Hamas Should Send The Knesset a Fruit Basket

I have been reading about the Israeli government’s sorry response to the problem of unarmed citizens being murdered by imbeciles from Gaza.

I lived in Israel for 4 months, and back then, guns were everywhere, mainly in the hands of the omnipresent soldiers. I saw soldiers with M16’s on buses and city streets. I also knew a kibbutznik who had a rifle for hunting, and I was with him when he took it to an almond grove. I can’t find information on the history of Israel’s gun laws, but I know that prior to the Gaza ambush, it was very hard for Israelis to get guns. At best, you could get one pistol (pathetic) and 50 rounds of ammunition (enough to last a few minutes at best).

This, in a country where nearly everyone is forced to join the military for two years. It is no exaggeration to say Israel chooses not to trust millions of trained, patriotic soldiers with guns.

Now government officials are saying Israel must arm its citizens. It’s making some piddling, ineffective corrections that come too late and do way too little.

Israeli Jews are not the type of people who use guns to commit crime. The risk of a gun-fueled crime wave is not small; it’s imaginary.

I admit, there was a time when thousands of Jews committed very serious gun crimes in Israel. They gathered and stored illegal firearms under the British, and when independence came, and the Arabs made their predictable effort to exterminate Jews, the guns and other weapons came in pretty handy.

The predecessors of the government of Israel thought it was smart for Jews to hoard guns in their homes, in case of Arab attacks. When did they decide helplessness was better?

Did Israel turn its citizens into Hamas practice targets because it was afraid of ordinary crime, or was the government trying to prevent extremist nuts from mounting insurrections? I don’t know. I haven’t been able to find out by Googling. I do know a huge segment of Israel’s population is made up of Jews from Europe and America, and Western Jews love leftism and gun control. Jews always commit political suicide whenever possible. Give them enough rope, and they will give it to their enemies.

If Israel wanted to prevent deaths from gun crimes, it has failed catastrophically. More people just died from gun crimes committed by Arabs than would have died had every law-abiding adult Israeli been allowed to carry a loaded M16 this year. And Israel encouraged the murderers to attack by disarming the victims. Would Hamas have attacked an armed populace? It’s a valid question.

It looks like the leftist tech establishment is suppressing stories about Israelis who fought off terrorists, but they are out there. And you can find videos of the police slaughtering terrorists with pistols, which is remarkable. It shows how little good a rifle does an untrained coward.

It would be tough for an enemy like Hamas to invade rural America, at least in the areas where Trump got a lot of votes. Not only are rifles everywhere, including in vehicles, but there are many, many people who are trained to kill animals and/or people a long way off. Over the last decade or so, precision rifle shooting has taken off. I’m part of it. I went to a facility where I hit a man-sized target well over half a mile away. Thermal scopes are also popular, so a lot of men in America have the ability to kill underarmed assailants in the dead of night from hundreds of yards away. What works on wild hogs works on terrorists.

It’s bizarre that I, a fairly unskilled person who has never been a policeman or soldier, have the ability to kill more terrorists than the entire population of a typical kibbutz full of soldiers. If you’re a terrorist, you are literally better off attacking 2000 trained Israelis than you are approaching my house.

As for a Biblical perspective, the rapes and the murders of children and babies made me think of prophecy. I thought these things were predicted by Isaiah, but it turned out Zechariah was the prophet who spoke about what is happening now:

Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, and thy spoil shall be divided in the midst of thee.

For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished; and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city.

Then shall the Lord go forth, and fight against those nations, as when he fought in the day of battle.

Hosea also spoke about the fruit of rebellion:

Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.

I am not going to study the word all day to figure out whether Hosea was talking about the present day, but it’s pretty obvious Zechariah was, because he said his predictions would come to pass at the end. Hosea serves to point out the kinds of things that happen when Israel is detached from God and connected to idols, including the idol of self-confidence. Infants dismembered. People killed.

What Zechariah said about all nations being gathered against Jerusalem is clearly coming true. All over the world, Muslims and leftists have formed a bizarre coalition, and thousands, not dozens, of people are protesting Israel, the victim. It shows that antisemitism has increased greatly. There are millions of people out there who are just waiting to be allowed to do what they want to the Jews. A lot of them are in Jewish sanctuaries like New York.

Why did America ever start allowing Muslims to become residents? It’s amazing how stupid this country was. We now have entire communities where people who support Israel aren’t safe. And the rest of us are on the same list.

In Sydney, Australia, Jews have been warned to stay indoors in order to be safe from Muslims. Not in Syria or Iran, but Australia!

In the US, BLM has come out against Israel, exposing some of the all-too-common antisemitism among American blacks. We don’t call minorities out on their wickedness; just Caucasians. It’s too bad, because America is full of blacks who literally believe they are the real Jews. They think the Jews stole their inheritance. Hispanics also have issues with Jews. Small wonder. Look what their ancestors did.

I saw addled leftist Jake Tapper expressing surprise to see how many leftists were raging against Israel and the Jews. What a fool! For at least a quarter of a century, it has been obvious to anyone who can see that conservative Christians are the only American friends Jews have. The antisemitism of the left has been on display for ages, as has the support of the right, but people like Tapper are somehow unable to summon the honesty and integrity to acknowledge what has been right in front of them since before the turn of the century!

If American conservatives stopped supporting Israel tomorrow, the Muslim world would descend on Israel a month later. Leftists would celebrate, and only God himself could defeat the invaders.

God has done miraculous things to rebuild Israel, but as long as most Jews reject their true Messiah and the Holy Spirit, they will have much less protection than they need. Zechariah says God will eventually fight the nations that are against Israel, but only after a lot of damage has been done.

Some Jews are saying this feels like the Holocaust. Yes, it is like the Holocaust. It is the Holocaust. The Holocaust never ended.

The Old Testament is full of proof that Israel is on top when it pleases God and on the bottom when it doesn’t. Israel is surviving, but it’s still not on top, so even Jewish sages who hate Yeshua should be wondering what’s wrong.

My wife and I pray for Israel and the Jews every day. We don’t just ask God to open the eyes of the Jews. We pray for protection and abundance. Lately we have been cursing their enemies. We pray for their arms to malfunction. We ask God to cause the weapons to harm the enemy, not the Jews. We ask him to make Israel’s enemies fight each other, and we don’t limit it to those in the Middle East. We call on him to expose their filthiness.

We also pray for God to rescue Israel’s enemies from Islam.

Apart from prayer and blessing and cursing, though, we are just spectators. It’s too bad we can’t do more. We can’t go over and fight. We’re already buying weapons through our tax dollars. I vote for candidates who support the Jews.

There are ministries that help Jews. Jewish Voice is one.

If you’re a Jew, get yourself some rifles while you still can. You should really try to get in touch with Yeshua, because he’s much better than a rifle, especially in the afterlife. But rifles are better than nothing in the short term.

If you’re in a state where you can’t have semiautomatic weapons with large detachable magazines, get out, and take your children. If you can’t help your family when the murderers come for you, and you had a way out, how will you be able to excuse yourself?

All Beer Should be This Good

Today I’m drinking my lovely Great Again Lager, brewed to an orange hue to honor the president who stood up for our right to great showerheads.

I brewed on October 2, and today is the 10th. I kegged at a gravity of 1.013, which should have been rock bottom, judging from other iterations. I pressure-fermented in a stainless 6-gallon keg and transferred the beer to a smaller keg without exposing it to the air. The day I kegged it, I shot a teaspoon and a half of hydrated Knox gelatin into it to clarify it.

It has been 4 days since kegging, and I have been watching the beer closely, taking samples. Until yesterday it was too cloudy and yeasty to really savor, but today it is nearly normal, so I am having a full pint.

I think this beer will be a monster when it’s fully clear and mature. Assuming there is any left by then. It has always been wonderful in the past.

While I was waiting for this beer to be ready, I opened a can of Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA. My favorite factory IPA is Snake Dog, but I can never find it. Dogfish Head is very nice. Lighter in color than my Great Again Lager. They dry hop it, which means they dump additional hops into it after brewing, so they’re not boiled. These hops add raw flavor and aroma, so you really get the value of all that breeding.

I started to think Dogfish Head was better than my lager, and I wondered if I should dry hop my next lager and stout, but then I had second thoughts. The dry hop aroma and flavor were wonderful, but I felt the aroma distracted me from the taste of the beer itself.

When you cook, you don’t always have to give people both barrels. If you throw everything you have at them, you can overpower subtle qualities they would otherwise appreciate. For example, putting anything other than salt and pepper on steak is dangerous unless it’s a cheap cut, because a good steak fried in butter already has all the flavor you need. I would make an exception for Bearnaise sauce, but I believe nothing but salt and pepper should be applied prior to cooking. I don’t even use pepper.

What’s my favorite kind of pizza? Cheese, AKA plain. I like pepperoni, and I like Hawaiian, but nothing impresses like a good cheese pizza. A monkey can make an okay pizza with 6 toppings. It takes a good cook to make an excellent cheese pizza. All the flaws are exposed.

A good beer without too much frippery is like a good cheese pizza or a really excellent biscuit. It stands on its own.

The world is full of brewkids now, and they are always doing too much. They make “juicy” IPA’s. That means they have lots of sweetening malts and not much bitterness. Like juice boxes. They make “milk stout,” which is stout sweetened with unfermentable sugar. It’s gross. I saw one guy making Cinnamon Toast Crunch beer, named for the cereal. No, thanks.

They seem to dry-hop everything. I would not go so far as the Germans, who seem to think flavor and aroma are embarrassing, but if you’ve got something good to start with, why cover it up?

I now think I’m going to dry hop my next beer, a wheat, but I don’t think I’ll touch my stout, which is perfect. I might add a tiny bit of raw Crystal hops to my orange lager next time, but just enough to draw your nose to the glass, not so much it punches you in the face.

I’m always behind the times. Today I joked that my orange beer was really an India Pale Lager. It has a robust flavor and lots of hops, somewhat like an IPA. Then I Googled and found out India Pale Lagers exist.

It seems like a stupid name for a beer. “India Pale Ale” got its name for good reason, long ago. The Wikipedia page on IPA is interesting. British brewers made an amber ale called October beer. In Britain, people cellared it for two years before drinking it. It was also shipped to India, and it was discovered that the conditions of the trip improved it. Eventually, it became known as India Pale Ale.

The phrase “India Pale Lager” is a modern thing invented by brewkids. It didn’t exist until recently. The British didn’t send amber lager to India and all that. I guess I understand why brewkids call it IPL, though, because it makes it pretty clear what it is.

I started brewing again at about the turn of the year, and it looks like I have a pretty good system going. I can keep 5 kegs going in the kitchen, using both beer gas and CO2. I can ferment two beers at once at whatever temperature I want. I have the brewing machine figured out. I haven’t had a single infected beer. I think the brewing future is bright here at the Heavily Armed Gated Northern Florida Compound.

