My Normal Life

My wife and I have to sleep in separate rooms due to her pregnancy and a painting project.

This morning she woke up and came and found me in the master bedroom, wearing earmuffs and fluffy shearling slippers, staring out through the sliding glass doors, holding a loaded semiautomatic rifle with a scope.

Her first question: “How did you sleep?”

This is the difference between red state marriage and blue state marriage.

Here, only the rodents are squirrely.

I am very seriously considering buying a propane deep fryer for the back porch.

Taste 9; Aerodynamics 1

Hope everyone is having a great Thanksgiving. God has been kinder to us than I can say.

Our Thanksgiving has been marred by my wife’s admission that she is not crazy about boneless turkey. We had a talk about it, and I said I would make turkey the regular inferior way, and I even offered to make prime rib, but she wants to go boneless again, so that’s what we’re doing.

I told her turkey is mandatory on Thanksgiving, even for people who don’t like it. This is one of the rules of living in America. It’s like America’s Passover lamb. But I wanted her to enjoy what she ate.

I asked what Zambians ate on Christmas, and she said chicken with rice. I told her she should go ahead and fix it this year. She was not interested at all. Prime rib, baby. Flavor wins out over nostalgia.

Most people who don’t like turkey have eaten turkey by people who don’t cook well. Regarding my own creations, I will not lie. My turkeys are generally spectacular. They’re tender and juicy, and they are packed full of cornbread stuffing laced with champagne.

We got lucky and found a small turkey this time. Misguided turkey fryers usually snap them up, and everyone else ends up with a bird weighing at least 15 pounds. They’re harder to prepare. They take ages to thaw and cook. Only a big family can finish one before it goes bad.

Remember all those times when your mom or wife said, “It’s not done yet. Maybe another hour”, and you ended up eating at 8 p.m.? That’s because Americans buy turkeys that are too big.

Our bird was 11 pounds before I removed its bones. Nice.

I made the usual cornbread-and-sausage stuffing. I am not making extra to go on the side. It’s all in the bird.

We’re taking it easy this year. No pumpkin pie. It’s a loser desert. Nothing green. Turkey, stuffing, potatoes, yams, fresh rolls, cranberry relish, and pecan pie with a little bourbon in it. Korbel brut, remaining from preparing the turkey, stuffing, and gravy. Good enough.

Not sure what the wife will drink.

I used Woodford Reserve bourbon in the pie. It’s pricey. I got it a few years ago because I was told that if I liked Knob Creek, I would like Woodford Reserve.

I found Woodford Reserve harsh. I don’t like it at all. When you buy expensive booze, you’re paying for complexity and smoothness. Without the smoothness, it might as well be Old Crow.

Maybe it’s better if you put water in it. Anyway, I use it for flavoring food now. Usually, I use Jack Daniel’s, which is also harsh, but I need to get rid of the Woodford Reserve.

I used raspberry Jell-O in the relish. Really nice. I hope it comes out nice and firm. It was too loose last year. This time, I omitted half of the water from the Jell-O.

I’m cooking the turkey at 250° so it will be tender and juicy. I plan to yank it when the stuffing hits 157°. The USDA recommends 165°, but they’re also way off the mark with steak and pork. Fricking lawyers. Any parasite that can survive 145° in a pork roast has earned the right to give me trichinosis.

Didn’t hurt RKF. All that much.

The web says the USDA now recommends 145° for pork. I believe that’s new. I’m pretty sure they used to recommend 155° or 165°, which are temperatures guaranteed to kill the flavor.

I see sources recommending 140° for turkey, so I may go lower than 157°. I saw a chart that lists temperatures and the times it takes salmonella to die. At 145°, salmonella dies in 13.8 minutes. I can pretty much guarantee that if my turkey hits 145°, there will be no way to get it to the table before 13.8 minutes pass. More like 25, I would think.

Have a wonderful dinner, and be sure to lock out the relatives who ruin it every year. I sincerely hope everyone who shows up at your table either loves Trump or is willing to shut up for a few hours.

This is Exactly What’s Supposed to Happen

So why are so many Democrats telling other Democrats to abandon and avoid their conservative and Christian friends and relatives? Many Americans seem to think this is a bad thing, but it’s not. Not for Christians, at least.

It’s a very interesting thing from a supernatural standpoint. It’s part of Satan’s counterfeiting operation.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural. Every good thing has a dark reflection. And Satan is not smart enough or powerful enough to come up with anything original. He copies God, and you know what they say about the sincerest form of flattery.

In aping God, he glorifies him. There is no way to avoid it.

A long time ago, God showed me that the fundamental activity taking place on Earth and in the heavens is a genocidal war. There are factions, and they want to annihilate each other.

There are people who belong to God, and then there are people who belong to Satan. They make up an overwhelming majority of human beings. They always have.

God is in the reproduction business. He created the world so he could have children and increase the size of his loving family. It sounds like a platitude, but love really is the best thing there is, and it’s the reason we and everything around us exist. God created humanity so we could come to know him and go to be with him in a perfect environment of love and peace. Without human beings, the world serves no purpose. Satan, on the other hand, wants to get rid of everyone who knows God.

You can see the genocidal spirit at work in Genesis. Adam and Eve had two sons. One was holy, and the other was worthless. The worthless one murdered the holy one, not just because he was angry, but because he wanted to prevent his descendants–his nation–from existing.

In Genesis 4:10, God told Cain, “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” Even leftist Google AI admits that the Hebrew word translated “blood” is plural, indicating God was not just referring to Abel, but also the descendants he would have had if Cain had not murdered him. Cain committed genocide.

When God flooded the world, he committed genocide. Of course, what he did was completely correct. He’s God. Genocide itself is not evil. It depends on the motivation.

Haman tried to commit genocide. So did the powerful Jews who imprisoned and murdered Messianic Jews after the crucifixion. Paul committed genocide before he repented and accepted Yeshua as God.

What is the purpose of all this? Ultimately, it’s separation. God has prepared places for his children in heaven, and we will go there eventually. Everything will be perfect. There will be no Antifa and BLM riots. There will be no pogroms. There will be no Islam. There will be no pride marches or sexual perversion. Crime and hatred won’t exist.

It isn’t possible for God’s children to live in a realm of pure blessing while Satan’s children are among them. They have to be taken away from us permanently. It’s not enough for them to be subdued. Just being around them would ruin heaven for us.

Just being around them is rough on us right here on Earth. They torment and tempt us. Their women parade around in lewd outfits, and they fill the world with lewd entertainment. They say filthy things which do harm when we hear them. They insult God.

They also murder us all the time, although the press ignores it. They steal what God gives us. They imprison us. They keep us from getting jobs. But even if they didn’t do those things, we are harmed just by seeing and hearing them. We are like Lot, who was vexed continually by the behavior of the cruel, arrogant perverts around him.

One of the worst curses in the Bible is to have your name and memory forgotten. This is the curse Orthodox Jews speak to Yeshua every day. They call him “Yeshu,” which is an initialism for, “May his name and memory be blotted out.”

As Abel represented his nation, Yeshua represents us. To blot out the name and memory of Yeshua, our enemies will have to blot out our names and memories, too. Genocide.

I’m not saying Orthodox Jews sit around plotting to kill off gentiles. That isn’t true. But the ones who curse Yeshua are also cursing us, even if they don’t realize it. You can’t curse a man with erasure without cursing his children. Satan put them up to it, because he fully understands what the curse means.

He also wants to kill the Jews off. This is why Muslims are constantly trying to remove every Jew from the earth.

My wife and I pray every day, and one of the things we pray for is that God would show us the worthless people and spirits around us and remove them from our lives permanently. We know we need to have our exposure to them limited. It’s bad for us. It will be bad for our son. It makes life unpleasant. It puts us in danger.

This prayer comes from God. It’s correct. It’s necessary. But if you look at it objectively, you can’t help but realize we are doing something very much like what Satan’s children are doing.

“Don’t have Thanksgiving dinner with your conservative relatives.” “Cut them off.” “Don’t talk to them.” The separation movement on the leftist side comes from Satan. It’s a dark reflection of the prayers God’s children pray, asking God to remove the wicked from among them.

Symmetry.

Satan hates leftists even though they do his work for him, and like God, he wants to take his own children to be with him, but unlike God, he wants to take them to a place where they will exist in perfect, eternal torment. Our very presence hinders him, just as the presence of the godless harms us.

The people on Tiktok and Twitter who order other people to cut off conservatives are doing something like prophecy. In prophecy, the Holy Spirit speaks through people who yield to him. The people telling others to cut conservatives off are yielding to dirty, stinking spirits who speak through them.

What about censorship? It’s the same basic thing. If you’re Satan, you are completely right when you say the words of people who belong to God are harmful to your movement. Our words pull people away. They expose the plan. They show how right and how good God is. Our words threaten Satan’s kingdom, so our existence threatens it.

This is why leftists keep saying our words are violence, while claiming burning cities and rioting are expression.

Our words probably cause evil spirits a great deal of pain and fear. I sure hope so.

There is nothing wrong with separating yourself from useless people. It’s the correct thing to do. Yeshua did it. He showed up, demonstrated God’s power and goodness, accepted whoever listened, and left the rest behind. Quickly. He didn’t allow himself to be manipulated into becoming an enabler. He didn’t spend his life begging and bribing and compromising.

A Christian is required to be the head and not the tail. When you show God to people and offer to help them get to know him, you’re leading. When you start compromising to get them to pretend to convert, you are a follower.

Yeshua sat among drunks. He didn’t do shots or play drinking games with them. He showed them a way out, and then he moved on. This is how we should behave. Instead we have churches telling everyone sodomy is wonderful and excoriating people who quote God’s word to them.

“It’s worth it if just one person is saved.” This is a lie. If you don’t repent, you’re not saved. We don’t have the authority to lower God’s standards.

People are getting so crazy now, they’re like hollowed-out puppets. Demons come in, and at first they persuade and push. Eventually, there isn’t much left of the person they targeted, and he becomes a skin full of demons. When you watch the nuts screaming and shrieking about their terror of Trump and conservatives, you’re listening to demons, not people. You’re listening to projection. The demons are describing the torment they want to inflict on Christians and Jews.

We should expect things to get worse. Separation will increase. Violence against us will increase. People who talk of healing and unity are virtue-signaling for Satan. “How can you be against peace and unity?”

Satan loves to do this. He positions himself as the god of love, and if you respond in righteousness, he tells people you’re a heartless Nazi. You’re the problem.

The accusers are full of hate, not love, and they promote a false peace.

Appeasers always get false peace, and it never lasts.

Yeshua said this:

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.

He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.

He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me.

If you read that and then watch the Tiktok mental cases, you will understand what Satan is doing through them.

To some extent, I agree with them. If you have to decorate your house with condoms and paint your turkey pink to mollify your enraged and deranged son, have Thanksgiving dinner without him. If your vegan daughter tells you the sight of a turkey will make her vomit, tell her to eat with friends. Don’t make a fake turkey from tofu. Don’t be a follower. You are supposed to be the light of the world, for others to follow.

Satan rules his children, and he also rules Christians who let his children manipulate them. Do you want to serve Satan? Eventually, you will give up so much territory, you won’t have any left.

Yeshua says he will replace the people we lose to Satan because of him. No one wants to lose a loved one, but it’s not your place, and it’s not within your power, to decide who will be saved.

