Make a Splash With the Rest of the Trash

I just realized Columbus Day is almost here. What an unfortunate coincidence. Right now, the financial markets are dissolving, it’s Yom Kippur, we have a pivotal election coming up, and–call me a religious nut–I think we ought to be on our best behavior. Instead, boatloads of Miamians are going to go out on the water this weekend, strip naked in open view, and have sex in front of crowds of gaping strangers. It’s part of our annual Columbus Day Regatta celebration. People go out in the bay, raft up their boats, and do whatever their animal instincts tell them to do. And most of them could never be made to understand that what they do is wrong and harmful. It would be like trying to explain calculus to a cockroach.

I’ve written about it before. Can you imagine a bigger disgrace? It makes Mardi Gras seem refined.

Click This Link

As you may be aware, Sondra K. is now a kickboxer. For that reason, I am posting the following link:

LINK. When you get to that link, you are to vote for Soldier’s Angels, a fine charity which Sondra likes. Apparently, the charity with the most votes gets a big wad of cash.

She asked me to post that a few days ago, and I completely forgot. Hopefully I have spared myself a kickboxing lesson.

Oops

Looks like they called this thing off early! No point in voting now.

I have to go hide from Sondra.

Yom Kippur is Upon Us

Today is Yom Kippur. The Jewish day of atonement. It is the last in a contiguous series of holidays, beginning with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. During these days, Jews are supposed to reflect and repent. They are to acknowledge their sins and resolve to do better. I wonder if this is where we get the New Year’s resolution concept.

I got up this morning, fully aware that it was Yom Kippur, and I looked at the TV (I use the Weather Channel as an alarm), and what did I see? A flood warning. For real. Don’t tell me God doesn’t have a sense of humor. For the atheists and the forgetful, let me point out that the Biblical flood was a punishment for an unrepentant world.

The sky isn’t the only place where clouds gather and storms threaten. Look at Wall Street. Look at Iran, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela. We are perched on the edge of a cliff.

The truth is, we’re always perched on the edge of a cliff. It’s just not obvious. We look at our possessions and our armies and our abilities, and we think our lives are completely secure. Of course, they’re not. You can be rich and powerful and die from a fall in your bathtub. The things you cling to for security can be taken away in an instant. You can be taken down overnight. Look at Kim Jong Il. Earlier this year, he was one of the most powerful and dangerous men alive. He’s probably wearing a diaper right now.

The Bible is full of examples of people who partied their way into the abyss. People who became powerful, misattributed their success to themselves or to pagan gods, and then suffered catastrophes.

I believe that if you want God to look out for you, you always have to be careful about giving Him credit for your success, and you have to be careful about how you get what you have. Americans are falling short. Pride is now considered a virtue. And we have become drunk on a steady flow of quick money. My sense of the moment is not that God is judging us. It seems to me that He’s just slapping us awake. This is not a Depression, and we have not been conquered, and there is no famine, and there is no plague. But we’re being reminded that we can lose what we have. To some, that is incentive to continue living it up, while the good times last. To the wise, it is incentive to shape up.

I’m reading up on Yom Kippur. Here’s something interesting. Jewish holidays are connected to Christian holidays. For example, Jesus was sacrificed during the week of Passover, and the disciples received the baptism of the Holy Spirit on Shavuot. Some Christians believe Yom Kippur foreshadows the final day of judgment. That sounds reasonable to me. It has to have some meaning to us; it would be unlike God to create a holiday as important as this, without giving it some significance to Christians.

Here is something else: Jews are expected to confess their sins, apologize for wrongs, and forgive others on this day. That makes sense. God generally expects us to treat others the way we hope He will treat us.

I don’t know how much hope there is for the US, but there is always hope for the individual. I am thinking about the significance of Yom Kippur today, and I am trying to take advantage. I hope you’ll consider doing the same. We may be about to endorse socialism (a substitute for God and righteousness) and humanism by putting a far-left liberal in the White House. Our country may be headed for a decline, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be dragged along in the current.

Yom Kippur is winding down in Jerusalem. Mish Weiss says she has forgiven everyone who did her wrong during the last year. I wonder if that means she forgave me for yammering at her to consume animal products! You might drop by her blog and say a prayer for her, and for Leah Friedman, who is still recovering from surgery.

We are All Racists Now

Has everyone noticed how the Obama campaign and its surrogates are openly accusing their opponents of racism? Any criticism of Obama or his cronies, no matter how legitimate, can now be characterized as racist. It’s disgusting and shameful, but that’s how leftists play. Here’s a wake-up call to the swing voters: if Obama and his pals are crying “victim” now, what do you think they’re going to do after he’s elected? For four solid years, anyone who disagrees with the President will risk public accusations of racism. And because that threat will be hanging over the head of every pundit in the world, they will hesitate to warn us when Obama screws up, just as they chickened out when Frank Raines (black) looted Fannie Mae and caused the economic crisis.