This is How You Get Your 72 Virgins

So Israel is at war again, and as always, it was the other side’s idea. The idiots of Hamas say they have fired 5,000 rockets into Israel, and they crossed in, killed people, and took hostages, including small children. Of course, they fired at non-military targets because attacking actual soldiers or anyone who might fight back would be a violation of policy.

As one would expect, there are slimy, ignorant, bigoted people on the left, claiming Israel deserves it. We have a vile Congresswoman named Tlaib, an Arab Muslim, who refuses to comment. Based on her past, it’s pretty obvious she sides with the terrorists.

Here is a screen shot of Orthodox Jews celebrating victory over a Palestinian combatant.

Oh, wait. Sorry. That’s a shot of Arab terrorists celebrating shooting an unarmed civilian woman in the head. They removed her outer clothing, because it was obviously necessary, and drove the body around, and other Arab Muslims spat on it. The video shows these proud Muslim warrior men playing with the body.

It looks like they snapped her knee to get her into their vehicle.

If you watch the video, you may breathe a sigh of relief, thinking Muslim culture is not lost, because the crowd is so appalled by the spectacle.

NO. You will see that everyone there is thrilled with what’s happening. Could this happen in a Jewish city if the tables were turned? Don’t even ask. Palestinians are not just regular people with a set of gripes. Compared to people in most countries, they are savages.

To anyone who is dumb or dishonest enough to equate Israel’s defense efforts to the habitual cowardice and cruelty of Arab Muslim soldiers and terrorists, I have to say this: when have Jews ever done anything like this? Arabs do it all the time. It’s nothing like the civilial collateral damage Israel sometimes inflicts unintentionally. It’s policy. Arab Muslims PLAN to do this, just as Israeli soldiers plan legitimate attacks on military and terrorist targets.

Imagine watching a video of US Army recruits in boot camp, training to go into houses, capture women and children, commit rape, kill some of the victims, and haul the rest off for imprisonment and torture. It’s unthinkable. But if Hamas and many other Arab organizations trained recruits for their actual missions, this is what it would look like.

This is the difference between human beings and talking baboons. Anyone who supports this kind of behavior is a baboon, not a person.

I guess people who read the news know the lady in the photo is a gentile, not a Jew. She was a German tourist. I’m sure she told the terrorists before they executed her. They shot her anyway. Imagine Israelis invading an enemy city and shooting foreign tourists in the head. It could never happen.

This kind of behavior is unusual even in battles between corrupt nations like Russian and Ukraine. It’s comparable to things the Japanese did in the last century.

This must be a consequence of Islam. The Koran is full of barbarism. Mohammed was a murderer, pedophile, and rapist who taught Muslims to form gangs of thieves and pillage their neighbors’ cities. This is his legacy.

Anyway, yes, Israel is better than its enemies.

Better.

There are people calling for Israel to cease hostilities, as though this were a normal war instead of a response to terrorism. I disagree. Go in there and level enough of Gaza to put the fear of God into them. Make life so miserable, the people will resent the terrorists and fight them from within. Make the terrorists so afraid they will think twice before doing this again. They’re cowards who only know how to fight unarmed civilians, so it shouldn’t be hard to scare them.

As for the government of Israel, fine job on gun control. Do you really trust your Jewish citizens less than you fear your sociopath neighbors? I’m a nice, law-abiding American, but if I saw terrorists coming across my property, I could fill my yard with bodies for hours, and I’m sure my neighbors could do the same. There is a reason it’s taking so long for leftist mob terrorism to move from blue cities to red counties.

In Israel, a citizen can have one pistol and 50 cartridges. First, he needs a license, and he has to show a special need. Isn’t being Jewish in a tiny Jewish state surrounding by terrorists a special need?

It’s amazing rifles aren’t allowed. They should be required. In the real world, a typical person will be lucky to hit an attacker once if he empties two pistol magazines. It’s very, very hard to aim pistols in actual attacks. A rifle is very different. Rifleman Kyle Rittenhouse hit everyone he aimed at, and part of the time, he was on the ground being beaten by a lynch mob. Also, a rifle round will do much more damage, as the maimed criminal who surived the shooting could tell you. He only has one bicep.

Any law-abiding Israeli should be allowed to have a semiautomatic rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and many, if not all, should be allowed to have automatic weapons. As it is, Israel just waits for people to be murdered and then responds after the fact.

I’ve driven to church and back with a rifle and more than 50 cartridges on hand, but an Israeli on an isolated kibbutz has to depend on a pistol and one box of 9mm ammo, if he can get a gun at all. Do they stockpile illegal weapons under their own government, as they did under the British? Yes, if they’re smart.

I wonder what kind of gun and ammo restrictions the terrorists put on their teams.

Jews aren’t going to use guns to rob people. They’re not going to form gangs. They’re extremely unlikely to use guns in domestic abuse episodes. They have zero interest in overthrowing their government. I think gun control in Israel simply stems from suicidal Jewish leftism. American and European Jews make up over a third of the population, and these groups are hopelessly mired in leftism.

It’s like Israelis have forgotten what happened to unarmed Jews in Europe. And the harm wasn’t just done by their own governments and Nazi invaders. Their neighbors joined in. When the Nazis rolled into countries, antisemites saw it as a license to do what they had always wanted. For example, in the death camps, Ukrainian guards were feared much more than the Germans. I knew an Austrian Jew who had to hide in France as a girl, and she told me the French were much worse than the Austrians. The other kids held her down and pushed a thumbtack into her forehead to see if a Jew could bleed.

Pistols. Why does anyone rely on them? Too many movies, I guess. Some socialist Hollywood clown in lifted cowboy boots shoots a nickel out of the air at a hundred yards with a crude 1800’s revolver, with help from special effects, and people think that’s what pistol shooting is really like. They’re like the people who think coconuts are small and round because they watched Gilligan’s Island.

I carry a knife because it’s legally safer to draw a knife than a pistol, and also because everyone needs a knife. There are special penalties for brandishing a gun. I carry a pistol because a knife won’t always deter an attacker. Ideally, I’d go everywhere with a rifle in a sling. Maybe DeSantis will make it possible some day. I guarantee you, if it were legal, there would be several people in every local grocery with rifles right now, and shoplifters would be very nervous.

A pistol drills small, narrow tunnels in people. A rifle will tear them up and even blow out large chunks of them. When the criminal who ran up to Kyle Rittenhouse with an illegal pistol was shot, a large percentage of his bicep ended up scattered on the pavement. It wasn’t like TV, where a 5.56 round hits Magnum in the shoulder, he makes a bandage from a strip of his shirt, and then he uses the arm to punch out the villain and hug the girl.

I don’t understand why Hamas attacked, although they were probably encouraged by the huge cash gift Joe Biden gave their sponsor, Iran. They know they’re going to be crushed. Then the leftist gaslighters will chime in as Israel sends in bulldozers to build up the necessary buffer zone.

I don’t know why I write about this. No one who hates Jews will read this and come around.

Telling the Truth Gives Them Chest Pains

I can’t find my favorite chili garlic sauce. Like we need another shortage. And the people who claim global warming is the problem are apparently lying.

It’s very disheartening to see people blame everything on man-caused global warming, which probably doesn’t exist. Drought? Global warming. Floods? Global warming. Heat? Cold? No change? All caused by global warming.

There are people out there claiming sexual perverts are disporportionately harmed by global warming. Explain that.

The shortage began with Huy Fong sriracha sauce, which is a below-par sauce made in California. It’s the one with the chicken on the bottle. At some point, hipsters decided they had to put sriracha on everything, including things that taste bad with sriracha on them, and, being the mindless herd creatures they are, they decided Huy Fong was the only brand worth buying. This seems to have established a large consumer base.

A year or two back, Huy Fong’s production dropped. Hipsters lost it. They scrambled to corner the sriracha market. For a while, Huy Fong’s unimpressive sriracha commanded astounding prices. Now you can buy it on Amazon for the low, low price of $14 per bottle, which is still grotesquely inflated.

I didn’t care. I like sriracha on a few things, but Huy Fong’s product isn’t that great. It leans toward ketchup. I have an ancient, nearly-full bottle in my fridge.

You want good sriracha? Try Shark brand. It’s amazing. You can get it at a site called Import Foods. I have two bottles. The medium and the hot are virtually identical, so buy the cheaper one.

Shark is a real Thai product, made in Thailand. By Thais. The California guy who runs Huy Fong is Vietnamese. “Huy Fong” sounds Chinese to me, but let’s not go there.

The eco-nuts want us to think a drought in Mexico caused the Huy Fong shortage, but even the MSM says otherwise. It turns out Huy Fong committed fraud and nearly destroyed Underwood Farms, the CALIFORNIA (not Mexico) operation that supplied most of the peppers. Underwood Farms sued and won $14 million, and the verdict has been affirmed on appeal. The original verdict came down in 2019, so the problems existed before that.

Underwood Farms now sells its own line of sauces, and Huy Fong is hopping mad but can’t do anything about it.

I would have called the Underwood Farms brand “Su Yu,” but no one asked.

I don’t eat Huy Fong sriracha, so why do I care? Because now they aren’t shipping their chili garlic sauce, a different product which is excellent. It suddenly disappeared from stores. My guess is that they redirected a lot of peppers to the sriracha operation, because sriracha is now liquid gold.

I used to dump chili garlic sauce on my hummus when I ate breakfast. I did that until two days ago. Then I went to the store and saw no Huy Fong products at all. I Googled and saw Reddit posts in which people asked what else they could use. It looks like chili garlic sauce vanished quite a while ago in most places, but I didn’t know because I bought it in big bottles which take a long time to empty.

Now, breakfast is a sad and gloomy affair, during which I pretend Frank’s Red Hot is an adequate substitute for chili garlic sauce.

I managed to locate the sauce on the web at a reasonable price, in a very strange place. I haven’t bought it yet because I am looking at alternatives.

I read that you can make your own sauce from red jalapenos or Serranos, sugar, garlic, salt, and vinegar. These peppers are not hard to find because, hello, there is no pepper shortage. Peppers are everywhere, as are sauces that have no connection to Huy Fong.

I may make my own sauce before springing for the real thing. The site I found advertises two jars for an okay price, but it doesn’t say how big the jars are. That makes me want to wait.

I also learned that there are other Asian pepper sauces I should be looking at, so I may order a few. One is called sambal, and there are different kinds of it. At least one type is flavored with shrimp paste, which sounds pretty good. I found three varieties of sambal, and I may order all of them. Import Foods recommends sambal oelek to replace chili garlic sauce.

Asians make the best pepper sauces. Mexicans aren’t even in the running. I’ve tried all sorts of Mexican sauces. Some are pretty good, but nothing compares to Huy Fong chili garlic sauce or Shark sriracha. Yesterday, I bought a goopy sauce made by Thai Kitchen, and it’s fantastic. It’s not good with hummus, because it’s sweet, but it’s a wonderful discovery. It’s used on egg rolls. I may as well start looking around to see what else I’m missing.

Americans make a lot of bad hot sauces. I think Tabasco may be the most overrated sauce, after Huy Fong sriracha. It’s harsh and flavorless. Frank’s and Crystal are better, and you can get a quart of Crystal for 4 dollars.

