His Marks are in the Wrong Places!

I had a funny thought this week.

What if the Antichrist has already been born and died, and his name was Mohammed?

Sound crazy? Think about it.

The Antichrist is a warped copy of the actual Christ. That means there should be similarities. Here’s a big one: the fundamental purpose served by Jesus Christ was to save people and baptize them with the Holy Spirit so they would become like him and do as he did, “infecting” the world and undermining Satan’s kingdom. Sort of like Agent Smith in The Matrix Reloaded.

What did Mohammed do? He created a Satanic religion, and then, like Jesus, he left the earth. Like the followers of Jesus, the followers of Mohammed slowly increased in numbers, and they came to control more and more of the world’s population.

In some ways, Islam is the opposite or negation of Christianity. Accepting Mohammed prevents you from receiving salvation. It prevents you from being baptized with the Holy Spirit. It assures that you will not become like Jesus or serve him. In fact, it is likely to cause you to persecute Christians and Christianity, as well as Jews and Judaism. True Islam requires the persecution of all unbelievers.

As you progress as a Christian, you become less fleshly. Your character improves. You shed things like selfishness and greed and gluttony. Your final reward is to go to a place where you are free from fleshly drives and you can live an enlightened life in true righteousness.

What happens when you progress as a Muslim? Okay, you go to hell. I guess I should be clearer. What are you told will happen as you progress as a Muslim? If you manage to win salvation (killing Jews and Christians is the surest method, according to Islam), you go to a place where all of your fleshly, crass desires are sated continually. You get 72 virgins, all the food you can eat, beautiful young boys, and lots of wine. Basically, you spend eternity living a lot like a hog. If you want to see a good imitation of Islamic paradise, read up on Hugh Hefner’s private life.

Islam promises to cause people to become degenerate, sort of the way Christianity causes them to improve.

A modern clergyman who calls himself a prophet claims the Antichrist will not be a single individual. He says the term actually refers to a people. Maybe it works like this:

1. Jesus was the Christ.

2. Mohammed was the Antichrist.

3. Christians are the body of Christ.

4. Muslims are the body of the Antichrist.

Jesus has always identified with his people. The Old Testament called him Israel. Jesus said that when we do certain things to others, we do them to him. Maybe the Antichrist is the same way. Maybe the term “Antichrist” can refer to Mohammed and also to the body of people who follow him.

Perry Stone suspects that the Catholic Church will eventually venerate Mary so excessively that she will replace Jesus, and the Muslims will get on board, and in the end, they’ll form a religion that serves the Beast. It’s an interesting idea. There are already Catholics who consider Mary a sort of co-savior.

Prophecy is a funny thing. It’s full of metaphors, so you have to be careful not to take things literally when it’s not appropriate. It’s even worse than that. Sometimes a Bible verse is true literally and also metaphorically. The Jews recognize three levels of meaning in the Bible. Anyway, the fact that the Bible calls the Antichrist a man may not necessarily mean he’s only one individual. The Bible calls Israel a fig tree. It calls Satan the Prince of Tyre. God deliberately made the Bible confusing so Satan and ungodly people would not be able to understand it. You can’t hope to understand it until you’re baptized with the Holy Spirit, and even then, you only get as much understanding as God thinks you need.

The term “Antichrist” may apply to more things than we know. There is a great spirit–Satan–for whom the term is probably most apt. Then there are the host of spirits who constantly persecute and work to exterminate Christians and Jews. They are an antichrist force. And then there is the human being we all expect to see one day, and there are lesser antichrists, like Hitler. I don’t know if I’d get all hung up, trying to drop the label on a single individual. But it may be that Mohammed is the best fit.

Muslims are turning out to be good at Antichrist-like accomplishments. We all wonder how the Antichrist will make people put marks on their hands or foreheads so they will be able to buy or sell. You would expect people to resist that. But look what they’ve done at our airports. They’ve manipulated us into posing publicly for nude pictures and allowing strangers to feel our genitals. That’s pretty impressive. If they can do that, maybe Islam can find a way to put the infamous marks on us. Over sixty years ago, the antichrist effort got Jews and other Nazi prisoners to strip naked in large mixed-gender groups, as if it were perfectly normal, and it managed to get Jews to get tattooed, which is forbidden by halacha. Getting us to mark ourselves should not be hard. Maybe it will have something to do with computer hackers making the money supply unsafe.

Maybe Muslims will bring the rapture about. Maybe it will be a wave of executions. The Bible says we’ll meet Christ in the air, but does it say how we’ll get there? Somehow I can’t see millions of people disappearing without explanation. A sign that powerful seems unlike God; he likes to leave room for faith, and an event that spectacular might make his existence extremely obvious. But I can imagine an epidemic of beheadings, poisonings, and shootings, performed by a new religion that has the world convinced that Christians and Jews are all that stand between the human race and peace and progress. We are already a stench in the nostrils of Europeans and American liberals. I could see them rejecting boring traditional religions, joining a trendy new cult, and marching us to the killing fields. People who don’t have the Holy Spirit inside them are wide open to crazy influences. Look at the Germans and Austrians. They were highly cultured, accomplished people, yet they tried to exterminate the Jews and gypsies.

Maybe the rapture will be the result of a new Kristallnacht.

It’s probably a mistake to sit around scanning the horizon for a flashy new worldwide celebrity with “The Antichrist” tattooed on his forehead. The antichrist process is already at work. It was at work in Eden, when Cain killed Abel. It was at work in Egypt, when Ramses tried to kill off the Jewish messiah (small M) Moses. The battle is already taking place. If we wait for the appearance of the Antichrist to slap us in the face, we’ll probably fail to notice a lot of his work.

I suppose I should leave this kind of speculation to people who are willing to study the Bible very closely, but I can’t help thinking about it.

Talent = Pedals

Today I picked up my J200 from the luthier. I haven’t tried it yet. I bought a new PEDAL on the way home! Every electric guitarist knows practice and talent mean nothing; it’s all in the pedals. So I buy a new one about every ten minutes. Today I chose a Fulltone Plimsoul.

This thing is amazing. I wanted to get a tone that sounded hot, without losing all the treble grit. I tried a Way Huge Fat Sandwich, and it’s great, but the distortion is so powerful you can’t always get it to work with your guitars. I tried a Way Huge Pork Loin, and it has some nice sounds, but it tends to kill the treble. Today I’m trying a Fulltone Plimsoul, and it does EVERYTHING well.

This is supposedly an improvement on the Fulltone OCD, which is a respected overdrive pedal. The neat thing about the Plimsoul is that it has two independently adjustable overdrive stages. One is fairly soft (no treble edge), and the other is harder. You can get a nice warm sound using the first stage, and then you can sharpen up the edge with the second. When I do this, I can play slow blues with my neck pickup, and I get a big, fat, round sound that’s still so hot it makes you feel like you just opened the oven door.

