers have pleasant, high-paying, recession-proof, epidemic-proof jobs in an industry that will only get stronger as America ages. They get protective gear and chemicals the rest of us can’t get. They get free medical care. Most of them don’t go anywhere near C19 patients.

Yesterday, the official case count in my county was 151, which is astonishingly low, and there are still signs here and there that say, “HEROES WORK HERE.” I’m not feeling it. Even if it were true, why would anyone praise himself like that? Who works in the places who put the signs up? Healthcare workers. It sure looks like they’re the ones installing the signs.

You’re a hero for going to work and getting a paycheck and free medical care while your neighbors max out their credit cards and straight-arm their landlords? Really?

I’m sure there are places in the Northeast where the risk of exposure for health workers is high, but they’re not dropping like flies, regardless of what anyone says without checking.

This afternoon, I’m going to go out by the highway and put up a sign that says, “A HERO LIVES HERE.” I braved Home Depot in order to buy graphite for my reloading press.

Don’t make a big deal out of it. I deserve praise, but I’m too humble to put up with it. I’m wonderful on many, many levels, but if you try to wrap your head around it, you will only realize how limited you are compared to me.

Today I did a very brief news check–something I am determined to stop doing–and I learned that our pork supply has been dented to the tune of 25%, and the figure for beef is 10%.

Do I misunderstand how the system works? Will a 25% reduction in pork really drive us to forced veganism?

I also learned that the Donald has given meat processors special status and instructed them to try to stay open. CNN and other outlets are taking the ball and running with it, trying to convince Americans that trying to keep food on our tables is somehow proof that Trump is incompetent.

Here’s a fun exercise. Sit back, close your eyes, and try to imagine something Donald Trump could do which would not be criticized by our far-left media.

Good luck.

I inadvertently came across a video the other day, showing Trump boarding Air Force One with a scrap of paper stuck to his shoe. I’m not kidding. A major news outlet took the time to film this, edit the story, and put it in front of the public.

Imagine if they had treated John Kennedy this way. His dad was a Hitler-supporting anti-Semite with strong ties to organized crime. Kennedy himself cheated on his wife pretty much continuously. He escalated the war in Vietnam with no clear plan. He accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book someone else wrote. His alcoholic brother drove an attractive young female employee into a pond and ran away while she suffocated. His time in office would have been a continuous party for the press, had anything like Trump Derangement Syndrome afflicted him.

So now I have enough meat for a month, and if I freeze it, I may never actually need it. We’ll see how it plays out.

One nice thing about steak is that you can keep it for several weeks without freezing it, and it just gets better.

Tyson, along with some other companies, said it was considering closing 80% of its operations. Interesting fact no one is talking about: Tyson helped create Bill and Hillary Clinton. The story in Arkansas is that Clinton got into the governor’s mansion with Tyson’s help, and then he didn’t play ball. Tyson chose not to support him in his reelection bid, and he was voted out. Then he decided to kiss the ring, there was a reconciliation, and back to Little Rock he went.

I got this information from my dad, who represented Holly Farms before and during the Tyson takeover. He got it from his business contacts.

The Tyson connection was so strong, Ross Perot used to call Clinton “chicken man.”

Tyson is the company that gave Hillary Clinton the famous $100,000 bribey windfall back in the 1990’s. Remember? Someone at Tyson made commodity trades for her, the margin requirements were relaxed for her, and somehow she made a $99,000 profit on a $1000 investment.

Donald Trump made billions by virtue of his own skill. Like many politicians, the Clintons had to have a little help. That help is why you can go into the House of Representatives, to pick an example, with student loans and a negative net worth and come out 10 years later with several million dollars.

Do the Clintons have sufficient juice to get Tyson and other meat companies to try to destabilize Trump? You have to wonder.

Meat plants hire large numbers of illegals, and getting rid of Trump is probably a priority for many meat companies.

CNN is saying Donald Trump is inept, because meat workers won’t go back to factories. They don’t actually have proof of this, but that didn’t get in the way of the story. It’s not clear how doing nothing would have been a better idea.

Hmm. A whole lot of illegals sneaked across the border and endured considerable hardship to get their precious American meat-packing jobs. Now they’re going to refuse to work, encouraging other illegals to flood in and replace them? Not so sure about that.

Meat-plant jobs are not skilled labor. The only reason they exist is that we still can’t program robots to do everything. I guess some day we’ll pull that off. If we ever reach the point where machines can look after themselves, the machines may wonder why they still keep feeding us.

I feel like I fell for a carnival scam, buying all that meat. At least I didn’t hoard toilet paper. That’s like crowning yourself with a dunce cap.

Fauci is saying a COVID-19 “second wave” is “inevitable.”

What does that mean?

What does “second wave” mean? Does it mean a major epidemic or a much smaller epidemic? And how does he know it’s inevitable?

Here’s my guess. A second wave is inevitable because coronavirus likes cold weather (hat tip: Trump), and saying so is not very brave, because a second wave could be very mild. If we get a new hump in the curve this fall, and it’s 5% as bad as the current hump, it will be a legitimate second wave, but the harm will be negligible.

Fauci, a fungible bureaucrat who has to think about his future every day, will be able to say, “See? I told you so.” But the impact of the disease will be even lighter than it was this time around.

I’m going to make a common sense prediction and see if it holds up. We will see another hump when the weather cools down, but it will be nothing compared to the present hump, and it won’t be a big deal. We will have a toilet paper shortage anyway, because it only takes a few ignorant, selfish people to clean out stores.

Barring mutations, COVID-19 will not be a major factor in our futures. That’s another guess. Journalists like to shriek that there is no proof we will have immunity, but that’s what comes of studying tooth bleaching, hair extensions, and ruthless self-promotion instead of math and biology. Scientists, who know even more than journalists, generally expect us to develop immunity. This is why Sweden didn’t lock people down. They wanted the infection to spread so immunity would develop.

Sweden knew a Ferris Bueller scenario was unsustainable.

When COVID-19 returns, there will probably be a huge number of people who can’t be infected, along with people who can be infected but can’t have severe symptoms.

Maybe it sounds like my confidence in my judgment is inflated, considering my near-total lack of qualifications, but how many things have I been wrong about? How many things have the experts been wrong about?

