That’s the Only Part of You That Will Feast

Today is Sunday, so I won’t be here long.

We don’t cook anything that requires effort on Sundays. This morning I fried up a piece of country ham and two eggs, and because we don’t cook anything that requires effort on Sunday, I added a frozen Fresh Market croissant the store gave us for nothing. We never buy loaves of store bread. My wife makes bread for us. We ran out, and she can’t fix more until tomorrow.

I used Meacham ham which I ordered for my ham search. Along with Meacham, I’m testing Benton’s, Broadbent’s, Penn, and Newsom’s. I already eliminated Broadbent’s. I made red eye gravy with the drippings.

Meacham ham has a unique side flavor, and it smells a little funny before cooking. That threw off my analysis at first.

The smell goes away during cooking, the flavor is strong and tasty, the salt level is just right, the ham isn’t too dry and there is a reasonable amount of fat. It’s very nice.

The other companies are up against the wall now. Newsom’s is nearly perfect, but it costs about twice as much as Meacham, it’s not aged as long, and they won’t slice and bag it. The more I try Meacham, the more I think it’s just as good. Penn and Benton’s might be great. Benton’s can’t match Meacham on price, though. Penn is pretty close.

Penn is sending me a half-ham, sliced and bagged, for $64. It’s only a few pounds, so it doesn’t weigh half as much as a whole ham, but they keep the bones and probably some stuff I would remove and discard. I don’t know if it’s honest to call it a half ham or not, but there is a lot of waste in a whole ham, so maybe it is.

The good thing about butchering a whole ham is that you get a hock and a bone for beans or soup, so losing that is a significant hit.

I ate this in front of my baby son. I guess that was mean, but he can’t have country ham. He will be raised on it, though.

That’s all I got. Enjoy your Sunday.

This Salt Needs to Lose Some of its Saltness

The country ham search continues.

I tried to get some ham from Benton’s in Tennessee, but I made a mistake and ordered the wrong thing. The photo on the site was more than a bit misleading, and somehow I either failed to read all of the copy or I read copy from another product. Anyway, I thought I was getting half a pound of ham slices, but I ended up with paper-thin slices of very old ham intended to compete with prosciutto.

It tastes fine, but I’m not a prosciutto or charcuterie person. My feeling is that if you can afford a fancy board, you can afford bread so you can make a proper sandwich.

Charcuterie is boring. It’s a fraction of a real dish. When you eat charcuterie, you’re eating ingredients.

I think peer pressure convinces people they like charcuterie even though they don’t. It’s not a legitimate course. It’s just scraps of meat on a board.

I contacted Benton’s because I thought they had made a mistake, and they are graciously sending me what I actually wanted. I just have to pay for shipping.

Meanwhile, my second package of Broadbent’s ham has arrived. The first samples I bought were very dry, unbelievably salty, and somewhat leathery in consistency. Also, I couldn’t taste much flavor. I ended up throwing some of the ham out.

Country ham is supposed to be salty, but the slices I received were not normal. It’s supposed to be a little tough, but it should fall apart when you chew it. You shouldn’t feel like a shipwreck victim trying to eat a shoe.

I tried the new package today, and it was better.

The ham is still very salty, but I don’t think it’s quite as extreme as the first package.

The texture is still tough, but it’s not like a hard piece of leather.

I was able to taste the country ham flavor. It was not the near-perfect flavor of Newsom’s, or the unique-but-still-classic flavor of Meacham, but it was good. A little better than the ham slices at Cracker Barrel, I suppose.

The slices were still too thin for me. The perfect thickness for fried country ham is 3/8″, and these looked like half of that. It’s meat. It’s not copying paper. Give the customer something to eat.

If I had to buy a Broadbent’s ham, I would slice it thicker, soak the slices in water for three days, and then store it in vacuum bags. The water would tame the salt and fix the dryness.

This would probably work, but I won’t be buying any more Broadbent’s ham, so I will never find out. Meacham is as good, or nearly as good, as Newsom’s, and it’s much less expensive than Broadbent’s, so I don’t have any reason to buy Broadbent’s.

I don’t know why Broadbent’s hams are so salty and tough. All hams are cured pretty much the same way. They are covered with salt. You would think they would all be equally salty.

Maybe Broadbent’s is using hams that are dryer and less fatty to begin with, or maybe they keep them at lower humidity.

I’m not complaining about the salt because I’m an ignorant person who thinks all country ham is too salty. I know what a ham is supposed to taste like.

The two last contenders are Benton’s and Penn. Both should arrive this coming week. In the end, I will have tried 5 brands of ham, and that will have to be enough.

Creative Cure from Meacham Hams

A third type of country ham has landed on our porch: Meacham Hams of Sturgis, Kentucky! I fried up two small slices, and we tried them.

The raw ham scared me a little. I am used to country ham smelling a certain way. A little bit like bacon. A little smoky, if smoke is used. A fermented umami smell which is hard to describe. Sort of like a Slim Jim.

The slices I bought from Meacham didn’t smell much at all. When I used to buy Gatton Farms hams, I could tell there was ham in the boxes before I opened them.

The slices I bought today had an aroma that surprised me. It was just a little bit like dog poo.

I wasn’t disturbed. I know nobody cures hams with dog poo, and I have had hams that smelled like manure and mold.

There was also a faint odor that reminded me of maple syrup. Maybe it has something to do with the sugar in the cure.

I put a small amount of water in a pan and boiled the slices for around 45 seconds per side. The purpose of this is to cut the salt and make the slices moister, but my grandmother used to slice and fry, period.

Important to point out up front: the fried slices did not smell like dog poo.

This is a mild ham. It’s mild by country ham standards, not Oscar Mayer standards.

On the saltiness scale, it is below Newsom’s and the Broadbent’s slices I bought. If Broadbent’s is a 10 and Newsom’s is an 8, I call this a 6. Still very salty, as it should be, but toward the lower end of the country ham spectrum.

I consider this a good thing, because this ham should not need any water in the pan, and that saves time. Also, water probably carries off some flavor.

It’s not tough at all. It’s easy to chew, but it has the texture of a true country ham. It’s not like a canned ham. It’s not dry, either.

The texture of Newsom’s made me think of cheese for some reason. It sort of collapses between your teeth like the center of an aged prime rib eye. The Meacham slices don’t have as much of this quality.

It has a nice, acidic country ham flavor, but I would say it’s a little less pronounced than Newsom’s. The Broadbent’s slices didn’t have much flavor.

On the whole, it has a flavor all its own. Newsom’s produces hams with a very well-executed typical country ham flavor. This one is just a little different.

At first, I thought I liked Newsom’s better, but this ham grows on you. I stopped eating, and then I kept going back to finish it.

Here is my conclusion: this is a great ham, but if you want perfect textbook country ham just like your granny’s, you will prefer Newsom’s. If you are open to something a little distinctive but still completely authentic, Meacham is something you should try.

If you like country ham, but you are tired of dealing with excess salt, and you want a flavor that is slightly less intense, Meacham is probably ideal for you.

In terms of quality, I think there is no difference.

The price can’t be beat. Nobody else will send you a year-old proper country ham for this kind of money.

I think this is an excellent product that fills a need. Not everyone wants a hard core ham, but if you try to find something a little milder, you are likely to end up with a fake made for New Yorkers and Californians. Meacham makes a mild ham, but it’s for real. Also, the unique flavor gives people a new option without going outside the genre.

Anyone who likes country ham should try Meacham Hams. They deserve credit for doing their own thing.

MORE

I sliced my Newsom’s ham and soaked it in water for two days under refrigeration. Today I tried it.

I was afraid I was ruining it, but it’s better. It’s slightly less salty, and it’s juicier. I recommend this approach.

Bad Day for Broadbent’s

Back in 2023, I ordered samples from Benton’s and Broadbent’s, two of the leading producers of real country ham. I was going to compare them.

I used to order hams from Father’s Country Hams in Bremen, Kentucky, but they closed up. Then I started ordering from Scott Hams. They went out of business, which is not surprising, because they were not sufficiently competent to answer the phone or answer emails.

I went to the trouble of comparing Benton’s and Broadbent’s, and then I forgot to take notes. Whatever conclusions I drew are forgotten.

Now I’m doing it all over again. Somewhere, George Santayana is smirking.

Last week, I ordered a whole ham from Colonel Newsom’s in Princeton, Kentucky. I had never had their product. It’s expensive, and I am cheap. My late cousin Wade swore by it, and based on the company’s reputation and his recommendation, I was confident enough to give in and pay for one of their very expensive hams.

I also ordered more slices from Benton’s and Broadbent’s, and I followed up with an order from Meacham Ham. I have not received the Benton’s and Meacham slices yet. We have tried Newsom’s and Broadbent’s.

I don’t recall being disappointed by Broadbent’s in 2023, because I don’t recall anything about my first order, but the slices I received this time were no good. They are too thin. The ham has very little flavor. They’re tougher than they should be. The ham is so salty, it’s hard to eat.

I don’t know how one country ham can be saltier than another. You create a country ham by dumping it in a box with loose salt and other cure ingredients and packing the cure all over it, so you would think they would all come out with the same level of saltiness.

We tried two slices last week, and we did not finish them. We tried two this morning, and again, we threw a good deal out. It’s just not worth the effort to eat it.

The slices smelled very good when I opened the package. They had a strong fermented smell; almost alcoholic. I expected a lot of flavor. After cooking, all I noticed was salt.

I cooked today’s slices by putting a quarter-inch of water in a pan, boiling the slices on both sides, and then frying them. This is supposed to reduce the salt. Still, the slices were useless.

I reviewed Broadbent’s slices a few days ago, and I was more charitable. I said we preferred Newsom’s by a narrow margin. That is not how I feel today. As of now, I would turn down Broadbent’s if it were free. My wife doesn’t like it either.

I don’t know if the slices we ate today are different or what, but I take back all the nice things I said. Maybe my high hopes colored my perceptions to the point of distortion.

Maybe the first slices were better because I fried them in the same pan with Newsom’s ham. That could explain it.

I sent Broadbent’s an email asking if there might be something wrong with the ham we received. I think they deserve a chance to respond.

Their hams get very good reviews from most people, and I don’t recall having a bad experience with my first samples.

The Newsom’s ham is just about perfect. It has a strong fermented flavor. It’s very salty, but not like Broadbent’s, which tastes almost like fatback. It’s not hard to chew. I think the long curing process may have broken the meat down a little.

A 16-17-pound Newsom’s ham costs $152.83 before shipping, and curing a ham is not rocket science, so I am hoping Meacham Ham or Benton’s will be just as good at a lower price.

I did my best to butcher the Newsom’s ham, and I put the pieces in a pot of water to add moisture and draw out excess salt. I’m going to drain them and put them in vacuum bags.

Newsom’s is just about flawless, so if I never find a great ham at a lower cost, at least I’ll have one company that will come through for a price.

MORE

Broadbent’s got back to me:

Without seeing a picture of exactly what you received, my best guess would be that the center cut country ham steaks you received might have simply been from a smaller and/ or older ham, which would have resulted in less fat (leathery texture) and a saltier taste. As you know, every ham is different in fat content, size, and even how it shrinks down and takes to the cure, so every pack of ham steaks is as unique as the ham it came from.
We stand by our products, and every customer’s order comes with a 30-day guarantee where if you are not happy with what you received, we will send a replacement or refund you the cost of your merchandise

I will try another package and see what happens. Surely my slices were not normal. No one would order them.

Good Ham is no Luxury

I am still thinking about country ham.

Hams have gone up a lot in price, like everything else. A ham that used to arrive at your door, sliced and sealed in bags, for $65 will now run you twice that much in one piece. Also, a company’s ability to promote itself can affect prices whether or not the product is better. It seems likely that shopping around can pay off.

