Approved

It is time for an update on my wife’s immigration status.

At some time during the last 24 hours, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a document known as an I-130 approval. This means they have signed off on our application for Rhodah to join me in the United States.

So now she just jumps on a plane, and I meet her in Orlando!

Actually, no.

The case now moves to the National Visa Center at the Department of State, and they arrange for Rhodah to be interviewed in Zambia. Assuming she convinces them she’s not a problem immigrant, she will then be issued a visa, and THEN I will meet her at the airport.

Along the way, I will have to show I can support her.

This process takes a while, but nothing like the 384 days it took for our petition to be approved. Really, we need a little time to get things in order, so the additional delay isn’t a big deal. She has to dispose of her car and whatever possessions she isn’t bringing. We have to make travel arrangements. I have to make any necessary changes here at the house.

I don’t know how many more trips we will take before she arrives here. We are all set to visit Singapore, and there is no point in canceling. We intend to visit Israel, and I would like to take her to Europe, if only to spite the bureaucrats who kept us out this year.

My understanding is that a US green card makes it easier to get tourist visas from other countries, but they have been pretty irrational so far, so one wonders how it will pan out in practice.

We’re not going to keep going to second-tier and third-tier destinations. Not unless God sends us.

It will be very strange being together with Rhodah 24 hours a day. We’ll be able to do normal-life things together all the time. We’ll be able to travel, go to restaurants, shop, look after our properties…no cell phones or email accounts required. We’ll get used to going various places together. We’ll get used to certain meals. We’ll visit the dump as a team.

It will be great not to have to do every little thing for myself as well as looking after another person from thousands of miles away.

When the visa process is over, I will post the news.

Garbage Doesn’t Get Better With Time

I keep doing things to improve the house.

Today, I’m looking for ways to get rid of the trash compactor.

I’ll tell you right off; if you use a trash compactor, I have no respect for your trash standards. There are lots of reasons to avoid them, and there is only one reason for having one: laziness.

Garbage compactors attract and feed roaches, ants, mice, and rats. Anything that can squeeze in there will stuff itself on your garbage and then pee and poop all over your kitchen.

Garbage compactors stink. You can’t keep unrefrigerated garbage in your kitchen for days without growing bacteria and fungus.

Garbage compactors turn what should be light, fresh, manageable bags of garbage into heavy bags of rotten garbage.

Garbage compactors encourage dirty, low-class habits.

I used the compactor in this house for a while because the people who built it seemed to know what they were doing. There is no garbage collection, so I drive my garbage to the dump. I thought the previous owners, as longtime farm residents, knew something I did not, so for a time, I tried to do whatever they did.

Eventually, I quit. I could not see any virtues in the compactor. It smelled, the bugs loved it, the bags were heavy, and it didn’t actually save me much work.

At some point, I decided I would no longer tolerate having edible garbage in the house overnight. I started putting all trash that had food in it in the garage in a sealed can before bedtime. I abandoned the garbage compactor, cleaned it as well as I could, and hosed it with pesticide.

Now the kitchen never smells like rotten food, and the bugs and mice are out of luck.

I go to the dump three times a week. Twice if I forget. I buy cheap 30-gallon plastic bags for 10 cents each online, I use them for garbage and lining Marvin’s cage, and I end up spending something like $120 per year. If that sounds like a lot, find out what you spend on expensive bags from the store. A cheap store bag runs 25 cents. Big-name brands cost a lot more. If you’re buying store bags, you’re probably paying more than 2.5 times what I pay.

Last time I bought cheap bags online, I bought a box of 1500. I don’t play. Next time, I’ll try Ebay and see if China has anything cheaper.

Bag makers like Hefty love to talk about how tough their bags are. Know why? They’re trying to appeal to dirty, lazy people. “We know you only take the trash out once a month, so here’s a bag you can jam 50 pounds into. Go ahead and jam your foot in there. Pack it down good. Our bag won’t split. Comes with free cotton to shove up your nose.”

You don’t need tough bags. You need to get your butt to the curb or the dump more often.

What do professionals use, in places where letting trash sit can lead to big fines? They use exactly what I use. You’ve seen them beside highways, waiting to be picked up. You’ve seen them on the backs of utility carts at stadiums and malls. Hefty bags are for people who let garbage rot in their houses.

If your trash is moving out of your house in a timely way, you don’t need a bag that can contain a rabid wolverine. It just has to survive long enough to make it to the can or the dumpster.

I’m naturally lazy myself, so anything that helps me improve is welcome.

When I was looking after my dad, I was lazy with the garbage. Usually, I didn’t do all that bad, but often I made dump visits a week apart, which was disgraceful. There were times when the bed of the pickup was pretty full.

When you have a dementia patient in your house, garbage piles up fast. You need to stay on top of it. I did a poor job. Since then, by God’s grace, I have repented. In the time since I turned over a new leaf, there have been days when I simply forgot to go, and I ended up with little ecosystems developing in the bags, but overall, I love going to the dump, and it’s unusual for me to miss visits.

When I go, I see horrendous scenes that take me back, except many are a lot worse than the scenes I caused. Many people show up with pickups entirely full of bags. I see people walking quickly to the dumpsters, holding dripping bags as far from themselves as they can. I’ve seen utility trailers covered with bags.

When I go to the dump, I look carefully at the people in front of me. Here’s a tip for dump users: never get behind a trailer, a pickup, or a van if you can help it. There is a reason people bring vehicles like that. Clean people generally drive passenger cars and only have a few bags.

Now that I have better habits, I am disturbed by other people’s practices. I pray for them. I look at their beat-up cars, their mountains of maggot-ridden trash, their tasteless, ill-fitting, stained, worn-out clothes, their tattoos, their obesity, and even their bad posture, and I realize they have problems going far beyond poor trash standards. I know demons are involved. They need to know God. I am being improved, and they need the same help I’m getting.

I want to get rid of the trash compactor and fill the space with some kind of storage, but I don’t know if there is any way to do it without ruining the way the kitchen looks. Maybe a handyman could find a matching set of drawers.

I also want to get rid of my terrible sink.

The lady who designed the kitchen was no cook. I can tell, because she did things a good cook would not do. First, the compactor. Second, she bought a 4-burner electric stove with a useless electric grill taking up space in the middle. Third, she put her wall oven at knee height. Fourth, she gave a microwave priority, installing it above the oven. And the oven the house came with had no warming drawer.

The worst thing she did was to install a two-basin sink.

My sink has a gigantic basin on the left, and it has a small basin on the right with a garbage disposal. The big basin is too small to wash cookie sheets. Unforgivable. The small basin is not much good for anything.

I tried to find out why people get two-basin sinks, since it’s clearly a stupid design. It turns out one answer is laziness. People want to be able to hide dirty dishes in one basin.

Okay, so your dishwasher is a foot from the sink, and you want a place to hide dirty dishes instead of, at the very least, putting them in the dishwasher to wait.

You already have a roach feeder full of old garbage, and you want to add a roach buffet to the sink area.

What?

I remember a time when I was too lazy to put dishes in the machine. I would say it ended about 25 years ago. If you can’t find it in yourself to put a dish on a dishwasher rack and push a button, you have a very serious problem. As I did, for half of my life.

I want to put a new sink in, but the old one is in a stone counter, and they cut the stone so you can’t put a rectangular sink in it. You have to find a sink that’s bigger on the left side. Turns out they exist. I guess a lot of people got tired of their ill-conceived two-basin sinks and had them replaced. If you’re in my shoes, you may be able to buy a one-basin offset sink that will fit your hole. “Offset” is the Google term you need.

You may also be able to use an apron sink. These things rest on top of counters, covering up a lot of the stone. If your counter has weird cuts in it, you may be able to put an apron sink on it.

I think I am headed for an apron sink. The likelihood that a one-basin offset sink will fit the cutout I have now is not high, and I don’t believe I can make my cutout fit a new sink without ruining the cutout’s appearance. An apron sink doesn’t need a perfect cutout because the edges of the cutout would be covered. I should be able to open my cutout up with an angle grinder and make an apron sink fit.

My advice is to avoid garbage compactors and two-basin sinks. Sooner or later, you will know you made big mistakes.

I want a new faucet to go with the sink. The existing faucet is very low, which is extremely bad design. You want to be able to get things between the faucet and the sink. Big things, like 3-gallon pots. The faucet I have is in the way all the time, and it dribbles water back onto the stone, where a calcium crust forms.

I plan to get what is known as a pot-filler faucet. It will arch up over the sink, and it will have a built-in sprayer on a hose.

I don’t know how the original owner’s wife managed to do anything in the kitchen. Maybe she didn’t.

I’ve talked to Rhodah about these things, and she says I should wait until she moves here. That never occurred to me. I’m so used to the single mindset. Having someone to help me is a new experience.

Storm Update

God, as always, has been extremely gracious, and the corpse of Hurricane Nicole has done no damage here. The putative center of the former storm is now as close to me as it will get. It’s breezy, and there is a little rain, but even the Weather Channel’s trained actors couldn’t make this look like a real tropical storm. At least not so far.

I am now seeing one outlet predicting stronger winds later today. That is new. I hope it’s just the usual over-reaction. If not, I’ll be moving to the Red Roof Inn.

My prediction, which is worth what I paid for my meteorology diploma: things will get better, not worse. As the storm moves to the west, winds will have to go over most of the lower half of the state to get here, and that should cut their speed. Also, the storm is getting weaker with time.

I guess this theory won’t work if the winds in the bottom half of Nicole are stronger than they are up north. This doesn’t appear to be true, though, because if it were, Sarasota and Orlando would be having high winds now, and they are not.

Winds can’t just materialize magically in the middle of dry land. The storm circulates. Before the winds get here, they have to be somewhere else.

The same site that says we’ll have 33 mph base winds 45 minutes from now says we’re at 15. So an 18 mph increase in 45 minutes? Doubt it.

A friend in the northern part of the county says she lost power, which is surprising, but the properties where she live are maintained pretty badly. Maybe that’s the explanation.

She also managed to get a broken window, which is a bigger surprise. It’s a good idea to protect windows during hurricanes, but even if you don’t, the odds of losing one are low. And this is no hurricane. It was barely a hurricane when it WAS a hurricane.

My power company, which is one of two in this county, reports 489 customers with no electricity, county-wide. Not bad. Duke Energy, the other company, reports around 6 times as many, which is much worse but still nothing compared to Irma.

Maybe Duke Energy doesn’t manage trees well. My company went on a trimming binge last year.

In other news, I am very happy with the batch of Texas trash I made. I’ll post the recipe.

INGREDIENTS

1/4 cup butter, melted
1 teaspoon celery seed
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 tbsp. brown sugar
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp. A1 sauce
1 teaspoon chipotle powder
4 tablespoons Crystal sauce
10 cups cheddar Chex Mix
2 cups Spanish peanuts

You just mix it up, spread it in a pan, and bake it at 250° until it drys out. I stir it every 20 minutes for the first hour, and then I quit.

MSG might make it better. MSG is the reason it’s so hard to eat only one Dorito.

For some reason, idleness sets in during a storm, so you do trivial things to kill time. Yesterday I put a new diode in my Ronco Showtime rotisserie oven. I installed one a year or two ago, but I did a bad job, and it pooped out.

These ovens have 120V AC wires going straight to the heating element, and there is no way to adjust the heat. A clever guy realized he could reduce the heat by cutting off half the AC signal.

AC is positive half the time and negative the rest of the time. A diode will only permit current to flow one way. If you cut off either the positive or negative part of an AC signal, you reduce the power by half.

