Bitter Clinging Goes High-Tech

My new green laser arrived. It’s a hoot. I’m wandering around looking for new things to shine it on.

These things pose some risk of eye damage. I am going to be careful not to hit anything shiny with it.

I’m thinking it may have been a mistake to go green. Indoors, which is where this thing would be used, there are a considerable number of reflective surfaces. I don’t want to injure my eyes while defending the house, and the additional brightness of a green laser isn’t needed indoors.

Fun to play with, regardless.

You Can’t do it; They Can’t Help

Home Depot may not be the most efficient retailer on earth, but it is one of the most entertaining.

They put a saw on sale. The saw was on their website. The site said the sale price was not available in local stores. I ordered a saw. I paid for shipping.

I ran an errand to Home Depot. I saw that they were selling the saw for the sale price. I bought it. I tried to cancel the online order. I was told I could not.

Home Depot called me and said they couldn’t stop the shipment, but they were waiving the charge. I took the other saw back to the store.

Today I checked my email, and Home Depot said the online order was CANCELED.

I called them up, and sure enough, it’s true. There is no saw on its way to me. And the one I bought is back at the store.

Now I have to go to the store again and buy back the saw I returned.

My bet: the other one will arrive this afternoon.

More

A reader comments: “My bet is that the one you brought back (the last one in stock) has been sold.”

I just got back, and it appears he was correct. I would have recognized that beat-up box anywhere, and it wasn’t there. But two new saws had materialized, so I bought one of those.

While I was wrestling it onto a cart, some guy appeared from nowhere and helped me. Then a second guy appeared in line behind me and started telling me what a great saw it was, and how he had one, and how I was going to enjoy it.

I know this will sound truly stupid. I understand that fully. But every so often people pop up in your life, out of the blue, treat you unexpectedly well, and disappear. And you know how religious people interpret things like that. But you don’t expect it to happen when you run random and insignificant Home Depot errands.

The only non-self checkout line was bogged down, and I didn’t know I could take giant boxes through the self-check lines, so I stood there and waited it out. I thought they would never get me out of there, but it finally happened.

Now I fully expect the saw I ordered online to arrive later today. This story would not make sense if it didn’t.

Have you ever tried to accomplish a simple task and had so many things go wrong, you were amazed? That’s what this saw purchase has been like. I almost wonder if there is some secret significance to it. It’s crazy! I’ve been trying to get one of these saws for about a year, and things have gone wrong over and over.

I am afraid to open the box.

I Can’t Believe We’re Even Discussing This

Kim du Toit claims he is all done blogging.

Who believes it?

Color me skeptical.

If he sticks it out, it will be a gigantic loss to the Internet.

I’ve been awaiting his final post all month, and then yesterday, I forgot to check! Unbelievable.

Excuse the cryptic title and subtitle. Obscure reference.

I Have no Faith in Lizards

I am kind of stuck, with regard to new writing projects. That is a rare situation for me. I have been blessed with an ability to generate ideas prolifically, and I manage to get up almost every day and write something I’m pleased with, but for a while now, I have been idling.

I would like to do something worthwhile with my time. Humor is fun, but I wouldn’t say I’m improving the universe with it. If I could come up with something useful to a Christian audience, I’d like to do it, but ideas like that don’t fall in your lap three times a day. And there are so many people doing Christian writing well; I don’t think I’m needed. Humor is different. Virtually nobody does it well. Maybe five people in the US. Oddly, humor is still very hard to sell to publishers. Maybe it would be easier to sell serious writing, in spite of the law of supply and demand.

I considered trying Christian humor. I foresee two problems. First of all, who would publish it? It’s very easy to get yourself in trouble when you’re a humorist, by writing things that turn out to offend people. Inadvertently crossing the line must be much easier when you write Christian humor, and I have to wonder if editors have the stomach for dealing with the problem. Second, it would be a harder thing to write, because I would have to go over and over it, looking for things like doctrinal and factual errors. I would have to write it with references sitting in front of me, and it would be best if everything were run by a minister before going to print. Sounds like a nightmare to me. I’d have to find someone willing to read this junk, and then I’d have to deal with him before publication.

