Stoke up the Fire

I guess I am to Catholics as Michael Savage is to the parents of autistic kids.

I just heard what Savage said about autism. He says 99% of autistics are brats who have never been told to knock off the act. Ooooookay. After we get done spanking the autism out of them, we really need to go the other fakers, such as the blind and amputees.

I sympathize with the parents who are mad at Savage. I’ve had a lot of people tell me ADD doesn’t exist. Rush Limbaugh, the great neurologist, pushes that theory. I don’t know if it’s right to call ADD a disorder, since it’s so common, but it absolutely exists. As a person who has been known to put cereal in the freezer and ice cream in the pantry, I am aware that it is all too real.

I made some Catholics mad by observing that the Pope was criticizing materialism while living in an opulent palace and wearing handmade clothes and so forth. I can’t believe that upset people. I didn’t call him a fraud or accuse him of eating Protestant babies. And fundamentally, I was right. It’s kind of weird for a church leader to live in such earthly splendor. It doesn’t mean he’s a charlatan, but it doesn’t look good, either. CEOs of companies which are openly unreservedly dedicated to the accumulation of wealth can’t match the Vatican’s trappings. It seems odd for a clergyman to live there.

So far, I’ve been favorably impressed by this Pope. He seems to be a sincere guy with a low tolerance for BS. He appears to be a reformer, and churches need more of those. I’m sorry if it seemed like I was accusing him of being a fraud. I hope he’ll be more sensitive than the last Pope, who made the mistake of posing with his arm around Yasser Arafat. When I was in Jerusalem in the 80s, that photo was everywhere. Someone turned it into a poster, and every Arab in town had one. I have to wonder how the Jews felt about that. It had to make peace overtures a lot harder to take seriously. The US equivalent would be the current Pope posing with Osama bin Laden.

Popular churches tend to have problems dealing with wealth. The excesses of Protestant televangelists are horrifying. They’re not fit to lick the Pope’s pricey shoes. If these guys want to receive comfortable salaries and live in nice homes, that’s swell, and they are absolutely entitled to anything they can earn outside of their jobs, but taking money from old ladies on Social Security and buying private jets and air conditioned doghouses…come on. That’s a bit much. And those things actually happen.

I’ve been learning a lot about Judaism. I read Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein’s book, How Firm a Foundation, which explains the Jewish roots of Christianity. He says the Jews differ from Christians in that they don’t have a negative view of materialism. That’s pretty much how he puts it, and it sounds bad when you put it that way, but what I believe he meant was that Jews believe it’s good to earn money and build a financial base for yourself and your family, and that asceticism is generally not good. I think that’s the correct view. Most Christians probably misunderstand the Bible’s teachings about money. I think the New Testament’s message is that money shouldn’t control you, not that you should not have it. It would be a little odd for a Jewish Messiah to condemn all wealth, especially since the disciples were businessmen who had servants. Abraham was rich. Isaac was rich. Joseph was rich. David, Solomon…it’s a long list. The Bible says a good man accumulates wealth and passes it on to his children. You can’t really reconcile that with a view that we should all wear dirty sandals and live in the gutter.

If they elect me Pope, I’ll probably tell people to be responsible and earn money and manage it well, but not to be greedy, status-driven idiots who waste their money on yachts with gold-plated faucets in the bathrooms. I can’t think of any Christian church that teaches a good balanced way of dealing with money. Maybe there’s one out there somewhere.

Anyway, I would appreciate it if the people I annoyed would refrain from burning me at the stake.

Earl Butz, we Need You

The Pope is telling young people to spurn materialism.

I have to ask. Wouldn’t this be more convincing coming from a guy who didn’t live in a palace, wear handmade clothes, fly first class, and get free medical care?

Yeah, yeah. He took an oath of poverty. Give me his deal, and I’ll forego a salary, too. He already has all the things you need a salary to buy.

I thought Al Gore was bad, but at least he hasn’t stuffed his ten-megawatt mansion with Michelangelo sculptures. Yet.