I stuffed a questionable diode in there, and it was great until it frizzled due to lack of heat sinking. This time, I used the same diode as the guy who came up with the concept. It’s enormous and should require no heat sinking.

I had to cut wires and put in spade connectors, a selector switch, and shrink tubing. I had to find a way to cram the giant diode into the oven. Now it’s done, so I should be able to slow-cook rotisserie meat.

These ovens are wonderful. It’s hard to believe a TV huckster could invent something that really benefits mankind, but Popeil did it. My only big complaint was the lack of adjustability. If you don’t like things browned well, or you want certain things to cook very slowly, you have to wrap them in foil or try other tricks. Now that my oven is modified (again), I can throw a glazed pork roast in it, slow-cook it for a couple of hours, and then turn the heat up to brown the glaze.

The newer ovens are made in China, and there are complaints. Mine is Korean, and there is really nothing wrong with it. I’ve been through every part of it, so I know how it’s built. It’s not the toughest oven ever made, but it’s not junk, either.

Starlink is working fine, except for one thing. We had a one-second power flicker, and the system had to reboot. Starlink can take a very long time to start working after an outage. I put a battery backup on it, so I should be okay now.

The verdict is in: I’ve decided I’m a big Starlink fan. There are little annoyances, but it works, and it’s a great deal better than my old system. Once it becomes more mainstream, there will be more help available for users, so maybe people like me will not have to crawl around in their attics and drill holes in their walls. Tradesmen will be ready to help.

I also like my VPN, but it isn’t perfect. I get a lot of security puzzles now, and sometimes a site will refuse to load because it’s convinced I’m a hacker.

Hmm. We just got a couple of pretty decent gusts. Hello? Am I still here?

Guess I’ll post this using my mobile hotspot. Come on, Starlink. Get it together for daddy.

MORE

It’s 4 hours later. We are supposed to have winds of around 50 mph. It’s not happening. I’d call it 10 mph.

Never trust a weatherman.

Looking Forward to Newsmen Doing Their Marcel Marceau Impressions

Tropical Storm Nicole is turning out to be pretty lame, so I am optimistic about tomorrow.

The center of the eye is west of Freeport, around 70 miles from our coast, and the NHC says the wind speed was 75 mph an hour ago, making it EXACTLY equal to the minimum speed of a hurricane. Suspiciously, some would say. A remarkable coincidence. Maybe they round to the nearest 5 or 0.

Weather Underground, a well-known weather site, is saying some remarkable things right now. It says 1) Nicole is a hurricane situated over Grand Bahama, and 2) a wind gust of 61 mph was recorded there tonight. Like, now.

Okay. Here is how storm speeds are measured. Storms are measured by “maximum sustained winds,” and a maximum wind is “sustained” if it maintains speed for at least one minute. So in order for Nicole to be a hurricane, it has to produce winds higher than 74 mph for at least one minute, right where it is, which means Grand Bahama. If a gust of 61 mph is so significant it made the news, how can Nicole have maximum sustained winds of over 74 mph?

Gusts are faster than maximum sustained winds, so it seems bizarre that a gust of 61 mph made news in a storm which is supposed to have maximum sustained winds of at least 75 mph.

I saw a site claiming there would be “coastal flooding” all the way to North Carolina. Uh…no. Flooding is when water comes in under your front door, way above the high tide line, at the very least. Right now, the worst-hit areas are expecting a maximum storm surge of 6 feet, and it could be as low as 3 feet. If Florida, right in the crosshairs, is going to top out no higher than 6 feet, North Carolina is not going to have “flooding” by any honest definition. In all likelihood, anything resembling flooding will be confined to some barrier islands in Florida. We are not going to see people in Atlanta paddling kayaks in their front yards. Not unless CNN or the Weather Channel shows up and fakes it, as they are known to do.

Here’s a quick video of a Weather Channel reporter getting ready for hurricane season.

Maybe you can see why I don’t trust the dire predictions we always get.

The storm is now moving at 13 mph, which is good news. Better than the 8 mph they quoted earlier. You want a storm to move as fast as possible so it doesn’t sit on you and blow trees down for two days.

At this speed, the eye, if one still exists tomorrow, should pass by me roughly 24 hours from now. By that time, the storm will be broken up pretty badly. My county will probably get nearly no wind damage. My opinion may change if the storm’s track moves significantly. Things could be worse than I now expect. But the future looks good right now.

The NHC says I am well within the tropical-storm-force wind area right now, but it’s not bad at all. I would call it very breezy with no rain. The longer the dry conditions hold out, the stronger the trees will stay.

Weather Underground still thinks my area will get 2″ of rain, which is wet but not disastrous. When I was a kid in Miami, we got 14″ one day. I remember, because my mother went into cardiac arrest at a doctor’s office and failed to pick me up from school, and my sister and I had to walk home in it. Supposedly, the county I’m in right now got 10″ during Irma. There was water standing in my woods.

Palm Beach County is supposedly about to be hit with very, very hard rain. I got that from a TV newsman, however, so it may be a gross and intentional exaggeration. The NHC is number one in terms of reliability, and news people are right up there with mood rings, Miss Cleo, and Democrat pollsters.

Weather Underground predicts winds of 25-35 mph here tomorrow, but they also predict them for…right now. If there is any basis for their predictions, then I am already seeing the best Nicole has to offer.

I gave in to storm paranoia and bought sugary cereal, Pop Tarts, and the makings of Texas trash, one of my favorite party snacks. I rolled Cheddar Chex mix and Spanish peanuts in Worcestershire, A1, butter, Crystal hot sauce, celery seeds, brown sugar, and a couple of other things, and I baked it at 250 until it was dry. Really nice.

I guess I will be overindulging today and tomorrow. Ordinarily, I go out on the patio at lunchtime and fix a big cheeseburger on my dangerously-modified propane grill, but I don’t want to deal with the rain and wind, if it comes. Looks like it will be Frosted Mini-Wheats instead.

Rhodah and I have been interceding regarding the storm, and I hope you will, too. Nicole is not a scary storm, but it has the potential to cause fairly serious problems for some areas, and there are always people who do dumb things that turn mild storms into killers. A guy on the West Coast decided to stay in his beachfront home during Ian even though he knew he couldn’t swim, and now he’s dead. He posted commentary on Facebook, and the last posts were very sad.

Hurricane parties and “riding it out” were popular activities when I was a kid. There is something exhilarating about having drinks with friends on a screened-in patio by Coleman light as a storm whirls around your house.

Years ago, people could be forgiven their bad judgment. We didn’t know as much as we do now. These days, there is no excuse. When the government tells you your storm surge will be “unsurvivable,” and they tell you to write your name and Social Security number on your body so it can be identified when they find it later, you should get in the car.

There is no “riding it out” where I live, because we don’t get hurricanes. We get tropical storm winds at best. Storm surge can’t come near this county. This is not the coast, so unless you live in a mobile home under a big tree, you don’t have to leave home. Coastal people have to be more careful.

I truly hope I still have power tomorrow. Otherwise, look for me to blog from a nearby hotel until it comes back.

New Storm Drives me to Buy Pop-Tarts

Once again, a friend and I are in what we jokingly call THE CONE OF CERTAIN DEATH. Unbelievably, the devil has managed to scrape together a tropical storm after the end of hurricane season, and he has tried really hard to get it to go right over my house. The National Hurricane Center’s prediction cone is looming ominously, like the strong possibility of Kamala Harris becoming president when Biden finally forgets who he is.

This threat, Tropical Storm Nicole, is not too bad. It’s below hurricane status now, and it has very little time to build speed before it hits the coast and starts falling apart. They are predicting 75 mph upon arrival, which sounds like perverse hurricane optimism to me, because that’s the exact number where storms become hurricanes. It sounds like the forecasters took a look at it, figured it would be somewhere in the mid-70’s, and said, “What the heck. Let’s say it’s going to be a hurricane.” The storm is also somewhat dry compared to others. Rain makes hurricanes worse because it soaks the ground and loosens up things like trees and power poles.

The unfortunate thing about Nicole is its size. It’s really wide. On the NHC’s current map, it looks like the tropical-storm-force wind field is 5 times as wide as Florida. That means you can be pretty far from the center of the track and still be in the storm. Is the map correct? Well, if it was, I would be experiencing sustained winds of at least 40 mph, and I’m not, so draw your own conclusions.

Looking out the window, I’ll call it 10 mph with gusts to 25. Best guess. Safe to drive in. Nothing flying around.

Of course, it happened right after I got my Starlink cable installed more or less correctly. I am no longer using a bath towel to cushion it as it runs through an open window. That bath towel is not looking good. It’s amazing how a week of sunlight can bleach a towel. No wonder people get skin cancer.

I would be amazed if my new roof dish mount had problems in this breeze. This will be a good test.

What have I done to prepare? I got gas, and I bought one case of bottled water. I no longer have the big cooler I bought before the last threat. I got it in case the power went out and I needed to use ice. Then I took it back to Walmart. Hope that was not a mistake.

In other news, Rhodah and I are finally going somewhere. Italy lied to us. Germany wasted our time. Ireland let a new employee deny our visa application. The Czechs came up with a ridiculous document demand probably intended to prevent us from applying. Now we’re headed to Singapore, where they never turn anyone down. They wouldn’t care if Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey arrived in the same flight kennel with Steven Seagal.

I really, really do not want to visit the Far East. Ever. I have never been very interested in visiting the Orient, and traveling is such a bad experience now, I dread visiting any place with a flight that takes more than 15 hours. My flight to Singapore will take around 30. The stuff of nightmares. Jonah went 72, however, so perspective is important.

These days flying is physically extremely unpleasant, and it’s also humiliating. They process everyone like Jews at the gate of Auschwitz. The service is terrible. The seats are like clamps. They nag constantly about masks, or at least they did in the past. I don’t know if they’ll do that this time. Anyway, it makes you wonder if the TSA hired the guards from Abu Ghraib.

Singapore is so far away, one of my flights will go east, and the other will return from the west. The airlines do it both ways. It’s nearly half the circumference of the world away. Vietnam is substantially closer.

On the up side, Singapore is supposed to be crime-free, clean, rich, and full of great restaurants. It’s certainly free of chewing gum, because they confiscate it at the airport. Good for them. I can’t imagine what it’s like to reach under a restaurant table and not feel globs of gum left behind by women and girls.

I may not want to visit Singapore, but if I had to live in the Far East, I would beg to be given citizenship.

Back in ’07, famed investor Jimmy Rogers said Singapore was the place to be, and he loaded up his truck and moved there, never, so far, to return. A long time ago, he decided the US of A was washed up, and he predicted a rosy future for Asians. I wonder if he made the right move. I don’t like the idea of living in a non-Christian country, though. I mean more non-Christian than the one I live in now.

I was surprised to learn that Singapore has a lot of American chains. We already have reservations at Lawry’s The Prime Rib and Ruth’s Chris. I also found a promising barbecue joint, and we’re booked.

So I’m a typical American, wanting to stay at the Hilton and eat steak? Yes. Go ahead and shame me, like I care. No apologies.

Actually, that’s not totally true. I have other reasons for choosing these restaurants.

Rhodah loves meat, and she has not yet been able to have steak or barbecue in a top American restaurant, so I picked a few places in Singapore in order to give her a special experience that will prepare her for life in her new home. We do want to eat the local stuff, but come on. It’s all Chinese food. We’ve seen that before. Call it Chinese. Call it Indonesian. Call it Thai. If it ain’t Chinese, it’s all close enough for jazz. Here’s your pile of white rice. Here’s your bowl of meat and vegetables in sauce. Here’s your funny sticks. Dig in. Chinese.