I’m also using a “new” guitar: my old American Roadhouse Strat. I love this thing, but it’s been put away, because I put elevens on it, and I wasn’t ready for them. Changing string gauges on a Strat is a pain, because you have to adjust the springs on the trem bar. Lighter strings lower the bridge, and you have to bring it back up.

The Roadhouse Strat is not all that popular. I don’t know why. I love it. It has three Texas Special pickups, which are hot-sounding single-coils. They used to make a Texas something or other Strat that had a humbucker at the bridge, and I think that was more popular, but I think the Roadhouse is fantastic. It has tremendous clarity, heat, and responsiveness, and you can hear it through a brick wall, so it would probably sound good right through a band.

I thought the Strat might be what made the pedal sound good, so I plugged in my magical Chinese Epiphone Riviera, and it sounded exactly the way I’ve been wanting it to for weeks. I can actually hear the individual notes on “Sweet Home Chicago.”

One thing I didn’t expect: I can get even more tones by using the Plimsoul and my Way Huge Pork Loin and Fat Sandwich, in various combinations. I feel like I finally have a little control over my sound.

I showed the Chinese Epiphone to my luthier, and he admitted the neck was a thing of wonder. Are they all this good? He had a Chinese Les Paul on his lap when I came in, and he didn’t seem too excited about it. He seemed to think the Riviera (and presumably other 335 clones) were designed better. If that’s true, it’s time for people to run out and get Epiphone 335 clones before the Chinese screw them up. You may hate the pickups, but for $200, you can have any pickups you want.

Here’s something funny: he plays an Eastman. This is a Chinese guitar made by a company known for violins. Obviously, a luthier sees a lot of instruments, and he knows what’s good. When he played the Epiphone, he said for a minute, he almost felt like he was playing the Eastman. That was his way of saying it had a great action.

I no longer have any excuse for buying electric guitars. I have seven now, and they’re all at least very good, and four are wonderful. I’d love to have an Epiphone Casino, but they’re fully hollow, so I would expect a lot of feedback. The Riviera is great, but I think the third pickup is pointless. I guess I could rewire it with the middle pickup cut out of the system.

I talked to the lead guitarist from my church, and here is what I gathered: the CAGED system I have been busting my rear end studying is pretty useless unless you know theory first. Great news. There has to be a way to “get inside” the guitar without selling your soul to the devil, but I have not found it yet. My technique is getting better, but technique is useless if you can’t sight-read, improvise, and write music. I may have to break down and take lessons. Maybe I should find a jazz instructor. I am not really interested in jazz, but I figure a jazz player can handle anything the blues has to offer.

I finally have equipment good enough to not drive me insane, so I guess I can think more about woodshedding and study. It’s hard to think about those things when your tone or the bad actions on your instruments are making you climb the walls. I know I’m picky, because I can’t make myself leave the truss rod covers on any of my guitars except my Taylor, my Fenders, and my Epiphone. Those guitars always seem ready to go, but when the others move a couple of thousandths one way or the other, I notice it right away, and it’s very distracting. I think the Historys and the Burny will be okay as I home in on the right setups, but the Gibson Blueshawk will probably always be a little crazy, because it wasn’t made all that well.

You can’t blame Gibson for making guitars with wavy necks. After all, they don’t have the advantages of half-trained Chinese labor and a $500 price point.

Back to practicing.

The Price of Dignity: One Boarding Pass

Back when George Bush was President, it was a gigantic invasion of our civil rights when the TSA asked us to take off our shoes. At least that’s what many prominent liberals told us. Then Obama got elected, and Jim Carville said it was okay with him if the TSA measured his genitals. Not that there is a double standard, mind you.

I used to make fun of the people who complained about taking their shoes off at airports. No one really feels violated when forced to remove his or her shoes. The fuss was actually about George Bush and the left’s irrational hatred of him. But now screeners take naked pictures of us, squeeze women’s breasts, and feel our genitals with the palms of their hands. They do it to men, boys, old ladies and little girls. In front of the general public.

That’s different.

This is the kind of thing the Bill of Rights was written to prevent. If you think otherwise, you are probably very stupid. At best, you are ignorant of history. The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to prevent government excesses. We were fleeing British tyranny, and the crown had a long record of torturing, confiscating property, performing unreasonable searches, prosecuting people without trials, and so on. We wanted to prevent our government from doing these things to us, so we drafted the first ten Amendments to the Constitution.

We didn’t write them so they only applied to life-threatening government action. We included minor inconveniences. If you were to write a trivial blog post the government didn’t like, and the government were to make you delete it, that would be a minor inconvenience. Such governmental action is absolutely illegal, however. The cops can’t pull random cars over for fifteen seconds each and search their glove compartments without warrants, even if it might save lives. They can’t come to your house and take fifty cents from your piggy bank, without a legal basis. If you and ten friends are hanging out at the mall, having a good time, the cops can’t come and tell you to disperse. Small things. Completely illegal.

The Bill of Rights was not written just to keep you from being thrown in jail or executed or impoverished. It was also written to force the government to be polite. That is no exaggeration. So when the government demands the right to photograph or feel your vagina or scrotum, even for a few seconds, it ought to have a very good reason. And there is considerable doubt as to whether the TSA has good reasons for doing these things. The Israelis don’t do them, and their air safety record is second to none.

The sad truth is that it’s better for a few hundred people to die in midair explosions than for an entire nation to submit to sexual abuse. If that sounds crazy, think about the things our soldiers die for all the time. They die so we can have blogs. They die so we can have pornography. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers have died to protect things that seem relatively trivial. And we are no better than our soldiers. We ought to be willing to face the same risks they face, in order to protect basic civil liberties. In fact, by refusing to be photographed naked and groped, we would face a much smaller risk, or no risk at all (judging by Israel’s experience), since soldiers are much more likely to be harmed than civilians, even in an atmosphere of terrorism. We don’t have to be nearly as brave as our soldiers. We just have to have a little tiny bit of bravery. But we apparently don’t have it.

We don’t have the advantage our ancestors had. We have no memory of a government that forced us to board soldiers in our homes or punished people by drawing and quartering. We don’t recall what it was like to live under the Sedition Act. So the new incursions on our liberty don’t remind us of a painful past. No! To many of us, they seem innovative! Clever! Rational!

It would be no different if we were asked to give up other liberties. If we gave up the Fourth Amendment’s protection from unreasonable search and seizure, hundreds of thousands of violent criminals would be jailed within a year. Our streets would be safer; there is no doubt about it. If we gave up the Sixth Amendment right to confront our accusers, all sorts of terrified crime victims would be encouraged to come forward, and again, prosecution rates would soar. If we reduced defendants’ rights across the board, a dramatic national cleansing would result. The bodies of dead children would be recovered. Fortunes would be restored to crime victims. Adults kidnapped as children would meet their real parents for the first time.

You can almost always get something very good by giving up something precious. So what? Who wants to live like that? If that’s how we feel, why not go ahead and turn our military cemeteries into public urinals? What did we spend those lives for?

