Just Let me Brew

My first 6-gallon Megamouth Torpedo ball lock keg is still not here, and I feel like my life cannot continue until it arrives.

Have you ever been in a situation like this? You want or need something, you order it figuring it will arrive in an acceptable amount of time so you won’t lose your mind, and then it keeps being delayed and delayed and delayed.

I ordered two Nukatap beer faucets 17 days ago. Amazon and UPS kept telling me they were coming. They were almost here. “Get ready.” “We really mean it.” They were out for delivery. “Honest.”

Then they weren’t out for delivery any more. They were coming after the weekend. Then they were coming a few days later. Then they didn’t have a date, but they were still sure. They were coming. Of course, I never got them.

I ordered a keg 13 days ago, which is a long time in a world where stuff commonly arrives in three days. I used Morebeer.com, which is usually a pretty good site. For days, they did nothing. I contacted them, and suddenly, the keg was on the way.

All this time, I was losing brewing days. I was afraid I would run out of beer, and I didn’t want to use my existing equipment to brew more. I kept thinking, “It will be here tomorrow. I can wait one more day.”

Then the keg arrived, and it was the wrong size. They sent a new one, and it’s supposed to arrive today. Wonder what size it will be.

Eight days ago, I decided I really wanted three kegs, so I ordered another. I used an Ebay seller who had been okay with earlier buys. As of today, Ebay says the kegs have shipped. Oops; wait. “Shipped” means a shipping label has been printed. The kegs have gone nowhere.

Yesterday I went ahead and made a batch of stout. I used one of my plastic buckets. It will be fine, but a keg is easier to use and clean. It will cool faster when I fill it with hot wort and throw it in the pool. You can’t pitch yeast into wort when it’s hot, so it’s a pain when it takes a long time to cool.

Today, Fedex says Morebeer’s replacement is out for delivery. Am I supposed to believe it?

I have ingredients for a lager. I want to get it going. I really, truly do not want to use a bucket. I want to ferment under pressure, and that means a keg.

Pressure won’t make the beer any better, but it will speed it up. So I’m delaying brewing so I can speed it up. Not sure that makes sense.

I need to learn about pressure brewing because if it works as it should, I plan to make it my default method for lagers. It’s not great for ales because pressure discourages the formation of flavor chemicals that give ales their reason to exist. If I can’t brew under pressure, I can’t learn, so all I get from my next batch is beer.

Back when I wrote the recipe, I called it “Death Hop Lager.” This impressively witty name was intended to reflect the use of a ton of hops. It came in at around 60 IBU’s, which is kind of a lot. Budweiser, which has several similarities to beer, is said to reach about 10.

I am planning to do a version which runs around 43 IBU’s. I think a 60-IBU lager is more of a message or a protest than a beer, although it was very good.

More

The keg finally arrived. Of course, Fedex left it at the end of the driveway, 100 yards away, even though they have the gate code.

Right now, I have a wheat beer and an improved American Lager kegged and chilling. I have a stout which should be ready in 5 days. Because the keg is here, I’m in a position to make the lager I was talking about. Things are settling down. I have three acceptable brews on tap, two more should be ready to drink in no more than two days, a stout should be ready in a week, and a lager should be ready in two to three weeks.

I am almost at the point where I don’t have to be concerned that I’ll have to drink one beer over and over because nothing else is ready and everything else has been consumed or poured down the sink due to brewing problems.

I’m not sure what to call the improved lager. I think I’ll call it “Great Again Lager,” but I’m not sure. The wheat beer is full of esters, so I may call it “Aunt Ester Ale.” I’m considering calling my improved American lager “Yard Boss.” I thought about calling it “Lawn Ranger” and “John Beere,” but those names were taken. As was Mowinbrau. “Mower Low Life” isn’t taken.

Things are coming online. My draft system is becoming stable and reliable. I’m developing a stockpile of beers.

Being impeded is very annoying, but I’m winning, and God is on my side, so everything is fine.

Don’t try to tell me you don’t like “Aunt Ester Wheat Ale.” You know you love it.

God Wants to Give You the Things You Want to Earn

The other day, I dreamed I was at Thanksgiving dinner with my mother’s relatives, and they were hunched over their plates, bolting their food like starving hogs (even though they were fat) and blocking other people’s access to it. I saw this dream as God’s comment on the church. We go to satisfy ourselves, and we think very little about giving and helping.

Last night, my wife dreamed she brought food to her family, and she tried to put a plate together so she could give her dad his favorite dish. Her relatives swarmed the food and took it all so she couldn’t bring him anything.

Seems like our dreams are pretty similar. Relatives are fellow Christians because the church is supposed to be, literally, a family. Churches teach selfishness, and it comes from good authority, because so many preachers are selfish. They know the material.

She also dreamed she saw a man with a knife preparing to go into a church and kill people. She went in to warn them, and he attacked her instead. A man appeared and gave her a smooth stone. She threw it at the attacker, and it slammed into his forehead. A little man grew out of the wound and started choking the attacker. He represented the power of God.

The armed man is Satan, spewing his tasty but toxic doctrine, and Rhodah represented herself, warning people. The man with the stone must have been an angel. The smoothness of the stone represents the way we are polished and refined by the flow of the Holy Ghost and tongues. A smooth stone will fly truer than a stone that has peaks and flats.

When you try to curse people God has anointed, the curse goes back to you. The man with the knife tried to silence Rhodah, so God silenced him.

Both of us are rejected by preachers. Why? Because we expose grifters and proud ignoramuses, if you want to get down to the root of it. They preach whatever it takes to bring themselves money, financial security, power, and admiration. People who expose them and tell people what God actually wants us to have threaten their rackets.

We have been taught that God loves everyone, but that’s not in the Bible, and it’s not true. God hates some people. If you want God to hate you, be a hypocrite and a leech. It will be a good start. Starve his children of real food and feed them poison.

Sometimes I think there are so many preachers in hell, it’s hard for a whore or a murderer to find a place to stay.

Christians who say God loves everyone only have one verse to point to: “For God so loved the world…” But that’s very general. There are lots of verses in which God says he hates certain types of people. Is the Bible true or not?

The tribulation is described in the Bible as the day of God’s anger. A lot of people will still be here, unraptured. Their suffering will be unprecedented, and it will come from God’s anger. That’s not a sign of intense affection.

God has favorites. That’s what “favor” means. There is a privileged class among human beings, which is why leftists, who take talking points from their father Satan, are trying to shame people over what they see as privilege.

Doesn’t God love everyone equally? Doesn’t look that way. Speaking of Israel’s destruction, God told Ezekiel that if Noah, Daniel, and Job were there, they would deliver only themselves by their righteousness. He didn’t mention big names you would expect, like Moses or David. The Bible calls John the disciple Jesus loved, and the others didn’t get the same treatment.

In Matthew 7, Jesus tells nominal Christians he never knew them as he sends them to the outer darkness. He addresses people who claim they have prophesied, cast out demons, and done many wonderful works. Sounds like preachers to me.

It’s funny how much evil has been done because of a desire for security. We struggle to amass wealth because we equate it with power and safety; we see wealth as a sort of godhood. We try to get jobs with guaranteed security. We invest in things we call “securities” which have guaranteed interest rates.

I know human nature and preachers well enough to assure you that most preachers are very concerned about security. The Catholics provide their priests with everything, and guess who made that their policy? Priests. Preachers in other denominations work the crowds, accumulating money to stash away and invest, or just to spend on things like orange mansions, plastic surgery, tacky $9000 shoes, and sluts. They teach people the false doctrine of tithing, because it obligates people to give them regular payments.

We have this idea that we can stabilize ourselves with wealth. We can cement ourselves in place so nothing can touch us. It’s an illusion. Elon Musk could lose everything in a week. The tech era’s history is full of people who went from billionaire status to working every day to feed themselves. Social Security can fail. Tenure can be revoked. Companies that provide annuities can vanish due to mismanagement. Pensions can be stolen. Even if your financial blessings don’t disappear, things can happen to you that make them worthless to you. A billionaire can have an accident that leaves him paralyzed from the neck down.

Everyone wants a rock to stand on, but the only rock is God.

The world teaches us to give little and work hard to accumulate more. It says we can store up so much money, nothing will be able to harm us. Christianity is different. A Christian knows he has to give, and it can’t be a rare thing. He has to have a lifestyle of giving. You don’t say, “I’ll give Uncle Ernie 50 more dollars, and then I won’t have to give him anything any more.” You give to Uncle Ernie, and then you keep your knees bent and look around for the next person God wants you to help. You don’t glue yourself down and say you’ve given enough. You’re supposed to be a river, and rivers keep flowing.

Most preachers are preparing for old age the world’s way. They think if they have enough Social Security money and retirement savings, they’ll be able to live in a nice place and have nice people change their diapers. They want sources of wealth that come from worldly sources, with worldly guarantees. They don’t want to keep trusting God because they haven’t developed the habit.