We need to find a good Indian place. Singapore might be the only city in the world that has clean Indian restaurants. Actually, there’s an extremely clean Indian place in Ocala, which is odd, because nearly all the American restaurants here are dirty.

We also plan to go to a Scottish restaurant. McDonald’s.

What about activities? Hey, it’s Singapore. No Eiffel Tower. No Rhine to cruise on. No Big Ben. No Renaissance art or architecture. No museums worth discussing. No alps. No Vatican. No Taj Mahal. No pyramids.

They have a couple of really neat buildings, and I think there’s an aquarium.

Truthfully, it sounds a lot like Vegas.

We will have great food, a nice hotel, safety, and each other. We are extremely blessed. A lot of people in our shoes can’t be with each other at all, and most of those who can get together don’t have trips as nice as ours.

It’s a whole lot better than the other places where Rhodah can go without a visa. Hong Kong arrests sick tourists and imprisons them until they test negative, so it’s almost as oppressive and backward as Australia. The Philippines are apparently extremely squalid, because Filipinos who live there advise tourists not to come. Malaysia is Singapore under oppressive Muslim rule. African countries are African. More or less like Haiti.

We should be going to places God chooses, to do things has planned for us. That would make the nature of the destinations less important. Remarkably, Rhodah has been counseling a new Christian in Singapore, so maybe we’ll meet him, and that will redeem the trip.

I guess I should go to the store and pick up a few items of face-ready food, just in case. You never know what a storm will do.

Hope I am still online tomorrow night.

No Munich for You!

I will say this for the Germans: they may not be helpful, but they are fast. My wife applied for a tourist visa last week, and she was turned down early this morning. Why? Because they think she wants to stay in Germany as an illegal alien.

This is different from our experience with the Italians. Their representative in Lusaka lied to us, convincing Rhodah she would get a visa if we bought airline tickets in advance. She was extremely rude and insulting, too. The Germans were polite and truthful and simply said no.

I have been reading about the problems Africans have getting visas in Europe. It appears to be a systemic thing.

I read a remarkable story about two African scholars. They helped put together some kind of scholarly gathering in Europe, with lots of academics. They visited Europe once and went home. Then they applied to return for the event. Their presence was vital to the event’s success. Excluding them would have been like excluding the Rolling Stones from a Rolling Stones concert. They were clearly employed in their own country. They had all sorts of proof they intended to return. They were turned down.

Boris Johnson, former prime minister of England, acknowledged the problems Africans had with visas. A couple of years back, he got so upset, he spurred reforms.

Some people say the problem is racism. I don’t think that’s accurate, although it may be. I think it’s just incompetence and institutional prejudice.

Prejudice is not the same thing as racism. You can be prejudiced about anything. It doesn’t have to be race. To be prejudiced means you make judgments without knowing the facts. The people who grant European visas are very clearly prejudiced against citizens of African countries. Even the nice countries. Not just Nigeria.

A baboon could look at Rhodah’s history of travel to foreign countries, as well as her husband’s assets in America, and realize there is no possibility she will try to stay in Europe and clean people’s toilets for cash. The Europeans, who are known to be smarter than baboons, didn’t really look at our applications. They just stamped them. African? No visa.

This makes me realize there is no point in trying to find Zambian employment or buying Zambian real estate for Rhodah. The Europeans claim they look for such ties when granting visas, but they are obviously lying. If two university instructors can’t get in, with a horde of European academics vouching for them, and a history of visiting and then going home, a crummy Zambian house and a job won’t get Rhodah in.

Why should a house or a job help? You can move to Europe and then sell your house. You can move to Europe and quit your job in Zambia so you can get down to toilet cleaning and hiding from the government. Sure, if you’re the president of Zambia, or you own a huge emerald mine you have to manage personally, you would need to get back to Zambia fast. Other people with normal jobs and properties would not.

A normal Zambian job would not be a big motive to get back to Zambia, because an illegal alien would be trying to get away from a life of normal Zambian jobs.

I don’t think a Caucasian would have been approved, either, but I can’t say for sure. Rhodah said the lady at the Italian embassy sucked up to a white family during the same visit when she was snotty to Rhodah.

The Germans were polite and respectful and still turned her down, so maybe the demeanor of embassy employees doesn’t mean much.

We are not upset with the Germans, because they didn’t abuse us. They were just following orders.

Sorry.

We are back to looking at destinations.

Oddly, Hong Kong is now open, and we could both go tomorrow without visas. It would be an interesting destination, even if it’s small and not likely to keep us entertained for more than three or four days. The big problem with Hong Kong is the quarantine rule. We would have to sit in a special hotel for three days and pass covid tests. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it’s a consideration. What if one of us failed a test? Imagine two weeks in a hotel room, with the same room service menu in front of you the whole time.

Singapore and the Philippines are open and will let Rhodah in immediately. Both hot, humid places. Singapore is tiny, so again, not much to sustain our interest. The Philippines are poor and don’t have much to offer.

We can go to a whole bunch of sweaty beach destinations. Lots of Caribbean islands. Bermuda. The Seychelles. Beaches only appeal to shallow people who don’t have a lot going on upstairs, though. Lie in the sun. Get drunk in the evening. Parasail. Lie in the sun. Get drunk again.

We are looking into the UK because of Boris Johnson’s efforts. We are also going to apply to Ireland again. It’s not the destination of our dreams, but it’s pleasant and welcoming. The Irish treated us very, very well, both at the embassy and during our visit. We will never forget that, even if we do get tired of tourist-grade fish and chips.

I have never had any interest in visiting England or Scotland. Ugly architecture, no mountains, mediocre scenery, bad food which is in some cases frightening…not exciting. I have no interest in going to “the old country” and looking up my ancestors. I have no ties whatsoever to Great Britain. I don’t care about my ancestors. I’d be over there eating disappointing meals and wishing I were in France or Austria.

I don’t understand people who want to poke around in courthouses and libraries and look for their own surnames. Maybe that would be interesting if I had noble blood or something, but my ancestors were pretty much owned by nobles and did absolutely nothing to make the world remember them.

Even if your ancestors were a big deal, should you really be proud? Here’s something you can say to most people who have impressive ancestors: “If they were so great, what happened to you?”

I’m not interested in getting to know the British, because I have seen such disappointing things. Unbelievable coarseness. Rudeness. Arrogance. Hatred of Christianity. Maybe the media and the web show the worst side of England, but I don’t want to bet thousands of dollars to find out the truth.

Maybe I’ve watched too many Guy Ritchie movies.

The French are rude, and that is fact, not bigotry, but I still want to go back. The food and sights are worth putting up with the percentage of French people who are offensive. When the British grow a Mont Blanc and invent things that can compete with croissants and Napoleons, I might change my mind and put Great Britain on my list beside France.

I’m harder on Americans than anyone, in case a British person is reading this and feeling feisty. American places I would pay not to visit: Miami, Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Detroit, New Orleans, Miami, Cleveland, Atlanta, Houston, Miami….

I would rather spend a month in London or even Glasgow than a day in Miami.

Many of our cities are snakepits. It amazes me that foreigners are willing to pay to see them.

I think I really depressed a guy in Ireland. He was looking forward to his Miami vacation, and I made the mistake of giving him my views. Dude…you live two hours away from…EVERYTHING…and you want to go to Miami, sit on one of the world’s worst beaches, and spend half your vacation stuck in traffic, listening to rap through the closed windows?

The nonexistence of Miami will be one of the key benefits of the Messianic Age.

Think of the places an Irish person could go for a fraction of the cost of a Miami mistake. Rome. Athens. The Tirol. Paris. Marseilles. Istanbul. Vienna. Norway. Zermatt. It makes me sick.

I should have kept quiet, though.

Okay, whatever. We’ll pick a couple of places in Ireland we haven’t seen yet, we’ll get really nice hotels, and we’ll tough it out. Maybe we’ll see London if things go our way. First world problems, right? The best kind of problems to have.

Help from Unlikely Source

Today something odd happened.

As I have said here before, my wife Rhodah and I meet in other countries while we wait for her to be allowed to move here. I have no interest in taking an expensive 35-hour flight so I can visit Zambia, and she wants to see new places.

We tried to get visas from various Schengen Area countries in Europe. Sweden and Italy rejected us. The lady at the Italian embassy was extremely rude to Rhodah and also lied to her, telling us we needed to buy airline tickets in order to get a visa and that if we did, the visa would be issued.

We bought the tickets, and she didn’t even get back to us. Rhodah had to go to the embassy after the customary processing time had passed. Once again, the lady who worked there was rude. She didn’t have the courtesy to leave her office. She sent out an underling who spoke no English, along with a bilingual Zambian, in order to tell Rhodah she had been rejected. Through an open door, she shouted at Rhodah from her office without leaving her chair.

We lost over a thousand dollars because this woman lied to us, and while Rhodah was at the embassy, the same woman fawned on a white family.

The form that “explained” our rejection appears to have been prepared frivolously. It said they found our expression of the purpose of the trip unreliable. In other words, they did not believe we were tourists. They thought Rhodah was going to abandon her house, car, friends, family, and move to Italy, where she wouldn’t be able to speak the language. Instead of the life she leads now, which involves receiving checks, shopping, and doing nearly nothing else, she would presumably find a good toilet-cleaning job in Naples and share a room with 15 Nigerians.

It’s pretty obvious they made no effort to investigate. I believe the lady who lied to us simply put the application in the trash and issued a standard explanation for rejecting it.

Upon reading our materials, even a monkey would have known we were trustworthy tourists. We made the mistake of buying tickets for both of us. This was not required, but it showed we were sincere, because it gave me powerful motivation to go to Italy. What kind of fool would think an American with a cushy life, real estate, and a nice house would want to move to Italy and have a much lower standard of living, combined with political instability, corrupt courts, and extremely poor government?

Maybe there is a constant flow of American retirees, moving to Naples to take advantage of Italy’s unreliable economy and its history of borrowing billions and not paying them back.

Italy is a wonderful country in many ways, but if I wanted to move anywhere for economic reasons and stability, it would be Singapore or Switzerland.

Italy is a sexy girl you date and then forget during your gap year. Singapore and Switzerland are girls you marry.

We decided to try the Czechs. Czechia is known to be easy when it comes to visas. They seemed encouraging, and they told us to make an appointment. Then they stopped responding to our inquiries, which they had told us to make.

After this, I learned that Austria is liberal with visas, so we decided to give it a shot. Then we learned the Germans handle applications in Zambia. That did not sound good, for reasons too obvious to explain.

Rhodah went to see the Germans, with no appointment, and they told her what to do. Then she made an appointment for this morning to bring them the required…PAPERS!!!!

Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

The Swedes supposedly handle visas for a number of Schengen countries, but in reality, they hand the job off to an apathetic, unhelpful company called VFS Global. Rhodah wasn’t given an embassy appointment when we tried to go to Sweden. She had to go to VFS Global, where she dealt with low-level employees from Zambia, not Europe. It was not a quality experience.

We went to Ireland this year, and the Irish process visas at their embassy, because, I guess, Ireland is a real country that doesn’t delegate its responsibilities to McVisa. They treated Rodah like royalty, even though Ireland is very strong economically and a much better destination for illegal aliens than Sweden or Italy.

Ireland gave us no trouble at all. We got our visa in around two weeks, I believe. There was a delay because someone in the US failed to communicate with them when they checked to see if we were really married, but Rhodah helped the Irish get proof, and they were apologetic about the wait, which was not their fault.