I will consider it a major defeat if I ever deal with my sister again. I have dropped a lot of people without warning. I wish we could all live in harmony, but they chose the wrong way, and I chose the right way. I can’t abandon that which is right in order to coddle and humor people who do harm to my family and me.

Now you know why the holidays will be so chaotic this year and why silly, embarrassing celebrities are, for the first time, backing up their boasts and leaving America. I wish they would all go. I pray for the destruction of their industries every day.

Rob Reiner just checked into a mental hospital. His demons can’t stand seeing Satan lose a presidential election.

The other day God told me bad people pursue and insist on living with good people, but good people flee from bad people. Something to keep in mind. If God delivers you from a vexatious person, and you decide you know better, and you take him back, don’t expect God to save you a second time.

I Thought Your Son was a Lady

I am now trying to make bagels for the second time. I started out with the King Arthur Baking recipe, and it had obvious flaws, like using at least 6 times as much yeast as any experienced baker would put in bread. It also had a hydration of 63%, which is far from the 55-58% recommended by other references. At 63%, you’re close to pizza territory, and pizza is nothing like a bagel. Pizza is softer and has big air holes.

I am now working with a 55% dough. I added more malt, I think. I was interrupted by a phone call, but I’m pretty sure I increased the malt by a third.

The dough is pretty hard. It’s so dry, it doesn’t stick to my fingers at all.

I decided to look at some videos featuring people who, unlike the King Arthur company, make bagels for a living. I was suspicious of King Arthur’s rising, resting, and shaping instructions.

King Arthur says to knead, proof for an hour and a half, cut in pieces, form bagel-weight balls, and let them rise for another 30 minutes. It says you then stick your finger in each ball and twirl the ball until you get a 1-1/2″ hole.

If you do this, you’re handling the dough a lot, beating it up, and you’re making it hard to get a nice shape.

The first rise will make the dough lumpy and soft, and when you try to form a ball, you get a ball that wants to bounce back and be lumpy again. If you try to twirl it later, it will stretch irregularly, give you a bagel which is thicker in some places than others. It seems like a stupid idea.

I decided to forget all that work. I took the dough from the Cuisinart and made three balls. I’m letting them rise for around an hour and 50 minutes. Then I plan to put holes in them and stretch them out. I may take one ball, roll it into a stick, and fasten the ends together to make a ring.

The professionals I watched didn’t do a lot of crazy steps. It generally goes like this: knead, rest a short time, cut and form into bagels.

Youtube shows New York bakers taking long strips of dough, wrapping them around their hands so the ends overlap, and rolling them until the ends merge, forming rings. There are also machines that turn dough into rings, though.

Baking is full of superstition and witchcraft. Face west when you add the yeast. Stand on one foot when you knead the dough. Use kosher salt, which is exactly the same thing as gentile salt. The problem is that most bakers will not challenge the useless fake wisdom. If a step worked for their grandparents, it must be necessary.

I like to weed out the nonsense. For example, I don’t really knead dough. I throw it in a Cuisinart with a chopping blade, and in 30-60 seconds, it’s perfect. There are still people out there claiming you have to break your back kneading dough for 10 minutes with your hands. It makes it taste like love! No, it doesn’t. You can’t taste love.

Most bakery bread is baked by illegal aliens who just got off the boat. Do you think they’re thinking about love when they do as they’re told? No, they’re thinking about ICE and vans with no windows.

I’m not sure 55% will work. I may move up to 58% next time. I’m sure 63% will not work, because it doesn’t work for me, and it looks like no one but King Arthur recommends it.

My first bagel batch was full of lumps and tears. I believe this next batch will be smooth and regular, like real bagels.

I’m using baking soda and salt in the water bath, and I’m not going to boil the bagels for three minutes this time.

I’m using high-gluten flour. Seems like an obvious choice.

The web says King Arthur makes a high-gluten flour called Sir Lancelot. You mix it with your other ingredients, turn your mixer on, swing on a chandelier, and kick the bride in the chest.

I don’t know why King Arthur didn’t recommend Sir Lancelot in its recipes, but this could go back to my theory that the people who write their recipes are not very good. They should call their bagels “bitter yeast rings.”

I don’t know if these new bagels will be better than the previous ones, but they can’t be much worse.

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The dough rose nicely, and it is surprisingly soft for 55% hydration. It was very relaxed when I took it out of the oven, where it was rising.

I was going to try to shape the bagels the easy way, poking holes in the balls of dough and opening the holes up. But I decided to try doing what the pros do. I rolled the bagels by hand. It turned out to be much easier than I expected.

You take a doughball, mash it into a flat, long shape, like a rectangle, and then you roll the dough up, starting at one short side. Then you use your hands to roll and stretch it into a stick around 10″ long. After that, you put the ends in your palm, overlapping. You roll the dough back and forward to mash the ends together. You will get a fairly uniform ring of dough around your fingers. It will look a lot like a real bagel that was not made by a machine.

I’ll post a helpful video.

I’m letting the bagels relax a bit before I boil them.

They seem a little small. They weigh around 126 grams each, which should make fairly big bagels.

I believe the rolling is important because it will get rid of the big holes inside the dough. A bagel is supposed to be dense. I didn’t try to make them too perfect, because real bagels don’t look like perfect little O-rings.

Hoping for the best.

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The bagels are cooling.

They look pretty much like bagels, although I did not do an adequate job of joining the ends on one stick of dough.

They’re too dark, at least for me. I should not have listened to people who said to bake at 450 or 500. I started these at 450, and within about 8 minutes, they were dark enough to take out. I had to leave them in so the insides cooked. I dropped the temperature to 400, and they still cooked too fast, so I went down to 350.

Apparently, there are a lot of people who like dark bagels, because a lot of recipes specify high temperatures. Next time, I’m going to try 400.

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I tried a bagel.

It looks like a bagel, and it has a pretty good crust on it. Problems:

1. The crust is too dark. The baking instructions I found on the web can’t be right. The temperature is wrong.

2. The crust should be harder and chewier.

3. The crust doesn’t have the sweet taste bagel crusts should have. It’s more like a baguette. The recipes I looked up must not use enough malt powder for boiling.

4. The holes in the crumb are way too big, like a pizza. I believe I let the dough rise too long and this caused the problem, even though I used much less yeast than King Arthur’s bakers recommend. If I had used the amount they suggest, the bagels would look like balloons.

The plan:

1. Reduce the temperature to 400 next time.

2. Double the malt powder in the dough.

3. Add enough malt powder to the boil to make it a lot sweeter.

4. Boil the bagels for two minutes per side, not one.

5. Decrease the rise time.

This ought to get me closer.

“King Arthur Baking” or “King Arthur Faking”?

Back in ’09, I complained about a recipe for doughnuts. I was on the mailing list for the King Arthur flour company, and they sent a recipe for no-fry doughnuts. I wrote a post saying how mortified I was. Not the most serious post ever.

Of course, you can probably make a decent doughnut without frying it, but I don’t know why you would, since fried doughnuts are the stuff of legend. Krispy Kreme fries. What else do you need to know?

My mother loved Farm Store cake doughnuts, and I thought they were okay, too, but come on. Fried is FRIED.

Maybe they were fried, now that I think about it. I just assumed they were baked.

A guy claiming to work for King Arthur Baking somehow found my blog and wrote this in a comment:

“Dumbest junk email” – WOW, far as I know we’ve never been characterized that way before. A first! Thanks, Steve. As for baked doughnuts – to each his own, huh? Not my favorite, but actually many, many customers love them, so, what the heck? To each his own. Thanks for the mention. You know what they say, even bad PR is PR… PJ _____, King Arthur Flour baker/blogger

For me, this was one of the weirder moments in a long history of blogging.

It just occurred to me: maybe he wrote the doughnut recipe.

I don’t know if King Arthur still has his Internet knights out there Googling and defending the realm, but if he does, I will probably hear from them again. Here goes.

It is not easy to get good bagels where I live. The best grocery here is Publix. Their bakery’s bagels are acceptable, which means good enough to be considered bagels and eaten when nothing else is on hand. Every store has a little box full of bagels from the Einstein Bros. chain, and they’re fine, but as I said, the box is little, and if you don’t get there early, you can forget about getting a plain bagel, which is the only kind of bagel Publix stocks that works with cream cheese and Nova.

I think the old Jews who live around here rush to the stores every morning and clean them out.

It’s a good theory. They keep leaving the blueberry and raisin bagels. The sweet ones. Old Jews get diabetes.

There is a bagel joint in town, and they serve real bagels. It’s a long drive, though. By the way, they don’t serve smoked fish. Bagels, but no lox. No Nova. I’m serious. What is wrong with them? Salmon is the reason bagels were invented. Or it should be.

Yesterday I got fed up and decided to find out how hard it was to make a bagel. I remembered something about having to boil them, and it sounded like a hassle, but I had been pushed to the brink of sanity.

I made the mistake of going to the King Arthur site, because its recipe came up in search results.

King Arthur makes hugely-hyped flour. Is it really better than everyone else’s flour? Take a deep breath. Ready? I don’t think so. I buy their bread flour often, but the truth is that it doesn’t seem to be anything special. Sometimes I buy Pillsbury or Gold Medal or whatever that brand is that’s above King Arthur and the left at my local Publix stores. Everything comes out fine.

Back when I was making large numbers of pizzas and garlic rolls for a church that enjoyed using my free labor, I tried just about every flour you can name. Caputo 00. Bouncer. Golden Tiger. Gordon Food Service Primo Gusto. All Trumps. I can’t recall them all. I tried King Arthur bread flour, known affectionately to pizzaiolos as “KABF.”

My favorite flour was Primo Gusto, a cheap store brand. Naturally, the last time I went to Gordon Food Service, they didn’t have it. Maybe they discontinued it. This happens every time I find a product I like. It even happens with vaccines. I took the Johnson & Johnson clot shot, and now it’s restricted.

Actifed? Gone. Sudafed? Gone, unless I want to sign a government list when I buy it. My favorite tennis shoes? Gone. Wait…there must be some other things…

Okay, maybe not everything gets discontinued, but sometimes it feels like it.

Primo Gusto is a high-gluten flour, and KABF is, of course, bread flour. Whether one has more or less gluten than the other, I can’t say without Googling, and I am too lazy, but high-gluten flours, as a group, are supposed to be a bit more gluteny than bread flours.

Gluten makes bread chewy and crusty. I like high-gluten flour in pizza. Primo Gusto is a high-gluten flour.

To get back to the point, I never got results that made me think King Arthur was a big deal.

I remember trying a pizza dough recipe they suggested. It had baking powder in it for extra oven spring. It did not impress.

Later I learned that you don’t put baking powder in pizza dough to make it rise higher in the oven. You use the proper hydration (67% will work), you use the right temperature, and when you set your dough out to proof, you stretch the ball and fold it inward a few times to make the outer surface taut. This works.

Why didn’t the people at King Arthur know this? Amateurs on a pizza forum did.

I tried their bagel recipe, using their flour, and the bagels sort of flattened out in the oven. Inside, they were maybe 20% more like bagels than, say, Kaiser rolls. To me, they were not bagels.

Before their web knights errant show up to challenge me to jousts, let me say that I lived in Miami and New York, so yes, I know what a bagel should be.

King Arthur’s site is full of good reviews. Their bagel recipe has a 4.5-star rating and 343 reviews. A mystery.