Maybe it would work for books. A column would require weekly or monthly interaction, but books would work out to two or three times a year, which would be easier to manage. Imagine trying to write a weekly column another person has to review before publication. You’d kill four days every week, trying to get it ready, emailing back and forth.

Yesterday at church, the pastor mentioned Charles Templeton, a person I had never heard of. Templeton used to be one of America’s greatest evangelists. As an adult, he had “a religious experience,” and he became a Christian. I don’t know what kind of experience he had; I can’t find a description of it. He toured the country with Billy Graham, filling football stadiums with believers. Later on, he started to have doubts. At one point, he watched a newsreel of Holocaust victims and decided he could not believe a loving God existed. He ended up studying theology at Princeton, which is a bit like studying stripping at a yeshiva, and he eventually proclaimed himself an agnostic. He turned hostile toward Christianity and devoted a lot of energy to attacking it. Funny thing for an agnostic to do; maybe he was unclear on the definition of the term.

What a wretched story. How does a thing like that happen to a person? How does a person know God and then decide God doesn’t exist? My best guess: he never knew God to begin with, and instead of learning to use God’s power and guidance, he had a forced ministry based on his own desires and efforts.

The Holy Spirit is the biggest difference between effective believers and believers who fail. The Apostle Peter is the evidence many people cite. Before being baptized in the Spirit, Peter was a worldly disciple who sought glory for himself, he was not reliable enough to stay awake for an hour while Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, and he didn’t have the courage to stay with Jesus after he was taken captive. He was not impressive by any standard. After the Spirit entered him, he wrote wonderful inspired scripture about the way in which a Christian is supposed to grow and develop, and he accepted crucifixion instead of renouncing his faith. He became an amazing person. A marvel.

My guess is that Templeton never experienced the baptism, and that he did his best with his limited human abilities. When his little human brain told him God existed, he believed. When it could not generate the faith to overcome doubt, he ceased believing. A Christian who hasn’t been baptized with the Holy Spirit is like an electric toothbrush that never gets recharged. He has no external power source to sustain him.

Many people think every Christian is baptized with the Holy Spirit immediately upon believing or being baptized with water, but that didn’t happen to the disciples or to other believers in their time, and two millennia of history show no evidence that it happens, generally. On the contrary; the general rule is that Christians are not fundamentally changed by belief alone. They retain their old nature, although many fight to subdue it. They don’t understand scripture any better than nonbelievers; they get little insight from God. They don’t have a greater capacity for faith. They don’t become prophets. They don’t exhibit the character improvements known as the fruit of the spirit. They develop truly silly ideas about God.

Sincere Christians raped and pillaged during the Crusades. They turned Jews over to the Nazis. They exterminated the Indians. They participated in the slave trade. I find it hard to believe that these people had experienced anything resembling the infilling of the Holy Spirit. You can have the baptism and still sin, but you aren’t likely to live like a vicious, ignorant animal, as millions of Christians have. It seems pretty clear that while you can receive the baptism simultaneously with salvation, it is a separate thing, and you don’t get it automatically. And being baptized “in the name” of the spirit is not the same thing. It’s not even equivalent grammatically. If it were the same thing, then being baptized in the name of all three parts of the trinity would mean you have been “baptized with the Father” and “baptized with the Son” as well as with the Holy Spirit. And of course, that is not what happens. Those baptisms don’t exist; I just made them up.

I think people who deny that the baptism is a separate item are sometimes trying to excuse the poor spiritual condition of their denominations. “Not Invented Here” is the phrase. If it didn’t come to their church first, it must be wrong, because surely God would give all the good stuff to the best and only correct denomination. And admitting you’re not full of the spirit, and that lots of other people in the one perfect denomination are not…that’s just unthinkable!