Another factor: the single most important variable in ham quality is aging; older hams are much better. Aging a ham costs money, so older hams cost more. What if you can find a mediocre young ham for a good price and then age it in your pantry, dramatically improving the quality?

Any cured ham will continue to age safely in your kitchen, as long as you don’t keep it too cold.

I decided to go through some of the best-known online ham suppliers to see what I could learn.

1. Benton’s. A Tennessee company. From their site: “Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams are slow cured using salt, brown sugar, and sodium nitrite and typically aged 9-10 months, though hams are available 1 year and older.” You can buy them smoked or unsmoked.

A whole smoked ham (15-17 pounds) costs $88, and in my case, the total with shipping is $123.23. That’s a little over $8 per pound, including bone and some bits you will want to cut off and throw out.

A two-year ham costs $275 before shipping.

2. Broadbent’s. Kentucky. They say they use a special curing mixture, so that means sodium nitrate is involved. Any ham producer that only uses salt will say so; it’s a bragging point. Broadbent’s makes vague references to smoking, and it appears this applies to their hams as well as their bacon; my best guess. They say their hams are aged 6-9 months, so call it 6.

They sell hams aged a year or more (call it a year) for $199.90. They say these hams are prosciutto-style, and they are smoked. The ad says “American Dry Cured Ham,” and I don’t know what that is. It must not be country ham.

A whole ham (16-17 pounds) costs $85.90, and to put it on my front porch, the cost is $108.30.

3. Burger’s/Clifty Farm. To me, “Clifty Farms” has always meant cheap, immature hams. The kind of ham Cracker Barrel serves. A tasty product, to be sure, but it’s at the bottom of the country ham hierarchy. I recall the name of the business differently. I believe it used to be “Clifty Farms” with an “S,” so maybe there has been some reorganization.

Burger’s used to be an independent business known for serious country ham, but now their website features two types of ham: Clifty Farm and an upscale product called “Attic Aged.”

The claim for Attic Aged ham: “Each fresh ham is rubbed with salt and brown sugar and aged over 210 days and hickory smoked.” So 7 months, which is pretty good. Clifty Farm hams are aged three months, and they use sodium nitrate.

The price for a 15-17-pound Clifty Farm ham is $105.00, shipped. The price for an Attic Aged ham, shipped, is $120.00. Impressive. Why would you buy the younger ham?

I remember the commercial Little Jimmy Dickens did for Clifty Farms. He said something like, “Folks, we’re blessed to be living in these times, because we have the best country ham t’ever was.” I guess if you had Clifty Farms ham and biscuits made with Martha White Flour, which Tennessee Ernie Ford said was “pea-pickin’ good,” you were living the high life.

4. Colonel Newsom’s. This is a Kentucky company. They don’t use nitrates. I see no mention of sugar on their site. They smoke their hams. The minimum aging period is one year. Colonel Newsom’s is at the top of the country ham status heap.

The price for a 16-17-pound ham is $152.83, and with shipping, it’s $189.92. You can see why I would like to find a cheaper option of similar quality.

I don’t see an option for an older ham.

5. Meacham Hams. They are located in Sturgis, Kentucky. Their hams are aged one year. They don’t tell what they put in the cure, so they probably use nitrates. They use sugar, and they smoke their hams.

A 15-17-pound ham costs $17, and with shipping, it’s $108.06. That is a real bargain for a year-old ham.

They don’t sell older hams.

6. Penn Country Hams. Situated in Kentucky, they do not list their cure ingredients, so assume nitrates. They do not mention smoking. They sell hams in two tiers: 4-6 months and 8-10 months.

For me, a 4-6-month 16-17-pound ham will cost $85.99 plus $18.24 in shipping, or $104.23. That’s very good. An 8-10-month ham will cost $99.99 plus shipping, or $118.23. I don’t know why anyone would order the cheaper ham, except to finish aging it at home.

Curing a ham is not rocket science or even ham science. You put salt on it and wait. Add nitrates if you want. Add sugar if you want. Sugar and smoking are optional.

A lot of people are afraid of nitrates, but the truth is that there is nothing sneaky or dangerous about using them. Using salt alone doesn’t make a ham better in any way, as far as I can tell.

The point I am trying to make is that any ham that covers the basics should be wonderful if aged long enough, so it is reasonable to think it’s worth risking buying a young ham and leaving it on your shelf for a few months.

Based on what I see, Meacham presents a compelling case. They will put a year-old ham by my front door for $108.06. I could buy one in January and start eating it in July. It would be 18 months old, and it should be heavenly. I could start a rotation, ordering a new ham as soon as I unwrapped the last one.

I would like to try a sample of their ham, but it would cost $56 for a small package, so I don’t think I’ll do it. But knowing me, I might.

I suppose it’s inconsistent to talk about saving money while spending a lot of it on samples. At this house, we will probably go through two hams per year, tops, so buying samples puts a big dent in any potential savings.

Consider the sampling process my gift to humanity, then. My little sacrifice. Because I care about you. Truly.

If I have properly-aged country ham available all the time, we will be able to have real country breakfasts at will, better than the ones Cracker Barrel makes. Scrambled eggs, country ham, biscuits, cream gravy, fried apples, and red eye gravy, which is just ham drippings and water.

Results will be posted when I have collected my data.

The Data

Two boxes arrived today, so I fried up a couple of ham slices, and my wife and I compared them. The companies: Newsom’s and Broadbent’s. Broadbent’s is cheaper, so I was rooting for it.

The Newsom’s ham was whole, so I had to slice it myself. I butchered it in the literal and figurative senses. Slicing a hard, slippery ham is not easy. While I was cutting, I remembered something: my grandmother didn’t slice hams well, either.

The ham was covered with a gross black substance which must have been mold. This is normal. I had to put it in the sink and scrub it with a sponge, but I never really got it clean. I guess I got about 85% of it off.

Because I sliced it myself, I was able to get nice, thick slices. I shoot for around 5/16″. The Broadbent’s slices I ordered came in a vacuum bag, and they were more like 3/16″ thick.

The Newsom’s slices had kind of a bland smell. They smelled like country ham, and that was about it. The Broadbent’s slices had a complex aroma. They smelled fermented; almost as though there was alcohol in them. Very pleasant. This gave me high hopes.

I fried one center slice of each. I put a little water in a skillet, boiled the ham briefly to remove some of the salt, and then fried them until they were lightly browned in places.

Broadbent’s: very salty, even for country ham. This is not a problem, but I would have to remove some of the salt when cooking this ham in the future, so it’s something to be aware of.

The fermented flavor hit right away, and it was very nice. I wish I could think of something to compare it to. Maybe a barnyard smell. The texture of the ham was tough, which is not unusual for country ham.

Newsom’s: less salty, but typical of country ham. I didn’t get a big hit of fermented flavor. The texture was tender, as if aging had started to make the meat break down. Like the center of an aged rib eye. It was much more pleasant to chew.

In the end, the Newsom’s ham had the flavor I associate with a good country ham. It was a lot like the hams my grandmother cured. Acidic at the end, with plenty of umami. Since I was looking for a flavor I was used to, and not something new, I preferred the flavor of the Newsom’s ham.

My wife liked the Newsom’s a little better as well, and she also noticed the fermented aroma and flavor of the Broadbent’s.

I can’t say I noticed much in the way of smoke flavor in either ham.

We thought both hams were very good. Sadly, we both preferred the more-expensive one by a narrow margin.

Two more packages will be here soon, so Newsom’s will have to take on Benton’s and Meacham Hams.

Depends on Which Pole You’re On

I had a spectacular day.

I was going to go outside and remove the nasty old rocks around an unwanted flowerbed, but instead, I ordered country ham over the web and took the family to Costco for pizza. We actually like having dinner at Costco, and it runs us about 10 dollars.

I love country ham, but it has to be good. My grandmother used to cure her own hams back in Kentucky, and she aged them a couple of years, so they were magnificent. They were also fatter than today’s hams, so there was no lack of grease for gravy. If you go into a grocery store that sells country hams, you’re likely to end up with Smithfield or Clifty Farms, which are aged very little and lacking in flavor. Also, Smithfield ham smells a little bit like manure.

One of the pleasures of having a foreign wife is introducing her to American food. My wife loves barbecue, Ruth’s Chris, Lee’s Famous Fried Chicken, Dr. Pepper, and a number of other things, but she has been a little slow to embrace country ham.

A country ham is supposed to be fermented. The aroma is supposed to have a little funk to it, and when you slice the ham, you should have to scrape some mold off of it. It’s also supposed to be very, very salty. It’s supposed to contain enough salt to prevent harmful bacteria from growing. After all, country ham was invented in order to help people preserve pork so they had meat during the winter. People made it as a survival tool.

When my wife tried country ham, she did not think much of it, but I fried a piece yesterday, and she liked it. She keeps telling me she is becoming Americanized. She has quit eating the flavorless corn mush Zambians call nshima, for example.

A few years back, I ordered samples from several ham companies so I could compare them. Sadly, I failed to record the results of this important research, so I was forced to repeat it.

I used to order hams from a company called Gatton Farms, but they went out of business. After that, I uses Scott’s hams, but they tanked, too. This is why I needed to find a new source.

My second cousin Wade, who is now gone, liked Colonel Newsom’s hams, made in Princeton, Kentucky. He once told me walking into Newsom’s was like entering a shrine.

I’m sure he knew what he was talking about. Everyone from the hills knows a good ham when he tastes one, and it seems like no one else does. My grandparents and all of their daughters knew what a good ham tasted like. I know. But people on food websites make deplorable recommendations.

Newsom’s doesn’t use curing salt. Just table salt, brown sugar, and hickory smoke. My understanding is that curing salt speeds up the cure process. Personally, I have nothing against it, as long as the ham gets plenty of aging time in spite of it.

I have never had a Newsom’s ham. They are extremely expensive, and Gatton Farms and Scott’s made top-notch products for way less. I used to get a whole ham, sliced, bagged and shipped, for under $70. I couldn’t persuade myself to spend more for Newsom’s.

Yesterday I decided to make sure I wasn’t missing out. I ordered a whole Newsom’s ham. Life is short. When my wife saw me looking at the website, she increased my joy by suggesting I order sausage, too. She used to refuse American sausage. She’s coming around!

It wasn’t a cheap purchase, but it will be nice to find out whether these hams are as good as some people think they are.

I also ordered slices from Broadbent’s and Benton’s; two other famous ham companies. My hope is that they will turn out to be as good or better than Newsom’s. If so, I won’t have to pay Newsom prices in the future.

The important thing will be to record the results of the experiment. If I could remember what I thought of Broadbent’s and Benton’s the last time I compared them, I wouldn’t need to spend more money.

My wife was also critical of Southern-style collards, which I love. I boil them forever with ham hocks or neckbones or whatever other smoked pork products are available, and they are heavenly.

Zambians are like yankees. They barely cook their greens. Sure, they look nice, and they have a less-wilted texture some people like, but that slow-cooked flavor is not there. It’s a giant waste of potential.

Yankees always say Southerners turn vegetables into mush. They don’t know what slow-cooked vegetables are supposed to taste like, so they don’t know what they’re missing.

Now my wife says she loves Southern-style collards. We have been going to a place called Fat Boys BBQ, and they serve collards. They won her over.

Sadly, Newsom’s doesn’t slice hams, so I will have to do it myself or find a butcher who has a machine. I can vacuum-seal the slices, but the tedious job of slicing is mine. Another reason to root for the other two contenders.