God showed me we are afraid of 4 things: giving, believing, loving, and lack.

When Jesus gave the loaves and fishes, he wasn’t afraid of any of these things. He was not worried that giving would lead to bad consequences. He wasn’t afraid to love the people he fed, even though most of them turned on him later. He wasn’t afraid he and the disciples would go hungry if they shared. He wasn’t afraid to believe God would supply more.

When he gave, on one occasion, he got 12 full baskets of food back. One for each disciple, as I saw Mark Hemans point out. He had much more than he would have had, had he held onto what he started with.

Actually, the disciples did the giving. He just told them to do it.

He didn’t bury the food in a hole. He didn’t trade it for gold and hide it. He didn’t give it to the Roman government so they could send him Social Security payments later.

If you get used to giving and believing and loving as a lifestyle, God will look after you. But what happens to a preacher who teaches lies to get money, proving he has no faith in God’s generosity?

I got a funny revelation today. For a long time, I’ve been trying to get God to communicate more clearly with me. When I’ve felt his presence fall on me, I’ve asked him what I can do for him or what he wants to do through me, hoping he will help me hear him. Today, I realized the right thing is to ask God what he can do for me.

It sounds selfish, but the truth is that I can’t do anything for God. All success and power come from him, not me. Many people think it pleases God when they say things like, “Just give me this much, and I won’t ask for more.” I believe it pleases him when you say, “Please give me more and more and more.” After all, Jesus said we have not because we ask not.

Satan and his children aren’t shy about taking as much as possible from us, so presumably God is happy to give us a great deal. Deliverance. Revelation. Healing. Protection. Wealth. Families.

If you’re a person who can’t be cursed, then good things can’t hurt you. I remember saying there was nothing wrong with alcohol. There are entire peoples who don’t have serious issues with it. The problem is the person and his demons. Wealth is the same way. Some people can’t be hurt by billions of dollars. Others can take a hundred-dollar bill and destroy themselves in an hour. I know a person like that. If you give her anything, she uses it to torture you and destroy herself.

The other day I saw a celebrity bragging that she wasn’t leaving her kids anything. She said she and her husband were going to spend it all. She said she didn’t want money to ruin them.

What an imbecile. If money is a curse to her kids, they are already ruined whether they have it or not, because they are cursed. There is something seriously wrong with them. If her kids aren’t cursed, then all the money in the world can’t harm them, but it can be a blessing to them.

She is confessing she believes her children are weak, selfish, immature, and stupid. She’s saying she and her husband didn’t do their jobs.

Wealth does not corrupt people. It’s beneficial and harmless. Corrupt people destroy themselves when they get wealth.

Drugs are the same way. I’ve had access to things like Vicodin, Dilaudid, morphine, and codeine syrup. I never became addicted or had much interest in it. I never raided a stash, got hooked, and started buying Fleet enemas because opioids made it impossible for me to relieve myself. Many people can’t be in a house with opioids or even cans of spray paint. Is morphine bad? Is Dilaudid bad? Of course not. The effect depends on the person and his demons.

Inheritance is the difference between savages and developed nations. Savages don’t learn to write, so they can’t pass information down to their descendants, and their descendants end up just as weak and stupid as they are. They don’t accumulate wealth and pass it on. They don’t record and share what they’ve learned about God. They learn nothing about medicine. Lack of inheritance is why the population of the pre-Columbian Americas went nowhere while Europe and Asia filled up. When you build up information and wealth, your food supply goes up, and life expectancies increase.

If you don’t give to your children, they have to re-do and re-learn everything you did and learned. There is no progress. Nothing is built. Your family becomes like a family of rats or squirrels or ants. Go forward or back 10 generations, and they look exactly the same. A family of human beings is supposed to improve with each generation.

I want whatever God is willing to give me, and everything he gives me is an inheritance, which is why the volumes of the Bible are called “testaments.” I want the maximum. Health, protection, revelation, correction, knowledge, commands, love, faith, joy, power, and even money. Just shovel it over here. Make me a person who can’t be cursed, and then give me everything you want to give.

God is generous, and he is better than an IRA. We just don’t know it because no one teaches that giving and receiving are two sides of the same coin. So are doing harm and suffering adversity.

Satan is very generous with curses, so why shouldn’t God be generous with blessings?

I’m really disgusted with what has happened to Christendom. Theologically, we’re a nation of savages. We didn’t preserve what the early church knew. We didn’t inherit knowledge that would have made our lives easy. We went right back to the Greek excrement that was taught all over the Western World. The failed wisdom of pantheists, sodomites, and crowd-worshiping democrats. We are not as well off as we were 2100 years ago. That’s disgraceful.

Things we Should Have Figured Out by 2023

More remarkable than the fact I got married at all is the nature of our marriage.

Rhodah keeps getting revelation with or without me, and her positions on things change all the time. She doesn’t rely on me to drag her through life. I’ve told her a few things, but God teaches her when I’m not around.

I wrote about a friend of mine. He married a childish, emotional, selfish, dangerous woman, and now there is a restraining order, and he says he just found a bottle of fentanyl in his closet, waiting for the police to come find it. For as long as I have known him, he has had to treat his wife like a child, cajoling, humoring, negotiating, and so on. It wasn’t enough.

A lot of people have mates they have to drag like manure wagons with broken axles. Their mates never get on their feet and start walking for themselves. They continue making their spouses miserable because that’s what Satan sent them to do.

Last night, Rhodah had a dream. She was in a little European church, about to be married. She wasn’t marrying me, however. She was about to marry Jesus!

That’s sobering, but I can’t complain. It shows she belongs to him, not me. No matter how happy our marriage is, she’s only partly mine, and that only while we live here on Earth.

She doesn’t have Facebook or Twitter, but she posts Whatsapp statuses. In foreign countries, people actually read those. She keeps posting about the errors of the money gospel and the preacher-worship gospel. Both are big problems in Africa. I don’t have to prompt her. She does it on her own, providing scriptural references that are right on target.

If you’re thinking of getting married, please think first. Do your best to get God to choose your mate. Marrying the wrong person is worse than getting cancer.

In other news, I have new beer taps. When I got started building my keezer, I thought I should go all-out and get the best taps I could find. I researched, and it looked like Perlick flow control taps were best. They have little levers on them to restrict flow, and this makes the pouring process shake less CO2 out of the beer. If you agitate beer too much, you end up with a mile of head but no carbonation in the body of the beer. It’s a huge problem.

After I spent like a hundred bucks on these things, which would have been worse had I not received a free one due to an error, I learned the flow control mechanism makes beer turbulent, so in a way, it’s self-defeating. I had problems getting beer to pour well.

Eventually, I learned about Kegland plastic flow control disconnects. These are fittings that connect beer tubing to kegs. They have valves inside them, and you can adjust the flow restriction right on top of the keg, far from the faucet, without making the beer too turbulent.

I also found out about Kegland Nukatap faucets. They don’t have flow control, but if you have the disconnects, you don’t need flow control faucets.

I ordered Nukataps a long time ago, and UPS lost them. I keep having shipping problems. The enemy is interfering with my homebrewing, which seems ridiculous. If anyone should be in favor of homebrewing, you would think it would be Satan. My second order got here today, and once I got them installed, I poured this wheat beer.

That’s about as good as it gets. Wheat beer tends to produce a lot of foam no matter what you do, so you shouldn’t hope for a little two-finger head. This beer had a manageable head and plenty of fizz. I am sold.

The beer has some hop issues, but I have another wheat beer in the keg waiting to replace it.

I ordered myself a couple more faucets, and I already have more flow control disconnects installed. When the faucets get here, I’ll have 4 Nukataps with flow control disconnects plust one stout faucet which doesn’t need flow control.

I’m no expert, but I would encourage anyone who is trying to deal with beer lines to look into my solution.

The alternative is to do a lot of math and try to figure out exactly how long each beer line has to be. This is called “line balancing.” The longer a beer line gets, the less the beer will foam in the glass, so you try to make lines long enough to end your problems.
This is a chump solution, or so it seems to me. You end up with lines as long as 11 feet, coiled up in your keezer, in the way. If my disconnects and faucets keep working the way they are now, I’ll be able to make the beer lines any length I want. I’ll be able to make them long enough to make them convenient to handle without having loops of tubing all over the place causing trouble.

If you choose a one-size-fits-all length for your lines, you can have problems when you adjust pressure up and down for different beers, and I’m sure there will also be problems with beers that are naturally foamy.

It just seems stupid to ignore the latest technology when it’s right there in front of me.

Some brewers would argue. Brewers are vulnerable to old wives’ tales and outdated theories. A great deal has changed since I quit in around ’07, and there have been substantial changes even during the last three years. If you don’t keep up, you make a fool of yourself and waste a lot of money. Then suddenly you’re that crotchety guy on the forum who thinks it’s stupid to send email when the good old US Postal Service is at our beck and call. The guy who didn’t have a cell phone until his children brought him one in 2015.