Human effort is great, but if it were sufficient to make you an effective Christian, the baptism of the spirit would never have been provided. The Bible is full of references to God helping us to grow from within. Helping us to obey. Giving us faith. Illuminating the scriptures so we understand them correctly. We still have free will, but he helps us to want better things, and he gives us the strength to do what our better inclinations tell us to do. You can find it in both testaments.

Spirit-filled believers allowed the Romans to kill them and turn them into torches to light Nero’s gardens; that is how brave and full of faith they were. Charles Templeton couldn’t even withstand a newsreel. My best guess is, he was limited to his own strength, and he was doing his own will. He built his house on sand.

I have seen too much, not to believe. The obstacles to my faith are vastly outweighed. Templeton got all excited by the fossil record. That’s great, but when I put my reasons for believing on one side of the scale and the fossil record on the other, the fossils don’t amount to diddly. We live in a universe created in a series of miracles. I have seen supernatural phenomena with my own eyes, so I have ample reason to find the creation story plausible. If the supernatural exists, there is no reason not to believe that God can create space and matter and do what he wants with them. There is no reason to think other spirits can’t manipulate matter; they did it to the staffs of the magicians when Moses confronted Pharaoh. Who can say ancient physical evidence is irrefutible or even trustworthy, in a universe where physical laws are clearly trumped by supernatural forces? I can’t see giving up a dramatically improved life and the assurance of a better life to come, in exchange for a cold, unfulfilling life of depravity and the remarkable belief that God’s existence is disproven by the bones of a dead lizard.

The Templeton story made me very sad. It is frustrating to read about someone discarding something beautiful and precious and vital. And to learn that he spent the latter part of his life encouraging other people to do the same thing is even worse.

Junk, Redeemed

I am trying to turn my huge surplus MDF desk into a router/miter saw table. I just put it back together and stood it up in the garage.

This thing is like 1 1/4″ thick, so it ought to be plenty sturdy. But it has a dip in it. The center is a little lower than the ends. I’m thinking of fixing this by screwing a piece of scrap aluminum to the bottom of the desk. It’s shaped like an angle iron, about 2″ on a side. I’m not sure it’s stiff enough to do the job, but I’ll know ten seconds after I attach it.

The table is really long. I am not sure what to do about a T-track, since they are probably shorter than the table. I suppose it doesn’t matter if a T-track dead-ends in the table’s surface, as long as one end is open.

The fun part will be cutting the hole for the router insert. I believe the ideal tool for this is…a ROUTER. But I am not sure. Maybe you’re supposed to jigsaw it out and then clean it up with a router. And of course, I have no jigsaw.

I figure I can plop the miter saw over the router opening, and on the rare occasions when I want to use the router, I can take it off.

If none of this works, I can always put the mangled results by the curb and enjoy the knowledge that comes from screwing up.

Sisyphus Dreams of Chocks From Harbor Freight

I am trying to be better to the birds these days. They see me all day, and I interact with them, but I think I’ve been giving them too little time out of the cage, and I worry that their toy budget has been too low. So I’m taking them out occasionally during the day, for brief bird-pounding sessions. This can be challenging. I got a second huge cage so I would be able to relieve their boredom by moving them from one cage to another. When Marv is in the cage nearest to my chair, and Maynard is out, Marv squawks and tries to run interference, and Maynard launches himself repeatedly at my face and grabs my nose. It’s a jealousy thing. So when I want to take Maynard out, I now have to make sure Marv’s cage is behind me, out of Maynard’s sight.

I still haven’t sold Marv’s old cage. You would think people would jump at the chance to pay half price for a big King’s Cage in nearly new condition, but no one has bitten. I even tried to sell it to Tommy, for his green-winged parakeet, but he won’t go for it. And I was willing to sell extra-cheap!