First Class is Cheapest

I said you had to be an idiot to spend hundreds of dollars on a bee hive, when honey is so cheap. And a commenter said I had spent $6000 on brewing, and that microbrews were available cheaper. I know he was kidding, but I did a calculation anyway. And I’m amazed at how cheap homebrewing is. I thought I was was getting a price break of about 80%, but it’s even bigger.

Here a six-pack of microbrew costs at least ten dollars, including tax. Some are worse, but that’s a good, solid figure. There are 72 ounces in a six-pack. So that comes out to about 14¢ per ounce. Not good.

I just realized I made a boo-boo. This is what I get for laying off coffee. Okay, let’s run with it anyway. I put the wrong number in the homebrew cost calculation the first time around. I’ll do it right this time.

I used to pay twenty bucks for ingredients for five gallons of beer. That’s 640 ounces. Do the math, and you get 3.125¢ per ounce. That’s less than 25% of the cost of microbrew. Ingredients are more expensive now, thanks to the hippies and the idiotic ethanol scam, but ingredient costs are hitting microbrews, too, and they will never be anywhere near as cheap as homebrew.

What if I had bought microbrew in the amounts in which I brewed my own beer? Let’s see. Multiply 640 by 0.14. You get almost ninety dollars. Good Lord.

It’s true, I spent money on equipment, but I went completely insane and still kept it under a thousand dollars, over six years. I’m not sure of the actual figure, but that’s probably correct. If not, it’s not far off. I don’t use fancy equipment.

Apart from the economics, homebrew is better than microbrewed beer. You get exactly what you want, and regardless of what anyone tells you, bottling adversely affects the taste of beer. When you drink from your own kegs, you’re drinking better beer, stored in the best possible way.

My beer is just plain superior to the fancy-shmancy stuff in liquor stores. And if you brew at home, your beer will be better, too.

What if I decided to keep bees? If the stuff I’ve read on the web is any indication, these days, it’s expensive. Hundreds of dollars for equipment for a single hive. And what do you get? Honey that is no better–maybe worse–than the honey you get at any store. What’s the most money you can save? I spend ten bucks or less per year on honey. So even if beekeeping cost nothing at all, the most I can hope to save is less than ten bucks per year.

I’m not seeing the logic.

My relatives in Kentucky used to keep bees, but they spent absolutely nothing. You prop a section of hollow log on a stone slab, paying nothing for materials, and you let the bees do their thing. If I could do it that way…no, it’s still a stupid idea. They did it because they were used to producing their own food, and they had lots of kids to feed. For me it would be silly.

I think I’ve proven that you have to be a fool not to brew your own beer. It would be IRRESPONSIBLE not to. Why, you have an obligation to start brewing, as soon as possible.

Get on it.

Day-Lewis’s Milkshake Brings the Critics to the Yard

I recently paid $6 to sit through a 158-minute movie, just to find out what “I drink your milkshake” means. Now that I know, I am not impressed.

There Will be Blood was very odd. The story was a big nothing. It goes like this: insecure, materialistic guy becomes an oilman and has a miserable life. But the acting and directing were so good, I nearly forgot I was watching a movie with the depth of a microscope slide.

I am starting to be a big fan of Daniel Day-Lewis. This is one of the great scenery-chewers of all time. Bill the Butcher was a fine bit of over-acting, and with Daniel Plainfield, Day-Lewis has established his credentials beyond question. Here’s what I want. Let’s put him in a flick with a bunch of other over-actors. Let’s see. Al Pacino. Maybe Joe Pesci. Robert Blake. Jim Carrey. I’d add Robin Williams, the king of all over-actors, but he’s so annoying, I wouldn’t be able to sit through the film. They’d have to use two screens, side-by-side, to have room for all the unnecessary emoting.

Am I the only one who thought that after Life is Beautiful, we didn’t really need the Robin Williams remake, Jakob the Liar? Williams has a reputation for stealing jokes. Stealing a whole movie, however, puts him in a whole new class of plagiarist.

One thing about There Will be Blood impressed me. Of course, I’m referring to the lumber. The wood they used to build the “Mary” oil derrick was thick slabs of what appeared to be mature hardwood. No Home Depot pine or spruce two-by-fours. Reminded me of the white oak boards my grandfather used to build his last tobacco barn. They had to drill holes in that stuff before they could put nails in it. The movie studio must have paid a screaming fortune for that beautiful wood.