I am writing this because I just read about John Tyner’s TSA experience. He refused to have his genitals grabbed by TSA screeners, and they forced him to miss a flight. They even manufactured a bogus lawsuit threat, ordering him to leave the airport and then telling him he would be fined and sued if he obeyed. They acted the way threatened bureaucrats always act. The way the Founding Fathers had seen colonial bureaucrats act, prior to the Constitutional Congress.

One commenter on Tyner’s blog said he was making a big fuss over a brief grope. Here is what another commenter said: “Anonymous 3:22: it probably seemed excessive for Rosa Parks to risk arrest over a bus seat.”

Exactly. I guarantee you, there were people who said Rosa Parks was crazy. All she had to do was sit in the back of the bus. She would have arrived at her destination at the same time as the white people up front. She wasn’t even required to let a stranger feel her breasts. But she was right. Dignity matters. A good deal of the Bill of Rights exists purely to protect our dignity. And dignity is exactly what we gave up when we agreed to be photographed naked and allow TSA agents to handle our children’s crotches.

Ask yourself if George Washington would have let the TSA feel up Martha.

Liberals like to tell us “slippery slope” arguments are nonsense, but of course, that’s wrong. The Jews in Germany and Austria lost their rights incrementally. We went from a modest Social Security system to a bankrupt socialist ponzi scheme incrementally. The “slippery slope” concept exists because it has been proven right, time and again. We are seeing it now, in our airports. If you will let a stranger palm your wife’s crotch, what exactly would it take to offend you?

Just blow me up. Really. Kill me. Today. How bad can death be? I am not that scared of it. I ride motorcycles. I’ve flown in private planes. The other day I ate tomato sauce from a dubious can, just because I didn’t want to drive to the store. I’m not that scared of death. A low risk of death is preferable to certain repeated humiliation.

If you think things are bad now, wait until the first rectum bomb goes off on a plane. I guarantee you, most Americans will gladly submit to random rectal exams. When we reach that point, consider me grounded. Eventually, you have to put a firm price on your dignity. I don’t like the idea of being molested just so I can have a short vacation, and when they reach the stage where they’re looking inside anuses and vaginas, there will be no destination I consider sufficiently tempting. Seriously, if I offered you a ticket to California in exchange for letting me sodomize you, would you go for it?

I’ve always been like this. When I was in college, I thought fraternities were disgusting because they made young men strip naked and perform in gay rites.

I can’t wait to see what the next “necessary” violation will be. I don’t think Americans have the guts to stand up to the TSA, so I think the abusive searches will continue, and that will encourage the government, and they’ll go ahead and make things worse.

John Tyner is an inspiration. I don’t have a tenth of the character he has. People like John Tyner are our only hope of an acceptable quality of life in the future. Let the commenters criticize him. Capos criticized people who resisted the Nazis, and history passed judgment. History will be very kind to our John Tyners. It always has.

Take up Arms

Mike got a weight loss miracle from God, and now his body is under a mysterious attack his doctors can’t understand. I am trying to get him to find a church and get serious about fighting back. Please pray for him.

Somebody Talk me Down

The other day I realized I had lots of homemade pork sausage in the freezer, and I needed to start eating it. It’s over a year old.

Here’s what I had for dinner tonight. It’s BISCUITS AND GRAVY AND HOMEMADE PORK SAUSAGE! It was incredible. I finished like an hour ago, and about every five minutes I hear myself say, “MAN, that was good.”

I do not understand my own cooking. Some of it is over the top, and some of it, like the biscuits and gravy, is very understated. What could be more understated than a biscuit? Sometimes I do something insane, like the whole stuffed pig covered in sage and apricot sauce, and other times I try to make something very ordinary, so well that it’s still exciting. You would think I would go one way or the other.

MAN, that was good.

Sorry.

This batch of sausage isn’t all that high in fat, so I had to add a spoonful of lard to the grease in order make the gravy. And I made the biscuits with a mix of bacon grease and butter, just to see what would happen. I also messed with the leavening and added a teaspoon of sugar, figuring there is almost nothing a teaspoon of sugar won’t help.

MAN…never mind.

I guess I’ll be reliving that meal until I go to bed. To me, there are two things that tell me when I’ve got a good recipe. First, I can’t quit eating it. Second, after it’s gone, I sit and think about it for at least two hours.

Why did this happen to me? Obviously, God has dropped a gift on me. What am I supposed to do with it?

Drowning in Food Ideas

Today I’m making spicy fried chicken with homemade sourdough batter, plus mashed red potatoes and cream gravy, with bacon grease biscuits. Inspiration is falling like rain. I hope this works. A lot of this stuff is coming to me as I work on the food.

More

The chicken was excellent, but I think I’m frying too much chicken in a small pan, because it’s not crisp on the outside the way it should be. The recipe is a keeper, although I have to increase the peppers.

Many are the Afflictions of the Righteous…

From Heather:

Penelope will be having surgery sometime this afternoon. They will be removing all of the grafts and putting in a drain. Once the infection is cleared, then she will have to have another surgery. Please pray for success.

Bad Breath a Small Price to Pay

These are pretty sick.

Here’s some rolls without sauce.

Here’s some rolls with sauce.

Here’s the bottom of a roll, so you can see how they brown up. Crunchy and full of flavor.

Here’s how they pull apart. Beautiful.

The flavor and texture are excellent, but strangely, they seem a little sweet. Next time I’ll use more starter and make sure they’re sour. In any case, I have never had a roll this good in a restaurant. Very nice.

Baked up a small loaf, too, and it was also good, although you don’t get the pull-apart strips.

Thank you, Lord. These are tasty.

SHOO!

Sourdough is changing my life.

I started out by making sourdough garlic rolls. Then I branched out and made a loaf of bread. Then while I was pouring some excess starter down the sink, it hit me: “This looks a lot like fried chicken batter.”

Oh, yes.

I plan to try it, as soon as I can get a milk-based batter to ferment. I have another idea for improving it, but it will have to wait until next time. I should be able to fry some drumsticks tomorrow.

Again, I credit God with these ideas. The other day I sat down to write recipes, and a team of yard guys was making a huge racket near me, and I came up with nearly nothing. The next day a pile of ideas landed on me the way Plymouth Rock didn’t really land on Malcolm X.

Nothing like reaching too far for a metaphor.

Last year I fasted and then found I had improved self-control, especially in the area of eating. I lost lots of weight without much effort. This week I repeated the fast. I was starting to feel like gluttony was creeping back toward me. Now I feel great again. This morning I had oatmeal with water and salt, period. Can you imagine anything more disgusting? But I had no problem with it.

Mike has dropped something like 40 pounds since he accompanied me on my second fast, a few months back.

In a related matter, today I learned something interesting while Googling the origins of the swastika. As you may know, people claim the Nazi swastika was a reversed form of an old Buddhist symbol used in Tibet and India. That’s not true. It turns out the Tibetans use both forms of the symbol. Perry Stone claims that when Hitler was elected, the Tibetan monks said that a thousand of their “gods” left Tibet for Germany. Maybe they were right. There is a big occult link between Tibetan Buddhism and Nazism. Fun stuff to look up.

