Knowledge Plus a Rifle is Real Power

Man, I wish my new rifle parts would arrive.

I ordered plastic furniture for my Vz58 folder because the cool faux-wood furniture was not accessory-friendly. Broke my heart, but I had to do it. Now I’m scanning the horizon for the UPS truck.

I was all worried about 922(r) compliance, but I double-checked, and I’m in the clear. Not that I would care, if I heard footsteps in the hall. You can always put the original parts back on while you wait for the cops to arrive. After that, you have the Fourth Amendment on your side. Like they would care.

I keep thinking I should have an AK47 and an AR15, but it’s hard to get excited about new defensive rifles when you have a Vz58. The magazines hold 30 rounds, the rifle is as reliable as an AK, it’s light, the ergonomics are great, it’s short, the ballistics are excellent, it’s not stamped out of surplus Soviet rain gutters, and it looks cool. What more do I get if I buy an AK? Nothing whatsoever. I suppose with an AR15, I’d have the potential for better accuracy, and accessorizing would be more fun, and the AR15 is more of a well-finished, upscale weapon. But getting one ready to use would probably cost me over a grand, and then I’d have one more caliber to shop for.

I didn’t realize until last week that 7.62mm is actually an inch-based caliber. I was sitting around when it occurred to me that 7.62 is an integral multiple of 2.54, which is the precise number of centimeters in an inch. That means 7.62mm is exactly (down to the angstrom unit) 0.30 inches. Can’t be a coincidence. I’m always the last to know everything.

I still think a Tommy gun would be a great defense weapon. It’s heavy as lead, but it won’t kill you to carry it household distances, and the weight seems to make the recoil less objectionable. There isn’t much recoil to begin with, since .45 ACP is a pistol caliber. Put a 30-round magazine on one (or a huge drum), pop a laser on it, and wait for the boogerman to come up the stairs to your bedroom. If you can’t hit him with this thing, you might as well murder yourself and rob your own house, because someone is eventually going to do it successfully.

Sondra is blegging for a Tommy gun. I can’t believe it. A while back, she asked for advice on her first rifle, and my lone voice recommended the Tommy gun, mainly because it would look great in photos with Sondra. I figured I would be dismissed out of hand, but now she says she wants one!

Yes, it’s expensive, but it’s only about a hundred bucks more than a good Vz58, and if you reload, the ammunition is $5 a box. Come on, work with me. We want Sondra to buy this thing.

The pistol version is really cute. The barrel is short, so it’s more like a real Tommy gun. The new Auto Ordnance Tommy guns have longer barrels than the originals, except for special, government-regulated short-barrel models. Buy the pistol version, and you avoid this cosmetic problem.

I don’t see how you could use the sights. The recoil is pistol recoil, so you don’t need to shoulder it to deal with that issue, but I think it would be hard to hold a Tommy gun up like a 1911, so you could sight down the barrel.

I don’t care. It’s still cool. Put a laser on it! If the battery goes dead during a firefight, throw the gun at the criminal and crush his skull! Use the magazine as a blackjack!

I have all the rationalizations answers.

Have you ever been to Israeli-Weapons.com? I shopped for some Vz58 stuff there. Later, I went back and looked at it again, and I realized this is a very serious site. They sell tanks, for crying out loud. Now I know where to go when I need a vehicle to patrol the Central Florida compound and scare the fertilizer out of Jehovah’s Witnesses and meter readers.

You have to love the Internet. You can order a tank. You can order a live anaconda. You name it; it’s five clicks away.

Haiti Effort Marred by Competition?

Yesterday I read an interesting article about Haiti. The relief teams that are working there are competing with each other, not just to provide the best aid, but to get the most money, attention, and control. The article cited an organization that ran another organization off, even though the second outfit had essential equipment the first one lacked. Nice. I’m sure the people who died as a result of the turf squabble would be glad to know the first group didn’t lose its spot in the limelight.

It said two “competing” doctors got in a verbal altercation on a flight leaving the US.

If I understood the article correctly, aid organizations or their branches get funding based largely on the turf they’re able to carve out. So if you can set your clinic up in Port au Prince before the next guy can do it, you can keep him out and get more money for your work next year.

Nothing is as evil as bureaucracy. Satan started his career as a civil servant, after all. The Nazis and Soviets were bureaucrats who killed people in the name of efficiency and order. The Chicoms are bureaucrats.

Bureaucrats are driven not by the express missions of their organizations, but by the desire to enlarge and secure their own power. The guy who dies with the biggest cubicle and best parking space wins. If that means a few people who rely on you have to suffer, no problem.

One of the wonders of America is that we keep so much power out of the hands of bureaucrats. That’s the purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Tenth Amendment. Some parts of the Bill of Rights still function pretty well. The Tenth Amendment is more like a whale’s vestigial pelvis. It’s there, but it’s not clear what it does.

Bureaucracy is like idolatry. Sometimes, it is idolatry. It distracts you from the purpose you were intended to serve, and it causes you to hinder that purpose by serving another one. Either you’re trying your best to dig earthquake victims out of the rubble, or you’re diverting some of your strength to venal pursuits such as attracting media attention and increased funding. When you divert your strength from your stated mission, you’re working against it.

I hope Aaron will forgive me for quoting an email he sent me yesterday. It applies:

That “progressives” seek to eradicate poverty flies in the face of scripture which asserts that there will always be some poor people. That becomes a challenge to those better off, but even then there is a hierarchy of what should be done. Among the following levels of “tzedakah”, none include the legislative threat of fine or incarceration for the wealthy to not adhere to an unfair progressive taxation policy. Rambam organized the different levels of tzedakah (charity) into a list from the least to the most honorable.

8. When donations are given grudgingly.
7. When one gives less than he should, but does so cheerfully.
6. When one gives directly to the poor upon being asked.
5. When one gives directly to the poor without being asked.
4. When the recipient is aware of the donor’s identity, but the donor does not know the identity of the recipient.
3. When the donor is aware of the recipient’s identity, but the recipient is unaware of the source.
2. When the donor and recipient are unknown to each other.
1. The highest form of charity is to help sustain a person before they become impoverished by offering a substantial gift in a dignified manner, or by extending a suitable loan, or by helping them find employment or establish themselves in business so as to make it unnecessary for them to become dependent on others.