I guess the movie was supposed to be art. It used to be that art had to have intrinsic substance. These days, you say absolutely nothing and let the audience project substance onto it.

Art doesn’t give me a big thrill any more, except for music. I was thinking about this last night. When I was young, I read a lot of literature, but I eventually cut way back. My bookshelves now contain books that have nothing to do with art. Biographies. “How to” books. A little history.

I think I cut back on art stuff because as a Christian, I didn’t feel a strong kinship with the godless people who wrote arty books. People who write great literature generally don’t have relationships with God. Most literature reflects a completely godless and pessimistic mindset. When God enters the picture, He’s almost always a big disappointment. A pathetic myth or an apathetic absentee landlord. That’s fantasy; reading it is like reading libelous nonsense about a person I know well.

Great writers are generally blind to the reality of God. Maybe that’s why they move us. They have a black, cold, empty space inside them, where God is supposed to be. And that helps them to write effectively about misery and injustice and futility. They’re like caged songbirds, which sing best after you blind them. Many great writers are blind to the most uplifting truths in the universe, so their song is especially dark and troubling.

There Will be Blood was predictable in its take on Christianity. Really trite. There was a young man in the movie who started a ministry which included faith-healing, and of course, he was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. And the screenwriter’s bicoastal Hollywood tunnel vision was obvious in his depiction of a healing. To someone who has never been to church, it would probably seem believable. A bogus preacher, engaging in hysterics to throw imaginary demons out of gullible people. But to anyone with even a scant acquaintance with Christianity, none of it rang true. None of the real-world cliches, so familiar to Christians, were there. If you want to see a liar behind a pulpit, acting the way false prophets always do, all you have to do is turn on TBN and wait. I guess this guy failed to do that; his movie preacher was the cinematic homologue of a straw man. The screenwriter couldn’t even come up with a good proof-text.

I think this movie won critical acclaim for several reasons. 1. The direction was wonderful. 2. The acting was engrossing. 3. The topic was interesting. 4. It was critical of Christianity. Hackneyed criticism of Christianity always passes for brilliance in Hollywood. I don’t care what the critics say. This movie had no plot, and it left me with nothing to think about. Therefore, on the whole, it was bad.

I thought I saw the new Batman movie on the PPV choice list, but I guess I was wrong, because it’s not there today. I would have preferred to watch that. Call it Brokebat Mountain if you want; it probably has more substance than the film I watched.

Weep, Hippies

I am still waiting for someone to tell me how bees, which are supposedly addled by nicotinoid pesticides, could set up housekeeping in a yard full of imidacloprid. It’s in the lawn, the trees, the shrubs, and the vegetables I’ve planted. Yet the bees had no trouble making a home here and finding their way back to it over and over.

I think I’ll be waiting a long time for that explanation.

A beekeeper came last week and plugged the places where the bees were getting in, and he blasted the cavity they were exploiting with poison, presumably doing in the queen and all bees inside the house. But the remaining bees–thousands–weren’t ready to give up, and they swarmed on the chimney. I suppose they could still smell the queen, dead though she was. They make special poison that shoots a long way, for the specific purpose of killing bees and wasps, and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than paying a beekeeper. So the swarm got a good dose of it, and now there are dead bees all over the place. I only wish the ghost ants were as easy to slaughter.

The experience got me thinking. It would be nice to have a bee gum. Honey is expensive, and the bees will give it to you for nothing. But I wonder if it’s possible to keep bees here. It’s not that I wonder if they could survive. I just wonder if the honey would be worth eating. If you put bees around the wrong plants, you get pretty weird honey. I’ve seen very strange honey at my grandmother’s house in Kentucky. Some was very dark, like dark corn syrup. I’m not interested in accumulating bad honey.

I am only familiar with the flavors of three types of honey. Clover, orange blossom, and sourwood. I like them all, but the last two are the ones I like best. I’m not sure how you get sourwood honey. The sourwood tree is not very common. Maybe there are beekeepers who plant groves of it. The honey is very clear, and it’s bright yellow.