Guess where I went to find out what was wrong? A pizza forum. The guys on the forum may not be paid professionals (for the most part), but they are very serious, they put in the oven time, and they post their results. One of them went on to open a blockbuster pizzeria in Atlanta.

Some of these guys have huge pro ovens in their homes.

I did not go to Serious Eats to see what Kenji Lopez-Alt had to say. He went to the pizza forum to find out how to make pizza, and he still got it wrong. His restaurant gets middling reviews. I got a good Caesar dressing recipe from his site, and I think there is some good stuff there, but I trust the pizza guys more.

A bagel isn’t a pizza, but a person who will make dozens of pizzas every year to get his recipe just right will also put in the effort to get bagels right.

Here’s my tentative conclusion: King Arthur got the hydration wrong, along with some other things.

First, I think they use the wrong flour. Maybe they don’t make a high-gluten flour. That might explain it. The purpose of their site is not to help you make good food. They don’t care about that. The site’s purpose is to sell flour. I believe any crusty, tough bread should be made with high-gluten flour.

Second, they call for 63% hydration. NOBODY puts that much water in a bagel. Water makes bread soft. Obviously.

I have read that factories that make really bad bagels (Thomas’, Lender’s, et alia) use high hydration. I forget why. Maybe to prevent old customers from losing their dentures in front of other people and suing them. Lawyers ruin everything.

I seem to recall reading that it’s because proper bagel dough is hard for factories to work with. It’s stiff.

Third, the bagels don’t taste like bagels, so I think the dough and water bath ingredients are wrong.

A guy on the pizza forum has a recipe that gets high marks, so I am changing the King Arthur recipe to be closer to it. He puts baking soda and salt in his water bath. That seems smart to me, because the outside of a bagel should taste a little different from the inside.

King Arthur says to put white sugar in the water bath along with malt syrup. I think this is wrong. The forum guy doesn’t use sugar, and why would he? It would reduce the malt flavor.

Fourth, and this is insane, King Arthur calls for a TABLESPOON of yeast in 400 grams of flour. That’s three teaspoons. If you listen to them, all you will taste will be bitter yeast. NOBODY puts that much yeast in dough. I have a recipe that uses about 400 grams of flour, and it calls for ONE SIXTH of a tablespoon. Less would be better, but I don’t want to wait a year for dough to rise.

The yeast thing is a rookie mistake. It’s not a matter of preference. It’s not a case of “Reasonable minds may differ.” It’s like putting pepper on Cap’n Crunch.

I will admit that I did not pay any attention to this recommendation when I made “bagels.” I knew it was crazy. I thought maybe it was a typo.

So what about the great reviews on the site?

Here’s something I have to keep telling myself over and over: most people have no idea what good food tastes like. They can tell what other people say tastes good, and they get in line and agree, but only a small percentage of people can tell good food from mediocre or bad food. That does not prevent them from putting in their less-than-two-cents’ worth.

You can’t listen to professional cooks, either.

As I have said before, even most trained cooks…can’t. How many bad restaurant meals have you had? Hundreds or thousands. How many were made by cooking school graduates? A big percentage.

Back when I was a churchgoer, I knew three trained chefs and one Jamaican guy who was self-taught. The trained chefs were what I would call “airline-grade” cooks, but the Jamaican guy’s food was dazzling. The trained chefs asked me for tips, and I have no training at all.

Back in Miami, there is a guy who calls himself Zak the Baker. He started supplying baked goods for Whole Foods, which used to have very, very nice stuff. They sold excellent croissants, pain au chocolate, Danish rolls, and so on. Whole Foods publicized Zak’s name to impress people.

I strolled in after Zak came along, thinking he had to be wonderful if Whole Foods was telling people he made their food, and that was the last time I ever bought their baked goods. They were baked no-goods. Worthless. Flavorless.

Zak promotes himself. He uses his first name as a trademark. When it’s mentioned, it’s supposed to impress. Whatever. The food was not good, and I quit buying it.

You can’t trust a cook’s reputation, especially when he’s a self-promoter.

I went to two Mario Batali restaurants: Lupa and Mozza. Both were awful. I went to Marco Pierre White’s restaurant in Dublin. The food was borderline gross. Incompetently prepared. Stale.

I’ll bet White can’t cook. Michelin stars? Don’t care. Things can be bought. Corruption is real. And maybe Michelin critics aren’t that good at what they do.

How much does a Michelin spy get paid? How much does money does a chef make from a star? Things to think about.

I went to Pride and Joy, a barbecue restaurant that belonged to Myron Mixon, reality TV’s barbecue king. It was just plain bad. He himself ended up distancing himself from it, after laying down a line of smack he later had to eat.

Better the smack than the food.

I don’t understand Zak. If you have time to build a huge business and promote your name, don’t you have time to learn how to cook?

Today I’m making some bagels with 55% hydration, along with some other changes, and whether they’re good or not, they will surely be better than King Arthur’s unholy toroids.

I will eventually get this right, just like I got white bread right. I taught my wife how to make white bread, and now we always have the finest white bread on God’s green Earth, for maybe a dollar a loaf. This bread makes the angels jealous. One day soon, we will have delicious bagels to set beside it.

Fries WILL be Great Again

RFK Jr. is about to become the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, a department which sounds leftist when you say its name. What conservative would use the phrase “human services”? It’s idiotic. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s too broad. I’m a human. When I hire someone to look at my AC system, it must be a human service. But HHS doesn’t send out air conditioner repairmen.

We had better department names when we had fewer departments. The Department of Defense was the Department of War. No apologies. Truthful. Trumpish.

Let’s Google.

HHS, which is called “HHS,” even though the DOJ is called “the DOJ,” was put together in 1939. Already, it makes sense to me. A socialist put it together.

It was originally called the Federal Security Agency, which is a pretty good piece of leftist PR for its day. “We just want you to be secure and know there are no monsters under your bed.” It was supposed to be in charge of Social Security, health, and education. They must have rejected “the Department of Intrusiveness.”

The guy who ran the department was a man named McNutt. That’s too easy. Before leading the Department of Buttinskyism, he was the governor of Indiana and burdened the citizens with the state’s first income tax.

Perfect.

Eventually, the government felt that the jobs of using Social Security and centrally-planned education were so important, they should be given to separate organizations with independent armies of stooges, so we ended up with the Social Security Administation and the Department of Indoctrination. I mean Education.

HHS includes the CDC, NIH, and FDA.

That’s all I need to know. Let’s disband it.

Okay, okay. We do need someone to keep really awful drugs off the market. I mean, if we didn’t have a government agency doing that, some company might put out untested vaccines that cause blood clots and myocarditis, leading to an epidemic of excess deaths among young people, which the government’s unofficial department, the MSM, would have to tell us did not exist.

All right. All right. We do need the FDA. I think. Even though it keeps Americans from receiving excellent medications used everywhere else in the world. Look up Rowachol. I got covid recently, and the pharmacist in Rome gave me two well-regarded drugs, neither of which had I ever heard of. Thanks to the FDA.

Anyway, the FDA is out of control. It lets lobbyists tell us what to eat. It gave us the Food Pyramid, which was originally known as the Iowa/Nebraska Joint Pro-Diabetes Pyramid. The Pyramid told us to stuff ourselves with all sorts of carbohydrates which rotted our teeth, strangled our pancreases, filled our arteries with placques, gave us high blood pressure, and made us one of the fattest nations outside of Polynesia.

Carbohydrates are the single biggest killer in the US. Think about that.

Here is the Pyramid.

It says to eat 6-11 servings of carbohydrates per day. I overeat, I love food, and I can’t manage that. I can’t even picture the people who do. They must make Jabba the Hutt look like Olive Oyl. All by itself, their gas must have raised sea levels an inch.

Rice and pasta, it says. Bread. Know what you’re eating when you eat those things? Glucose. A sugar so bad for you it’s used as the standard for the glycemic index, a metric which tells you how much damage your food is doing to your body. You chew your bread, mixing it with an enzyme in spit that converts starch into glucose, and before long, excess glucose is pouring into your veins, threatening your eyesight, your circulatory system, your brain, your nerves, and your chances of marrying anyone remotely attractive.

The weird thing about this is that you don’t need carbohydrates at all. We all love them, but you can go your entire life and be extremely healthy without carbs in your diet. Can’t do that with fat and protein.

The Pyramid discourages consumption of meat. I guess the pork and beef lobbyists had a lower budget for hookers and trips.

Meat is harmless. It’s great for you. Plant-based foods cause diabetes, tooth decay, obesity, and high blood pressure. It’s pretty much impossible to have those things without eating plants, and the fewer carbs you eat, the less likely you are to have these issues. Meat simply can’t cause them.

The FDA used to tell us to get 25 grams of fiber every day. Have you ever tried to do that? That’s 6 bowls of raisin bran. You would literally wear out your toilet seat. You would go through life clearing elevators and subway cars.

The government has no business managing our diets. The government is corrupt and stupid. It tells us what lobbyists and leftist freaks tell us to. And nutrition is not properly part of the government’s business. What’s next? Compulsory calisthenics?

Guard the borders. Fight our enemies. Protect business. Run the courts and prisons. The government should do these things. Where does it get off telling us what to put on our dinner tables?

All this being said, RFK is kind of a nut. He seems like he would be a great guy to hang around with, but come on. He eats roadkill. He thinks vaccines cause autism, a theory which is right up there with Pizzagate.

Not taking vaccines causes things like polio, diphtheria, smallpox, and rubella. This is proven.

I don’t know whether he’ll be good or bad for us, but it would be nice to hear less propaganda from HHS, and it would be good if Americans could buy the same drugs that save lives in Europe.

He hates seed oils. I don’t know whether he’s right or not. He loves animal fat, and there, I am with him.

He said something wonderful. He reminded America that McDonald’s used to fry potatoes in beef tallow. They quit in the Nineties. Bad research and the FDA convinced American women animal fat and eggs were bad, which they are not, and women have strong voices when it comes to food purchasing. All sorts of companies started cutting out animal fat. Oreos abandoned delicious lard. We even have skinny pigs now. You can’t make much gravy from a country ham these days.

Women are much more gluttonous than men, and they drive the chip and ice cream industries, but they do more than anyone to deprive the rest of us.

Beef-fat fries are magnificent. I’ve made them. They smell like prime rib. A beef-fat fry is Jane Russell. A canola fry is Elizabeth Warren.

I wonder if he’ll be able to bring beef-fat fries back in some major restaurants. Maybe he can make them trendy. That would be a dream come true.

Potatoes are practically poisonous, but there is no denying their impact on cuisine. They taste wonderful. Fried. Mashed. Baked. Boiled. You name it. Beef fat makes ingesting an inherently unhealthy vegetable worth it.

People say potatoes are actually healthy. They have vitamin C! They’re low in fat! Whatever. Try one without salt and added fat and then return to the discussion. Worthless. Prison food.

I always feel bad after eating potatoes, but they’re too good to give up.

Even if the FDA were right about everything, I would still want it to shut up about our diets. It’s outside the government’s lane.

Getting back to RFK, I don’t think vaccines cause autism. Demons cause autism, and if autism has increased, it’s because America has turned into Sodom. We invite demons to rule us now. They cause disease, mental illness, and other misfortunes. Unfortunately, the FDA will never admit demons exist.

Regardless of what Roadkill Robert says, I plan to take every well-tested vaccine I can get, except for those made with mRNA. That stuff is horrifying. My son is going to be vaccinated, and he will live under the same policy. I don’t want him dying needlessly of some ridiculous 1900’s disease like tetanus or whooping cough.