I’m also having shipping problems with kegs. I decided to buy three stainless 6-gallon kegs for fermentation.

You can ferment beautifully in a plastic pail as long as you don’t care about fermenting under pressure. You can ferment beautifully in a stainless keg and have all the pressure you want. Neither solution will give you a conical bottom.

A conical bottom concentrates all the junk that falls during fermentation. It puts it in one little place, and supposedly, this can improve your beer, because the more contact your beer has with old yeast and hops, the more likely it is to take on flavors you don’t want. Also, a conical bottom may result in less junk being transferred to your serving keg when fermentation is over.

Okay; I don’t care about conical bottoms. For a bazillion years, people have made perfect beer in containers with flat bottoms, so exposure to trub is apparently not very important. As for avoiding sucking trub into serving kegs, they have a new gadget that helps.

A homebrew keg sucks beer from the bottom using a long stainless tube. If you want, you can get rid of the tube and replace it with plastic tubing with a float on one end. The float makes the system pull beer from the top of the keg where it’s cleanest. You can ferment in, and serve from, kegs with floats. One reduces the crud that goes into the serving keg, and the other reduces the crud that goes into your glass.

Put it all together, and to me, it says you don’t need a conical fermenter. That’s good, because a decent one runs $1500. Oh, sure. They say they sell them for $600. Try using one without the $900 worth of additional “accessories” they offer after you click the “Add to Cart” button.

Nobody in his right mind would buy several $1500 fermenters, and no good brewer is going to be satisfied with fewer that 4 fermenters. If you only have one fermenter, you can only make one batch of beer every two weeks, and that means you and your friends will empty one keg after another before you fill new ones. No real brewer is satisfied with a one-keg life.

My plan is to ferment in kegs by default. They work for every beer. I’ll go to buckets or my All Rounder when I run out of kegs. If I really want to ferment under pressure, I’ll do it in a keg.

The All Rounder is really not that useful because I can’t pour hot wort into it without ruining it. Chilling wort is a real hassle, and because I have a swimming pool, it’s unnecessary. I don’t want to get into it. There is no reason to right now. If I don’t put wort-chilling equipment together, the All Rounder will not see any use.

Of course, the 6-gallon keg I ordered a long time ago turned out to be a 5-gallon keg when it arrived, and it was very late. I should have had it days ago, and had it been here, I would have a new stout fermenting. It’s amazing how many brewing-related things have arrived late or failed to arrive at all. Supposedly, a 6-gallon keg will be here tomorrow. Even if it’s not, I can do a stout in a bucket. The weak point of a bucket is that it’s not that easy to move beer out of it without exposing it to air, but I figured out a way to do it with nothing but CO2, so unless I need pressure, a bucket will work as well as anything.

So to recap, I think Nukatap faucets with short beer lines and Kegland flow control disconnects make the best system. I believe kegs are the best fermenting vessels under $1500 except for people who enjoy the hassle of wort chilling. I think buckets make fine fermenters for everything that isn’t pressure-fermented.

I believe it’s time to see if my second Nukatap does my latest lager justice.

Know What You’re Sleeping With

One great thing about being female these days is that you can deflect just about any criticism of your gender, truthful and valuable though it may be, by claiming it’s sexist. Unfortunately, however, there are faults which are especially common among women, and it is profitable to know what they are. It’s very profitable for women, because one fault women commonly have is that they dislike other women and try to ruin them.

Yeah, I said it.

Here are two other faults common to women: they are much more vindictive than men, and they tend to take revenge through dishonesty or subterfuge. People get mad at me when I say these things, but they’re true.

It’s amazing how rarely women forgive. Often, when a woman says she forgives, she really means she has decided to be quiet about your sin until the next time she needs to bring it up in order to control you. Right now, a friend of a friend is being tormented by his forgiving wife for an affair he had decades ago. He woke up one day, recently, and found out over $80,000 was gone from his business’s bank account. A divorce is in the works. His grown kids will not talk to him. Real forgiveness is permanent. You’re not allowed to put the paddles on it and bring it back to life when it’s convenient.

People who don’t really forgive go to hell, even if they go to church, pray, give to the poor, and make cookies for the homeless. Hell is full of Christians. It’s full of women who only pretended to forgive other people.

Today, one of my best friends looked in his closet, and guess what he found in the suit he wore to his marriage rededication celebration? A bottle of fentanyl pills.

It is painful to refer to the woman who (presumably) did this to him as his wife, but that’s what she is. The divorce is not final.

According to my friend, she is not permitted to have contact with him or the children. That’s a good thing, because he says she went to the house a while back, tried to get him to fight her, beat herself up in front of their kids, and then called the police in order to have him arrested for DV. Of course, the kids told the cops what happened. It’s amazing she would be so dumb.

He says she has tried to convince the police he sells fentanyl. It looks like he found the proof she planned to give them.

He flushed the pills down the toilet, he says, and he did not take pictures. Too bad. He was scared because he had touched the bottle. He was afraid fentanyl would poison him through his skin. I guess he wanted the bottle and the contents far from his children.

If you get enough fentanyl on your skin and you leave it on long enough, it can kill you in a hurry. What kind of person puts fentanyl where her children can get it?

He showed me a handwritten list he said she had made. Poisons. This one and that one. Dosage. Effects. How long they took to kill. How much suffering they caused.

He was discouraged today. I told him he should be glad. God showed him a bomb that was waiting to blow up and ruin his family. He looked out for my friend and defeated his wife.

I said he should search the whole house.

She’s not going to get anywhere with a bottle of fentanyl. It wouldn’t have his prints on it. There would be no way to connect it with a dealer. There are no customers. There is no evidence of unreported income. There is no cash in mattresses. What there is is a crazy ex-wife who has already been caught lying to the police. Allegedly.

He says the cops have asked his kids about drugs before, because of his wife’s accusations. They asked if people were coming and going, the way they would if he were selling drugs. The kids said they hadn’t seen anyone like that. Allegedly.

In the state where he lives, merely having fentanyl in your house doesn’t make you guilty of selling drugs. The state has to provide evidence you knew it was there and intended to sell it. That will be hard to prove when the possessor is a family man with no drug history, no clientele, and a wife who makes lists of poisons and beats herself up for the police. And if drugs turn up in locations that are obviously hiding places, it will make it harder to prove he knew they were there. If I were selling fentanyl, I would keep it on top of the toilet, and I would flush it at the first sign of trouble. I would never hide it.

I could have a ton of fentanyl on my property right now. How would I know?

The cops found dope growing on the grounds of a courthouse where my grandfather was a judge. They didn’t arrest the courthouse employees.

So what about the wife, buying fentanyl, possessing it, and planting it? If the suspicions are correct, she has a lot to answer for. I told him if he found any more drugs, he should have the containers fingerprinted.

Gentlemen, if the lady you want to marry lies about other people and does sneaky things to them, she will, and probably is, doing the same things to you. If not, she will as soon as things stop going her way. A word to the wise. In order to find out what someone is capable of, look at the way they treat people they hate or don’t care about. You may become such a person one day.

Only God can find you a good woman. If you chose one yourself, you took a huge chance.

Never Get Between a Hog and his Slop

Coronavirus is like political correctness. It’s a filthy enemy that waits till you think it’s dead and then starts to squirm again.

Something like three weeks ago, I started to feel a little off. I thought it was because I needed sleep, but within a couple of days I had chills, and then I had something like a mild cold. Then my sense of smell vanished for a day or two. I also had problems with my sense of taste.

I’ve been brewing beer since early January, so I am very excited about getting new beers in the can. Well, the keezer. I need to taste and smell things all the time. It was frustrating when I couldn’t smell beer and when perfectly good beer tasted like club soda with soap and hops added.

The problem went away, but I think it came back. A couple of days ago, I tried my latest beer, and it wasn’t good at all. It didn’t taste like it was oxidized or infected with exotic organisms. Those are the problems most failed beers have. The hops tasted metallic, and the malt tasted like horehound.

I also tried a new factory beer. It’s a Kolsch-style ale. Kolsch is a German ale style which supposedly tastes a great deal like lager. Brewing lagers, at least the old way, takes more time and effort than brewing ales, so if there is a beer style out there that will get me lager taste with ale effort, I want to know about it.

I poured this stuff into a glass, and the head disappeared right away. That’s not a great sign. It was extremely clear and light in color. I tasted it, and it was sort of like a combination of Miller and ginger ale or Sprite. Pretty bad.

I gave up on it and poured it down the sink. I got myself a glass of my own stout, which is magnificent.

The stout was only okay. It seemed more sour and bitter than it should have been. I wondered if I had somehow infected it with bacteria.

Last night, I decided to try an Old Rasputin imperial stout in order to see if my senses were working. I think this beer has no flaws. It could not be much better. If I tasted anything funny, the problem had to be with me.