I ordered the Newsom’s ham yesterday, and I ordered samples from Broadbent’s and Benton’s today. Feeling satisfied with my accomplishments, I forgot all about moving the rocks and told my wife we were going to Costco for dinner.

We drove down to Sumter County, to the Villages. This is an enormous retirement community. It’s as close to heaven as an old person can get without dying. There are all sorts of stores, restaurants, and golf courses, and the old people zip around the community in golf carts.

There is no Costco in our county. I belonged when I lived in Miami, but I had to quit when I moved here. Last month, the Costco in the Villages opened, so I renewed my membership.

The drive is very pleasant. It was relaxing. Lots of little farms. Oaks arching over the roads. You would never know you were in the same state as Florida Man or Miami’s aggressive hordes.

It was very different from our recent visit to Gainesville for P.F. Chang’s.

To get to Gainesville, you have to use I-75, which is crowded and full of pushy drivers. Florida’s population keeps growing, and the main roads have not kept up. The pushy drivers are from South Florida, along with some from Georgia. People here don’t act like that.

We visited Trader Joe’s, P.F. Chang’s, and Bass Pro, in that order.

Gainesville is in Alachua County. It’s where the University of Florida is located, so it’s full of miserable people. College students from other places. Angry, cynical leftist academics. On a visit prior to our last one, we saw two young men in prairie dresses and work boots. We ate at a restaurant where they gave us paper straws. What more do I have to tell you? But I will tell you more anyway.

Trader Joe’s was packed with leftists. Young college students; not the kind of people who build Charlie Kirk memorials. Old ones who looked like worn-out communists. Freaks by choice.

In the parking lot, people were driving aggressively to get as close to the door as they could. That never happens here.

The atmosphere was cold and unfriendly. I would even call it tense. People seemed rushed. I asked my wife what she thought of the people, and she told me she would tell me when we got outside.

When we take our baby out in our county, people always want to see him. They tell us how cute he is. They say they want to take him home. At Trader Joe’s, precisely one lady noticed him.

At Bass Pro, the atmosphere was completely different. It was peaceful. We felt calm. Everyone was friendly. We took our baby to see the aquarium, and he loved it. Other families were showing their little ones the fish.

Today, before we went into Costco, we checked out Fresh Market, an upscale grocery my wife hadn’t seen yet. The people were wonderful. Everyone wanted to see my son. They talked about how cute he was. The employees loved him. They spent a lot of time telling us about the store and ways to get deals.

At Costco, my wife occupied a table, and I went to pick up pizza and a chocolate sundae. While I was gone, the old man behind my wife turned around to talk to her about the baby. He noticed how aware he was of his surroundings.

We only bought three things, so we weren’t there long, but a number of people wanted to see the baby.

He smiled at people. He loves meeting them.

The drive home was just like the first drive. No hurry. The golden light of late afternoon. A baby full of ice cream.

We could be living among sour, furious University of Florida professors who frown to the point of injuring their faces over the existence of Christian and conservate students and their beloved president. We could be in Miami, being insulted and scammed by aggressive, rude illegal aliens. We are extremely blessed to be where we are, surrounded by warm, loving people. We are blessed to have had our priorities changed so we aren’t still mud-wrestling with people whose only pleasures in life are being unhappy and making others unhappy.

This morning, we watched videos about Singapore. We both said we wished we were there instead of in the US. As much as we love our area, Singapore has some big advantages. No one is killing Christians, or anyone else, there. The air isn’t filled with hatred.

We saw a video about the huge underground developments in Singapore. They are building a vast network of tunnels attached to their clean, safe, comfortable train system. I told my wife that if anyone tried to build something like that in the US, enraged hippies would glue themselves to the pavement and scream bloody murder.

I noted the difference between videos about Singapore’s trains and videos about American subways. American videos are about terrorism and other crimes. Black people shoving whites and Asians onto the tracks. Turnstile-jumpers. Ghetto kids terrorizing passengers, doing stupid dances and demanding to be paid. Gropers. Daniel Penney being prosecuted for saving strangers from a disgusting bully.

We loved the trains in Singapore, and also in Hong Kong, for that matter. So clean, safe, and pleasant. I went to college in New York, and I can’t tell you how strange it seems to me to go down into a subway system and not be immersed in the intense aroma of fermented pee.

I told my wife Singapore reminded me of the New Jerusalem, in the Revelation. A perfect city full of peaceful, well-intended, like-minded people. Maybe that’s why it appeals to us. In our spirits, we know we are supposed to live in a place like the New Jerusalem.

We have been to Egypt, Turkey, Ireland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mexico, Switzerland, and Italy. After Israel, we both agree that we would rather go to Singapore a third time than revisit any of the other places.

Egypt is dirty and crazy. Ireland is pleasant but boring, and the food is not good. Turkey is nice, but not nice enough to make you dream of going back soon. Rome was one giant tourist trap, and it was full of pushy illegal aliens who had no manners. Switzerland is gorgeous, but they have jacked prices up to the point where tourists feel insulted, and it’s also filling up with Indian and Chinese tourists who are not always fun to be around. Staying in Cancun is like sleeping in a college bar.

I never thought I would say this, but I am not interested in seeing Switzerland again. I used to love it, but that has changed. You only have to charge me $7.50 for tap water once to make me understand that I’m unwelcome.

My wife doesn’t want to go back to Rome, ever. The illegals really got to her. She says she would make an exception so our children could see it. I liked Rome a little better, and I like Italians (real Italians in Europe), but I’m not hot to go back.

Singapore feels like home. When we arrived for our second visit, we felt like we were home again. It’s the strangest thing.

Singaporeans do everything well. They shame Americans every day.

To get back to the day I just had, I don’t know what I did to deserve a life this good. Actually, I know I didn’t do anything. I was rotten and immature. I deserve evil, and the Lord gave me the good he deserves.

I look forward to a bright future. The millennium. The New Jerusalem. Seeing God face to face. And maybe before the rapture or the day my body gives out, I’ll get to see Singapore a few more times.

God Tells Everyone the Same Things

Last night before my wife and I prayed for other people, I asked her how she was feeling about the way things were going in the world. She said she felt detached.

That’s exactly how I feel.

Her sense is that this world is not a place where we can be accepted and build a future.

You turn on the TV or the PC and look at the world, and what do you see? Homosexuals, including cross-dressers, protesting in favor of Hamas, which has been known to throw homosexuals off tall buildings. Millionaire sluts rapping about their genitalia, saying things so crude, even a sailor would be grossed out. Satanists and witches praying aloud before government meetings. Transvestites reading stories to kids in libraries and schools funded by taxes. Many non-Muslim members of the United Nations accusing Israel of genocide for defending itself against…genocide. Public protests, some violent, against businesses that are Jewish but not affiliated with Israel.

Lesbians in colorful sashes, pretending to be priests, running large organizations that pretend to be Christian churches. Demoniacs vandalizing electric cars because Elon Musk helped a Republican get elected. Violence against Republicans that has become routine. Transvestites performing a big percentage of mass shootings for reasons they seem to be unable to articulate. Ads for Jaguar cars featuring sexual deviants but no cars and no normal men.

My wife watches a family on Youtube. Supposedly, this is a Christian family. She tells me they used to pray and talk about God on their channel.

Yesterday, I saw a video in which they dropped their daughter off at Berkeley, which stands out among schools dominated by left-wing insanity. They were thrilled for her. They toured her dorm floor. They went into the bathroom. It’s unisex. They thought it was funny that their daughter would be using the toilet and showers with young men.

If this is what Christians are like now, no wonder unbelievers are delusional.

I can’t send my son to Berkeley or any other far-left academic nuthouse. Any mainstream university, in other words. Imagine what they would put him through. Lectures about whiteness and patriarchy. Lectures about transphobia. If he stood up for his beliefs, he would be the most persecuted student on campus. He could never fit in or be treated fairly. He would be a target, and he would get low grades from vindictive instructors. He would be excluded from opportunities. He would receive negative recommendations. He would probably be thrown out of classrooms.

We had lunch at Costco yesterday. Costco is pretty woke. They gave us weird cup lids intended to discourage straw use, and they provided paper straws that leak and get soggy. To protect the sea turtles from plastic. In a country that dumps zero garbage at sea.

Before we visited Costco, we took my baby son to the dermatologist. They gave me a tablet so I could tell them his history. They wanted to know his gender identity. This is the second provider that has done this to us. A pediatric facility asked what my son’s preferred pronouns were.

“Detached” is the right word. We are now like disaster tourists. We are here. We observe. We can’t join, though, and we don’t want to stay. It’s like having a day pass at a mental asylum.

Both of us are aware there is no future for our family here within the system. We will live out our lives as outsiders.

This isn’t the old America. I watched World War Two veterans talking about their experiences the other day, and by modern standards, some of them sounded like religious fanatics. Mainstream guys. One said an angel had appeared to him to tell him he wasn’t going to be hurt. That kind of talk used to be considered normal.

The other day, I saw someone on the web suggesting that really smart people should be working to solve hard problems for society. Cancer and so on. As though able people owed society something. Not true.

I thought of what Yeshua said: “The poor, you will always have with you.” More broadly, he meant that the world’s problems were not going to be solved.

Mankind is cursed. It’s in rebellion. Things aren’t going to go as they should during this age, because we consistently reject the only source of real, enduring blessings. We will never have clean, cheap, inexhaustible energy. We will always have disease. We will always have violence and poverty. We will never stop doing the things that cause our misfortunes, so there is a limit to what we should do to fix the world. It’s a treadmill.

Secular solutions have some importance, but our main obligation in life is to expand the kingdom of heaven. Look after your own soul. Do what you can to help others become like Yeshua. Give to people who need help. Deliver people from demons and work miracles if God permits. You’re not really obligated to work 16 hours a day in a lab, trying to synthesize a chemical that obliterates every kind of tumor or cures AIDS.

Mary was right, and Martha was wrong.

It’s more important to help one person go on to eternal salvation than it is to fight global problems which are not going away. Salvation is permanent and priceless. Fighting worldly problems is Whack-a-Mole.

It’s hard for people who are close to God to position themselves so they have the power to do what unbelievers think is good. If you’re a genius Christian, and you try to do groundbreaking cancer research, Satan will probably see to it you end up assisting incompetent DEI hires or teaching biology to bored high school students. Satan’s kids blackball Christians.

It’s even hard to make headway in churches. I tried to work as an armorbearer. I created fantastic food for a church kitchen. I tried to get into prison ministry. I helped drive poor people to church. I shared revelation with people. My pastors and many of the other volunteers treated me like a troublemaker. They crippled and shut down programs. They promoted sychophants and nincompoops and made sure I was always an outsider.

I can’t complain. John the Baptist was a priest by inheritance, and instead of taking a position of honor in the temple, he had to live in the desert and eat bugs. Religious people beat Yeshua and had him murdered, and they murdered the prophets as well as many Jews who believed in Yeshua. A secular Jew whose father built the temple murdered John.

If you belong to God, you can’t join the herd. If you’re part of the herd, and you think you belong to God, you are deluding yourself. It’s normal for Christians to serve Satan and the flesh while claiming they’re sold out to God. Look at Chris Pratt. I could make a long list.

We always want to have our cake and eat it, too, and we are better at lying to ourselves than lying to other people.

My wife and I feel as though the end is just about here, so it doesn’t matter much what we do. America has fallen away for good. But does that mean the rapture is close? The area that is now Turkey used to be the boiler room of Earth’s Christian activity, but it went Muslim, and the world didn’t end. Europe took over the lead role in spreading the gospel, and then it turned on God, and the world didn’t end. Should America be different?