If you reverse this thinking, you may also conclude that one of the worst evils is to do charity poorly because you subvert the goal of easing suffering in order to gain admiration and wealth. When you do that, you unnecessarily increase the suffering of others–greatly–in order to bring yourself a trivial benefit which is, ultimately, a curse.

If you travel to Haiti and you work hard, but you’re extremely concerned with the attention you get, and you find yourself blunting other people’s efforts in the process of glorifying and financing your own, what have you really achieved for God? Almost nothing. You’re working to bless yourself and your buddies. Heathens do that. For that matter, many non-believers work more selflessly than you do.

Whatever you’re doing for God, you’re certainly doing nothing to improve yourself. If you’re not improving yourself when you do a thing, you’re doing evil. People say life is a test. That’s wrong. Life is a school. If it were a test, you could finish it in a day, like the SAT. It takes decades because it’s a long process of positive change.

The actual test will only take a day. That day has already been named. We call it Judgment Day.

This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed the subtle venality beneath the surface of some of the relief efforts, but I haven’t made a point of writing about it. I don’t want to stir up trouble pointlessly. It’s good that people are getting help, even if a lot of that help is ego-driven. But it’s very ugly to see this kind of suffering used to build careers and draw ratings. And I’m sure it discourages good people from getting involved. This kind of behavior is the reason I vet charities before I do anything for them. You have to be sure you’re paying for rice and bandages instead of Bentleys and hookers. Nonprofits, including churches, have made a lot of carnal people rich.

Nonprofits shouldn’t be glorifying themselves when they help Haitians. They should glorify God. For Christian nonprofits, this should be obvious. If you’re in Haiti, God put you there and gave you every penny and every item you have, and if you succeed in helping, the glory is his. That means you should never even consider getting in the way of another relief worker. The glory isn’t yours to begin with, so competing for it is a type of theft. When you have to explain yourself on the day of judgment, you’ll be told you’re a worker of iniquity. No one will care how many TV channels aired your story. “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.”

We’re reaching the long-foreseen stage when the attention is cooling down and the public is getting bored. The glory hounds will probably lose interest soon, because the glory will be elsewhere. As relief workers dribble out of Haiti, hopefully, they will leave a residue of people who are humbler and more sincere. I can’t help but think that over the long haul, those people will do Haiti more lasting good, because they will rebuild souls as well as bodies. Ultimately, Haiti’s problems are spiritual, not physical, so spiritual people will do more good than well-financed attention gluttons.

Wudan Pizzeria

Even though last night’s pizza session at church did not work out all that well, it was highly rewarding. First of all, people came up to me when they saw me in the building and asked if I was making pizza, and after I got to work, people came into the kitchen to tell me how great it was. That’s always enjoyable. But on top of that, I learned new stuff about pizza.

I usually use the low setting on the convection oven fan, because I’ve been told higher speed means burned cheese. But last night I decided I wanted the crust cooked more, so I used a trick I came up with on my own. I put the fan on high and added olive oil to the mozzarella to prevent it from burning.

I can’t be totally sure, because the ovens acted strangely last night, but it looks like the trick worked beautifully. I plan to do it with all of my cheese Sicilians from here on out. I think butter would be better, because butter brings out the flavor of food and makes flavors mingle. Olive oil can’t do that. Most fats don’t. Chicken fat seems to do it.

I don’t know why people rave about olive oil. It’s nearly flavorless, except for the taste of olives, which isn’t really that exciting. I could eat butter with a spoon, because it tastes so good. Olive oil? No way. I believe the exaggerated response to the very mild and uninteresting flavor of olive oil is an example of herdthink. Chefs say olive oil tastes great, so people who listen to chefs say it tastes great. It’s the same phenomenon that makes people scream with excitement when Emeril uses a pepper shaker.

If the taste of olives is such a thrill, why don’t people stuff themselves with olives all day?

It’s great to be able to make pizza, and it’s even greater to have a bag of tricks I can rely on when I need a certain effect. Professional cooks all over the US tremble when their cheese suppliers vary the fat of their mozzarella, but I can take a wide range of cheeses and make excellent pizza.

You can’t tell the professionals or advanced hobbyists anything. If their pals or heroes didn’t come up with it, it can’t be right.

It amazes me how they overcomplicate pizza. They tell me I have to ferment the dough over a period of days, and that home-oven pizza is a compromise. They use complex calculations to create dough recipes. One guy suggested I use a scale that works in 0.1-gram increments. One portion of pizza dough weighs roughly 5,000 times that much. Do I really need to know whether the oregano amounts to one hundred seven or one hundred eight five-thousandths of the total mass?

Here’s how I make pizza. I mix tap water and yeast, in a fairly loose ratio. I mix non-kosher salt, flour, and pepper, equally imprecisely. The flour is any flour I feel like using, including all-purpose. I mix the water and yeast into the dry ingredients, poking the dough with my finger until it feels right. I let the dough rise until I feel like getting up from in front of the TV, which could be half an hour or two hours. I mash the dough into an oiled pan. I repeat the TV proofing period. Actually, I don’t watch much TV, so I may be at the PC or in the garage, butchering metalworking projects.

I add sauce that contains no crushed or whole tomatoes and no fresh ingredients of any kind. I add cheese from Costco and Gordon Food Service. I bake the pizza at 550 in a crummy GE oven. I flop it out onto a stone and let the bottom of the crust bake until it looks brown.

Then I eat. It’s perfect every time. Best pizza I know of.

No ten-day fermentation, no rocket-fuel-powered oven, no flour sold only by Tiffany’s. I don’t use micrometers, pyrometers, microtomes, electron microscopes, precision scales, hygrometers…nothing. The only time I measure precisely is at church, when I need fast repeatability and complete consistency, and I need to be able to scale things up and down.

I’m not saying their way doesn’t work, but I can’t see my incentive for trying it. The long fermentations, maybe, but other than that, it seems like a lot of bother to go from 98%-perfect pizza to 99%-perfect.

My way: I can have the best pizza imaginable, 90 minutes from now, starting from scratch.

Their way: I can have pizza on Saturday, if I get started today. I have to plan pizza the way I’d plan a weekend trip. What if Saturday comes and I want Chinese?

You can see why I’m not motivated.

