Wreath of Flubber

I can’t seem to quit cooking with Marsala. Yesterday I tried a new idea for pork tenderloin. Last week I fried medallions in Marsala, but I thought they were a little dry. This time I decided to bake a whole pork loin in Marsala. I made up the recipe on the fly, which is not hard to do when you bake pork in wine. It will always be good. You might try it and fiddle with it and see what you think.

INGREDIENTS

1 pork loin
1 cup Marsala (Florio’s Sweet)
1 large white onion
3/4 cup sliced carrots
1 clove garlic, pressed
20 grape tomatoes
5 cayenne peppers, seeded and chopped
2 tbsp. butter
1 tsp. salt
pepper to taste

I dissolved the salt in about 1/2 cup of Marsala and put it in a plastic bag with the tenderloin, with the air squeezed out. An hour or two later, I arranged the tenderloin in a wreath shape (it separated into two long halves) around the bottom of a 2 1/2-quart Pyrex dish. I sliced and quartered the onion and lowered it into the round hole between the pork loin halves without breaking it up. I tossed in the peppers and the butter and everything else. I peppered the top of the loin. I baked at 300 for two hours and then increased the heat to 350 for one hour, to brown it.

It was very nice. Maybe I should have added beef broth. Sun-dried tomatoes might be better than fresh. I meant to add sauteed almonds at the end, but I forgot.

Truthfully, it was still dry, even though it baked while soaking in wine and butter. Is that just inevitable with pork loin? If so, I’d go with a boneless pork roast. They’re fantastic.

Today I’m fixing lamb arm chops (Winn-Dixie cheapies) using my recipe for lamb shanks with orzo. I’m leaving out the orzo. They’ll still be good. I don’t know why arm chops are so cheap. They’re great.

Spring Claims Another Victim

Today Marv blogs about romance.

Approach with caution.

A Pilot You Will Never See

I saw an interesting post over at Lashawn Barber’s blog the other day. She was commenting on her self-imposed celibacy.

In the interest of touting my own virtue, I would like to remind everyone that I, too, am celibate. However, I didn’t do it on my own. I had a lot of help from the world’s 3 billion women. They seem only too eager to assist.

She obliquely refers to Sex and the City, one of the most revolting TV shows in recent history. Four women with absolutely no sexual morals, aging as they try to fornicate their way to a happy marriage. And wondering why it’s not working out.

I have never understood the appeal of this show. It’s gross. It’s trashy. And it’s depressing. The statistics on sex and marriage are sad enough as it is. Do you really need to see the problems exaggerated on situation comedies?

You can’t find Mr. Right by becoming the perfect sexual toy. Men are programmed to want sexual variety, so no matter how great you are, you will eventually be less exciting–from a purely sexual standpoint–than someone less attractive whom he hasn’t had yet. That’s just the way it is. Lust diminishes. To hold a man’s interest, you have to offer him something beyond sex. Something of lasting value. Something he won’t get tired of. The funny thing is, even men don’t understand this. They sleep around trying to find the sexiest, best-looking woman available, on the theory that only a woman like that can satisfy them for the remainder of their lives. But every woman will eventually seem less sexually inviting, regardless of how attractive she is at the start. Look at Hugh Grant.

Aside from that, women tend to become less physically attractive after marriage, in absolute terms. They get fat. They have babies. They get stretch marks. They have less interest in sex, or they get tired of pretending to have interest. Keeping the product fresh and appealing is a full-time job, and most women fail at it. It’s unnatural, anyway. You should be worrying about more important things. You don’t have to be a supermodel, if the foundation of your marriage is strong.

Lashawn mentions a few of the by-products of fornication. Illegitimacy, for one. It’s funny how blind people are to the exorbitant cost of sex. Illegitimacy is just the tip of the iceberg. Prisons are full of men who killed because of problems related to sexual sin; for example, they kill their unfaithful wives and their lovers, or they kill the husbands of the women they sleep with. Over twenty million people in Africa are dying of a hideous incurable disease, because Africans are very promiscuous. Here in the US, medical treatment is better, but there are still people with AIDS and herpes and HPV. Over half of young black women have HPV! Think about that the next time you’re in a bar. America is full of broken homes. We have kids who don’t know their fathers. We have kids who become criminals because they grow up that way. And we kill unborn babies by the thousands, primarily because we’re too lazy to use birth control. And then there’s the cruelest form of fornication, with its horrible costs: rape.

Somehow we still defend promiscuity. We don’t listen to common sense, or to God. We listen to the herd. Everyone around us is doing it, and we have to do what they do, because otherwise we’ll be weird. We do what our peers do, because we think they’re smarter than God. And we talk about abstinence as if we were being asked to cut off our legs. It’s impossible! It’s insane! It can’t be done!

And yet millions of Americans manage it, every year. I guess they’re superheroes or something. Magical powers the rest of us lack.