It’s kind of strange that Mexicans make mediocre hot sauces compared to nearly everyone in the Far East. After all, the New World has had peppers forever, but the rest of the world didn’t get a chance until around 1500.

So in a nutshell, leftists lie again, Shark is better than Huy Fong, and it may be a couple of weeks before I can make breakfast great again.

What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

My latest beer, an orange lager, is nearly ready to keg, and I only started on Monday.

Brewing is like cooking, because it’s really a kind of cooking. It’s a culinary art. Beverages are part of every cuisine. I stand by that. Like all types of food and beverage preparation, brewing is full of myths and old wive’s tales. You know what I mean. “Steaks have to be rested.” “Dough has to be kneaded for 10 minutes.”

Traditional lager brewing takes a long time. Lagers are fermented at lower temperatures than ales, slowing the yeast down. Then they are “lagered,” which means they sit and age for weeks to kill the off flavors. How much of this stuff is really necessary? Not all of it.

There is a site called Brulosophy. The proprietor tests beer myths. For example, he may make two batches of the same beer, boiling one for 30 minutes and the other at 60. He then makes people taste the results and tell him whether they can tell a difference. He applies statistics to determine whether there really is a perceptible difference. He has brewed beers at different temperatures with excellent results. He has tested to see if lagering is needed. He has done all kinds of things to annoy traditionalists. There must be a bounty on him in Germany.

Also, homebrewing has changed over the last few years. For one thing, many people, myself included, now ferment some beers under pressure. The pressure suppresses off flavors that ordinarily arise when you ferment at higher temperatures. If you crank up the pressure, you can ferment faster and get the same results. Yeast likes heat.

I started pressure-fermenting as soon as I heard about it. I made the mistake of buying a plastic pressure fermenter called an All-Rounder. It’s made by Kegland, an Australian company. Actually, I think they’re Chinese, because they have a shop on Aliexpress, the guy who does their videos looks Chinese, and they have at least one product they can’t sell in the US because of patent problems.

The All-Rounder is just a huge plastic jug with a round bottom. The screw-on lid has fittings on it for disconnects, which are devices that let gas and liquid go in and out.

I got a decent lager out of my All-Rounder on the first try. I fermented at 75°, which was convenient. No fridge needed. It had a taste that reminded me of freshly-mown grass, but it wore off after a month.

I decided I did not like the All-Rounder. The jug is flimsy. It weakens with repeated use. You’re supposed to pressure-test it and eventually get rid of it. I don’t want a fermenter blowing up in my garage, and I don’t want to spend a lot of money on the same product, over and over. It’s like buying an inkjet printer for $50 and spending $5000 on ink.

I now use Torpedo Megamouth 6-gallon stainless kegs. These do not blow up if the pressure gets too high. Like ordinary homebrew kegs, they have pressure relief valves, and these valves release long before the pressure can hurt stainless steel. Plastic, not so much. Not if it’s old and weak.

I make 5 gallons of beer at a whack, so a 6-gallon keg will hold all the beer plus whatever foam grows on top. I add a product called Fermcap to prevent the foam from getting too thick.

I wondered if fermenting at 75° caused my off flavor. I also suspected oxygen, because I believe there was a point where I had to let a tiny bit of air into the All-Rounder. I decided to ferment this latest batch at 60° instead.

There are always a few little problems on brew day, but I got this thing into the fridge in the evening on Monday.

Of course, I always have to make a mistake, and this time, I failed to set the keg O-ring properly. As of yesterday, I thought the beer was doing nothing, because the pressure wasn’t building. I have a gauge on the fermenter, and it was stuck at zero.

Instead of doing the obvious thing and checking the seal with soapy water, I fiddled around for several hours. Finally, I got out the spray bottle, and I found the issue. I fixed it up and pumped 15 psi into the keg. While I was doing all this, I had to crack the keg lid open, and I saw all sorts of krausen, which means foaming yeast. The fermentation was flying.

Today when I checked, the pressure was way over 15. It was past the numbers. Maybe 25, if I had to guess. I adjusted it and tested the beer’s specific gravity, which drops as beer ferments. I got 1.013. That was a lot lower than what I expected. Things are going quickly.

I had some unusual problems measuring the gravity on Monday. Not sure what was happening. I was using a cheap refractometer which generally works fine. I have a theory that, because I was mixing boiled water into the wort to change the gravity, I got some samples which had more water in them than others. Or maybe stirring the crud on the bottom of the kettle up while mixing the water in increased the gravity for some readings. Anyway, my best guess is that the OG (original gravity) was 1.053, or 0.001 above the target. A bullseye, really, because refractometers and hydrometers aren’t as accurate as brewers like to think. This beer’s gravity plunged 40 points in under 60 hours.

My target FG (final gravity) is 1.012, so 1.013 means the beer is either finished or nearly so. If it was actually lighter than 1.053 to start, it’s done. If it was heavier, it may have some time to go.

It tastes fine, except for the harsh yeast bite every new beer has before the yeast drops out. Yeast is bitter. I’m not getting any grass flavor.

It looks like I can ferment a great lager in 4 days at 60°, which tells me there is no reason to go to 75°. I remember when people were keeping lagers in their fermenters for much longer. Four days will be fine.

Now I have to decide when to clarify and keg the beer.

Conventional wisdom says beer doesn’t ferment after kegging, but I know this is wrong. It may be true for factory beers, some of which are pasteurized, but I know at least one of my beers (stout) gets dryer after kegging, and that means yeast is at work.

I would like to have yeast on the job after kegging, to continue to improve the beer.

What about clarifying? I will be adding gelatin to the beer, and this makes all the floating stuff fall out, presumably including yeast. If I clarify before kegging, will that be too much for the yeast to handle?

Stout isn’t clarified, so I can’t really judge by what it does.

When I got started in brewing, they told me not to touch a lager for weeks after I kegged it. Should I listen to that advice now? I don’t think so. Many people question it, and not just people who don’t know good beer.

I think this beer will be very good as soon as I keg it, and it will be perfect a month later. The plan is to keg it and then put it in the keezer at 35°. I’m a slow drinker, so I will probably take 6 months to empty it. I think it will age perfectly well during that time, and I think the beer will stop improving after a month.

Brewers who do lagers often do “diacetyl rests.” This means heating your still-unkegged beer a few degrees and letting it sit until the diacetyl goes away.

Diacetyl is the chemical they put on fake buttered popcorn. Sometimes beer generates it during fermentation. I don’t plan to do a diacetyl rest. My understanding is that warm fermentations don’t produce diacetyl. This is one of the reasons people use pressure. I have also read that commercial brewers use pressure for this reason.

I think I’ll just shoot gelatin into this beer tomorrow and keg it using a closed, oxygen-free system. I should be drinking it on Saturday.

Tomorrow I’m making stout. I haven’t finished my last keg, but the thought of being without stout is terrifying. After that, I might go nuts and make a wheat-heavy Belgiany beer I made in the past. It’s very strong and full of flavor, and you can literally age it for years without ruining it.

By the middle of next week, I should have a keg of orange lager and a fresh keg of stout ready to drink. After that, I’ll feel safe enough to play with other things. I don’t want to run out of staples. They come first.

I wanted to call my orange lager Mar-a-Lager, for obvious reasons, but someone took the name a long time ago. Same for MAGA Lager. “Bigly” is taken. “Covfefe.” I call it Great Again Lager. Best I could do.

Because the beer I’m making now is already under pressure, carbonating it should be either easy or unnecessary. Another benefit. Carbonating a flat new beer is tricky, and you can end up with a long period of foamy beer.

It’s nice, having kind of a system worked out. I don’t wonder what equipment I need or what changes I have to make. The basic plan is in place. Everything else is small strokes.

Reliably Unreliable

Here at the Armed Fenced Northern Florida Compound, we have an electric gate on the main approach road to discourage riff raff and also possibly function as a choke point in dark times. I had some problems with it, and they merely served to confirm what I already knew about human nature.

The gate has a box with a keypad, and you push numbers to get in. The opener was installed 19 years ago, so I would guess that by now everyone in the county has the code, but I still make delivery drivers and the power company use it because I don’t want to find out how to change it. You push the buttons, the gate opens, it stays open while you do what you have to do, and then when you leave, a sensor by the driveway tells the gate to open again.

UPS has the code, but lately, they have been refusing to put boxes on my porch. I’ve had to walk over 100 yards to the gate to get my wet boxes covered with leaves and lizard poop.

What do you do when you have a UPS problem? You use UPS’s website, which has all sorts of ways to put you in touch with caring UPS employees. Right? I mean, the site actually encourages you to try.

Thing is, UPS has deliberately changed everything so it is virtually impossible to have any kind of communication with them. You complain to Amazon, and they tell you to complain to UPS. Then you find out it’s easier to have lunch with the Great and Powerful Oz.

Amazon could complain to UPS, and UPS would listen. But Amazon doesn’t want you bothering Amazon. Just keep buying that Chinese stuff with the funny names Chinese people think sound American. “Honey, look at my new IZMURDNULL golf pants!”

I think those names are like the Chinese characters ignorant millennials have tattooed on their bodies. You think it means, “courage of tiger,” but it really means, “fat chick pay me $300.”

Maybe Chinese factory owners make their US-educated kids make up those names, thinking they must have learned something at UCLA.

Feng Sr.: What “IZMURDNULL” mean?

Feng Jr.: “Courage of tiger.” I need the Bugatti keys.

In the past, you could call the UPS number and yell “AGENT!” over and over until the phone tree wilted and gave you a person. Now you go to the site, get a bunch of prompts that don’t apply to your situation, and then receive instructions to get lost. If you call and yell “AGENT!”, the system tells you you can’t have one, and it hangs up.

None of the web prompts matched my problem, and that was deliberate on the part of UPS. I had a driver who would not put boxes where they were supposed to be, and probably three million people had the same problem today, so obviously, they do not want people with poorly-placed boxes calling them. They would be inundated.

You can’t just go to the local UPS hub and ask for help, because they will shoot you when you try to scale the fence. UPS doesn’t like riff raff any more than I do. Okay, perhaps they won’t shoot you, but you can’t complain in person. That’s my point.

I tried to use the site in spite of the lack of relevant options. I picked a prompt which was not very appropriate, figuring some human being might read it and decide to do something even though I had responded to the wrong prompt. Unbelievably, UPS contacted me. A guy named Bill at the local hub seemed to be very upset that my boxes were being rained on, and I think he really tried to help.

He thought I hadn’t entered my code on their site. I told him I had. He said he couldn’t see it, and that meant his drivers couldn’t see it. He was convinced this was the issue. He gave me a number for UPS tech support.

I called and got one of the Indian guys.

Here’s something you need to know about phone customer service people. Generally, they have no interest in solving your problem. What they really want is to get rid of you. They look for ways to justify sending you to other representatives in other departments, and one of their favorite tricks is to connect you without permission, very quickly, while talking over you, before you can scream and tell them they’ve made a mistake.