Still no major celebrity deaths today. Will we ever see one? My personal Ebay bench grinder poverty index is holding steady at 41 items. The Johns Hopkins new-case curve is trending downward strongly, in spite of increased testing. Trump says the USA’s ostensibly high infection numbers are due to a superior testing regime, as I said I suspected, and the BBC, which is on the far left, admits it’s true. It appears I was right when I said the decline in the acceleration of the rate of infection was probably greater than the graph showed.

I often refer to changes in the acceleration of transmission, because an epidemic can break down and turn around while there is still a steady increase in the daily number of infections. Acceleration of transmission is not the same thing as infection rate. It looks like we’ve reached the point where we have an infection rate which is decreasing.

You can be in the process of decelerating while your speed is a hundred miles per hour. You can have an acceleration of 300,000 miles per second squared while traveling at a speed of 5 mph. Speed and acceleration are different.

It’s good when acceleration slows down, and it’s better when we have deceleration, which appears to be what’s happening now.

I need to resign myself to eating a lot of steak. Yesterday I ruined my appetite with Reese’s Pieces and M&M’s. Today I will be strong. I need the refrigerator space.

Plant Closures Threaten Americans with Crippling Flatulence, B12 Deficiencies

The meat frenzy is about to kick into high gear! Get ready for a couple of months of tofu and tabouli. Buy yourself some Beano or get used to driving with the car windows open.

What’s going on? Well, workers at certain meat plants are testing positive for COVID-19 at high rates, and our genius overlords are shutting the plants down.

Here’s the question an intelligent person must ask: what percentage of the C19-positive workers have symptoms? Also, how many have symptoms that aren’t extremely mild? Here’s a really good question: if a big percentage test positive and very few are significantly ill, what does it mean for the rest of us?

I’ll tell you what it would mean: the lockdowns were a bad idea.

C19 has been in the US since December, at the latest. There is no way to deny it. You can’t have an undetected yet vigorous epidemic in China, plus abundant air traffic between China and other countries, without spreading the infection abroad. It’s just not possible.

It’s starting to look like the infection rate in the US is very high, and that the only reason the official numbers are low is that we are very, very bad at diagnosing the disease. If this is true, then lots of good conclusions follow.

One conclusion is that the disease just isn’t that bad. If it were, we would have sick and dying people everywhere, and we don’t.

Another conclusion is that the epidemic is wrapping up due to herd immunity. If, say, 20% of Americans have already been infected, the body of vulnerable people has decreased greatly, and they are also separated from infectious people by a growing buffer of immune individuals. If this is true, the recent collapse of the acceleration of the infection rate is largely due to saturation and herd immunity.

“BUT THE LOCKDOWNS FLATTENED THE CURVE!” Did they?

The shortest likely incubation period for C19 is 3 days, and the average is 5 days. If lockdowns were saving us, the curve would have started flattening 3 days after they went into effect. Did it? Doesn’t look like it. The downturn didn’t even begin until the second week of April. Go look. The influence of lockdowns isn’t even visible on the graph at the time when it should have appeared.

As always, I’m relying on a graph which is based on squishy numbers, but then so are the authorities.

There is no doubt that lockdowns save some people, but then they would also save us from the flu, which kills people in numbers comparable to C19. We don’t have flu lockdowns. We don’t even force people to get vaccinated. We say, “Disease and death are inevitable, and freedom and prosperity are essential, so we accept allow free adults to make their own choices, and we accept some casualties.” That’s what we’re thinking, even if we don’t articulate it.

A cousin of mine is in the food industry, and he says the meat thing will hit hard in two weeks. This morning, after texting him, I felt like I should buy protein. I prayed about it. I was thinking maybe I would get three dozen eggs and pickle them. I thought I might buy 5 more rib eyes and maybe 8 pounds of chicken. I considered getting canned salmon. I like it, and it’s cheap. And almost no one else likes it, so it’s not a big hoarder priority.

I felt like God told me I could get a few cans of salmon and 4 pounds of chicken breast, but that was all. I saw some gorgeous bone-in rib eyes on sale for $5.49 per pound, and the temptation was serious, but I let them go.

I have enough protein to maintain a pretty decent level of consumption for something like 6 weeks. That will have to do. I’m not turning on the spare fridges.

The press is telling us millions of chickens will be slaughtered because farmers can’t sell them to plants. That sounds like a big deal, but we slaughter at least 10 billion chickens per year in the US. Also, chickens grow fast. Guess how old chickens are when we kill them? A year? Six months? Try 7 weeks. If we killed half the chickens in the US, we could be back on track in July.

What about cattle? I can’t speak for everyone, but the cattle on my land aren’t expensive to keep in hot weather. The grass grows, and they don’t require hay or silage. I would be surprised to learn that farmers were slaughtering herds this far into spring. Maybe a reader who knows more can tell me.

I have read that steers are generally slaughtered when they’re between one and two years old, so a panic massacre could presumably cause problems for a year or two.

I don’t think eggs are going anywhere. You don’t have to butcher eggs. Also, if meat production falters, chicken feed will be cheaper. Farmers will need to sell grain.

I was thinking about it today, and I realized the meat problem is not a big deal. I don’t think it will last long, and even if it did, life with a little less meat will not be difficult. Who cares? It’s better to do without than to be a hoarder.

One silver lining behind the meat cloud: squirrels. I have an endless supply, and shooting squirrels is one of the most virtuous things a person can do. They’re destructive and also quite tasty.

Squirrels are out of season here, but I contacted the authorities, and they told me homeowners are free to kill nuisance squirrels all the time. My squirrels are ALL nuisance squirrels. The other day I wrote about losing the fuel gauge on my lawn tractor to a stinking squirrel. I can shoot them whenever I want, legally. Squirrel works just fine in chicken recipes. Kung pao squirrel may be in my future.

Maybe the meat panic will wake people up and make them realize it’s time to go back to work. That would be nice.

In case anyone is interested, this county’s current C19 tally is 151. Barely moving. That may be a bad thing. It may mean we don’t have as much herd immunity as other places. It’s nice for now, however.

This morning at the store, I saw several packages of toilet paper, right out there where just anyone could grab them. I was awestruck. Things are getting better.

I can’t stop writing about coronavirus without mentioning the American major celebrity death toll: still zero. I’m also checking my used bench grinder poverty index. The number of used items that come up on an Ebay search for “Baldor bench grinder” is 39. This is down from 41 but a lot higher than last year. Maybe the economy isn’t as bad as I thought.