Mankind is funny. Life used to be full of obvious perils which followed our misdeeds closely. And they tended to drive us to repent. Then technology helped us soften the blows. And it has made us feel safe from judgment, so we continue doing wrong. It used to be that if you got VD, you died in misery in a pretty short time, or you became sterile, or you went blind or insane. Now we cushion the blow with medicine. Many times we prevent the consequences entirely. So we think we’re getting away with something. But are we? You can’t think so, if you’re religious. If God exists, the evil that you do will affect your life adversely, sooner or later. Unless you turn from it. The price may not be as obvious as it used to be, but it still exists.

Yet people like Lashawn Barber are labeled kooks. I don’t get it. Sex just isn’t that wonderful. We’ve convinced ourselves that it’s the most pleasurable activity in existence. Do you find that to be true? A good percentage of women don’t enjoy it or want it, and an awful lot of men have bad sex. You have to worry about pregnancy and disease. And even good sex often comes with a huge burden of guilt, especially if you’re a man and you lie to get women. And the more you sleep around, the more boring sex gets.

I remember a documentary about a professional wrestler who was a drug addict and sexual adventurer. In middle age, he complained that he couldn’t have relationships, because he had seen so much, he couldn’t be excited by the prospect of normal sex. He indulged his fantasies until he got so spoiled, he couldn’t enjoy what a decent woman could offer him. I don’t think he’s unusual at all. I think he’s completely normal. If you’re a woman and you marry a man who has slept with a lot of other women, you may be getting someone just like him. And you have to wonder: can he quit?

Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of soup. I admit, sex is usually better than soup. But fornication is still no bargain. I wish I could undo my own mistakes.

I don’t think Lashawn Barber is a kook for abstaining. It’s something we should learn to be proud of. You wouldn’t be ashamed of having the sense not to jam your finger in an electric socket. The risks of extramarital sex are a whole lot higher.

Store Ammunition Suddenly Looks Mighty Good

I am so bummed out. I got all my reloading crap, and I put together data, and I got the press mounted to my workbench. And it still does not work.

It turns out that the Hornady Lock-N-Load AP manual doesn’t give you unimportant information such as how the press works or how to assemble it. I mean, sure, it has bad diagrams and incomplete and self-contradictory assembly directions and some general suggestions regarding operation, but you can’t take your load data and Hornady equipment and powder and brass and lead and primers and actually DO anything. It doesn’t even tell you the order of the dies the ammunition goes through.

I finally figured out the die order, after spending hours putting the press together. I got a few clues from the manual, and the rest I figured out on my own. Then I ran some stuff through the press without powder, and I managed to ding up the seating die. It may be ruined. Not sure yet. I jammed a bullet about an eighth of an inch too far down into a case, which is a lot. Ruined two cases. Lost a primer. Hey, that die was only forty bucks. Hornady probably saved over seventy-five cents by not providing a real manual.

The documentation says virtually nothing about how deep to seat the dies or how to adjust them. Is there a special, super-premium Hornady manual that contains this information? If so I would like to buy one. I have a reloading book, the documentation that came with the press and powder measure, several mini-reloading manuals that were provided with the press, and the Speer manual. And none of them actually say how to reload. Which, you would think, would be among the topics the manual might cover.

Maybe you have to hire Mr. Hornady himself to come out and tell you how your expensive machine works. Am I crazy, or is it a little weird to sell a complicated machine, in pieces, with a manual that doesn’t tell you how to assemble or operate it?

The first case I put through the machine ended up with a big giant belly in it. The top half was normal size, but the bottom half was much bigger. I kept thinking it was my fault, but apparently, I picked up a piece of stray brass some nutcase had overloaded and blown up. I guess it had been stretched all to hell, and the press only managed to resize the upper half. Or something. I don’t really know.

This is starting to look like one of those activities where you’re supposed to be born into a family that already does it. Like being a sherpa. You want to be a sherpa? Forget it. You can’t go to vocational school and sign up for sherpa class. Either you’re a sherpa or you’re not.

It reminds me of the misery I went through, trying to find basic metalworking and machining courses in Miami. They DO NOT EXIST. I like to be positive. I like to think you can do anything you want to in America, if you have the time, the money, and the ability. But you can’t! It would be easier for me to become a professionally trained circus clown (Sarasota, two hours west) than it would for me to learn to run a milling machine.

People say, “Go hang around machine shops and ask them to teach you.” Uh…are these people from earth? You can’t just wander into a machine shop and hang around. It’s called “trespassing.” It’s roughly equivalent to begging strangers to beat your ass and hand you over to the police. Do you let random strangers wander into your workplace, hang around, and ask you to teach them stuff? NO, I don’t THINK so.

Back when I was getting my physics degree, I took a course in electronics. The text was a classic: Horowitz and Hill. Completely worthless. Because it was sold to beginning students, and it was written so that you could only understand it if you had already learned everything in it. If you were an EE with twenty years at Motorola under your belt, meaningless nerd jargon like “sourcing current” (which can’t be looked up in any dictionary, anywhere) might mean something to you. But to someone who only speaks English, the book was basically a fifty-dollar doorstop. Hornady has revived those fond memories.