Aedidev the CSR: OkayIamtellingyoutheproblemisnotwithourdepartmentyoumusttalkto billingpleaseholdwhileIswitchyouhaveagooddaynamaste…

You: STOP STOP WAIT WAIT

Aanandaswarup the other CSR: Hello, can you please repeat the long story you told the other CSR and repeat all the facts he did not bother to provide me with?

The Indian guy told me the general tech support people could not help me. He said the UPS My Choice tech support people were the problem, so he gave me their number.

I called and got a lady with an accent so weird I suspect it was fabricated by AI on the spot. She told me all the My Choice people could do was track packages. Which is why their department is called “tech support,” I guess. Totally appropriate.

I think it was the next day when Bill called me again, and he was distraught to learn that UPS had been no help at all.

At some point, I started telling Bill I thought the driver was the problem. I said the gate had had some issues, and I had had another driver who was a trainee, and he had been too cowardly to drive through the gate because he thought he would hit it.

No, no. Bill was positive the driver could not see the code.

I ended up talking to another Indian guy. This one started talking over me and repeating things he would have known were not true had he actually listened to anything I told him. I was somewhat abrupt with him. I said things like, “PLEASE STOP TALKING” so I could get a few words in.

Eventually, he told me to wait, and then he stopped talking. But I could still hear everyone in the boiler room in New Delhi talking around him. And I heard something that sounded like labored breathing.

I started asking him if he was there. I asked if he was all right. I think he had some kind of fit. After a while, he started to talk. He said he could not help me and that he would send me to another department. Then a robot voice came on and asked if I wanted to take a survey, giving answers to be recorded. I took the survey, explaining my complaints in detail. Then the robot said the survey couldn’t be processed, and it hung up on me.

I followed up with Bill and told him the second Indian guy seemed to have some kind of problem, and maybe someone needed to check on him.

I really said that.

Bill and the foreign lady continued to call me, and Bill also emailed. The lady was really annoying. She would say she was going to call at a certain time, then miss the time, and then call me when I was doing important things.

She always sounded the same, but she insisted she was different people. I kept asking her if she was the person who talked to me before, but she denied it.

AI. It’s coming for all of us.

Packages kept landing outside the gate.

Today, I saw the driver by the gate, and I walked out to talk to him. He said he had the code, but the gate had refused to open twice, and it was closing so fast it hit his truck. He was leaving packages in the rain to avoid being trapped or hitting the gate.

Exactly what I thought had been happening, had happened. Being old is like being clairvoyant. You get so familiar with human failings and incompetence, you always seem to know what’s really going on.

We talked for a while and did some experiments, including one where he drove through the gate. He barely moved. No wonder the gate closed before he made it. A garden slug could have passed him. It was bizarre to watch. But he was right about the open time being too short. The control box needed to be opened up and looked at.

He seemed a little nutty to me, and he definitely could have made it through the gate (like the Fedex guy and me) had he not had a bizarre fear of normal acceleration. Still, the box needed to be worked on.

I decided to go ahead and pay a tradesman. The people who built the house left me an opener manual, and it had two phone numbers written on it. A guy named Kenny.

I called Kenny, and he was surly. He said you can’t get Powermaster parts. He said the cost for a service call was $150. I asked if he was planning to do service or sell me a new box. He said he would sell me a new box. Then I asked him whether he was planning to charge me a $150 service fee for giving me an estimate on a new box.

You can see how the conversation went. The only thing I was sure about after we talked was that I was not going to do business with Kenny. If you’re a crabby old crank when a new customer calls, you’re going to be a horror for the duration of the job. Kenny, if you ever read this, this is why you work from a cell phone and your competitors have big, beautiful websites and nice shops and trucks. Get a life.

The box is from 2004, and Powermaster, the company that made it, has decided to cut off parts and support entirely. Their rationale is that it’s too hard to upgrade the boxes to current federal safety standards, but that doesn’t really apply in situations where customers want repairs, not upgrades. Their new boxes cost $3000. Why would anyone buy one after being told to forget about parts for an older one?

They encourage people to contact them via email, and they do not answer emails. It’s a good system. It works.

I have some documents that have some application to this old box, so I took a look. I also took some gut shots of the electronics. I found the potentiometer that makes the gate stay open, and I fixed it so it holds the gate fully open for 70 seconds. Even Mr. Magoo should be able to get a UPS truck through in that amount of time. On a good day, Joe Biden should be able to get his Corvette through in 70 seconds.

So I called UPS and told them what happened. No, I didn’t! I’m not that stupid. I taped a note to the keypad by the gate, saying it had been adjusted and would stay open for 70 seconds.

I did try to email Bill. UPS rejected the email instantly.

“MAIL UNDELIVERABLE

This email conversation thread has expired, and your message will not be delivered. No further action will be taken by UPS.“

Yeah, that’s not rude or anything.

What’s with the boldface? Is that supposed to be scary? Am I being scolded?

The inside of the box has a lot of dirt and crud in it, so I plan to take half a day, put a tarp down by the box, open the box, undo and clean all the connections, apply terminal protector, apply sealant to the box’s access plate, and close it up. I should be able to get another 10 years. The Powermaster people may be a little jerky, but the components in the box look basic and tough.

I think I can put an electric eye on the box to let it know when cars are in the gateway, which would be nice, because no one wants a gate that closes on cars. Driven by people they want to see, I mean.

Driver: STOP! I just wanted to tell you about the Jehovah’s Witnesses!

Gate: GATASAURUS CRUSH!!

They sell aftermarket electric eyes. I just have to find the right contacts to attach one to, and then I have to modify the box so I can run a wire into it without letting rain in. Pretty simple compared to other things I’ve done. I would rather just call someone, but I can hear the spiel already. “They don’t sell parts for this old box, but I can get you a new Liftmaster…”

If I get a new Liftmaster, guess who will install it? Me. There are like 4 wires involved. I can take it from here, chief.

In short, as has happened many times before, I was sitting here looking for people to take my money, but I could not find anyone worthy.

As for UPS, I hope Bill and the Indian guy with the anxiety attacks are doing well. Base pay at UPS amounts to $170,000, so I guess they’re fine.

Wonder what that comes out to in rupees.

Fungal Bungles

Today I had an interesting experience involving photography and the lawnmower.

I was riding along beside the fence that separates the pasture from the yard, in a long, grassy strip that resembles a road. I looked ahead and saw a couple of clusters of mushrooms. They were pretty new. Ordinarily, I would have splattered them with the mower, but I realized I was seeing something I could photograph, so I mowed around them.

When I went back later, I realized I only liked one of the clusters, so I tried to take a few shots with a Sigma 105mm macro lens. I was carrying it because I hoped to find some small things to shoot. Smaller than mushrooms.

Fortunately, not every shot I take with this lens has to be a real macro shot. I was able to shoot from far enough away to get the whole mushroom cluster in the photo.

I shot some more stuff I will probably delete, and then I edited two raw photos. You see them below.

I’m reasonably happy. The focus is bad, because I keep overestimating the depth of field, but the pictures showed potential. I picked a fairly good subject, the composition is okay, and but for the depth of field issue, these pictures would have been pretty good.

I like editing raw photos. Seems like I can stretch my work a lot closer to adequate. I am using the trial version of Photoshop Elements, and I plan to buy it.

The second photo is a little disturbing to me, because Photoshop cropped it. I did a crop first, and then I saw that the program was recommending its own crops. A couple were hideous, but then I saw the third, which was just like mine, only better. So am I still a photographer if a program crops my photos?

I learned I should not be afraid to clean up the area around things I shoot. I thought the blades of grass in the foreground would add context, but they are just distracting.

I tried to get a shot of another mushroom I spared with the mower, but the depth of field problem was so bad, it’s not even worth posting. I need to make a strong effort to preview depth of field in the future. It’s not all that easy when you’re on the ground looking down at your camera, especially if the sun is bright.

I tried to shoot some little weed blossoms, but this lens is not great for really small subjects. Disappointing. There is a very good Chinese manual focus lens that could be better. It has 2x magnification.

I’m not afraid to give up autofocus. I don’t really like it. It seems like it’s not as trustworthy as manual, and it doesn’t always want to focus on the right thing. I can spend the rest of my life mastering the camera’s focus programming, and I guess I’ll get sharper shots than I get now, but I already know how to focus manually.

Great photographers took very good photos for decades with manual focus, so I feel like I should be able to pull it off.

I would like to shoot more bugs, but they don’t like to pose. I had an idea: pour sugar water on things and wait for the bugs to arrive. A weak solution should dry and become invisible, but the bugs should still smell it. I’m trying it now. Tomorrow I’ll go out and see if anyone has shown up.

I have to be more serious about recognizing subjects, I saw some interesting mushrooms at the base of a tree, and I kicked them to see if they were mushrooms or edible fungus. It wasn’t until later that I thought about taking a picture.

I also have to learn not to go out and shoot things on the ground right after dinner. It’s not the best time to be squatting and bending over.

These mushrooms should keep popping up until the cold weather comes, so I should be able to get some really neat photos once I figure the depth of field out. As it is, I am a disgrace to the body of people who own this lens, which is supposed to be excellent.

I could have done better with the DSLR, but I’m not going there. I have to master this camera.

Shouldn’t we Run TOWARD the Light?

Seems like I am constantly reminded that I can’t trust anyone who claims to represent God.

Years ago, when I was an armorbearer at Miami’s Trinity Church, inadvertently helping “pastor” Rich Wilkerson and his son, Rich Wilkerson Junior, in their efforts to con the poor out of what little money they had, a man named Bill Wiese came to speak at the church.

Wiese wrote the book 23 minutes in Hell. He says God took his conscousness out of his body and put it in hell so he would be able to come back and warn other people.

Wiese was a pleasant, soft-spoken, sincere-sounding guest. He didn’t clamor for money or promise people God would make them rich if they gave him offerings instead of paying their electric bills. In this respect, he was unlike the Wilkersons.

I read his book, and the story seemed plausible to me. It appeared to be consistent with scripture as well as the things God had revealed to me. I figured the story was probably true.

He has a Youtube channel, and he has put up a lot of material my wife and I have concluded was helpful. I subscribe to his channel.

A while back, though, after he refused to answer a question I asked him, I started to wonder about him. Yes, he seems sincere, but then he’s a professional salesman. Before he wrote the book, he sold real estate for a living, and I believe he still does. The best salesmen are the ones who can convince you they’re pure and meek, regardless of what’s going on inside them. I’m not Jesus. I can be fooled. The fact that a man seems innocent and guileless to me doesn’t mean much. Wiese seems earnest and humble, but who knows what’s really in his heart?

He does not respond to comments on his Youtube channel, but he encourages people to submit them on his website. I had a question, so I submitted it.

In his book, he says hell is filled with the sound of screaming and crying. That makes sense to me. He also says there is so little air in hell, you have to gasp for every breath.

It occurred to me that it would be hard to scream continuously if I couldn’t breathe, so I submitted the obvious question.

I wasn’t trying to catch him in a lie. I thought maybe he had some kind of explanation. I can think of one myself, but I’m not going to mention it here and give people ideas.