I think it is, because there is no other part of the world that can take our place. When Turkey fizzled, Europe took over. When Europe fizzled, America took over. All the other countries and continents have already been evangelized heavily, and they are not making progress. We’re not going to see China or Africa or India take America’s place.

When Europe faded, the US was ready to step in. Nobody is ready to step in now that the US is spiritually almost dead.

Chris Pratt is an interesting case. Unbelievers in Hollywood love him. He’s a nice guy, and he doesn’t make waves. That last part is important. Satan’s kids often take up for Christians who don’t make waves. If you actually accomplish anything, they go after you.

Pratt makes movies that endorse fornication. The characters aren’t Christians. God isn’t involved in the scripts.

Come on.

He’s a nice guy. A goodfella. A good old boy. Tamed and declawed.

I feel like the world is stuck, like a car that has run out of pavement and gotten stuck in mud. We seem to have reached the end of a journey. None of it seems to matter.

I don’t feel like attending to home repairs, yard work, or my other responsibilities. I don’t feel like planning. I don’t feel like watching our spending.

If the county had forced me to sell my house so it could be demolished, and I were outside waiting for someone to pick my family up and drive us to a new home, I wouldn’t run back inside and start painting the kitchen.

Maybe things will change, the rapture won’t come during my lifetime, and I’ll feel differently about the future. I hope not, though. It would be wonderful to be raptured and forget about this place.

VIP Service. Make that “VVIP”

Today my wife and I drove to Gainesville to take food to Marvin, my parrot friend who has been ill since night before last.

This morning, I got a bad report. The vet said Marv seemed somewhat worse off than the day before. I discussed the situation with her. We talked about ways to stimulate Marv’s appetite.

I asked what they had been feeding Marv, and she mentioned seeds, carrots, tomatoes, and greens.

Very discouraging. I had to tell her Marv would turn down those vegetables regardless of his condition. I expected this, however, because the vet is a lady, she works at a university, and women and university employees lean left. Leftists are very self-righteous about food, and they project their own beliefs onto others, sometimes including animals.

I mentioned the possibility of trying meat, which Marv loves. Unsurprisingly, the vet made a wild claim, saying African greys were essentially “vegan.”

This is an old wives’ tale. Parrots are omnivores. African greys mainly eat seeds in the wild, along with other plant parts, but they also eat bugs and carcasses. They have been seen swarming on dead animals.

I said Marv liked yogurt, but she said parrots were not set up to eat dairy foods. Other vets have specifically recommended yogurt for birds, but okay.

I made rice with butter and salt, and I stirred a couple of eggs into it. I shelled some roasted peanuts and put them in a bowl. Off we went to visit Marv.

I was praying and commanding healing and so on most of the way up.

I appreciate everything they’re trying to do for Marv, but I am concerned that their prejudices may harm him.

They put us in an exam room. While we waited for them to bring Marv out to us, I was tense. Yesterday morning, he was in a bad way, and they had said he was worse today. When he came out, he looked a lot better than he had the previous morning. He was standing. He was alert. He talked. He wasn’t throwing up or seizing. He didn’t have poop stuck to his feathers.

They left us with him, and I took a spoon and fed him a tablespoon or so of the rice mixture. He wasn’t voracious, but he ate willingly. I got him to eat a tiny bit of a peanut. They brought some peanut butter on a spoon, and he ate a small amount.

I got to rub him and pet him and tell him what a great bird he was and how he had been a blessing to me all of his life.

When they came in to check on us, they were surprised to hear him talking. I guess he had been quiet since we left yesterday. He asked for food, saying, “Here you go, Marv.” He thanked me with his thank you noise. He said “bird toy” a few times. I think this is his new name for me.

I had to pick him up because I needed to smell him. When birds get fungus in their crops, they smell sour. He smelled like a hamburger. When I put him back in the cage, he surprised me by climbing on top of it. He could not have done that yesterday morning.

I didn’t want to pick him up, because he was somewhat weak and wanted rest, but I thought it was important.

I anointed Marv’s beak with oil and laid hands on him. We prayed for his healing, and I told God I believed his promise. He has said that if we lay hands on the sick, they will recover.

We got a call maybe 90 minutes after we left, and the vet said he was still relatively energetic. He didn’t crash from exhaustion when we left.

I keep saying “he.” Marvin laid a surprise egg two years ago.

That’s the situation. We had lunch at PF Chang’s. The Gainesville location is excellent. Now we’re at home, and Marv is still receiving care.

They didn’t look at Marv’s poop until today. I persuaded them to do it. Ordinarily, it’s the first thing a vet does. We are waiting for results.

They shot an antibiotic into him yesterday or today. I can’t recall. I think they should have done that at the start, because it was unlikely to do harm and could have turned out to be a quick cure. But I’m not a vet, so I am guessing.

From the natural standpoint, things are bad, but not clearly dire. I am approaching the situation from the supernatural direction as much as possible.

They now think he could have been poisoned by fumes from nonstick cookware. The old wisdom was that it was safe around birds unless it burned, but now there is suspicion that it can do cumulative harm even if you use it correctly. I find it hard to believe it’s the problem. I wouldn’t expect this issue to come on suddenly, over a few short hours.

When you smoke every day for 60 years, you don’t wake up one day with COPD or a huge tumor. When you drink too much, you don’t develop cirrhosis in a day. The vet says Teflon causes lung burns. Well, surely if Marvin had large lung burns, we would have seen some kind of evidence earlier. Generally, when you hear about birds being killed by Teflon, it happens over a few minutes because someone left a pan on the stove.

We didn’t do anything extraordinary with Teflon the day Marv got sick.

As far as I know, a burn is an acute injury, so it doesn’t sound like it fits Marv.

They’re shooting in the dark, to be honest. They are checking every angle, hoping something pays off. I think Marv has some kind of infection or ate a ball of rat poison or something. We recently had a mouse intrusion, and the mice stole rat poison and moved it around the house. I believe we kept Marv away from it, but I could be wrong.

I sprayed a piece of furniture with a bug product, and although Marv was never close to it, I suppose it could have affected him. The active ingredient is harmless to birds, but the carrier may not be.

I hope my little pal comes home tomorrow, and that we are able to give him at least 20 more years of improved care. God is kind and forbearing, and if he loves me, surely he loves Marvin. I remember how angry he got at the man in the parable who killed a pet sheep.

If you prayed for Marv, thank you and may God bless you.

One More Chance, Please God

This is a tough day.

Marvin, my sweet little feathered buddy of 28 years, had some seizures last night. I had to hold him and consider the possibility that he was dying in my hands. Seizures can be caused by things that are reversible, like low calcium levels, but they can also be caused by worse things.

I did what I could for him last night, and he pepped up and started playing with his toys, but in the morning, he was weak, so I took him to the animal hospital at the University of Florida in Gainesville. That is where he is now, having tests and receiving care. I have been praying and commanding the illness to go. I have been speaking blessings over Marvin.

My county is extremely conservative and full of Christians. Gainesville is different. A typical university town, it is a hotbed of white-hot socialism, Trump Derangement Syndrome, DeSantis Derangment Syndrom, imperialist feminism, perversion, wicca, and, presumably, antisemitism.

My wife and I got into the car with Marv, and of course, our son had to go, too. The people at the hospital took a long history and started work quickly. They were very nice to us.

I was highly distraught last night, and I was only a little less upset this morning. Having harm come to one of my pets has always been one of my worst fears. I lost my cockatoo, Maynard, 4 years ago, and it was very, very painful. Now Marv is having problems.

It’s terrible when something you have feared and fought to prevent for decades comes to pass.

I speak blessing over Marvin twice a day, and we include him in our daily prayers. I try not to do anything to open myself or my family to dangerous spirits. I think this is the best a human being can do.

When we left the hospital, my wife asked me if I had noticed something. She saw several women who helped us, including a veterinarian, and every single one had a huge septum ring hanging out of her nose.

She didn’t see the receptionist, who was an older woman. I believe she didn’t have a ring.

Anyway, it was very disturbing to be told that 80% of the women who helped us had these off-putting ornaments. They looked like they belonged to a cult. It really bothered me. I felt like I had just discovered that I was living in a horror movie.

A septum ring is supposed to be a way of expressing your individuality and your contempt for conformity, but in reality, nothing says you’re a conformist like a septum ring.

My son, true to form, blew out in his car seat, so my wife had to use the “family” restroom to clean him up. There was a women’s room and an everything room, but there was no men’s room. I suppose that was a deliberate insult.

My wife was hungry when we left, so we went to a nearby pizza place. It was a dirty little place with good reviews.

We had to stand to order, and then we filled our own drinks and waited for the food. When I got our drinks, I couldn’t find the straws. The lids had weird openings in them, much larger than would be needed for a straw. I realized the obvious, but hoping against hope, I asked where the straws were, and a young black man behind the counter told me they weren’t allowed to put them out where people could see them. He said, “It’s kind of weird.” I nodded and told him I understood.

While we were waiting for our food, a couple of big young ladies in long dresses came in and sat near us. The dresses were very similar. The kind of thing you would imagine Auntie Em and her friends to wear back in Kansas. I think they may be called prairie dresses.

The women were not good-looking, and they had big feet. They didn’t appear to be wearing brassieres. They had fairly large breasts that needed, but lacked, support. One of them was wearing what I would call gladiator sandals. They had no makeup on. One of them had sideburns, which I failed to notice at first. I thought she had just combed her hair down in front of her ears.

They looked bizarre, dressed so oddly and so similarly. Like they had just escaped from a Mormon commune.

Soon after they came in, my wife let me know they were both men.

This shocked me. Ordinarily, trans-whatevers are obvious. I wasn’t in the mood to be observant, and I guess the sagging breasts fooled me.

The smaller guy had a great big septum ring. I believe the other guy had one, too, but I’m not sure.

A feeling came over me. It said, “This world is lost.” I realized my family lived in a precious bubble. There are children of darkness where we live, but the Christian population is very large, and the wicked haven’t been able to take over. It’s an unusual place. Gainesville is more typical of America. Although it’s small, the university’s presence gives it a culture like a big city. Most Americans live in and around cities, and almost all cities are lost.

No men’s room. No straws unless you ask for them. A hog ring in almost every nose. Men proudly wafting around in frumpy cotton dresses with little or nothing underneath. This is my country now.

Importantly, such people control the university; a type of portal just about every American is required to pass through if he ever expects to be successful and accepted. Going to college has become like joining the Freemasons. It’s like becoming a Mormon in Utah. You don’t have to do it, but expect to be blackballed if you don’t.

American kids think they have to go to college, even if they’re going to become cops or Burger King managers, and nearly every college is controlled by perverts, socialists, witches, minority members who hate whites, antisemites, militant atheists, man-haters, America-slanderers, backers of Islamist terror, and every conceivable type of pagan. “You want your child to be a success? You have to give him to US first.”

It’s like putting your baby through the fire to Moloch, except the baby comes out alive with a diploma that entitles him to a fair shot at employment as a fungible cubicle occupant.

America is done. It is absolutely finished. It’s nice that Trump won, but it doesn’t mean the climate or the trend has changed. If the Democrats hadn’t put two vegetables in a row up against him, we would be looking at a fourth Obama term. America will probably elect a Democrat in 2028.

I told my wife we have no place in this world.

I had this feeling that our situation was like living in America while we were at war with Japan, supposedly in the Pacific, and suddenly noticing that people around us here were Japanese and looking forward to taking over.

I told her about the plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

People have decided they don’t need God in order to have pleasant lives. Worse, they have decided God is an obstacle. They have decided he is evil and that the world will progress and suddenly make a great leap forward (to borrow a phrase) when the world is rid of Christians as well as Jews.