That’s what the Hornady instruction manual is like. “We won’t bother wasting your time with actual step-by-step instructions, since you proved you’re an expert by buying our weird, esoteric products. So we’ll just give you a few vague hints and tiny diagrams in which the machine is presented from the wrong angle, and you’ll be on your way. We’ll be happy to replace the parts you destroy while trying to figure things out by trial and error. If you pay us for them.”

If anyone knows what book I was supposed to buy in order to understand how this thing works, please let me know. I am not yet ready to believe that it is only possible to reload ammunition if you know someone who will come to your house and teach you.

Bolted to Workbench!

Even though I went to Home Depot, where everything is hidden or out of stock, I found some lag shields and a two-by-six, and I came home and got to work sticking them in my workbench. At the store, I looked at the package, and it called for 5/8″ holes. I figured I had to have a 5/8″ spade bit at home, so I didn’t buy one.

Guess what? It turns out a foot-long 5/8″ masonry bit makes a fine spade bit in a pinch. I already had half-inch holes opened up, and the masonry bit did a swell job of enlarging them.

The lag shields worked like a charm. Thanks, Ed. The press is firmly attached to the table. I’m a little concerned about how they’ll hold up when I move the press on and off the bench, but I got some spares, so I don’t care.

Incidentally, let’s have a round of applause for Ridgid power tools. They have a lifetime warranty on a bunch of their stuff. Unfortunately, if you throw out the box before applying, you lose the UPC code you’re supposed to send in, in order to qualify. I lost one or both of the UPC labels for my tools (miter saw and table saw), and I contacted Ridgid to see if I could work something out. Today they emailed me and said they had upgraded me to lifetime warranty status on both tools.

“He was Bitter, and Once I Saw Him Carrying a Bible”

You will be shocked, I know, but I now have enough brass, primers, powder, and lead to start reloading. I just have to get my behind to Home Depot and buy “lag shields” and a two-by-six to replace the front supporting member of my workbench.

Reader Ed B. tipped me off about lag shields. I appreciate that.

No Timer, no Warm-Up

Six days ago, I bought a boneless rib eye roast at Costco. Choice. They were selling for $5.59 per pound again.

The meat is nice. Not the greatest. Frankly, I think the choice meat at my local grocery is somewhat better. But it’s hard to go wrong for Costco’s prices.

I’ve been aging the meat since I bought it, faithfully changing the cloth every day. That’s extremely important, because when the meat gets wet, off flavors and smells develop. In the past, I put up with this, but now I think it was a mistake. Let it rot a little, but not too much, and keep it dry.

I ate a steak the day I bought the meat. It really wasn’t good, by my standards. It was worth the cost, but it was fairly tough and didn’t have a great flavor. Yesterday I ate another steak. Man, was it different. Much more tender. Juicy. Loaded with flavor. I was amazed. Same piece of beef, five days later. It was like 10% worse than prime. You really have to try this, keeping in mind that I know nothing about food safety and that you may experience a hideous, prolonged death from food poisoning. This steak is good enough for company. Not IMPORTANT company, but company.

I’ve changed the way I cook steaks. I couldn’t get it into the book; it was too late. But I’ve made it simpler, and I want you to know about it.

First of all, the flat cast iron griddle is king. The black crud that accumulates on the surface adds a flavor that is truly magnificent. Like skillet seasoning, only more intense. You have to scrape it down with a spatula on occasion, and after you cook steaks, you’re smart to pour the excess grease off immediately, but you don’t want to clean the griddle, ever. Sometimes I heat it up and run water over it to reduce the amount of crud, but I never remove it completely.

Second, you don’t need a timer if you have a digital thermometer. Stick the probe halfway between the sides of the steak. Note the temperature. You should already know what you want the final temperature to be, from past experience. I like 115-120 degrees. Subtract the final temperature from the initial temperature, divide by two, and add to the initial temperature. This is the temperature at which the meat will be halfway done. At this temperature, turn the steak. You don’t have to wait for the steak to warm to room temperature before you cook it, if you do it this way.

I’ll give an example. Initial temperature, 50 degrees. Final temperature, 120. Subtract, and you get 70. Divide by two, and you get 35. Add to the initial temperature, and you get 85. When the probe hits 85 degrees, the steak is about halfway done, so turn it.

Easy!

Another thing: raise the edge of the steak once in a while to see how it looks. Depending on the thickness, you may have to cook the outside faster or slower. If you’re cooking a thin steak, you don’t have much time, so you’ll want higher heat in order to get the outside brown and crisp. If you ever see black spots developing, flip the steak immediately and lower the heat. And don’t get nervous. If you check the steak at least every two minutes, you’ll be fine. My 2-inch rib eyes take 18 minutes, total. If you’re cooking more than one steak, you don’t necessarily need to put probes in all of them. If the steaks are identical, the internal temperatures will be about the same at any given time.