Months have passed, and neither Wiese nor his wife have responded.

It’s a very reasonable question, and if he’s a truthful person, he should be eager to answer it. I would if I had been to hell. I would thank the person who asked it, because I would realize other people might doubt my true story if I didn’t explain.

So that looks bad.

He’s not Ryan Reynolds or Taylor Swift. He’s not a big celebrity. He doesn’t have a huge following, so I know he’s not inundated with questions. He or his team saw my question, and they chose to ignore it. Either that, or they ask for questions but don’t look at them.

He recently put up a video asking people what their lives say about them. In the video, he criticized people who criticize preachers, suggesting it’s a bad thing to do.

Naturally, I had to comment.

If you took the New Testament and removed the parts where the writers and Jesus criticized religious authorities, you would end up with a pamphlet. I exaggerate, but Jesus went after them many, many times. So did Paul, naming names. Jude went after them. I’m sure other authors laid into them, but I can’t remember the entire New Testament in order to name passages.

What about the Old Testament?

The prophets criticized priests, prophets, and kings, in addition to other people. This is why the Jews killed so many of the prophets. Eli was the high priest, and his sons were priests, and God sent a prophet to tell Eli God was going to cause them to die.

What would Bill Wiese have thought of that prophet? Would he have shamed him in a Youtube video?

The idea that it’s bad to criticize preachers is not found in the Bible anywhere. In fact, it’s extremely important to vet them. We are taught to test the spirits.

It’s extremely important to rip dishonest preachers PUBLICLY, before as many people as possible. Lying is different from other sins. You don’t have to expose a murderer or a burglar who did bad deeds in the past, but a liar has to be exposed, because if he isn’t, his lies will continue to hurt people.

In my comment, I named prosperity preachers who destroyed countless lives, and I gave my testimony. I said I had criticized them openly by name on the web and, instead of being cursed, I received lots of money I didn’t work for, a wife, a wonderful farm, and good Christian friends. I don’t have to work.

If you read my blog, you’ve read the story already. Preachers turned on me. People told me I was going to get it for touching God’s anointed. Meanwhile, my blessings did nothing but increase. And my last pastor, Alberto Lee Santiago, who denounced me and told people to shun me, went to prison for molesting a little girl, beginning when she was 6. While he was awaiting sentencing, his abusive wife, who also hated me, died from a brain tumor. His church vanished. His son is a job-allergic atheist who promotes drugs and posts blasphemy on the web.

Rich Wilkerson has artificial knees, terrible back problems, kidney stones that require lithotripsy, some kind of weird stones that grow in his chest, a rare blood disorder that requires regular draining, and diabetes. His church is going nowhere. He has had a problem with the young men in his inner circle running through the local girls. His megachurch pals rake in the dough and write bestsellers, but his Youtube videos never seem to break 300 views, his church can’t pay its mortgage, and no one knows who he is.

If what happened to me is punishment, perhaps I need to look the word up. If the “anointed” ones who denounced me are blessed, I need to look that word up, too.

Today my wife tried to look up my comment, and she could not see it. Wiese or his wife, or someone on their team, had muted it.

Muting is a sneaky tactic. You fix a person’s comment so he can still see it, but no one else can. It’s dishonest. It’s like the social media dirty trick known as shadow banning. You think you still have a voice, but it goes nowhere.

It’s a slimy thing for a preacher to do, especially to a person who is giving his honest testimony.

So, if Bill Wiese would do this, what other dishonest things has he done? Did he make up his hell story?

The web says he sold a million copies of his book, so that means he made at least hundreds of thousands of dollars. He speaks at big churches that take offerings. He speaks at prosperity churches, and they commonly make deals with speakers, dividing up the spoils of collection. Is Wiese bringing home bundles of tax-free cash? Could be. He may have made himself rich with his story.

I don’t know the answer. Maybe he pays his own expenses when he speaks, and he doesn’t accept offerings. I do know that muzzling other Christians who provide honest testimony is not something you would expect an honest person to do. It’s disgraceful. My wife thought it seemed crooked, just as I did.

I won’t accuse anyone of lying without proof, but he did mute my comment. That’s a fact, and it’s hard to imagine a good excuse for it. It’s hard to imagine a legitimate reason, but other possible reasons are obvious.

Christians should not run from the light. You know who runs from the light? Cockroaches. It’s not a good sign, and when people see you doing it, they suspect the worst.

I hope he has some kind of explanation, but I don’t think I’ll ever find out. I am presenting my story here so other people can pray and judge. It would be great to find out there is some explanation that absolves him.

So Much for European Enlightenment

Got some pretty interesting news this week.

First of all, my wife’s final embassy interview was postponed 10 days. No explanation given. We got the news earlier this week. Today, the embassy’s Facebook page (which, incredibly, exists) said 10 embassy employees had been fired for corruption.

Postponement explained.

My hope, of course, is that they fired people who were likely to DELAY issuance of visas. I hope they kept the ones who rubber-stamp everything.

The second bit of news is that the Europeans have denied her a visa again.

We were trying the Czech Republic. They respond to requests pretty quickly, and they seemed to have a relatively positive attitude toward Africans. For example, the Czechs have a scholarship program that brings Zambians to Czechia to study. We told them we would go to Prague and then Rome.

We weren’t all that excited about visiting Eastern Europe in November, but we knew a Schengen visa would get us into Italy as well as Czechia, so we were willing to take the bad with the good. Actually, I was hoping to change our travel plans after we arrived and cut our Czech time to three days. Once you’re in Europe, they can’t do anything to make you go where you said you would. Nobody needs to spend a whole week in the Czech Republic.

Today we found out we were rejected. They had a ton of documentation proving my wife was not going to stay there illegally and clean toilets for a living, but they didn’t care. We showed them she was about to be cleared to move to the US. We proved assets way beyond what was needed to pay for the trip. We showed them we had already paid for accommodations and tours. We gave them our original marriage certificate, which, bizarrely, they required. Didn’t matter.

So what’s the explanation? Prejudice is the only plausible answer. They just don’t want Africans. They don’t trust them. Maybe they let a few students in, to take study positions where they can be closely monitored, but forget visiting as a tourist. They don’t care how obvious it is that you won’t be a problem. They don’t want to look at the facts.

They put her application in a pile or threw it out, and they waited for her to come back for an answer. Then, without looking her documents over, they told her to take a hike.

The good news is that I’m glad, because this means she will be her sooner, and we will avoid spending a huge amount of money on a trip to a third-rate destination in bad weather. They did me a big favor. Now I don’t have to go to Prague.

I’m sure Czechia is nice, and Prague may be the most beautiful large city on Earth, but it’s a historical and cultural backwater compared to places like Paris and Rome, and these days, it is jam-packed with tourists, even in winter. Tourists are thicker than TBN preachers in hell.

Also, the food looks unbelievably bad. There is a reason we never see Czech restaurants in malls. Remember the dinner scene in Top Secret?

The farther north and east you go in Europe, the more off-putting and strange the food gets. Spain, Italy, France, Greece…excellent. Germany…passable. Scandinavia, England, and Russia…like prison food.

Based on Youtube videos I’ve watched, it appears Russians are swarming Prague. I don’t know how well they mix with tourists from NATO countries. I am not all that eager to mingle with Russian tourists. I suspect they are like British tourists. Drunken, loud, and likely to vomit at any second. Dublin sidewalks are always decorated in British vomit.

Russians sound like the kind of people I would have wanted to hang around with in college.

Americans used to be the problem tourists on this planet. As other countries have accumulated wealth and started to travel more, that distinction seems to have become harder to award. The mainland Chinese do unspeakably rude things, for example. Communism makes people coarse. The Taiwanese are probably great guests.

To get back to Prague, it looks a lot like Disney World. Throngs of tourists everywhere, even in the slow season. Tons of businesses designed for tourists. Lots of scams.

If it’s bad in cold weather, imagine the summer.

Rome sounds better, but my research suggests it’s not what it once was. It’s hard to book activities in November. The crowds are legendary. Also, tourism forums warn about the omnipresent pickpockets, who have formed a de facto industry.

I wasn’t excited about this trip. Wrong season. Lackluster primary destination.

Now that Europe has once again shown us its true, hypocritical nature, my wife should be able to arrive here a week earlier, which is fantastic. We lose 10 days because Zambia is crazy, but we gain days we would have spent traveling. There is absolutely no reason to expect anything but a quick visa issuance. America isn’t Europe. We actually let people in. Boy, do we let people in.

We feel cheated because we didn’t get a second trip this year, but hey, America is huge, and my wife hasn’t seen it. Maybe we can see the Smokies before the leaves fall off. Meanwhile, we can apply for a visa to visit Israel, which is a better destination than any European country.

European visas are not that hard to get once you have a green card. I think the Europeans don’t want to make Uncle Sam mad, and besides, they realize nearly no one wants to leave the US and move to Europe. Half of them are trying to move here.

American winter destinations are generally pretty bad. There are the beaches, which neither of us wants to see. The beautiful non-beach areas will be cold, there will be no leaves on the trees, and many locations will be rainy and muddy. Most of our big tourism cities have turned into mental asylums. Neither of us ski or plan to learn, so forget the western mountains.

Maybe we’ll never see Prague. That’s okay with me. I’ve never wanted to visit. It makes me think of Franz Kafka. Prague will never see my dollars, so it’s a two-edged sword.

When I got the news about the visa, I went online and canceled a whole lot of engagements. Around $3000 for hotels and an Airbnb. Another grand or so for activities. Thank God I didn’t buy airline tickets. There may be some long faces in Czechia and Italy today. Nothing I can do.

I feel God has blessed us once again.

It’s Good if You Think it’s Good

It’s a milestone day. Last night, ghetto kids, and probably many people who were not kids, sacked an area of downtown Philadelphia like Nazis raiding Jewish stores. They fought the police, of course. At about the same time, Target announced it was closing a whole bunch of stores, including locations in Harlem, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco. Hmm. What do those locations have in common? The amazing thing is that Target came out and admitted crime was the reason. Not just crippling theft, but violence which exposed the company to lawsuits from employees, customers, and their families.

Target snitched on its urban customer base. The gloves are off.

What were the stores most prominently mentioned in the Philadelphia story? Apple (phones treasured by ghetto kids), Foot Locker (expensive athletic shoes), and Lululemon (major vendor of trashy twerking pants). Is it a dog whistle if a news organization mentions the companies?

WGN, a big Chicago news station, just ran a story about a Democrat mayor (El Paso) busing illegal aliens to a “sanctuary” city (Chicago) with a black mayor. Two things to take away once you’ve seen the video: Democrat mayor doing what DeSantis and Abbott did, which was supposedly cruel when they did it, and the WGN team sympathizing with him and making it clear the invasion is a problem.

When a major news organization in Chicago starts repeating conservative talking points about illegal aliens, it’s a day of note.