In other news, today I watched a video by Messianic rabbi Zev Porat. He interviewed a student of late rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, a revered mystic who died not long ago. Kaduri said he had met the Messiah. He left a note indicating that the Messiah’s name was Yehoshuah, which is the long form of Yeshua (“Jesus”).

Kaduri’s son claimed the note was a forgery, but Kaduri students have come forward and admitted that Kaduri did, in fact, believe Jesus was the Messiah. So much for the forgery claims.

In the interview, the student suggests mainstream Orthodox Jews believe Menachem Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe who died many years ago, is the Messiah. Schneerson was the leader of a big sect called Chabad. Many thought he was a Messiah candidate, but the official hard-line rule was that no one who died without fulfilling his mission could be the Messiah, so Jews with integrity abandoned his candidacy when he passed away.

I already knew that certain Jews thought he was the Messiah, and you can find them online saying they pray to him. They believe he is immortal; a god. Some think he will rise again. It’s a big kerfuffle. Allowing Jews to worship a Messiah could open doors they work hard to keep closed against a certain well-known individual from Bethlehem. Defining Jesus out of monotheism is extremely important in a culture beset by Christian missionaries.

You can see the dilemma. Anti-missionaries have objections to Jesus. One is their belief that the Messiah can’t be a god. Another is that he can’t die before fulfilling his mission. If a strict Orthodox Jew says Schneerson is a god and admits he died, what happens to two very strong objections to Jesus? POOF.

Anti-missionaries dismiss the miracles of Jesus as magic, and they say you miracles don’t prove someone is righteous or approved by God. But Schneerson’s worshipers say he worked miracles and cite them as proof of his Messiah status. Problem.

The official Jewish posture is that if you believe Jesus is the Messiah, even if you were born Jewish and continue practicing Judaism, you are no longer a Jew. Just like that. But what if you accept Schneerson? How does one rid the faith of followers of one putatively false Messiah while embracing others?

Schneerson denied that he was the Messiah. I don’t think he can be blamed for what happened after he died.

There are followers who claim he did’t die. That’s really something. He had heart attacks. There were witnesses. A doctor signed a death certificate. The body was seen. It’s in a hole right now.

Christians admit Jesus died, so our situation is different. There is no body. There are no bones. There never was any physical evidence that he remained in the tomb. The Gospels say the Romans put soldiers around the tomb to prevent his followers from stealing the body, but it vanished anyway. The penalty for the soldiers was death. You can look that up. I did. It’s not like they would have taken their job lightly.

I didn’t realize how big Schneerson Messianism was. I thought it was a few fringe characters. Now that I’ve seen the video with the Kaduri student, I realize it may be a much bigger movement than I thought. I looked around online, and it appears to be a major phenomenon.

What will the repercussions be? Will the Schneerson movement make more Jews open to embracing Yeshua? Will it make them more determined to exclude Messiah impostors? Will it lead to the termination of the Jewish status of Schneerson worshipers?

My guess is that they will refuse to confront the issue. I think it’s a can of worms they will run away from. That appears to be what’s happening now. I don’t think they’re ready to expel thousands of Jews. I think they want to hang onto all the religious Jews they can get. They worry about numbers. It’s a very big issue with them.

Is this a double standard? I don’t know enough to judge. It doesn’t look too good.

It’s very interesting how the policy of expelling Messianics has made Jesus seem like a huge problem. If Jews don’t expel them, then Messianics can be seen as annoying Jews who are still brothers. If Jews expel them, their conversions become reductions in the total number of Jews, and conversion, which would otherwise be a mere nuisance, becomes an existential threat. Suddenly, Jesus isn’t just a Messiah pretender. He’s a potential end to the existence of the Jewish people.

It looks like the rabbis have chosen the threat of annihilation over the possibility of tolerance.

If they don’t expel Schneerson worshipers, in the minds of reasonable people, the Messiah contest may come down to a competition to see who has the best candidate. That will be weird.

I guess it’s a good thing they don’t stone people any more. Walking in Mea Shearim would be like crossing an asteroid field.

It will be interesting to see if the Schneerson faction gains ground. I think it’s certain the Kaduri faction will be unpopular for the foreseeable future.

While I’m writing about God, I should mention a testimony I just got from my friend Mike. I had the honor of baptizing him last year.

I didn’t know he had serious arthritis in his neck. He couldn’t turn it normally without pain. Last week, he was in bed, and he started praying in tongues. He raised his hands, and he felt a sudden sensation in his neck. As soon as it passed, he was able to move his neck without pain. He said he has 90% of the motion he had before arthritis set in. He is completely freaked out. Overjoyed. Really nice.

I have my own testimony, as always. I believe it was last year that I wrote about a growth on my hand. It had a funny color to it, so immediately I thought of melanoma. I decided to take the Christian route. I did not go to a doctor. I prayed, and I cast things out and so forth. I spoke healing to myself.

I will not lie. I did a few other things after praying for permission. I put hot sauce on it, because hot sauce and other things like curcumin and green tea have made growths dry up in the past. For a brief time, I also applied a prescription drug that belonged to my dad. These things didn’t seem to help. I threw the drug out. On a lark, I also tried fenbendazole, which is an interesting deworming drug that people are using to fight cancer. I gave it up, too. Didn’t seem to do anything.

I don’t have worms. That’s for sure.

I forgot about the growth for several weeks. The one day I remembered it and checked. There wasn’t much going on.

Right now, it’s not easy to see where the growth used to be. There was a pronounced raised place, and it was getting bigger. Looks like it’s history.

One less thing to worry about, as Forrest Gump would probably say.

God always tells me, “None of the things you worry about will come to pass.”

I’ll take that.

Just What we Need; More Panic

It’s official. I am a meat hoarder.

Today I saw a story that said Tyson Foods, a major chicken supplier, ran a Sunday ad in the New York Times that said all meat would disappear from the earth by Friday.

I may have the details slightly wrong. Let me see.

Okay, they say they’re being forced to close some plants because of C19 outbreaks. They also say “millions” of chickens, cattle, and pigs will have to be killed because farmers have no place to sell them. Does Tyson even sell beef and pork? Isn’t it a chicken company?

My dad used to be the labor attorney for Holly Farms, a poultry company Tyson bought. If I recall correctly, Tyson went with their own in-house counsel, so my family was cut off from its supply of delicious pre-breaded chicken burgers.