My son will never be vaccinated for covid.

Covid vaccine : young person :: birth control pills : Caitlyn Jenner.

Trump needs to put a libertarian in charge of the Department of Education. A real Ron Swanson, unlike cookie-cutter kneejerk liberal Nick Offerman, who played him. We need someone who will destroy the department from the inside. The suggestion that states can’t run schools is asinine and insulting. I could run a school. Nearly any educated adult could.

The business of education requires a very low level of competence. You know it’s true. Remember your teachers?

I had one who told us there were 52 states.

I hope RFK succeeds in doing good things and is restrained when he tries to implement ideas he heard from Alex Jones. All in all, I prefer him to anyone Harris would have appointed, sight unseen.

Burning Stuff Shouldn’t be This Hard

I got up today with the intention of getting myself a burn permit. I must have 20 tons of tree parts already in piles.

Figured I was prepared. I had my customer number for the forestry people. I knew I had to call before noon. The weather was okay.

Called with plenty of time left. I thought. They told me I had to call by 10 a.m.

Now what do I do with the day?

It seems like they used to give permits more easily. I used to call in the morning and sail right through. Then they said I had to call by noon. They said I had to take a class and get a special status in order to be able to burn under certain conditions. Now I have to call by 10 a.m.

I miss the days before I knew about permits. I went outside, set the pile on fire, and that was that. I never got caught, even when I accidentally set my pasture on fire.

It’s too bad downed oaks are worthless, because God has blessed me with thousands of oaks. They’re useless for lumber and furniture. They make fine firewood and smoker fuel, but the supply is so great, no one wants them.

The types of oak I have rot pretty fast outdoors, so even though they would make very strong posts and boards, they wouldn’t last. Indoors, furniture made from them wouldn’t look very good, and they’re so hard, they’re tough on tools.

I also have a fair number of sweet gums. It’s a second-tier furniture wood, and Asians like to make chopsticks from it. No one wants it, though. It’s supposed to be terrible for smoking. Some people claim it’s toxic.

My latest chainsaw is on the way. I thought I might get out and cut some more wood this weekend, but the saw won’t be here until Monday, and if I use my old saw now, I won’t get to use the new one for much. Also, the burn piles are immense, so I would like to stop adding to them until at least one is clear.

I guess this will be a good day to remove the remaining bits of trash that could obstruct the mower. Then I can replace the mower’s exhaust pipe. Tomorrow, I could mow. My yard looks like a jungle.

I’m looking forward to having the election over with. Biden is basically a retiree, the country is on autopilot, Harris and Walz keep making fools of themselves, and it’s starting to look like Trump will win. If he does, I expect a lot of violence from leftists, who are much more hateful and immature than conservatives. I would like to see that behind us.

Today I saw Kamala say something truthful. That makes it a special day for me.

Christians showed up at a Harris rally. They were protesting the murder of the unborn. Harris was speaking, and a man shouted, “JESUS IS LORD!”, which is true. And Jesus hates abortion.

Harris was talking about walking Trump’s progress backward and making it easier to turn women’s uteruses into murder scenes. The man shouted during a pause, when the room was quiet. He could be heard clearly.

Harris said, “Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally.” She said she thought they had meant to go to a Trump rally close by, which she described as “smaller.” Of course, Trump was in another state so he could go to the Al Smith dinner, which she skipped, perhaps out of the same cowardice that keeps her from doing interviews.

She grinned. She thought her remark was funny.

She was correct about the protestors, though. A Harris rally is no place for Christians. The Democrats openly opposed God and Israel in a voice vote at their convention years ago, they elected Obama, who was very hard on Israel and promoted perversion, and they treat the unborn like unwanted warts.

No Christian has a good excuse to be a Democrat. They have excuses. Just not good ones.

If you vote for Kamala, you’re voting for perversion, the murder of unborn children, antisemitism, racism, rioting, shoplifting, and the persecution of Christians. Those are major issues. Fake Christians who refuse to vote for Trump complain about his personality and his sexual history. That’s ridiculous. Yeshua himself is not running for president. We don’t have an ideal candidate. We have to avoid the worst choice we have, and that choice is Harris.

It’s not just Harris. It’s the flood of demonized Harris appointees that will follow, including EVERY FEDERAL JUDGE. She will appoint judges that support the castration and skinning of confused minors going through phases. They will support abortion up to and possibly past the point of birth. They will persecute Christians. They will empower Muslim terrorists.

Both parties serve Satan to a large degree, but the problem is much, much worse on the Democrat side.

Even though I hope Trump is reelected, I still believe America is finished. Evangelism is pretty much dead here. The perverts have won; even Fox uses incorrect pronouns. Young people are awful, and they are the ones who will take our places. In the future, unless the rapture comes, the vast majority of Americans will be arrogant, cruel, Yeshua-hating, antisemitic, witchcraft-loving, feminized, dishonest, shallow, useless people.

Privacy is a thing of the past. With the advances in surveillance and artificial intelligence, free will is disappearing. Immigrants from horrible places are piling in and having huge families. Nearly all churches where the Holy Spirit is acknowledged are run by greedy, heartless pimps and whores who enslave people with the prosperity gospel. The other churches promote anal sex but not holiness.

It’s not going to get better.

Christians are going to be marginalized more and more. We will be impoverished and silenced. Attacks on Jews will be tolerated and encouraged.

We chose all this. The people who came before us chose Satan over Yeshua, they raised us in their stupidity and immaturity, we are worse than they were, and the nation has continued to deteriorate.

These days, I spend a lot of time resting in God’s presence. I don’t do it just because I want him to do good things for me. I do it because I want to take breaks from this stinking, corrupted world. It’s like cracking the door to heaven and sticking your nose in. I keep begging God to bring the rapture and tribulation and put an end to this culture.

I hope it happens quickly, because otherwise, my children have no future on their own planet. They’ll live in little Christian bubbles smaller than mine.

America was wonderful. We didn’t understand what we had. The lack of persecution was extraordinary, and it was combined with extreme wealth, power, and safety. Those things are disappearing. Living here will be like living in two-tier England, where Christianity is broadly hated and Christians are seen as troublemakers and parasites.

When America is gone, there will be no big, rich, Christian country to run to. Every single large nation will belong to Satan.

The world has two big continents: the Americas and Africa/Europe/Asia. Then there is Australia, which is lost. There is no fourth land mass we can run to in order to establish a Christian society.

The filth of the coming world is disturbing to think about. The whole world will be like the most degenerate cultures we now have.

Consider “Palestine.” They hack suspected Israel-sympathizers to death and leave their body parts on display in the marketplaces. They have children’s shows where they tell kids to murder Jews. The filthiest kinds of terrorists have called their parents during massacres to show off the blood on their hands, and the parents have been transported with joy and pride.

Think of Afghanistan, where the rape of boys is considered normal. It’s a country so savage, it’s not worth trying to save. They murder the people who try to help them, just like the Somalis.

Consider Nigeria, where Muslims are so dangerous, you need multiple armed escorts in order to get around. Think of North Korea, where intelligent, hard-working people drop dead on the streets and rot, starved and full of worms.

Then there’s Central America, where drug dealers skin people alive, and the people support them.

Left to themselves, human beings are almost as bad as demons, and the majority of us have decided to be left to ourselves. There is no limit to the depravity we can embrace.

The other day, I read about government employees in Maryland, removing a young man from his parents home, permanently, because they refused to support his “trans” delusion. The parents are Christians. I was so discouraged, I prayed for God to kill the government employees.

Thousands of times, I have prayed for God to reach vile, cruel people and correct them. When I read about this kid, and I thought about him being castrated and pumped full of drugs by people full of demons, I couldn’t find the patience to ask God to turn them around. Just kill them. They can’t be reached with persuasion. They will do too much harm if they are allowed to live, and what they are doing is an atrocity.

What will I do when the demonized run Florida, my son goes through a feminine phase, and clown-haired stooges with unlimited authority drag him off to have his penis sliced down the middle, hollowed out, and turned into a fake clitoris in a stinking, never-healing hole that grows fungus and bacteria? Shooting them won’t help. I’ll go to prison, and they’ll send more stooges. Suing won’t help. The judges will be on their side. If it happens, I’ll just sit and pray and wish God would take both of us.

I understand why Yeshua, the God who is love itself, is going to return and massacre people. The Bible says his robe will be wet with their blood. I get it. Enough is enough. It’s better than letting this mess deteriorate to the point where life is utterly pointless. Saving new souls is important, but the reality is that human beings have limited value. A person is worth more than many sparrows, but it’s better that people die and go to hell than to have them remain alive and torment the people God loves without significant resistance.

God has killed millions of people, so no Christian should be upset when someone says he will do it again. He told us he’s going to do it.

He created hell and the lake of fire. Satan didn’t do these things. He couldn’t, and besides, the lake of fire is his future home for eternity.

One of the main purposes of these places is to keep the irredeemable away from the rest of us. Heaven can’t be heaven if they aren’t confined and forgotten, and the Messianic Age can’t take place unless fallen angels and demons are removed.

Regarding the apocalypse, I don’t want to see people suffer. I just want evil people to be defeated and kept away from God’s children. I have very little energy left to deal with them. Unfortunately, death and hell are the only permanent solutions. We can’t get permanent relief unless a lot of people die and go to hell. They will not change.

There is a blessing in knowing and being close to a totally worthless, hateful, destructive person who brings misery to everyone around her and makes it impossible for them to relax and thrive. It teaches you that God was right to create hell and the lake of fire. It makes you realize people eventually have to have relief, regardless of what the worthless have to suffer.

Most Christians never learn this lesson. They learn that Yeshua wants us to pray for our enemies, but they don’t pay much attention to the scriptures about turning people over to Satan or refusing to eat with them.

Yeshua never chased anyone. Have you noticed that? He showed up and invited people. He showed them God’s goodness and power by supernatural means. That’s it. When they turned him down, he left without hesitation.

He left most of the Jewish people behind at about 33, knowing hell would swallow them by the millions. He knew Jerusalem would be sacked, the temple would be destroyed, and the people would be dispersed for 2,000 years.

He could have stayed until he was as old as Methuselah, begging and cajoling. The priests had no power to arrest him. He turned himself over to them and chose to be crucified.

Would he have let a worthless son live in his house for 50 years and abuse him? Would he have enabled a junkie or a gambler? Would he have sold his house to pay the son’s creditors or bookies? Of course not. God can’t be manipulated. This is the real meaning of, “Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test.”

I curse the Harris campaign, literally, as often as I remember to do it, but a Trump victory would be like giving a terminal cancer patient Tylenol. Better than nothing, but no solution.

Incidentally, I learned something interesting about the diaspora. Solomon caused it.

Solomon was a failure and a disgrace. He was also a hypocrite. People talk about him as though he were nearly a god, and he wrote part of the Bible, but he was a curse to Israel.

God told Solomon that if he or his people turned away, the people would be driven out of the promised land. A lot of people think the Jews were driven out because the people turned on God, but according to scripture, Solomon’s rebellion, by itself, was sufficient to invoke the curse.