Now you know what Rhodah experienced in her visits to various outfits that provide visas. So what happened at the German embassy?

First of all, the building is very nice. Much nicer than the one the Italians occupy. Everything is kept up well, too. Clean and orderly. The Italian embassy was disorderly and generally gave a bad impression. Rhodah said it was easy to tell Germany was rich and Italy was poor.

Second, the lady who worked with Rhodah is German, not Zambian, and she was very kind and polite. The official German policy is that if your application materials aren’t perfect, they send you home. The German lady found a little issue with our papers, and instead of rejecting them, she told Rhodah we could fix it and email them a file. That’s what we did.

She didn’t shout at Rhodah. She didn’t try to get her to buy airline tickets. In fact, the Germans advise people not to buy them before approval. She also told her she should receive a decision very quickly. They have 15 days to get it done, but we could have a decision much sooner.

Here’s the best part: as Rhodah left the embassy, this nice lady said, “Have a blessed day.”

I don’t know about Germany, but in the US, “Have a blessed day” is something Christians say. It’s not something you hear from unbelievers. Here in the most conservative county in Florida, people say it all the time. I believe God steered us into the hands of a German Christian, and that’s remarkable, because Europe is overwhelmingly against Christianity. Some countries give lip service to the pope, but Catholicism isn’t really Christianity, and one of its big appeals is that it allows people to do whatever they want as long as they go to mass and confess every few years.

I don’t know whether we will be approved or not, but at least the Germans treated Rhodah like a human being. The Italian embassy is a disgrace.

In order to maximize our chance of success, we tried to make our application as palatable as possible. We were concerned the Germans would be rigid and hard to please, and that they might be more reluctant to approve people who intended to spend most of their time in Germany. This is probably not true, but we factored it in anyway. We created an itinerary which puts us in Austria about 60% of the time.

I don’t know a lot about Austria. I have visited Salzburg a couple of times. That’s about it. Austria is very beautiful, and it’s full of alps. I really, really want to see the alps again. I recall the food being very good, with the caveat that you have to watch out for the stuff that’s overly Teutonic, like piles of beans covered with sausages and melted cheese.

I have never seen Vienna. It looks great on the web, and it’s a practical place to fly into, so we will be spending a few days there. It appears to be very much like Paris in that it’s packed with history and excellent sightseeing. It seems to have a similar feel, with cafes and so on. It looks like a place a person could enjoy for months, not days. We will see whether my impressions pan out.

We also chose Salzburg and some places not too far from it.

We are set to visit Munich. I am not sure about that one. The hotels are extremely expensive given the second-tier status of the destination. Munich is fine, but it’s not London or Rome. Let’s be honest. I’m not sure Germany has a big city which is a truly top-notch destination. It’s loaded with incredible smaller towns, though, and the natural beauty of the countryside is extraordinary.

When we started looking at Munich, I didn’t know Oktoberfest was a threat. For some strange reason, I thought Oktoberfest took place in October. Turns out that is not the case. It’s really Septemberfest.

In case you’re wondering how “September” is spelled in German, it looks like this: “September.”

My understanding is that Oktoberfest is mainly about getting kneewalking drunk on beer. They set up tents all over the place, and you have to have a reservation to sit in a tent and get hammered. This sounds insane to me, but it’s what I’ve read. A reservation to sit in a tent.

I don’t see the appeal. I could see going to one beer garden and having one stein of beer with the wife, but that would take maybe an hour. How do you kill most of a day with nothing to do but drink beer? Yes, I did it when I was young, but I was pretty stupid back then, and Germans are not stupid.

Like Jesus and the disciples, I am not a teetotaling Christian. I used to make my own beer from my own recipes, and with reference to all other beers I’ve had, it was incomparable. I like a really good beer. Thing is, Germans are not that high on the list of good brewers. Americans are at the top. AND bottom. We make unbelievably bad fake beer like Coors, and we also make the best beer in the form of microbrews. Belgians are probably next. After that, I would give third prize to the Irish. German beer is extremely well made, but it doesn’t taste all that great. It’s bland. Like drinking the 5-series BMW with the small engine.

People think the Germans make the best beer, but that has never actually been true. They make boring beer to exceedingly high standards. Like they’re making it for NASA.

They make some very nice beers, but good luck finding anything as impressive as Flying Dog Snake Dog Ale or Chimay Triple.

I’m not knocking a good Spaten lager or the nice weissbeers that come out of Germany, but if I had to present an alien ambassador with the 10 best beers of Earth, it would be American, all the way.

Actually, the Turks make a truly wonderful lager. It’s called Efes, which is the Turkish name for Ephesus. It has a marvelous balance of sweetness and hops. On the dark side, leaning toward amber, and rich for a lager.

I’m starting to think we should forget Munich and fly into and out of Vienna.

What ever happened to Switzerland? That was our original dream destination, after Israel. We might be able to go there during this trip, but as of now, it seems safer to leave it off our application materials.

After the horrible experience with the Italian lady, we are very grateful to be treated better by the Germans. Granted, they made intrusive demands for the most private documents imaginable, short of medical records, and that was clearly unnecessary, but I think that’s just the Germans being German. There is nothing they can’t overthink.

After the abuse Rhodah suffered at the Italian embassy, I felt God was showing us to stop involving nasty people in our lives unnecessarily. We listened, and now we’re dealing with someone who appears to be a Christian.

I hope we get in. Otherwise, it’s back to Ireland, perhaps with a side of Turkey, depending on the breaks.

Someone Needs to Abort the Antichrist

My last blog entry was about homosexuals teaching children to do erotic dances on a stripper pole. I thought this was another reminder that the end is here. Then Ruth from Rockport Conservatives left a comment directing me to something even worse: a video of a leftist woman advising women who kill their children to create altars and put the remains on them.

It works like this: first, you kill your unborn child. Then you obtain the corpse or the pieces that remain after the baby is ripped up. Then you put the remains in a container and place it on an altar in your house. Then you use your altar when you do yoga or meditate or do whatever else leftists do instead of honoring the God who let himself be tortured to death for them.

It’s hard to make my mind accept knowledge like this. Based on my knowledge of the way sane people behave, it’s hard to make myself believe the video is serious.

I’m not alone. A conservative who drew attention to it on Twitter made sure he informed people the video was not a parody. He knew they would not be able to prevent themselves from looking for a reasonable explanation for it.

Last night, we got another reminder. The FBI raided Donald Trump’s home and broke into his safe. Journalists are saying they did it because they suspected he kept classified material after leaving office, and they also think he destroyed documents that were supposed to be preserved.

Think about Hillary Clinton. She was not a president. She was a Senator and Secretary of State. That means the feds should be much less likely to hesitate to raid her home. She kept classified material in her house. She also violated the law by using a secret email address to do official business under the table. When they asked for her computer, she had the hard drive wiped clean before handing it over to them.

She also took a $90,000 bribe before she took office. She had a trading account, she invested $1,000, and successful trades were credited to her until her account was worth about $100,000.

Obviously, Hillary Clinton is no trader. Someone saw to it that she did extraordinarily well, absorbing losses and attributing gains to her, and then her trading career ended. Ordinarily, a person who can generate 9000% profits over short intervals will keep trading and build a fortune.

We know Hillary and Bill love money. They do everything they can to profit from their status. If she could have continued generating 9000% profits every 10 months, she would have.

It’s like the roulette scene in Casablanca. Rick feels sorry for a married couple fleeing the Nazis, and he knows the husband is trying to raise money at the roulette wheel. He directs the croupier to do a couple of bogus spins, the husband gets the travel money, and then Rick tells him to quit.

The FBI didn’t break into the Clinton home. They politely requested evidence, and Hillary destroyed it. Like Trump, she was in a position which made trusting her to comply a very bad idea, but they effectively gave her permission, and time, to destroy evidence.

One of the clues that a relationship has gone past the point of reconciliation is that hostility and dishonesty are brought out into the open. The adversaries stop caring about hiding their hatred and misdeeds. This is what’s happening to the world now. The DOJ, including the FBI, no longer cares about preserving the appearance of integrity. They are now in an open war on non-leftists.

We have seen it coming for years. Leftists filed 84 ethics charges against Newt Gingrich, and only one stuck. They tried to get the IRS to charge him, but he was cleared. They got Tom DeLay arrested, and he was cleared. They impeached Trump twice for some things he hadn’t done and some things that were not even illegal. They filed bogus charges against Sarah Palin until she became so busy fighting them she could no longer serve.

Democrat politicians are more corrupt than Republicans, but we don’t see the same things happening to them.

No one who has lived a long time and had any kind of a life can survive intense, prolonged government scrutiny. Sooner or later, everyone does something that can be used to destroy his life. Leftists know this, so they hammer away at conservatives until they find things they can hang charges on.

As Horatio Hornblower said, “Each of us can find a maggot in our past which will happily devour our futures.”

You may think there is no maggot in your past. Ever drive home from a party drunk? If you’ve looked at Internet porn, are you positive every model was over 18? Are you positive you can’t be connected to any images or videos? Did you ever sell a friend weed or coke when you were in college? Have you ever walked into a prohibited place with a concealed weapon? Have you lied about your drug and alcohol use on a background check form? Keep thinking. You’ll find your maggot.

Why is all this happening? The answer is simple. Satan is the false god of this world, most people serve him, and he is using them to castrate the political allies of Christians and Israel. The human race has chosen Satan over God in the most important election of all, and God is letting us suffer the consequences.

Politics belongs to Satan. Too many conservatives don’t understand that. Most of us think politics will save us, and that in a democracy, we will eventually win because there are so many of us. These things are not true. Only God protects us, and many, many nations have been ruled by unpopular minority factions. The Japanese ruled China.

American democracy isn’t like the laws of physics. It’s not necessarily permanent. It can be taken away. It can be nullified, as events surrounding the 2020 election show.

I don’t think Trump will be tried, but the raid is still very damaging, because it will surely bring us a big step closer to civil war, which is our ultimate destination. It’s a sure thing. You can only treat people unfairly so long before they snap. Satan wants us to snap, and we will. Cruelty to conservatives will increase without restraint, we will be tormented, raped, robbed, and killed by mobs in our own yards, conservatives who don’t know God will grab their rifles and try to fix things, and streets will run red with blood.

We will descend to the level of our adversaries, and that’s Satan’s real goal.

People think civil war is a far-off thing, and that we are not in immediate danger. That’s not true. The US is full of leftists who are not merely willing, but eager, to cut our throats, steal everything we have, and pile us into mass graves. When the hot war begins, it will be sudden, and those who hate us will come after us very quickly.

In part, their haste will be motivated by a classic drive of looters and rapists: the desire to arrive early and get the best of everything. It serves no purpose to loot a store or a home two weeks after a hurricane. The people who get there fast take all the good things. Looters, which is what leftist revolutionaries are, know this.

The video about the dead-baby altar is chilling because, like our new mob crime epidemic, it harks back to ancient times. In the ancient Middle East, parents, including Jews, murdered their firstborn male children, put them in jars, and put the jars in the walls of their homes to please false gods. They also burned them as sacrifices to Molech. Murdering your baby and using his parts to create a shrine is essentially the same thing.

Spirits are immortal. We are still corrupted by the beings who corrupted Eve, Cain, Noah’s neighbors, the Egyptians, the Amalekites, the Philistines, the Benjamites, the ancient Jews who worshiped Ashtoreth and Molech, Solomon, the communists, and the Nazis. These spirits miss the old ways, and they are bringing them back in forms we will accept. They love being worshiped again. They love seeing beings God loves, who resemble God, march into hell with big smiles and rainbow flags.