Sure enough, the bitterness and acidity seemed high. The beer was only pretty good, and for Old Rasputin, that’s a disastrous performance.

I guess something is still playing around in my head, changing the way things taste.

I’m strong. My nose isn’t running. I don’t have a fever. My throat is fine. My bones don’t hurt. But I’m afraid to drink beer because I may find out it tastes bad, and then I’ll end up throwing out beer I’ve worked and spent to make. I’m also unable to get my hair cut, because I don’t want to make the barber sick. I’m starting to look like Phil Spector.

I suppose coronavirus must come and go until it disappears entirely. I don’t remember being warned about that.

In other news, the cousin I baptized sent me a photo of what looked like the roof of a church. Her text said, “I’m at Asbury.”

I figured Asbury was a church near her. I was glad to see she was together with believers. Then the next day, I saw a news story about the Asbury revival.

Asbury is the name of a Christian college in Kentucky. It’s an easy drive for my cousin. People say the Holy Ghost is falling on them, and the usual worship and joy are filling the place.

What are my feelings about it? I see both good and bad things about it.

First, it’s great whenever there’s a real revival. I hope this is one. Second, I think Christians will make too much of it and use it to feed the delusion that revival is going to sweep the world. It’s not going to. It did that already during the 20th century, and the world said it wasn’t interested.

I think it’s helpful to write about the Pensacola revival, which is known officially as the Pensacola Outpouring and the Brownsville Revival. A big charismatic revival took place near Pensacola between 1995 and 2000. People spoke in tongues. The usual things happened. Now it’s sort of like Woodstock for Christians. Old hippies are perversely proud they debased themselves at Woodstock, and many who weren’t there lie and say they were. Call it stolen degradation. Christians who visited Pensacola like to talk about it.

The Outpouring may have done a lot of good. Surely it must have. But there were excesses, and disgraceful characters like Todd Bentley showed up and used it to glorify themselves and turn people away from Jesus.

People think the Outpouring was a big deal, but was it?

Paul went from Israel to Italy on foot, evangelizing as he went. Some think he made it to Spain. He and a few friends turned entire nations to charismatic Christianity. Look at the cities of the seven churches of the Revelation. Were they in Israel? No, they were in Turkey, in places where demon worship had been dominant. All, or nearly all, of Europe became Christian because a few people passed through and did healings and so on.

What happened after Pensacola? NOTHING. Oh, sure, it’s probably true that a few thousand people were changed. But America was a nation of more than 300 million people, and overall, we paid no attention. Canada wasn’t transformed. Neither was Mexico. Neither was most of Florida. Not even Pensacola.

These days, revival is like a case of coronavirus that hits someone who has been vaccinated twice and infected three times. It flares up and burns out fast.

My prediction is that what’s happening in Asbury will do a small number of people a lot of good, and then life will go on as usual.

We have become like Catholics. They get very excited whenever a Catholic claims to have been healed. They ignore it when thousands of Protestants get healed, but if a spirit claiming to be Mary appears to a goatherd standing in a creek in Albania and his bunions go away, they build a shrine and start flocking to the place to buy creek water.

We have become like Jews. In the time of Jesus, they had no prophets and had not had one in 400 years. Not one they accepted, I mean. They had John the Baptist. They couldn’t get a miracle to save their lives. But they knew an angel occasionally troubled the waters of the pool of Bethesda, and whoever got into the water first after a visit got healed. So the pool became a destination for medical tourists. They lay around it hoping to beat each other into the water.

Miracle healings are commonplace, and so is prophecy. The Holy Spirit does amazing things for people every day. Jesus appears to people. It’s crazy to think an isolated event that helps almost no one is a good sign or in any way normal.

What’s happening at Asbury, if it really is happening, should be happening every day where there are Christians. Churches should always be full of people singing and praying in tongues and working miracles. Instead of being excited about one little revival, we should be sobered by it. We should realize that if God manifests himself to thousands of people and no wave of conversions follows, we are close to the end, because it proves we have rejected him. We have rejected Yahwah, Yeshua, and the Holy Spirit. God has no one left to send.

Thank goodness the Holy Spirit didn’t come as a man. We would be trying to kill him.

There was an outpouring at Azusa street over a century ago, and it spread all over the world. That does not happen any more. People need to wake up and see the obvious.

I had a dream this morning, and I didn’t think it was related to the revival, but maybe it was.

It was Thanksgiving day. I was with my family, meaning my mother’s relatives. We were having dinner. At first, it was just the actual family, but as the dream progressed, something like 75 people appeared in the room.

My relatives were sitting at tables, and the food was on the tables. That’s not how you serve dinner to a big group. You put the food on tables, and you seat the people at other tables. That way, everyone can get to the food. In the dream, the food was in the middle of the tables where my relatives were sitting, so they made it hard for anyone else to get any.

They were hunched over their plates like hogs or dogs, shoveling the food in and thinking only of themselves. They looked straight down at their food. They didn’t talk. Most of my relatives are only interested in getting whatever they can for themselves, and I can’t think of anything much they have done for the poor, so this made sense to me. But I don’t think it was just about my relatives. I think it was about all the people who are supposedly my brothers and sisters in Christ.

I complained because they weren’t putting the food on tables where other people could get at it.

I decided to try to get something for myself. I saw a buffet table that had been set up, and a friendly bearded man in a chef’s toque was serving. He seemed to be Australian. He asked me if I wanted mashed potatoes. I wasn’t all that interested, but then I remembered that mashed potatoes were customary on Thanksgiving, so I said I wanted some. He gave me a huge plate with a giant mound of potatoes on it, and he hid big pieces of turkey in it. Entire legs.

While I was going around looking for other food, I must have put the plate down, because one of my relatives stole it.

Given the way the distribution of my grandparents’ wealth has gone, this is not surprising, either.

I saw some ladies who had sort of a booth where they were giving away candy. As I walked by, I grabbed three packages of peppermints without asking and ate one. I felt like I was stealing, but the candy was free.

I sat down next to my aunt. This is the lady who had a delusional fit the other day because I complained about the way she mishandles family property and money. She accused me of living alone in poverty, but a recent real estate transaction made it necessary for me to inform a title agent I was married, so I guess now she has to live with the knowledge that I have a wonderful young wife. And I am not poor.

Anyway, she looked up from the food and said, “Isn’t this wonderful?” I said it was not, and I pointed out the obvious problems. She got very angry. She said she should know better than to ask me or my cousin Russ about things because we were always so negative.

My aunt is like an Asian. Appearance is everything. Admiration is everything. The truth is a threat that has to be kept out.

Maybe the dream was about the stunted revivals we have now. People who are supposed to be brothers and sisters show up to get whatever they can from God, they take things other people are supposed to receive, they reject and abuse anyone who points out the truth, and the revivals die like young tumors eating big doses of chemotherapy drugs.

I felt like I was starving when I woke up. I felt exactly the way you would feel if you showed up for Thanksgiving dinner and found out your relatives ate or hid every last scrap of food.

I told Rhodah. She said I should get a big, fat McDonald’s breakfast. So I did!

I think the Australian guy and the candy lady were angels. God uses angels to give us way more than we need, and then people do their best to steal it.

All sorts of suppressive spirits have been after me since before I was born. Some–probably the most effective ones–worked through relatives. My sister used to torture me while I was lying in my crib. She didn’t want my parents to bring me home from the hospital. When we got older, and there were big meals at my grandparents’ house, she always tried to make me sit at the kids’ table. I would go in and shove a chair in with the adults and the rest of the older children. When I was in my forties, it still infuriated her whenever I rode in the front seat of a car! That’s how crazy she is.

We all have enemies, and we all have friends. Some are natural, and some are supernatural.

My sister ended up getting a lot of what she wanted me to have. She got disinherited. She got lung cancer. She lost her law license. She lost the house she lived in. She was convicted of a felony. She will never have a husband or a baby. No one, not even other people who are close to Satan, can stand her. She can’t have friends. Only temporary hosts.

There are people who can only be cursed, and there are people who can only be blessed. If you’re the first kind, and you try to harm the second kind, the curses go back to you, multiplied, and they turn out to be great blessings to the people you tried to hurt.

Jesus told us to be good to our enemies. He said we would pile burning coals on their heads. That’s because they can’t be blessed. Every blessing you try to send a person like that comes back to you, and it turns out to be a curse to them because of what they do with it.

You can see this principle in the instructions he gave the disciples. He said:

And into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace be to this house.
And if the son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it: if not, it shall turn to you again.

“Peace” is a bad translation. It’s a general term referring to a state of blessing.

What happens to the man who doesn’t receive your blessings? Here is what Jesus said about cities that wouldn’t receive blessings:

And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.
Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.

He meant that. There will be punishment.

This is one reason it’s important to pray for your enemies. You’re really praying for yourself.