That’s not the thing I plan to write about, though. While I was reading, I came across the concept of “hungry ghosts.” The Tibetans believe there are dead people out there, roaming around trying to satisfy their earthly desires through us. I think I have that right; you can check. These beings have withered arms, tiny mouths, extremely slender necks, and huge bellies. If they try to eat, they feel intense pain.

This idea is also found in Christianity, but we call them demons. The Book of Enoch suggests they are the dead spirits of the giants spawned by rebellious angels who had sex with women. I believe the Book of Enoch is correct, and I have seen plenty of evidence to back it up. If you start with the premise that God is working to exterminate the seed of the fallen angels, many things in the Bible that are hard to understand suddenly make sense.

It’s interesting to me that false religions like Buddhism acknowledge what we know. They have the wrong explanations, but they see many of the same phenomena.

It’s also funny that proud Americans turn to Buddhism because they think it isn’t a religion. They think belief in supernatural beings is primitive. Buddhism is full of supernatural beings and concepts. Buddha as a Hindu, after all. When you go from Christianity to Buddhism, you’re not moving from superstition to enlightened philosophy. You’re abandoning one set of supernatural beliefs for another. Might as well be voodoo.

I think I drove one or more of these things off when I fasted, and that’s why I don’t have a problem with gluttony any more. I think fasting makes them miserable, and it teaches them they’re not welcome, and that more suffering is coming if they remain. It’s sort of like a deportation procedure for illegal aliens. In fact, I think aliens symbolize demons in the Old Testament. One of the big curses is to have aliens come into your land and have power over you. In the Old Testament, the Holy Land symbolized a human body, and the enemies of the Hebrews symbolized hostile spirits, so it only makes sense that demons would be represented by hostile aliens.

I know some Christians will jump up and claim you just have to tell them to leave in the name of Jesus. Unfortunately, Jesus himself said otherwise. Some will go easily, but others require prayer and fasting before they will pay attention.

On Thursday (second day of my fast), I found myself feeling compelled to watch food shows. Seems like a crazy thing to do, but I enjoyed it. Looking back, I think it may have been the Holy Spirit’s way of making my personal spirits suffer and leave. Call me crazy if you want. My size 30 shorts don’t lie. What do you have to put up against them? I know the answer already: nothing. It’s impossible to successfully contradict the things another person has witnessed.

I saw Jentezen Franklin on the tube last night. Ordinarily I have serious doubts about him, but he said some useful things. He expressed impatience with people who say they believe in Jesus, yet who don’t believe in Satan or demons. His question: how can you believe in someone who believes things you don’t? Jesus dealt with evil spirits all the time. If you’re a Christian, you have to believe they exist.

Fasting is incredibly powerful, and that’s why Jesus fasted after receiving the baptism with the Holy Spirit and before doing miracles and embarking on a ministry. If he had not fasted, the demons assigned to him would have remained and clouded his judgment, and he might have ended up using his great power to serve them, inadvertently. God does not like giving power to evil spirits. That’s why he doesn’t give us all the money and power and success we want, right away. Satan stuffs people with “blessings” they can’t handle, and it destroys them. God waits until it’s safe to bless us. That’s why he told us we had to put his kingdom and his righteousness first, and that our blessings would arrive later.

You wouldn’t let your kids eat dessert before the meat and vegetables. There is a proper order to things.

I’m glad I’m not fasting today. I have rolls and a loaf of bread rising, and I have to be able to sample them. Lunch will be a crummy chicken sandwich, though.

I’m pretty sure what I believe is true. It lines up with the word, and it makes sense. Try it yourself and see if you get the same results I did.

I Pity the Fool

The weather is glorious today. In Miami, fall is spring, and we are finally getting temperatures that make outdoor life bearable. I may actually DO something, like painting the soffit that was repaired months ago.

No, surely not.

I had a great experience last night. I went on a fast this week, and the end point was 6 p.m. yesterday. I was planning to make sourdough garlic rolls and pizza (in moderate portions, since I was fasting partly to keep gluttony out of my life), but my father offered to buy me dinner. He took me to Randazzo’s Little Italy, a restaurant run by a former boxer. I love this place. They play The Godfather nearly all the time, on big screens, and the food is pretty much what I would cook if I were Italian. Giant portions of red and white food, and it’s all tasty.

Last time I was there, I had rigatoni with neckbones and sausage, and I told the maitre d’ they needed to brine the neckbones in baking soda to kill the boar taint. I don’t know if they’re doing it or what, but last night, the neckbones were totally stench-free. Delicious. And the waiter grated a big pile of extra romano on a side plate, just because I asked for a heavy dose. That’s how you run a restaurant, baby. A lot of places cook pansy food that looks healthy but isn’t and tastes like silk flowers, to satisfy people who can’t get real about what they want. Randazzo’s puts a feed on, and you’re expected to take it like a man. The menu tells people that if they have high cholesterol, they should go eat Chinese food.

I enjoyed my dad’s company, and the food was fantastic, and I even had the sneaky pleasure of knowing my own food is a little bit better. On the way home, my dad made a special cell call to Mike to torment him with a description of the food we ate. All in all, I give the event a 9.

I am the opposite of a food snob. I completely understand beer snobbery and whisky snobbery, since good beer and whisky are a thousand times better than bad. But I do not understand frou-frou girly food. Give me twenty bucks, and I can make a dinner for four that will bring my guests to their knees. A great biscuit is better than boring pate. I guess Mr. Randazzo feels the same way. His ingredients seem very ordinary, but the food rocks. Good cooking isn’t about innovation or cleverness or expensive ingredients. It’s about knowing what tastes good, pure and simple. It reminds me of what Glenn Gould said: “You don’t play the piano with your fingers. You play it with your mind.” Good pianists say you can play anything you can hear. I think a determined cook can cook any dish he is capable of conceiving and appreciating. If you can imagine the taste, and your instincts are good, you will eventually be a great cook.

I can’t find the exact wording of the Gould quotation, but I think it’s right.

I’m fooling with sourdough today. I’m not sure how to work it. The first batch I made fermented for one day, and then I added yeast and let it rise. Last week, I made a batch to store in the freezer, and I let it ferment for two days, and it rose without yeast. This is interesting, because I’m sure sourdough without yeast has its own great qualities, but I don’t know how to manage it.

I will explain.

When I made the first batch, it fermented enough to taste good and have a great texture, but it didn’t rise until I added yeast. I put the yeast in and then formed rolls, and then it rose. This took around two hours, so the dough stayed in the shapes I created. If I use bacteria alone, I believe the rise will take a lot longer. This will probably cause the dough knots to melt back together overnight, and that would mess up the rolls. You want them to come apart in pieces.