I have been through a bunch of hurricanes, and I know the sensation that falls on an area before a storm arrives. There is a strange stillness and a sense of foreboding. There is also a feeling that there is no point in trying to do anything to prepare. I keep having these feelings with regard to America’s future.

When storms used to come, I would get a 300-quart cooler, lunchmeat, bread, ice, batteries, and a keg of homebrewed beer, and I would wait without fear. I knew nothing really bad would happen to me. I might have to go several days without refrigeration in the house, and I might have to move to my dad’s boat in order to have air conditioning and hot water, but that would be about it.

I have that feeling now. I don’t think what I do now matters very much. I think that if I took up cigarette smoking, it wouldn’t matter, because I wouldn’t be here long enough to get sick. If I ran up bills, it wouldn’t matter, because I would be gone before anyone could sue me.

I believe God has told me repeatedly, “Don’t worry about the hard times ahead, because they were not written for you.”

That doesn’t help everyone else, however.

Other people can only be helped through repentance, and repentance comes through listening, and listening is something people no longer do. Or rather, they do, but they only listen to Satan, who tells them what they like to hear so they can burn with him.

I suppose this is what the Bible really means when it says, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” If you can hear God, you can believe and be saved, but you can’t hear unless the Holy Spirit speaks the word of God to you and opens your ears.

Most people think that verse means you will have faith if you hear the word of God–the Bible–all the time, but that isn’t true. The world is full of people who immerse themselves in the word and still hate Jesus.

The group that put out the abortion shrine video had a blog. It looks like it’s gone. At the top of the blog, a title read, Gospels of Lilith: Self-Guided Abortion Blog.” Fitting. According to Jewish legend, Lilith is the predecessor of Eve. She hated being ruled by a male God and having to submit to a male partner, so she used the power of God’s name to fly away. She had sex with the archangel Samael (believed by many to be Satan) and gave birth to demons.

I don’t know if Lilith was real, but Eve was not much better. The first known human leftist, because she hated rightful authority. The first known witch, because she served Satan, not God. The first known drug user; the forbidden fruit was a mind-altering drug.

Feminism is leftism, and Satan was the first leftist, so it all makes sense.

The altar video was made private yesterday, but you can see bits of it in videos by commentators.

What’s happening is like labor. I keep wishing it were over. It’s like we are stuck in a doorway.

I guess I will write about new abominations as they develop.

It Pays to Have Connections

I have some testimony to report.

My wife and I visited Ireland. We did a great deal of shopping for her. In addition, I brought her things from America. I got her expensive Keen hiking shoes, wool socks, MAC cosmetics, an insulated Carhartt jacket, a bunch of wigs, a costly Spyderco knife, and at least two pounds of homemade beef jerky. I can’t recall all the things we bought in Ireland or all the things I brought, but when she got ready to fly home, her checked bag felt like it contained a dead body. The value was in the thousands of dollars.

She used Aer Lingus, Air France, and Airlink South Africa to get home. Aer Lingus took her to Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Air France took her to Johannesburg. Then she flew to Zambia on Airlink, which is called Airlink South Africa in South Africa and Airlink Zambia in Zambia.

We checked her bag in Dublin using the confirmation code we received when we bought her ticket from KLM, which is the same company as Air France. The claim ticket said the bag was going to Charles de Gaulle. We thought nothing of it, because routing bags was not our job. For all we knew, all bags on multiple flights had tags that only mentioned first destinations. The airlines knew where she was going, and we assumed they knew what they were doing. When I check bags, I never look at the tags. I rely on the billions of dollars’ worth of computers use to keep track of them.

Before she landed, I got an email from Air France, saying her bag had been delayed. It said we should file a report online. I forwarded the email to her. Her bag was not in Johannesburg when she arrived, so she went home.

I tried to file a report, and Air France’s site would not accept it. It is not possible to use Air France’s global site to report bag problems in South Africa. Air France had told us to do something impossible. When I called Air France, they said it wasn’t their problem. They said we had to deal with the last carrier in the chain, which isn’t really true. They were lying in order to avoid paying for the bag if they couldn’t find it.

Airlines steal luggage all the time. “Lose” is the wrong word. They don’t just lose it. They sell it. If Air France keeps your bag and refuses to file a report, they can sell it for a profit and save the cost of reimbursement. There are companies whose only business is buying “lost” bags and reselling them.

An Aer Lingus employee at its central baggage facility told me Air France was lying in order to avoid responsibility. Aer Lingus also told us Air France had flown the bag to Johannesburg two days after Rhodah’s flight, so we knew Air France had the bag.

When we called Johannesburg, they lied to us. They hung up on us. I got Skype so I could call them, and Skype banned me for life because I called so much. I would call, the system would hang up, and I would call again. Microsoft decided I was some kind of criminal, so there was no appeal.

Airlink’s Zambian employees filed what is known as a “courtesy report” solely for tracking purposes. This kind of report doesn’t include an admission of liability. I was able to access this report online for a while, but then the airlines–probably Air France–locked me out.

We had insurance through another company, Heymondo. They refused to compensate us without documentation from the airlines, which the airlines refused to give us.

Of course, Heymondo knows this happens, so their bag insurance is not very good. If an airline accepts responsibility, the airline pays a lot of money, and Heymondo may be off the hook. If the airline doesn’t accept responsibility, Heymondo doesn’t pay you anything. It looks like their coverage only works after the airline pays its share.

It’s a racket, all the way around.

Rhodah went to the Lusaka airport over and over. I spent a ton of money on calls to South Africa. In the end, nothing happened.

Rhodah had a vision during this time. She saw a strange woman wearing her Carhartt jacket.

We pray together every day. In prayer, I kept cursing the spirits that were trying to keep what belonged to Rhodah. I cursed the people involved with defeat. I felt as though God were telling me the bag would come back, but my faith was nothing to write home about.

I bought Rhodah a new jacket, knife, and shoes for our upcoming trip. I replaced the wool socks she had lost. I told her she should replace what she could in Zambia because we didn’t save much by stuffing my bag, and we could always lose things again.

Today Rhodah sent me this photo.

There is the bag, nearly 4 months after they stole it. Airlink brought it this morning after an unexpected call. The jacket is gone. The knife appears to be gone. That’s about $350 right there. The rest of the things seem to be present, so we have avoided a loss amounting to several thousand dollars. She has yet to comb through the bag carefully. Of course, they beat it up.

We should now be able to force the airlines to pay for her stolen items, and if they won’t, the insurer should have to pay. The fact that the bag came back 4 months late should be good evidence that there was a problem.

I took Rhodah a lot of homemade beef jerky, and it was still in the bag. She got so excited, she started eating it even though she was supposed to be fasting. I’m glad it was in there, because it took a lot of raw beef and time to make it.

I still have to take her the new jacket. I’m putting the new shoes in my closet. The ones she recovered should last years, so there is no point in taking new ones to her. I can’t return them to Amazon because I gave the box to Marvin, and he ate holes in it and pooped all over it. When the old shoes (which have about two weeks’ worth of mileage on them) wear out, she will have a fresh pair ready to go.

I still lost the money I spent on calls.

So who stole the jacket and knife?

I considered the possibility it was a South African or Zambian. South Africans are very violent, and they like to use knives on each other. Zambians are not very inclined to violence. I think most French bag thieves would find knives uninteresting, although there are a lot of criminals in France who come from Muslim countries and Africa, and a really good lock-blade knife would appeal to such people. There is a lot of Muslim knife crime in France.

Rhodah thinks it was a white woman. The wigs in the bag were worth something like $800, and the cosmetics were also expensive, but they were not touched. A white woman would not have been able to use them. A black woman would have wanted them. The jacket was small for a man, so the thief was probably female. Maybe our things were stolen by a Caucasian Muslim woman in France who thought her husband would like a good knife to carry in their dangerous Muslim neighborhood.

People think Muslims don’t steal. Wrong! They steal like crazy when they aren’t afraid of Muslim justice in the form of unneeded surgery. Islam teaches that Allah encourages stealing from non-Muslims. Somali pirates are Muslims.

I think it is somewhat unlikely that a Zambian woman would steal a highly distinctive American jacket and wear it in Zambia, especially in an airport where her coworkers knew a passenger had reported such a jacket lost. A thief in France or South Africa could be certain the victim would never see her with the jacket.

Today we prayed for the thieves and their families.

I have given Rhodah a lot of money for redundant purchases, so this event is a score for her.

When I found out the bag was back, I felt bad for not having more faith. Yahweh is the master of the tiny, weak spirit Muslims worship when they use the name “Allah.”

What happened is remarkable. When a bag is gone for almost 4 months, generally, you can consider it lost.

In other news, I kept hearing something strange last night during prayer: “Rejoice! Your day is here.” I’m grateful for the luggage, but somehow I don’t think God would say my day was here just because my wife got a lost bag back. Either he was talking about something else, or the bag is part of a bigger event, or I imagined everything.

If the words came from God, then whatever has happened is very good, because “rejoice” was in there.

I am ready to rejoice. My life is easy, as is my wife’s life, but I have been rejected and hindered since before I was born, and so has she. A lot of Christians go from acceptance, wealth, and successful marriages and families straight into Christianity. Many people who become Christians are doing very well before the change comes. I had a brief period of fitting in and doing well during and after law school, but other than that, I have always been an outsider, and I didn’t marry until I was old. I have been cheated out of one thing after another.

Yesterday I was thinking of prominent Christians who have been treated very badly, and I thought it was strange that things were going well for Rhodah and me. I wondered if it meant we were not good Christians. Then I thought about all the rotten things that had happened to me when I was younger. It may be that most of my suffering is behind me. I have heard that in prophecy a lot.

I always tell people two things: I wouldn’t go through my childhood again for anything, and anyone who wants to prolong his life on Earth is insane. I have been abused since before I was born, and I am tired of this place even though life is pleasant now. Maybe God’s exasperation with the people and spirits that have mistreated me is greater than his motivation to let me be tested further.

I believe we are also spared because we ask for it. Jesus said we should pray that God would not lead us into temptation and that he would deliver us from evil. Rhodah and I ask for those things every day. They must not be automatic, or we would not have been told to ask.

Satan is a bully, and he has favorites, like any bully. Some people get more of his abuse than others. Surely God will provide favor that outweighs Satan’s disfavor. And eventually we’ll get to see Satan thrown screaming into the fire, which will erase all the pleasure he got from hurting people.

We now have to contact Airlink and tell them our items are lost. I do not have high hopes, given the way we have been treated so far. After that, we will try Heymondo. It would be nice to have a few hundred dollars returned to us.

I am working on getting us into Czechia. I accidentally reserved a hotel room in a place where they are not allowed to install air conditioning. It’s a historic building. Forget that place. I don’t care if King Wenceslaus himself slept there. I’m not going to Europe to sweat.

I sent the Zambian embassy in Rome an email, detailing the way the Italian embassy in Lusaka lied to us and treated Rhodah rudely. They claim they are taking it seriously and following up. I hope so, because the nasty lady who caused our loss needs to be fired or corrected. Someone else should be handling visas. Maybe she can be reassigned to the copier room where she can hurl abuse at the guy who delivers toner.

The Zambian embassy helps Italians the way the Italian embassy is supposed to help Zambians, so they should be very angry to learn how we were treated. I don’t think I have to check when I opine that the Zambians in Rome are much more honest and kind than the Italian lady in Lusaka.