Frankly, this looks like an opportunistic self-back-patting ad which contains hysterical predictions that are very unlikely to pan out. An awful lot of the ad basically says, “Tyson wonderful Tyson wonderful.” “Tyson love employees. Tyson very very good.” There aren’t a lot of numbers.

This epidemic has been an incredible PR opportunity for many companies and people.

I doubt the supply will falter severely. Nonetheless, remembering how the toilet paper thing worked, and considering how much I’m enjoying my new propane cooker, I decided this aggression would not stand. I ran out and got like 10 pounds of ground chuck and 7 rib eye steaks.

I know I don’t hoard very well. I could have filled both freezers today. I’m destined to remain an amateur. I felt like other people should get a shot at the precious.

My plan is to freeze 5 of the steaks and turn all of the ground chuck into half-pound patties for freezing. My best guess is that Tyson’s berserker mouth-foaming moment will pass and that we will continue to have a decent supply of meat, perhaps after a couple of weeks of insanity. I bought enough meat to get me through a month of relatively heavy usage, and I left it at that. If the meat supply dries up, I’ll fall back on my pizza skills.

Freezer space limitations should limit meat hoarding. Let’s see. Are freezers selling out? Time to check Best Buy’s site.

Well, I should have seen this coming. The hoarders have bought all the freezers. They’ll be eating frozen stuff through Christmas while the rest of us eat fresh food. They even hoard frozen vegetables. Why? One of the most notable things about the C19 epidemic is the total lack of impact on produce. Vegetarians are sneering at normal people.

People have the dumbest ideas. They really thought the world was ending. Nice job, American journalists.

I belong to a cattle forum, and I just checked. They have some concerns, but no one is panicking. Except Tyson and the people who bought freezers, I guess.

Here’s something to think about: people who run big companies don’t know everything. They make a lot of stupid mistakes. Remember a company called Sears? Remember New Coke? Remember the Edsel? Remember the Pontiac Aztek? Don’t run down the street naked because a chicken executive tried to play prophet. I mean, okay, I ran out and bought steaks, but I don’t expect long-term issues. I was concerned about the effects of his remarks, not the effects of the virus.

The rib eyes I make now with the big propane cooker are mind-blowing. Steakhouse chefs should make pilgrimages to apologize and kiss my unwashed feet. I have never had a high-end steakhouse steak that compared to my own steaks, and they cost three or four times as much. My choice steaks are better than their prime steaks because the preparation is better.

Ground chuck is the best pre-ground burger material available at grocery stores. That’s my opinion, anyway. Sirloin is like dry sawdust, and regular hamburger is made from tonsils and private parts. Okay, it’s probably not, but it has so much fat it sort of disappears when you cook it.

I should try grinding up a rib eye. All other cuts bow to the rib eye.

Anyone who tells you to make burgers from sirloin alone is a bad cook, so there is no point in finishing a recipe that starts with sirloin. It’s astonishing how many chefs who publish online are inept enough to promote sirloin-burger recipes. There are also people who put other types of meat in burgers, and that’s a red flag, too. If you put pork, poultry, or seafood in a burger, you have to cook it well done, and that destroys it.

Rachel Ray makes burgers with pure sirloin. Now I know not to listen to her.

Some chefs recommend grinding short ribs and brisket into burgers. Hmm…a short rib should have the same flavor as a rib eye, shouldn’t it? I’m too lazy to grind meat for burgers. Ground chuck is outstanding, so even if custom grinds are better, I’m not motivated to try.

America’s Test Kitchen recommends grinding sirloin tips with butter. I would never argue with these people. They’re just too good. Butter must make up for the dry texture of the inferior meat.

I don’t know what a sirloin tip is or how to get them.

I like mixing fresh garlic and salt into hamburger and then gas-grilling with super-high temperatures, but in lazy moments, I fry burgers in butter and Worcestershire sauce, and they’re wonderful. I cook them medium, with hot fat running out. I use brioche-style buns, toasted on the inside over the grill.

My gas grill was weak when I got it, so I bought a much bigger regulator, and now it’s not bad at all. If you buy a gas grill for burgers, you may have the same problem. I think they make them weak because of lawyers. It’s literally impossible to prepare a decent burger or steak on the model I bought without hot-rodding it mercilessly.

Gordon Ramsay cooks burgers that appear to be almost an inch and a half thick. Bad idea. A super-thick burger will tend to be raw inside, and you don’t want an overly high ratio of inner meat to outer crust. The flavor is in the crust. It’s also hard to eat a burger that’s too thick. I like burgers 7/8″ to 1″ thick.

I’ll snap a photo from Youtube so you can see a Ramsay burger.

You can’t really eat that like a burger. Your mouth won’t open wide enough. It’s all show and no go. Made for TV, not the table. He cuts his burgers with a knife and fork, which is about what you would expect an untutored foreigner to do.

Lately I’ve been toasting the buns on one half of the grill and then putting them on the other (unlit) side to wait for the burgers. I turn off the flames on the side where the buns are toasted. I flip the buns’ tops and apply cheese. The lingering heat in the grill softens the cheese. This makes it easy to go heavy on the cheese without having melting issues. You may have to put condiments between the cheese and the bun, though. It may resist being pried off so you can put it directly on the meat.

Maybe I should just throw the cheese on the meat and use a propane torch.

I don’t want to get back into cooking, but the constant talk of shortages makes me think of food.

Enough about meat. I also bought famotidine today. I could not resist.

A day or two ago, news organizations started saying famotidine, the drug in Pepcid, showed promise as a coronavirus treatment. What the heck. Can’t hurt me to pick up a couple of bottles. It’s a good thing to have around regardless of whether there’s a pandemic. Heartburn is annoying. When I got to the store today, naturally, most of the famotidine was gone. There must be a hoarder hotline out there. They are fast.

I think I’ve already had coronavirus, and I don’t expect to have it in the future, but it’s fun to feel like you’re doing something that might help.

I got the famotidine at Walgreen’s. They had a hand sanitizer bottle at the register for customers. After I paid, I pumped some out and rubbed my hands with it. It felt luxurious. Like putting caviar on my hands. The smell was invigorating, but that’s normal, because hand sanitizer smells like martinis.

I went to two Walmarts and a Winn-Dixie today. The first Walmart was not in good shape. It was pretty post-hoardery. The second was jammed with goodies. It’s always striking to see how hoarding, which is not guided by reason, varies from location to location.