I guess I sound like I’m not in favor of revival. That’s not true. I’m not in favor of mistaking small, fleeting revivals for important movements that indicate the world is going to be saved. It is not. The Bible is very clear about this, and so is the Holy Spirit, who wrote the Bible.

And Rape

The run-up to the rapture is proceeding faster than I expected. I guess I’ll be saying that several times a year until Jesus calls us. No matter what I expect, I’m always getting surprises.

I took a quick look at Fox News today and learned the following fact: A SCHOOL DISTRICT IS NOW TEACHING CHILDREN HOW TO MAKE AND SEND CHILD PORNOGRAPHY.

I put that in capitals, figuring it was the one thing anyone glancing at my site really needed to read.

A parent named Jay McDonald, who is an actual male who never had to have breasts removed, stood at a school board meeting in Anchorage and read from a book called Let’s Talk About it — The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human.

Could any title be more asinine? Leftists who are obsessed with sexual aberration are now proclaiming themselves experts on relationships and being a human? Even if the authors are experts on sex, which is surely not true, no intelligent person would go to a self-anointed sex expert for relationship advice, and there is a lot more to life as a human being than sex.

McDonald had the right to read the material. I should point that out. He had been recognized by the board. He didn’t crash through the doors in a pickup with Confederate flags mounted on the bed.

The book tells kids the Internet is a safe place to meet other people in order to learn about sex, and it tells them how to send each other pornographic photos of themselves.

Here’s something he read: “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying some porn, it’s a fun sugary treat. When consumed right, porn can help you discover new aspects of your sexuality.”

Obviously, this is not a viewpoint a school should be presenting to anyone, let alone children. Most Americans, Christian or not, belong to religions which holds that pornography is evil and harmful. Schools should not be giving kids books that tell them, flat-out, that their religions are wrong.

On top of that, it’s bad advice, even for atheists. Pornography is a real problem. Many people who appear in pornography are poor and desperate. Many are addicts. A lot of pornography is produced by human traffickers. Pornography degrades women and encourages boys and men to think of them as objects, like back scratchers or massage chairs, that are supposed to be used for physical pleasure and then ignored. Pornography addicts people. There are many, many people in the US who are so addicted they end up seeking treatment, and this is a problem that afflicts atheists and pagans, not just members of mainstream religions.

Even if pornography were not harmful, it would be wrong to promote it to minors. That’s exactly what Anchorage schools are doing. What else are they promoting? Cigarettes? Liquor? I’ll bet they’re not encouraging kids to use firearms.

Here’s another horrifying passage:

A great place to research fantasies and kinks safely is on the internet. There’s tons of people and communities out there who share your interests and have all kinds of advice.

So children are supposed to join internet forums and chat rooms and talk to perverts. And it’s safe?

My last pastor is on a fun website for adults who like to share their sexual interests with kids. It’s called the FDLE Sexual Offender and Predator System.

As I told my wife today, if you want to rape and murder a little boy and bury his body in a field, the Internet is the customary place to start. It’s the best possible place to find victims. This is why we keep seeing stories about men who were convicted of crimes after Internet chats with policemen posing as children. I can’t believe I have to point this out. Hasn’t any one heard of To Catch a Predator?

If you want to rape children, and you don’t know how to use the Internet, what, exactly, are you supposed to do? Drive around in a van waving chocolate bars? That’s not how it’s done in 2023. It’s done through chats and forums.

“Kinks” are not harmless. They are mental illnesses which are often caused by demons. It’s not acceptable to promote them to children. Even if this were not the case, children should not be investigating them online with the help of adults. How can any school official not know this?

The book encourages kids to make child pornography and send it to other kids. So children should send other children material, which, if viewed by adults, would ground felony convictions. In its treatment of child pornography, it says, “So before you start sending your naughty masterpieces around the world, take some time to get friendly with photo editing, software and apps.” Don’t just make images people you know will keep and use to humiliate you forever; use technology to make sure you do a nice, professional job.

The school board illegally forced Mr. McDonald to stop speaking. To understand how insane that is, in your mind, project this event back to 1950 and imagine what would have happened. Anyone on the panel who tried to shut down a citizen exposing this book might have been beaten by the others. And that would probably have been a good thing.

The school board panel should have been outraged to learn that this book existed, let alone that they were providing it to children. They should have begged Mr. McDonald to forgive them. They should have pledged to remove every copy from their libraries, discard it, and give the same treatment to similar books. They should have promised to identify and fire every employee involved in approving the book and to provide their names to news outlets.

Evil can’t get much worse than this. In order to make things any worse, they would pretty much have to have classes where they put kids in front of computers and have them visit pervert forums.

So what else will God tolerate before he puts an end to this age and calls his children away? How much worse will he allow things to get before he gives up on evangelism and removes the Holy Spirit from the world? Not much worse, I hope. Humanity has proven conclusively that it will always reject God in the end. Before Jesus, men rejected Yahweh. Then men rejected Jesus. Jesus left and sent the Holy Spirit. Humanity saw signs and wonders. God gave us a big Holy Spirit revival during the last century. Humanity wasn’t interested. But mankind is very interested in sexual perversion, to the point where anyone who has a religious objection to advancing the cause of perversion risks being treated like a Nazi.

One of the strangest and most important things God has shown me is the importance of giving up on people. God has tremendous patience, and he expects us to have patience, too, but he also requires us to quit when the time comes. He gave up on the world and flooded it. He gave up on Sodom and Gomorrah and burned them. He gave up on the Canaanite cities and told the Hebrews to kill even the old people and babies. He gave up on the Jews and decided to kill them, but Moses interceded. About 2000 years ago, he gave up on the temple, Jerusalem, and the nation of Israel, at least for a time. God is not going to wrestle forever with a human race that spits on his gifts and abuses his children. He has proven, and stated, that his patience has limits. In both Testaments, he has commanded human beings not to go too far with patience.

My wife wants to have kids. Right out of the starting gate, we know we can’t send them to public school. In America. The nation that has done more evangelism than any other. How are we supposed to live in a world like this? If it’s like this for us, what will it be like for our children? Is there any hope they won’t go to hell? If they resist the world, is there any hope they won’t be treated like Jews under Hitler?

I hope God does whatever he has to do in order to prepare the two of us for the rapture, and I hope he comes as soon as possible. I don’t want to be here to witness the worst things of which the human animal is capable.

Next Up: Heavy Fake Belgian

I kegged my latest lager today. If I had to describe it, I’d say it’s an IPA made with lager yeast. I used a grain bill fit for an IPA and fermented it with lager yeast. This means I didn’t get the weird fruity flavors that make IPA what it is, and that sounds like a sacrifice, but it’s also nice to get the clean, unmolested flavor of a lager.

Is the lager any good? I’m not sure. I drank a glass because I’m impatient, and it seemed to me that it was too sweet and lacked the kind of aroma modern beers get from dry hopping, which is adding hops after brewing is over. I can’t be sure, though, because the beer still needs more carbonation. That will add carbonic acid, and that sharpens up the flavor. And lagers improve with age.

I fermented under pressure at about 66 degrees. Ordinarily, you would ferment a lager with no pressure down in the fifties, and after that, you would do various time-consuming things to perfect it. Pressure-fermenting allows brewers to create lagers fast, at relatively high temperatures, but I don’t know whether it completely does away with the need for aging. There isn’t that much information available for homebrewers yet.

The glass I drank was okay, but it needed to be colder and fizzier.

I transferred the lager from the fermenter to the keg under pressure. I cleaned a keg and hooked it up to the fermenter. I shot a lot of CO2 into the keg to reduce the O2 content. I then used my CO2 tank to pump the lager directly into the keg, with the keg and fermenter closed to the atmosphere. After that, I burped some of the gas out of the keg to reduce the CO2 further.

To really do it right, you fill the keg with sanitizer and water and use CO2 to pump it out, but I didn’t think that was necessary. That’s overkill. When you put 5 gallons of liquid into a Corny keg, you leave very little room for gas, and if you’ve already shot a fair amount of CO2 into it, you’re probably dealing with one gallon of gas which is mostly CO2.

I now have one incredible stout, a lager which will be, at least, okay, and a wheat beer which is drinkable. I had to fiddle with my draft setup a lot because it’s new, and I may have tainted the wheat beer with some kind of lactobacillus or something. It’s pretty sour, but not so sour it’s useless.

I have a wheat beer and an ale fermenting, and at least one will be ready to keg in a few days.

I need inventory. If you only have one keg of beer to drink from, you will empty it faster than you think. If you have 5 kegs, you will empty them slowly, and you will be able to maintain a variety of beers.

My stout is so wonderful, I’m afraid I’ll blow through it. I was so concerned, I ordered more ingredients yesterday, and they will be here tomorrow. I can’t even explain how good it is. I now think stout is my favorite beer. Oatmeal stout, which is what I made. Imperial stout. Wonderful stuff. Stout is full of sweet, sour, bitter, and full of flavors which have no right to be there. How can a beer taste like caramel, coffee, and chocolate when none of those things are in it?