Somehow Muslims aren’t considered problematic, in spite of mutilating girls’ genitals with kitchen knives, beating women for going outside with their faces uncovered, and murdering and hypocritically raping homosexual men.

I don’t know why the people we saw bought septum rings, apart from conformism. Maybe one or two of them think they’re close to God, and adopting a signature adornment of the children of darkness was just error. But seeing so many of them made me feel as though I were in a horror movie, waiting for someone to send an attack signal through the rings and yank the wearers into battle by their noses. A huge swarm of nose-ringed Agent Smiths.

To say I felt left out was an understatement.

It’s normal for younger people to make the mistake of altering their dress and appearance to upset older people, but it is very strange to see so many of them choose exactly the same ornament, as though they were threatened with prison time if they didn’t comply. Back in the Sixties, young people made all kinds of ill-conceived fashion and grooming choices, but there was way more variety. There was no single accessory nearly everyone felt compelled to wear.

While I thought about these things, I thought about the way my prayers have changed. These days I keep saying, “Yeshua, please come back and rule the world.” I want to cavalry to come save us. The waters are rising around us, and I don’t know how we are supposed to carve out futures for ourselves here. I don’t want us to become like Christians in Rome under Nero and Domitian.

As I was thinking about these things, I started to feel great peace about Marvin. I want Marvin to come back home and spend more years with us, but on the other hand, this world is a very bad place, and if God has decided Marvin should not have to be here when things get worse, then that’s how it is. Even a bird should not have to suffer here more than is necessary.

In somewhat-related news, I heard from my aunt the other day. The one who has been so abusive, and whom I believe uses the stubborn unsold remains of my grandparent’s estates to enrich herself and her family. She called about selling an inconsequential piece of land.

She couldn’t have been nicer. She behaved as though she had never attacked and insulted me, and she clearly expected me to act as though it had never happened.

I was polite.

She wanted to know if I still had my wife, which was a jarring question.

Now that I think about it, I guess it makes sense. I think her has been married three times. I have met three wives. There may have been others for all I know. Adultery and divorce are like musical chairs in her area. In most places, you ask a man how his wife is doing. In Eastern Kentucky, you ask if he’s still married to her.

My wife will have to sign things in order for the lot to be sold. Ostensibly, this is how she came into the conversation. My aunt asked if she were here with me. In America, I think she meant.

She asked about children, and I told her we had a son. She asked for photos, so I sent a couple, and she said he was “the cutest baby,” which is actually true. She asked if she could forward the pictures to her daughter, which was fine by me.

Before she hung up, she said it was good talking to me.

That could be the Parkinson’s talking for all I know. She has admitted she has some dementia because of it, and maybe she doesn’t remember insulting me and telling me she was going to do whatever she wanted with my inheritance regardless of my wishes. Strange thing for a fiduciary to say.

She likes bragging about her family; people whose relationships with me she helped end permanently. She told me she had an enormous grandson who was being recruited by Harvard for football as a high school sophomore. Harvard actually does that, although Ivy League schools don’t offer athletic scholarships.

My aunt’s family has had the misfortune to fall under the spell of Catholicism, the quasi-pagan and dominant branch of nominal Christianity. Her daughter married a Catholic, and my aunt converted. The city where my cousin lives has several prominent Catholic high schools dedicated to producing pro athletes, which is an extremely perverse goal for a Christian organization.

I don’t believe or disbelieve her. I don’t know what the truth is. This is the same aunt who said her daughter was likely to become Miss Kentucky, which wasn’t anywhere near true. She also said her son had been accepted by the University of Michigan’s prestigious law school when it was actually the University of WEST Michigan, which is the single worst law school in America. He ended up going to the second-worst.

Maybe the boy really is being courted by Harvard. This is not a school known for good football teams, so it wouldn’t be that remarkable if a big, smart kid who was playing pretty well in the 10th grade seemed like a fine prospect. They can’t get really good athletes because they all go elsewhere.

My understanding is that his dad is an accomplished individual and a good family man.

It amazes me that any Christian allows his son to play high school or college football, and no Christian should be in the NFL. Football takes a toll on the body, it causes brain damage, most players don’t get rich, most who get rich lose their money, it develops negative character traits like aggression, competitiveness, materialism, and pride, and it subjects players to armies of aggressive sluts. Combine all this with the fact that college and NFL football only exist because of gambling, and it’s a very unwholesome picture.

I thought about the horrible atmosphere at Harvard. I would not be happy if Harvard wanted my son. I want him to have a business and investments, and I want him to have a wonderful Christian wife and Spirit-led friends. I don’t want him to be tormented and assimilated by sick, vicious freaks for three years and eight months at my great expense.

She said another grandson was getting degrees in anthrolopogy and archaeology. I said, “I guess he’ll be a professor.” I thought that sounded positive.

Try and imagine a field more worthless and anti-Christian than anthropology. And archaeology sounds like employer repellent to me.

I had to take anthropology as an elective while I was getting a physics major and a math minor, and I found the whole business contemptible. The professor taught us made-up, implausible, unclever theories from a thin paperback text, and my studies for the entire semester took up less than one day. The final was a multiple-choice test. I got an A for breathing. Physics took about that much work every week. Physics was so hard, math seemed like a gut major in comparison. I spent about 4 hours a week doing homework for multiple advanced math courses, and I put in several times that much work for physics.

These things I say are literally true. Even good physics students are often unable to finish their homework, and my math courses, while hard by college standards, at least generated homework people could reasonably be expected to complete in a few hours a week.

With math homework, you quit when you know the problems are solved. With physics, you quit so you can get three hours of sleep before showering and going to class. You hope everyone else did as badly as you did, and usually, they did.

At the University of Texas, as a grad student, I asked my quantum professor about a particularly hard problem he had given us. I found it so hard to finish the math, which, I believe, was a long string of vector operations that would be easy to fumble, I bought a program called Mathematica and made my computer do it. I didn’t know if the result was right. I felt panicked.

He told me he hadn’t been able to do the problem. He asked me what I had come up with. True story.

His CV says he got his master’s at Cambridge with first class honors. Cambridge is where Newton and Hawking worked. Couldn’t do the homework he assigned.

His name is Fitzgerald. He’s still there. I should fly out there and egg his house.

Anthropology is just gossip, like the Talmud or the theories aborigines made up around campfires to explain their universe to their children. Giving your life to it is an appalling waste. It’s an insult to God, like playing golf. It says you have no idea how valuable your time here is.

It’s like going to college to become a phrenologist.

It also challenges the creation story, which is factual.

I’ll give you an example of anthropological science. You can Google to find out the actual details so you can repeat them in a comment as though you’re smarter than I am, although I’m actually just too lazy to check. A theory named after someone who may be named Hanson or Hansen says that people close to the equator have dark skin and long limbs, while the opposite is true in colder regions. Well…Eskimos. Mongolians. Thais. Indonesians. Slavs. Scandinavians. Amazon Basin Indians. See if you can see how they violate the theory. That’s some great science, that is.

Archaeology is a legitimate field of study. My main problem with it is that every time shaky research tends to discredit the Bible, it is lauded as proof, and then years later, the research is always discredited, after the damage is done. And academics who have been shown up don’t make any effort to inform the public. People keep quoting their nonsense decades later as though it were fact.

By its very nature, archaeology is incomplete. We have only dug up a tiny fraction of what’s out there. But archaeologists love to draw firm conclusions based on fragmented evidence.

These fields are bad choices. You shouldn’t pay for your kids to throw away years of their lives so they can become Uber drivers or do data entry, which is where liberal arts people often end up unless they become academics and try to join the opposite sex. Or they go to law school.

My mother got a degree in social work, so she had to become a realtor. You know those people you end up talking to when you call Mastercard about a charge you don’t recognize? Liberal arts majors.

If you want to have a revealing conversation, get together with a bunch of college graduates at least 35 years old and ask them what their majors were and what they do for a living. See how many of those history majors became historians. See how many of those philosophy majors became professional philosophers.

I don’t know this grandson. His name was not familiar to me because my family’s interest in including me in anything dried up and fell off years ago.

The family I loved and treasured lives only in my memories. He must be my aunt’s son’s son. I don’t know his siblings’ names or how many of them there are. I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. I hope he finds a career that pays well. We prayed for my aunt’s whole family last night.

College should serve some purpose, but I would estimate that for most kids, it does not. I think most college kids major in fecklessly-chosen dead-end fields. The lofty notion that learning for its own sake justifies college rings a little hollow when the learning can cost half a million dollars and leave you years older, penniless and in uncancellable debt, filling out applications at Marshall’s and Walmart.

Liberal arts degrees made little sense even before the Internet, but now you can stuff your head with all sorts of knowledge all day for nearly nothing, so why would you pay someone thousands to tell you what Huckleberry Finn and Pride and Prejudice were about? And then end up not reading them and cramming from Cliff’s Notes.

Before I gave up secular entertainment, I saw some clips from a movie called The Company Men. It’s about a company that built ships. The white collar employees weren’t brilliant naval architects and engineers. They were unremarkable people who did work anyone could do. Negotiation. Sales. Submitting TPS reports.

Future AI targets.

America’s manufacturing base collapsed. Nobody wanted to build ships in America. The company cut lots and lots and lots of jobs.

Ben Affleck played a young executive who made 6 figures, had a nice house the bank owned, drove a Boxster the bank owned, and belonged to a country club. He was cocky. He thought he was important and too valuable and just plain wonderful to fire. Then they canned him without warning, and after being rejected by a long list of potential employers, he ended up getting a pity job from his brother-in-law, a carpenter.

I watched this movie and thought, “What do you expect to happen when you get paid a ton of money to do a job anyone else can do? What do you expect to happen when you’re not remarkable, you got a liberal arts degree, and you never developed any actual skills or learned anything useful?”

If this were a real company, the people who had important skills and knowledge that couldn’t be picked up in a month by a random Circle K clerk would have kept their jobs to the bitter end. If the company had gone under, other companies would have gone after them. They wouldn’t have chased the sociology or art history majors.

A doctor can always find work. An accountant can always find work. A guy who writes conjecture-filled papers about Sumerian poetry is not so blessed.

To circle back around to the point, I don’t see how anthropology and mainstream archaeology could have any importance to a Christian. They promote all sorts of faulty anti-Christian notions, and to make it in these fields, you pretty much have to buddy up to people who hate your religion. I don’t think an informed Spirit-led Christian could want anything to do with these fields.

My cousin the lawyer is not Spirit-led. That is obvious. The most reasonable guess is that his son is far from God and never had a chance to get to know him. I have a feeling law school is in his future.

I feel extremely distant from my family. They live in a different universe. Nearly all of them are in real trouble, but they don’t know it. I wish I could help them.

When my dad died, I took his ashes to Kentucky to be buried. He had an astonishing testimony of conversion and reconciliation with God. At the sparsely-attended viewing, I told the whole story to my cousin the lawyer as well as his wife and another male cousin. Didn’t make a dent. My aunt wasn’t there, but I’m sure I told her the story by phone, and she only got worse after that. One cousin visited me for Christmas the following year, and I baptized her in my pool, so I have hope for her.

I have heard from the animal hospital, and at the time of the call, Marv was perking up. They had run a number of tests. Marv had eaten a little. They seem to expect him to make it through the night.

What a privilege it has been, owning that sweet little bird. I have been a miserable excuse for a caretaker. I hope God sends Marv home to me so I can do better and better every day.

Wanted: a Machine That Sews Ralph Lauren Horses on Baby Clothes

The crown prince keeps surprising us.

My son is now in his 6th month, which means he is not yet 6 months old (for those who didn’t pay attention in math class). A couple of weeks back, he started imitating us.