I think the problem is that it’s so hard to get pizza right the first time, most people live in terror after that, fearing they’ll lose the secret. I know that fear. But I got over it through practice. The hundredth time you make pizza, you should be able to leave the scale and the hydrometer in the cupboard.

Some people insist on using kosher salt, in a dissolved form! How nutty is that? Kosher salt is identical to regular salt, except that it’s much harder to dissolve, and it costs more. Kosher sodium is just like non-kosher sodium. There is no specialized periodic table just for Jews. I don’t even worry about iodized versus non-iodized. Microscopic amounts of potassium iodide are impossible to taste, and even if they were not, I like the taste of iodine. It’s one of the reasons Scotch tastes good.

Pizza nuts like to talk about “authentic” pizza, dating back to the strange, unappetizing Italian product known as pizza margherita. What they fail to remember is that the people who invented and perfected pizza didn’t own bizarre modern equipment. They did what I do. They slopped it together using, at best, measuring cups and spoons. That’s authentic. Making your pizza at Livermore Labs is not.

Cooking is like painting. The greats don’t do it by the numbers. You have to loosen up and quit being afraid of the food. Precision should serve you; you shouldn’t serve precision.

Mike never measures anything, and his pizza is great. There is absolutely no hope that he’ll ever be able to pass on a recipe, but the food is top-notch.

Anyway, next time I make pizza, it’s going to be better than the last time. I’m glad the church gave me the opportunity to expand my skill set.

More “Coincidences”

Sometimes I think I should rename this blog “testimony.com.”

Last night I made pizza at the church. There were problems. The pastor who led the service didn’t mention the cafe or pizza to the congregation, so we didn’t get nearly the traffic we got last week. The pre-service traffic was excellent; I could barely keep up. I got rid of 8 pies in a hurry. But I believe we only sold two afterward. Then something went wrong with the ovens; maybe the propane was running out. I couldn’t keep the temperature up. I had to quit.

I threw out maybe eight dough portions. Sad. I arrived at the church at about 4:15, and I didn’t leave until 10:45, and I achieved nearly nothing.

We’ll do better next time. This is how churches are; efficiency is not what Christians are known for.

When I got home, I had to take the birds out for half an hour each. I had forgotten to do it before going to church. I got to bed at 1:30, and then my eye started bothering me. I don’t know if it’s conjunctivitis or what, but I looked carefully in the eye and used drops and washed it out with water, and I still was not able to get to sleep for quite some time.

I figured I’d sleep late, but my father had other plans. He had an appointment to meet someone at his boat at 10:00 a.m., and he wanted me there, so he woke me up.

The boat had three problems this week.

A freshwater pump needed to be reinstalled; it had quit working earlier in the week, and I had removed it yesterday. I checked the motor, and it ran fine. He took it to a store, and they looked at the pressure switch, and it worked. So today it had to be reinstalled, and I had to check the wiring.

A cable on a transmission had fallen apart, and it needed to be fixed or replaced. I looked at this yesterday, but I couldn’t see a way to repair it.

Last time we took the boat out, the GPS couldn’t get a signal. I poked around yesterday, trying to find an antenna problem, but I couldn’t see anything wrong with it. When I turned the GPS on, it worked.

Today we still had to worry about the pump and the cable. We also needed to install some 12-volt bulbs in the engine room.

I was grumpy for several reasons. First, I was born that way. Second, I had not slept well. Third, the boat guy was late. Fourth, my morning prayers had been derailed. My dad left to buy some mounting screws for the water pump; he had lost the ones I removed. That left me sitting on the boat alone.

I rewired the water pump and put it in place without screws, and then I decided to try to catch up in prayer. I ordinarily do half an hour of prayer in the Spirit every morning, so I started the stopwatch feature on my phone and got started. After 12 or 13 minutes, I heard the boat guy, Juan, out on the dock. He was on his cell phone, talking to someone for business purposes. I prayed he would keep at it long enough for me to get to 30 minutes.

At 29:55, he stepped onto the boat, and we started talking. He had been working at his own church until after 2:00 a.m. He had to redo a bunch of audio wiring under the altar, and naturally, it was so screwed up it took forever to fix.

He started working on the cable, and my dad showed up. He loves to give Juan a hard time about religion, so he brought it up. He said he was starting to think there was something to it, because every time he had a problem with the boat, I showed up, and the problem disappeared. That’s not quite true, but it’s not far from it.

That got Juan going. He started telling my dad how good his life was because of God. His marriage worked. His job went well. His kids were doing well. I’d say he gave my dad a good half-hour of testimony. He told about his involvement with the Promise Keepers. He’s also an avid hunter, and he helps with a Bible-based hunting camp for kids. He said he had been filmed for one of the outdoor channels, teaching kids to hunt. He said he’d bring the video next time so we could watch it on the boat.

My dad used to be extremely hostile to Christianity. It made him angry. It filled him with contempt. But his attitude has gotten more and more open. Today he almost sounded like he was ready for a visit to church.

I left the boat ahead of my dad and thanked Juan in the parking lot, and he said he talks to my dad like this all the time. I had no idea. It means much more when this kind of thing comes from someone outside of your family, so this is a big deal.

The dockmaster was standing next to Juan when I approached him, and I explained what I was thanking Juan for, and it turns out he’s a Christian, too. And a hunter. I used to let him hunt on my land in Kentucky.

What a morning. I didn’t feel like going over there and crawling around in the engine room on this particular day, but I told myself there would be a blessing for me if I did the right thing and honored my father, so off I went. And look what happened.

Now my dad wants to buy me lunch, so I guess I’ll be blessed with a Dan Marino’s cheeseburger. That’s gilding the lily.

This is Like Washing Q-Tips and Re-using Them

Today’s exciting food experiment: cheese dicing.

My church has no slicer. When I told them they could get a good used one for $200-$300, it seemed like they were about to go for it. Then they decided they wanted a new one. Those run $2100. So instead of having a used slicer we can put to work, we are looking forward to having a new slicer at some far-off point in the future.

The problem with having no slicer is that we have to pay for sliced and shredded cheese, which is more expensive and somewhat less tasty than loaf cheese. GFS charges $4.00 per pound for sliced provolone and $2.85 for loaf provolone. I don’t know if Costco charges different prices for sliced and shredded mozzarella.