I decided to take some dough out of the freezer, form it into a loaf and some rolls, and see what happened. I suspect the bacteria ate so much of the sugar in the dough that the dough will not poof up again, but you never know.

I’ve noticed that the fermentation makes the dough very sticky, as though it had extra water. So I guess next time I’ll have to cut the water back by maybe 5%. Maybe it’s just the gluten, absorbing water overnight. I don’t know. I am not a real baker.

I’d like to learn to make breakfast rolls with this stuff. If you’ve traveled to Europe, you may have had fresh-baked hard rolls with a continental breakfast. The ones I’m thinking of have a shiny crust, and they’re chewy. I’d like to make something similar with sourdough. I think it would be one of the greatest breakfasts possible. I already make croissant-type deals full of chocolate or strawberry and cheesecake filling, and if you put hard sourdough rolls next to them, along with strong, sweet hot chocolate, you’d have the makings of paradise.

My two favorite breakfasts are a Kentucky breakfast (country ham, biscuits, et cetera) and McDonald’s with ketchup on the side. After that, continental breakfast with butter and really good preserves. After that, eggs Benedict. So the rolls are clearly a priority.

I wanted to do sourdough biscuits, but I wasn’t sure how. I think the fermentation would kill the baking soda, and the biscuits wouldn’t rise. And the texture would be funny, because the gluten would activate. It occurred to me this morning that maybe the answer is to sour the milk, not the dough. Of course, that would be a lot like buttermilk biscuits, wouldn’t it? But as I understand it, the buttermilk we buy in stores is fake and doesn’t taste like the real thing. I wouldn’t know; my mom used to get the real thing when she was a kid, but she is no longer around to tell me what it was like. I suspect the sourdough bacteria would give a different result. Can’t hurt to find out. I can set some milk out with sourdough culture in it and see what happens. Ohhhh….hey! What if I gave up on the biscuits and made sourdough GRAVY? Oh, man. THAT’S an idea.

If I could make it with cultured milk, I could freeze the milk in advance. What convenience.

Now I’m thinking about croissants. Some day if I love someone enough to do it, I should make a big continental breakfast with pain au chocolat, strawberry cheesecake croissants, and sourdough rolls. That would KILL.

I wish I had a source for real butter. The expensive stuff they sell in stores (Plugra, and so on) is no good. If you’ve ever had fresh (churned) butter from an actual cow, you know what I mean. Maybe the crud in the churn gives it flavor.

I made the mistake of watching The Food Network while fasting. I watched Man Versus Food. It’s a show in which a guy goes around trying to eat challenging objects.

I respected some of the things he ate. There was a greasy roast beef sandwich that looked good, and the same place also served roast beef combined with a cheeseburger and sauteed onions. But for the most part, it seemed like the restaurateurs simply took ordinary food and made it larger. That’s not cooking. That’s engineering. Boring. I make a lot of big food, but generally, there is more to it than size. For example, I make chicken-fried steak on a Frisbee-sized biscuit, but I use a home-aged rib eye instead of a nasty chunk of cube steak with varicose veins, so it’s not like I just added weight. Anyone can make food bigger. I can’t get excited about that.

The show is good, even if the food is not always interesting.

I also enjoyed a show about cheap restaurants. The title is “Something, Drive-Ins, and Dives.” I forget. A guy with bleached hair traveled from place to place, checking out great cheap food. I particularly liked a Mexican place he found. They operate out of a Shell station. Seriously. A Mexican family put a restaurant kitchen in there, and the food is supposedly really good.

I keep thinking of my dream of opening a pizza place. I won’t rule it out. I’ve learned so much at my church, I can crank out six dozen garlic rolls in twenty minutes, starting from zero. Pizza is also pretty fast, and if I used sourdough, it would be even faster, because I could do prep days in advance. And I still haven’t had a cheesecake that compares to mine (Randazzo’s has a very good one, though).

Maybe some day. God has to open the door and show me a way. Restaurants are really bad investments, because they almost always fail, so you don’t want to start one without a higher power stacking the cards.

Randazzo’s was inspiring. It shows how well one good cook can do, if things work out.

Plus New Advancements in the Treatment of Terminal Hemorrhoids

I got involved in an Internet discussion with some guy who called Andrew Breitbart a “race baiter” for his attack on Shirley Sherrod. If you recall, Ms. Sherrod worked for the government, and she told a story about her intentional discrimination against a white farmer. Breitbart released the video, but later, it turned out that we hadn’t seen the whole thing. In reality, the discrimination story was about an act Ms. Sherrod later came to regret and disavow. The Obama administration, in a move which would have been to its credit, but for the incompetence, fired Ms. Sherrod without checking the facts. Then they reinstated her. I guess they voted against her before they voted for her.

The guy I dealt with insisted that the attack on Sherrod was deliberately deceptive and racist. I argued:

1) Breitbart has a history of incompetence, and it might explain the deceptive nature of the video. The most credible explanation is deliberate dishonesty, because it’s hard to screw up this badly without knowing exactly what you’re doing, but Breitbart is probably capable of that level of carelessness, as the Acorn mess suggests.

2) It is not racist to criticize a black person (Ms. Sherrod is black). Breitbart was almost certainly motivated by his desire to expose the shortcomings of progressives. He and James O’Keefe have gone after plenty of white leftists, and Breitbart would definitely have published the Sherrod video, had Sherrod (and Obama) been white.

The reason the Internet discussion arose is that my opponent was trying to get ABC to remove Breitbart from a televised election discussion. It was a sort of petition drive. My opponent said Breitbart should not be allowed to appear on ABC, because he was a racist and liar. I said ABC had a right to do anything it wanted, and that there were plenty of good reasons not to put Breitbart on the air, but that I was against pressuring networks to prevent people from speaking. They do enough of that as it is. Let’s be real. They put Al Sharpton on the air and even tried to give him a sitcom. How can Breitbart be any worse? Surely he deserves as much respect as Al Sharpton.

Now ABC has canned Breitbart’s appearance, and the petition guy is claiming victory. However, the letter ABC published reveals that their impetus had nothing to do with lying or racism. In fact, Breitbart was canned simply because he annoyed them:

Dear Mr. Breitbart,

We have spent the past several days trying to make clear to you your limited role as a participant in our digital town hall to be streamed on ABCNews.com and Facebook. The post on your blog last Friday created a widespread impression that you would be analyzing the election on ABC News. We made it as clear as possible as quickly as possible that you had been invited along with numerous others to participate in our digital town hall. Instead of clarifying your role, you posted a blog on Sunday evening in which you continued to claim a bigger role in our coverage. As we are still unable to agree on your role, we feel it best for you not to participate.

Sincerely,

Andrew Morse

My conclusion is that ABC’s actions are more in line with my views than those of my opponent. Grossly exaggerating your role in a telecast falls under the broad penumbra of incompetence. It’s not something a professional would do.

Actually, I suppose dishonesty was a factor, since ABC’s letter says it based its decision on untrue claims made by Breitbart.