The world really is ending. It’s amazing, watching videos about our sudden plunge into chaos. I feel like I’ve been sucked into the TV screen during a disaster movie. You know how they create fake news shows. “Godzilla just used San Francisco’s South of Market area as a litterbox, and he’s headed for Palo Alto!” “The asteroid has hit, and here’s a live feed of a tsunami swallowing Leonardo Dicaprio’s house!” It’s all happening now, but it’s real.

I predicted this years ago, and even though I believed what I was saying, it’s still hard to fully accept as reality. Vote for whomever you want. Buy a solar roof. Learn to grow potatoes. It won’t help.

Sit back and enjoy the ride. I don’t know what else to say. Sooner or later, the wave will make it to your area.

Every big city in America is becoming Detroit.

Businesses are boarded up all over America. Crime and covid ended them. Covid drove people to remote work, which they really like, because it’s easier to get away with doing very little at home. Now they don’t want to go to cities and support stores, restaurants, and landlords. BLM and Antifa taught people crime was a human right, so even if people wanted to return, many are afraid to. Commercial property values are tanking. Maybe next year you’ll be able to buy the Chrysler Building for a thousand dollars.

A long time ago, I saw Detroit described as a doughnut. The suburbs were the ring, and the center, which was destroyed by the people of Detroit, was the hole. I guess we’re going to see a lot of doughnuts in the near future. A lot of worthless toilets that used to be centers of commerce where decent people could live decent lives.

In other news, I saw a great video about photography. It was about photographer Vivian Maier, sort of. Really, it was about the importance of taking pictures primarily to please yourself.

Maier worked in Chicago, and she left hundreds of thousands of negatives behind. She did not exhibit her work. Somehow, she was discovered after she died. Her photos are excellent. Truly exceptional.

Was she a great photographer, or will anyone who takes half a million pictures produce extraordinary work inadvertently? Is it a million-monkeys thing? I think the explanation has to be talent. There are millions of monkeys out there taking hundreds of thousands of pictures each, and most of them don’t produce much of value.

The gist of the video seems to be that you shouldn’t feel you have to post everything you shoot on the web in order to justify what you do. If it’s satisfying to you, that’s enough, and it’s more validating than likes from people who think Kim Kardashian and Joe Biden are saving the world.

I have been caught up in the mechanics of taking photos. F stops. Lenses. Figuring out endless camera menus. I should be thinking more about whether I like the pictures, and I should not be eager to discard pictures I think are flawed. Sometimes a picture that is over- or underexposed or blurry can be very satisfying.

I should know this better than anyone, because I write and cook primarily to suit my own tastes. I can’t say I would write as much if I knew no one would read it, but know NEARLY no one reads, and I still sit down and type.

As noted in my last post, I decided to get a used Canon SL2 to replace my 350D. I couldn’t make myself sell my lenses, which are nearly worthless, and the camera is worth so little, I would have to either throw it out or let it sit in a closet until my heirs threw it out. I felt like dropping $300 on a new body would make me happier. It arrives today.

I think it was a smart move. I’ll be more willing to risk damaging or losing it than the big new Sony, and the photos should be just as good, albeit a little smaller.

I got a flash for the Sony. I am getting nowhere with it. It works in either TTL (through the lens) or manual mode. My understanding is that TTL is for idiots. The flash receives data from the camera, as though looking through your lens, and it decides what kind of light to give you. The lens tells the camera your F stop and focal length, and your camera relays the information to the flash.

I tried idiot mode yesterday, and I got idiot photos. I turned the light in my dining room down to restaurant levels, and I tried to shoot as though I were taking travel photos in a restaurant. I got very grainy, poorly focused pictures. Because I was using a 15mm lens (I surmise), I also got something resembling vignetting. There were shadows around the photo’s center. I think the flash was not prepared for the wide field of view. The lens I used doesn’t tell the flash anything. It’s a manual lens.

I also tried a longer lens that was not manual, and things were little better, although turning the flash upward and back for indirect light killed the vignetting.

I kept getting really slow shutter speeds, and when I used automatic ISO, it went way up. This increases noise.

As a photo ignoramus, I just assumed a good flash would let you take decent pictures in a restaurant. I didn’t think the shutter would slow down to nothing. I didn’t expect the ISO to skyrocket. I thought the whole purpose of a flash was to fix those problems.

I have not tried using the flash’s manual mode yet. It seems to me that if idiot mode is too hard, manual, which requires knowledge, is still a ways off.

Of course, now that I have a good APS-C camera on the way, to save money, sort of, I am starting to want a new APS-C lens. As was said of King Lear, “He hath ever but slenderly known himself.” I should have seen this coming.

APS-C is good for travel because the camera and lenses are smaller and cheaper, and travel is upcoming.

My wife’s arrival here appears to be very close. The other day I was cleaning up the kitchen, and I considered giving away the T-Fal deep fryer. I find it useless and unpleasant to handle and clean, and it takes up room. She said I should keep it until she gets here, and they we can decide. Her expected arrival is so close, it actually made sense to say that.

If she gets the go-ahead, and we also get a European visa we applied for, we will visit Prague and Rome, so plenty to photograph and film.

My macro efforts are going badly. Part of it is getting use to the new lens and camera, but I’m also having a hard time finding critters to shoot. I had an idea: spray some plants with sugar water. It won’t show on film, and it will draw bees and flies. I may try it.

The guy who did the video I posted did another video about exercises to help photographers make the most of their surroundings. They are intended to help you see potential in things you would usually walk by. I may try them.

Having seen the videos, I feel like I need to amend my photography philosophy. I have been dividing photos into two types: documentary (Louanne and I were at the world’s largest ball of string) and artistic (Check out the amazing bokeh on this tiny orchid). Now I think I have to create subcategories: photos that obey the rules, and those that don’t. People keep telling photographers to make everything sharp and look for textbook composition and lighting, but sometimes a photo is better because it breaks those rules. I think I have to start throwing photos out because they’re bad, not because they would get me bad grades in a community college course. I should hold onto strange photos that are still pleasing.

I like photos that tell a story, but today I realized I also like photos that suggest there is a story no one is telling you. Sometimes a photo is telling you a story, just like a Normal Rockwell painting. “These boys got caught skinny-dipping.” Other pictures suggest something is going on, but you can’t figure out what it is. “This man is grinning, and the woman is furious, but why?”

Lots of things to think about when you take a photo. There are lots of things that can give a photo merit in one way when it appears worthless in other ways.

None of this philosophizing will do me any good until I learn how to work the equipment. I’ll get back to it today.

Bugs are Demanding Models

It has been a while since I got my Sigma 105mm macro lens for my new Sony camera, and I still haven’t been able to accomplish much. It’s hard to get used to the controls, and the lens and camera, together, just seem hard to operate.

I went outside and looked around for macro opportunities, and as luck would have it, a big, fat carpenter bee started feeding on the blossoms on the weeds by my house. I ran over and started trying to capture him doing something interesting. It was pretty much impossible to focus in time to get a decent shot. I got one depressing picture of him flying out of the scene.

Later on, I saw some kind of wasp or bee on a blossom, and he was taking his time, so I didn’t have to chase him. I got all excited and tried to shoot him. Afterward, I realized I had forgotten to check the shutter speed and ISO. Here is the best picture I got, and this is AFTER a lot of doctoring. Of course, it’s slightly better at full size.

The exposure is horrendous, and it can’t be fixed.

Yesterday, I decided to try shooting in RAW format, and today I tried editing. I tried to photograph some lantana blossoms. I could not get a good sharp picture, and the photo seemed dark in spite of checking the exposure. I used Photoshop and Camera Raw to try to fix the picture up, but it’s still a mess. I only took one shot because I had to shoot from a very uncomfortable position.

I’ve been thinking maybe I got the wrong lens. The Sigma is heavy, and the best magnification you can get is 1x. A Youtube macro guy says the Laowa 58mm macro is the way to go. It’s small and light, and you can photograph things between one and three inches away, which makes life easier. It does 2x magnification, so you can get shots the Sigma won’t get.

I have a perfectly good APS-C Sigma macro lens for my old Rebel 350D, but I don’t want to spend the rest of the year taking 8MP pictures. When I first started thinking about getting better equipment, I assumed I would use my old lenses, and people said I should get a newer body that would fit them. They recommended the T7, also called the 2000D. It looked great compared to my 350D, but while I was researching it, I learned that DSLR’s are now obsolescent, so I didn’t go for it. I bought a mirrorless.

Today I started considering the T7 again. I found out the resale value on my old lenses is about enough to buy three pizzas, so selling them will not be very rewarding, and they are capable of very good work. I looked around, and I decided to pick up a used Canon SL2 body.

This body is considerably better than a T7. It’s lighter than my full frame. It does video. It has 24 megapixels. It will give me an excuse to keep my old camera bag. I can use it when I’m afraid to take the Sony out or when I travel to places where good cameras tend to get stolen.

Now I should be able to get some decent macro shots, one way or the other. Eventually, I should get somewhere with the Sigma on the Sony camera. Until then, I can produce some useful work with the Canon.

I have an external flash coming, along with a cheap flash diffuser. I learned that you need a fast shutter to do macro on anything that moves. Bugs flap fast. To get good lighting, you use a flash, and the diffuser prevents it from looking like, well, flash.

Working with raw files sounded intimidating, but it doesn’t seem too hard. It seems pretty much like fixing JPG’s in Photoshop Elements, but you have a wider range of adjustments, and you are a lot more likely to be able to save iffy shots.

Tomorrow my used Laowa 15mm zero-distortion lens gets here. That should be a lot of fun while traveling. We are hoping to go to Rome, and it sounds like the perfect lens for shooting inside old buildings. I don’t know what I’ll do with it here, though.

My wife should be here for good in as little as 5 weeks. It is possible I will meet her in another country and fly home with her. That would give us a lot of photo opportunities. She is very supportive of the whole thing, because like me, she has very, very few childhood pictures of herself. We want to do better.

Sorry for the lame pictures, but I am plugging away, and I expect better results before long.

How Low Can the Bar Go?

People like to joke that the movie Idiocracy was prophetic, but it’s not a very good joke, because it’s really happening.

We now have a brain-damaged senator who either will not or cannot wear grown-up clothes on the floor of the Senate, and instead of reprimanding him, the Senate has changed the rules to allow him to wear gym shorts and hoodies. Of course, it true leftist elite fashion, the Senate’s leaders did not apply the rule change to the little people. Everyone except senators has to show up dressed properly. Now it is quite literally possible for a senator to show up wearing only a jockstrap, while his underlings have to wear business clothes.

Remember Idiocracy’s President Camacho? Well, we now have a Senator Camacho, and his name is John Fetterman.

Fetterman actually showed up to meet the leader of another country in his bum attire. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s Fetterman, showed up in a sweatshirt to address the Senate, and Fetterman wore his usual gear. Bros!

Fetterman is pretty clearly crippled, intellectually. He has to use a captioning machine to understand people, and he can’t speak coherently. It may well be that his caregivers can’t put a suit on him in the morning because he throws tantrums or has some stroke-related mental issue that makes him unwilling to do what the other 99 Senators do.