Yesterday I decided to buy a loaf of provolone and dice it with a cleaver, while running a timer. It turns out it takes 20 minutes to dice a six-pound loaf of cheese. In case you wondered. That includes bagging and cleanup.

Slicing would take three minutes, I’m guessing. You could slice two months’ worth of cheese in hour or two and only have to clean the slicer once.

I suppose that as a dedicated Servant Leader (our church likes this term better than “volunteer”), I could buy cheese once a week and spend an hour and a half dicing and bagging it at home. There is no way I can do this at church, while dealing with pizza demands.

Given the huge cost difference between new and used slicers, I think we should go used. If we burn through ten slicers in five years, we’ll have spent the cost of one new one. And we won’t burn through them that fast unless we buy lame brands. In the meantime, the savings would pay for a new (used) slicer about every 600 pies, or once every 5 months. Faster, if we start using sliced toppings.

A new slicer would take four years to pay for itself, but it would last thirty years.

Here’s what I’m thinking. We’re going to continue buying sliced cheese until something gives.

I bought Bouncer flour at GFS. It comes in smaller bags than Golden Tiger, it’s slightly cheaper, and pizza chefs like it. I doubt I’ll be able to tell the difference. The nearest GFS sells Bouncer, Golden Tiger, All Trumps, and Primo Gusto. Rumor has it that Bouncer and Primo Gusto (the house brand at GFS) are the same thing.

I have to be at church at 4:30 today to get ready for tonight’s service. I have to sell at least 20 pies. It’s my mission in life at this point.

I Need a Diesel Mixer

I can’t help fiddling with pizza-production methods, in order to make things work more smoothly at my church.

Today I did some calculations and came up with a recipe for about 220 ounces of sauce. That will knock twenty minutes out of a typical day.

I wanted to find out what size mixer I would need to make dough using an entire 25-pound bag of flour. The answer? In a vertical cutter mixer, 40 quarts. In a planetary mixer, 60 quarts. A good used planetary mixer runs $3500. Used vertical cutter mixers are hard to find.

It turns out Bosch makes a very good bargain for pizza chefs. The Bosch Universal Plus mixer with a stainless bowl will allow me to make dough for 14 pizzas at once. It will take nearly nine pounds of flour. That’s not too bad, for the $440 price. That would get me down to two batches of dough per day, which beats eleven.

I’m not sure why anyone buys a Kitchenaid mixer. I wouldn’t touch one with a ten-foot calzone. The capacity is low. They’re not durable. They’re messy. I don’t get it.

A dough sheeter would be great. I could fire the dough into it, mash it into oiled pans, and be done with it until it was time to bake. I just need to find one that costs under a hundred dollars. Hey, maybe if I plant some magic beans, they’ll grow into one.

I suppose I could get clever and glue a 9 by 12 frame to a plastic cutting board, dump the dough into it, and roll it out until it more or less fit. That would save time.

I don’t want to lose the hand-forming. I just want to reduce it to a minimum. It doesn’t matter what shape the dough is when it begins to rise. If it’s nearly the shape of a pizza, it will make the job go faster, and it won’t hurt the quality. It would probably improve the dough by reducing the mashing and trauma.

My cheese frustrations continue. I might go ahead and buy a loaf of provolone and see how hard dicing it is. If I can do it in half an hour at home, it will obviate the need for a slicer, and I’ll be able to use cheap cheese from now on. I may also make a pie using only provolone.

I want to start cranking out thin pizza, but unless someone shows up to help, it will never happen.

Last night my old man took me out for dinner, and he said it sounded like it would not be possible to turn the cafe into a serious business. It’s hard to make people think about money when their big goal is saving souls. He thinks I should learn what I can and then open a place.

The pizzeria I visited turned me off because they said they grossed $600-$700 on a typical day. I thought that represented a lot of work and very little money. Now I realize their business was slow. That figure probably represents 40-50 pizzas. I churned out over 20 by myself, with bad equipment. With decent equipment, one cook could easily do 60 pies a day.

That little shop should have been able to produce 24 pies an hour, more or less.

Let’s see. Say I do 24 pies an hour, and the food cost per pie is $3.00, and I sell them for and average of $13.00 (more like $14.00 in practice). That gives me $240.00 per hour to pay for rent, gas, power, and so on. A place with a more realistic floor plan would be able to make 72 pies per hour, so $720.00. Surely a decent place with two full-size double ovens could make $3000 per eight-hour day above food costs, before talking about toppings and soda. That’s over $70,000 per month. You would think it would be possible to make a living.

Whoops, I’m wrong. Their oven holds 12 large pizzas, so figure 48 pies an hour, at full tilt. Two of the larger ovens will do 128 an hour. So you would think you could do maybe $5000 per day, after food costs, if your pizza was good enough to attract customers. Did I misplace a decimal somewhere? Seems like you should be able to survive.

I must be underestimating the impact of the slow hours.

Tomorrow night I cook again. I’m going to do my best to be ready to produce 20 pies over the course of one service. I’ll experiment with the provolone, and I’ll get a container suitable for the big cheese recipe, and we’ll see if things speed up. Maybe I can get them to round up an assistant to spread the cheese.

Better head to GFS.

Volume Volume Volume

I just made about five million pizzas.

I arrived at church this morning at 7:30, and I quit working at around 3:30. I am not sure how many pizzas I actually made. I couldn’t keep up with demand, but then I’m pretty slow.

Judging by mozzarella usage, I made 22 pies. But that sounds high.

I weigh the mozzarella, and I use 7.5 ounces per pie, and I went through over ten pounds.

Anyway, it was easily the most hideous spectacle that has ever been witnessed. Pies were all over the place. Cheese was airborne during much of the day. Fans peeked in to gawk at me. I brought two pies out, and some kid said, “Now that’s what I’m TALKIN’ ’bout! God BLESS you, sir!”

I need a pizza Renfield, to spread cheese and eat spiders. Mostly the cheese thing. Spiders haven’t been a problem.

Even if his name isn’t Renfield, I need an assistant. It’s out of control. And we need a 30-quart mixer, because making dough 58 times in a 5-quart mixer is killing me.