I saw a lot of paper towels today. Real brands, not just the typical pandemic store brands. “Ekono-Pryce towels, made from real Chinese sawdust!” It’s comforting to know Bounty is back in a big way.

I have cinchona bark on the way. It’s the source of quinine, which is the drug from which chloroquine is descended. As mentioned in an earlier post, I read up on this stuff online, and it got me thinking about gin and tonics. I got some Boodle’s gin and Q tonic water. I couldn’t resist. Q tonic water has almost no quinine in it, so it’s probably not much help when you’re sick, but you can’t read about gin and tonics for two days and not want one. I decided to try the real thing, because people say it’s phenomenal. When the bark arrives, I’ll make some syrup with it. I would guess that the amount of quinine I bought would get me through something like a day and a half of actual treatment, but in practice, it will give me maybe a month of delightful beverages.

I’ve been drinking a gin and tonic almost every other day for quite a while now, and I’m not sick, so that proves it works. No, seriously.

Okay, maybe I’m wrong, but I’m going to continue my arduous regimen. I’m no quitter.

G&T’s with quality tonic are peak-experience-level beverages. I need to have one with my next rib eye.

I have to wonder if quinine is useful for things like colds and the flu. It’s worth a try. Several tries.

It’s for science.

I also wonder why meat plants are especially vulnerable to C19 outbreaks. They’re some of the cleanest places on earth. They hose their equipment with harsh disinfectants all the time. Maybe it’s because they’re cold. C19 does not like heat, humidity, or sunlight. A meat plant is probably a great place to keep the viruses alive on surfaces. They’re also staffed largely by illegals who are not always the cleanest beings in the universe. Maybe their personal habits are spreading C19 at home and overcoming the hygiene measures at the plants.

It shouldn’t take long for plants to recover, especially if they’re hit hard so a lot of employees return at roughly the same time. C19 runs its course in a couple of weeks, and then it leaves you immune and noncontagious. It’s not like meat workers are dying or being hospitalized in large numbers. They’re just having flulike symptoms that pass quickly.

If you wrap and freeze a steak correctly, it will be very good when you thaw it. The quality difference isn’t a huge deal. I don’t know if burgers hold up as well, but I know they’re okay. If it turns out there is no beef shortage, I can always put the burgers in meatloaf and go back to fresh. If not, a B burger, while not an A burger, is well worth cooking.

Is it Already Over? The “Experts” Really Don’t Know

The coronavirus news never stops changing.

For some time, people have been saying they thought COVID-19, which I have just decided to call “C19” because it’s easier to type, had shown up in America much earlier than the authorities were telling us. Now even the New York Times is getting in on the act. It says we now know that an American death in early February was caused by C19.

Want better evidence that the disease has been here a long time? A test of random people in New York City supermarkets came up 21% positive. An expert is trying to dismiss it as the result of false positives, but like many experts, he doesn’t understand math. The false-positive rate, if the Chinese are to be believed, is 40-80%. Even if the real positive rate in New York City was 4%, allowing for the worst possible rate of false results, it would still be much higher than the official rate.

The people who were tested were out shopping. They weren’t sick people hooked up to ventilators. What does that tell you?

I think about my own mystery illness. I got sick in January. I had conjunctivitis, a runny nose, a cough with chest pain, and body aches. I also had nausea and diarrhea. These are all C19 symptoms. The illness lasted longer than a typical pink eye case, and there was no pink eye epidemic in my area. Pink eye is extremely contagious; much worse than the flu or C19. You don’t get it all by yourself.

My disease was mild, like C19. It took a long time to come and go, like C19. I had a dry cough with chest pain, like a C19 patient. I had a virus, not bacteria. Bacterial conjunctivitis comes with pus and different symptoms. I was sick in the winter. Viral conjunctivitis peaks in the summer.

How could I get C19? I live in the woods by myself. I have an answer.

Early in January, I traveled to North Carolina for a Last Reformation event. Most people there had traveled a long way. There were many Europeans there. One prayed for me, and I spent a lot of time with him. People were laying hands on each other. We got close to each other. I would have returned here on about January 6. I noticed I was feeling funny during the days preceding January 20.

The incubation period for C19 is now known to run to 24 days in some cases, and I was exposed to a lot of people from distant locations around 10 days before I got sick.

When I realized I was ill, I stayed away from people, including my barber. My hair was out of control. I went to buy groceries and so on, but I didn’t have guests or visit anyone. In other words, I did exactly what every contagious person should do but generally doesn’t.

So. Did I save my county from coronavirus? Wouldn’t surprise me at all, if I were the only person who had it, but in all likelihood, a lot of people had it and weren’t diagnosed.

In order to believe C19 wasn’t a problem in the US until late January, you have to believe some unlikely things. You have to think there was a serious outbreak in Wuhan in late fall, that thousands of people traveled between Wuhan and the US before the disease was identified, and that somehow, the infection didn’t spread in the US until January. The first three things are undeniable facts. The fourth is so unlikely it should be considered impossible.

If C19 got here earlier than we think, why is there a big medical crisis now?

Is there really a medical crisis? The stories of hospitals filling up with the dead and dying still aren’t true. Only a tiny percentage of Americans have been diagnosed, meaning not many are significantly ill. The death toll is comparable to that of the flu, and many so-called coronavirus deaths will turn out to be flu deaths because of false positives and provider bias. We’re hearing about shortages of certain medical items. Were those shortages caused by sick patients or by providers scrambling to get more equipment than they needed? People talk of a ventilator shortage, but in reality, it’s still not here. There is only an ANTICIPATED shortage.

We’re having a lot of problems due to C19, but are they generally medical problems? No. They’re hysteria-related problems. We can’t work. We’re struggling financially. We can’t get haircuts. We can’t travel. When you’re caught up in panic and deprivation, it’s easy to confuse your problems with medical problems.

If everyone in your city is hoarding toilet paper and going around in masks, it doesn’t mean there is a major illness problem. Healthy people can do those things.

C19 hits very old people very hard, and it’s a real scourge when it hits old folks homes, which is what happened in Massachusetts, but the rest of us are generally fine. Even the sick.

I am no expert, which means I am not part of a group of people who indisputably got nearly everything wrong, but if I had to make a guess my life depended on, I’d say C19 has swept most of the nation already. I think I already had it. Maybe you’ve had it, too.