I tend to start off with the heat fairly high and then turn it down once the outside is brown. But sometimes I find that the outside is still grey close to the end, and I crank the heat up to fix it.

I never put anything but salt on my steaks. I hold them over the sink in one hand and rotate them while I salt the hell out of them with a shaker in the other hand. The amount that sticks is always right. Once the steak is cooked, I’ll pour garlic butter on it, but I don’t fool with pepper or Montreal seasoning. The flavor of aged meat cooked on a griddle is so good, it would be a sin.

If you like a lot of sauce and crap on your steak, and you’re using good aged meat, it means you don’t like the taste of steak. There is nothing wrong with that, but you might as well be aware that you’re not getting what other people get out of the experience. It’s like smoking a flavored cigar.

I hope this change to the method makes your lives easier. There is really no excuse not to have excellent steak-and-potato dinners on tap, all the time. Easy, tasty, and very little cleanup.

Barbecue: New Opiate of the Masses

I have let a few emails slip through the cracks. Sorry about that. I’ll try to fix it.

First, I have to look at my weekly Winn-Dixie ad!

Rump roast is on sale again. I have to find out if that stuff is any good.

Brisket, $2.49 a pound. I need to barbecue!

Chicken leg quarters, 69 cents a pound! Oh, man. Barbecue is looking even more tempting.

Lamb chops, $2.49! Last week I used my recipe for lamb shanks with orzo to fix some sort of low-budget WD lamb chops, and they were fantastic. I removed the orzo, since it’s pure carbs. Still well worth eating. I was thinking the orzo could be replaced with rice or beans. Rice is not quite as horrible for my gut as pasta. But the worldwide famine is beginning, so I may have to learn to live without rice.

Spare ribs, $1.99 a pound. Are they trying to FORCE me to barbecue?

Whole pork shoulder, 79 cents per pound. This now amounts to coercion.

What else is happening? Hillary beat Snob-ama in Pennsylvania, but it wasn’t a rout. But some of the pundits who said she needed a rout are now saying she’s still in the race. Have we been lied to, or what? I don’t get it. Maybe they’re reluctant to announce her demise because it will mean fewer opportunities for them to appear on TV.

Tony Snow thinks there isn’t much difference between Obama and Hillary. He’s nuts. Hillary has no convictions. She’ll be as conservative as she has to be to gain and maintain power. We’ve already seen it, from her as well as her husband. Conservatives rammed a lot of policies down Bill Clinton’s surprisingly eager throat, and we can do the same thing to Hillary. Obama, on the other hand, is not sharp enough to compromise. He’s a true far-left fringer. And man, does he love taxes and gun control. And he wants to gut the military. I don’t think Hillary would be brave enough to do that, in the current climate. She and Bill reduced our soldiers and sailors to beggars in the past, but that was before 911.

Obama has stated publicly that he wants to cripple arms development. Not just nukes, but conventional arms. Even Carter was too smart to do that. Obama wants to lower our pants and then invite our enemies over for tea.

He’s also a huge gun-grabber. He wants all ammunition labeled. He backed a bill that would have made ammunition sales virtually illegal, by banning sales within five miles of a park or school. Get out a map and try to find a place that isn’t within five miles of a park or school. We would be buying ammunition on a barge in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.

Obama has been endorsed by a new gun-grabbing organization fraudulently named the American Hunters and Shooters Organization. It was put together by far-left kooks with long histories of anti-gun activism. You wait and see. If he gets elected, he’ll pack the Supreme Court and the federal courts with judges who think the second amendment only applies to militias, and gun-grabbing organizations will file suit after suit, trying to get the Supreme Court to reverse its recent decision that the right to own and carry guns is an individual right.

And if he gets the justices he wants, they’ll do it.

That will be nice. He’ll destroy our national defense, and he’ll disarm us so we’ll be easier to invade. And he’ll destroy the economy with high taxes and a revived welfare state, so the current recession will last ten years. Violent crime will take off. The whole country will be like the District of Columbia.

Hillary will be awful, but Obama would be considerably worse. He’s not smart enough to understand how international relations or the economy works, and he’s a true socialist. And he worships at a church run by an anti-Semite. Kiss Israel goodbye. They won’t have the 1967 borders. They’ll have the 1947 borders.

I truly hope he wins the Democrat nomination, because he’ll be easy to beat. All we have to do is tell the truth about him, and the public will run screaming into the booths and vote for McCain. Hillary is much better at fooling people.

We’re in for a depressing four years no matter what. But Obama would be a catastrophe. A sick cross between David Dinkins and Jimmy Carter. A vacant suit masquerading as a messiah. There is nothing to this guy. He got into college and law school in an atmosphere of extreme affirmative action. He accomplished nothing in the private sector, beyond what perfectly ordinary lawyers do all over the US. He has no history as an effective politician. He has no business in the White House. He isn’t even fit to be a cabinet secretary. And what little record he has tells us he wants to impose worn-out, destructive, completely discredited socialist policies on us. If “change” means going back the Johnson administration, change is what this guy is all about. Ralph Nader is more credible.