I got them a $25 hanging bird toy, much like other toys they have destroyed in the past, and they ignore it. I don’t know what their problem is. At the same time, I got a weird bamboo-ladder toy, and they are eating it at a respectable rate.

Maynard is on my arm, watching me type. Soon he will want to stroll on the keys, and then he will want to walk down my legs and eat my shoes.

There he goes.

I wish they had an enclosure outside, so they could get some air. Parrots don’t like the sun–for that matter, they’re not too crazy about being outdoors, generally–but it would be good for them to have a daily change of scenery. I can’t sit them outside on perches. There are hawks here. A while back, I saw one staring at Marv while I sprayed the dust off of him. It probably could not understand why I was doing such a thorough job of washing my food. These guys would be a real treat for a hawk. Other birds eat slugs and lizards. Marv and Maynard eat seed mix, fruit, Jelly Bellies, and pizza. They are hawk Wagyu.

I am getting a bigger miter saw. Home Depot’s sale price is irresistable, and the lifetime Ridgid warranty is hard to beat. This means I will no longer have an excuse for stalling on a few carpentry jobs. I just couldn’t face doing them with a 10″ saw or a circular saw. The small miter saw would have been hard to set up perfectly, because flipping the boards in order to cut all the way across them would reveal tiny errors in cut squareness. The circular saw is a pain in the butt, pure and simple. When I cut a board to length, I want the operation to go “plop, whizzzzzz, plop, next board.” Not “plop, whizzzzzz, turn, aim carefully, whizzzzzz, curse.”

How did people ever live, back in the hand saw days? Imagine cutting twenty boards to length with a hand saw. Galley slaves had it better.

Maynard’s new thing: standing on my belly, lunging at my nose. He has had enough time out.

I don’t just want tools. I want tools that make things easy. Over and over, I have said that the real purpose of tools is to end frustration. My idea of hell is spending every day doing jobs with the wrong tools. While listening to rap. And wearing bell bottoms. And drinking Budweiser. In France.

Kind of got off the track there.

The right tool is the difference between pleasure and misery. The other day, I dug a hole for a citrus tree, using a shovel. Planting the tree was pure hell, because the dirt here is full of rocks. I think it took me an hour and a half, lifting a pint of dirt at a time. I dug the next hole with a hoe, and it took maybe ten minutes, and I didn’t break a sweat. This is why I want a big sliding miter saw. This is why I don’t want to build things using small or inappropriate saws. I don’t want a half-hour job to last four hours, and I want results I can be proud of.

This principle is why people who create new slot designs for fasteners should be released naked in the middle of the Libyan desert at midnight. During the scorpion rut. Every time a new slot design is created, people who want to be able to turn screws have to buy at least three new drivers and a bunch of bits. I have tons of these things, I and I still can’t turn all the screws I encounter. That leads to fun activities like trying to turn screws with a small Vise Grip. Put it on, start to turn, watch it pop off. Repeat for four hours. Check Expedia for fares to Libya.

By the way, I saw some fantastic videos yesterday. They’re at Taunton.com. A couple of guys demonstrate carpentry stuff. They build a bookcase. They build a workbench. They install a vise on it. Wonderful. If you click on the first video and watch it, the second one will load when it’s done. I sat through the whole set, mesmerized. They were doing things that WORKED. How come that never happens to me? Their tools didn’t break. They always had what they needed to do the job. The wood cooperated. Nobody threw anything or got out a sledge and beat a frustrating workpiece to splinters. Not that I have ever done that. Three times in one day.

Of course, it’s all rigged. It’s like an old Popeil commercial, where they use a cheap knife to cut a nail in half, but the nail is actually made of lead. The videos are totally unrealistic. They rig them by doing unfair things like preparing, measuring, and owning $500,000 worth of tools.