I still can’t dispense 5 beers via mounted faucets in the keezer. I need four fittings to connect two more kegs to faucets, and the Ebay seller I used is taking forever. Once these parts arrive, I’ll be all set.

Every time I pour my first beer of the day, I raise it and thank Jesus for coming for us. I tell him I celebrate his return.

It’s too bad I have the tolerance of a medium-sized ant. Three beers, and my day of drinking is done. Things were very different when I was young, but of course, I was also an idiot, so there was a tradeoff.

Because I’m very interested in getting my beer endeavors working, I drink beer nearly every day, and I have realized it impacts my life. I’m not getting in the car if I’ve had more than one beer, so now I have to plan my errands and my drinking. Sometimes I ask myself what will happen if I really need to go somewhere and I’ve had two beers. I have to think ahead.

It looks like coronavirus is behind me, at least for the next few months. I think I can detect a tiny vestige of my symptoms, but it’s basically over. Looks like I’m not yet one of the cursed few who get the virus and die in two weeks.

I spend more and more time with God now. I see people I pray for and talk to doing better and better. Things are going extremely well. The revelation I got about closeness with God is paying off. It’s beautiful.

I have a friend whose wife is immature and malignant. She has put him through terrible suffering for 15 years. We pray for him all the time. She finally blew up and showed what she really was. She ran around with some man. She told my friend she would take his kids. She even beat herself up and told the police my friend did it, and she was dumb enough to do it in front of the children. She went on the web and researched poisons, and she left her handwritten notes where my friend could photograph them.

I keep sharing revelation with my friend, and he puts it to work. God has changed his mindset and set him free. The wife has done things so stupid, they pretty much assure he will get the kids and the house.

There used to be turmoil in his home. That was before she left. Now when I call, the kids are asking him what he wants for dinner. They’ve cleaned the house. They pray together every day. There is peace. They want him to get custody. He sent me a new family photo without the wife, and it shocked me. They seem to glow.

Things will keep getting better and better for people who stay close to God. Things will get worse for the rest. The world is being centrifuged. From my perspective, it’s beautiful. It looks different to people on the other side.

Get close to God. Let him fill you. Be like the ark of the covenant. Carry him with you everywhere you go. It will work. It’s his plan.

Goodbye Guinness

Yesterday, my new stout was finally ready to drink.

I kegged it a few days ago, but I made a mistake and confused two gas hoses, and I ended up pumping it full of CO2 when I thought I was hooking up beer gas, which is a nitrogren/CO2 mix. As a result of my mistake, I kept pouring glasses of foam, and when the foam subsided, the beer was flat. It was nasty. I have been letting the keg sit without pressure so CO2 would come out of it, and it has been working. Last night I poured beer I could drink.

It’s very sad. I guess I lost half a gallon of beer. But I’m still learning how to set up the system, and losses are unavoidable.

When I started drinking the stout, I thought it needed more alcohol, and it seemed too thick. As the carbonation balance improved, I realized there was nothing wrong with it at all. It was astonishing. For me, a two-beer day is a big deal, but I drank 4 glasses of stout, and I wished I could have kept going. It was mesmerizing.

I have several cold cans of Guinness pub draught stout, and I feel like pouring them out. I can’t drink that stuff any more. I used to think Guiness was wonderful, but comparing it to my stout is like comparing cube steak to a prime rib eye.

Guiness is a very light beer. It’s extremely dry. It has no body. It has very little alcohol. It’s low in calories. The aroma is lacking. The head is weak. It’s a very simple product.

It seems fantastic if Budweiser is what you’re used to, but the truth is that it’s just a cheaply made working man’s beer. A good product, but not something you can set beside a quality homebrew.

My stout tastes like coffee, dark chocolate, licorice, and dried fruit. It has a little sweetness, but not too much. It has a lot of body. The head looks like you could take it out and make couch cushions out of it. It’s not strong, but when you drink it, you can tell it’s beer. Guiness comes in at a little over 4% ABV, so it’s barely beer.

I can understand why a lot of old beers are weak. Beer used to be used like water. For example, British sailors drank a gallon of beer per day, at work. Moving a beer from 4.5% ABV to a respectable 6% would increase alcohol intake by a third. In the old days, people drank beer to get drunk, but they also drank it to stay hydrated, so I suppose weak beer was a necessity.

These days, beers fall into two categories: session beers and everything else. A session beer is a beer you can drink slowly all day. Guinness is a session beer. My stout is also a session beer, but it’s less sessiony than Guinness.

Budweiser has a reputation for weakness, but its alcohol level is around 5.5%, so it’s considerably stronger than Guinness. What’s really weak is the taste. Like carbonated dishwater.

My stout can be drunk liberally, but it would be hard to make myself do it. It’s too good. When I bring it up to my face, I have to stop and smell it. I move the glass from one nostril to the other and think about what I’m taking in. Then I take one mouthful and hold it briefly, experiencing the initial sourness, bitterness, and sweetness. Then I swallow, and all the flavors rise up in my head. After that, the beer seems to stick to my teeth. It makes my teeth taste good.

It reminds me a lot of Old Rasputin imperial stout, a much stronger beer with a more powerful flavor. It’s like Rasputin had a little brother. Old Rasputin is breathtaking.

In short, my stout is a success. I think I’ll still fool with it, though. I believe I’ll make a batch with a different finishing hop. The current version uses Kent Goldings, which are very good British hops. I think I’ll bitter with Kent Goldings and finish with Crystal, an American hop derived from European noble hops used in things like German lager. Crystal tastes like spices.

I’m a hack brewer, so when I drink my stout, I have to wonder what better brewers are making. I would think there must be some incredible stout out there in garages and game rooms.

I’m not sure, though, because I know most people can’t cook. Brewing is a form of cooking. If the ability to make and recognize good beer were common, Coors would have gone bankrupt decades ago.

It seems like a lot of new brewers are falling for gimmicks. When I got back into brewing, I was happy to see that a local grocery had a ton of different beers, but when I started looking for things I would actually want, I saw there weren’t many. A lot of kids are starting breweries and making ridiculous things. Strawberry cheesecake stout. Gluten-free hibiscus maple syrup IPA. Okay, these are slight exaggerations. But you get the idea. It’s like they’re trying to out-weird each other, and they are piling on flavoring ingredients instead of learning how to get flavor and aroma from grain, yeast, and hops. You can do beers that vary a great deal without resorting to dumping things like lactose and coffee into your wort.

Lactose beer is disgusting. Trust me. If you haven’t acquired a taste for actual beer, you may love milk stout, but if your palate is developed, you’ll be amazed that anyone would drink it.

Today I’ll try to make my wheat beer again. I think the first batch is infected. It tastes very bitter. I kept moving things around and changing things after it was kegged. I was trying to get the draft system right. I may have introduced bacteria or wild yeast.

I am now up to three freezers. A serving keezer, an upright fermenting freezer, and a new chest freezer for fermenting and storage. Because beers vary a lot in their temperature and fermentation-time requirements, one fermentation freezer is not enough. I could tie it up for weeks with one beer, and during that time, nothing else could go forward. If I have two freezers, I’ll always be able to ferment at least two beers at once and store maybe two below room temperature.

It sounds extreme, but I’m not so poor I can’t afford cheap freezers, and doing this wrong will take half the pleasure out of it.

I made a light lager two days ago. I thought I was making wheat beer, but I got the bags mixed up. I was going to pressure-ferment the lager, which speeds things up, but my pressure fermenter already has a lager in it, so I’m using a regular fermenter at 66°. The yeast I’m using will tolerate that temperature.

I’ll make the wheat beer and put it in the new freezer with the lager.

The new lager is interesting. I created it years ago to see if I could win over a Bud addict. It has corn in it to make it taste more American, and I originally used what is believed to be Budweiser’s yeast. Bud has a green apple flavor which may be from the yeast. A chemical byproduct called acetaldehyde can cause it. Anyway, the beer is light and easy to drink. I love it. The guy I created it for had no interest, though.

Bad Priorities Destroy People

My site had some problems over the last couple of days. The comment page refused to load, and then the site started redirecting to the “About” page. I used chat to get support from my hosting company, but they were not helpful. They kept asking the same questions over and over, and it wasn’t until after I contacted them that the site started redirecting, making things worse than they already were.

The person I chatted with seemed offended when I pointed obvious things out, and he or she told me they were not responsible for fixing problems like the one I had. I was told they were doing me a favor by even trying. Of course, this is not true. If I set WordPress up wrong, that’s my problem, but I didn’t do that. Something had to go wrong with the data in the server, and that’s on them. Something must have been corrupted, and finding and fixing corrupted data is 100% their job. They have access to server backups, and the whole purpose is to recover data. I can’t do that as far as I know.

Anyway, I was disconnected from the person I chatted with, and I think he or she hung up on me.

So why would there be a server problem?