He was already smiling back at us. I don’t know if that’s imitation or not. His new thing is imitating hand movements.

When he was maybe a month old, I decided infancy was no excuse for laziness, so I started doing what I call “the math game.” I made a circle with my hand and said “zero.” I showed him one finger and said “one.” You can probably guess the rest. If not, send me an email.

This is one of his favorite things on earth. He glows with a kind of ecstasy when his parents play the math game. He grabs our fingers like he is touching something miraculous and awe-inspiring.

I don’t know why I call it a game, since all he has to do is lie there.

A couple of weeks back, if memory serves, his mother told me he was trying to make numbers with his own hands. I thought she could be giving him too much credit, but I was open to the possibility.

Today I was making red chicken curry, and the boy was watching from his swing. I kept talking to him and acknowledging him because I know he craves my attention and feels rejected if I do something like walking through a room without talking to him.

I looked over, and he was trying to get my attention by holding his left hand out and extending various fingers at me. He was not able to do numbers, but he was varying the fingers he showed me and looking at my eyes to see how I reacted.

I have no idea whether this is normal, but it surprised me. He can’t talk. He can’t walk. He doesn’t seem to know his face is like my face, because the only expression he repeats back to me is a smile. But he knows his hands are like his parents’ hands. I guess this is easier to figure out that facial expressions, because he can see his hands, but he can’t see his face.

He is also sitting up, sort of. If you sit him down on a flat surface, he will eventually flop over and give up, but if you sit him against something, particulary in a corner with good support, he is happy to remain in a sitting position and play.

Still no crawling. I don’t think he’s trying. He climbs up his mother’s side in bed just fine, but I don’t think he has motivation to try to crawl over any kind of distance, because he never has to.

He seems to have passed out of the phase where he stuck his tongue out at everything. It made for some great pictures. He is now in the phase where he screams at the top of his lungs just to hear himself. He loves it. It sounds like someone being tortured, but he does it when he’s very happy.

He scratches himself. Particularly his crotch. I hope he quits doing that soon. When the diaper comes off, the scratching starts.

The other day, he tried to make his mother shut up. At least we think he did. We were doing something we are not supposed to do. We disagreed about something in front of him, and his mother was getting a little loud. He reached up and tried to shut her mouth, more than once. Or at least it looked that way.

Solid food is going okay. He has reacted to at least one food by turning red. Hives. His digestion seemed to bother him yesterday, so we decided to give him most of a day with nothing but milk and formula.

I hate formula, but keeping up with this kid is not easy. He keeps growing, and he is taking in more calories than ever. The other day, I grabbed one of his hands, and I realized it wasn’t the tiny baby hand I had gotten used to loving. It was like a big, thick pork chop. His weight has more than doubled, and he has grown over an inch per month.

Lugging him around in parking lots and businesses is getting difficult. Between him and the hefty car seat, it’s like carrying a big suitcase. His mom uses carriers a lot now; those sling things that wrap around the mother’s body. We are going to have to get real and start taking the stroller with us.

His personality is wonderful. He loves us intensely. He stares at us. When I sleep, he stares at me and smiles because when I snore, he thinks I’m talking to him.

He likes people. He smiles at them and finds them fascinating. The other day we ate at a restaurant, and he sat facing another table. A couple was seated there. When I picked him up to leave, the husband told us they were not okay with him leaving. They had been having a pantomime conversation with him while we ate.

He still cries a lot. I think he hates being away from his mother. When he has something to do, he forgets about her, but that lasts 40 minutes, tops. Then he wants what he probably sees as the rest of him back.

She spends a huge amount of time with him. Too much, I think. I find her lying in the bed in the middle of the day, flying him around over her like an airplane. We have a recliner for nursing in the corner of the bedroom, and she must be spending 8 hours a day there with my son sitting on her. I have been making her get dressed and leave the room, and he usually leaves with her.

He is crazy about his mother, and the feeling is mutual. She sings him songs she made up. “Changing Baby’s Diaper.” That’s a major hit. The other day I found a $500 American Express charge for Ralph Lauren baby clothes. We had to have a chat. She loves dressing him up.

I complained to some female friends, and they backed my wife up. I should have seen that coming.

I didn’t know there were five hundred dollars’ worth of baby clothes on Earth. My wife is now on a spending moratorium that goes well into next month.

He wakes me up. He can’t wait for me to wake on my own. He gazes at me and waits. I hear his noises, and I look over and see that radiant, overjoyed face staring at me, like I’m the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I grab him and play with him, and he thinks it’s fantastic until he abruptly gets hungry and starts crying for his mother.

He is trying to talk, but it’s all gibberish so far. I suppose we will hear a real word very shortly. It should make me happy, but I’ll be sad because he’s such a wonderful baby. I want him to grow up to be a man, but I also want to keep the little guy we have right now.

He has been chewing his toes for quite a while. Ever since he could get at them. I don’t know if he knows they’re his.

He’s in a crib now. He got too tall for the bassinet. We shoved the crib up beside the bed where the bassinet had been, and now we have to think about the day he will move to the nursery and we won’t have him with us all night.

Every time he does something new, I feel a mixture of joy and sadness. I wonder if parents look forward to having second children because they miss the baby experience.

I have said I didn’t know what I did to deserve such a wonderful baby, but the truth is, I know I didn’t do anything. I didn’t get what I deserved. I got an extraordinary gift in spite of all the evil I had done.

We are involving him in prayer now, so we expect him to consider this normal, and we believe he will know God personally early on. We pray he will be saved and baptized with the Holy Spirit early on. We can’t guarantee that he will be a man of God, but I believe he will. He’s getting help we never got.

The Opposite of Peter Pan Syndrome

My buddy Mike sent me a link to a video about Jackson Laux, and I was very impressed.

The web says Jackson, or maybe I should call him Mr. Laux because he is so grown up, is 9 years old. He is Internet-famous for his love of tractors, especially John Deere. He has appeared in lots of videos. He has a spic-and-span shop. He has multiple tractors. He can talk all day about them. Their strengths and weaknesses and so on. He really enjoys what he’s doing.

As a Christian, I find Mr. Laux interesting, because he helps me understand what most parents do wrong.

When I was a kid, my dad made very good money. I should know, because I have all the money he never spent. So we went on vacations to Europe to broaden our minds, right? We had music instruction, tutors, and all sorts of help with interests that could be lucrative and fulfilling later in life, right? Well, no. My dad was cheap. We had furniture from discount outlets in the Carolinas. We had cars we got at cost from my mother’s father’s dealership. My sister and I didn’t have much in the way of toys. Another kid down the block gave me hand-me-down toys and clothes. When we traveled, we went to see my mom’s family in Kentucky or we went to the Keys, which were a short drive away.

My hobby was TV. My dad’s hobby, which consumed hours of his life every day. I sat in front of TV sets and ate ice cream.

I had interests, but it never occurred to me to ask my parents to support them. To them, every non-necessity they bought for me was either a toy or a gift. Frivolous. The only exceptions were books, which they didn’t mind paying for, and two banjos. They would never have bought me tools, a tractor, a welder…no way. They would never have put $10,000 in an investment account and taught me what to do with it. They would never have bought me a rental property and helped me manage it.

You go to school. You get B’s or better. You become a lawyer or maybe a doctor. That’s what you do. This was their limited understanding.

My mother didn’t have much in the way of vision, and neither did my dad, but he was worse, because he didn’t care. He didn’t spend time with his kids. He had no idea who our teachers were or what subjects we were taking. He forgot our birthdays. Once, he came home drunk, with no idea it was my birthday. I was using a music stand my mother had bought for $8.00. When he realized what day it was, he asked me how I liked my gift, and he didn’t buy me anything else.

My mother made some effort to interest me in science. I’ll give her that. She enrolled me in a mail-order program that sent me little science kits. She tried to interest me in coin collecting, which was dull, given that there was almost nothing available to spend.

Here I am, an adult with a thousand interests. Writing. Music. Machining. Welding. Cooking. Science. Engineering. Maintaining my land. Building things. Photography. And my parents never managed to set me up with a single activity. Not one! Yes, I got banjo lessons, but the banjo is a dead-end instrument, and music lessons are nothing if you don’t learn to read and write music.

Photography is actually a very profitable profession if you have the gift, and by now I know I have it. I have taken a lot of excellent pictures. I could have made money with cameras.

My parents failed. Now let’s look at my buddy Mike.

He has two sons, and they started life near where I live. Mike spoke to one of their teachers. According to Mike, regarding his son, the teacher said, “He be real smart.”

When he saw the pickle his sons were in, Mike moved to New Hampshire, where they have better public schools. When one of his sons turned out to be a gifted football player, he moved to the DC area and put him in a famous sports high school. When the time came to think about college, Mike’s son was connected with scouts. He didn’t become a pro in the usual sense of the word, but he did receive a free college education, and he is a happy, very successful adult.

Mike lived across the street from me, and his parents didn’t do much to start him off in life. His mother died when he was about 16, and his dad’s involvement with him dried up. His parents can’t take credit for the way he raised his sons, and neither can his wife, who gave him custody during their divorce and then ran off to pursue her career. Mike’s sons are doing better than he did. Mike had to learn to hustle when he was their age, taking whatever job was available or creating his own jobs.

Mr. Laux did not get a job at age three and save and invest and buy tractors and a shop. No one has told me this. I know it because I’m not an idiot. No little kid does that. Even Mozart had an aggressive manager. Mr. Laux’ parents encouraged him in his dream and also financed it heavily. They paid for everything. They knew the difference between spoiling a kid with toys and investing in his future.

As a result, barring unforeseen problems, Mr. Laux will be self-supporting when most kids are rotting their brains with video games and dope, and he will not have to waste 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars at a university where he will be pushed to become an antisemitic, God-hating, emasculated, demon-worshiping, drug-using, socialist pervert, given a useless degree in English or History, and then relegated to a cubicle farm.

I will have my son’s back with regard to any wise pursuit that interests him. That doesn’t include getting an English degree or starting a band. He can study STEM fields. He can start a business. He can learn to invest. I’ll help him learn instruments and languages. I will never tell him things I buy that are related to his wise pursuits are frivolous or that he should think I’m generous for buying them. That would be like telling him I’m generous for paying his pediatrician.

I wish I could go back in time about 50 years and give my autopilot parents a good talking-to. It might have given my mother ideas. My dad wouldn’t have paid any attention, because he didn’t care. I wish I could go back and talk to my young self, but I was underdeveloped and hardheaded thanks to my parents, so I don’t know if I would have listened.

I might have listened. I remember a few times in my past when appalled strangers who knew my parents were blowing it told me things that stuck.

My parents didn’t know God. They never heard from the Holy Spirit. We didn’t pray together. I rarely saw the inside of a church. They imparted virtually no wisdom to me. They didn’t cultivate a single useful habit in me. I didn’t have the natural character to raise myself properly. It’s a wonder I’m not living in a refrigerator box.

The Customer is Always Wrong

I had a sad experience with pride today.

I was running around with a friend, and we decided to meet another friend for lunch. Both of these guys had tried a local burger joint, and they liked it, so that’s where we went.

It’s a mom and pop joint, literally, in a strip mall. They serve burgers somewhat like the ones from Five Guys. They use sirloin beef. The fries may be frozen, but they are prepared well. You can expect to pay a little more than Five Guys, I think. The price structure is not clear, for reasons I will explain.

The place is very clean. The couple (the mom and pop) that run it are very nice, or at least the mom is. We didn’t talk to the pop. There is plenty of parking.

You order at a counter, and you wait until they call you. Then you take your food to your table. You have to clean up your own mess afterward.

The owners were the only people working there today, but there was a tip jar on the counter anyway. In a self-serve restaurant.