Oh, well. I can’t control the world. I guess I better pray for McCain and focus on taking care of myself.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Blogs

I was starting to think Marv had given up blogging, but no such luck. He has apparently been posting at The Answer Bird again.

Time to Find a New Registrar

Scroll Down for Info on Godaddy’s Explanation

I registered a domain name at Godaddy.com, on a lark. Then it lapsed. It was a com name. After it lapsed, I decided to see if I could revive it.

Their site said it was not available, so I registered the net version. Then I sent an email asking what was going on with the com domain, because their site said something about a redemption period. I just got a reply. They’re holding it hostage. They’ll give it back to me for ninety dollars. I told them to keep it.

I’ve registered more domains than I’ve actually used. Sometimes I get a domain idea I like, and I register it for the hell of it. Until now, I reflexively went to Godaddy. But they can forget my business from now on. I hope they enjoy their worthless domain more than they would have enjoyed my continued patronage.

One unfortunate thing about Internet hosting and domain businesses is that they have no oversight. There are no ethical rules binding these people, and a lot of them are creeps. They should consider their customers clients and look out for their best interests, but they don’t have to. I’m surprised that a well-known outfit like Godaddy would resort to something resembling extortion, but I’m sure it’s completely legal.

I’ll be moving all my domains to my current hosting company as they near expiration. It’s time for Godaddy to go, go, go.

Glad I learned this lesson with a domain I don’t care about.

More

Godaddy now says “the registry” charges them $80 to “redeem” a domain name, and that this is why the fee is so high. I don’t know who they’re talking about. All I know is, somebody is trying to charge me a ton of money for a worthless domain which has never been associated with a website, and which would cost about six bucks to register, were it new.

Evidently, there are companies above Godaddy in the food chain. Googling around, I come up with one name: Verisign. Are there others? I don’t know. All I know is, they’re the folks who get the bulk of the cash.

Here is what I suspect. “Redemption” consists of clicking a check box on a website somewhere or typing a few characters into a form and pressing “Enter.” That’s how complicated most of the processes associated with creating a website are. If redemption is different, you have to wonder why. I’m still thinking “ransom.”

I also wonder why Godaddy doesn’t mention this when you email them about redeeming a domain. You would think they would want customers to know they’re not the ones applying the screws. It looks like I was mistaken and Godaddy is not evil after all. But it sure looks like somebody is milking this.

Even More

It looks like expired domain names are auctioned off on a site at tdnam.com. So I suppose what you’re paying for is the service of having your site yanked off the auction site. However my expired domain isn’t on the site. So I wonder what I would be paying for.

Hmm…someone on Metafilter claims a Godaddy affiliate called Wild West pounces on expired domains and buys them for ransom purposes.

I don’t know what the deal is, and I don’t care. I take care of the domains that matter. This one was just a whim.

This is How You Break World Records, I Guess

I set the DVR to record Tred Barta’s Versus Network show, almost out of morbid curiosity. If you don’t know who Barta is, I’ll fill you in. He’s a blustery charter boat captain who rose to quasi-fame as a columnist for Sport Fishing Magazine. His column was always fun to read, although the basic and shameless message was “Tred Barta is quite wonderful and everyone else is a moron.” He also hunts, and Versus airs his hunting and fishing adventures.

I wanted to see what this guy was like, because the things he says are so obnoxious and macho, and because he toots his own horn like he’s being paid by the decibel. And he’s a bona fide nut. He does things like shooting grizzly bears at 40 yards with a bow, which is about as smart as being a White House staffer and looking Hillary Clinton directly in the eye when she passes you in a hallway. Whatever is hardest and least likely to work, that’s what Barta does.

I was prepared to hate him, but watching the show, you can’t help liking the guy. He writes like a two-fisted he-man, but on video, he turns out to be an aging dad with a big belly and an insatiable thirst for chocolate milk. How can you hate a guy like that?

Last night I watched a show in which he took two fathers and their young sons fishing for marlin, off the South Carolina coast. It was hilarious. He made one of the kids sit in the cockpit with him while they spent ten minutes practicing the following drill. Tred yells “right long,” referring to the outrigger line on the port side of the boat. Then Tred points his hand at the rod and says “rod.” He did this over and over, based on the theory that it would help the kid get to the rod faster when the marlin showed up. And of course, the kid thought he was a mental case. And when the fish showed up, Tred grabbed the rods before anyone else could get near them and set the hooks.

They didn’t get any marlin. For some reason they were dragging rigged ballyhoo; maybe that’s a great marlin bait off South Carolina, but my guess is that he would have done better with fast-trolled plastic lures or maybe live bonito. It seemed weird to me. The ballyhoo did exactly what they do here in Miami, which is, attract dolphin. They HAMMERED the dolphin, and nearly all of the fish were big. At least one looked like it was in the twenty-five pound range. Tred was upset because they couldn’t get away from the dolphin and find marlin, but like all kids, the boys were happier catching nice fish often than great fish very rarely.