Someone wrote a joke for Fetterman, and he has used it twice to criticize mature people who talked about him treating OUR Senate chamber like L.A. Fitness.

Nate Silver is a celebrity who makes money predicting outcomes in the political world. He made a joke suggesting he thought people were overreacting to Fetterman’s wardrobe choices, and Fetterman responded, “I dress like you predict.” He apparently lacks the mental capacity to tell critics from friends.

Later the same day, apparently pleased with himself, Fetterman responded to criticism from Governer Ron DeSantis, saying, “I dress like he campaigns.”

Maybe he has been using this line all week. “I dress like you made this Happy Meal.” “I dress like you answer my email for me.”

Later on, Fetterman blessed us all with an announcement that he would put on a suit when the House stopped trying to shut the government down and fully supported Ukraine. He referred to his colleagues in the legislature using slang describing males addicted to masturbation.

No mention of women. Sexism?

It’s reasonable to say that fictional President Camacho is more dignified than a real US Senator.

This isn’t normal. Most people have an extremely strong herd instinct, and they think whatever people around them are doing is fine, regardless of how different it is from what they were doing a short time ago. My herd instinct is not strong, and I have the Holy Spirit to tell me what’s normal. I remember what normal times were like. They were not like this.

Fetterman is disgracing himself these days by attacking people who comment on his disability, calling it “bullying.” He started crying about it yesterday. Shameless, dishonest self-pity. Just what you don’t want in a person in leadership.

If you’re disabled to the point where you can’t serve, you should resign. If you’re in the Senate, or if you’re any kind of man, you don’t cry when people criticize you. Imagine how he would cry as president, when confronted with a major disaster or a military attack. Democrat Harry Truman said, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Trump has been indicted falsely dozens of times, he’s facing the possibility of prison time, and he shakes it off like it never happened.

To make the picture even worse, yesterday Joe Biden proved, beyond any dispute, that he is demented. He’s still able to walk around and handle a lot of his daily tasks, but dementia has ruined his memory.

The commander-in-chief of the United States military should have a functioning memory. Is this a controversial statement?

He was speaking in Manhattan, and he told a false story about the well-known rally in Charlottesville. Then he moved on. Then he told the story again, in a way that proved he had no idea he had just told it. He repeated it nearly verbatim.

Repetition is part of dementia. My dad repeated things all the time, especially questions. At first, I thought he was doing it to be pushy, because he was that kind of person. Eventually, I realized he couldn’t help it. If he asked me the same thing twice in one minute, it wasn’t because he wanted to get on my back. He was just forgetful.

Anyone who has dealt with dementia patients can tell you how this works. It’s standard behavior.

He also walked into a flag yesterday while walking to a podium to appear with the president of Brazil, and then he walked off the stage without shaking his hand. His Brazilian counterpart made an angry gesture and walked off.

On top of all this, he spoke to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and told them how glad he was to be speaking to the Congressional Black Caucus. And they were sitting right in front of him, being mostly not black.

There is no longer any way for leftists to deny that Joe Biden is senile. Old people who are still smart enough to be president don’t tell the same stories twice a few minutes apart.

In English, Biden repeated a false story about a rally. The Chinese communists ran it through a translating device, and the output said, “INVADE TAIWAN NOW.”

So we have Dwayne Camacho in the Senate and Grampa Simpson in the Oval Office. Idiocracy is here. It has started, and it’s going to get worse.

We are told Rome was invaded and sacked by ignorant barbarians. America is worse. We’re becoming the barbarians.

In the background, behind the nutty political news, there are countless fathers watching helplessly while perverts with medical degrees and judge’s robes prepare their sons for castration and their daughters to have their vaginas sewn shut and their breasts sliced off and discarded.

It’s always the fathers. Sexual perversion generally enters a society with the fierce support of women.

The other day I read about a man in a blue state who is trying to prevent medical perverts from giving his daughter drugs to prevent her from becoming a woman. He is already under a court order forcing him to call his daughter by a boy’s name and pretend she’s male. How must that feel; being told what to call your daughter in your own house, when you know it’s factually wrong?

Imagine his frustration, sorrow, and anger. How must it feel to have strangers collude with your crazy ex-wife to drug, deform, and mutilate the child you held as a baby? What is it like to imagine your hopes for your baby’s future, resting in a cold, bloody, stainless steel pan?

This morning, I prayed for God to send spirits to evaluate the world the way they evaluated Sodom. I begged him to come for us before things get worse. This place is disgusting. It’s already intolerable for those Christians who are not fortunate enough to live in relatively safe zones like the one where I am. Even here, it’s going to get so bad, no decent person will be able to stand it.

Evil has a way of moving from cities to the country. I’ve seen it.

When I was a kid, men started wearing long hair in cities, and people in the country made fun of them. They said they looked like girls. A decade or so later, rural Appalachia, where I spent my summers, was full of men who groomed themselves like Phil Robertson and his sons. So was the rest of the South. Robertson wore his hair short in the Sixties, but he eventually went along with the crowd. The same kind of thing is happening with perversion. Count on it.

I’m not saying long hair is evil. I’m saying the long hair trend of the Sixties, which was spawned by an evil culture, spread to resistant areas quickly. If the Beatles had worn orange shirts, and people in the country had started wearing them, it wouldn’t make orange shirts evil, but it would show how influential evil people are.

It’s too bad we can’t go back in spaceships, abduct people from the Fifties, bring them here, put them in focus groups, and make them look at the news. I’d give anything to watch them react.

This planet is washed up. I can’t wait for this to end. I just want to be among my own kind.

Someone Wise Guy Would Sell a Product to Make Them More Comfortable

Yesterday, I resurrected my bush hog after several years, and I learned a few things that could help other people.

There are different names for bush hogs. “Brush hog.” “Rotary cutter.” “Brush cutter.” I call it a bush hog because that’s the term my grandfather used.

It’s a giant lawnmower you pull behind a tractor. A shaft connects it to the tractor’s motor, and a huge apparatus somewhat like a lawnmower blade spins underneath it, cutting weeds and even small trees. I call it a giant lawnmower, but it’s not for lawns. It’s for getting rid of stubborn plants you hate.

It’s a very crude tool, but when stuff gets deep, you need it. It’s also a cheap substitute for a flail mower, which is what you really want if you can afford it. A flail mower will really wipe out brush. It will have problems with saplings a bush hog will take down easily, though.

My bush hog is a 72″ model, so it’s very heavy. The tractor hitch keeps the front off the ground, and there is a little pivoting wheel in the rear that serves a similar purpose, although it’s perfectly okay to run the cutter with the rear wheel off the ground. I think it’s mainly there to keep the cutter from bottoming out.

When I tried to put my cutter back on the tractor, I ran into problems. There were two mysterious chains attached to the front, and I could not figure out where they attached to the tractor.

When I asked for help on the web, I was told these were “check chains” or “limiting chains.” They keep the rear of the cutter up. I was told you can omit the top link and rely on these chains instead. Because chains bend, they give when the rear of the cutter hits the ground, allowing it to swing up. This supposedly prevents pressure off the top link, which would otherwise be compressed.

It looks like this is a giant load of steaming BS. The chains appear to be unnecessary. My cutter, which is still made, doesn’t come with chains. The guy who sold it to me must have bought them.

There is a company that has gone so far as to manufacture these chains as a kit, complete with little bars to use to connect them at both ends. To me, this seems like selling people umbrellas because they’re too dumb to come inside.

My tractor’s first owner was a dentist. He and his wife seemed like wonderful people, but he was not a mechanical or landscaping genius. If you’ve seen the way he had my old brush fork tines attached to the tractor’s bucket, you know what I mean. It was a disaster. He used 4 turnbuckles to chain the tines to the bucket, bending it, and the tines were never rigid. They moved around all the time. He jammed two pieces of 4×4 in the bucket to resist the pressure from the chains.

The tines probably cost him two or three grand. They were made very well, apart from the design. They appeared to have been made in the USA. I didn’t care, because I could not stand using them any more. I cut them to pieces and reassembled them as one quick-attach unit, and it’s fantastic. I converted the bucket to quick-attach, too, so now I have two useful attachments instead of one attachment what works poorly.

If you can’t do steel fab, you are at a big disadvantage in this life.

I still have maybe 45 pounds of steel to throw out. Not sure what to do with 4 huge turnbuckles.

He also sold me a tractor with serious hydraulic leaks, which I cured in a short session with one wrench. Two fittings weren’t tightened enough. He told me I would need new fittings, or I could do what he did: top off the tractor after every use. Meanwhile, the shop floor kept getting oiled.

To get back on topic, I found out my cutter was put together wrong. This appears to be the sole reason it needed chains. I don’t think the chain company puts this information in its ads.

My cutter has a couple of flat bars that reach up to the tractor’s top link. At the top, between them, there is a U-shaped bar with two sets of holes in it. Whoever put this cutter together ran two bolts through the bars and the U-shaped part. In this configuration, the U-shaped bar serves no purpose, and it can’t move.

In reality, the U-bar is supposed to be held in place by one bolt. It’s supposed to swing freely. The other holes are for the top link pin. When the rear of the cutter hits something, the U-bar swings, allowing the cutter to swing upward.

I learned this stuff from a great video, which I will embed here. It will explain the situation so I don’t have to post pictures.

I learned something else about my bush hog. It has parts it may not need.

On the front of the deck, there is a bar with little places where short chains can be attached. There are only a few chains on the cutter now. They are maybe a foot long, and they hang down in front of the cutter, which is open so weeds can go in. It looks like they’re supposed to stop flying objects the blades kick up.

I used to think I should go to Tractor Supply and get more chains. I now suspect the dentist had a totally useless item welded onto his cutter. It’s obviously not factory.

When things are thrown out from under a bush hog, they can move pretty fast. I know this because there is a hole around 5″ long in the side of my bush hog. Something took off from under the cutter while he was using it, and it flew so fast it went right through steel plate. This probably happened right before he got the hanging chains.

It may be that the item that flew out was a piece of a blade. I think this is probably the case, because it left a long, thin hole. A rock would have left a round hole. Actually, a rock that small would surely have broken up.

I see some people on the web saying chains are great, but if objects can fly so fast they go through steel plate, what is a little wimpy chain going to do? Maybe they work. I don’t know. I plan to keep researching.

I don’t get off the tractor while the blades are moving fast, and I wouldn’t let anyone get near me while I’m using the bush hog. Best to keep them off the whole parcel where I’m working.

Hooking the PTO shaft up was no fun. The button that releases the coupler was stuck, so I had to hit it with a hammer. I got some good tips about making it easier.

I want to replace the shaft with a better one. Squirrels chewed up some plastic shielding around the shaft, and it looks like it’s so messed up it can’t be used without falling off. I don’t want to buy replacement parts if I can get something superior.

The shielding is hard to put on correctly, unless I’m doing it wrong. Far as I know, I have to use a huge screwdriver and pry a tough stainless ring out in order to remove the shields, and then I have to find a way to get it back in. I didn’t put it in yesterday, and the shields slipped back and let the weeds wrap up.