It’s amazing how unreliable experts and authorities are. This is one of those things you have to be old to understand. The natural thing is to trust people in power and people who have credentials, but the older you get, the more you will find that you are often better off figuring things out on your own. There are a lot of mothers out there who have had to tell incompetent doctors what was wrong with their kids. There are laymen who have been executed who would have been better off representing themselves.

The more experts and authorities let you down, the more firmly you will believe you have to do your own thinking. You have to do your best to decide which things you can figure out and which things you have to put in other people’s hands. When you rely on other people, you have to watch them. They will let you down in ways that will astound you.

Right now, the new-case graph is still oscillating. I thought it would peak more sharply, but a lot depends on physician bias and the availability of tests. A sudden increase in testing will drive the graph upward even if the actual numbers are plummeting.

Guess how many major celebrity deaths America has, as of today? Not one. Still.

How many major celebrities are there? Let’s look at football. There are 1700 players right now. The average career is 3.3 years. That means there are tens of thousands of retired players. Many are famous. None have died. Now throw in baseball, basketball, and hockey. Throw in college athletes, past and present. Where are the deaths? We have Tom Dempsey, but most people have no idea who he is.

Trump-hating journalists are still falling back on Mark Blum and Joe Diffie. When you have to reach for poor examples to prove your argument, something is wrong.

In other news, my new propane cooker is working out great. I did okay with the smaller one, but even when it did a fairly good job on steak, it wasn’t on the level of a 200,000-BTU unit. The crust and charring on steaks weren’t as good.

Yesterday I threw a Walmart cowboy rib eye in the skillet with butter. It was magical. I was stunned by how good it was. Two hours later, I was still pausing to think about it. You really have to be nuts to cook a steak any other way.

I need a big griddle. This cooker has a huge burner, so heat rises all around it. I have to use long tongs to avoid being burned. I’m pretty sure I removed all the hair on the fingers of my right hand yesterday. Walmart has a nice big griddle for around twenty bucks.

One of the best things about the cooker is not having to clean the kitchen or open windows to let smoke out. The cooker is on the patio, where it belongs. It can’t stain my ceiling with condensed grease. And it’s not just good for steak. I could put a wok on it. I can’t do that on my stove. I could use it for big pots for gatherings.

One of my favorite meals now is a rib eye plus a microwaved russet potato. The oven is better for potatoes, but when you’re alone and you just want to get dinner on the plate, a microwave will give you 85% of what you want in 8 minutes. I would never use it if I had guests, but for me, it’s excellent.

I found a bag of small russets. Big ones are just TOO big, and small ones are better anyway because they have a higher ratio of skin to starch. I wanted to buy a single potato, but Walmart’s single russets are disgusting. They had some overpriced nuke-ready potatoes for a dollar each. Forget that. For $5, I got maybe 10 pounds of beautiful little potatoes that weren’t covered in hoe marks.

I have to go to Walmart for chlorine, so I should grab a griddle. Home Depot is out of chlorine. Apparently, people are washing their food in it. I am not kidding. It’s a legitimate news story you can look up. I wondered where the bleach had gone. People are poisoning themselves and ending up in hospitals.

Life is good. Don’t fall for the panic. Unless you enjoy it and get angry at people who are relaxed. If that’s you, you bring it on yourself, so swim in it. Eat it. Drink it. Just don’t bother me with your manipulation and guilt trips. I plan to savor the good times with which I have been blessed.

Navy Beans and Poached Squirrel

I still have not set up my reloading press. I made a platform for it yesterday, but I haven’t followed through. I plan to get on it shortly.

I thought I would say something about the epidemic, since I have been writing about it for so long. Today, again, the infection rate is dropping. At least that’s what’s happening according to the Johns Hopkins graph page, which I have linked to in the past.

The rate at which the rate is dropping seems to be slowing at the moment, but bumps are to be expected.

Toilet paper is still unavailable online, unless you order questionable Chinese coronavirus scam paper, or you get really lucky, or you pay some low-life 5 times what the paper is worth.

At some point, the expense and trouble make using the curtains an intelligent choice.

I can’t figure the toilet paper problem out. I was wrong to think the problem would only last a couple of weeks. I read that factories would keep churning it out, and I figured people could only continue buying three dozen rolls per day for a short time. I figured online sources would rebound quickly because they could limit per-person orders and no one could go in and clean them out.

Still, the paper is hard to find during reasonable shopping hours, and online sources are useless. I check because I get bored.

I saw someone trying to explain it online. The theory was that people were using home-quality paper instead of commercial-quality. They make you stay home, you can’t use the toilet at work, and you end up using ridiculous fluffy paper with baby ducks stamped on it instead of the military-looking stuff. Somehow or other, increasing the demand for fluffy paper threw things out of whack.

I don’t believe it. I never used that stuff, and I still can’t find the kind I buy. Not online. I can’t find anything that isn’t Chinese or overpriced. Several months from now, this could become a problem. I’ll have to get up early and get to the store before the hoarders, and I may have to have a late breakfast. This is how you get toilet paper. Be at the store when it opens. While you’re there, make sure you use the can. Free is free.

I think the explanation is a crock. If the only problem were the difficulty of making fluffy paper, we would be able to buy non-fluffy paper, and we’re not. The problem is that people are still buying every roll they see. The system, which isn’t designed for a 2000% increase in demand, is just not built to cope with it.

If people don’t get over it, some morning in July, I will have to be at Winn-Dixie as soon as the special old-people-only shopping hour is over.

Manufacturers are ramping production up, and distribution, contrary to what some people claim, is not out of commission due to the the millions of dead truck drivers who can’t show up for work. They don’t exist. More people have died from the flu this year.

It’s amazing how people think there are overflowing hospitals and bodies on sidewalks. Does anyone actually read the news?

I still don’t know a single person who has coronavirus or who has mentioned a relative or loved one who has it.

There are STILL STILL STILL no major celebrities who have died! Inexplicable! But there are celebrities who are trying to capitalize, and I don’t just mean the ones who are virtue-signaling and trying to tell us what to do on social media. Bill Cosby, Michael Avenatti, Bernie Madoff, R. Kelly, and Julian Assange are all trying to get released so they can avoid the virus.

Here’s how out of the loop I am: I had no idea Avenatti, Kelly, and Assange were incarcerated. I’m thrilled to see how little I know about such things.

I have to read up on Avenatti. That guy is not to be believed. Is he still posting cocky Tweets? When it comes to denial and lack of remorse, he rivals the pre-conviction Harvey Weinstein. I feel sorry for him. I’m astounded by what he did to his life.