I didn’t see any evidence that the “right long, rod” drill helped.

Barta wore a ridiculous captain’s uniform while he fished. Khakis with a matching shirt, and the shirt had silly bars on the shoulders. I would feel like a complete idiot in a getup like that, but for a guy who practices saying “rod” over and over, it seemed like the perfect costume. When I fish, I get so hot I can barely stand to wear shoes. If I had to dress up like Ensign Pulver every time I went out, I’d have a stroke. And how do you get blood out of expensive khakis?

The appealing thing about Barta is that he seems to be exactly what he pretends to be. A well-meaning kook. He drinks his chocolate milk and does his rod drills and wears his captain suit with complete honesty. This is what he is. A bizarre and oxymoronic phenomenon: a sincere poser. He has decided not to fight it.

He hates the liberal media and says a blessing before each meal, so score two more points in his favor.

His show is a lot more fun than other things you may see on outdoor shows, like stuffy gun writers shooting hand-fed exotic animals on ranches ordinary people can’t afford to visit.

I wonder if we could get him to put on camo, stand in a hallway, and look the Hildebeest in the eye.

She Writes!

Great news! Leah Friedman is writing now!

As you know if you read my blog, Leah suffered respiratory arrest related to a heart condition, and she was comatose for a while, and now her brain has to recover from the insult. A bunch of my readers have been praying for her, and it’s working. I hope she won’t mind me posting this.

Hi, Everyone:
I’m Home! I am able to type, very slowly.
My brain still has trouble getting the message to my fingers.
In time the doctors say it will return. I have some memory loss and walking is
very difficult, therapy is three times a week. I have so many emails and comments from all of
you, THANK YOU for refuah shleimah.
As energy permits I will write to everyone.
G_d Bless!

B’Avahav,
Leah

Here is her blog, if you want to comment.

Wouldn’t Surprise Me

I have a pile of bullets on the way from Oregon Trail (the Laser-Cast people). I had a hell of a time getting load data. I managed to scrounge up a few recipes on my own, and I also contacted Oregon Trail, and they kindly faxed me pages from their old reloading manual. The obvious question is, if they have a manual, why don’t they sell it? As is so often the case when I can’t get a product I want, I smell the fishy, fetid aroma of tort lawyers. I’ll bet Oregon Trail has been sued.

Right now I have an opportunity to do some tort work. My father sometimes works with another lawyer, and this guy has a client who wants to do a case on a contingency basis. I could be useful, because it’s an area of law I know a little about. At first, I was interested, mainly to make my dad happy. But now I don’t want to do it.

If the client was looking to make peace, end the defendant’s destructive practices, and get reasonable damages, I could see doing it. But I think the goal here is to get as big a cash settlement as possible. That’s perfectly legal and ethical. But is it the kind of thing a Christian gets involved in?

“Blessed are the peacemakers.” That sentence keeps rolling around in my head. And we’re supposed to be merciful. How do you reconcile that with contingency tort suits? You can’t. No lawyer ever says, “We got a giant verdict, but it greatly exceeds our actual damages, so let’s give some back.” Lawyers are greedy, and so are clients. They take every dime they can get. It may be legal, but it’s not right.

I should have realized this back when I was practicing full-time. I represented clients who wanted all the money they could get, yet when I had opportunities to sue people in my own right, I chose not to do so. I do not like the idea of putting someone under that kind of stress, unless it’s truly unavoidable. The businesses I sued on behalf of my clients were large, wealthy, impersonal, and guilty, and I still feel doubts about the money we got. I’d feel considerably worse sticking it to individuals. I was stupid to do contingency work to begin with. It was a moral mistake.

I’m glad I got out of contingency work, and I am going to have to get out of the case I’m being offered now. I’m sure there is a way for a Christian to make a living practicing law–mediation, maybe–but sticking people up with a briefcase, as though it were a revolver, is not it. People call lawyers “hired guns.” It sounds flattering, but it’s not. It’s something to be ashamed of. Where do real hired guns end up? On death row, in little cells in which the sinks are also toilets. They’re losers. Pitiable people.

Tort lawyers remind me of corporate raiders in that they let other people work to accumulate wealth and create jobs, and then they come in, take it away, and leave nothing behind. They create nothing of value. They only plunder. When you’re a tort lawyer, and you win, you don’t have to show up to help people vacate their offices. You don’t have to help them find new jobs. All you see is that clean, pretty check, when it arrives in the mail. Never mind what it may represent. That’s not your problem, right? The bar says it’s not. The law says it’s not. It must be okay.

I suppose tort lawyers have made some products safer, but they’ve also made them more expensive, and they’ve prevented great products from coming to market. And they stimulate litigation, which is something lawyers are not supposed to do. On the whole, tort law is a disease, and people who participate in it should be ashamed.