Look at this scripture from 1 Kings 9:

But if ye shall at all turn from following me, ye or your children, and will not keep my commandments and my statutes which I have set before you, but go and serve other gods, and worship them:

Then will I cut off Israel out of the land which I have given them; and this house, which I have hallowed for my name, will I cast out of my sight; and Israel shall be a proverb and a byword among all people:

And at this house, which is high, every one that passeth by it shall be astonished, and shall hiss; and they shall say, Why hath the Lord done thus unto this land, and to this house?

And they shall answer, Because they forsook the Lord their God, who brought forth their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and have taken hold upon other gods, and have worshipped them, and served them: therefore hath the Lord brought upon them all this evil.

That’s really interesting. I wonder why no one teaches it.

Solomon praised God before the people, but all the while, he was sacrificing to fallen angels who literally stink. It looks like he, singlehandedly, assured that the Jews would lose Israel.

Look at the people we elect. And somehow many of us think we will never lose America.

Is There Anything it Can’t do?

The last couple of days have been pretty good.

Milton came through, we spent a day without power, it came back on, and since then I’ve been cleaning up the yard.

My tractor has been out of commission for a long time due to a problem that prevented it from starting. I researched it for months. I asked for advice from all sorts of people who know tractors. I got conflicting information. Nothing worked.

I was going to send the tractor to the dealership, but then we had the Europe trip, and we had three storms go by. And we both got covid.

A day or two back, I found I could get the tractor to start with some effort. It’s a pain, but it will run. Since then I’ve been moving trees and limbs.

Last year, I finally learned how to make chainsaws run reliably. I may be the only person on Earth who knows how. I spent years listening to bad advice from people who were supposed to know the truth, and it did not help much.

I have a bunch of gas saws, and I have run three in the last couple of days. All started and ran, on treated no-ethanol gas 5 months old. I have this thing licked.

My lead saw was an Echo CS-590, which is a homeowner-grade saw you can get at Home Depot. I paid $400, which is maybe half what a pro saw would have cost. I kept screwing it up because I got so much bad information. Last year, I invested in a Husqvarna 562XP, which is a real pro saw. It has electronics in it that supposedly reduce or eliminate carb adjustments.

I got good information on maintaining saws at about the same time I got the Husqvarna. I modified the Echo to make it run like a pro saw. It’s a monster now. But I’m glad I got the Husqvarna, because anyone who has a farm needs two big saws. One could need repairs. Also, the Husqvarna has a 25″ bar, which is 5″ longer than the Echo’s bar. On this property, you need a 25″ bar, but there are times when 20″ is more convenient, so now I’m all set.

I wonder how many other people in this entire county know how to maintain and use saws correctly. I would guess nearly all are arborists. I took the Echo to an authorized repair guy who didn’t know.

Milton dropped a large oak across my driveway. I would say this tree was around 20″ thick at chest height, and it may have been 80 feet tall. As noted in an earlier post, my neighbor showed up after the storm, cut the tree in two places, and moved it out of the driveway with a forestry grapple. That still left me with two big collections of debris to disentangle, cut to sizes a tractor could carry, and move. A tree service would probably have charged over $1500.

I took a little homeowner-grade Jonsered/Husqvarna with a 16″ bar and did a lot of cutting. I moved a lot of distracting junk to my pasture. Today I used the Husqvarna to cut the tree’s trunk in sections. I also cut up a 16″-thick oak Hurricane Helene left caught in some other trees.

When I went back in the house, bleeding and covered with grease and sawdust, I told my wife it was a good thing she hadn’t married a Democrat. She said, “Don’t even say that.”

I didn’t mean a Teamster or an ironworker. I meant the kind of Democrat whose pores weep estrogen. Like the pansy in the old pajamas-and-cocoa Obamacare ad. Like the skinny-jeans-wearing waifs who get pummeled when disrupting other people’s rallies.

Compared to men from the World War Two generation, I’m practically a girl, but I can fabricate, machine, shoot, run a tractor, buck trees, make ammunition, shoot sub-MOA, smoke ribs, make beer, and do lots of car, mower, and tractor repairs.

I’m very good at interior painting. I don’t mind killing annoying animals. I have stomped on mice instead of taking them to therapy and trying to rehome them. I’ve shot a bunch of squirrels from inside my home. I know how to fish for everything from snapper to marlin. I can run a yacht or open fisherman 200 miles to Eleuthera with no help, and I’ve done both. I can keep a marine diesel running. I have a basic knowledge of electronics, and I have built a bunch of electronic devices.

I can also practice law.

If my wife had married a boy-band-looking liberal, they would be equally helpless. She would be able to do all the woman stuff, but he wouldn’t be able to do man stuff or woman stuff. Hot yoga and sitting in a cubicle. That would be all he could do.

I had to make a 50-amp San Francisco adaptor for my generator on Thursday. A San Francisco adaptor is male-to-male. I went to Lowe’s and asked for 6/3 cord. The Lowe’s guy and I started having a conversation. Maybe they didn’t have 6/3. Would 8/3 be okay? Well, I wasn’t sure my generator could break 30 amps, so 8/3 was fine. I didn’t have to ask him what kind of cord a generator uses. I didn’t have to ask what 8/3 was.

He didn’t explain anything to me. He seemed to know there was no reason to. Men in this area can do things, except for some of the snowbirds.

Came home, took apart two cords I had made for 220-volt tools, put the plugs on the 8/3 cord, and we were in business.

Two new plugs are on the way from Amazon.

I am sure leftists will eventually start swarming homes all over America, killing and looting. They’ve done that in every revolution. But should we all be scared of them?

In percentage terms, there aren’t many tough leftists. There are a lot of leftists who can throw bottles of pee at the police, and many of them can rob and kill unarmed people with stolen plastic 9mm pistols, but how many can deal with a conservative who can shoot and has multiple weapons, modified to suit his needs, for various uses?

Even gang members don’t train, and they are generally stupid.

Kyle Rittenhouse was a chubby, out-of-shape high school kid with a cheap AR-15, and he obliterated three leftists as they and a big crowd tried to lynch him. He killed a child molester (raped 5 boys) who had been in prison and gotten a reputation for fighting. He blew the bicep off a criminal who charged him, committing assault, with an illegal pistol in hand. He killed some idiot criminal who tried to bash his skull in with a skateboard. He scared the rest of the lynch mob off. Rittenhouse was extremely effective, and his two armed assailants, as well as the unidentified person who shot at him early in the incident, were incompetent and useless.

I just don’t think you can sit around smoking dope all day and apologizing for your maleness and expect to be a real factor in physical confrontations with armed people.

If my wife had married a vegan yoga boy, they would have to live in an apartment or on a very small lot. They would have to live somewhere where there was little for men to do.

Man stuff is fun. Burning things and blowing things up are fun. Steel-toed boots are fun. Shooting is fun. Catching fish and cutting them up is fun. Welding, machining, running heavy equipment, and bucking trees are fun. How could anyone prefer wearing a man bun, carrying a murse, and spending his time going from one moronic activist meeting to another?

Good knives are fun. Concealed carry is fun.

God is masculine, and he was right to make men masculine. The sex roles he created work. People who accept them enthusiastically are fulfilled.

I feel like buying another rifle.

Tomorrow I have to finish moving trees and limbs. Then I have to replace my diesel yard tractor’s exhaust pipe, cut off the muffler I made for the old one, and weld it onto the new one.

I’m glad God didn’t let me become a sissy.

You Will Eat the Entire Thing

People are asking for my white bread recipe. It’s not health food. It has no fiber. It has no quinoa, steel-cut oats, or kale in it. It’s a decadent white bread for people who do not fear death.

Here is the recipe.

I recommend using a big food processor with a standard chopping blade to mix the dry ingredients. If you use a short dough blade, it won’t stir them well. Once the dry ingredients are mixed, you move to the short blade. A standard blade may be too hard for the processor to turn.

You can also do all this by hand, or you can use a mixer.

This is for a big nonstick bread pan.

INGREDIENTS
520 g bread flour
1.5 tsp. salt
1 tsp. instant yeast
2.5 tbsp. sugar
4 tbsp. butter
300 g warm water

You can use half as much yeast and let the dough rise longer. Ordinarily, bread tastes better when it takes a long time to rise.

Blend the dry things first in the food processor. Then blend in the water until the dough is well mixed. Maybe 20 seconds. Wait 5 minutes. Blend in butter (softening it first will speed this up). Butter a bread pan, and be sure to add extra salt to the butter.

Form a loaf and put it in the pan. Butter it with more salted butter. Let it rise in a humid place. Score it a few times with a razor to let it expand in the oven. Bake about 35 minutes at 375°. You want the bread to sound hollow when tapped. You can shoot for 195° if you have a probe thermometer.

The top will burn if you’re not careful. I bake for 20 minutes at 375° and then drop a sheet of foil over the bread.

Smaller loaf for 1.5-pound pan:

350 g bread flour
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. yeast
4 teaspoons sugar
2.5 tbsp. butter
210 g water

The smaller the loaf is, the higher the crust-to-innards ratio. A small loaf gives you more of the hot crunchy stuff. You can also roll this dough into balls, put them in a round cake pan, and make rolls.

I recommend letting the bread cool before storing it. Otherwise, steam comes out and makes the crust soggy.

This stuff is best right out of the oven, and the heels are worth fighting for.

18 Hours of Electricity

This must be what the rapture feels like.

What is the rapture? A sudden translation to a place where your problems are instantly ended.

Last night I slept on clean sheets in an air-conditioned room, after a long, hot shower, and today I got up and ate eggs fried in butter, two big slices of toast made from homemade bread, and three slabs of Tennessee Pride sausage. And not I’m sitting in a leather recliner, thinking about how great I feel.

This is much better than yesterday. I almost had to bathe in the freezing 70-degree pool. I had to work on our generator with no running water to wash my hands. We had no air conditioning. Most restaurants were closed. There was no gas.

What a difference.

When I was young, I took things like electricity and cars for granted. I am not like that any more. Sometimes when I’m driving down the road, I tell God how amazed I am. I’m doing 70 miles per hour. It’s 95 degrees outside, and the inside of the car is at 69 degrees. I’m in the shade. I’m sitting on leather upholstery. If I want, I can have the great musical artists of the last hundred years sing and play for me.

That’s pretty wild if you think about it. Three generations back, the only way to travel faster than 7 miles per hour was to board a train. Nobody had air conditioning. There were almost no recordings.

I thank God constantly for dishwashers, clothes washers, and dryers. You shove your stuff in and walk away, and your electric slave does the work for you, better than you could.

My grandmother was an educated woman with a wealthy husband, and she had to wash 6 people’s dishes and dirty underwear. When I was little, she had a washing machine with a wringer on it. Imagine standing on your porch running your family’s used underwear through one of those with your bare hands.

I’ll be honest. She had a lady who came in and helped, but I doubt that took care of all the laundry. Granny did make my mom and her sisters do chores, though.

Anyway, somebody was washing other people’s dirty underwear.

My grandmother had washboards. She had one in her house when she died in 2003.

In Zambia, my wife used to bathe in a bucket a lot of the time. The Zambian power grid is not great.

I always ask God not to take wonderful things away from us.

I eat homemade bread because my wife hates American bread. I can’t say I blame her. The white stuff has no taste, and the brown stuff is like eating a welcome mat. I showed my wife how to make my white bread recipe, and now she’s happy.

Bread probably costs us $1.50 a loaf, and I have never had anything that compares with it, anywhere. It’s so good, I have considered making it worse so I don’t eat so much of it.