In other news, I’ve escalated my own fight against COVID-19. Having heard that quinine will keep me well, I have committed to having a gin and tonic every day, no matter how difficult it is to choke it down. It’s definitely working. I started two days ago, and I’m as healthy as a horse.

I found a very nice brand of tonic water: Q. I’ll bet Patrick Stewart drinks it. Is there really any quinine in it? Observe my symptom-free status and judge for yourself. That’s science, right there.

I didn’t realize how nice a G&T could be. A good mixer really helps. It makes me want to buy cinchona powder–the source of quinine–and make my own tonic. Summer is coming.

There’s a good chance my resolve will fail when my 4-pack of tonic is gone, but I might want one or two G&T’s later this year.

I believe you would have to buy something like a pound of cinchona bark in order to get a therapeutic quinine dose every day for a couple of weeks. I was curious, and I checked. For malaria, you take 200 mg per day. That adds up to 4 grams of cinchona, so one ounce per week.

Okay, you have to have two or three ounces. Still a lot.

Now that the known rate of COVID-19 here is above one in 3,000, I have to admit I think more (i.e. a little bit) about protecting myself. I think about that with the flu, too. I really hate getting sick. I’ve been pretty bold about running errands. Will I still be this brave if we get up to one in 100? That would probably mean the real rate was more like 10%. The world would be a sea of cooties.

Here’s something I wonder about: what do single people do for food when they get sick? When I had pink eye, I still went to buy groceries, taking what precautions I could. Would I do the same thing if I thought I had coronavirus? Would I have a choice? I guess I could order food. I don’t know if I could eat Domino’s for three weeks. It’s hard enough to eat it once.

I bought two bags of navy beans. I wasn’t afraid stores would run out of food and leave me starving. I was afraid hoarders would buy all the navy beans in existence and that I would not be able to get them again until after the harvest. I don’t know how the bean supply chain works. I really like to have beans with cornbread occasionally.

I guess that with those beans and a canister of oatmeal, I could get through a week of quarantine without crippling constipation. Beans by themselves would be worse than coronavirus. Those things can lodge in your system for days, doing what beans do the whole time.

When the week was up, I would have to poach squirrels, in both senses of the word.

No, I guess I could still use drive-throughs.

I have some .38 Super brass soaking in water and citric acid. I should take them out and work on the press.

If I die, the first one here gets the toilet paper. It’s in the master bath in a cabinet. Sorry it doesn’t have baby ducks printed on it. This is what happens when men do the shopping.

Goodbye, Pandemic; Hello, Needless Recession

The coronavirus news gets better and better, at least as far as the disease itself is concerned. The oppression and totally unnecessary economic destruction are different matters.

The Johns Hopkins site that graphs new cases as they appear shows that the American infection rate is down near the point where it was two weeks ago. That means transmission is decelerating. The epidemic is going away, and it’s happening fast. Some time in May, we should be walking around outdoors again, and toilet paper will be on sale everywhere. We will be using it for landfill.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be without toilet paper for weeks. I’m so grateful. My own supply seems to grow. I had plenty before the lunacy started, and I keep discovering new rolls. Found one in a closet yesterday.

Amazon has had a run on bidet attachments for toilets. Maybe coronavirus will drive Americans to catch up with France and start cleaning their rear ends properly.

When I’m in stores, I force myself to walk by paper towels. It’s actually exciting to see them. I feel drawn to them. But I have all I need, and as long as I’m willing to shop before noon, I can always get more. If I pass them by, people with big families may get a shot.

I don’t want to pick on people, but I’ve seen some desperate, uninformed behavior here. I’ve seen a lot of masks. The only kind of mask that is known to protect people from coronavirus is an N95 or N100 mask. I don’t know much about it, but they’re for people in unusual situations. I read about these masks yesterday. A doctor said they were very uncomfortable and that it’s hard to wear one for more than half an hour or so. You have to push the air in and out, and that wears you out. You also have to fit them properly, which most people would not do even if they had them. And you can’t keep the same one forever. They get contaminated. They’re disposable. Health care workers just came up with an approved way to clean them, and that was out of desperation.

Even good masks don’t catch all the bugs, even if you fit them correctly. That’s interesting. They may catch a significant percentage.

I hate to cite experts, who have been wrong about all the big things, but they say you shouldn’t wear a mask. They don’t think it helps. I guess it will help you not to put virus-laden fingers in your nose and mouth, but were you planning to do that?

When I go out, I see people in bandanas and Home Depot dust respirators, often loosely fitted. They’re not being used like protective gear. They’re being used like charms. “If I wear this, the disease will stay away. And I will win the Florida lottery.”

I’m still waiting to see someone who has poked a hole in a mask for cigarettes. I guarantee you, that person is out there.

People are wearing gloves. How is that supposed to help? You can’t get the virus through your hands. If it gets on a glove, it’s just as easy to transfer to your face as it would be if it were on your bare hand.

Here’s my hat tip to neurosis: I keep a bottle of alcohol in the car. I pour it in my hand when I leave a store, and I rub it over both hands. Then I let it dry. Does it actually do anything? How would I know? If the official numbers are right, I’ve probably never seen a person with coronavirus, let alone been near one. Even if they’re off by a factor of 100, I haven’t been exposed much. But it feels nice to make the effort, and the flu and colds, which are bigger threats, are out there.

I should have been using sanitizer a long time ago, and I was, but I found that it pours out of the bottle when you leave it in a hot car. I never fixed that problem. I gave up.

I wonder what people think when they see me with the car door open, pouring precious alcohol on my hand. Maybe I should draw my gun before I do it. Couple of warning shots might be smart.

I’ve actually considered buying real quinine, which is available on Ebay. How could it hurt? But I suppose if I had the extreme misfortune to develop a serious case of COVID-19, doctors would come up with better treatments than I would. It’s just possible.

What’s going to happen when the total number of active cases drops down near zero? Will our keepers determine that hot weather really does kill coronavirus infections, giving themselves heartburn, because Donald Trump guessed it first? Maybe they’ll tell us to stay indoors because our crazy lockdowns are really what did the trick. It’s important for the powers that be to keep confirming that their bad choices were correct.

China isn’t the only place where saving face leads to doubling down on terrible decisions. Hello…Biden nomination.