They don’t take credit cards. It’s cash or nothing. The mom told us it would cost her $24,000 per year to process cards, and she wasn’t paying it. They had an ATM in back. The ATM charged one of my friends $3, jacking the cost of his meal up considerably.

I tried to order a burger and a drink, thinking it would be cheaper than a burger, drink, and fries. The mom said something weird about discounting the food by $2 because I was not using their ATM. She said this made the combo cheaper than a burger and drink. I don’t see how that could be true, since the burger and drink should also be affected by the ATM discount, but whatever, I didn’t want to get into it, so I paid and sat down.

Why wasn’t the discount $3? I don’t know.

My complaints:

1. No credit cards? Paying cash is considered a hassle these days. Personally, I have chosen to avoid restaurants many times because I didn’t have cash on me. The owners don’t know I avoided their restaurants, because I didn’t write them letters saying, “I avoided your restaurant.” They probably never realized they were killing their own businesses. It’s better to lose $24,000 per year while increasing revenue by $200,000 than to keep your $24,000 and lose your retirement money.

2. Sirloin? No. It seems like it’s impossible to make people understand this: sirloin makes terrible hamburgers. It’s dry and has the consistency of pressed sawdust. It does not work. Steak and hamburger are two different things. You want more fat. You want 80/20 lean/fat, which means ground chuck. It’s THE perfect burger meat. Better than rib eyes. Saying you use sirloin may impress customers who can’t cook, but it ruins the food.

3. Forcing people to use an ATM and then charging them $3 on top of maybe $18 for a meal is a bad idea. This should be obvious.

4. They smash the burgers down so they’re practically a film. This makes the crumbly nature of sirloin more obvious. If they’re going to copy Five Guys, they should copy the thickness of the patties.

5. The burgers were not hot. Mine was lukewarm. Maybe they were waiting for fries to cook. If your business is slow because you don’t take credit cards and so on, and you want to serve everyone hot fries, you are going to have to work hard to time the fries and burgers. If you mess up and start the fries too late, the burgers will get cold. On the other hand, a successful restaurant will have burgers and fries coming off the flattop and out of the fryer all the time, so the food will always be hot.

6. Pop, the cook, barely put any condiments or toppings on the burger. Trying to save money? Bad cook? Both?

7. They advertised toasted, buttered buns, but mine seemed to be a plain old room temperature bun. Maybe they toasted it a little. I didn’t notice any toasting or butter. And the bun seemed thick because I could see through the burger. Okay, I exaggerate. A bit.

They’re going to go out of business if they don’t change. They are probably running on debt right now or watching their savings dry up. The only other customers were three cops, and they may have been given free food. That’s common.

A few easy changes could fix everything in a month.

I went to the web and wrote a review, hoping to be helpful. This shows how naive I still am in my old age. Restaurant owners who like advice are extremely rare. They are more likely to respond and tell you off. Before going out of business.

I looked at the review score: 4.6 out of 5, with over 600 reviews. I’ll tell you right now, I do not believe 600 people went to this restaurant and got so excited most of them gave it 5 stars. I think they bought reviews.

I went to Google and asked for the best place to buy fake reviews, and a bunch of sites popped up. Examples: Reliablereviews.com and Buyreviewz.com. The second site will give you 50 5-star reviews for $420. So 600 would cost about $5000. I can see a business owner paying that instead of swallowing his pride. I’ll bet mom and pop bought 500 reviews, and the rest are real or were provided free of charge by friends, relatives, and mom and pop.

There are bad reviews, and they say exactly what I said. Take cards. Fix the meat. Serve the burgers hot.

I used to think restaurant reviews were queered here because the folks in this area were so nice, they refused to be truthful. Now I think review farms are the reason.

I went to a couple of AI sites to get more information. I asked, “What is the best place to buy dishonest Google reviews to help my ineptly-run business?” Google, Grok, and ChatGPT refused to help me, thank goodness.

I was given similar lectures by all three sites. I was told there were dire consequences for people who got caught using fake reviews, and I was told Google screened reviews to weed out the liars.

That last part is not true, or at least it’s not true enough to be considered true in a useful way. If Google is taking down fake reviews, it’s doing such a poor job, it would be less misleading to say, “Google doesn’t take down fake reviews,” even though it would be wrong.

Check out this review from “Arimas 03”:

!! It is cash only!! Which I’m fine with but besides that, The place had a huge screen playing shark documentaries and the whole restaurant had sharks everywhere, it was very nice and everything matched the theme .this place has one of the best burgers I’ve had. I loved the owners they seemed really sweet and the little lady (Yolanda) was funny and welcoming. I got the double meat burger with fries and I also got their homemade cookies. Best cookie I ever had. I will definitely be back. Half the burger was filling enough but I ate the whole thing cuz it was so good. Time for a nap,

Ms. Arimas has a total of 4 Google reviews, and guess what? All are 5-star. Here’s another:

Elayne was great. She had a bubbly and sweet personality. Made us feel welcomed and comfortable. Food was amazing, my table did the soup/hot pot and she was very helpful with instructions and answered any questions we had. Definitely will be back and I recommend receiving service from her.

Another encomium for “sweet,” welcoming owners!

Here’s one for a “facial spa”:

Love love love the vibe. Crystal always gets me right with my lashes. Definitely coming back to her

Five stars! Funny how she always knows the owners personally.

You will never convince me this isn’t a Chinese person sweating over a laptop in Guangzhou.

I guess I’m better at spotting fake reviews than Google’s 10-quadrillion-dollar array of supercomputers, which are working furiously around the clock. Reviewers lie, so of course, Google lies about chasing lying reviewers. Let’s all lie! It doesn’t matter, right? We’re all speaking “our” truths, I guess.

I don’t think Google cares. I think Google’s attitude is like the police’s. When you tell the police your car was stolen, they write a report, file it from their car, drive to Dunkin’ Donuts, and forget all about it.

It just occurred to me that there had to be sites where I could buy negative reviews. I checked, and they exist. See Bigapplehead.com.

This is the kind of thing that makes me wish for the rapture. The Internet comes along, and suddenly little people have a voice. Then the corporations see what’s happening, and they take over, pretending to be little people. They crowd the little people out. They ban little people for saying things they don’t like. They pay to have their own profiles raised. This puts the the little people right where they were to start with.

Human beings make me want to puke.

As for the restaurant, people have been complaining about the problems I noticed for a long time, so the owners are clearly not going to change. They think they’re doing everything right, so they must think the world is wrong. Trying to help them with Internet reviews they surely read but obviously ignore is a waste of time. I expect their restaurant and their investment to vanish.

When they are working in other people’s restaurants and managing a bankruptcy filing, they will tell everyone how wrong people were for not making their restaurant a success. Because they did everything right!

Pride is amazing, because it makes smart people behave like stupid ones. A stupid person doesn’t learn because he can’t. A proud person doesn’t learn because he refuses. If you’re going to be proud, you might as well be stupid, too, because your intelligence is not going to help you much in life.

Carnivorous Baby

They say kids should start eating solid food at 4 months. Or 6 months. It’s always like this when I look for answers about baby care. This source says that. That source says this. And they say everyone else is wrong.

Our son is a voracious feeder. My wife has had trouble keeping up recently because he feeds so much, and we don’t want to use formula. He started staring at our food and drooling. After asking an actual mother instead of websites designed to generate clicks, we decided to try giving him a little cereal, even though he’s not 4 months old yet. I thought he might eat a teaspoon or two.

Try two tablespoons. I could not believe it.

We’re inexperienced, so we blew it by giving him that much food. He started throwing up and having bowel pain, so we took him to the emergency room.

No, we didn’t! He ate it all, blew it right out the other end, and wanted more. The next day my wife gave him some avocado. The day after, baby food from the store. He got furious at her for feeding him too slowly. He wanted her to jam it in as fast as possible. We’ve tried several foods, and nothing bothers him.

This kid is so vigorous, it makes me nervous. He eats like he’s starving. He churns his little legs and tries to run on his back when he sees us. He screams with joy. He grabs my hand, traps it against his chest in a bear hug, and chews on it while growling like a Doberman.

He knows us from across the room. When we approach, he follows us with his eyes, returns our smiles, and squeals with happiness. He follows objects. He throws things, although not very accurately.

He is intense. He gets very quiet and stares when things go on around him. His attention span is better than mine. When I show him his plastic numbers and tell him what they are, I have to quit after maybe 15 minutes, but he wants to keep going.

I don’t know what to make of it. Every parent thinks his baby is a cross between Albert Einstein and Superman, and then they end up selling insurance or managing drugstores, so I try to be objective, but I can tell from the way other people talk about him that he is unusual.

I wonder if we pushed his development by showing him numbers, singing with him, exercising him, and spending a ton of time interacting with him. Is that possible? If so, is it good? I don’t want him to peak at 6 months. And it’s not like his life is a job. He has a few obligations already, but he’s not training for a decathlon or Jeopardy.

He’s not ahead in every way. He still hates being put on his stomach for more than about 90 seconds.

I wish we had had him sooner, but my wife lived in Africa. Imagine having a child 8,000 miles away, in a country where people don’t have it together. I would have been lucky to see him once every 6 weeks. He would barely have known me when he got here. If he’s precocious, though, it should take a little bit of the bite out of waiting for him to be born.

Today we had friends over. One saw a photo on my wall. My wife and me on Victoria Peak in Hong Kong. He asked if the location was Victoria Peak, and it startled me. He said he had worked for Open Doors, smuggling Bibles into China. He had been to Hong Kong many times.

We ended up looking at videos of the trips my wife and I made to Hong Kong and Singapore. Then after he left, we looked at our Europe trip. There my son was. A big lump in my wife’s belly. Holding our son, she watched the videos and told him he was in them.

What an adventure our marriage has been. We are so blessed. I hope God continues to build our son up and consider him his own.

How long will it continue, though? Looking at the photos, I noticed I had taken a lot of shots of roads, hallways, and sidewalks. I shot people who were leaving one place and moving to another. It made me think of the rapture. This world has gotten so filthy. People are so insane. How long will it be till we find ourselves on the way somewhere?

I hope things keep going as well for us until we are taken as they have gone so far.

Welcome to the Fryers’ Club

Back in December, I got us a Bayou Classic 4-gallon deep fryer, and we have made a few things in it. It has been a fantastic experience. It’s a tremendous labor-saver compared to a pot on the stove, it fries a lot of food at once, it fries food better than the stove, and it doesn’t grease up the kitchen walls. Also, it’s not feeble and useless like an indoor fryer that plugs into the wall.

The oil lasts forever. I just added new oil after over 6 months. I don’t use the fryer all that often, so I would guess that other home fry cooks need to change their oil more often than I do.

I think it would have lasted a lot longer if I had tried to push it. It was fine the last time I used it.

One reason I decided to change it was that I did not have a proper cover for the fryer. I used a plastic bag and a bungee cord to hold the bag against the fryer. This kept bugs out. The other day I left the bag off overnight, and it made me a little nervous the next day. What if a bunch of roaches had gone for a moonlight swim? I think a bug would float in oil, but I may be wrong. I would hate to drain the oil later, after using it several more times, and see dead roaches shooting out of the hose.

I got a real cover this week, so things are looking up.

I use peanut oil, which is highly regarded. It has a high smoke point, and they say it resists taking on food flavors. It’s not cheap. If I get a good deal, it costs $55 to fill the fryer.

I would like to try beef tallow. I see it selling for $120 for 50 pounds. At that price, I could fill the fryer for about $80. Not out of the question, considering how many meals I could get out of the tallow. Dinner for two at a barbecue joint can easily cost $50 these days, to put it in perspective.