We prayed for this lady and her family, but that doesn’t mean she what she did should be ignored.

This time, I will tell Rhodah to be careful not to pack anything she is afraid to lose. We will photograph everything we pack, and we will check bag tags very carefully.

ALPS!

The world of tourism is possibly weirder than ever before.

My wife and I meet in foreign countries while we wait for Uncle (or is it “Aunt”?) Sam to allow her to join me here in the Forbidden Country of Coronavirus Hysteria and Rewarding Illegal Aliens. We had to go to Egypt and Turkey last year because we could not go where we wanted to go, and in March, we visited Ireland. Also because we could not go where we wanted to go.

The Egyptians were great, but the country is insane and really dirty. The Turks were great, and I don’t have any qualifying remarks to add. The Irish were great, but I didn’t want to go to their country, and it turned out to be a better place to live than to visit.

Where did we really want to go? Israel. Unfortunately, Israel, which relies heavily on tourism, punishes people who intend to do evil things such as traveling there and spending a lot of money. They had a long period of extremely neurotic bans and bureaucratic hoops, and as of now, they want Rhodah to ship her passport to Pretoria on the off chance they might see their way clear to allowing us to help finance their embattled nation’s success.

We decided to shoot for Italy and Greece because policies changed and getting her a visa started to look possible. Italy has an embassy in Zambia, and they also do Greece.

Did we actually want to go to Italy or Greece? Well, sure, but they’re not Israel or Switzerland, my top two foreign destinations. And we didn’t want to visit Italy or Greece during hot months. I would make an exception for Israel because it’s dry and because I really like Israel.

Anyway, we are getting her a visa now. We are pretty sure. The Italians assure us we will get it.

Trying to arrange this trip has been a miserable process, as evinced by the fact that it’s July and we are still not abroad. Well, Rhodah is always abroad, being a foreigner, but you know what I mean.

We unintentionally annoyed the Italians by making mistakes, so we are going to have to present our case a second time. It has been nearly impossible to get information from them except when they’re mad at us, so we have been in the dark about the way European visas work. In the US, I can call the Italian embassy and get someone to talk to me, I would guess, but in Zambia, when you contact them, you get confusing emails and an appointment a month or so out, so you do your best with the limited knowledge you have.

It may be that they are very busy. Maybe they’re understaffed because of coronavirus. In any case, you can’t just stroll in unannounced and ask questions.

We have managed to glean some information which may help other people, so I’ll write about it.

We were under the impression that when you visit Europe, you have to get a visa from the country where your plane lands. We thought we would be limited to one or two countries. We thought it would also be impossible to go through other countries by train or whatever. All these beliefs are wrong.

Visas for individual EU countries don’t exist any more. Actually, not EU countries, but Schengen Area countries. The Schengen Area is nearly the same thing as the EU. If, say, Estonia lets you visit, you can hop on a train in…whatever the capital of Estonia is…and go to Paris or Vienna or any other Schengen location.

This was not true during the height of the covid insanity, because there were special rules, but it’s generally true, and it’s true now.

So why do we have to apply to Italy?

We have applied to other Schengen nations, and they turned us down for really bad reasons. We considered Switzerland, and we found out they really torture visa applicants. It’s easier to get clearance to launch nuclear missiles. We were led to believe Italy was more cooperative, and it’s also a great place to visit.

Schengen countries have an official policy: when you go to Europe, you have to apply to the nation where you will spend the most time. They do this to make life easier on themselves. I don’t quite understand it, but I think they may be trying to discourage people from using cooperative embassies in places like Latvia to get into highly desirable illegal alien destinations like Liechtenstein.

Supposedly, Estonia is the most malleable country when it comes to visas, and people know this because Internet. I guess they and other easy countries don’t want to be flooded with applicants who are really going to Germany or France, hence the policy.

Having irritated the Italians with our ignorance, we continued studying the visa game, and we learned that we can visit other excellent and relatively cool (in terms of temperature) destinations with a visa granted by Italy. As great as Greece is, it’s hot, so we have abandoned it, and we are now planning to do France and Switzerland on the way to Italy.

This is a dream come true. Three top tourism nations in one trip.

I would never go back to Egypt except maybe for another Nile cruise and a weekend in Cairo. IN COOL WEATHER, not another 115-degree summer. I could see doing that for nostalgic reasons in a few years, but overall, Egypt is a destination with problems. I would go back to Turkey, but it’s not a huge priority. I would not go back to Ireland unless I wanted to emigrate and they offered me permanent residency, because moving there is more appealing than visiting. France, Switzerland, and Italy are on another level.

It looks like we will be visiting three places I’ve already been, which is fine with me. When you’ve been to a lot of fantastic destinations you know you can trust, visiting new places is overrated. We are also going to Rome, which I somehow managed to miss in the past.

What if we decide to change our plans? It can be done, but the Europeans don’t like it. If you say you’re going to Poland, for example, they want you to go to Poland, even though there are no border checks and you can go anywhere you want.

I wouldn’t want some European to look at Rhodah’s passport the next time we apply, compare the stamps to the things we told the Italians, and find out we went to Austria and Holland and avoided Italy entirely. What if they keep tabs on such things? We plan to make them as happy as possible with our cooperation. But I have a feeling they wouldn’t check.

Now you know how it works. You have to apply to the country where you will spend the most time. You can go to other countries once you arrive. The Europeans want you to keep your word. Whether breaking it will cause problems, I can’t say.

I watched some informative Youtubes about Switzerland today. I almost fell into a trance. I love that place. I wish I could move there. It’s hard to believe heaven itself is more beautiful. The food is good. The people aren’t running around tearing down statues and throwing urine on the police. Capitalism reigns. The economy is stellar. The weather is wonderful. Even the winter weather is nice compared to what much of the US gets.

The Swiss are great at absolutely everything, except probably driving, because their speed limits are pathetic. Everything they make is top-notch. Their houses, buildings, towns, and cities are beautiful.

Of course, Switzerland would be ruined if people like me moved there. My wild Appalachian Scots-Irish-derived approach to life would contaminate the order and offend the Swiss, with considerable justification.

I didn’t grow up in Appalachia, but my people came from there, and the sick parts of the culture have tainted my nature. If I were Swiss, I wouldn’t want people like me to move there. I would disrupt the perfection. “He returned a library book three days late? This cannot happen!”

What can you say about Italy? When most people think of the Renaissance, other countries don’t even enter their minds. For example, they don’t know Shakespeare was a Renaissance figure. Art reached its peak in Italy in the 1400’s, and since then, it has all been downhill. Italy also produced Galileo and pizza.

Maybe there is no point in mentioning anything but pizza. It’s so great, the Renaissance looks silly in the same discussion. It’s like saying, “I finally got my doctorate in astrophysics, and also, I made a mud pie.”

I think Italians are the Southerners of Europe. More full of life than the French and Germans. Better able to enjoy their time on Earth.

I would say Italy stands out because of the ruins of Rome, but Rome is everywhere in Europe because it was an empire, not a country. There are functioning Roman baths in England. In a town named Bath, as a matter of fact.

Paris is one of the prettiest cities in the world, and the French are insanely serious about their cooking. The museums can’t be beat. The people can be annoying, because their reputation for rudeness is based in fact, but you have to blow that off and keep going. And not all of them are rude.

France helped us get our independence, while the British, who are supposedly our best buds, were busy doing the opposite. Our close relationship with England is based largely on misconceptions and people’s opinions of Richard Dawson and Mary Poppins, who, thanks to our leftist-controlled educational system, most Americans believe to be a real person.

I truly hope we please the Italians and get a visa, because they made us to buy plane tickets before they would even rule on our application, and if we can’t use the tickets, that money is gone forever. They claim we will make it.

Maybe this blog entry will help other travelers. I hope so, because there is very little other material of use on the web.

Bad Cooks Spread Bad Recipes

Yesterday Mike and I celebrated Memorial Day by eating something we would have eaten anyway. It’s not really true that we celebrated the holiday. Monday was coming up, we hadn’t bought anything to fix for dinner, and we had frozen spare ribs, so we smoked them.

I decided to try something Internet gurus rave about. It’s called the 321 method, for spare ribs. You smoke them for three hours. Then you wrap them and bake them for two hours. Then you unwrap them and bake them for one more hour.

I thought it might be a surefire formula that would eliminate guesswork in the future, so what the heck.

After three hours, the small pieces of our full rack were completely done, and the big pieces were not all that far behind. I realized I had once again been fooled by bad cooks with big platforms.

I set the small bits aside, covered the big ones, and smoked the big ones for around 45 minutes. Then I cooked everything, unwrapped, for about 45 more minutes.

The little bits were more done than they needed to be, although they were very good. The unneeded cooking time took some of the moisture out, so they weren’t what they could have been. The bigger ones were perfect.

I went to a BBQ forum and asked about the method, and I got negative responses. It is not popular with people who actually know how to barbecue. Still, for reasons unknown to me, sites like The Spruce Eats promote it like it cures cancer.

That website says nearly all of the smoke is absorbed in the first three hours. Right away, that tells you the person who wrote the article is a barbecue duffer. If you use so much wood it’s still smoking after three hours, you are overdoing it. My smoker uses about 2.5 ounces of wood, and that much wood will not burn all day.

It’s always amazing to see the disparity between people’s willingness to publish cooking information and their ability to cook or even recognize good food.

If I had let my ribs go 6 hours, the meat would have been dried-out mush. No question about it. How can the Internet gurus not know this? Answer: twofold. Some have never tried it, but they are willing to copy it from other people and republish it because they need content to put in front of the public. This is dishonest but very typical in the food-information industry. Some have tried it and simply can’t tell good food from bad.

These are my guesses.

I guarantee you, many rib recipe articles are written by paid writers who have never made ribs. I promise you, this is true. I know how publishing works. Outlets hire kids fresh out of college to do the actual work. A friend of mine who knew nearly nothing wrote authoritative articles for one of the biggest women’s magazines. There are probably vegans writing rib recipes for food websites.

I have a new method I’m going to use next time. It’s the 2-2-.75 method. I’m going to smoke for two hours. If you use the right amount of wood, your smoke will poop out after about 90 minutes, so there is no real point in pretending you’re smoking them after that. Two hours of smoking will make sure I got all the benefit from the wood, but it will conserve the water in the meat. After that, I’ll wrap and bake for two hours to ensure tenderness. Then I’ll cook the ribs, uncovered, for maybe 45 minutes. I’ll check occasionally to make sure they’re okay.

This will definitely work. Big ribs need at least 4 hours of cooking, so the first two-hour stretches will be guaranteed not to do any harm. After that, I’ll be able to monitor them and make sure I don’t overcook them.

People will say nearly anything about food, just to hear their heads rattle. They’ll tell you Peter Luger’s is a great restaurant, which is, objectively and obviously, wrong. They’ll tell you soy burgers are just as good as beef. They’ll claim cottage cheese is great in lasagna. They say baby backs, which are small, dry, and expensive, are better than big, juicy spare ribs. They fill the world with bad recipes and deprive other people of the quality food experiences they should be having.

Avoid the 321 method. You have been warned. And if you see a food “authority” pushing it, don’t ever trust that person in the future, because it’s not possible to be that wrong about ribs and be reliable concerning anything else.

Here is a vinegar sauce I made up, in case you, like me, are interested in light sauces for pork. It’s very, very good. Scale it up as desired.