I only need to bush hog a couple of times per year. Thank goodness for that. But even at twice a year, I don’t want to spend 40 minutes attaching or detaching an implement.

If your bush hog is rigged up wrong, this post should be very helpful to you. If you know anything I don’t, let me know in the comments.

I Think I See Waldo Behind a Tree

My efforts to become an award-winning photographer are going poorly at the moment.

I took some okay photos with my old Canon 350D and my new Sony ZV1M2, and I got all excited and bought a Sony A7IV, which is sort of a low-end pro camera. I got myself a 24-70mm lens and started shooting.

First problem: macro is not really an option.

I had been doing macro photos with the Canon, and I was extremely pleased with them. My farm is a good place for macro photos. I guess any place is good for macro photos, because you’re shooting things the size of a quarter. Shrinking the size of your subjects increases the number of potential subjects per unit of area. You can spend all day shooting macro in your house.

The new lens does not like macro. You can’t get close enough to little things to really fill the screen, so you end up with longer shots you have to crop, and even with this camera’s huge sensor, you can only crop so much. Also, I’m not very good at using the camera.

In addition to these problems, I have a lot of mosquitoes right now, and I need to get on the tractor and bush hog a lot of the farm. Thorny, unproductive blackberry bushes are taking over, and there is also some kind of stinging weed that sets your ankles on fire. The farm is not the most pleasant studio at the moment.

Giving up on macro puts me in a position where I have to find bigger things to shoot, so now I have many fewer subjects to choose from. I am struggling to find subjects, and it is not going all that well.

I ordered a real macro lens, and while I wait, I’m shooting bigger stuff, including landscapes.

I think my farm is beautiful. I treasure it. God used it to save me from Miami. But let’s get real. The land is flat by landscape photo standards, there are no creeks or rivers, there is no lake, there aren’t many big flowers…it’s not like the same size parcel in Switzerland or Norway.

Yesterday I walked all over, trying to find things to shoot. My understanding was that it was best to shoot when the sun was low, so I went out in the afternoon. The sun was still blazing like a thermonuclear blast, which, I guess, it was. The grass looked bleached. I didn’t know how to cope with the light.

I shot a bunch of garbage anyway, because I knew it would help me learn. Trying to find subjects is good practice even when you fail, and I was also getting familiar with the camera.

The landscape shots, apart from being shot in kind of a boring area, seem like subjectless photos. Photoshop people into them, and they would be fine. As it is, they’re like big empty frames.

I’m starting to wonder: are there places where you just can’t take a lot of wide shots, even if you’re good? I’m not saying I’m good, but I have taken some decent pictures.

I think a lot of people would say a good photographer can take great photos anywhere. I’m guessing, because that sounds like the kind of thing people would say, because they say things like that. But I have to point out that when Ansel Adams wanted to take great photos, he went to Yosemite. He didn’t hole up in his house, shooting dust bunnies and refrigerator magnets.

I Googled his photos, and I don’t see any shots of his toaster or recliner.

The macro lens will arrive tomorrow, and I expect it to save my life. You can never run out of macro subjects.

So, getting back to things like landscapes and street photos, I’m wondering if I’m going to have to start getting in the car and wandering around in public. Also, am I going to live for traveling with my wife? When you travel, you run into good stuff all the time.

I think I should get a wide angle lens for the future. I mean like 12mm or so. Not a fisheye, either. One that leaves straight lines straight. A really wide lens will give me stuff which is very different from my current minimum focal length of 24mm. It will also let me shoot in very small places without losing everything except someone’s elbow or a napkin dispenser.

I have looked at photos from different wide angle lenses, and I feel like a person’s first wide lens should be very, very wide. When you spend a lot on a lens, you want it to do something very different from what your old lenses do. If all you have is a 24-70mm, you don’t want to buy a 20mm lens.

I like the dramatic feel of wide angle photos, and it’s neat, the way they can make the observer seem isolated from the subject matter. When a lens pushes people away, it lets you know you’re not part of the action. You’re like John Cusack, in the portal, watching a lesbian live his intended life with his ex-girlfriend.

In Singapore’s airport, I used my phone to take a wide shot I really liked. It helped motivate me to think about wide lenses. I tried to find out what sort of lens the phone had. I figured that if I could find this out, I could get a lens just like it.

It turned out the center lens on my phone was (allegedly) a 24mm. I have that already, in my zoom.

If I lived in Singapore, I could go to the airport and take the same shot with my zoom, to see if the 24mm measurement is really correct. Can’t do it from here, though.

The web says my phone’s sensor has 50 megapixels. Can that be true? That’s insane. I think the Hubble only has 40. You get 50 with the center lens, 10 with the long lens, and 12 with the telephoto. On one $750 camera. Which is supposed to be a telephone.

The world has gone nuts.

The wide lens on this phone is said to be 13mm. If I had started thinking about still photography before the trip, I could have done more wide shots.

Is 13mm on the phone the same as 13mm on a full-frame camera? You tell me.

Really good wide lenses, like nearly all really good lenses, are really expensive. I found one that could be a bargain, though. A company named Laowa makes a 9mm job which features zero distortion. It’s affordable, it’s very small, and it’s light. It gets good reviews. The only problem is that it does not do autofocus.

Do you really have to have autofocus all the time, especially when you’re doing crazy-wide shots? I don’t really see myself suddenly developing an urge to shoot moving subjects at 9mm. Also, the depth of field is always large with this thing.

It’s difficult to make equipment decisions when you know as little about photography as I do. I am seeking advice on the web. Maybe trial and error are inevitable.

When the macro lens gets here tomorrow, I should be able to produce some acceptable shots. It should keep me supplied with subjects for, well, ever. Meanwhile, I’ll keep looking for ways to get good material out of the zoom. I might pick up the Laowa.

At ISO 2000, I Don’t Mind the Grey Skies

My new camera arrived today. I decided I can now call myself a photographer. I have decent equipment that will allow me to create really excellent photos. Can you call yourself a photographer when you’re not highly trained? Yes, if you are capable of doing acceptable work. This is my ruling, based on the fact that there are innumerable experienced professionals out there, making a living, who couldn’t take a decent passport photo on the best days of their lives.

Maybe someone else out there is trying to decide which mid-range mirrorless camera to get for travel, so I will issue a couple of conclusions.

I was torn between two models: the Sony A7IV, which is full-size, and the AC7II, which is nearly the same camera in a compact package. I fretted a lot about this. I am a pretty experienced world traveler, and I know what it’s like to lug heavy stuff around while walking several miles per day.

Get the bigger camera. The difference between the compact and full-size jobs is nearly nothing, and once you put a huge lens on your camera, you will realize how stupid you were to worry about it.

I bought a 24-70mm zoom, and it’s as big as a can of corn. It’s bigger than the 17-17mm EF lens I had on the old Canon 350D. Attaching it to a camera that weighs 4 ounces less and is about 1/4″ shorter across the front is going to make no difference at all, and bigger stuff works better because there are fewer internal compromises. Big stuff overheats less. It has more features. It’s what you want.

This camera has a much better viewfinder than the small one, and it’s in the center, the correct place. It’s also shaded, unlike the one on the AC7II. You don’t want to fight with the sun when you look through a camera with old creaky eyeballs.

If all I had was a pancake (stubby non-zoom) lens, maybe I could bring myself to care about the difference in camera body size, but with this mechanical whale hanging off the front, the body doesn’t make much difference.

One disappointment: no charger tray. There is a charger, but you can’t attach it to the battery. You have to plug it into the camera itself, so if you have multiple batteries, you can’t charge one while using another. Amazon has a fantastic charger tray for $19. It takes two batteries, and it accepts USB-C and that other connector which is shaped like a “D.” It will charge two batteries at once, and it will give you a use for your old USB cables.

The bag B&H included with the camera at no charge is great. It’s a high-quality bag, just like the Lowepros I’ve had. The free memory card is a $120 Sony. The free second battery is a somewhat questionable brand, but they are all somewhat questionable, and this brand, Watson, is the least questionable. It costs something like $60 by itself, so no complaints here. A new Sony battery runs $80, so if this one is any good at all, I will be very pleased.

Sony sent its own battery empty. Bummer. I stuck the Watson in the camera, and it said it was at 58%. I’m charging it while I type this, and I’ll have to survive the weekend using the camera as a tray. Then the new one will arrive. This camera will supposedly take nearly 600 shots on one Sony-battery charge, so I should be okay. It will do two hours of 4K video, which I never plan to shoot. I’m a 1080p guy until someone changes my mind.

The Sony strap is not great. It’s thin, so it will cut into my neck. I’ll have to find a replacement.

I’m going to take the camera outside and see what I can shoot. I hope it’s less annoying than the 350D. The 350D is a fine camera, but it does some irritating things, like shutting off the internal display right before you take a picture.

I might conceivably read the new camera’s manual, but I doubt it. That would be cheating.

The lens looks perfectly fine to me. I’m not much of a photographer, and I try not to be a cork-sniffer. I know serious pros can criticize any lens. I’m going to shoot some regular shots and some extreme closeups and then render a premature, poorly-informed verdict. My bet is that if this lens has any real issues, it will be at least 6 months before I realize it.

I don’t look forward to lugging this thing around, and I hate looking like a Japanese tourist, but I should be rewarded abundantly for the effort.

I’m really happy about this. I did the right thing. I didn’t worry too much about saving my pennies, the way I did when I got the Canon and the small mirrorless Sony. I got something that will get the job done for a good long while. There will be fewer times when I can’t do something well because the camera won’t let me, and years from now, if the rapture is that far off, my family will have a lot of wonderful imagery to help us relive shared history.

I’ll tell you something weird about doing little bits of nature photography. It relaxes me to look at my own work. I don’t know why. When I take a shot I like, and I put it on the TV and stare at it, my blood pressure plummets. All my worries vanish. It makes me wonder if putting a few framed photos up in the house will improve my health and mental state.

I did not see this coming.

I generally don’t feel this way when I look at other people’s photos.

I supposed it makes sense that looking at God’s work is a little bit like being with God, who radiates peace in all directions.

Guess I should order a strap and then put the camera to the test. It will be a big relief, taking the ISO above 200.

MORE

I fired the new camera up and wandered around looking for things to shoot.

First thing I realized: this is not an ideal macro lens. You can get some good shots with it, but it’s not all that easy, and when you shoot things that are really small, you have to crop a lot.

Here are a couple of things I shot. I don’t think the first shot is great, but it’s acceptable for today’s purpose, which is to get the camera to work. It’s a bunch of leaves on a tree in the side yard.

Here is another weed blossom. The depth of field is too shallow, but I love the dark green background. It’s less grainy at the original resolution. Still too grainy to blow up.

Here’s one more weed blossom, cropped two different ways.

Finally, a shot of the goat shed. Here, I was learning how to avoid lying in the manure by using the flip screen. I extended the screen and looked at it while I lowered the camera.

I am able to take shots that were out of reach for the Canon 350D, and I have a lot more room to crop, so all is well.