I’m glad I figured this out before spending a long career, raking in ill-gotten loot. I could very well have ended up in that position. I’ve done dumber things.

I don’t know if there is any point in fooling with law. I would truly like to continue writing. I used to be afraid that trying to please God would make my writing worse, but that isn’t true. It actually improves it. It makes it smarter and more useful to the reader. I think my voice will change considerably in the future, so I wonder if my existing work will be of any use in selling work that will probably appeal to a different market. But you can’t make moral decisions based on what will or will not sell.

Anyway, I will not be a bottom-feeding tort lawyer. I have done a lot of crappy things in my life; I don’t need to add that to my resume.

“Bulletproof” Real Estate Starting to Slide

As usual, I am starting the day with Drudgebart.com.tv. I’ve finally learned my lesson about clicking the blind video links. I used to find myself inadvertently watching one disappointing video after another, before realizing what I was doing. Now when I see “breitbart.tv” in the link, I avoid clicking.

One interesting story: Miami luxury homes are finally dropping in value. A LOT. The story has to be horrifying for speculators. Among the examples: a property that sold for $2.75 million in 2005, selling for $500,000 at auction. I knew the prices of ordinary homes had dropped something like 20 percent. But 80%? Wow. The story says the deal still has to be approved by the seller. I think I’d hold on and try to squeeze more out of it, before I’d eat a $2.25 million loss.

I know a realtor who got caught up in the tulip-bulb frenzy when it started, and for a while he made good money. Unfortunately, instead of merely selling real estate, he bought a bunch of spec properties he couldn’t afford. If I recall correctly, one of his loans has an interest rate of 18%. Why? Because “experts” were saying the interest rates didn’t matter. If you make a 50% return in six months, what do you care about an annual rate of 18%?

Now he’s trying to unload his own house, to save his credit. He may have to quit real estate. He hasn’t made a payment in months, and the only reason he hasn’t been thrown out on the street is that his lender is even more scared than he is. Better to have a nonpaying owner living in a house and taking care of it than to let the house go unoccupied and fall apart.

This neighborhood is looking more and more like a ghost town. There are several “for sale” signs on every block. There are vacant lots all over the place. When you drive down the street, you see one empty house after another. Houses that should have gone up two and three years ago aren’t going up at all, or they’re finally starting, after terrible delays. I would hate to buy one of these places. They’re being built to sell, in a county where construction is illegal-immigrant-built junk even in the best of times.

And people are RENTING here. That’s unusual. Anything to get the houses filled, I guess. If the economy gets a lot worse, this neighborhood could easily become a collection of unoccupied homes subject to vandalism, squatting, and arson.

Here’s what I wonder. Where did everyone go? Many, many houses are empty. They had to go somewhere. Maybe they did what I want to do. Maybe they moved north.

According to the story, things are going to get a hell of a lot worse here. A huge number of apartments have been built, and they’re going to get their certificates of occupancy soon. When that happens…WHEEEEE, you’ll be able to rent a nice place for three hundred bucks a month. For owners, that means no more positive cash flow. You won’t be able to charge 2x in rent and pay x on your mortgage and expenses. And that will drive selling prices down even farther.

It’s amazing how bad people are at math. Professional investors seriously believed home prices could increase 25% for year, for eternity. Someone do the math for me. What would a hundred-thousand-dollar house be worth in twenty years? Fifty million dollars? Some ridiculous number. I’m too lazy to figure it out. Wait, I found an online calculator. Looks like it would be worth roughly nine million dollars. Yeah, that’ll happen. With income increasing maybe one-fifth as fast. Assuming a five percent annual increase in income, which we’re not really getting, your income would increase by a factor of 2.65. So your house’s price increases by a factor of nearly 90, and your income goes up by a factor of less than three. Maybe in Bizarro World.

I know almost nothing about economics, but for at least two years I’ve been pointing out that we were headed for a cliff. The free market didn’t cease to function simply because a lot of misinformed people got into house-flipping. Sooner or later, the money to pay for a house has to be earned. And if it can’t be earned, the price has to drop.

Does this mean we’re headed for a buyer’s market? I dunno. The prices will be low, but a low price doesn’t make a good investment. We have a lot of other problems hurting us. Oil prices, food price increases caused by the ethanol scam, increased competition from India and China. Real estate may drop to a plateau where people feel safe buying and then it may plummet even farther. I guess the only good reason to buy a home these days is to have a place to live.

My instincts tell me the credit crisis has to hurt real estate badly. Not just because it will reduce the number of loans, but because it will make buying more unpleasant. If people have to pay more for homes up front, they’ll feel the pain much more directly. Credit is like insurance. It takes the suffering out of high prices, driving prices up. I would venture to guess that the more money people have to put down, the more prices will drop. Here in Miami, small, ordinary homes have been selling for four hundred thousand dollars. It’s one thing to put fifty grand down and pay a thousand a month. It’s another to come up with a hundred thousand or even the whole cost of the home. Those little houses are going to stop looking like bargains soon.