For a long time, I’ve held that Jews and blacks make terrible, self-destructive political decisions. They support the Sharptons and Jacksons and Obamas and Franks. They get behind foolish, silly people who ultimately harm those who back them. These days, it seems like conservatives are in the same boat. We’re so used to being pushed to the back of the media bus, when a semi-credible conservative gets a voice, we clamber up his or her legs like drowning victims trying to get to air. This is how we ended up with Ann Coulter (“camel jockeys”), Glenn Beck (hemorrhoid video and constant crying), Roger Simon (near annihilation of the right-wing blogosphere), Arnold Schwarzenegger (don’t get me started), and now, Andrew Breitbart.

We need to get over our desperation. We have the Internet and Fox News now. We are not completely shut out. We can afford to wait for legitimate voices to arise. How about Zo? I haven’t seen him say anything insane or despicable yet. If he’s out there swinging, surely we can find others. Why seed your own house with termite eggs?

I know some of the people I named have done some good work. On the other hand, a cake with a piece of cat poop on one corner is mostly cake. Based on that logic, would you serve it at a party? And remember, it’s not like there is a shortage of cakes. Pundits, I mean.

Or cat poop.

We will continue supporting people who embarrass us. I know that. We circle the wagons and shoot the messenger, time after time. The appearance of solidarity is more important than ethics. We’re terrified that if one of our idols falls, we’ll be transported instantly, back to the 1970s. The conservative press will cease to exist without [insert name of pundit/ette here], and the people who criticized will be to blame, and the earth’s tectonic plates will split apart, and we’ll all fall into hot magma while paying excessive capital gains taxes.

You have to love mob thinking. A mob never does anything right. A mob would still be stupid even if every person in it were a theoretical physicist. When it comes to supporting kooks and amateurs, conservatives are a mob. We boil the baby in the bathwater and then drink it.

I guess the lemmings will head my way now, to charge off the cliff I created. I should be glad my blog gets no traffic.

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I guess I should point out that I used the term “camel jockeys” as a pejorative allusion to Ann Coulter’s use of the same slur. I am not advocating the use of this ridiculous and offensive term to describe Arabs.

Progress Never Stops

Last night I had the best Italian (maybe “Italian-style”) meal of my entire life.

Since I stopped working in my church’s cafe, I’ve been getting lots of food ideas. I got some wonderful ideas for improving my garlic rolls.

One big change involves the structure of the rolls. As you may know, many people make garlic rolls by tying strips of dough in knots, which improves the texture immensely. I like to cut the strips lengthwise before tying them. This way you get two strips, which are better than one. This week I decided to divide them one more time, into four strips, and I took steps to prevent the strips from re-joining during the rising process. I also twist the strip assemblies like candy canes before tying the knots.

I’m also using sourdough now. I made my own starter using bacteria from a very unlikely source, and I made a big batch of dough without yeast. The idea is to keep portions of this stuff frozen. When you need one, you put it in the fridge. It can sit there all week (maybe longer), and whenever you want to make rolls, you mix it with fresh dough, and in a fairly short time, you have excellent sourdough with a beautiful texture.

If it gets old, throw it out and thaw a new portion. They probably cost fifteen cents to make.

Yesterday I decided to make three rolls. One with all the improvements, and two the way I was making them last week. I bought the cheapest grating cheese (mystery-brand romano) I could find, since I was only doing a test. I also made spaghetti rigati (spaghetti with longitudinal ridges) with sauce based on tomato paste and Cento cherry tomatoes. I had a can lying around (bought it so I could try it in pizza sauce), and I figured it was time to use it.

The cheap cheese turned out to be the best grated cheese I had ever eaten. It didn’t have a lot of weird, funky flavors, the way many expensive cheeses do, but the taste and texture were perfect by my standards. The sauce was a thing of beauty; I think I know of better tomato products to use, but the cherry tomatoes were very good, and I left the skins in for fiber.

I made the spaghetti, buttered it, dumped half of it in a bowl, piled a lot of thawed-out mozzarella (still cleaning out the deep freeze) on it, added the rest of the spaghetti, tossed it slightly, added sauce, and grated cheese over the result.

The roll…I can’t describe it. I would almost describe my response to it as reverence. I covered the rolls with garlic sauce and grated cheese, and I ate them one at a time, and while all of them were excellent, the one I did the new way was on its own plane of existence. It fell apart beautifully. The mix of textures was a joy to behold. The sourdough flavor and aroma transported me. And that cheap cheese complemented it perfectly.

I think I have a way to improve the dough even more, but I would lose a little bit of the convenience. I can’t wait to use it in pizza.

There is no doubt about it. God guides my cooking. The ideas fall like rain. They land on my head when I least expect it. What is the purpose? I can’t even guess. I thought I was supposed to be making this stuff in church, but I was not able to do that.

I would love to open a pizzeria and sell nothing but pizza, rolls, and cheesecake. I honestly think people would faint in the parking lot. But people keep telling me quality doesn’t count in the pizza business. It certainly hasn’t counted for much in other business ventures I’ve been involved in, except for law. Oddly, law practice seems to be a purer than average meritocracy. Gladhanding and office politics count for something, but if you’re good, work will come to you, because the people who aren’t good are afraid to stand on their own feet; they will want you to do their work for them and hold their hands.

It would be great to do things for my church, but it’s extremely difficult to bless Christians. It seems like they mess up every good idea you give them. Buy your church a new chapel, and they’ll use it to store fertilizer. Buy them chef’s knives, and they’ll use them as screwdrivers and chisels. I suppose this is what God has to deal with every day. “Here’s a pillar of fire and a cloud to guide you through the wilderness and defeat all your enemies, and WAIT! Get away from that golden calf! What are you DOING? Get back here! Stop burning your babies for Molech this INSTANT! Are you listening to me?”

I assume God will not help a church make good use of things, unless the people in the church are on the right spiritual wavelength. If there isn’t enough prayer and enough determination to walk by faith instead of jumping into projects that seem right to our limited minds, God takes his hand off what we do, and the enemy wrecks it. Maybe. There has to be some explanation. Maybe I am pushing my church to accept things God wants me to keep, or maybe God is teaching me to have realistic expectations when I deal with churches (my pick for likeliest explanation). Anyway, it looks like my only hope of accomplishing anything with the good things God gives me is to hold onto them, do my best with them, and support God’s work from whatever profits I receive.

I am really enjoying the ideas I get, even if they don’t bless anyone except me and my family and friends.

This week I’m repeating the fast that delivered me from overeating. I do that once in a while. I felt it was time. It seemed like gluttony was trying to creep back into my life, which is to be expected periodically.

I couldn’t get anyone to join me on this fast. Oh, well. I’ll get my blessings, and I tried to help other people get theirs. What more can I do? When you’re a Christian, you have to accept the fact that very often, you are going to have to step out on your own, because other people will not want to go forward with you.