Most likely, it was one of those inexplicable things that happen to computers. A few electrons go to the wrong places, and errors pop up. Another possibility: a hacker figured out my password and went in and changed a few things to be an annoyance. Third possibility: a company employee with delusions about sex roles and Christianity didn’t like things I was writing.

I think it would be pretty hard for a hacker to get my password, but I know host company employees can mess with files without my password because I can also do it. I doubt they can create a new WordPress account, because that requires a password, and anyway, I would see it.

Whatever the explanation is, the whole thing is trivial, and it was a helpful taste of the future, when Christians will be banned from the web. If this blog vanished for good right now, I would not despair or threaten to sue people or call the FBI. I like blogging, but it’s not my life. I don’t make money from it. It serves no essential purpose. It would bother me if my data were destroyed, but I would be over it in an hour or so.

It’s not like we would be losing the works of Chopin.

I thought I should write about it, because ths blog still gets a surprising amount of traffic. How much of the traffic is human, I can’t say, but last time I looked, it was something like 1500 per day. Someone out there will be interested in what’s happening.

I always wonder what people thought when I vanished from Facebook. I announced it in advance, but I was the kind of person Facebook shadow-banned, so who knows if people saw it? I’ll bet a number of people thought I blocked them and still wonder why. You can’t shadow-ban a blog, so whoever looks at my blog regularly will read what I’m writing now and know I didn’t pull the plug.

Enough of that. There are more important things to write about.

I get a lot of revelation, and there is no way I can convey it all on a blog. If you really want to understand what’s going on in the universe, you have to hear from God directly. It’s too complicated and interwoven for one person to explain to another. I can relay bits and pieces, but the whole picture is multidimensional and can’t be transmitted well using a one-bit connection.

Or is it two bits? Is one wire a one-bit system because only one piece of information can be carried at a time, or is it two bits because it can send both 1’s and 0’s? I don’t know anything about computers. Anyway, writing comes out one character at a time, and nobody can read multiple sentences at once.

Yesterday, I really, really heard from God.

I was in my car, which is something I should write about. I had a huge music collection, and I used to listen to secular music in the car. Then I got to where I only wanted to hear certain Christian artists. Then I got to the point where I only wanted to hear the Bible. Now, I turn the Bible off because it drowns God out. I supposed this is how things are supposed to work as a person gets closer to God.

I’ll tell you some of the things I heard.

First, God is very angry at all the people who have abused me, and there are a lot of them. I don’t think about it a lot, because my life is very pleasant anyway, but he does. My life is better than the lives of all the people I know of who have mistreated me, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t do harm or that my life should not have been better.

People have cheated me out of many opportunities. They have lied about me. They have stolen from me. They have abused me verbally. They stabbed me in the back behind closed doors and kept it quiet, thinking they had gotten over on me for good. They set me back in life. My wife is in the same boat. She’s an orphan, and she literally had a wicked stepmother.

People who are stupid enough to participate in the occult have cursed both of us. I guess I should mention them. It’s worse for Rhodah, who lives in a country where cursing people is more popular than video games.

If you’re a Zambian, as soon as anything good happens to you, at least one of your relatives will put a curse on you. It’s expected, like sending a high school graduate a nice card.

When you curse someone God favors, the curse comes back to you, but when it returns, it’s a lot bigger than it was when you sent it, and you can’t do anything to defend yourself. Witches and various types of pagan nuts don’t believe this, so they curse themselves and their families all day, thinking they’re hurting people God loves. It’s very silly.

Think of Haman. He tried to kill the Jews and destroy his rival Mordecai, but Mordecai got to stand by and watch as Haman and his 10 sons dangled choking on ropes attached to the gallows Haman had built for Mordecai. This is a picture of what happens to people who have joined the supernatural underclass and decide to attach the nobility. The people God favors are the nobility.

To get back to my situation, I got an overpowering conviction that God was going to bless Rhodah and me very, very powerfully not just because he loves us, but to punish the people who have mistreated us. To an abuser, few punishments are worse than watching a victim succeed. It absolutely kills them.

I also learned about the rapture.

The rapture will be a gathering of wedding guests. Oddly, the guests will also be the bride, but that’s how it works. So what happens when you marry a woman? Do you burst through her front door unannounced and yell, “I just bought a tux! Let’s get married!”?

No. She would murder you. You get to know each other. You become engaged. You prepare yourself financially. You get your house ready. The bride, in all likelihood, tries to lose 25 pounds. You prepare for the ceremony. You plan a honeymoon. By the time the wedding rolls around, you and the bride are ready, if you’re doing it right.

When it comes to the wedding of Christ, it’s a little different, because he’s marrying a bunch of people who started out as dirty, crooked peasants. We have to be cleaned up a lot. He’s not going to drop out of the clouds and snatch Christians off prostitutes or out of crack houses. He’ll prepare us. The word says the bride will be without spot, blemish, or wrinkle, and those things appear to be people.

We are always in danger in this corrupting world, and if God leaves us here long enough and doesn’t step in frequently, many or all of us will backslide and go to hell. Human beings have peaks and troughs in their walks with God, like athletes who train for events and then eat cheeseburgers during their down time. God is monitoring our peaks and troughs, and he will time things so we will be on peaks when the rapture comes. I’m only referring to Christians who will make it. Most will be left here to suffer.

Three people have been raptured. We should look at them and ask ourselves why we would be raptured if we’re not like them. Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus walked with God. The Bible literally says Enoch walked with God, and then he was not. Elijah was a loner; he complained to God about it. Jesus was constantly wandering off to be with God, abandoning even the disciples. If you’re not walking with God before the rapture, why would you expect to be taken? It’s not speed dating. He’s going to take people he knows. Are you better than Enoch and Elijah?

There isn’t going to be any worldwide revival. Christians who think there will be don’t understand how the world works. We already had our big revivals. Generally, the world has chosen Satan over Jesus, and there is nothing God can do, because he will not interfere with free will.

I had a dream last night. I was invited to an event thrown by The Last Reformation, a pretty good charismatic ministry. They work miracles, prophesy, and baptize people with the Holy Spirit. They think they’re changing the world, though, and that isn’t true.

I was given a hand-drawn map. I was supposed to drive down a residential street, make a turn, and park by a house where people were meeting. A lot of people were supposed to be there.

When I got there, there was no house. There was a big building containing warehouse condos. They faced inward, opening onto an indoor hallway. It was a winding hallway just wide enough for a car. I got out and pushed my car up the hallway.

I ran into Torben Sondergaard, the imprisoned leader of TLR, and his wife. There were only a couple of other people there. The warehouses were empty.

I woke up, and later on, I dreamed I went to a similar building where my late father owned warehouses. This building doesn’t actually exist. My dad was there, working hard to get the warehouses in shape for new tenants. He was so tired, he was stumbling. He limped. He was sweating. I was afraid he would die if he didn’t quit. He said the people who built the warehouse had covered up a lot of problems. All I saw was a need for some paint, which I could have applied, personally, in a short time.

I marveled at the size of the warehouses and asked what they were going to rent for. He said they would go for around $4000 each. I was happy. I had this idea that 10% would go to me.

I believe the empty warehouses show what has happened to the church.

During the last century, pretty good evangelists filled stadiums and expensive venues. When they came to town, newspapers announced it without being paid, and people showed up to get help. It’s not like that now. A Satanic evangelist like Joel Osteen can fill a stadium, but Torben Sondergaard visits churches that meet in tiny warehouses. Warehouses are pretty much standard for serious charismatic churches now. It’s an insult to God. Catholics can teach demonic doctrine, own perhaps trillions of dollars’ worth of real estate, and build huge, grotesque churches, but a man who casts out demons will probably have to rent, not own, a warehouse surrounded by car repair joints and little businesses that fulfill Amazon and Ebay orders.

My dad represented misguided preachers who have great power. They work hard in the flesh to build churches, but very little comes of it. They are so busy wasting time, they don’t spend much time with God, and that destroys their effectiveness.

God also showed me that the most important thing for me to do was to spend time with him. It’s more important than going to church, being with Rhodah, helping the poor, or any other aspect of Christianity.

Your main job as a Christian is to see to it you hold onto your own salvation and continue to be improved by God. If you fail, nothing you have ever done for anyone else will matter. In order to fulfill your main task, you have to avoid becoming busy with other things.

There are Christians out there who are proud of themselves because they put in long days doing things for churches and people. They work so much they have no time to spend with God, and they think he will be happy about it. They’re wrong. The main thing he wants is you, not your ridiculous works.

He gave us Mary and Martha to show how he feels. Jesus was in their house, and Martha was serving people and cooking and cleaning and so on. Mary abandoned her, let her do all the work, and sat at the feet of Jesus. When Martha accused her to Jesus, he told her Mary was doing a better thing than she was.

It was better for Mary to sit next to Jesus and interact with him, while Martha worked like a slave, than it was for Martha to do the work of two people in order to look after a gathering of believers.