Bench dogs. Who has bench dogs in his real-life garage? Okay, Og probably does. He probably makes them from brass he made on his stove, from ore he mined in his backyard. He probably assembles the copper molecules from a kit. But nobody else. These guys had a whole collection of these unbelievably useful things. They even had a special pointy hat for a bench dog, which you put on top of it so you can bang a piece of wood down on it and make a starter hole for a drill bit. I think that’s right. My memory is pathetic.

Here’s an idea. Go to the Home Depot in Coconut Grove and tell Employee of the Month Ernesto Rodriguez you want a pointy hat for your bench dog so you can dimple some MDF. You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t bend a pry bar over your head.

Like all DIY videos, these are misleading and ridiculous, but they’re very satisfying to watch, because these guys succeed easily at things you would like to do, but never could. If I were not a Christian, I would compare it to watching adult films.

Speaking of hell, I know the punishment these guys deserve. They should be forced to make complex wooden items without an endless supply of obscure and expensive tools their viewers have never heard of.

SATAN: [holding a leash attached to Cerberus, the three-headed bench dog] Okay, guys, time to make a printing press from a solid block of oak. Otherwise, you have to wear the red-hot cast-iron leiderhosen all day.

FIRST VIDEO GUY: That’s impossible!

SECOND VIDEO GUY: You’re crazy!

SATAN: Observe. I mill the sides flat, draw my guide lines, and THROW THE BLOCK INTO MY BRAND NEW THREE-MILLION-DOLLAR DELTA PRINTING PRESS MAKER!

FIRST VIDEO GUY: Could be worse. We could be in France, drinking Budweiser.

SECOND VIDEO GUY: Word up.

I think I’ll make my own line of realistic DIY videos. “Today I show you how to pinch yourself with pliers and get a blood blister!” “Today I show you a quick and easy way to get a scratched cornea!” “Today I show you how to do everything right and still end up with marred workpieces!”

I already know the name of my next book. “1,000 Exotic Fasteners and How to Strip Them.”

Here’s some comforting news: even the video guys sometimes have to use the wrong tool. In one of their videos, one of them uses a socket wrench to drive a screw that would take .3 seconds with my impact driver. HA. Amateurs. Toss me the ringer.

Tools remind me of War Games. The only way to win is not to play.

Burrowing Owl Impression

I will never figure Marv out. He is having some out time. I am sitting in a chair with high arms, and he is between me and the right arm, facing the rear of the chair, and my arm is mashing him down into the chair, and he seems completely happy about it.

Earlier tonight he made a flatulence sound so convincing it sounded like he had a subwoofer.

I don’t know what he’s doing right now, but it’s probably a good thing, because I don’t think he will poop in that position.

Long-Awaited Tool Purchase

I’m beside myself with excitement. The miter saw I wanted to buy is on sale! In a BIG way! Home Depot knocked $200 off the price!

A year or two ago I got myself a 10″ compound miter saw, and I felt like a big deal. But I was actually an idiot. Because I did not realize that a 10″ saw that doesn’t slide will not cut anything wider than about six inches. It’s great for tiny jobs. For large pieces of wood, it is utterly useless. You have to flip them over and cut from the other side, and then you get errors because the blade is out of alignment by a fraction of a millimeter. I have it very square, but it’s not perfect.

Since buying this thing, I have been amazed to learn how many jobs it WON’T do. It’s a great saw, but too small is too small.

A 12″ sliding saw will cut 13.5″ across a board. You can go right through a four-by-four with it, too.

Now I have to figure out what to put it on. Very confusing. There are a bunch of good stands out there. Ryobi makes a beauty, believe it or not. It’s also sold under the Denali brand. But hold on! It’s too small for 12″ sliding saws. So are a lot of the others.

Ridgid makes one, but it’s gigantic and heavy, and the legs that hold up the support things at the ends of the stand are no good. Bosch makes a great one, but it’s $279. Delta makes a nice one, but you have to attach your saw permanently. I’m not sure if that bothers me or not.

I guess I could flop it onto the Workmate and use two freestanding support doodads. Whatever they’re called.

This saw would be perfect for deck problems and so on.