The armorbearer team at my church fasts every Monday, but it’s not much of a fast. It’s surprisingly hard to get people to go a day without calories. We fast on Mondays until 6 p.m., which amounts to less than 24 hours when you count sleep time, and we are allowed to have any liquids we want. You could have ten milkshakes on this fast. I think it’s better than nothing, but I don’t think it achieves nearly as much as a zero-calorie fast, and I was starting to accept it as my standard fast. So I needed to upgrade. I’m back to zero calories, and I’m doing this two-day deal, which is called the Armorbearer Freedom Fast.

Mike has lost over 35 pounds since he went on the last Freedom Fast. That’s a good result and a great testimony to God’s power and kindness.

The Rain May Never Fall Till After Sundown…

In case it isn’t clear to everyone, this is how everyone but the extreme left sees Obama, and it is the reason for what’s happening at the polls today.

Prayer Team Issues

I started working with my church’s prayer team last week, and there were some excellent things about it.

First of all, NO RAP MUSIC. My church reaches out to kids, and that means a lot of blaring music, including rap. The kids who run the sound and lights come from a generation that has no understanding of the importance of conversation, so they keep the music blasting even after services, and it’s really annoying. I know it brings kids in, but I have always hated loud music, and it’s very hard to sense God’s presence when all you can think about is the pain in your ears.

The prayer team uses proper worship music, which is much gentler.

Second thing: the attitude is very serious. One of the pastors teaches straight from the word, and he doesn’t tell us we’re good enough and smart enough and people like us. He doesn’t tell us we’re wonderful just as we are. He tells us we have to know the word and remember God’s promises, and he expects us to work at our walks with God.

Third thing: tons of prayer in the Spirit. The Bible teaches that this is perfect prayer, and it charges believers like batteries, filling them with the fruit and gifts of the Spirit.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be able to keep going. The reason is this: I’m afraid we’re picking fights we can’t handle. I don’t want any part of that.

Perry Stone has written a lot about spiritual warfare, and one of the hazards he mentions is taking on gigantic spirits without God’s prompting and without the right preparation. Christians don’t like to hear it, but Satan is extremely powerful, and so are many of his underlings. You can say “Greater is he that is within me than he that is in the world” all day, but if you attack a big principality without authorization, you are going to get hammered into the dirt, and your family may get hammered right along with you.

If we had the kind of unlimited power some Christians think we have, I could walk outside right now and order every evil spirit to leave Florida, and they would have to go. Thousands and thousands of people would be healed of diseases and mental illnesses and addictions. It would be the greatest story in the history of journalism. But I can’t do it. Let’s just be honest. Satan is the god of this world, and God has not given us the power to deal death blows to his kingdom on a daily basis. Satan is going to rule until the return of Jesus, so let’s get used to it. A war is made up of battles; you don’t win in a day. Every day you face what your commanding officer tells you to face, and you don’t run around like a chicken with its head cut off, firing random shots behind enemy lines.

We see this in the Bible. In Daniel, a great angel said he had been restrained by one of Satan’s helpers for 21 days. Jude says Michael himself had to fight with Satan in order to hold onto the body of Moses. Paul says the Holy Spirit ordered him to stay out of Asia Minor, even though he wanted to go there and win souls. The Bible also says the Holy Spirit warned him to avoid Jerusalem. If no weapon formed against us will prosper, why didn’t he dash up there, order Satan out, and do his thing? Obviously, there are some battles we can’t win at the times of our choosing.

The pastor who leads our prayer team battles out loud with the spirits that rule Miami and the area of the church. He battles the spirits of idolatry, which is very widespread and intense in Miami. Voodoo, including Cuban voodoo, is no joke here. He addresses Satan personally. I just don’t believe what he’s doing is a good idea, and I don’t think we have the supernatural support to prevent it from hurting the church and the members of the prayer team.

On top of that, there is the subject of “binding and loosing.” Jesus told Peter that what Peter bound on earth would be bound in heaven, and that what he loosed on earth would be loosed in heaven. At least, that’s what the King James Version says. Messianic Jews see it differently. They prefer terms that mean “forbid” and “allow.” The Jews have always believed that God gave them the authority to make rulings on religious questions here on earth. When Jesus told Peter he could “bind” and “loose,” he was probably telling him God would support his decisions regarding spiritual matters.

Somehow, modern Christians got the idea that they could “bind” Satan. So we run around yelling things like, “I bind the spirit of pornography over my city in the name of Jesus!” Question: is there any evidence that this has ever worked? We still have pornography, drugs, prostitution, alcoholism, violence, and every other sin in every American city. I think we’re wasting our air or provoking retaliation. So it makes me nervous when the pastor starts “binding” and “coming against.” I see no examples of these behaviors in the Bible. I know we have the power to bless and curse things, but that seems very different.

The pastor also also said something about “loosing angels of our provision.” Again, I have never seen this in the Bible, including the New Testament. And I believe giving an order to an angel is idolatry, just like praying to a saint. I ask God to send spirits to help me all the time, but I would never give one an order.

I thought my family and I needed corporate prayer, and I suppose that is true, but I don’t want the kind of prayer that will make things worse.

Personally, I think prayer–the type where you ask for things, not the type where you search yourself or converse with God about other things–should be specific. Instead of “binding and loosing,” ask for the things you need. Ask God to rebuke the spirits that work against you. Fast and pray. And cast the spirits out, if you think you have the authority. Jesus ordered us to do that. But don’t make up doctrine.

You wouldn’t walk out onto a battlefield, shoot your rifle in random directions, and yell, “I COME AGAINST THE NORTH VIETNAMESE.” That would be what military historians call “a real bad idea.” But you might locate a tank and radio your commander for air support to take it out, or you might ask for permission to blow it up. I think the supernatural world is a lot like the natural world, and common sense should apply there, the same way it does here.

The conclusion I come to is that I am probably causing more problems than I am solving by getting behind rash spiritual warfare, so I better stay out of it.

Perry Stone says he knows of ministers who have tried to fight the big spirits ruling their cities, and he says the enemy mashed them like bugs, ruining their churches and causing all sorts of problems for their congregations. That’s good enough for me. He knows more about this stuff than I do.

Another thing that worries me: ministers insult Satan. Jude tells us not to do this. Satan has rights, and God generally does not support trash talk. Every time I hear a minister use words like “stinking” or “lousy” when referring to Satan or an evil spirit, I cringe. I believe Satan has the right to take these things before God and ask for permission to retaliate. Why open the door? What is the point?

I think you fight at your own level of power. Overcome the spirits that manipulate your body; that’s a good start. If you can’t control your body, how can you hope to de-pornographize your city? After that, get your home and family in order. THEN maybe you can start thinking about bigger targets. That’s my guess. The Bible says we are not even supposed to be deacons unless our houses are under control, so I think I have the right idea.

I think Jesus began by fighting small battles. His first move after being baptized with the Holy Spirit was to fast. Why do you fast? To drive off the spirits that corrupt your behavior. It’s self-improvement. He was cleansing himself before taking on the task of cleansing the world.