INGREDIENTS

4 oz cider vinegar
2 oz ketchup
1 clove garlic, crushed
several generous squirts Frank’s
1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. hot prepared mustard
maple syrup, sorghum syrup, or molasses to taste
water to taste

Sorry I don’t have precise measurements for the sweet stuff and water. Next time I make the sauce, I’ll record things better.

Don’t Let This Happen to You

I used to recommend a Christian teacher named Perry Stone. He got all sorts of revelation from God, and he taught about the deep truths of the Bible. He connected things in various books. He explained the meanings of symbols. It was something to see.

He didn’t ask for money, and he made it clear he never intended to. He counted on God to bring donations in. He gave materials to people who couldn’t pay, such as prisoners. He called his ministry Voice of Evangelism instead of putting his name on it.

Over time, he started to become somewhat crazy. He was angry a lot, and sometimes he relayed stories that were not true. He hadn’t checked them. He supplied information that wasn’t reliable.

He started to seem very proud of himself. He seemed to think he was always right. He wouldn’t admit it when he was wrong.

Eventually, he started asking for money. God didn’t give him what he wanted, so he appealed to people to help him build a big campus. He started calling his business Perry Stone Ministries.

I used to support his work, but it seemed to me that he was going astray, so I stopped. It was particularly ominous to see him appearing with Steve Munsey, a crooked megachurch grifter who is known for helping preachers get people to give them money. Rick Wilkerson Sr., the failed pastor of my old church in Miami, idolized Munsey and let him ruin his church. He thought Munsey was a genius because he had a Starbucks in his church.

I used to post comments on Stone’s Youtube videos, warning him to get away from Munsey.

In 2020, women associated with Stone accused him of gross sexual behavior, including things like showing them how sexually aroused he was. One said God had told him his wife Pam would be dead soon and that he needed to be with another woman. He took time off from preaching, but he went back very quickly.

He began attacking the victims and messengers. A lady stood up in church and called him a “nasty perv,” and he threatened to have her arrested and sue her, neither of which were credible options. He said those things because he panicked. His pride had been breached publicly, while he was on camera, in the pulpit, and after years of being surrounded by yes-men, he could not handle it.

He claimed he had a divinely-inspired dream about “ugly fish,” which represented women interfering with his ministry. He said he expected bad things, such as death, to happen to them.

In short, he went off his nut.

Recently, highly disturbing audio emerged. He had a meeting with two men who were close to him. One was a ministry leader, and the other was a cop who handled security for him. They tried to talk sense to him and calm him down. He cursed and said he was going to kill himself. I’ll provide quotations.

I’m going to go commit suicide up in the mountains and end this thing.

Listen to me, before God, I’m going to go take pills in the mountains … because I can’t put up with this. I am a very sincere person but I have almost no friends, man. And I have almost no friends because of s— like this.

I can’t shake a woman’s hand, “Oh, he’s coming on to me!” Pat them on the back, “Oh, he’s coming on to me!”

I will take my life before I let the ministry go down. I swear to God I’ll take my life!

No, no, no, no. This is going to get bigger. If he’s got letters, it means they’re talking. The ministry is ruined. I’m going to shut down and sell the building. I need to. I need to shut OCI down and sell the building and forget everything I’m doing. And if Pam Stone knows this, Pam Stone will leave me. Oh, she’ll find out. She’ll find out. And by accusations I’ll be destroyed, so what do I have to live for?

This is not your ordinary TV preacher scandal response. Stone reacted like a scared little girl, and he was caught up in selfishness, threatening to spite the world by depriving it of his exalted self. We haven’t heard any audio indicating remorse or a rational response. I doubt there is any.

The voice is undeniably Stone’s. You can go hear him on Youtube, and the story appeared in a reputable paper.

I looked at Stone’s Youtube channel last night. Videos are still popping up, many without Stone. Comments have been turned off. This is one of the signs of a ministry’s death. Crooked preachers like Kenneth Copeland, Paula White, and John Gray don’t let people comment on their videos. Cockroaches run from the light, as conservative Twitter users know.

I know what happened to Stone. Lust wasn’t his big problem. Pride was. He became so full of himself, he could not accept any kind of correction, and he craved wealth and admiration. After he became incorrigible, lust was able to get in and control him, and then after he sinned, pride made him lie.

God told me this: “The concealment of a sin is worse than the sin itself.”

I know why pride defeated Stone. He didn’t pray in tongues enough. He told people they should do it, but his own prayer life was scant. He bragged about the long hours he spent studying the Bible and other books. You can’t put in long hours every day and have a prayer life that works. It’s not possible.

He used to praise old mountain people who prayed in tongues “excessively,” and to him, “excessively” meant 20 minutes. That’s not excessive. That’s just a beginning. If you only pray in tongues 20 minutes a day, you aren’t winning at life. You are being deceived and defeated.

Stone thought a 20-minute session was a big deal, so he must have been putting in much less time than that.

One of the signs that you’re not praying in tongues enough is that you become deceived. Stone is clearly deceived. He isn’t being corrected by God, and he appears to be somewhat insane.

He needs to go home, quit preaching, get his prayer life going, and let God fix his life. He needs to repent publicly, for real, not like he did the first time, and apologize to the people he wronged. He needs to have demons cast out of him.

It’s a shame to see him taken down like this. He has become so deranged, he is willing to consider killing himself–going to hell–in order to avoid more embarrassment. His pride is worth more to him than avoiding eternal torture by an enemy who will have special punishments waiting for him.

Because he is crazy now, people will assume he was always crazy. They will be less inclined to look at the sound, valuable work he did years ago. Nice work on the part of Satan. He has retroactively defused bombs that were wrecking parts of his kingdom. Fewer people will benefit from Stone’s earlier teaching, so more people will be more vulnerable to attack. If he gets to torture Stone in hell, it will be the cherry on top of the sundae. What a trophy.

Stone didn’t teach people how to protect themselves, so many of his followers are sticking up for him. They’re not praying in tongues enough. They’re not seeking correction. As the Bible says, a bad tree bears bad fruit.

I was praying about this last night. I told God it was discouraging, because if a man with Stone’s background can fall, what could happen to me?

I have been proud and extremely resistant to correction from other people. I have been hostile to people who were right when they argued with me. I keep trying to improve, but what I say about myself is true.

God has given me grace to pray in tongues. That is what will save me. I am doing what Perry Stone does not do, so I should avoid the snares he fell into.

I hope he doesn’t kill himself. He should have enough money to have a soft retirement, so he should be able to stay home and stay out of trouble. The problem with disgraced preachers, though, is that pride usually drives them back into the limelight. Alberto Lee Santiago, the pedophile who ran my last church, went to prison because he insisted on preaching after he was caught, and I don’t think he is any crazier than Perry Stone.

In other news, the gardening project is going well.

The tomatoes we repotted the other day are all alive. Mike was sure it was good to put tomatoes in a 50/50 mixture of peat and dry cow manure from the pasture, but I insisted on checking the web, and I settled on a mix of peat, potting soil, composted manure, and perlite, along with epsom salt and lime. We repotted 10 plants, and we did 9 my way. Mike insisted on doing one his way. As of today, 9 are doing well, and Mike’s plant is somewhat yellow and is losing…is “branches” the word? He is full of remorse. I think the 9 healthy plants will thrive pretty well and produce tomatoes. They are looking stronger by the day.

I am planning to try Ruth Stout no-till gardening, which could also be called “no-character gardening,” because it requires little work. A lady named Ruth Stout decided to try throwing seeds on the ground and covering them with old hay, with no other preparation, and she found she got better harvests than people who worked hard tilling, enriching, and weeding the soil.

You can see why this appeals to me. First, I am somewhat lazy, second, I want big harvests, and third, my soil is like beach sand. Growing things in the ground would be very hard.

I found out Yukon Gold and LaSoda potatoes grow well here, and I also learned you can grow beans and tomatoes the Ruth Stout way. I have seed potatoes and sweet potato slips coming. I have pole beans on hand. I may get more tomato plants.

I think potatoes and beans are important, because they have calories. You can’t live on cabbage and cucumbers.

Getting a lot of hay seemed like an obstacle. It’s expensive. Then I remembered the round hay bales in my woods. My tenant farmer puts them there for his cattle. I can’t take the edible hay, but the cattle have left a gigantic amount of old poopy hay strewn around, and it’s free. I got myself a manure fork today, and I loaded up the utility cart. It took about 10 minutes, so getting enough for a bed should be fast work. As of today, I own a manure fork, so I’m armed with the correct tool.

Better news yet: you can plant vegetables in oak leaves. I only have a few thousand tons of those. They’re acidic, which is a problem. If only I had a source of something to cut the acidity. Like the gigantic pile of ashes under my burn pile.

I think I’ll put down a layer of hay and then pile leaves over it. The leaves will trap moisture for sure. Or maybe I should put the leaves down first, because they will definitely kill all the grass and weeds under the bed. They have killed enough of my grass to make me confident.

We have not built a structure to protect plants yet. The potatoes won’t need protection, because squirrels are too stupid to dig potatoes. My understanding is that they will eventually discover pole beans. Tomatoes will definitely be attacked. I was thinking of building a greenhouse-like thing, but the more I think, the more I believe I just need a frame covered with chicken wire. It’s not cold enough here for a real greenhouse.

The war on squirrels goes better and better. I have learned that trapping nuisance squirrels is legal here, and I have also discovered conibear traps. These are little snap traps you can bait with marshmallows and peanut butter. You tie them to trees, and squirrels climb up and grab the bait. They’re extremely humane (mainly to me, I admit). They crush a squirrel’s neck instantly. I plan to try them. I got squirrel-thinning permission in writing from the state, so there is no reason to hold back. During the past week, I have executed so many squirrels, I have lost count. There are three in the yard now, waiting for their rides. From hawks.

In past years, I spent a lot of time sitting in the woods in a blind I bought, failing to shoot or even see squirrels. I wish I had known what I know now: the best blind is my house. I shoot most of them from the front door and bedroom.

Being a Southerner is so great.

Tomorrow, I plan to pick a spot for my bed, amass a large amount of leaves using the blower, and put them in place. Then I plan to cover them with poopy hay. Then I have to wait for my seed potatoes and sweet potato slips.

I need to learn this stuff before Biden starves us all. I don’t want to be unable to find carbohydrates because I sat on my rear end and trusted the government. I would be a lot better off had I started two years ago.

I don’t know what Biden-trusting people will do in cities. Eat each other, I guess. What if they start driving to the country to steal food? Good recipe for the wave of killings predicted in the Revelation. When times are good, shooting people who steal crops and livestock seems barbaric. When your chickens and vegetables affect what your family weighs in the spring, or how many members make it through the winter, all that changes.

For the first time in my life, I understand why my great aunt Berthy shot at a man who tried to steal her chickens. I get it. As a Christian, I don’t see myself doing that, but other people would.

I learned I can eat wood ears. They call them “chicken of the woods.” I will never run out of those here. I wonder how many calories there are in a serving. Coons and possums are edible, too. You can even eat a coyote or bobcat if you need to.

The recent improvement in my squirrel tactics could serve me well in the future, if I’m not able to thin them out and they remain in good supply. Two people could fill their meat needs with a weekly tally of 8 squirrels. When things get bad, no one will care much about whether they’re in season, and since they will be nuisance animals when they’re close to my house, killing them would be legal anyway.

If all this sounds crazy to you, ask yourself how crazy a 5-dollar carton of eggs would have sounded last year.

Hopefully the rapture will lift me out of here before I start putting moles in my soup.

Sicilian Pizza Recipe

I rarely check the email address associated with this blog, so I get behind on correspondence. I have to go to a different location and turn on a computer I don’t use much. Sorry about that.