I learned about sourwood from my grandfather. We used to wander around in the woods from time to time, and one day, he pulled a leaf off a tree and told me to chew it. It had a very sour but not disagreeable taste. I suppose that’s where the name comes from.

The bees down here are very small and dark. I didn’t recognize them as honey bees. Evidently they all look like that here. The bee guy thought they were completely normal.

It’s too bad the bees didn’t tell me they were coming. They would have been welcome in a regular hive. In the walls? Not so much. It feels weird, exterminating useful bugs, but it beats having the house ruined.

Interesting news: the hippies are not as excited about imidacloprid as they used to be. Now there is evidence that a natural fungus is damaging bee populations. Also, the damage isn’t as bad as some of the nuts would have us believe.

Glad to hear that. The global warming myth and the ethanol farce are about to drive us into a recession. We don’t need any more Chicken Littles right now, removing wonderful pesticides from the market and driving food prices even higher.

Bees Not Confused

Liberals told us DDT harmed birds by making eggshells weak. It’s not true, but we banned DDT, and as a result, millions of human beings died of mosquito-borne diseases.

Now they tell us imidacloprid, a newer pesticide, confuses bees so they can’t find their hives. They tell us we’re going to run out of bees in a year.

Well I treat everything in my yard with heavy doses of imidacloprid. And I have a bee problem. As in a swarm I had to poison.

Funny, wasn’t that NOT supposed to happen?

I guess hippies who see this entry will whine about how a beekeeper would have taken the bees for nothing. WRONG, patchouli-suckers. Here they charge you to pick the bees up. So the cute little bees got poisoned. Just like roaches.

Imidacloprid is a godsend, because it’s one of the few things you can use on whiteflies, and whiteflies spread the new tomato plague: tomato yellow leaf curl virus. Florida growers say it will wipe them out if they can’t use imidacloprid.

I think the hippies are going to lose this battle.

More

I should make a correction. DDT is believed to cause some thinning in the shells of birds of prey, but the effect doesn’t apply to birds in general. And I’ll bet DDT kills fewer eagles and hawks than windmill farms.

Nuclear energy is safe, cheap, and inexhaustible. Too bad the hysterical hippies prevented us from doing the responsible thing and using nukes to generate our electricity. The backward socialist French are overwhelmingly nuclear, and we’re not.

One more thing. DDT can be used responsible and effectively without causing significant problems for birds, but instead, we limited it to applications that are nearly worthless.

Oh, well. The millions of folks who died were mainly Little Brown People, and the left owns them, so they can do with them as they wish. Sure, they died in agony, but it could have been worse. They might have survived, become Christians, eaten meat, and bought SUVs.

Cat 6

I have a Cat 6 socket on the floor of my office. But for months I’ve been using a cable lying on the floor, running to the router. Why? The guy who installed the sockets left a big coil of wire outside on the ground, connected to the system, and lighting strikes about three times an hour here, and at some point, a bolt of lightning managed to shoot current up that coil and into the house. It fried a good deal of cable, including the bit between my router and socket.

I thought I was going to have to go under the house to run the cable and use some kind of special tool to connect the ends, but I decided to try to fish the cable and open the connectors. I taped fishing line to one end of the old cable, pulled it through both holes in the floor, discarded the cable, saved the connectors, and hooked the new cable to them. It turns out you don’t need any special tools for these connectors. They even have helpful decals showing you which color wire goes where.

I am now blogging without a giant cable running through the room. And I didn’t have to call a guy to come out here and charge way too much for a one-hour job.

Tools used:

Klein flat screwdriver
Stanley needlenose pliers, small
Stanley diagonal cutters
flashlight
50# test
duct tape

Knowing how to tie fishing knots is very useful for this kind of thing.

I left maybe ten feet of slack under the house, and I’m going to leave the fish line in place. I am all done letting other people route ethernet stuff.

Those Stanley tools aren’t great, but they’re too good to throw out and replace.

Or Next to the Steak

I just put up a shameful post at Manly Grub. It’s about the healthy breakfast I eat most days. You can’t eat pork fat at every single meal, unfortunately.

I put up my final recipes for pita and hummus.