You think you’ve seen Teflon? You’re fooling yourself. Reagan was called the Teflon President because liberal smears didn’t stick. Obama goes one step further. He aborts criticism in the womb. Prior restraint, without the Constitutional issues. It’s a thing of beauty.

And after he’s gone, historians will face the same fear. No matter what this man does to us, he’ll be remembered by historians as a messiah.

Does that mean we should never elect black politicians to high office? Of course not. The Bush administration gave us Condi Rice and Colin Powell, and pundits have been very willing to criticize them, because Rice and Powell don’t whimper about racism. They would fail if they tried. The Republican deck doesn’t come with a race card. The press removes it as soon as a black conservative takes office.

The lesson here is this: never elect a minority politician who makes bogus racism allegations during his campaign. Not unless you want to cope with the same tactics for the remainder of his public existence.

Here’s an unintentionally funny quote from a New York Observer piece:

And Kevin Parker, a New York state senator from Brooklyn, said, “If you have to remind people that Barack Obama is African-American, you have reached the bottom.”

Looks like Obama and his surrogates reached the bottom quite some time ago.

Approaching Perfection

Mike and I collaborated on a pizza the other day. I was anxious to watch his tossing technique, because he is completely fearless with the dough, whereas I feel like I’m juggling a greased baby over a terrazzo floor.

We used 2 cups of flour to make a 14″ pie. I made the dough, and he plopped it on the glass stove surface (my tossing area) with no worries at all. It stuck, but he was still able to get it loose and work it. Weird.

He stretched it on the stove, pressing his hands down into it and out. It somehow worked, even though the dough should have welded itself to the surface. He tore it once, but when he does that, he just pinches the edges together and pulls them up into a flap, which he folds over onto the pie.

It’s always scary, moving the crust onto the screen. I wanted to see how he handled it. It turns out he usually tosses dough that has been in the fridge, so it’s not as fragile. He was worried about handling the warm dough I made. And he said the warmth made it more likely to get stuck in the screen. That has been a concern of mine; I didn’t know he was using cool dough. My solution has been to spread the sauce with my fingers, which lets me use very little pressure. The more pressure you use, the more likely the dough is to bond with the screen.

I’ve been making insanely thin crusts lately. Usually, there are areas you can see through. So you can imagine how easy it would be to make them stick to the screen. But it works. I used this technique on the pie I made.

The pizza was amazing.

It seems like the pies are better if you let them rise really high, mash them down, and let them rise again. Also, I’m considering putting a tiny amount of olive oil in the dough. I like a tough crust with a little fight in it, so I usually use oil only on the outside.

It’s remarkable how cheap pizza is. Between the Costco cheese and the virtually free sauce, it’s ridiculous. You could make big cheese pizzas every day for a week for something like twenty bucks.

I believe I’ll have one now.

More Power!

I’m a pretty awesome guy. I realize that, and I admit it, because it saves time.

Today I managed to install a 4-plug 20-amp socket inside my air handler closet. I also yanked an ancient light socket that went nowhere, capped the wires, shoved them back in the wall, and filled the void with Great Stuff so I’ll have a base on which to pile the patching stuff later.

I only worked about two hours, but I am wiped out. The air handler takes up almost the entire closet, and I was working in spaces about 15″ wide. Sometimes I had to back out and go back in to change tools. Exasperating.

At the outset, all I had was about eight feet of Romex going into the closet and attached to a 220-volt, 40-amp breaker at the panel. I had to remove the breaker, put in a 20-amp 120-volt breaker, cap the excess wires, rearrange everything so the colors were appropriate, attach hangy things to the wall in the closet to make the Romex to a square box, attach the square box to the wall, wire up two receptacles, attach the house wiring to the receptacles, and put the box together.

Because I plan to continue the circuit past the box (for some lights and the outdoor stuff), I decided to make the receptacle wiring super anal retentive. I used crimp-on eye connectors and extra wire to connect the receptacles to each other. Then I put eyes on the house wiring. I attached the receptacles to the face plate (which required me to come up with my own bolts), and then I put the whole mess together. If you know anything about the way electricians usually crap this stuff up, you will understand how weird my method was. But it’s incredibly clean, neat, and organized, and it will be much easier to run the additional stuff because I was so meticulous.