No, he’s great. Democrats should rally behind him. Wonderful choice. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

I guess it’s fitting that the Democrats are nominating a man with an underlying condition.

Here’s a prediction: when all is said and done, IF we get a reliable test and IF it’s applied retroactively to samples from people who have died (as it should be), we will find out that many died from something other than COVID-19. I may be wrong. It may be easier to diagnose a fatality than someone who gets well, so maybe coronavirus fatalities have been identified with more certainty. If we test people who got well, I think the overwhelming likelihood is that a lot of coronavirus cases will become flu cases. After all, the Chinese say current tests have a 40-80% false-positive rate.

It will be great when the vaccine becomes available. They used to tell us it would be 18 months. Now one company is shooting for a 2020 release. That would pretty much kill next year’s epidemic, if one begins.

I think I’ll be good this time around. I’ll get the flu shot this year, and when the coronavirus shot becomes available, I’ll get it, too, unless all the doses have been reserved for celebrities.

STILL NO MAJOR CELEBRITY DEATHS. Incredible. Are the Illuminati giving them enchanted gluten-free suppositories?

In lighter news, I used my new, bigger propane cooker last night. I splurged on a choice rib eye instead of the selects they sell at Winn-Dixie for hamburger prices. Splurging was a mistake. It wasn’t any better. The center was just as tough. On the up side, the cap was tender, and the flavor was magnificent. There is nothing like high-temperature butter-frying for steak.

I had to use long tongs because you can’t really get that close to the cooker when it’s working. It will take the hairs right off your hands. I think that means I should use a bigger skillet which will cover more of the flames. Now that I have a proper cooker, I can use a griddle if I want. I can cook for two, in the unlikely event I have a guest.

The butter in the skillet caught fire while I was cooking. That warmed my heart. It told me things were working out.

The rib eye is THE steak. All others are inferior. Unfortunately, Winn-Dixie has been pushing T-bones lately. It’s not a good steak. Sorry, but it’s true.

Filets are good. New York strips are acceptable. A T-bone or porterhouse, which is a filet and strip attached to a bone, is a bad steak for frying. The meat shrinks, the bone doesn’t, and the bone ends up interfering with the pan-to-steak contact. This means no crust. Even if you cook a T-bone by some other means, you still have a very good cut on one side and a lesser cut on the other.

New York strips are wildly overrated. They’re dry and relatively tough. A good one is okay, but it can never compare to a better cut, and bad ones are common.

I’d rather have a good skirt steak than a T-bone or strip.

If the recession goes as expected, good beef will be cheap. I think I paid $7 per pound for prime boneless rib eye during the real estate recession. That was at Costco. I had to buy entire roasts.

Let’s check my Ebay bench grinder poverty index. Yesterday, the search “Baldor bench grinder” came up with 42 used items. Today the total is 44. If my theory is right, the number will increase. Men will be exchanging their tools for signs to hold up beside highways.

But it was worth it. To fight an epidemic which is roughly as deadly as the flu.

It will be interesting to see how the index pans out. Sad, but still interesting.

Common Cocktail in the Crosshairs

If you’re in the state of Florida, I have news you can use. It turns out liquor stores and Dunkin’ Donuts are essential businesses. You may not be able to go to work and feed your family, but you can knock back all the gin you want. There is no shortage. And you can dunk crullers in it.

Speaking of gin, I bought some. I picked Boodle’s. I am just barely a drinker, but coronavirus drove me to the bottle. I kept reading stories about quinine-related medicines which are being used successfully to treat the disease. That got me thinking about quinine, and one thing led to another.

Quinine is an essential ingredient in tonic water, which is used to make gin and tonics.

For those who don’t know, here is the history of the gin and tonic, as I recall it from listening to unreliable gossip. The British conquered most of the world so they could do helpful things like growing opium in India and forcing China to let them sell it to addicts. A lot of the places the British conquered had mosquitoes and malaria. Quinine kills the malaria parasite, so British occupiers had to take it regularly. It tasted disgusting by itself, but some clever person–this is not a surprise, considering the fact that we’re talking about the British–decided to combine it with strong drink. Eventually, the concoction morphed into the concoction known as the gin and tonic, which Americans perfected by adding ice.

Some claim the gin was added to kill bacteria in third-world drinking water, but come on. We weren’t born yesterday.

Will tonic water give you a good dose of quinine that might help you avoid coronavirus? Yes. If you drink two liters a day. That’s what I read, anyway. Modern tonic water generally contains very little quinine. Two liters of gin and tonic per day may be business as usual for a British soldier, but it would be hard on most people.

I read that there are snobby brands of tonic water that contain a lot more quinine than, say, Canada Dry. Maybe you could get by with a pint a day. You’re not driving to work anyway, so why not?

I didn’t mean that.

Funny thing: tonic water seems to be disappearing from shelves. I went to the store yesterday and today. Yesterday, I could get anything I wanted. Today I couldn’t find the snobby stuff. I wanted to see what it was like. I’ve tried it before, but I forgot how it tasted.

There is a theory that quinine softens berserk immune responses like the one that kills coronavirus fatalities. Is it true? How would I know? Interesting, though.

In related news, locals are now hoarding inexpensive sugar. There must be a story out there that says it cures coronavirus. My local groceries are running out of store-brand sugar, but the expensive stuff, which is exactly the same, is still there.

Maybe the bag itself is the cure.

I got myself a new propane cooker. I had to order it because people hoarded them. Someone explain that. I bought a wimpy one a while back, and it had to be coaxed to do an acceptable job of frying steaks in butter. When I realized it was always going to be a challenge to use it, I decided to get a bigger one, but by then, half of the county had decided that propane cookers were the answer to respiratory disease.

The first one put out something like 50,000 BTU’s, if memory serves. The new one is over 200,000, I think. Anyway, it really pumps out the heat. Perfect steak, here I come.

I ordered it from Home Depot, and they shipped it to the store. Today I got a text telling me to get curbside service. I drove to Home Depot, and a guy in the wrong kind of mask came out and lobbed it into my hatch. On the sidewalk in front of the store, people were standing in line on marks six feet apart. They had to wait for the doorman to let them in. That was new. It used to be easier to get into Studio 54.

The epidemic appears to be dying out, so I hope the weirdness subsides soon. In the meantime, coronavirus has made shopping at Home Depot much easier. You sit in your car and make them do the work. It’s hard not to like that.

Guess I’ll have a steak and a G&T. Life could be worse.