Ironically, Miami has been blessed by the dollar’s slide. Foreigners love it here, and the dramatically increased buying power of their currencies lured them to buy homes. That’s all over now. With Sotheby’s withdrawing home after home, without a bid, the flow of foreign cash is going to dry up fast.

I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learned. You never try to surf a wave all the way to the beach. When I was in law school, I traded stocks, and I paid a big chunk of my tuition that way. When the techs started looking bad, I quit. And I kept my capital. A lot of people lost their retirement money, because they seriously believed the NASDAQ could double in value every year until Judgment Day. Sometimes you should be satisfied with a really, really good return. Otherwise, you’re like a gambler who stays at the table until he craps out. I’m sure there are people who got rich flipping properties. They’re the ones who got out two years ago.

I know I’m no expert, but the experts are losing their homes, going broke, and jumping out of windows. And I’m not. If anyone asked for my advice, I’d say the same thing I said two years ago. Stay out of this mess.

Try It

I had a pretty productive day today. I read the book of Galatians, and I studied up on the Trinity, and I read a fair amount of Such a Firm Foundation, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein’s book relating Christianity to Judaism. And I created a new pork recipe. I wasn’t planning to do that, but I had to fix something to eat, and I had a lump of Costco tenderloin, and I threw something together.

Here’s the basic idea. Cut a tenderloin into medallions and marinate it in a little Marsala, garlic juice (solids strained out so they won’t burn and stink later), several sliced cayenne peppers, and salt. Cut up a big white onion. Fry the onion in butter until it starts to clear, and then remove the onion from the butter. Add more butter if needed, or even if not needed. Fry the pork in the butter to brown it. Splash a little Marsala in while frying. When you have a pile of browned medallions, fry the onions a little more and add them.

The Trinity is an interesting concept, because it’s one of the main things Jews cite when they criticize Christianity. Even though Islam is a bigger threat to the Jews, Islam is considered less heretical than Christianity, because Islam is purely monotheistic. Christianity has the Trinity, which appears polytheistic to Jews. And to a lot of Christians, I might add. I didn’t know until recently that many Jews consider themselves forbidden to enter a church or even walk in front of one, whereas mosques pose no problem.

I tend to think Christians have screwed up the Trinity concept. While Jesus is clearly divine, it’s also clear that He considered himself completely subordinate to Jehovah. As for the Holy Spirit being a person separate from Jehovah, I’m not so sure. In the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit was referred to as “the Spirit of God,” and it was no threat to monotheism. I see it as an extension of the life of God into the human body, just as a plant’s life extends into a leaf. I think it’s part of Jehovah. If it was not considered a polytheistic concept in Samson’s time, it shouldn’t be any different now.

Rabbi Eckstein’s book is informative. I’ve read the first chapter, and so far the obvious underlying message is, “It is a waste of time to try to convert us.” He talks about the way the Judaic legal system works, the way a modern legal scholar might explain the American legal system. And it’s impressive. There is no doubt about that. First there was the Pentateuch. Then the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Then there was oral law, supposedly dictated to Moses but not reduced to writing until the time of Jesus. Then there were endless commentaries, and commentaries upon commentaries. And there are immutable procedures for resolving questions, and man–not God–is considered the final arbiter.

The peculiar thing about man being the final authority is that it places his interpretation of scripture and commentaries and so on above even divine revelation. Rabbi Eckstein relates a story in which a group of rabbis have a dispute, and God speaks from heaven, giving them the answer, and they reject it, because tradition says they’re supposed to vote. And God agrees, even though their answer disagrees with His, and He says they’ve beaten Him! And He’s happy about it!

How do you convert people who believe things like that? We rely on faith and the action of the Holy Spirit; modern miracles, if you will. And Jews are trained to distrust these things. It’s not unreasonable; they’ve seen fraudulent messiahs come and go for centuries. And they haven’t had a prophet in over 2000 years.

Jewish scholarship is much deeper and older than ours. Christians tend to reinvent the wheel every time a church becomes unsatisfactory. Jews–at least the Orthodox–build on old foundations and don’t abandon them. If you look at it from an intellectual standpoint, you can hardly blame them for thinking they’re on firmer ground. It’s remarkable that any Jew with a religious education ever comes around. I suppose they only convert when they decide they see Jesus in the Bible, so convincingly that they’re willing to disregard the bits of the Talmud that were created after the advent of Christianity. I haven’t read the Talmud, but it’s my understanding that it’s not a document that could ever be used to support the divinity of Jesus. To put it lightly.

I’m not concerned. If Jesus is the Messiah, then creating intellectual barriers is like like building a house of straw to protect yourself from the Big Bad Wolf. Illuminating reading, however.

I can’t figure out whether Rabbi Eckstein is Orthodox or Conservative. I assume he must not be Orthodox, since he is willing to speak in churches. He hasn’t burst into flame yet.

Wonderful day. I recommend the “sabbath” observation to one and all.