I removed a considerable amount of garbage the electricians and AC guys had left. By that, I don’t mean trash. I mean stupid things that needed to be corrected. The AC guy needed power to run a doodad connected to the handler. Did he put in a circuit? No, he drilled a hole into the garage wall, took an extension cord, and ran it out to one of my precious garage sockets. I kid you not. I got rid of that Sanford & Son monstrosity today. I had to sever the cord to pull it out of the wall. While I was at Home Depot, I looked for a plug I could splice onto it, but they cost nearly as much as new cords, so I’m tossing it.

Here’s a plug for Klein tools. I was tired, and I somehow got confused, and I cut the extension cord while there was still juice running through it. I popped the breaker when I shorted the wires. Those insulated handles work.

Tonight or tomorrow I’ll run conduit and connect this circuit to the outdoor stuff, and I’ll see if anything explodes.

I can’t say this emphatically enough: you need to overdo things when you work on your house. Example: never settle for a two-plug receptacle when you can have four. Never settle for a 15-amp circuit when you can have 20. Never get the crazy idea that you have enough power outlets. Sometimes you can add five dollars to the cost of a job and save yourself a lifetime of frustration and misery. Electrical stuff is very cheap, and if you spend a little extra, you can improve the livability of your house a great deal.

And always try to make things easier on yourself in the future. When you install something, imagine yourself trying to work on it a year later, and try to take the landmines and booby-traps out of it. I have no idea what I’m doing, but I am smart enough to realize that doing things right makes a big difference.

When this is over, I’ll have four sockets in the closet, two banks of lights in the closet, two more garage sockets, and a well-grounded 20-amp circuit that ISN’T connected to a 60-amp fuse.

Someday, I want an all-concrete house with concrete floors and double-pane windows. I want drains in the floors. I want to be able to clean the place with a hose and a leaf blower. I am fed up with frustrating BS that wastes my time.

More

I just have to offer myself this little salute.

Get Down With Your Own Bad Self, B.

I have been neglecting the blog because I have had to screw with some hosting problems. I hope none of you tried to email me at any address not on the HOI domain, because if you did, your emails are history.

Here’s something fun to keep you entertained while I finish my electrical project.

By the way, Walken now has his own email address. You can find it on the blog.

How?

Surprise me tomorrow morning with some information. How do you drill a 10″ deep hole in concrete with a coring bit that is 4″ long? Seems like long bits are hard to find.

I was thinking there must be some kind of bit extender, and that every time the bit bottoms out, you could knock the core out with a chisely shaped sort of a thing.

But maybe it’s impossible.

No Explosions

Man, I am beat. I haven’t been working that hard. And it’s not really that hot outside. But it’s so muggy, the sweat gushes out of you, and somehow, it’s exhausting.

I ripped out the conduit running from the AC disconnect box to the outdoor floodlight. I rewired the floodlight. I ran wire in through the garage wall. I opened a hole going from the garage into the air handler closet, where there is a handy, unused length of Romex.

The drilling was too easy. I barely got to enjoy it. The rotary hammer just farts once or twice, and then you’re through the wall. As tool experiences go, this is hard to beat.

I experienced severe confusion, trying to figure out how to take wires running from the floodlight’s EMT conduit and run them through a concrete wall. There are a lot of rigid conduit parts made for this, but I couldn’t find any EMT stuff. I guess EMT under an outdoor soffit is less than kosher. I don’t know. I solved it by screwing a 1/2″ EMT connector into the side of a PVC box and screwing the box to the wall. I popped the plug out of the back of the box, and I ran the wires through it and into the wall. I pumped the opening full of Alex caulk to keep bugs from using it as a highway, although I guess that’s kind of pointless in a garage. I may blast the cavity inside the cinderblock full of foam, purely out of spite. This is Miami. SOMETHING will make a home in there.

I suppose a real man would replace all the EMT conduit with rigid. I don’t know what the code is. Virtually every piece of outdoor wiring I’ve seen in houses here has been EMT, but that doesn’t mean anything.

The rotary hammer makes a bigger hole on the way out than it does on the way in, so I patched the holes with crap from a can, and now I have to wait until tomorrow before I can finish.

The wiring from the AC box to the floodlight was fascinating. It passed an outdoor outlet on the way. There was one color code on the way from the box to the outlet, a second between the outlet and the light, and a third in the light. So part of the time I was just replacing wires so things would make sense.

Fixing the outdoor wiring is not what’s exciting here. What’s exciting is getting a new 20-amp outlet in the garage, a new 20-amp outlet in the air handler closet, and two sets of lights on the wall in the closet. But that won’t happen until tomorrow or Thursday.

I am the king of all tools. Fear me. Etc. Etc.

Makita Makes it Easy

I am making a Youtube of the hammer drill versus the rotary hammer. I happen to have 3/4″ masonry bits for each. I started the hole in the garage wall with the hammer drill, and it was working okay. Then I hit it with the rotary hammer. ZAP. I was done. Very nice.

Woody Allen says 80% of success is showing up. I would say 50% is showing up and 40% is having the right tool.

The Garage Will Submit Shortly

It’s an exciting day. Aren’t ALL days exciting? Of course they are. But this one stands out, because yesterday, my ridiculous rotary hammer arrived. This means I can redo the 15-amp 110 circuit some brilliant contractor ran directly to a 60-amp 220 fuse. I get to drill two deep 3/4″ holes in concrete and cinderblocks.

The hammer is kind of scary. And it has several knobs, which means I may have to look at the manual. Yesterday I complained that a contractor had used a rented demo hammer to make a hideous hole in a wall by the AC compressor. I think I understand why that happened. I think the rental people refuse to rent complicated tools to complete idiots, because the rental people lose the manuals, and they don’t want doofuses making dubious guesses. The demo hammer is much simpler. You push button, it go.

I’m psyching myself up, here. I may have to Youtube this for posterity. I think I’ll plug the hammer into the existing defective circuit and see if it burns the house down.

WordPress!

I have had to redo a couple of my websites. If you were on the blogrolls at the old sites, you are gone now, because WordPress failed to transfer the links. I’ll try to replace everyone. Sorry about that.

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You will be glad to know Wilford Brimley is backing John McCain.

The Sand is Deep Today

I just watched CNBC for a bit. Apparently the world really IS coming to an end. Thought you might want to know.

The Dow went down over 700 points earlier today. At the moment, it’s down about 500. And suddenly that looks pretty good.

They’re saying the Fed is going to cut at least half a point off the prime rate. Will it matter? I don’t know.

I can’t help wondering if deflation is headed our way. The dollar is pummeling foreign currencies, and a lot of things are getting cheaper here, and because people are jittery, things that used to sell very freely are going to have to be marketed aggressively. We’re looking at cheap oil and cheap metals, except for gold. Real estate continues to drop in value. Unemployment is increasing, so presumably, people will be willing to work for less, and wages will drop. If wages drop, things just plain have to cost less, don’t they? I’m no economist, but it seems to me that consumers can’t spend money they don’t have. Okay, I suppose they can, but won’t that be harder to do as credit tightens up?

I suspect that Jim Cramer helped cause this. He went on TV and told people to sell stocks. He said that if there was any money they thought they might need during the next five years, it was time to pull it out. Over the last few years, this man has become extremely popular. He’s like Obama; a “rock star.” Fate raised him to a very lofty place, and this weekend, he dropped a very big rock on us from up there. Maybe he was right to say what he did, but I’m sure he scared millions of people to death.

The Pope says obsessing on money is vain. Here’s a Reuters quote:

The pontiff, using a biblical metaphor, said people who ignored the word of God to pursue wealth had effectively built their homes on sand instead of on a solid foundation of faith.

That is true. I have known a lot of prosperous people, and the impression I have formed is that things go badly for them unless God is in their lives. Their families fall apart. They get caught up in spirals of senseless self-destruction. Sometimes they lose everything. Sometimes they get richer, and it somehow leaves them even worse off.

Godless people with money remind me of socialists in places like China and the old USSR. A few things go right, and they become convinced it’s all coming together. If they just keep headed in the same direction. If you have money, you have power, and if you have power, you can fix your problems. Right? But the horizon keeps receding. They never catch up with the mirage.

I’m with the Pope on this one. I’m saying that publicly, because I’m sure he worries about my opinion. God really is up there, and if you turn toward Him sincerely and persistently, and if you submit, He’ll get you through your problems. Maybe He’ll fix them, and maybe He won’t, but you’ll come out on the other side in one piece, and you’ll be able to bear the journey.

I’m not suffering the way a lot of people are right now; the exposure isn’t there. But I feel very low anyway, knowing what hundreds of millions of people are going through. I’m so grateful that God woke me up and prepared me for this kind of thing.

Thursday is Yom Kippur. This is a great week to try to turn things around.

I Did Sleep at a Holiday Inn Express Once

As the proud owner of a rotary hammer that has not been delivered yet, I have an observation.

There is a hole at the foot of a wall, outside. It’s a three-foot-high wall. During heavy rain, water used to accumulate behind it. Long ago, I instructed a contractor to put the hole in, with a PVC pipe, to let the water out.

They rented a demo hammer with a chisel bit, and they busted a big nasty hole. It took them a long time. They quit before it was done. I had to go behind them with a hammer and chisel and open it up. I crammed a pipe in there and sealed it in place with foam. It looks pretty bad.

After I ordered the rotary hammer, a reader of this blog said I had to get a coring bit. This is pretty much the same thing as a hole saw, except it makes holes in concrete. You can make holes over 3″ wide with the hammer I ordered. Pretty, smooth holes. And if you hit rebar? No problem. The bits are made to cut it. It has occurred to me that this is what the contractor should have used.

Question: how many years do you have to work in construction before you realize a coring bit and a rotary hammer are what you need to make holes in concrete walls? Am I imagining things, or is this yet another example of Miami-contractor incompetence?

More, Please

On Saturday, I had a rare pleasure. I went to a movie about politics and social issues, and I didn’t have to cringe once. I didn’t have to watch American soldiers rape foreign women or use Indians for target practice. I didn’t have to watch fictional CEOs poison people in exchange for nominal increases in their profits. No gays or transgenders or [insert tedious all-inclusive phrase here] were beaten up by jocks. There were no unrealistic nuclear accidents caused by greed and laziness. And I didn’t see Christians portrayed as narrow-minded, unempathetic, self-righteous fanatics who mistreat other people in misguided attempts to please God.

Oh, wait. Actually, that last sentence is wrong. I did see some pretty nasty Christians. The movie was An American Carol, and there was a scene in which Little Satan Bill O’Reilly tormented a fat girl named Rosie O’Connell for creating a documentary dramatizing the many crimes of terrorist nuns and priests. You know their tricks. Exploding bingo markers. Radioactive rosary beads. Votive candles full of black powder and nails.

I guess you’ll want a review. I’ll give you the basics right now. It was broad comedy, and the slapstick accusations are correct. It wasn’t the finest movie I’ve ever seen. Come on; what did you expect? This is the Hot Shots/Naked Gun crew. But it was funny, and I enjoyed it, and I pray it will be the beginning of a whole new anti-socialist-kook backlash in entertainment.

The Christian-terrorist scenes were wonderful. They showed a nun blowing herself up on a bus, and a couple of priests entering a jet cockpit and beating the flight crew senseless with a switchblade cross. Why is that wonderful? Because the scenes were written by THREE HOLLYWOOD JEWS. David Zucker is the ringleader, and the movie also credits Myrna Sokoloff and Lewis Friedman. Yes, I’m assuming they’re Jewish because of their names. That’s okay; Jimmy Carter did it when he kept Jews out of his “peace” organization.

Do you understand what a remarkable thing this is? Three Jews sat down and tried to come up with a way to defend Christianity in a major film. That probably hasn’t happened since Ben Hur. What a day this is! There is a major charity dedicated to bringing Jews and Christians together and channeling Christian money to Jews in need. Christian ministers are being excoriated in the press for supporting Israel too fervently. And now we have secular Hollywood Jews, working actively to defend us!

The movie only took in $3.8 million this weekend, but I don’t think that’s a big deal. It was clearly filmed on a low budget, so they probably don’t have to make a fortune in order to break even. And it wasn’t advertised heavily, and it wasn’t screened for critics (who are overwhelmingly liberal), and the critics who have managed to review it have been nearly as venomous, dishonest, and unfair as the critics who have reviewed Sarah Palin. Give it time; I doubt it will do so badly it will scare Tinseltown away from conservative movies forever.

Conservative filmmakers should probably make a point of keeping budgets low. First of all, money isn’t what makes movies good. It just makes them flashy. Second, low budgets mean lower break-even points plus the possibility of funding more films from the same limited pile of investment money, and third, conservatives are supposed to be more responsible than liberals. Wasting money isn’t the conservative way! Ask John McCain.

If Zucker and the Friends of Abe are serious about making a dent in the entertainment industry, they need to make some effort to organize and recruit. An American Carol had a cast worthy of a major Hollywood epic. Performers are available. I think they need to work harder on the other parts of filmmaking. They need to find good cinematographers, writers, and directors. The stars aren’t going to look good unless they have strong people behind them.

Conservatives need to form their own businesses. We need conservative talent agencies and literary agencies. A conservative network that isn’t a news channel. Working from within the liberal-dominated infrastructure will be difficult and slow. If we’re going to do this, we shouldn’t screw around. There is no point in trying to hide now. The cat is out of the bag. It’s time to sink or swim. If the American Carol folks are brave enough to provoke the jihadists (unlike the gutless Hollywood establishment), they should be brave enough to reach out, openly, to try to find and organize talent.

Go see the movie. If you don’t feel like sitting through it, buy a ticket and throw it out. Show the establishment punks they can’t keep us down. Maybe this will be the start of something wonderful.