I was only without power for a day, but today I feel like royalty. Appreciate what you have while you have it.

The comedian W.C. Fields was on his own when he was a kid. He left home at 11. He found himself a hole in the ground and put a cover on it. For a while, that was where he slept. When he was old, he still got excited about beds and clean sheets. He described the feeling of settling down in a clean bed. He said, “God____, that’s a sensation!”
And he was rich.

I think about that every time I go to bed.

When I was a kid, and I didn’t have something someone similarly situated had, I thought God was unjust. I don’t feel that way now. I feel pampered, because I am. I don’t care if the guy across the street has a hundred times what I do. My life is great.

The natural thing is to become spoiled when God gives you things. That’s a choice you make. You can choose to become more grateful. The Bible shows that God punishes the spoiled.

If you have good health, a clean, safe, quiet, pleasant home, good food, good clothing, people who love you, and God, you are rich. It’s true. It’s not just something to put on a greeting card.

This is all true and wonderful, but now I have to fix the tractor and move the downed trees and branches from my yard.

Well. A lot of people don’t have a tractor or a yard.

November Can’t Come Soon Enough

Here we are at about Milton minus 13 hours.

Before I write about how good things look, of course, I have to mention the fact that many other people are not so fortunately situated.

Anyway, here is the news, as I understand it.

This morning, I found a Jacksonville station with a meteorologist who, I sense, may be fed up with the hysteria. He provided what seemed to be a calm, factual forecast. That’s a rarity. I assume he’ll be disciplined. He is an insult to the Anderson Cooper stand-in-a-flooded-ditch school of hurricane coverage.

He said the hurricane part of the hurricane was only 30 miles wide. People don’t understand how big Florida is. The driving distance from Key West to Pensacola is about 830 miles. This means hurricane-force winds will only hit something like 4% of the state’s coast.

California is shorter than Florida.

They expect the storm’s center to hit Sarasota. That’s 140 miles from here. That means the hurricane-force field will end something like 125 miles from me, and at the edge, it will be Category 1, not Category 4. A hurricane’s strongest area is the eye wall, pretty close to the center of rotation. The winds drop quickly as you get away from it.

They think the maximum sustained winds will be about 125 mph, so that’s the eye wall. At the edge of the storm’s windy part, how strong will the winds be? Simple. About 74 mph. That’s the figure used to define hurricane-force winds. If the hurricane-force area has an outer edge, the winds there must be doing about 74, and they will be lower just past it.

So 125 miles from me, sustained winds will be at about 74 mph, and they will drop off over the 125-mile distance between the edge and me. Also, the winds will have to cross about 70 miles of wooded land with hills to get to me.

The threat of tropical storm winds is iffy here as of the moment. That means we may not get sustained winds of 39 mph. They are predicting 28. That’s at tree-top level. On the ground, it will be lower.

I don’t care too much about gusts. A good gust can do damage, but it can’t compare to a nasty sustained wind that slowly pulls roofs off.

Hysterical forecasters love conflating sustained winds with gusts. They’re saying we may get winds of 60 mph. Well, sure. We get those during thunderstorms sometimes. For a few seconds. No one cares about those. Sustained winds define a storm.

They keep saying we’ll get TROPICAL-STORM-FORCE WINDS because we are sure to get brief gusts. That appears to be a lie; a deliberate prevarication intended to get people excited. You can’t have a tropical-storm-force gust. It would be like having a year-long decade. If the wind isn’t sustained for at least 60 seconds, it’s not a tropical-storm-force wind, no matter how strong it is. It’s a gust.

Meteorologists, even the ones hired for their looks, know the difference between a gust and a tropical storm. They shouldn’t lie.

I’ve never seen anyone but me call them on this huge and obvious lie.

Based on what I see now, we are headed for something like Helene, which means I could lose a few trees. The ground is wetter this time, so more trees could fall. Nothing bad is likely to happen near the buildings. I might lose power, but the odds are with me. The power company has been really aggressive about trimming trees since Irma, and a guy who works for them lives on my street, so we get priority.

I have several trees that have to go, so if Milton pushes them over, I’ll be thrilled. It will save me the work of felling them. Bucking trees is easier and safer than felling them. It takes no skill.

The pool got a bit gross due to our recent trip, but I have been fixing it up in case we have to bathe in it or use the water to flush toilets. Other than that, a power outage shouldn’t be too bad. I guess I should run to Walmart and get some ice for the cooler.

I haven’t bothered with the generator. I guess I should have. It could keep a ceiling fan, the refrigerators, and a water heater going. But I would have to get up every 6 hours to feed it. It may be ready to run, because I cleaned it up after the last time I used it, but I know better than to assume a small engine will work just because I take care of it. Gas is just too screwed up these days.

I learned that the only way to keep small engines going in a situation where there are long layoffs is to put oil in the gas tanks and run it through the carbs. I haven’t done that with the generator.

This is not a typical storm. Yesterday, the sun was bright and there was almost no rain. It was like a normal day. Ordinarily, the two days before a hurricane are gloomy, with an ominous feel. Today is more typical. It’s overcast and drizzly, and there is a light breeze.

They think we will get the worst of it after midnight. The nice thing there is that if the power goes out while we sleep, we may sleep the whole night. If the power went off earlier, the house would heat up and make sleep difficult. Heat makes it hard to fall asleep, but it’s not likely to wake a person up.

I just looked at the 11 a.m. cone, and while the overall wind field seems to be spreading, the hurricane area looks smaller, and the winds are dropping, as expected. The landfall area seems to have shifted south a little, which is good for me if true.

The storm is speeding up, which is great. It’s moving at 17 mph. The faster it moves, the less damage it will do, and the sooner life will resume.

It will be a bad couple of weeks for the people south of Tampa. I keep praying God will push the storm farther south to areas where there aren’t many people.

If you want to see some really stupid, uninformed, dangerous reporting, go look at the site of the British “newspaper,” The Guardian. It’s a left-wing rag, so no surprise. They say Milton has been called “the storm of the century.” Yes, by The Guardian.

They say there will be “up to” 15-foot storm surge in Tampa. No, there won’t. Where did they hear that? Tampa is outside the maximum surge area.

They’re making it sound like Milton is still a 160-mph storm. Off by 15, Fleet Street.

Publix and Winn-Dixie are closed today. The Postal Service is still delivering. Walmart is open. It will be open tomorrow, too, along with everything else. It’s not the end of the world.

This morning I learned that DeSantis was within a couple of miles of me yesterday.

North of me, about 5 minutes away, there is a facility called the Florida Horse Park. I don’t know much about it. It probably covers a hundred acres. For weeks, it has been covered with things like generators and powered lifts. It looks like there are hundreds of them. I thought somebody had rented the park, and they were selling these things.

Turns out it’s a staging area for hurricane relief. The tools at the park will be dispatched to help people. It’s amazing.

It’s very nice to be so close to it. They can have machinery here in less time than it takes to make toast over a can of Sterno.

DeSantis made a speech there yesterday. I wish I had known. We would have been there. We drove right by it. It’s a few hundred yards from the dump.

Speaking of dumps, DeSantis ordered them to stay open around the clock, and some local goofballs tried to close one. This was in Pinellas County, which, for practical purposes, is greater Tampa. It’s full of stuff that needs to be disposed of, partly to prevent it from going airborne tomorrow. They locked the gate used by public vehicles to dump storm debris. In response, a state trooper used a truck to destroy the gate, with the governor’s approval. Man, I love this guy.

Pinellas officials are lying, saying the facility was open, but news outlets clearly say the dump was not accepting storm debris, in an area recently pounded by two storms. Yesterday, even after the gates were opened, the line to dump debris was three hours long.

Our local dump isn’t supposed to be open on Tuesday, but Big Ron made it happen, so we dropped some trash.

In an amusing side note, Biden says DeSantis has been great with hurricane efforts, thus preemptively kneecapping any efforts Kamala Harris and Tim Walz hoped to make, to libel DeSantis and Republicans in general. There is speculation Biden is trying to kill the Harris campaign.

He doesn’t like Harris–who does?–and he deeply resents being kicked off the ticket. I don’t think he cares about our country. I believe he’s completely self-centered, so even if he really thinks leftism is best for America, he might be willing to torpedo the Democrat who replaced him and put Donald Trump in office.

Stories imply Harris has been trying to work with DeSantis as though she were president, and some say DeSantis has not been receptive. That’s understandable. He wants her to lose, and Joe Biden is the president. Biden may be senile, but he is still managing relief and preparation efforts, so why give Harris a chance to grandstand and virtue-signal?

“This was a middle-class hurricane, and LGBTQQIP2SAA BIPOC’s were disproportionately affected…”

Biden just told the world he and Kamala have worked together on all of his decisions as president, so now she can’t distance herself from his stench. That had to be a deliberate jab. Biden knew she was conning the world, pretending she would have done a better job.

I don’t know what to do today and tomorrow, apart from intercession for the people on the west coast. Guess I’ll be eating the inevitable Pop Tarts and hoping the air conditioning keeps working.

What is Left to Accomplish?

Based on weather forecasts, I made plans to do nothing today, and I am sticking to my plans. But I think I made a mistake.

Hurricane Helene’s weak outer winds were supposed to produce sustained speeds of about 40 mph here. Far as I know, it never happened. I would say the situation this county ended up with is 10% worse than the aftermath of Debby, which left a few downed trees here and there. We got nearly no rain during the Helene crisis, so that’s a plus.

I have some cleaning up to do. Yesterday I checked the forecast to see when it would dry up, because nothing is worse than doing heavy yard work on a 90-degree day when the air is full of steam. The forecast pretty much said it was going to rain until next Friday. The probability figure for today is 88%.

Of course, it’s dry and breezy without much sun. The temperature is about 82 degrees, or 8 degrees lower than recent days. This would have been a good day to clean up.

I don’t understand precipitation probability, and it turns out neither do meteorologists.

At some point in the distant past, I looked it up, and I read that a certain chance of rain meant that there was that much likelihood rain would fall somewhere in the area the chance applied to. So if you were in an area with a 25% chance of rain, the chance that it would rain somewhere in that area was 25%. How much rain? Whatever I read didn’t say. I assumed it had to be a significant amount, because if not, the figure was useless.

I just checked again. A British site says a figure of x percent means x percent of sources have concluded it will rain in the area. How much? Doesn’t say. An American site says it means x percent of the area will get measurable rain.

Either meteorologists have no idea what their own metric means, or they are letting uninformed people try to explain it to us.

Experience has taught me this: if a forecast says the chance of rain will be 60% or more, expect a nasty, rainy day, nearly every time. That’s more useful than the weird things I’m seeing on the web. Anything over 20% is reason to avoid outdoor activities as far as I’m concerned.

I am sitting here doing nothing. I still feel some covid fatigue, and I’m not sure I can start the tractor, so I am in no rush.

I’m not sure what to do with my life these days. We are done traveling. I doubt we’ll go anywhere until far into next year, and we will not be able to go any place exciting because of the baby. We still need to fix the house up a little, but that’s about it. What should we be doing with ourselves?

The world has turned into an immense toilet. Americans have proven they really are stupid enough to put Kamala Harris in the Oval Office. Wokeness is getting worse, not better. We are giving birth to generations of soft, useless, cruel, incompetent, spoiled, godless perverts who will make the last decade look like the Messianic Age.

I don’t know what we’re supposed to do here. I am spending more and more time in prayer. We think about things like good food, medical appointments, and managing our practical affairs. That’s about it.