Maybe the answer is to buy the Delta stand and leave it set up in the garage. A miter saw is extremely handy, but only if it’s always ready to use.

I don’t know what to do with the old saw. Buying it was a mistake. Craigslist, maybe.

I have been considering turning my old melamine desk into a router table. If I do that, I can put the miter saw on it and use add-on supports. The router is under the table, and the miter saw would be above it, so there would be no conflict.

Dust removal will be challenging. Maybe I should just put a big fan beside the table, to blow sawdust out into the driveway. I’ve noticed that no matter how much sawdust I blow out there, it disappears in a day or two. And I can pretend it’s mulch.

One-Oven Blues Get me Down

People who only have one oven should be shot and put out of their misery. I am juggling potatoes and dressing and a turkey, trying to get everything done at roughly the same time without burning or undercooking anything. Not easy.

My turkey pan has some kind of rack in it that holds the bird off the bottom. I had to remove it in order to have vertical clearance for the turkey plus two dishes of dressing. That meant the dressing was on the bottom rack, next to the heat. I had to take them out and put a hollow baking sheet under them to keep the bottom of the dressing from being burnt.

I have a mound of delicious garlic mashed potatoes in another dish. It’s at about 90 degrees now. I’ll have no choice but to nuke it. My sister made a sweet potato dish that will have to be warmed up somehow. And I haven’t even discussed rolls or gravy.

It will work. You wait and see. I will MAKE it work. I always have.

Don’t Forget the Founder of the Feast

Tell me you don’t love America. It’s Thanksgiving morning, and the kitchen smells like oranges. And it’s not because I’ve been making cranberry relish. It’s because I used Flush-Out to clean one of my rifles on the dining room table. Are there scenes like this in homes in Europe? Not many, I’ll bet.

I think things are going okay on this end. The turkey is odd-looking, but I think the brining will fix it up. I considered adding baking soda to the brine, because the dark meat of organic hippie turkeys is said to have a fishy flavor that needs to be killed. I changed my mind because I didn’t want to take the flavor out of the white meat.

Because our nation is a mess and we have just elected a socialist President, who will exacerbate things if he succeeds in implementing his policies, this is a very important Thanksgiving. People don’t think of Thanksgiving as a religious holiday, but it’s a day dedicated to thanking God. We have been very ungrateful, and we have insisted on doing our own thing, and my belief is that our current problems are caused by our foolishness and rebellion.

The purpose of this day is to thank God for the abundance and security with which we have been blessed. I hope everyone who reads this will join me in remembering who gave us families, homes, and all this glorious food.

Happy Thanksgiving.

AK Substitute?

I think I may have figured out what to do about my need to 1) get a nice home defense gun and 2) defy and offend Barack Obama and his stooges by buying an imported assault rifle. I am considering a VZ 58.

I wanted an AK-47. But liberal gun-grabbers and the whims of manufacturers have made really nice ones so expensive, it’s disgusting. A thousand dollars for a stamped receiver! Come on. I can do better with an AR15. I mean, MAYBE, if I were positive the prices would stay high. But I’m not. It’s conceivable that the artificial inflation will come to an end, and then these things will sell for $400, and my used one will be worth $250.

While I was looking for an AK, I learned about the VZ 58. It looks like an AK, but it’s totally unrelated. It’s a Czech design, based on a German gun. It’s lighter than an AK. The magazines hold 30 rounds. It’s supposed to be as reliable as an AK, with fewer misfeeds. It’s made better; they’re either made or imported by CZ USA, so there should be no quality issues. The receiver is milled. You can get one with a cute folding stock, which is exactly what I want. And they can be had for around $850, depending on what conformation you like.

