Tell me This is Not Happening

According to Stand for Israel, PM Olmert has decided to give back the beautiful Golan Heights. To a terrorist nation Israel just bombed. In exchange for…wait for it…peace.

What a brilliant strategy! How come no one thought of this before?

If Israel keeps this nonsense up, eventually they’ll have so little land, they’ll have to put a giant ladder on their last remaining square foot, for everyone to climb and hang onto.

Sooner or later, we are going to have to admit that imperialism is often a very good thing. The civilized nations of the world are going to have to unite and take over states like Syria and Iran and put everyone on an allowance.

I’ll say it again. Liberals believe battered wives aren’t fit to be trusted with handguns, but they think savages are fit to handle huge armies and nuclear weapons. Someone explain the logic.

I Wish Lieutenant Dan Were Here

It looks like I was spazzing over nothing, RE crimping .45 cases. As readers have pointed out, these cases aren’t supposed to have much of a crimp. I just assumed they needed one, because they looked unfinished. But I took out a sample of the closest thing I have to .45 ammunition–.40 S&W–and I saw that the case edges were perpendicular to the barrel axis.

On the up side, I learned how to adjust the die so it crimps. The instructions are completely wrong. I’m sure there is some way to construe them so they work, but I haven’t found it yet. It works like this. There is a sliding deal inside the die which seats the bullet. The body of the die does the crimping. So to crimp a case, you lower the die body until you get a crimp, and then you adjust the sliding thing down until you get the overall length you want.

I ran off a couple of crimped shells without primers or powder, just to see if I could do it. They looked okay, except that I think I may have belled the cases a little too much. If you don’t open them up a certain amount, the bullets may fall over in the cases as they are pushed up to the seating die. Instead of perfectly straight sides topped by a crimp, I got a very slight bulge around the case mouth, just below the crimp. Doesn’t matter, since I have to adjust the die all over again.

Not sure how accurate the OAL has to be. I got it as close as I could, using Vernier calipers. May be off by a thousandth or two.

I was going to try to run off 50 shells today, but I’ll never make it to the range if I do. I guess I’ll take Glocks, since I have ammunition for those.

A reader is taking me to task for being an “avowed fan” of Tucker Max. I get the weirdest comments. Anyone who read what I wrote about Tucker can see that I’m not comfortable endorsing his work. But the guy was very decent to me, when people whose values are more like mine were doing nothing to help me or even working against me. He didn’t know me from Adam, but he took the time to send me a priceless document full of PR tips. And Maddox was helpful, too. And unlike some conservatives I could name, who count every bean and extract payment for everything they do, they didn’t want a single thing in return. Neither of them has ever asked me for anything. So I’m not going to spit in their faces in order to look holy. When my spam book came out, the only conservatives I knew who mentioned it were Lucianne Goldberg and a generous contingent of small-time bloggers. And the same thing is going to happen when the cookbook comes out. At best.

Chastity is part of Christianity, but so is helping other people without demanding anything in return. So is gratitude. Think about that before comment rage compels you to tell me who I should be nice to.

Press Beginning to Function

Okay, here is what I got.

Press station 1: decapping and sizing.

Station 2: priming

Station 3: powder

Station 4: expanding

Station 5: seating

I used a combination of Lee and Hornady materials to get there. I have everything adjusted except for the powder charge and the crimp.

Here is my question. Right now, I’m producing .45 ACP shells with kind of a big lip on them. Should I adjust the seater thing so it crimps them in and makes them pretty?

I’m trying to figure out how to do that, but the tiny pamphlet that came with the die is not all that great.

It turns out my dies are titanium nitride, and the manual says no lube. We’ll see if that works.

Help Arrives

I guess I’m an idiot. This is not news. I thought none of the books I owned were of any use in setting up an ammunition press, but it turns out the handgun chapter in The ABCs of Handloading (or is it Reloading?) is pretty good. So I’m going to give it a shot.

I don’t have any lube for the cases. Damn it. Do I really have to buy lube? Can’t I just use pork fat? I guarantee you, it will cost me a mail-order fee or two gallons of gas to find lube around here.

Fixed my Bumper…

Agent Bedhead is in love with Quentin Tarantino. I find him entertaining but annoying. But today she managed to find a photo that may force me to rethink my views.

It suggests a buddy flick we could both really enjoy.

New Comment!

Leah Friedman has returned to my comments! She just posted this:

Thank you so much your prayers have helped me more than you will ever know.
Therapy sucks and at times is brutal.
But each day I get a wee bit stronger.
Steve I am sending you a virtual hug.
In time I will reply to everyone, just this post is taking me a very long time.
B’Ahavah
Leah

It was nothing, Leah. God is doing all the work. I just take the credit.

I’m so glad you’re writing and talking again.

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.