A reader asked me for my current pizza recipe, and I don’t think I sent it, so I am trying to make up for it now.

This is for a Sicilian made in a 9″x13″ aluminum quarter sheet pan. I season my pans with olive oil, baking it on at 500° or so until it’s a nice, slick film. A lot of people love steel and iron, but the truth is that aluminum gives a better crust, and it’s light and easy to work with.

I used to use 1-1/3 times as much dough, for a taller crust. My friend Mike is staying with me, and he has blood sugar issues, so I decided to try a thinner crust. It’s still excellent. If you want a taller crust, do the multiplication.

Whatever you decide to do, you want about 2/3 as much water as flour, by weight. Don’t measure the flour and water by volume, because you will get inconsistent results. Be precise about this. A small variation can ruin your pizza. Don’t be an idiot and say you have to do everything by feel.

The big exception here is the sauce. You want 4 ounces by volume. It can be hard trying to figure out exactly what 4 ounces of sauce weigh, but the volume figure is what you’re shooting for.

SICILIAN PIZZA WITH 3/4-HEIGHT CRUST

300 g high-gluten flour, like All Trumps or GFS Primo Gusto
200 g water
1 tsp. salt
1.5 tsp. sugar
1/8 tsp. instant yeast – This will take hours to rise, so multiply by 4 if you’re in a hurry.
1/2 tsp. pepper
1.5 tsp. gluten if using bread flour – You may want to add a little more water.

Mix everything but the water in a big food processor with a chopper blade. Add the water and process for up to a minute. Dry flour will fly up and stick to the sides of the bowl in the first few seconds. I like to stop the processor and scrape it back into the dough with a silicone spatula. Then I continue.

Pour olive oil into your sheet pan. When it spreads out, it should be a circle at least 5″ in diameter. Put a little oil on your hands. Take the dough out and turn it inside out a few times, stretching it to make it tighter so it gives a good oven spring. Flatten it out into sort of a crude rectangle about an inch thick. Put it in the pan, roll it in the oil, and cover the pan with plastic.

After at least 20 minutes, Try stretching it to fit the pan. If it won’t cooperate, do what you can and return after 20 more minutes. Once it’s stretched, put dents all over the top of the dough with your fingers. Then turn it over and fit it to the pan. The dents will form nice ripples and so on in the finished crust.

SAUCE INGREDIENTS

4 oz. volume or ~135 g weight Stanislaus Saporito sauce
4 oz. water

If you want a sauce that tastes more ripe, substitute around 1-1/2 oz. of the fruit juice of your choice for part of the water.

1 tsp. sugar
1 tbsp. oil
1-1/2 tsp. vinegar
1 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. oregano

CHEESE

6 slices Publix brand provolone
Enough Boar’s Head mozzarella (whole milk, low moisture) to make up 12 oz.

I used to use Gordon Food Service provolone, but it seems kind of rubbery these days. Boar’s Head deli mozzarella works well, but it’s expensive, so try to find something else. You can also substitute other things, such as cheddar or munster. Swiss can be very nice.

Cut the mozzarella in cubes if you want to make things easy. Otherwise, thin slices will work. I tell the grocery people to make me 1/2″ slices so I can turn them into cubes easily.

Apply the sauce to the crust. If you want, you can parbake it first, but it doesn’t really improve it. Apply the provolone. Spread the mozzarella over it. Sprinkle the pie with oregano. Add toppings.

I like to put a few slivers of cheese on the outer edge of the crust so they melt and burn against the pan. You have to have a well-seasoned pan, though, or the cheese will stick.

Bake at 500° or more (my oven does 550°) on the lowest rack, until you get what you want. These days, I have been burning pizzas pretty good, at up to 17 minutes. I use a pizza steel now. I put it on the lowest rack and let it get good and hot. Then I put the pizza pan on it.

Take the pie out of the pan and put it on a wire rack if you are obsessed with crunchiness. If not, you can put it on a pizza tray.

You will probably have to play around to see how to handle your particular oven.

You can use just about any flour you want. They all work, but they give results that are good in different ways.

I suggest you make yourself a pizza peel like the one I made. You can find photos on this blog. You just cut it out of a pizza pan, bend it, and sand off the rough bits. You need something as wide as the quarter sheet is long in order to get all the way under the crust, break any sticky spots loose, and support the pizza.

The sauce comes in huge cans, so you should break every can into portions and freeze them in airtight bags. I divide my cans into 4 portions. When I want pizza, I take the frozen sauce out and slice off as much as I want, using a scale to measure it. Then I melt it in the microwave and add my other ingredients.

That’s about it. The results are extraordinary. Maybe you can improve on them.

Living High on Pork Avenue

Today I had a traditional meal I had not had in a while. Cornbread and vegetables. I fixed green beans and collards, and I served them with a sliced Vidalia and a sliced tomato. Very, very nice.

Yesterday, Mike made BBQ chicken, and I made greens. Because the chicken came out of the smoker faster than I anticipated, the greens had been cooking less than three hours when dinner was served. For this reason, they were practically raw by Southern standards, and the flavor was substandard. They were probably better than the collards in 99% of America’s restaurants, but then restaurants make them badly.

I had hoped to make the greens with neckbones, but my local grocery was out of neckbones and hocks. I grabbed some fatback, but when I got home, I decided not to use it because it wasn’t smoked. I used half a pound of fried bacon instead, along with most of the grease. I also added a garlic clove, salt, MSG, butter, pepper, and a few squirts of hot sauce. In retrospect, I think half a can of chicken broth might have been nice.

Mike put vinegar in his greens, and he raved about them. I kept telling him they were garbage compared to the real thing, but he didn’t seem to think that was possible.

After we ate, I boiled the greens for maybe 90 more minutes, and they finally gave up. They wilted completely and gave up all their flavor. Instead of salad in hot water, I had sweet, wilted, wrinkly greens swimming in an acidic, aromatic reduction you could sell by itself in a high-end restaurant. Call it soup.

Yesterday, when I realized I wouldn’t be able to use the fatback in the greens, I put it in the smoker with the chicken. When it came out, it was gorgeous. It had a golden glaze on it. It was tender. It smelled like heaven. Today I used it in my beans.

Pole beans are the best green beans. They have lots of flavor, and they take a long time to fall apart when you boil them. You can boil them with pork for hours without ruining the texture. I did not have pole beans, so I put my regular beans in water with salt, garlic, pepper, sugar, butter, and MSG. I sliced the fatback into the pot.

After a couple of hours, the beans were getting soft, but there was still too much liquor in the pot, so I removed the beans and boiled the snot out of the liquor and pork. I reduced the liquid by a factor of maybe three. Then I put everything back together. The blandness was gone. The flavor was even better than the flavor of the greens.

I made cornbread using my standard recipe, which is 2 cups Martha White, 1-1/3 cups full-fat buttermilk, 2 eggs, 1/4 cup bacon grease, 1 tbsp. sugar, and 1 tsp. salt. I had to replace about two tablespoons of grease with butter because I was running low. I baked at 450° in a #6 skillet. The cornbread came out with a dark brown bottom and lots of crunch. It was beautiful.

I will explain how I eat this stuff. I slice the onion and quarter the slices. I slice the tomato. I butter the cornbread. Then I go at it, and most of the time, I try to get a piece of Vidalia on my fork with whatever else I’m eating. I dip the cornbread in the liquid from the greens and beans.

If that sounds weird, you may be one of the millions of people who don’t like vegetables much, or maybe you’ve never had greens or beans cooked correctly with pork.

Mike is a real challenge. I made hoe cakes, which are small fried cornbread pancakes, the other day. They were supposed to go with chili. Mike grabbed a squeeze bottle of cheap jelly and blasted some hoe cakes with it. I nearly died.

Today he said he thought the undercooked greens had been great, and he said he didn’t understand dipping cornbread in the juice from greens and beans. He can’t even understand why a person would put Oberholtzer’s Kentucky sorghum syrup on cornbread instead of store brand grape jelly made from dye and corn syrup.

He has a date in another city today, and he didn’t manage his time well. I sat down and ate like a king, and he had to get in the car to drive across the state. He was not happy when he saw the food.

In these apocalyptic times of Bidenian inflation, supply chain problems, and disease, it’s good to remember that the price of a dish and its sophistication are totally unrelated to how good it tastes or how good it is for you. One day people who can do wonders with collards, corn meal, and salt pork will be living much better than urbanites and suburbanites who think they can’t eat anything Gordon Ramsay doesn’t eat.

Near-Divine Food for a Divine Occasion

My friend Mike arrived yesterday. He is moving to the Ocala area, and he just sold his house in New England. He left on Wednesday, and he arrived on Saturday. It was a horrible trip. Car problems. Bad hotels. No one to share the driving. He should have arrived Friday, but his Mercedes had to make most of the trip in limp mode, and he stopped in North Carolina overnight for an unsuccessful repair.

The night after the failed repair job, he went to a hotel in South Carolina and found it too filthy to stay in. Someone had even left him a little gift in the porcelain receptacle, if you get my drift. He drove to another hotel, and a shabby pickup kept following him as he tried to park. Obviously, it was some white-trash dirtbag hoping to loot his trailer. He called the cops, the trailer left, and a beat-up Pontiac showed up to continue the game.

He checked out and gave up on hotels. He ended up stopping periodically to sleep in his car’s front seat.

Of course, demons were resisting his move to Christian Northern Florida. But they failed to achieve victory. They are, after all, losers and the children of losers. Losing is what they do.

We had to move maybe a thousand pounds of stuff into my house today, and there is still a lot left on his trailer. He had 20 pounds of yellow grits with him, because he didn’t want to throw out everything from his kitchen. They got out and went all over his lawnmower. He had similar problems with sugar and a big bottle of Mexican vanilla extract. And a bottle of liqueur someone gave to his late father.

The good news: we’re working on Passover dinner. Let’s go ahead and call it Passover, even if Christians celebrate on the wrong day. Jesus is our Passover lamb, and he was killed on Passover. No chocolate rabbit ever died for anyone’s sins.

Local stores put rib roasts on sale, and I picked one up Tuesday. I covered it with salt, butter, and garlic, and stuck it in my spare fridge under kitchen towels. I wanted to roast it in my new oven, but Mike got all excited about the Showtime rotisserie, so that’s where it is.

I told him I’d handle the baked potatoes and Caesar salad if he cooked the roast. I cut a baguette in pieces and roasted them. Then I tossed them in olive oil in which I had fried garlic. Very nice. I dried the romaine as well as I could and cut it in suitable pieces. I finally found a very good dressing recipe. You can look it up over at Serious Eats. I used to use an Epicurious recipe, but it was disgusting. I kept forgetting it was bad, and I ended up using it more than once. I also used a Bon Appetit recipe. Forget both of those. It’s Serious Eats Caesar from now on. I had to use more lemon and Worcestershire than the recipe called for, but the dressing is perfect.

Now I just have to fix the potatoes and horseradish sauce. I now rely on Mike’s potato method. He covers his potatoes with oil and salt, nukes them, and toasts them in a toaster oven. They’re better than potatoes cooked in a regular oven from start to finish. Really easy.

Yesterday, we ate leftover pizza, and Mike made garlic knots. I also had some homemade ice cream from my fancy Italian machine. Vanilla with Grape Nuts. Sounds terrible, but it’s delicious.

In an hour or so, we should be eating. The only disappointment is that Rhodah can’t be here with me.

Hope everyone else is having a wonderful Passover or Resurrection Day.