My methods are getting more streamlined. I measure the flour and water to the gram now, and I put the water and yeast mix in the bowl before the flour. That reduces the dry stuff that ends up in the bottom of the bowl, and it makes things mix better and more predictably.

Here, let me give you a present: 580 grams flour, 340 grams water (with 1 teaspoon yeast per cup added), 2 teaspoons salt, 2 teaspoons pepper. That should be nearly 100% reliable, if you use flour like mine. I’m using Golden Tiger high-gluten flour, so I guess any bread flour will be pretty close.

Do I recommend Golden Tiger flour? No, because it seems like every flour makes good pizza. But Golden Tiger works.

If we sold 19 or 20 pizzas today, which should be about right, the church made at least $200. Net. Okay, net not including electricity and gas, but work with me here. I’m talking food cost. If we could get people to come into that cafe every day the church is open, we could bring in $50,000 per year. That’s certainly more than I intend to donate. It’s worth the effort.

If I keep this up, I should be able to make the church $15,000 per year on our current schedule. They need to get with it.

They were trying to discourage me from making more pizza toward the end, because the people who work in the cafe like to clean up and get home early. But I knew the pies would sell. I told Pastor Marcus I “guaranteed” it, although that was a huge lie, because if they hadn’t sold, I would have just dumped the dough in the trash. I had unbaked crusts for three pies left over at the end, and I said a prayer that someone would take them, and one of my armorbearer buddies called and said they needed three pies. Then a fourth guy showed up and said he wanted one, and he was SOL.

Late in the day, I pointed out that we had made a three-figure sum, and that if I had to throw out two entire pies with pepperoni, it would amount to six or seven bucks. But if we sold them, it would be twenty to twenty-four bucks for the church.

It’s hard to make Christians think in terms of capitalism. I think I’m the only person there who cares at all if the place makes money.

The pizzeria I looked at grossed something like $700 per day. That means they sold maybe two and a half times the pizza I sold today, using a huge mixer and a bona fide oven, without a bunch of people getting in the way and selling other stuff and socializing the way they do at church. That place was probably open twelve hours a day. We ran five and a half hours today, and most of the last hour was dead time, and we only had one person making pizza, using pretty bad equipment. This is not that hard. I was there for two and a half hours getting ready, but that time would be greatly reduced if we had the right equipment.

If I had a real mixer, I could make dough once a day. I could work the yeast amount out so I could make the dough days in advance. If I could do that, I’d kill half of the work. Today I had to make two-pizza batches, what, eleven times? Insane. And every time, I had to wash my hands over and over, because I was doing repetitous jobs involving flour and oil. With a real mixer and a dough sheeter, I could fire out twenty-five pizzas at a shot, dump the doughs in oiled pans, and stack them on racks to rise. I’d only have to touch the dough once, so I wouldn’t spend an hour and a half a day washing my hands. Little things like this add up.

I also had to make sauce, which is a pain. From now on, I’m making one huge batch a week. It keeps forever. It’s stupid to make 75-ounce batches the way I’ve been doing. The sauce cans hold 107 ounces, so from now on, I’ll do 200-ounce batches. Each one will use a whole can.

I bought a huge can of cheap Berio olive oil and I got a 2-liter squeeze bottle, like the ones athletes drink from. Now I have no oil mess to deal with. I used to pour oil out of a jug, dripping all over the kitchen. That’s behind me.

I need a wall clock. The church will never get around to buying one. For three bucks, I can actually know what time it is, instead of guessing when a service is going to end and a giant crowd is going to hammer the cafe. As it is now, I have to remember to fish out my cell phone and check. That’s fun, when I have pepperoni grease on my hands. I could wear a watch, but clocks are better, especially when you’re working with a big mixer that can break bones.

I bought the church a decent kitchen timer. The one we had refused to stick to anything; the magnet was pathetic. I could never read it. And the alarm was horrible, and the controls were counterintuitive. Now I have one I can stick to the stainless steel wall by the convection oven.

This is all tremendous fun. I hope it will make money for the church, or that it will make money for me if I can’t get them to take it seriously.

I better call Mike and make him eat his liver.

I am a good friend.

Cheese Blend Fail

I made another experimental Sicilian pizza today, with around 75% Grande Cheddar Blend and 25% Grande East Coast Blend. I was hoping it would have the baking qualities of Grande Cheese, with more flavor than the East Coast Blend.

The verdict: I can barely taste the cheese. I thought pure Cheddar Blend was sour when I put it on a thin pizza, but on a Sicilian, it tastes like water.

There is nothing wrong with Grande cheese. No one questions the quality. But it’s not working for me yet. I still have to try their 50/50 mozzarella/provolone blend.

Pizza is amazing. Before an experimental pie goes into the oven, I always think I know how it will taste, and I’m wrong all the time. No other food is like that. It makes me realize how blessed I am to have a couple of recipes that work perfectly. I could have spent another five years making bad pizza.

I think I’m going to quit using the food processor at home. Non-kneaded dough is superior to food processor dough, in my opinion. The food processor is so fast, it can be hard to mix the dough just enough but not too much. Now that I’m weighing stuff to the nearest gram, I should be able to make dough with a wooden spoon and a bowl. It’s very easy to adjust ingredient amounts when you use a food processor, but with other methods, it’s a pain. When you have the amounts nailed down in advance, however, you can blend your ingredients with confidence regardless of the method.

I’m pretty sure.

The Grande rep says he’ll drop off some 50/50 when he gets his hands on it. After that, the Grande trials will be done, and it will be time to get started on Sysco cheese.

I are a Historian

Today I had a moment of boredom and decided to create a Blogspot blog documenting the evil things George Bush continues to do. I predict this will last about three weeks, but I am enjoying it so far. Feel free to send submissions.

I know Blame Bush does something similar, but they never update, and they wander off on non-Bush tangents.

Check out Stuff Bush Did.

Time Out, Mr. Burglar

Today I got some comments about point-shooting, which is the practice of shooting a gun without using the sights.

Gun nuts generally frown on point-shooting. They have solid reasons. If you’re in trouble, and you have an opportunity to use your sights and squeeze off carefully aimed rounds using the same skills you use at a gun range, you should do so. That’s my opinion, anyway. You can’t beat the sights when it comes to accuracy.