Lately I have noticed I am sometimes bored. That’s a problem I thought I had left behind decades ago. It’s strange to see it creeping up on me again. I find myself thinking, “I remember this!”

I think I had started believing I was immune to it. I took not being bored for granted for maybe 35 years.

I have zero enthusiasm about America’s future. I don’t want to live here. I don’t know how I’ll defend myself when my son asks me why we put him here, to face seventy-plus years of hiding out in a world gone insane. I can tell him God wants people to have children. Best I can do.

While we are here, we will have to devote a lot of energy to sheltering him from godless friends, Satanic entertainment, exposure to perverts, and so on. We will really have to have God’s help, because we can’t generate our own safe Christian bubble.

I don’t have any projects in mind. There is nothing I want to do here. I don’t want to start big things in a world which has no future.

I try not to imagine a future under Kamala Harris. Obama was an arrogant homosexual atheist who was hard on the church, the unborn, and Israel. Biden was dumb and without conscience, and he appointed godless nutcases to rule over us. Harris would make us miss Biden. She is a complete zero as a human being.

She’s a wonderful exhibit to use in order to prove democracy doesn’t work. When Biden gave her affirmative action and made her his running mate, she was extremely unpopular even among Democrats. That didn’t change during her time in office. Now she may get a legitimate majority in a presidential election. The people didn’t get to vote for alternatives. She was simply installed, and Democrats could either vote for her or let Trump win.

Imagine the kind of pigs she will appoint to abuse and control us if she wins. The worst choices imaginable. Disgusting, vile, incompetent, corrupt, and stupid.

It seems like there should be something to do other than praying and waiting for Yeshua, but if there is, I can’t see it.

Maybe I should prepare a rapture-ready will. Will it matter? Will the wills of raptured people be triggered when they leave? Will they be respected? Will whatever I could leave people be helpful to them in a world where demons and fallen angels are running amok?

I assume people will run around killing each other, squatting in each other’s houses, and stealing each other’s money, so I don’t think a will would be helpful.

There must be something useful for us to do right now. I just need to be told what it is.

What if the rapture doesn’t come, and I have to age and die in Satan’s America? Terrible thought. But I know from experience that if I pray in the Spirit enough, things will work out for me. I can’t do all that much for others, so it’s a limited blessing.

I can’t wait for this place to be wiped clean and remodeled. I don’t know what it is to live in a world that works. I’ve seen better times than the present, but I have always been surrounded by death, disease, injury, deformity, murder, accidents, poverty, and every type of emotional pain. I have always lived in a world ruled by Satan’s children.

My patience with suffering is gone. A couple of years ago, it didn’t discourage me as much. Now, every time I see someone with a terrible physical problem, or I hear about a terrorist attack or a natural disaster or some other cause of suffering, I think, “I have HAD it with this. Please get us OUT.” Enough. I have seen enough.

A few people can be helped, but almost everyone will continue to suffer and fail. Most of the people we try to help will turn our help into curses. They won’t turn to God. Not really. They won’t pray in tongues. They won’t repent. They won’t be accountable. Things won’t get any better for them.

The blessed will stay blessed, and the people who hold onto them like Titanic survivors holding onto floating planks will continue to hold on. Nearly everyone who leads a cursed life will continue to be cursed.

People who lead cursed lives generally don’t want to know God. They want money. They think money will fix everything and they won’t have to repent. It’s frustrating, because continued abundance comes from a relationship with God. You tell them how to fix their lives, they pretend to agree, and they don’t change.

When someone listens, it’s like you’ve found a big gold nugget in a manure pile the size of an apartment building.

We don’t have enough money or time to buy better lives for the people who won’t repent. We have to watch nearly everyone sink. Elon Musk couldn’t fix them. Look at his son, the pervert.

I like to prophesy, but I keep hearing about how God is going to destroy people who are against his children. That means the vast majority of human beings. I would love to hear about revival and miracles.

The human race is just too crooked to help. We have always been that way. God is always ready to bless, but almost no one is interested.

Guess I’ll go pray and then think about dinner.

Trading Alligators for Bears

My wife and I did something extraordinary last week. We went on a trip inside the United States.

We went to a bunch of weird countries while we were separated by the State Department, which was busy letting illegals into the US and watching daytime TV because employees were at home waiting for covid to go away. Until this month, however, we never visited another state.

We went to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. A place I loved as a child.

For those who don’t know, Gatlinburg is in the Smokies. The physical location is beautiful. It’s in a valley surrounded by mountains. To get to Gatlinburg, you have to travel scenic two-lane roads. The area is very nice. Appalachia isn’t as staggeringly beautiful as places like Switzerland and Utah, but it certainly beats the rest of the Eastern United States.

I don’t know when Gatlinburg became a tourist town. It happened before I was born. By the time my family started traveling between Florida and Kentucky to see relatives, everything was already established.

When I was a kid, it was considerably less tacky. It had a bunch of fun souvenir shops, including one called the Rebel Corner, which was decorated with huge Confederate flags. There was a place that made and sold candy. There were some okay restaurants. There were hotels built over the Little Pigeon River, which is really just a rocky creek. You could sit on your balcony or by your open window and listen to the soothing sound of the water.

There were trails and sights. I remember walking up Clingman’s Dome, a mountain nearly 7,000 feet high. My grandfather, the guy who taught me tact, was with us on the paved tourist path. He saw a man who looked like he checked in at about 350 shambling up the path with his own family, and he said, “It’s a good thing you’re not big and fat!”

Sometimes we saw bears. Back then, tourists did brilliant things like feeding them by hand through open car windows.

In those days, I enjoyed Gatlinburg and the nearby town of Cherokee, North Carolina, because to me, they were part of the experience of visiting Kentucky, which I wrongly thought was heaven on Earth.

Gatlinburg has gotten seedier with time. It’s a little trashy now. They used to have a tiny Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum, and now there is an array of Ripley’s attractions. They have a big saltwater aquarium where you can see sharks and sawfish. They’ve built a big concrete parking garage.

Watch the video below to see what Gatlinburg has turned into.

There are weird little attractions that don’t seem to make sense. One features a robotic horse in a dress, sitting out front to attract customers. We didn’t see the appeal.

Even though Gatlinburg is a somewhat downscale tourist town, we enjoyed ourselves. We walked in the woods. We had big breakfasts.

We didn’t go to Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s creepy amusement park. It’s in nearby Pigeon Forge.

I don’t like Dolly Parton. I thought she was perfectly okay when I was a kid, but over the years she and her park have worked hard to promote abomination, and all the time, she has pretended to be a Christian. She’s a complete hypocrite, but lots of stubborn, rebellious Southern women, and I don’t just mean lesbians, think she’s almost a co-savior, like the false Catholic version of Mary. Like a white Oprah.

I don’t know if her attitude has something to do with her unmarried brother who died young from an undisclosed disease or what, but I don’t want any part of her act. I never liked her music, either. She is no Patsy Cline.

The main reason we stayed in a tourist spot was to have a base from which we could look at the area. We have both had thoughts of moving to Eastern Tennessee, and if you stay in Gatlinburg, you can have good food and a nice hotel while you look around. Appalachia is not known for quality food and lodging, so to me, finding these things was a blessing.

We looked around Sevier and Blount counties. The geography and the trees and plants made a big impression, as did the sub-95 temperatures.

When you live in Northern Florida, you get used to living on sand that won’t support anything you really want to grow. You can’t grow apples, real peaches, blackberries, cherries, tomatoes, corn, or anything else without a lot of struggle. The grass is something called bahia. It’s thin, and when you walk across it a few times, you leave obvious damage. It’s full of stinging bugs, and nettles are a problem. Lying down in your own yard is not possible.

Once you get far enough north, you get into real soil. You can have apple trees and grow tomatoes. You can have a lawn.

I have been concerned that if we moved, the people might be backward on racial issues. I’m from Eastern Kentucky, and I’ve also spent a lot of time in Western North Carolina, and I know there are parts of Appalachia where you can have problems if you’re in an interracial marriage or even if you’re just black.

My grandfather was a circuit judge over Breathitt County, Kentucky, and during his time, a black woman moved there and tried to practice law. I never thought of him as an enlightened person with regard to race, but he supported her. The people of Jackson, Kentucky eventually burned her house down. And it wasn’t that long ago. He died in the mid-90’s.

On this visit, I was shocked. In Gatlinburg, we saw one interracial family after another. What a relief. And they were definitely Southerners. I also saw many clones of myself. Men in cargo or work shorts, T-shirts, and baseball caps. It was like they were pumping us out of a factory.

We saw two black families in rented Rzrs. A Rzr is a factory dune buggy made by Polaris. It has no windows. Apparently renting them is popular in Gatlinburg.

Maybe things have improved.

Southerners are very, very big on powersports and unnecessary vehicles. If you’re a Southerner, and you don’t have a golf cart, an ATV, a dune buggy, a dirt bike, or a Jeep, there must be something wrong with you. I use a gas-powered EZGO to get my mail.

The people were very nice. I was concerned that if we left our area, the people would not be as pleasant. There are a lot of childish, rude, stingy people in Eastern Kentucky. In Tennessee, just about everyone was great. And there were signs of Christianity everywhere. There were signs advertising help for women who were considering abortions. There were signs telling people Jesus was coming back. I loved it.

I have had the feeling God wanted me to move to Tennessee, as have many other Christians. I don’t know if we’ll do it, but now I am less concerned about the possibility of making a bad decision.

During our trip, we applied for a Schengen visa so we could finally visit Europe. The real Europe, not Ireland or Turkey. Incredibly, they granted our request, so now we have to decide whether we should go. My wife is going through some medical treatment right now–nothing bad or permanent–so we’re thinking it over.

We only saw one bear in Tennessee, but it was a whopper. We were walking down the main drag of Gatlinburg, and we saw a bunch of people staring at the area behind a hotel. I looked and saw a black shape not much smaller than a cow. This thing was enormous. It must have been checking out the bear-resistant dumpsters.

When I think of black bears, I think of animals about the size of a hog. Maybe 150-200 pounds. They sometimes hit 600 however, making them as big as medium-sized grizzlies. The record is over 900. I don’t know what this bear weighed, but it looked a lot more like 600 than 200.

It took my wife a while to spot it, which is bizarre. She finally saw it walking up some stairs.

I knew we might see some bears. I expected typical disappointing bears about my own size. Not this time. This baby could have fed a small town for a day. It would make a beautiful rug.

I enjoyed seeing real trees instead of one water oak after another. We saw hickories, walnuts, sycamores, maples, black oaks, chestnut oaks…serious trees that have practical uses other than fueling smokers. They made me think of the times I had spent with my grandparents in the woods. They seemed to know every plant’s name and purpose.

We saw a lot of people who were obese or had leg problems. Diabetes, maybe. We saw people who clearly weren’t on top of the financial ladder. We saw a lot of tattoos and cigarettes.

I thought about Gatlinburg’s status as a second-tier tourist town, and I felt like God showed me some things. We were there as people who did not have to work. We were able to stay at a very nice hotel. We weren’t going into debt to do anything. Both of us knew God very well and never felt that we were alone or that we might have to handle life’s problems on our own. Our health was good. We were surrounded by unhealthy people who were loading themselves with debt.