I’m disappointed, but there is no way I can change the way things are done in the prayer meetings, so I see no option except withdrawal. Maybe the answer is to start my own group. The church likes that. Right now, I AM my own group.

I’m Stuffed

If there is one thing I feel sure about as a Christian, it’s this: if you want God to reveal things to you, you are going to have to spend a lot of time praying in the Spirit. The less I do it, the less I receive. The more I do it, the more I hear.

Yesterday was a remarkable day. I’m going through the Bible systematically this year, and right now, I’m working on Jeremiah. “Coincidentally,” Perry Stone has been doing a lot of teaching about hell. It turns out this stuff fits together in an impressive way.

The book of Jeremiah compares us to clay in a potter’s hand. It says that when we’re “marred,” God re-shapes us.

Jerusalem contains a valley known as the Valley of Hinnom. This is a deep spot where the ancients burned their trash. Long ago, it was the place where Canaanites burned their children alive as sacrifices to Moloch. God took Moloch’s holy place and turned it into a trash dump. Fires burned all the time in the Valley of Hinnom.

Judas hanged himself in this area. In all likelihood, he hanged himself near the top, and he fell into the valley, and this is what caused his intestines to burst out.

When Judas realized Jesus was not going to escape death, he tried to give his payment (silver, symbolic of redemption) back to the High Priest, but it was rejected as blood money. The priests used it to buy a place called “the potter’s field,” to be used to bury the poor.

The potter’s field was in the area of the Valley of Hinnom. Potters worked there. They discarded bad merchandise there, in the form of broken pottery, or potsherds.

The Bible calls us “vessels,” and it refers to “flasks.” The first miracle Jesus performed involved turning water into wine, at a wedding in Cana. That water was in seven vessels used to fill mikvehs (sanctifying baths). The Bible tells us the Holy Spirit has seven parts. Christianity involves receiving the Holy Spirit, which is referred to as “living water.” The Holy Spirit fills us and changes us. It’s an internal mikveh. At Pentecost, when the baptism with the Holy Spirit fell for the first time, people declared that they believed the recipients were “full of new wine.” The miracle at Cana showed what Jesus intended to do to his church.

The Bible calls proud people “stiff-necked.” When a flask or other earthen vessel is fired, it becomes impossible to mold it, and the neck becomes stiff.

In the Bible, the Valley of Hinnom is used as a symbol for hell. And it just happens to be a former center of Satan worship, where fire used to burn all the time, and where malformed vessels were shattered and discarded because they had become too stiff to repair.

Sometimes God paints a picture for us, and all you have to do is open your eyes and look. Hell is reserved for Satan. It will also receive people who are too hard to allow God to change them. And God gave us the Valley of Hinnom to prove this is all true.

This is a pretty good explanation for the phrase “stiff-necked.” Pride doesn’t make your neck stiff. People don’t respond to pride physically by stiffening their necks. But it makes sense when you’re talking about pottery.

Incidentally, Moloch worship was Satan’s imitation of damnation and the lake of fire. God does not want to cast his children into eternal fire, so what did Satan do? He created a form of worship in which people threw their babies into burning pitch, in the belly of an idol. Satan always parodies God, even when he doesn’t realize it. And as Perry Stone says, the modern replacement for Moloch worship is abortion. A womb is supposed to be a place of nurturing and growth, but Satan convinces women to turn their wombs–their bellies, just like Moloch’s–into slaughterhouses. Places where beings are destroyed. What could be more perverse or disgusting?

I’ll bet there are many women out there who have had abortions, yet who would not live in a house where a murder has occurred. If you kill your unborn child, aren’t you such a house? Strange.

In lighter news, I came up with a shocking improvement for my garlic roll recipe. I made kimchi a while back, and I realized it was full of lactobacillus (taken from a jar of kimchi I bought), so it might be a good source for bacteria to make bread. I put some kimchi liquor into a jar with flour and water, and a day later, I had sourdough starter.

I mixed some of the starter into a batch of dough, without yeast. I let it sit for a day, and then I mixed yeast in and made rolls. They were incredible. The texture was different; the rolls were more transparent and satisfying to chew. The smell of sourdough filled the kitchen as they baked. I love it. And while I was eating them, I realized I finally had a great way to make dough in advance. If you put yeast in dough, it’s hard to freeze it well because of the CO2 that escapes, but if you make dough without yeast, it will work great with vacuum bags.

I’m going to make pizza this way from now on. It will be incredible.

I credit God. He just drops this stuff on me. I also have a new way of assembling the rolls, which gives them a much more complicated and pleasing structure to pull apart and eat. I recently received two ideas along this line. I got one a few days back, and another improvement came to me as I was typing this.

Unfortunately, I am not going to be cooking for my church any more. They’re going to miss out on all my new creations. I’m sure God will show me what to do with them. It’s too bad, because the new dough will make prep extremely easy and efficient, and I would have been able to streamline pizza production enormously.

This week someone asked me to make one of my banana nut bread/pineapple upside-down cakes for her birthday, but I had to turn her down. The nature of the food I cooked was somewhat sensational. It always made a splash. I think that spark is gone from our kitchen now. The food will be good, but not exciting.

I have two new chef friends. These are real chefs, not sous chefs or line cooks. They compete in nationwide contests held by the company that employs them, and they’ve won expensive vacations. They go to my church, but they won’t go near the cafe. Very sad, because they both run commercial dining facilities for big companies. I know of three chefs who go to my church but avoid the kitchen, and now I’ve joined them.

When smart, unselfish Spirit-filled people avoid an enterprise, it’s not a good sign.

These ladies have all sorts of training and experience, but they treat me with respect, and I appreciate that. I know I don’t have their superior knowledge and training.

On Saturday, one of them is cooking for a bunch of people, and I’m invited. She just asked me to make rolls! How about that!

I finally have a decent mixer. A long while back, I recommended a Bosch Universal Plus for my church, and I’ve used it for pizza, rolls, and cheesecake. It’s so great, I got one for myself. I’ve never had a stand mixer before. It’s my understanding that a more conventional mixer may be better for cakes and so on, but the Bosch is unbeatable for dough. I’ve tried a Hobart Kitchenaid for dough, and it’s horrible. Throws flour all over, has a small capacity, leaves tons of residue in the bowl, and turns the dough into a fist that climbs up the dough hook. With the Bosch, you turn it on, turn it off, empty it, and toss the parts in the dishwasher. Bam, you’re done. And it has a lid that locks on. It even has suction-cup feet so it won’t wander around the kitchen.

I guess the one in my church will sit and rot in my absence. I was the only one who knew how to use it.

If you get a Bosch, I recommend getting the stainless bowl. It usually comes with a plastic job. The version I ordered comes with both, so I won’t have problems if I need to mix two different things. You can also hook a meat grinder to it. That would be fantastic. Homemade sausage is the bomb.

I better get off my butt and make dough. I have to be ready for Saturday.

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Gallery of sourdough rolls: