Convenience

I’ll tell you what’s sad about being a cookbook author. You may forget to shop for normal food, but you will generally have ingredients for nutritional disasters on hand at all times. Which is why I am about to make another pizza. It’s either that or drive to Winn-Dixie to check out the on-sale meat.

I’m almost angry at Winn-Dixie for discounting meat all the time. I used to go into the store and buy what I wanted. Now I feel like I’m not allowed to buy anything that costs over six dollars per pound, and I try to stay under two dollars.

Finding out that Costco cheese is actually pretty good has been a problem. I have several pounds of it, and I bought a couple of cans of delicious Stanislaus Super Dolce sauce the other day, and I feel like I have an obligation to eat all the cheese before it turns green. So I have to eat about three pounds a week. I also want to test it in calzones, so I have to make some of those this week. I think calzones should be less demanding, because my big concern with the cheese is that the low fat content will cause it to scorch, and inside a calzone, scorching isn’t an issue.

Thank God I don’t have ricotta, or I’d be making calzones with that, too. When it comes to calzones, I like pizza sauce, mozzarella, and maybe ricotta. But it seems like most pizzerias just use ricotta and maybe some crap to season it.

It’s a shame I didn’t go into calzones in the book, because you can make absolutely anything into a calzone, and they’re fantastic. If you have the book, just decide what you want to calzonify, make a 14-16″ circle of my dough, plop the ingredients on one side, fold the other side over, and seal the edges together by wetting them with water and pressing. If you haven’t made a cheesesteak calzone, your life has been wasted. Or a pan con lechon calzone. Oh. Oh.

I have been told that Paula Deen uses cottage cheese in lasagne. Sounds horrifying and WASPy, but I can’t argue with her reputation. Maybe I’ll put a spoonful on the pizza somewhere to see what it’s like.

Mike may be coming into town this week. He could definitely help me get rid of that cheese. Is it immoral to feed your excess cheese to a friend, knowing it’s just as bad for him as it is for you? I guess. But sometimes you have to look out for Number One.

It’s funny, but there are some TV chefs almost nobody criticizes. It seems like some chefs can’t manage to write a single recipe that pans out for home viewers, but others rarely fail. Paula Deen and Alton Brown seem to fit that description. You never hear anyone say, “I tried Alton Brown’s recipe for X, and it was disgusting.”

I would be really uncomfortable if I had a successful show and a string of restaurants, and most of my food was bad. I guess I’m nuts.

Pizza is imminent.

Not Surprising

I would appreciate a couple of small favors.

First of all, as I said Friday, a TV executive has expressed interest in the rights to my cookbook. I don’t know if there is any point in pursuing this or not; I am now told that the idea is for me to sell the rights to them, and they’ll hire a professional chef to do the show. You can see the problems with this. I’d get a little check for the rights, and then I’d be gone. The show wouldn’t be very good, because I’m what drives the concept, and I wouldn’t be there. The show would probably have little relationship to the book, so it wouldn’t be very helpful in terms of sales.

The obvious concern here is that if I don’t go along, someone will take the idea without paying for it, and they’ll do a bad show, and I won’t get squat.

So I would appreciate it if you would include me in your prayers, to prevent that from happening. This idea has a lot of potential, and I’ve worked very hard on it for a long time, and if it is taken away from me, I’ll be at square one.

Second thing: someone I know has been harassing me for a while, and it has been very distracting. I won’t go into details, but it’s basically a hopeless attempt to squeeze money out of me. And this person has done a number of risky, wildly self-destructive things in the process. Help me out and join me in praying that this person has a change of heart, accepts salvation, and learns to use God’s power to be a positive and healthy force in this world. And of course, please pray that the situation is resolved without harm.

If you could help me out here, I would truly be in your debt.

More

This, from reader JeffW:

Praying here also. If anyone finds time, my wife could also use some prayer. Due to cancer in an ovary, she just had an Oophorectomy (like a hysterectomy except they remove the ovaries too). She is “clean” now, but we’re in the recovery stage (1-week down, 5-weeks to go).

Just when I think my problems are important.

Tisha B’Av Continues

It’s the Christian Sabbath. On the other hand, it’s also Tisha B’Av, the most calamitous day in the Jewish calendar. I guess the good news is that we’ll all be praying today. And boy, is it a good day for it. I was just watching the news, about the war between Russia and Georgia. I don’t know enough about the conflict to know who has the better claim to the disputed area, but I do know that Vladimir Putin is dangerous and ruthless. People are dying. Homes are being destroyed. And the Russians refuse to stop.

I wonder what the humanitarian aid situation is over there. We’ve had so many natural disasters over the last few years, I’ve gotten used to thinking of disaster relief as something that applies chiefly to things like hurricanes and earthquakes. But I suppose need is need, regardless of how it arises.

I’m checking, and predictably, World Vision has already reacted. These people are fast. Here is a link.

If there is one good thing about this mess, it’s that it lacks the scale of a natural disaster. It’s not another Burma. I have no idea what finally happened in Burma; they fought so hard to keep aid out, I quit reading about it. I can’t imagine a populous country nearly free of Judaism and Christianity. Talk about hopeless. If I lived in a place like that, I would expect a catastrophe every week. My personal suspicion is that the presence of believers is the only thing that keeps the world from being destroyed. I would not want to live in a country that contains fewer than 20 Jews and has an official government program to eradicate Christianity.

I have never understood what drives a person to oppose Christianity. Atheists make wild claims, with no evidence, that Christianity causes most of the world’s problems. What world are they talking about? The Inquisition and the Crusades were over a long, long time ago. The excesses and atrocities of atheist leftism continue to this day, and the horrors of anti-Christian Nazism (in many ways a form of leftism) are still fairly recent. And their scale dwarfs that of any problems caused by Christianity. As for the Jews, they’ve never been numerous enough to make trouble. On the other hand, they tend to provide us with inventions and vaccines and music and huge charitable gifts.

What’s the worst thing that could happen if Christians completely took over? Conversion by the sword is out of style, so that’s not a concern. You might have to sit through a prayer at the beginning of your next ball game. You would have a hard time finding pornography, which, as we all know, is essential to a healthy, happy life. If you’re a woman and you carelessly conceive a child, you might be expected to carry it to term instead of turning your womb into your child’s abattoir. The US would give a bigger percentage of its tax revenues to protect Israel. Can minor “evils” like these compare to leftist practices such as lining up hundreds of thousands of suspected political enemies and machine-gunning them so they fall into ditches? Can they compare to nearly wiping out the educated class of an entire country? Do they look bad juxtaposed with gulags and purges and forced abortions and infanticide? Those things are the rancid fruit of enlightened atheism.

Life tends to be pretty good in nations with a history of Christianity or Judaism, and it tends to be pretty awful elsewhere. There is a reason why countless people have risked death to move from the USSR and China and Cuba to the US, while virtually no one wants to go the other way. There is a reason why Muslims sneak into Israel and then refuse to leave.

I doubt anyone reading this today will live to see a wave of immigration to Burma. I feel safe making that prediction.

I think the US is facing its own slow-motion Tisha B’Av. The Jews lost their temples overnight. Americans have been watching God’s favor slip away since at least 2001. And our brilliant response was to legalize gay marriage and push Israel to give away more land. And half of us want a President who carries a Hindu idol wherever he goes. Even to the Western Wall, which is the foundation of the temple in Jerusalem.

Have you read about the idol Obama carries? The “god’s” name is Hanuman. He is the son–an incarnation–of Shiva. Many people consider Shiva to be the Hindu homologue of Satan. So what does that make Hanuman, in Christian terms? Figure it out. Here’s a hint: the incarnation of God is Christ.

Here’s a link to a story about Obama and Hanuman, with a photo of the large idol sent by Indian admirers.

Very creepy, for a Presidential candidate to carry the graven image of that particular heathen deity. Insignificant, to a person who doesn’t believe in God. But to a Christian? Highly disturbing. And taking it with him while praying at the temple…it’s like something out of a shlocky horror movie. An abomination.

It’s a strange type of Christianity Obama practices. It allows him to carry an idol and have a pastor who pals around with people who seek the destruction of the Jews. I’m having a hard time seeing the connection to the other type of Christianity, which says we are to have no graven images and no other gods, and that the Jews are the apple of God’s eye.

If only some nice leftist would put me in a camp and reeducate me, while distributing my property to local leftist officials. Then I might understand.

I Could Have Been Born in Yemen

I finished God’s Smuggler and started on Secret Believers today. The older I get, the more grateful I am that I live in America. And these books only reinforce the sensation.

Secret Believers is about real Christians living in Muslim countries. Some were born into Christian minorities, which is bad. Others are converted Muslims. That’s a whole lot worse.

One of these believers is a young man who piped up at a gathering of Muslim students. He asked the Imam why Muslims, who honor the prophets, did not honor the greatest prophet of all. And he was referring to Jesus. The others beat him, and the Imam turned him over to his father and told him to keep beating him until he recited the little prayer that supposedly makes you a Muslim. His own cousin told him, “God will be pleased when I kill you.”

Churches exist in many Muslim countries, but they suffer constant harassment and persecution. And Christians are divided, because the older churches resent the Protestants. It seems Protestants can’t convert Muslims very easily or safely, so they go after Catholics and Orthodox believers who are disenchanted with the less-lively spirit of their churches. And they succeed.

Here in the US, you can go to any church you want, you can get all the instructional materials you want, and people from different denominations get along very well. As long as they don’t talk to each other too much.

Atheists always say they don’t see how God can be good and allow suffering. That seems childish to me. If you want to ask a better question, ask why evangelism is allowed to fail. You would think God would assure the success of anyone who tries to spread the word. But there are very high barriers to evangelism, especially in Muslim countries, and progress is not exactly optimal.

It’s a curious thing. But I am not stupid enough to second-guess God. When I was younger, I was so smart I was able to do that, but it seems I have grown less intelligent with age, because I no longer feel qualified. I suppose there is a purpose to the multi-millennium human pageant, and if God forced everything to go right, it would all be over in about a week.

I think the most likely explanation is that God has some responsibilities, but He has put a lot of jobs–a lot of authority–in the hands of Man. And we screw up. There are a lot of things we could be doing to improve creation, and we fail, so the world is a mess. Now that I think about it, Jesus complained about it, saying the harvest was plentiful, but the workers were few.

I guess the question isn’t that hard to answer, after all.

God bless this country. I am happier than ever to be here.

Dishwasher

I just installed a dishwasher. I removed the old copper inlet line. I replaced it with two braided lines connected end-to-end. I used to have maybe seven feet of extremely fragile, leaky copper. Now I have ten feet of braided stainless. If the dishwasher goes bad, I can move it around all I want, without fear of sending water spraying all over the kitchen. My question: why couldn’t the people who installed the last dishwasher have done this? Answer: because they took no pride in their work, and all they wanted was to get a signature and get back on the truck.

No one does anything right any more. And it’s not a question of skill or knowledge. Yesterday I knew virtually nothing about installing a dishwasher. Today I have an installation which is infinitely superior to what I would have gotten had I paid the delivery guys to do it.

How did we end up like this? Time and time again, I find myself in a position where I would be thrilled to pay someone to do a job, but I end up doing it myself because I can’t find anyone to do it right.

On top of that, the money people charge for services is insane. I could get rich running a business where I only charged people fifty bucks for the fifteen minutes of work an appliance installation requires. That’s because appliance stores charge over a hundred. Lawyers don’t make that kind of money. Why would I pay it to a blue-collar guy who can barely be considered skilled labor?

In case you’re wondering, it looks like Kitchenaid makes the best dishwashers these days. Braun gets higher ratings, but they have an eco-weasel “feature”: no heating element. So your dishes never get dry.

I went to Consumer Reports and saw how they raved about Kenmore. Then I read the reviews from the unfortunate people who had actually bought the machines. Oh, man. You couldn’t give me one now. But the Kitchenaid owners all seemed ecstatic. I went to J.D. Power to check, and I saw four stars by Kitchenaid, and that was enough for me.

So I guess what this means is that Consumer Reports is right in there with all the other people who do their jobs badly.

I’m glad I’m learning to do all these things for myself. I am so sick of having people tear up my home and belongings; I am so tired of having to follow up and complain until they get it right. I just don’t need the aggravation. Better to suffer with the actual work than to spend time on the phone yelling at people who don’t care. I have the sort of feeling I would have if these people were deliberately conspiring to punish me with bad work until I got the message and quit hiring them.

Do I sound crabby? Maybe just a little? Go on. You can be honest.

In other news, I heard from a TV production company today. They expressed interest in the rights to Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man. How about that? I looked them up. It’s a real company. I don’t think they’re like the vultures who appeared when I put my press release up, offering to put me on THREE TOP LITERARY WEBSITES or let me buy an infomercial from a company whose name sounds almost sort of like a famous shopping network, but not quite enough like it to justify a lawsuit.

I don’t know if it will amount to anything, but it proves I’m not the only person on earth who likes this concept. Who knows? Maybe some day you’ll see me on cable at 2 a.m., putting together a turducken.

I don’t like the idea of having my face on camera, and I am sure America and I are on the same page in that regard. But PR is the key to riches, and regular TV appearances are hard to beat. The TV-chef pantheon is full of rich people who can’t cook. Investors even buy them restaurants. Where the food is bad. And people buy it and swear it’s ambrosia.

I’m not desperate to get rich, but I would like to generate a solid income with this stuff. Maybe there is a way.

Mail: a Bourgeois Luxury

I’ve been reading God’s Smuggler again. What a great recommendation.

One thing about the book that startled me was the way it illustrated the astounding cruelty of leftism. Brother Andrew said he went to Rumania to meet with the Christians there and bring them Bibles. A lady there was shocked to learn that Christians in other countries thought about Rumanians. They were not allowed to mail letters, and they hadn’t received any from abroad in thirteen years.

Maybe that doesn’t sound atrocious the first time you read it, but think about it. Sitting here on my rear end, I can contact people all over the world, instantaneously. If I felt like it, I could send and receive a hundred emails a day. And my penpals and I could attach photos, audio, and video. Now imagine going thirteen years with no contact with anyone beyond a few miles from your home. It would be like living in an aquarium, on another planet. It would be almost as if the rest of the world had disappeared. Even prisoners in the US can mail letters. And when we send our soldiers to war, we work very hard to make sure they can communicate with people here at home.

It’s true, the leftists provided a certain amount of “news.” Citizens of Eastern bloc nations heard wild stories about Holland being occupied by the USAF, and they were told that the Dutch were oppressed by capitalists. But people behind the Iron Curtain didn’t really know what was going on in the world.

If it doesn’t hurt you to think about millions of people cut off from the rest of the world, it ought to. But that’s how leftism is. People are objects; it doesn’t matter what you do to them, because the state…and CHANGE…are all that matters. Rumania, Cambodia, China, North Vietnam…it’s always the same. Only the degree varies.

It really is a shame God didn’t make human beings intelligent enough to see through the poisonous promises of leftism. We’re just bright enough, on average, to realize we like things like trees and clean air and fairness and freedom from poverty. Most of us are too dumb to realize leftism won’t bring us these things–that it has never brought these things to anyone. In fact, it makes life much, much worse. It tends to increase the very problems it purports to fight.

More and more, I think a good monarchy is better than a republic in which unintelligent people get to vote.

All Your Cheese are Belong to Us

How do you make one of these go away?

A website says they like cottage cheese. Guess I’ll avoid storing it on the deck.

Help

Let’s say you have a dishwasher that just crapped out. And the water line to the dishwasher is copper, and because the dishwasher has crapped out before, the line has become kinked from moving the dishwasher around. And you just lost a foot of tubing because a kink turned into a hole, and you had to cut the tube, roll it back on itself, and mash it shut with Vise Grips.

What do you use to put an extension on the tubing?

Copper is clearly crap. It will cause more problems. Can I join some kind of braided tubing to it? I’d like to use about six feet, so repair people will be able to move the dishwasher all they want in the future.

Time to Take Inventory

Sunday will be an inauspicious day. Tisha B’Av begins on Saturday at sundown.

I’ve written about it before. This is the Jewish holiday–funny word for it–which commemorates God’s pronouncement of a punishment on the Jews. On this day, He told them the generation that left Egypt with Moses would not enter the Promised Land. It’s also the date of the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 586 B.C.E. and the date of the destruction of the second temple in 70 C.E. And it’s a day on which other great misfortunes have befallen the Jews. You might think of it as Shavuot in reverse. Shavuot, the holiday of the first fruits, commemorates the gift of the Torah. Jews believe that without the temple, they are not able to enter the presence of God and receive and spread His blessings, in the manner in which they did it while the temples were in use.

It’s a tough day for observant Jews. No food, no drink, no sex, no bathing. Apparently, you spend the whole day thinking about what happens to rebellious people. It’s “Scared Straight” for people who believe in God. That’s a good thing. Mercy goes a long way, but eventually, you come to the end of it. And the result is things like the Diaspora. Or maybe your nation loses its political and economic dominance, and you find yourself paying Muslims and socialists $140 for a barrel of oil. A third of your corn starts disappearing into a wasteful ethanol scam, and the price of milk doubles as a result. Then you find your countrymen voting for a shallow, inexperienced, egotistical man who carries a Hindu idol with him wherever he goes. Things like that happen.

People wonder why God permits suffering. Here’s one reason. As soon as the suffering stops, we start to forget Him.

I remember a funny scene in a Burt Reynolds movie. He decided to kill himself, so he swam out into the ocean. Then he changed his mind. And he started promising God things, in exchange for help reaching the shore. The promises got bigger and bigger as he got more worried. Money and service, basically. Then as he got closer to shore, they started shrinking. And when he got close to the beach, he reneged on all of his promises, claiming he was close enough to make it without God’s help.

I don’t know about you, but that principle certainly applies to me. Maybe not as blatantly, but I always find it easier to be a good Christian when I’m in trouble. Religious people are like mental patients who go off their pills as soon as they start to work. They think they’re not crazy after all. When things go well for religious people, we think maybe we’ve been going a little overboard with the prayer and obedience. And maybe we got all that good stuff because we’re smart and we worked hard. We don’t think about all the smart, hard-working people in the world who live in squalor and misery.

I don’t know about you, but I expect to feel pretty uneasy until Sunday night. I was distressed by the predictable Muslim nutcake video, threatening destruction at the Olympics, and the sensation is exacerbated by the dream I had about the melting stadium. I’m not a psychic or a prophet, and the things I dream about almost never happen, but all the same, I don’t like it.

If the Muslim extremists want jihad, the Chinese will be happy to accommodate them. The Chinese don’t fear the ACLU, swing voters, Janeane Garofalo, or tort lawyers. They are leftists who don’t have to be nice, because they’re in control. They have never heard of due process or habeas corpus. Attacking the Olympics would probably be a really bad idea. But if it weren’t for bad ideas, jihadis would not exist.

The other day I listened to Brother Andrew, and he made an interesting point. He said that whatever we may think about Muslims, they are very sincere about one thing: trying to find God. If you can convince a Muslim that Jesus will save him, you will have yourself a very serious and dedicated Christian. He believes we should be turning that to our advantage. Appeasement is stupid–it’s surrender by inches–but what if you can replace a poisonous ideology with a fruitful one? George Bush says we have to fight terrorists abroad, to avoid fighting them here. Brother Andrew says we have to evangelize them abroad, for the same purpose. I guess we ought to be having prayer meetings all over the US, asking God to help us reach the Muslims. Are we doing that? I haven’t seen any evidence. I’m sure some churches are doing it. I know we pray for lower gas prices.

To get back to Tisha B’Av, I believe I have to improve myself while things are going well, to avoid being driven to improve myself by misfortune. My guess is that this is the point of the holiday. It’s a good lesson, and you don’t have to be a Jew to benefit from it.

More

If you have an interest in promoting Christianity in Muslim nations–or in helping existing Christians facing Muslim persecution–you should take a look at this page at Open Doors USA. It’s Brother Andrew’s site. It lists suggested contributions and tells what they will do with the money.

New Trip to Gordon Food Service

I forced myself to get a haircut, and while I was beyond the cave mouth, I made a run to Gordon Food Service for some wonderful Stanislaus Super Dolce Pizza sauce. I bought two gallon cans, for $11.58. The price has gone up, but you can still top around a thousand pizzas for under twelve dollars. And it’s wonderful on pasta.

I checked the frozen cheesecake while I was there. Remember now, this is what you generally get when you order cheesecake in a restaurant. A few restaurants make their own cheesecake, some order from bakeries, and a lot buy pre-made cakes from food service companies. And guess what? They’re full of guar gum and Crisco. The ingredients are listed on the sides of the boxes you never get to see. So when I tell you I have the only good cheesecake recipe in the world, you ought to listen. It’s nearly true. Have you been to the Cheesecake Factory? Cheesecake is their main draw, and their version tastes like sweetened lithium grease.

It’s hard to believe how easy it is to eat well for cheap. They had huge slabs of spareribs for $1.59 per pound. It’s funny, but some of the best foods on earth are also among the cheapest.

I’m going to slop together a pizza, with Costco cheese and Super Dolce. I already know it will be great. I may chop up the provolone to see if I can get away with using four ounces. I’m concerned that by not using slices that totally cover the part-skim mozzarella, I’m inviting scorching. I guess I’ll find out.

Are you as creeped out by the Muslim threat to attack at the Olympics? It has been giving me the willies since yesterday. A few days back, I had a dream about the Olympics, in which a big translucent stadium sort of a thing was essentially melted by a terrorist attack. It glowed kind of a yellowish orange, and it sank inward from the top.

These guys are like psoriasis. They never go away.

More

Now I’m more creeped out than ever. I just took a look at the National Stadium in Beijing, and it sure looks like what I saw in the dream. Although I think the stadium in the dream had translucent sides, sort of like the swimming stadium.

Anyway, I am really tired of videos from Islamist nuts.

I Know how Ford Prefect Felt

I have discovered that I was insane to think I could find a spotting scope that would enable me to see .17 HMR holes in a target 300 yards away. That’s a bummer. I guess this is why people shoot prairie dogs. They’re like little furry Shoot-N-Cs. They’re a certain size before you shoot them, and then they expand and maybe cartwheel on impact, confirming your accuracy. That’s decent of them.

Trail Glades is only a hundred yards long, and they have no prairie dogs. However they do have iguanas. I was shooting a few weeks back, and I saw motion in front of me, and when I looked down, a very disturbed ten-inch-long iguana was looking up at me from a position between me and my target. He took off before anyone could nail him. Which was a good thing, because he wasn’t even big enough to make a decent corn dog.

I am still waiting to see a python out there.

While I was looking at scopes, I discovered something else. Some scopes are actually telescopes. Yes, I realize that any spotting scope is technically a telescope. But some models are sold to amateur astronomers (and perverts) as well as shooters. Naturally, I ended up looking at telescopes.

I can’t believe how they’ve changed. For a relatively low price, you can get a telescope that will allow you to see Jupiter’s stripes.

Looking at telescopes made me sad. It made me miss my mother. When I was a kid, she bought me a Tasco refractor. I believe this was not too long before the Comet Kohoutek fizzle. I used to set it up in my backyard, and I looked at Jupiter and Saturn and Venus and the moon. She would come out and sit in a patio chair and smoke Viceroys and look at the things I found. She really enjoyed that. It’s kind of neat to see for yourself that Saturn really has those funny rings. My dad was not big on spending time with kids, and he spent way too much time in the house, watching TV. But my mother had a wonderful natural curiosity, which she probably learned from her father.

Soon after I got my telescope, Mike decided he had to have one, too. His parents got him one, and we used to take our telescopes down to the bay and look at boats and islands and Miami Beach.

So now I want a telescope. I’m not going to buy one, but I want one. It would cost about four hundred bucks, and I would use it twice.

I have no idea what happened to my telescope. I guess it disappeared along with my oil paints. When you come from a broken home, you lose a lot of stuff stable families manage to keep. There is a lot of moving around, and every time, something gets lost or stolen, or there just isn’t room for it.

The problem with amateur astronomy, as I see it, is that there are about five things up there you can hope to get a good look at, and once you’ve seen them, you’ve seen them. They would cost me eighty dollars apiece. That’s a bit steep.

I rooted around on the web for amateur astronomy photos. Mostly, they’re not great. The resolution is not high. But some are interesting. It’s possible to take shots of the international space station as it crosses in front of the moon and the sun. That makes for some fun photos. Here’s a space station shot, if you want to see what I mean.

Am I the only one who finds space frustrating? When I was a kid, they used to wheel TVs into school classrooms so we could see live video from Apollo missions. Then the shuttle was interesting for a while, and then the government decided to cancel the program. I think it’s because we realized there was no way we were going anywhere else. Mars, maybe, but if we want to go farther than that, we’re going to have to make discoveries that change our understanding of physics considerably. If we could travel at the speed of light, it would still take over eight years to visit the nearest star and return, and it’s not like we could land there and look around. Maybe I’m wrong; do we know if Proxima Centauri has planets?

We realized we were not going to be getting phasers and transporters any time soon, and we were not going to get to shoot Klingons with our photon torpedoes. That had to suck a lot of the wind out of the space program’s sails. Even if it was solar wind.

Frontiers used to be much less intimidating. Once man learned how to sail, we were able to go just about anywhere. Scholars claim the Vikings and the Chinese made it across the Atlantic before Columbus. Whether they did or not, we were sailing all over the Old World many centuries ago. The Apostle Paul had no trouble getting from Israel to Italy and maybe Spain. We figured out how to travel anywhere on the planet, and then we managed to get into space, and then we landed on the moon. And then we looked past the moon and realized we had reached a point of very sharply diminishing returns. We were at the edge of a very deep moat. It’s hard to get excited about spending a big percentage of your tax revenues to go to a couple of crummy little planets from which you can bring back nothing of value.

It’s not breaking out of Alcatraz that kills you. It’s the swim to San Francisco. That pretty much describes how space travel works, if Proxima Centauri is San Francisco.

Maybe we have reached a point where practical efforts are of much less use than theoretical research. If we study and improve physics long enough, maybe an answer will come to us, and after that, building the means will start to make sense. But we aren’t going to get anywhere shooting comparatively slow rockets up there over and over. I wonder how much energy it takes to push a ship eight light years, within a human lifetime. For all I know, it requires a chunk of fuel the size of the earth. Maybe God has provided a key, and we can find it if we look long enough and hard enough.

In any case, I guess I can forget spotting my own shots at 300 yards.

So to Speak

Sometimes I’m glad I have a scientific background, because I can help people with scientifical questions.

My answer to this one is in Agent Bedhead’s comments.

Sorry

One of the hardest things about being a Christian is learning to derive satisfaction from misfortune. Sometimes we are called on to do that. I was listening to Brother Andrew last night, and although I don’t remember exactly what he said, he pointed out that persecution is normal, and that we are told to be glad when it happens, because we will be rewarded for it. I suppose that principle applies to all types of mistreatment. When someone does you wrong or lets you down, and you end up holding the bag, you have to remember that it’s best to take one for the team instead of flipping out or looking for payback, and you have to remember that what has happened is actually a blessing and an opportunity, provided you handle it right.

Sometimes I manage to react the right way, and sometimes I don’t. Okay, a LOT of times, I don’t. But I’m more conscious of my obligation than I used to be, so I suppose things will improve.

This is a prime example of what is meant by “walking in faith.” Christianity calls on us to do things that are counterintuitive and appear counterproductive, but if God is real, He must be watching, and surely He is going to back us up and watch over us. That’s what Brother Andrew believed when he drove his VW into communist countries. There is faith of the mind, and then there is faith expressed in action, and if I understand things right, the latter is much better. It’s what enabled Abraham to hold a knife to the throat of the only son he had had by his one true love–the son through whom the promises of God had to be fulfilled–whom she bore, though infertile, when she was about 90.

How did I get off on this tangent? Might as well run with it.

There are so many counterintuitive obligations in Christianity. You have to give generously to strangers, which is something most unbelievers would consider irresponsible. You have to honor your parents, no matter how awful or how wrong they may be. In order to fully live, you have to count yourself dead to the world. You have to turn down opportunities other people would kill for. So often, you will be asked to do things which would be absolutely crazy, if not for the presumptions that God is there, and that He’ll make it work out.

I experienced this a long time ago, when I went to Israel. Got off the plane on a Friday. No idea how to get to the kibbutz where I thought Aaron was staying. A cab driver offered me a ride, and I hopped right in. He fed me some nonsense about how it was impossible to get a bus on Friday, and he said he would have to drive me to the kibbutz for about sixty bucks. And we would have to go convert some money first. Fine. I had this idea that God wanted me there, so I didn’t worry. We talked as he drove, and I told him how excited I was to be in Israel, and he had an attack of conscience, took me back to Tel Aviv, and put me on a bus for Afula.

I got to the kibbutz. Aaron was gone. It was Friday afternoon. I had nowhere to stay. Now what? They said they had a volunteer shack with an empty bed. So I got free room and board for the night, and I roomed with a guy from Brooklyn who was making aliyah. This guy had completely thrown away his life in New York, so he could become an Israeli citizen and be rewarded with two years in the IDF. I had a great time getting to know him.

Went to Jerusalem. Found Aaron’s shul. Surprised him while he was davening in his Clockwork Orange Purim outfit. Got to join in the Purim festivities. How many Gentiles get to do that? Found a hostel. Went to Tel Aviv and checked in with the Kibbutz Aliyah people–the ones who placed volunteers. Got a spot at a great kibbutz, right next door to the one where Aaron had stayed.

I just didn’t worry, and although I was an even worse Christian than I am now, things worked out and worked out and worked out. I suppose I should have kept it up when I got home. Faith has a kind of momentum to it. If you keep exercising it, it’s not hard to keep it working, but if you stop for a while, it’s hard to start up again. It’s probably easier to go on two missions with no break, than it is to do it with a big hiatus where you sit by the pool and rest up and forget what living by faith was like.

I can’t believe I’ve written all this. I was trying to write a short introduction to a topic, and that topic is persecution. While I was Googling around last night, I came across a site about the persecution of Christians. I thought I should link to it; you might want to see how Christians are being mistreated in other countries. The site is called Persecution.org, and you can probably guess the URL. Coincidentally, a reader emailed me about another site, which is called Persecution.com. It belongs to an organization that smuggles Bibles. I don’t know how reputable it is, but you can always check Charitywatch and Charity Navigator and Wikipedia. If there is anything wrong with a Christian nonprofit, you better believe a liberal will post it on Wikipedia.

As long as I’m rambling, I may as well mention one of the experiences that makes it impossible for me to give up my beliefs. I guess you’ll think I’m nuts, but if you’ve been reading this blog for more than a week and you DON’T think I’m nuts, you haven’t been paying attention.

It was January or February of the year after I went to Israel. I had college friends in Milwaukee. I was staying with my grandparents in Kentucky while I worked at a bar and tried to find a real job. My friends invited me to Milwaukee for a few days of drunkenness, and I snapped at the bait. I got in the ’70 two-and-a-quarter convertible and hit the road. Spent the whole time unbelievably drunk and enjoyed myself. That’s how I was.

I started driving home, over the frozen highways. I believe I was somewhere near Indianapolis when it happened. I had a sensation which was consistent with what I later heard about panic attacks. For no reason whatsoever, a feeling came over me, and I was absolutely positive I was going to die that day. I wasn’t depressed. I was looking forward to traveling. But I had this feeling anyway. I knew I was going to die, more surely than I knew anything else in the world. So I pulled over to pray.

The craziest thing happened. While I was praying, something got in the car with me. Something I could not see. Suddenly, it was on the front seat beside me, in the middle of the seat. It was not inside me; it was very clear that it was just to my right. I could have put my hand within the area it filled and known when my hand was inside it. It was full of love and assurance and peace and warmth. It was a person. It had come to defend me. And while it was there, I realized I was going to be all right. While this person was with me, trouble could not be present, and I could not be harmed. That sums it up.

I have never been able to explain it. I can’t explain why I got upset to begin with. I don’t know why my problem was so important that it justified a manifestation like this. Was I really going to die? I had no reason to think so, and I knew that at the time, even while the feeling had me in its grip.

Afterward, I had the feeling that this was a visit from Jesus Himself. I don’t know why I had that impression. I suppose it could have been explained by an angel or the Holy Spirit, but that isn’t how it seemed to me, and I can’t tell you why.

It didn’t change my life instantly; this wasn’t a Spielberg movie. I didn’t swear off drinking. The visitor didn’t heal my warts or tell me the name of the next Pope. It just came and helped, and I went on with my life. The great value of the experience wasn’t that it suddenly made me a perfect Christian, or that it convinced me that I needed to change. The value was that I had one more inescapable peg to hang my faith on.

Experiences like this are why I think of myself as a prisoner of faith. They explain why I have no patience with people who make intellectual arguments, claiming they prove God doesn’t exist. Don’t even talk to me about it. I just don’t want to hear it. You might as well tell me my shoes don’t exist. People have called me dismissive. Well, if you want to see “dismissive,” try to hand me a stale argument you heard from some smart aleck atheist professor when you were in college. Don’t even waste my time. I may not be a great Christian, but I’m not an idiot, either. “There is suffering in the world, and God is supposed to be all-powerful, and God is supposed to be good, so how can He exist?” You know what? I will ask Him when I see Him. Right now, I don’t care in the slightest, and I am not impressed by the question. It’s not my problem. And when you waste your time trying to prove God doesn’t exist, you are only making trouble for yourself and your family.

Maybe I shouldn’t write about Christianity. Aaron says a man shouldn’t be a rabbi unless he has reached a certain age and had children. There is no way I would hold myself out as an example for anyone to follow. I am not an authority. I am not a scholar. I am sure I would not be a good role model. Still, as long as no one thinks more of me than they should, I think relating my experiences can be helpful.

That’s all I feel like saying. Take it as you will.

Go Look

A reader has gone and started a blog. You don’t know what you’re asking for, dude! But welcome to the fraternity.

For your reading pleasure…Through a Glass, Darkly.

Choices Make for Headaches

Here’s a question for the gun nerds. I think I’ll post it on the Manly Grub forum, too.

How much magnification do you need to be able to see .17 HMR holes in a target 300 yards away?

I was told 10x is all I need, but I would like to avoid using a spotting scope, in the very unlikely event that I am lucky enough to get to shoot at 300 yards.

I have a cheap BSA spotting scope, and I can barely see bullet holes at 100 yards. I’m better off looking through my rifle scope.

Another thing: would it be crazy to put a Burris Fullfield II 4.5-14x on a .17 HMR rifle? They don’t have anything between 9 and 14, so 9 and 14 are the choices. I like my current Fullfield II, which goes up to 9. The 4.5-14x costs about as much as the rifle.