The only bad things I’ve heard are that there are fewer accessories, and the barrels heat up faster than AK barrels. However, I’ve already chosen the accessories I want, and I am not sure why I should care about how hot the barrel gets. I can’t see myself shooting so fast, in a self-defense situation, that a hot barrel will become a problem. And if it warms up enough to affect accuracy, so what? The gun is for encounters on a small piece of property. I’m not planning to shoot people in the next county. An inch or two one way or the other would be meaningless. Left ventricle, right ventricle…I am not picky.

I’ve also heard that the folding stock is lame, because it wobbles enough to affect accuracy. Again, it won’t keep me from shooting Floyd the Crackhead Burglar in the face at twenty feet.

Man, will this steam gun-grabbers. Between this and the giant Desert Eagle in hard chrome, I will definitely give them ulcers. Imagine me, parading around the house with my creepy assault rifle, with 30 rounds in the clip and a bright green laser and flashlight lighting my way. FREEZE, GOPHER!

I should get a holster for the Desert Eagle, just to be more of a scary fascist.

It’s really sad that the Desert Eagle is so worthless for self-defense. The odds of a stovepipe are like one in ten, whenever you pull the trigger. And it weighs like five pounds. And getting that second shot on target is a job. And the ballistics are not good. My best self-defense pistol is the lamest, most boring gun I have, and of course, that means Glock.

The VZ 58 is not as offensive-looking as an AK, and of course, that is a problem. But you can’t have everything. The giant green laser will go a long way toward uglying it up.

I slept through the cheap AK years. I slept while Arsenal quit making milled receivers. I slept through the cheap M1 Garand and M1 carbine years. Maybe I can partially redeem myself by jumping on a VZ 58 before Barack and Michelle decide gun shops are only allowed to sell Super Soakers.

I KNEW It

I decided to log in to the Cook’s Illustrated site to get the lowdown on fresh turkeys, and wouldn’t you know, they turned out to be the worst turkeys available?

Here’s the scoop. Turkeys have to be dropped to 26 degrees after slaughter, even if they’re sold as fresh. At that temperature, the water in the meat freezes, but the meat does not. Supposedly. While your local ripoff upscale grocery tries to keep the bird cold without freezing it hard, it is likely to undergo a bunch of cycles in which ice crystals form inside it and thaw. They break up the meat so it doesn’t hold water when you cook it.

On top of that, fresh turkeys tend to be spoiled. They get more exercise than factory birds, so they’re in better physical condition, and that adds up to tough meat.

Great. I hate it when a turkey turns out to be a challenge. My practice is to buy the cheapest factory bird I can find, and my turkeys are always perfect. Now I have a mutant Greenpeace bird that may taste like a brick.

Yuppies are never right about ANYTHING.

If you can find it, you want a fatty turkey. That means you don’t want the breed most packers use. You want a breed called Heritage.

If you have a fresh turkey, get it into some brine NOW. SCHNELL! And don’t buy one next year, unless you think expensive + bad = good deal.

The turkeys they liked best were Walters Hatchery (Heritage turkey) and Rubashkin’s Aaron’s Best.

Next Year, Bring on the Hormones and Antibiotics

The cornbread is magnificent. I managed to avoid eating more than one slice, and I decided to give Marv and Maynard a piece of the action. Now I’m fixing pecan pies.

I like pecan pie, but there is something basically wrong with eating a pie which is mostly sugar. It’s just an odd thing to choose to do. These should be pretty good. I jacked up the butter, and I added JD. I used Kirkland pecans. So the blessing of Costco is upon my pies.

I am going to brine the turkey. I just don’t trust all-natural meat.

Oh boy. I’m worried. I just read an article suggesting my fears are justified. It says fresh turkeys can be bland and “heavy,” whatever that means. Dang it. I knew better than to take a hormone-free bird grown by filthy hippies at face value.

I may as well get to it.

Gluttony is in the Air

I am in the process of making four pones of delicious bacon-grease cornbread.

What are the odds that the entire load will survive long enough to be made into stuffing?

In a very ironic word, slim.

Give us Your Bass Boats and we Will Spare Your Planet

Cream candy. Have you heard of it?