Many of the others would have to go home shortly and work at jobs they didn’t like, in order to pay for things they had already received. When you borrow, you get your reward up front, and then while you’re working to pay for it later on, you have no reward to look forward to, and you can’t quit.

It reminded me to keep humility, gratitude, and fear of God in mind. We earned very little of what we have. God gave it to us in spite of our evil natures and deeds. Every good thing we have is part of an inheritance from God. We should never feel superior to anyone. What is uglier than an arrogant heir who has no empathy? I have been that person.

We aren’t sure what we’ll do. Sometimes I think we should go to Utah instead of Europe. It’s a lot less complicated, and it’s a shame for Americans not to see their own enormous country.

In any case, my wife is now in the Schengen visa system, so if we decide to travel in the future, it should be easier.

One More Shot at the Lost Continent

Before too long, my wife and I will find out whether Europe’s racist visa policies apply to African green card holders as well as Africans still in Africa.

We have traveled a lot since we found each other. Egypt, Turkey, Singapore, Ireland…destinations that were pleasant enough, yet which were all compromises. We have never been able to get to Europe.

I mean the real Europe, not Ireland. The place with the alps and the great food. Going to Ireland is like going to Boston, only the people are much nicer.

Well, they would have to be, though, wouldn’t they? Okay, they were nicer than most Americans, not just the interesting residents of urban Massachusetts.

Ireland seems like a pleasant place to live. The climate is gentle. It’s green, just like you would expect. The countryside is pretty. It’s fairly prosperous. It could conceivably be possible to hole up in the sticks and hide from the national psychosis of leftism. But the cities are kind of dumpy, the food is worse than it is here, the sweaters are thin and cheap, and when you’re there, you feel like actual Irish people are a tiny minority.

The Irish have abandoned Ireland. Why is that? They’re all here now. Not completely true, really. They’re all over the world, and they didn’t quit leaving after the potatoes came back. Is Ireland really that bad? Seemed fine to me.

I would not go back to Ireland, simply because it’s dull. There is really nothing there except the cliffs of Moher. Other European countries are different. Those alps. The fjords. Renaissance art. Medieval architecture. Magnificent food.

I wouldn’t go to England, either, and I suspect Ireland is just England without the sights.

Most of my ancestors are supposedly from England and Scotland, but I have no interest in seeing those places. I don’t understand people who want to “visit the old country” and who get all weepy about places maybe 3% of their ancestors came from. Let’s face it; if you have a name identified with a European country, and your people have been in the US over a hundred years, your genetic connection to its people is like a gram of coke that has been stepped on 10 times. If genes were paint, the country’s genes were white, and other countries’ genes were black, you would be charcoal gray.

My parents were under the impression we were mostly Scottish. I don’t think this is true, but anyway, they went to Scotland and looked up my dad’s ancestors, who are dead and were not able to receive him. They enjoyed bad food and mediocre scenery. On a rare and prized, not to mention expensive, foreign trip.

Forget that. Give me someone else’s ancestral homeland. Give me Switzerland, Austria, Italy, France, Germany, and possibly the Netherlands. Give me a place with great sights and wonderful food. Give me excellent weather and hotels that aren’t full of mold.

My parents could have had Paris. Back when it was safe, I mean.

England is full of furious Muslims now. That’s not for me. If I want to go to a country full of furious Muslims, I’ll visit Michigan. With a side hajj to Minneapolis.

London has worse crime than New York now, and like New York, it prevents decent people from carrying weapons. Should I take my wife to a place like that? How would I explain that decision to her in a London emergency room?

It’s true that England has great food now. It’s called curry. No one goes there to find the best spotted dick and toad in the hole.

I would have to rank Egypt at the bottom of our destinations. I would never go again unless I had a sudden desire to do another Nile cruise. The people were very nice everywhere, and sometimes the food was good. The cruise was relaxing and interesting. But Cairo is a slum, straight out. A real mess. And Egyptians throw their garbage everywhere.

The best restaurant we visited had dozens of dead flies decorating the windowsills.

Singapore was the real sleeper. I didn’t want to go at all, but now we have gone twice. We have a bizarre sensation of being at home there. Inexplicable.

We enjoyed Turkey, and the people were wonderful. Now Turkey is threatening to annihilate the Jews, so that takes some of the shine off of it. Ireland is antisemitic, but at least they’re not planning genocidal military action.

I don’t know if they can. Do they have an army? A real one, not the kind that blows up department stores?

We are giving Switzerland another shot because its nearest consulate is on the way to Tennessee. Before too terribly long, we intend to visit the Volunteer State to see if we should move there. Switzerland has a consulate in Atlanta. I figure we can get in and out of Atlanta fast enough to avoid being soiled too much.

Other countries would have required us to go to places like DC, New York, and Miami. If you see me in Miami, alert the police, because I have been kidnapped. Miserable, stinking hole. Thank you again, God, for getting me out.

We were going to shoot for a short trip to Switzerland, but given that this may be our last real trip for years, I decided to tack on some time in Italy. Rome, to be exact. I have been to Florence a couple of times, and it’s wonderful, but I think a person who has never been to Italy should probably pick Rome.

We don’t jam lots of destinations into short intervals. We are not the kind of people who would do three days in Florence and 4 days in Rome. If you haven’t been to a place for a reasonably long spell, you haven’t really been there. If you spend a day in Rome and then say you’ve seen it, you might as well say the same thing after walking through the airport between flights.

It has to be Rome or Florence. Not both.

We are planning to cut Switzerland up a little, but I think that’s different, because as beautiful as it is, you can’t stare at the mountains all that long without wanting to do something else. We expect to do a few days in Lucerne and a few in Wengen. Go up some mountains. Eat some plates of potatoes and cheese. Move on.

Will they let us in? No idea. The visa picture is supposed to be better for green card holders than Africans in Africa who are married to Americans, but we have been lied to before. Every time, now that I think of it. We don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.

I’m starting not to care. We liked Hong Kong and Singapore. We got a Taiwan visa quickly and easily. We haven’t seen America together. We don’t actually have to go to continental Europe. There are other places to go.

I want her to see the nice parts of Appalachia and maybe the Rockies. Utah is breathtaking. We can skip the entire Northeast, all major cities, and anything south of Orlando. No wacked-out West Coast destinations. Sliding around on other people’s feces is not for us.

Traveling with one or more kids is a future concern. I don’t know how people do it. I don’t know how they deal with kids on short trips to the grocery store. My wife doesn’t think overseas trips with children can be done. Not well. Maybe she’s right.

So where do you go in Tennessee? Gatlinburg, of course. Good old touristy Gatlinburg. I went there many times as a child. I saw people feed the bears through car windows. We walked up Clingman’s Dome. We went to Cherokee, and my mother took a picture of me with a bunch of guys who claimed to be Indians. Did braves really wear Chuck Taylors?

It’s touristy, but on the other hand, it has the best hotels, there is real food, and it’s a good base for exploration. And we are, in fact, tourists.

I haven’t seen Gatlinburg since the early 2000’s, I think. My family got together. A cabin was rented. Two aunts, my dad, my sister, me, and some cousins. My sister tortured the rest of us with her nasty unhousetrained Maltese and her constant unprovoked attacks on me. I think things will be better this time. In the recipe for an excellent vacation, or any other pleasant or even bearable experience, the secret can’t-miss ingredient is her absence.

Some people have a gift; the gift of making every occasion better by being elsewhere. This explains the rapture, the tribulation, heaven, and hell.

We are gearing up for all this stuff now. We hope to travel during the coming month.

If the Swiss let us down, I guess it will be the Far East and rural America for the foreseeable future. We have to do something for recreation until Yeshua gets us out of this world.

Chicago Still Disappoints

I got suckered in again.

We were at the grocery, and I saw something I had never seen before: frozen Pizzeria Uno Chicago-style cheese pizza. Like a fool who never learns, having tried Lou Malnati’s acceptable frozen pizza and my own unimpressive homemade jobs, I bought one.

It’s not good.

The crust is hard pie crust with a tiny bit of air in it, and it’s not good pie crust. The shortening tastes old. The cheese is on the grainy side. The sauce is okay, but it can’t save everything else.

I just realized what the crust is like. You know those stale flat noodles they serve in bad Chinese restaurants as snacks? Imagine one of those big enough to put a pizza in.

The Malnati’s cheese pie I bought was pretty good. The shortening tasted less old, and the cheese was fine. But a decent Pizza Hut pan pizza is better. The sausage pie I tried was not good at all because the sausage sat under the sauce and got boiled.

As things stand now, I have to stand by my previous conclusion, which is that Chicago-style can be “worth making.” But let’s be honest. You could say that about oatmeal.

A good Sicilian is the best food possible. This is according to my rankings, which are, of course, correct. Top food on Earth: my own Sicilian. Number two: a good thin pizza. The style is not that important. It just has to be good. After that, prime rib. After that, my own cheesecake.

I think Chicago-style should probably be put in a second-rate pizza category along with frozen pizza, although I’m not sure Chicago-style can be as good as the best frozen pies. I do enjoy those Stouffer’s French bread pizzas.

Chicagoans themselves are not big fans of Chicago-style. They prefer the other Chicago-style, which is thin tavern pizza. How good can their deep dish be if the people who can get it whenever they want usually order something else?

My two Chicago-area-raised cousins love Malnati’s, but they seem to be out of sync with other people up there. I should try making Chicago tavern-style.

I threw out one slice of the Uno pie. I ate three because I was hungry. Very sad. Potential wasted for no good reason.

Why do people who cook for a living make bad food? That’s a perplexing question. If the food has to be cheap, or it has to have a 10-year shelf life, or it has some other weird condition to meet, like being vegan, sure, it may be impossible to make it taste good. But most food isn’t like that.

Let’s talk about kung pao chicken and fried pork dumplings. It costs the same amount of money to make bad Chinese food as good Chinese food, so why not do it right? Same amount of work. If you have a Chinese restaurant, and you’re Chinese, you can’t lie and pretend you can’t tell your food is bad. You should fix it. It’s 2024, and excellent recipes and videos are available to anyone. Why make bad food, then?

Still, most Chinese restaurants are very bad. No wonder the children of Chinese restaurateurs become plastic surgeons and cardiologists. They can’t take the shame.

The people who make this Uno mess know it’s no good. They’ve surely tried it. Surely no one would invest in a big business without trying the product.

I suppose that’s wrong. Maybe they haven’t tried it. Maybe some guy who runs a company that makes garbage frozen food for other businesses told them everything would be fine, and they believed it.

The web says Uno went public and was then taken private again, so now it’s owned by people who probably know nothing about pizza. That would explain a lot. I was thinking it might belong to heirs to were too busy doing coke and wrecking speedboats to watch the business.

Myron Mixon is supposed to be the world’s greatest BBQ pitmaster, but when he opened a restaurant in Miami, it served hog slop and closed with 3 Google stars. This, after he talked all sorts of smack about showing everyone what real BBQ was like. Humiliating. He blamed the people who actually owned and ran the restaurant. He claimed they wouldn’t meet standards. A name isn’t enough to make food taste good.

He shouldn’t have talked smack if he wasn’t going to be on the premises to maintain standards. Ridiculous error for a chef. Every cook knows that as soon as the guy who knows what he’s doing leaves the kitchen to use the can, everything goes crazy. A kitchen is lucky if it has one person who can actually make it work. The rest are all hourly NPC’s.

Uno frozen pizza is nasty, so if you try it after reading this, you have only yourself to blame.