Comments Read

I decided to remove an entry I put up earlier today, but I wanted to thank everyone for the kind responses.

Crap

Had a problem with the blogroll at Manly Grub. If your site fell off, it doesn’t mean I delinked it. I am working to get all the links back up.

If you’ve ever heard of St. Louis gooey butter cake, go over there and tell me about it.

How Wrong You Are

It’s 9:16 a.m., and I’m already tired. Lots of things going on.

I’m too lazy to write a whole blog post right now, but let me point you to one. Longtime reader Wormathan used my recipe to make a blueberry cheesecake, and it’s gorgeous.

You can see it here.

Don’t forget to join the forum.

EWWWWW

I did a radio show to promote the cookbook, and host Mike McConnell told me to steal his idea and write a book based on it: “Sounds Disgusting; Tastes Great.”

So I put up a board in the forum, with exactly that theme.

I am sure you will have no problem filling it.

Scones

I am now putting unpublished recipes up at Manly Grub. There is a link to them in the sidebar, and you can also find them on the forum.

Today’s treat: scones made with bacon grease, cream cheese, and rum-soaked raisins.

For a Weekend in the Hamptons

I was looking at the Drudge Report this morning, and I saw a photo from the new Batman movie, and I had to ask myself: have gays ruined Batman for everybody?

The photo shows Heath Ledger in his Joker suit, with makeup and a flamboyant hairdo, and behind him stands Batman, who appears to be a pencil-armed, out of shape guy of middling height. And what do they look like? A powerful superhero and an arch villain? No. They look like a couple of gay guys who work in cubicles during the week and dress up for raves on the weekend. What is Batman doing back there? Probably texting another gay guy who has a Riddler costume.

I think Hollywood predestined this when they dressed Burt Ward up like a cocktail waitress in the old TV show. In what was basically a short red silk dress and little green panties. And “Robin”? How is that a man’s name? I mean, sure, in England, maybe. But they tend to be a little ambiguous anyway. Would a professional wrestler call himself Robin?

Okay, bad choice of images. Wrestling is even more homoerotic than comic books. Hell, it’s worse than NFL football. And that is saying a lot.

Before gaydom became so popular, we were not as used to seeing men running around in costumes. Now every Marvel movie looks like footage from Fantasy Fest.

Maybe the problem is me. Sometimes I feel like I’m over movies. Sometimes instead of suspending disbelief, I see a bunch of spoiled rich people with drug habits and multiple STDs, playing make-believe. This is especially true of science fiction. Once you’ve seen video of Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford reacting emotionally to big blue things that will later be filled in with monsters and whatnot, it’s hard to take their agitation seriously in the final version. You think to yourself, “What idiots. How can a grown person do that for a living?” Acting seems exciting when you think of John Wayne as a guy who rode around on a horse shooting people, or when you think of Russell Crowe as a Roman general who fights tigers with his bare hands. It’s a little different when you think of actors as they really are. People who sit around in RVs taking drugs and watching DVDs while stagehands prepare for ten-second scenes.

I think Reed Richards may be the gayest superhero. He stretches himself out and wraps bad guys up. Think about this. When Reed Richards wraps sixty feet of himself around you, how much of that amount is crotch?

See what I mean?

Also, how come his clothes stretch along with him? Where can I buy an outfit like that? I could really use one when I’m working on new recipes.

Life is getting weird. These days if you want manly entertainment, you have to watch Rosie O’Donnell or the LPGA.

I want to thank everyone who joined the forum. It looks like it’s going to get plenty of business. Now I have to worry about bandwidth expenses. The hosting company says bandwidth is unlimited, but I have a feeling that is something they only say until it starts to hurt them.

Ordinarily, I get around 340 page views per day. Today it’s over 4,000. The unique visits aren’t high, but maybe they will be in a month.

People are posting recipes and food photos. I have a beer board up. I’m now putting submitted photos in the Coppermine gallery.

Come on by, if you get bored.

By the way, a well-known Blogosphere personality will be starting his own forum pretty soon. I am not cleared to reveal the news, so I can’t tell you who it is. But I’ll pimp it when the time comes, and you WILL join or face my disapproval. I know that would just tear you up.