Here is the problem. You won’t get that opportunity. Criminals are crummy targets. Criminals shoot back, they move, and they don’t give you time to aim. They’re very inconsiderate when it comes to providing you with good lighting, too. If you need to use your gun, you may not even be able to see your sights, let alone use them.

So imagine yourself in a dark place (like your home) with an armed idiot coming at you from fifteen feet away. Seriously now, are you going to assume a modified Weaver stance, take a deep breath and let half of it out, line the top of the front sight up with the center of mass (taking care to let the target blur while the sight remains in focus) and carefully squeeze the trigger?

Please. This has never happened in the history of mankind.

First, you’ll probably forget where your gun is. Then you’ll forget where the safety is. By the time you have your gun ready to shoot and you’re trying to aim, you’re full of cheap FMJ .38 Special ammunition fired by the idiot, who has never been to a gun range and who is holding his gun sideways like they do on TV.

Now, what if you’ve been practicing your point-shooting, and you carry a gun like a Glock which is always ready to fire? A long gun is better, but let’s say it’s in the next room.

Draw. Point. BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG. Reach for spare magazine, if necessary. Try to avoid getting criminal’s blood on your new shoes.

Call me crazy. It just sounds better to me.

When I was a kid, my cousin and I used to drive around in my car, shooting signs. I realize this was stupid. It was bad enough when we used his Crosman pellet pistol, but we also used a .22 rifle. While the car was moving. I actually shot signs while in the driver’s seat, while most of my body was hanging out the window and my cousin was steering.

We used to shoot mile-marker signs with the pellet pistol, with no hope of aiming. We held the gun with one hand. We almost always hit the signs. A mile-marker sign is smaller than a human torso, and a smoothbore pellet pistol is less accurate than a rifled firearm.

Granted, a pellet pistol has no recoil. Placing a second pistol shot would be harder with a real gun. But what about that first shot? No difference. And what if you’re shooting a low-recoil pistol, like that nutty Herstal thing that has all the hippies scared? Combined with point-shooting skills, that may be the ultimate personal defense handgun.

I remember standing by the side of the road with my cousin’s pellet gun, by a tall streetlight. I guess it was forty or fifty feet tall. I raised the pistol and fired at the light globe without aiming. PING. Nailed it. Expected to. I’m fairly sure I never used the sights on that thing, but it didn’t matter. I knew what I could hit and what I could not.

Maybe we shot it so well because we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to be able to do it. Being ignorant kids, we learned a lot of our marksmanship standards from cowboy movies. If Clint Eastwood could make a can dance up the road while shooting from the hip, why, we could, too! If we had known point-shooting didn’t work, we probably wouldn’t have been as good at it as we were.

I think the skills we learn at gun ranges are a lot like the languages we learn in high school. I won prizes in high school French, but I could not understand real French people very well. They broke the rules! They used slang, too! That wasn’t fair! Here in Miami, Cubans speak Spanish as if they have marbles in their mouths. No high school teacher will prepare you for that. And the things you learn about pistol shooting at gun ranges will not prepare you all that well for encounters with criminals.

I’ve read a lot of stories in the NRA’s “Armed Citizen” magazine feature. I’ve noticed two repeating themes. First, in many encounters, everyone misses. Second, in many encounters in which the victim prevails, the victim still gets shot. That’s no good. One shot can blind you or sterilize you or paralyze you. One shot can cost you an arm. You want to end the encounter before that happens.

You want to be able to shoot accurately and quickly, and you want to be able to hit the criminal with a large number of shots, because there is a huge difference between a mortal wound and a wound that prevents a criminal from harming you. You can shoot a burglar through the heart and still be killed by a blow from a rolling pin he took off your kitchen counter. You want to empty your magazine into him; shoot horizontally until you have to shoot downward because he’s on the ground. When you pull the trigger and hear a click, you know you’re done.

The last time I went to the range, I shot round after round into a hole the size of a golf ball. The leader of my church’s armorbearers was a few booths down, shooting into a much wider area. But he was shooting three shots quickly. Two in the chest and one in the head. I was shooting slowly. I started shooting his way (which is not allowed at the range I usually use), and my groups opened up by several inches. And that was at seven measly yards. It became obvious to me that practicing for ideal circumstances was stupid.

If I practice point-shooting, there will be no down side. I’ll still be able to use the sights when circumstances permit it, but I’ll also have a skill that allows me to get by without them. I see no reason not to do it. It’s all plus and no minus. The only problem I foresee is that if I do it with a pistol, I’ll have to carry the same gun all the time, because different pistols point differently.

As for point-shooting with a long gun, I think it’s probably a fine idea at household distances, when you’re using a weapon with limited recoil. The longer a weapon is, the easier point-shooting is, until recoil becomes a factor. Pick up a rifle and stand across the room from a chair and point the rifle at the chair, while holding it shouldered. Seriously now, are you worried about missing? I’d be much more worried about being shot while trying to find the front sight. And if recoil makes a second shot harder when point-shooting, it will be even worse when you’re trying to locate the sight after a loud blast and a bright flash.

If you point-shoot a long gun from the shoulder, you should have ample accuracy for hitting a human target at fifty feet. If you can’t hit a man that way, the sights probably won’t help you.

Here’s what I think should happen, should I be the victim of an armed home invader. I pick up a semi-automatic shotgun or a semi-automatic rifle which is ready to fire. I turn on the laser and strobing flashlight. I point the gun at the criminal and pull the trigger over and over until he falls. Then I retreat to a safe place and call the police. If I can manage to remember to do that short list of things under that type of stress, I’ll consider myself very lucky.

When Richard Marcinko ran SEAL Team Six, he made his men practice point-shooting, with tons of ammunition. If it’s a good idea for a Navy SEAL, it’s probably a good idea for anyone.

Cain’t Touch Dis

I like my church because I can feel God’s presence there, because so many people there are on fire for God, and because it’s flat-out weird.

Check out the newest link on my blogroll: G. Money Wilkerson.

Do not miss the Youtube clip.

Freeze, Heathen

Second cup of coffee, second blog post.

Today I found out that some items I ordered from Israeli-weapons.com are on the way. I can’t wait. I wanted to keep my Vz58 stock, with the weird old plastic-and-wood furniture, but it turned out it was not practical, so I ordered some stuff to help me mount a laser and flashlight properly.