I dreaded cleaning the fryer as I prepared to change the oil. It turned out to be very easy. You put maybe half a gallon of water in the bottom, add a lot of Dawn detergent, and scrub it with a sponge. The crud comes right off. Then you rinse it with the drain hose open. It was no problem at all.

Tonight I used the fryer to make a dish I really love but find intimidating: Cuban pork lumps. The Spanish name is masitas de puerco, which means “little pork lumps.” I believe that’s right. “Masa” is “mass,” so “masita” must be “little mass,” i.e. “lump.”

It’s a very simple dish. You marinate in bitter orange juice (or plain old orange juice soured up with lime or lemon juice), pressure-cook it until it’s tender, and then fry it to make the outside tasty. It comes out tendery and juicy. I like to pile lots of garlic fried in oil on top, along with fried onions and lime juice.

It’s a pain to make on the stove, but a pressure cooker and deep fryer take the suffering out of it.

I used an Instant Pot pressure cooker today, and the food came out great. I’ll post the recipe.

INGREDIENTS

3 pounds pork shoulder chunks with the really thick fat trimmed down
24 ounces orange juice
8 ounces lime or lemon juice
4 cloves garlic, crushed
salt

You want cubes maybe 1.5″ on a side. The size is not critical. Put them in a bowl and salt them down. Brining would probably be even better. It would add juiciness.

Let them sit until the salt goes into the meat. Then pour the citrus juice (also salted) and garlic over them, and let them soak. Half an hour should be fine.

I learned that marinating doesn’t really work, because no matter what you put on meat, salt is the only thing that actually goes in deeper than a couple of millimeters. That’s why I don’t marinate for a long time.

Dump everything in your Instant Pot and set it for 14 minutes. You have to be careful, because meat softens fast in a pressure cooker, so if you’re a couple of minutes over, you could end up with a mushy texture.

Now you fry the meat in a deep fryer until it’s nicely browned.

I made some stuff to go on top of it.

INGREDIENTS
4 large onions
8 ounces olive oil
10 ounces peeled garlic cloves
salt

Slice the onions and fry them until they’re dark. Remove them from the oil and drain them. Puree the garlic in a small processor. Fry it in the oil, but don’t brown it unless you like it that way. If you add some oil to the processor, the pureeing step will be quicker.

Serve the onions and the garlic sauce separately. Apply both very liberally at the table.

That’s all there is to it. It worked. My wife was practically beside herself.

I also fried some ripe plaintains. You just slice them and deep-fry them.

I put lime wedges on the table to squeeze over the pork and plaintains.

This is a marvelous feast, and black beans and rice go great with it. In Miami, they use white rice, but New York Cubans use yellow rice, and it’s very good. You can probably find prepackaged yellow rice near you.

Making your own black bean soup is a huge job. Goya’s version is pretty good, so I used that tonight.

The fryer’s baskets break down and go in the dishwasher, so no problems there.

I still hate Miami more every day than the day before, but my PMSD (figure it out) has abated to the point where I can stand to eat Cuban food. Cubans are great at making delicious peasant food for underpaid workers. There is no such thing as gourmet Cuban food, but if you want a fine dinner made with meat that costs $2.00 per pound, Cuban is a good choice.

RE Cubans and fancy stuff, there used to be a running joke about it in Miami. A Cuban guy goes into a bar and orders Chivas and Coke. Actually, that’s most of the joke.

Now that I think about it, it seems like most cuisines lack a high end.

France has…French food. Their middle-tier food is on our high end.

America has fine steaks and lobster.

Japan has extreme sushi and wagyu.

That’s about all I can think of.

But a lot of countries have good middle-class food, and Cuba doesn’t. It’s all peasant food. The recipes are all written like they’re trying to save money. “Braise a leathery piece of eye round.” “Boil a piece of flank steak.” “Hammer a cheap piece of sirloin until it’s edible.”

Pork shoulder is about as cheap as meat gets.

Its weird how things work out. For example, there are great Scotches and some excellent bourbons, but there is no really good Irish whiskey. I would know if there were. I like Black Bush, which is just Bushmill’s that has been aged a little, but you can’t set it on a bar next to Pinch or Lagavulin. Aged Irish whiskey is smooth and pleasant, but it has zero complexity.

I don’t think there is any such thing as a really good rum or tequila. I used to drink 5-star Barbancourt, which is about as good as rum gets, and you couldn’t compare it to a good Cognac. I’m pretty sure all tequila is paint thinner.

There are truly great beers, and I know, because I make a couple of them right here. No great rums or tequilas, though, as far as I know.

Bacardi was Cuba’s best, but I think of it as a flavoring agent for Saturday-night vomit, or a good fuel for setting your beard on fire like Dan Haggerty. None of it is good. I would as soon drink Everclear as Bacardi 151.

If you want a good cheap rum, try Flor de Cana, from Nicaragua. Very smooth, inoffensive, and not expensive. The Jim Beam of rums.

Whatever you do, avoid Myers’s dark rum, from Jamaica. Jamaicans I knew told me they don’t drink it. It’s poison for tourists. It’s the only thing I’ve ever drunk that made me throw up the next day. They should call it Old Dry Heaves.

I don’t know of any other liquor that causes dry heaves.

Before I became the fine, flawless Christian I now am, I drank myself sick a number of times. Normal booze makes you feed the bushes a couple of times the same day you drink it. Myers’s dark rum will make you wish you were dead a day later, for hours and hours. And you don’t have to get drunk to get sick on it. It nearly killed me after a few Mai Tais.

I knew a couple of Bacardis. One, for some reason, was a Bermudan, but he hung around Miami. Very nice guy. Came close to marrying a friend of mine, also Cuban but not Bermudan. It didn’t work out. He was very pleasant, and he was loaded, so he satisfied one of my friend’s family’s hard requirements–the main requirement, really–but they felt he was lacking upstairs. They weren’t all geniuses, themselves, but anyway, that was their complaint.

Another Bacardi I knew went to private school in Massachusetts and learned to play hockey. He was a Bosch. There were some Bosches related to the Bacardis by marriage back in Cuba, and one of them did big things for the company.

He enrolled at my prep school and joined the ice skating club, and he zipped up and down the ice on his own sharp hockey skates, while we, a bunch of warm-weather Miami kids, slid around injuring ourselves on dull rentals. He thought very highly of himself, but my French teacher, who ran the club and mentored me through high school, thought he was an oaf.

The guy who did most of the work on my dad’s fishing yacht also worked on the Bacardi family’s boats, which were in the same marina. His name was Juan. Sometimes we couldn’t get him. He would tell us by phone that the Bacardis had flown him to the Bahamas for this or that problem.

Juan said the old Bacardis were pretty crude, but I won’t go into detail. “Old school Cubans,” I think he said. And he was Cuban, himself.

Juan could be critical of other Cubans. Bertram was the big Miami yacht builder, but Juan didn’t like working on their boats. He thought they were second-tier. He said, “built BY Cubans FOR Cubans.” He liked Hatteras yachts, built in North Carolina. My dad had a Hatteras. They really were better.

I don’t recall what kind of boats the Bacardis had. Probably Hatteras or some kind of custom jobs.

I knew a Bertram, too, now that I think about it. He went to my school. We weren’t friends. I just knew who he was.

His parents got so tired of him playing Devo albums, they removed the disks and would only let him sit and look at the covers. In his senior photo, he posed by a sign on Devon Road with his hand over the “N.”

Wow, it looks like he became a “reiki healer.” It’s on the web. That is really too bad. Someone to pray for.

Wikipedia says his dad had 10 kids, so maybe he has had to fend for himself.

Based on what other students said about him, he seemed to be abandond. At my school, we had a lot of abandoned kids. Their dads gave their lives to Mammon and became rich. Their mothers were depressing socialites with nothing ostensible to live for. They gave their children everything except God and themselves. The kids took drugs.

I guess I have digressed enough. Enjoy the pork.

I Got This on Lox

I made plain bagels again today, and I cut samples for my wife and me to try. We compared them to an Einstein Bros. bagel. The verdict: my bagels are better than Einstein Bros., which are not bad, so while it may be possible to make small improvements, there is no longer any point in buying plain bagels at the store.

In the photos below, my bagel is on the left, and an Einstein bagel is on the right.

Weight: 138 grams (mine) to 110 grams (theirs).

Aroma and taste: mine smelled and tasted more like bagels. The smell and flavor were more intense.

Crust: mine were a little chewier and slightly crisp on the outside. Einstein Bros. bagels don’t have a crisp outside. My bagels were slightly lumpy, but I don’t see any point in working hard to change it. It may be possible to change the fermentation process a little, but it won’t improve the experience of eating the bagels.

Crumb: my bagels are slightly less regular. For the most part, the air holes are tiny, just like Einstein Bros., but there are some air holes as big as 3/16″. This makes no difference when eating them. It’s not perceptible.

The hydration is 57%, which may be a little higher than some bakeries. It could explain the slightly looser crumb, or maybe my fermentation was a little longer than needed.

I am told the New York bagel mafia vandalizes businesses that compete without permission. I wonder if this is why it’s so hard to find a good recipe. But then pizzerias don’t commit crimes to hold onto their business secrets, and it’s even harder to find a good pizza recipe.

I don’t belong to a food guild, so I will post my recipe in its entirety. If you can find a way to make the bagels smoother, good for you.

They’re easy to make. Not a lot of work. Very cheap. No wonder the bagel mafia is so nervous and protective.

DOUGH INGREDIENTS

385 g high-gluten flour
1.25 tsp. salt
1.5 tbsp. sugar
219 g warm water
3/8 tsp. yeast

BOIL INGREDIENTS

1 qt. water
2 tbsp. brown sugar
1/2 tsp. salt

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Make dough. Put dry ingredients in food processor with default chopping blade. Process to combine. Then add the warm water while processing. If anything sticks to the sides of the bowl, push it down into the mix with a silicone spatula. Go at least 60 seconds after the water mixes in. You might want to go longer. See what happens. Processing heats dough, so be careful not to kill the yeast.

2. Cut into 4 balls. They should be about 154 grams each. Dividing the dough can tear it up. I fixed this by kneading the balls, pushing the outer edges into the center and in, rolling the dough inward and up. This stretches the dough and, in other baked goods, gives better oven spring. You end up with a concave surface on the bottom. I pressed the edges into the center and forced them to merge with each other. Then I put the balls down with the merged sides down. It works.

3. Let them rise two hours under plastic or something. When they float in water, they are ready to turn into bagels.

4. Form bagels. Just flatten the balls and stretch so they have 1″ holes in them. You want them about 9/16″ tall. It’s okay if the holes close up a little. This is not the traditional way to form bagels, but it’s quick, it works, and you are less likely to end up with deformed bagels.

5. Boil them two minutes per side. Vigorous boil.

7. Bake at 400°. Make sure they are not resting on a hot, oiled surface. I used an air-bake pan. Use nonstick foil or parchment paper if you’re worried about sticking. Bake for 25 minutes. Do not turn.

Ovens vary, so start checking them at 20 minutes.

Cool on a wire rack so the bottoms don’t get soggy. Don’t take them off until they’re at room temperature unless you want to eat warm bagels right away.

You should consider this your default recipe, and if you want to modify it, keep it on your computer so you can go back to it if your modifications don’t work out.

They’re real bagels. They may not be exactly what you want, but they are as good as most bakery bagels made by skilled bakers. They are a thousand times better than bagged bagels from factories. Far better than Lender’s frozen bagels, which are gross.

I have had many, many real bagels. I lived in Miami. I lived in New York City. You can believe me when I say these are real bagels. I’m not saying no one can make better bagels, but these are very good.