One pleasant thing about having a relationship with my sister is that my dad is no longer the only person I know who is from Eastern Kentucky. My sister and I have memories of a place that might as well be Mars, for all the similarity it bears to most of homogenized America. We have made a couple of trips to north Dade [County], and both times, she requested a stop at Cracker Barrel. This is a chain restaurant that features Appalachian cooking. Years ago, on trips to Kentucky, the family used to stop at a Cracker Barrel in Sevierville, Tennessee (home of Dolly Parton). My cousin managed one for a time. Now they have them in Florida. On our last outing, my sister mentioned cream candy. If anyone outside of Eastern Kentucky makes this stuff, I am unaware of it.

It’s very hard to describe. It’s sort of like chalk, except that it’s made from sugar. It contains cream (butter, actually), or it’s supposed to, but a lot of people cheap out and use margarine. It crumbles and dissolves in your mouth, and it’s extremely sweet.

I wonder if I can find it on the web. Yep, here’s a recipe.

This stuff is extremely temperamental. I have never made it, but according to my sister, women in Kentucky claim you can only make it in dry, cold weather. And you have to mix it on a cold marble slab. Oddly, nobody up there that we knew realized you could cool the slab with ice; my sister saw my aunt or somebody sitting around waiting for the slab to cool between batches, and she came up with the idea of putting a bag of ice on it. When she makes it here in Miami, she turns her air conditioner down as low as it will go.

It’s not the greatest candy on earth. About two pieces will do me for a year. But until my sister mentioned it, I had not thought about it in forever.

As far as I know, the only other candy that comes from that area is the Bourbon ball. You make a white pasty confection flavored with Bourbon, and you cover it with chocolate. They’re not too good. For one thing, no one up there seems to know how to make a non-waxy filling for a chocolate. I am pretty sure I have eaten Bourbon balls made with Gulfwax paraffin. For another, chocolate and Bourbon don’t go together.

I’m sitting here thinking about it, and it occurs to me that cream candy would be a whole lot better if you could flavor it with Bourbon. Then Bourbon balls would no longer be necessary. As I recall–don’t hold me to this–“Gulfwax” was originally one word, and the little boxes had the Gulf Oil logo on them. I see someone is selling a product called “Gulf Wax” online, but I suspect they stole the name and put a space in it. Gulf Oil is gone. I’ll bet Gulfwax was a refining by-product. Mmm…put that on your food and enjoy.

Whoops…Gulf has a website. I guess the brand is still alive somewhere.

My grandmother used that paraffin a lot. She canned everything she could get her hands on, and she used to pour a layer of hot paraffin on top of her blackberry jelly to keep air from getting to it in the jars.

I miss the food we used to eat at Granny’s house. That is not news. I managed to make some okay-looking shucky beans last year, and I may cook them for dinner tomorrow. Some of the beans I dried got mildew on them; the weather here just isn’t right for drying things. I’m considering getting a dehydrator. I’m afraid it won’t be the same. The dried apples Granny used to make were brown and chewy, unlike the ones you see in stores, and there is no way you could get white, fluffy ones to taste the same in a hand pie. Another strategy: put a window screen in my dad’s SUV, spread the beans or apples on it, and leave it in the hot sun. They do that in Kentucky. It makes a car smell good.

I don’t want a machine that will cook the food while it’s drying. That would ruin it.

It would be fun to surprised my dad with a stack cake (they’re made with dried apples) at Christmas. He’d faint. I’m not a huge fan of these things, but he loves them, and he hasn’t had one since maybe 1998.

I have to get off my hind end and get started on the food. I have to make several pones of cornbread today, plus pecan pies. I may inject the turkey today. It’s some kind of silly organic fresh turkey my sister found. I’m worried that it will be dry because it’s not full of the right chemicals and hormones. Maybe I should brine it. Arggh.

Whatever happens tomorrow, the food will be fantastic. I hope all of you have a great holiday.