I have a polymer foregrip on the way, plus two pistol grips, front and rear. The front grip has an incorporated flashlight mount. I also ordered a laser mount. This combination should enable me to operate the light and laser without taking my hands off the pistol grips. Because my gun is a folder, I may be able to hold it at hip height while shooting, which would be a huge advantage indoors.

Shooting a folded rifle is generally considered to be a stupid idea. You can’t use the sights. But does that matter when you’re a civilian protecting your house? The distances you’ll be working with will never reach a hundred feet, so it seems like a laser should be more than adequate. And you can’t see ordinary rifle sights in the dark anyway.

I don’t think recoil would be an issue. The Vz58’s recoil is not all that bad. Not to me, anyway. I need to find a permissive gun range so I can find out.

One of the most notorious Internet videos features a police officer being shot over and over by a man holding an M1 carbine at hip level, without a laser. By the time he shouldered the rifle and used the sights, he had already won the gunfight. But he did use the sights in the end. Does that mean shooting a folded long gun is a bad idea? Can’t tell unless I get a chance to try it. It’s a bummer, living in a place where I can’t walk outside and start shooting.

I used to shoot from the hip all the time, and I had no problem hitting things, but I was using BB guns and video game guns. Not a great way to test the theory.

When this junk arrives, I’ll have to sit down and do a parts count and make sure I’m not violating federal law.

I decided not to get a pistol grip with a built-in bipod. This is a pretty neat invention, but in a self-defense situation, how likely are you to shoot from a prone position? The flashlight mount seemed like a better choice.

I haven’t been able to shoot my long guns folded, but I’ve been able to use my lasers, and guess what? They work. If the dot is on the bad guy when you pull the trigger, he’s going to get shot. People criticize lasers, but I’ve seen all sorts of shootout videos on the web, and I’ve noticed that virtually every shooter misses over and over, and that they often don’t use their sights. I don’t see how a laser can be anything but helpful. The sights will still be there, if you get a chance to use them. When an armed idiot is in your house threatening your safety, the shooting will probably last less than ten seconds. I think you want a system that will give you the best possible chance of hitting something other than the ceiling during that time. To me, that means a laser.

I really like 7.62 x 39mm for self-defense. The meanest pistol on earth has puny stopping power in comparison, and pistols are harder to aim, and my rifle holds 30 rounds. What’s not to love? I like the 12-gauge better, but it has more recoil, and the magazines are smaller.

Last night I was the guy who accompanied my church’s ushers when they counted up the offering. I realized what a big responsibility this is, and what the risks are. You’re in a locked room with a steel door that’s hard to force open but easy to shoot through, and you don’t know what’s happening outside. They need a camera in there, to film people who approach the door.

We’re working on security training. Might as well know what we’re doing.

I think somebody in the church should always have access to a long gun. Pistols are fun, but they seem pretty pathetic in real-life shootouts. It seems like a pistol’s usefulness decreases as the suddenness of the encounter increases. If you can lie in wait with your pistol drawn, great, but if you have to yank it out in a hurry, the likelihood of missing seems to go up fast.

Famed church defender Jeanne Assam worked a near-miracle when she shot an armed intruder repeatedly from a distance of over sixty feet. At that range (or a fifth of it), most people armed with pistols would miss. Even more amazing: the guy she disabled was using a Bushmaster. If some crazed doofus shows up at your church with a rifle or shotgun, you don’t want to be fifty feet or fifty yards away, holding a Glock with a 3″ barrel. It’s great that Jeanne Assam succeeded, but it’s almost always better to be the guy with the rifle.

It sounds silly to talk about weapons and church, but before Jeanne Assam put him down, Matthew Murray killed two people and shot three more. Defensive weapons are only silly until you need them. And if you never need them, what have you lost by buying them? A few hundred bucks. You can’t even treat a minor gunshot wound for that kind of money. And they don’t hurt anyone while they’re sitting in storage. As we all know, guns don’t actually kill people.

The main reason for carrying isn’t to be a cop wannabe who waves a pistol and orders people around; it’s self-defense, just like it would be in your living room. But in any big church, some members will have the training to use guns to defend others, and they ought to have the tools they need.

I look forward to putting this stuff on my rifle and taking a trip to the range.

Last night, the leader of my church’s armorbearers called on me to say the prayer at the end of the evening. I was totally flustered, but I managed to put in a reference I thought was helpful.

Over the last few months, I’ve often asked for guidance as to which scriptures to read, and over and over, I hear “Nehemiah.” A few days ago, I picked up my Bible at the start of the day, and it fell open to the first page of Nehemiah.

What did Nehemiah do? He rebuilt Jerusalem. He rebuilt the temple and the city walls. His enemies tried to kill him, and they also wanted to kill the people who helped him. So Nehemiah and his helpers developed a habit of working with one hand and holding a sword in the other. Last night, I prayed that the armorbearers would be like Nehemiah and his friends, building God’s house while remaining ready to defend his people and keep them safe.

On the way home, a thought occurred to me. “The sword of the Spirit, like any sword, only works when carried on the person.” I think we should be armed physically, as Nehemiah and his friends were, but they were probably also intended to be spiritual examples. If you don’t learn scripture, how can you think you have the sword of the Spirit? As I see it, the sword of the Spirit only exists in two forms: the written word of God, and the things the Holy Spirit says through us today, through the spiritual gifts. If you don’t know the written word of God, you’re missing a big part of your armament.

Nehemiah carried his sword with him, like an extension of himself. We should carry God’s word in our minds, so it’s always ready to use. It’s the best concealed weapon you can have, and it doesn’t require a permit. Yet.

My advice: load your magazines. Memorize scripture during lulls in battle, so you’ll have it ready when your enemy comes calling.

New Book Idea

I’ve been thinking about the pizza joint I checked out yesterday. It’s an interesting deal, but I doubt it will get any takers. It will probably be available a month from now, for nothing, to anyone who will take over the lease.

The place is so small, the number of pizzas it can produce is limited. The owner said a really good daily gross was a thousand dollars. So if it ran full-tilt every day, it would bring in, what, three hundred grand? It has been suggested to me that I might net 10%, and if that’s true, I’m looking at $30K per year. Yow.

If I had a college-age son, this would be a great project. I could turn him loose with this place and tell him he had a year to make it work. I think that would be a better education (and cheaper) than ten years at a university. But for a middle-aged guy with other fish to fry, it’s not a great move.

I have an idea for a Christian book, so maybe I should put this pizza thing on the shelf for a while. It has occurred to me that one of the biggest problems with Christian books is that they’re extremely vague. They say things like, “Stand on God’s word!”, and, “God is holy, so you be holy!” What do these things MEAN? Imagine yourself as a beginning Christian. The stuff you would find in many Christian books would sound like gibberish.

What if someone wrote a book that was clearer and better organized, without strange Christianese phrases obfuscating the meaning? “This is the story the Bible presents, reduced to basics.” “These are the things you need to do, in order to live a blessed life and experience God’s power.” Nobody writes that way. Christian authors tend to have the same problem mathematicians and physicists have when they write books. Without realizing it, they write in a way that only works for people who already know what they know. I know people have tried to provide help for new Christians, but they’ve been very ineffective.

I used to dream of writing physics texts in plain English. Understanding the writing of physicists is harder, for bright students, than understanding physics itself. I never fulfilled that dream, but maybe I can do the same thing for Christianity.

You can write five thousand words and give new converts everything they need to know, to put a solid foundation under their efforts. But no one does that. Instead, they write stuff that only makes sense to people who are already knowledgeable.

Of course, some people would disagree with what I wrote. But if that was a problem worthy of consideration, how would it be possible for anyone to write a Christian book?

God has a long history of providing us with knowledge in a non-sequential and encrypted way. Our job has been to understand it through the revelation power of the Holy Spirit, and then to present it to each other in a more digestible way. My project would be a prime example of the way this process works.

I wanted to write books for my church, but they’re just too busy, and I can’t wait any longer. Maybe they’ll eventually find time, but while they’re doing other things, I should get busy with my own work.

Intriguing Rathole

I made pizza at church last night. Every Tuesday, they have a big youth-oriented (i.e. “musically loud and annoying”) service, so I was called in to do my thing. I should add that it was a fantastic service, apart from the pain it caused my middle-aged ears.

I made a total of 14 pies, and of course, after they were gone, somebody wanted one. We should have unloaded 18.

I bought a slice for myself; I was starving. I still can’t believe how good this stuff is. Most Sicilian is like wet bricks. Mine is so light it practically floats.

People kept coming in to the kitchen to view the freak of nature who made the pizza. They could not believe it was made from scratch. One girl keeps asking me for tips on making it. I told her my cheesecake was even better, and she asked if I had a son about seventeen years old, so she could marry him.

This morning I checked out the $20,000 pizzeria from Craigslist. It’s a former Jerry & Joes. It makes a Domino’s look like Mama Leone’s. I’d guess the square footage is about 600. Seriously.

Jerry & Joes is a small chain. I’ve only had their pizza once, about ten years ago. It was actually pretty good. They claim they use real cheese.

The place is a real rathole, which makes it all the more tempting. One person could run this place solo. I could open up, limit myself to the lunch crowd, and sell pies four hours a day. If it looked promising, hire lackeys and extend the hours. If not, close the business permanently when I get bored.

The oven is an old Blodgett. It holds six 16″ pies or eight 14″ pies. It goes to 650°, so it will satisfy my temperature needs. The stones are cracked; I don’t know if that matters.

They have a three-door wall refrigerator about nine feet long and seven feet tall, plus a home fridge in a corner. They have two stainless prep tables, plus a three-door refrigerated prep center. The mixer is an ancient Hoover that will accept 22 pounds of flour. That’s irritating, since the smallest commercial bags are 25 pounds.

There is no range, so if I made garlic rolls, I’d have to prepare the sauce at home. Not a major issue. I could make a few gallons at one weekly session and refrigerate it.

The kitchen is pretty filthy, and it’s not what you would call aesthetically pleasing. The tile is messed up. The suspended ceiling is grubby. The whole place needs a good scrubbing. The owner left the coolers full of rotting stuff. That will start smelling nice in a few more days. I’m surprised it doesn’t reek already.

The shop is divided into two areas. The outer area is about ten feet by twelve, and it has a counter and two small tables. The rest is kitchen and staff bathroom. One nice thing about this place is that there is no way for diners to see the beat-up kitchen in any detail. Pretty up the outer area, and you have a fine dining experience. The rear part has to be clean, but it doesn’t have to be cute.

I found the real poop on the lease. The owner’s son speaks English, and he gave me the lowdown. The rent is $975, and it can’t go up, because there are seven years left on the lease. They considered that a selling point. I consider it a negative. Commercial rents are going down, and it’s hard to find tenants. If I take this place, I’m stuck with that lease. I guess I can incorporate and skip out if the business fails, but that seems lame. I suppose it isn’t, though. The whole point of incorporation is to limit liability and encourage people to run businesses without risking their personal wealth.

Here’s how I see it. It’s not worth $20K. The only value comes from the equipment and the community’s knowledge that pizza can be found at this location. I don’t get their recipes. I don’t get franchise support. I don’t get the benefit of their reputation. I have to buy into what may well be a sucker lease. I think this place would be a good buy at maybe $5K, assuming everything runs and that there is some way to avoid getting hooked on the lease.

This is a lot of fun, but I also have an idea for a Christian book, so maybe good judgment will win the day, and I’ll be satisfied making pizzas at church.

For a while now, I’ve felt as though I were on rails, traveling toward pizzeria ownership. I wondered if God was in it, because so many strange pizza-related things were happening. Maybe he’s behind this, but maybe he’s not, and if he’s not, it’s a very stupid idea. I’m going to try hard to determine his will and follow it, regardless of where that leads.

Like Psalm 127 says, “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” I don’t want to get involved with any more activities that God will not bless and cause to succeed.

Cheap Pizzeria

This is what I call temptation.

Pizzeria. Exactly the type I wanted; basically a Domino’s plus a few seats. Cost: $20,000 (asking). Equipment included. Gas, power, phone, web, water, trash, and rent: $1615, max. Located in a busy area near a mall and lots of apartment complexes. And it’s near the county line, so it’s in the direction of AWAY FROM HERE, which I like. In fact, it’s ten minutes from my church, via a major traffic artery.

Arrghh.

Arrrrrrgggghhhh.

I may have to drive by this place.