Many times, God has said, “Stay close to me and enjoy my love and my favor,” and I have asked him to help me do it. He’s doing it now. By turning off the car stereo, I’m getting closer, and I’m hearing more from him.

Jesus isn’t going to have an arranged marriage where he meets the bride for the first time and hopes for the best. Read the Song of Solomon. He will be marrying a bride he already knows very well, whose heart is aligned with his.

Revival is not coming. Not in any grand way. A few people here and there will be saved. The Last Reformation will not grow. Not unless they abandon their principles and whore out. Men who heal incurable diseases on Youtube will not get large followings. Things will get worse, because people’s hearts have gotten too hard for God to break.

That relates to another thing God showed me.

A tribulum is a board with nails driven into it. Sort of resembles a cross, now that I think about it, but that’s a digression. Tribulums were used to remove the husks from very hard grain. A man would stand on the tribulum, and an animal would drag him around over grain spread on a rock. Sort of like the rock the sower threw grain on, but that’s another digression.

The nails protruded from the bottom of the board, and as they ran over the grain, they would break the husk. Tribulation was only necessary for very hard grain. Other grain came out of its husk with less persuasion.

The tribulation will be God, using extremely harsh means to harvest a few of the extremely stubborn people who have not yielded to nicer means of persuasion. Some people are easy to bring to God. Others have to feel the flames charring their feet.

People who have already yielded to God will be raptured before the tribulation, because tormenting them would serve no purpose, and because God could not do it if they were on the earth to pray for it to stop.

How do you know it’s time to get the tribulum out? You get it out when only the hard grain is left. When using other means fails to produce results, you resort to tribulation.

God showed me this: we are now in a time where almost all the grain is hard. Even the little warehouses aren’t very full. God has sent us preacher after preacher. He has performed sign after sign, and we have ridiculed and rejected the people who were used to perform the signs. The soft approach has been exhausted, so the tribulation is about to start, for man’s own good.

The tribulation will be the last chance for the people of this age. Anyone who won’t listen when the world is burning up and the trees and the fish are dead will go to hell, and it will be the right place for them, because there is no reaching them.

Yesterday I heard Jeremiah in the car. All the bigwigs and clergymen in Israel hated him. They called for his death because he prophesied against Israel. They didn’t say he lied, which is funny. They said he prophesied. Maybe they knew, or at least suspected, he was right. Maybe they were willing to risk killing a man for repeating a message God had ordered him to give. No wonder God stopped sending the Jews prophets for 400 years. He had to be tired of watching them torment and kill them.

I can relate to Jeremiah. Every preacher and church rejects me sooner or later. They’re with me up to a certain point, and then they turn on me when I set God above them and their imaginative, self-serving doctrine. I could have been very, very helpful to the people at the churches I belonged to, but Christians drove me out. They do it to everyone who speaks the truth.

Christians love to look down on the Jews and talk about how stupid they were for rejecting Jesus, but we do the same thing every day. We torment and exclude everyone who goes a little too far in telling us what Jesus is saying.

If Jesus came back today under a different name, Christians would kill him as soon as possible. They hate being told this, but it’s true.

We would celebrate his death. We would say, “God really showed HIM.” We would post memes showing his dead body, taunting him and anyone who believed him.

Most Christians, including charismatics, hate the doctrine of Jesus.

If you think I’m wrong, read the Revelation and see what people will do to the two witnesses he sends. I’m sure nominal Christians will be among those who throw parties.

If you’re not rejected by the world and the church, which is really just part of the world, you’re doing something wrong. I didn’t say that. Jesus did. Look it up.

One of these days, this blog will be gone for good, because persecution will increase, and whoever takes it down will smirk, thinking I’m washed up. In reality, he will be driving nails through his own hands and feet. And things will keep going better and better for me.

Finally

This is a milestone. I finally tested positive for covid. A drugstore test shows the dreaded pink line. If I don’t have the rona, I must be pregnant.

I can’t be bothered typing “COVID-19.” I’m even getting too lazy to type “coronavirus.” Covid, covid, covid. This term is not case-sensitive any more.

Why do I say “finally”? Because I’ve had pretty much the same symptoms about 4 times, and the tests, including one PCR, always came out negative. The tests are lame. I’m pretty sure I had the virus.

I had covid in the US in 2020. I had it in Egypt in 2021. I had it in Turkey in 2021. I just had it here again. I think I had it one more time here, but I can’t remember. Maybe not. Maybe I’m remembering testing myself here after flying home from another country where a PCR test failed me.

So why do have I tested negative over and over? I follow the directions on the home tests, and you can’t screw up a PCR.

I’m thrilled I tested positive, because it shows I’m not one of those people who get covid one day and have to be flown to the hospital the next. Is this true of every strain or just this one? My guess: a whole bunch of strains. I’ve been sick several times, several different strains have been running around when I’ve been ill, and not one strain, including the one that got me when I was unvaccinated, amounted to anything. It is a virtual certainty that I’ve had whatever was around in 2020, plus Delta and Omicron.

So does this mean there is no strain that can get me? I would guess it means there is no strain YET that can get me, but covid changes. Who knows what the next variant will be like?

The virus can change, and I suppose I can, too. Covid really nails the very elderly, and presumably, many of these same people would have been fine had they gotten sick decades earlier.

Am I going to keep getting more and more severe cases as I get older? If not, will vaccines and earlier bouts build me up so I’m less vulnerable than old people who got sick during the first two years? No idea. I don’t know, and neither do the best scientists on Earth.

One thing seems to be clear, and I know people will hate reading it. Ivermectin seems to help.

When I have taken ivermectin as soon as I realized I was sick, my symptoms have improved a lot or disappeared within a few hours. When I’ve taken it after letting more time go by, when the symptoms have become more severe, my symptoms have changed less, but still significantly.

It’s not the placebo effect. The placebo effect doesn’t make snot stop coming out of your nose, break a fever, or make your throat feel better. It may be that my body just happened to bounce back after I took ivermectin, and maybe ivermectin did nothing at all, but the improvement wasn’t my imagination.

Don’t tell me about studies “proving” ivermectin doesn’t help. If you think that ever happened, you have a very shallow understanding of studies, statistics, word games, and politics. Doctors are generally bad scientists, and they’re the ones who do most studies. They ask the wrong questions. They choose the wrong subjects. They take money from entities that have an interest in cooking the results. They misinterpret the data. Their entire profession leans left, hard. Doctors have done some truly stupid studies over the years, and they have clung to them until they almost had to be beaten to get them to let go. Virtually no one who runs around claiming studies proved ivermectin has any idea what questions were asked, what kind of subjects were chosen, who paid for the studies, or what the raw data looked like. Give me a few million dollars, and I’ll do a study and prove dogs believe in Santa.

I don’t claim ivermectin helps. Maybe it doesn’t. I know what happened to me repeatedly when I took it, and that’s good enough. Experience is a good enough teacher in perhaps 99 out of 100 cases in a typical person’s life. You shouldn’t ignore it just because it involves health.

I remember being given an antibiotic called Levaquin. Every time I tried to sleep, I felt like I was in hell as soon as my head hit the pillow. I was instantly in a place of torment and screaming. Amazing nightmares. Nobody had to do a study to tell me to quit using it. I had a similar problem with hibiscus tea. Glad I quit taking Levaquin, because the same establishment that did studies proving it was safe later concluded it could cause permanent tendon damage.

My mother refused to take thalidomide when she was pregnant with me. Kind of glad she didn’t read the studies saying it was fine.

I think Rhodah had covid in Singapore. Snot, fatigue, and a bad headache. Didn’t want to get out of bed. I slept right next to her and never caught it. Then I came back here and lived like a hermit. Got covid anyway. She didn’t catch it when I had it in Egypt and Turkey.

Her version of covid was very minor, like mine. She didn’t want to get out of bed, but she was certainly able to. On her worst day, we walked around town and did things.

I’m overjoyed to have proof I had covid, because as long as you don’t know you’ve had it, you wonder how it will affect you. I’ve always hoped to test positive except when it endangered my ability to fly.

I have probably flown with covid. Oh, well. That’s on the governments who make the rules and the people who give the tests. I answered every question and did as I was told. I played their game and didn’t take it upon myself to add new rules. I gave them some credit for knowing what they were doing.

I never flew with symptoms. That much, I can say for sure.

So now what do I do? Hide in a hole and have people bring me food?

The web says people are generally no longer contagious after 10 days. I had a fever on January 29. When I got the fever, I realized I had felt funny for at least two days, pushing me back to January 27. That makes this day 13. Guess I won’t be eating Papa John’s.

I have been out several times. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. I didn’t know what I had, though, and as I have said, I had had the same symptoms before, along with at least 5 negative test results.

I may not have covid now. The tests are not very reliable.

Here is good news: my inability to taste beer is almost completely gone. Maybe it is completely gone. I had to blow my nose earlier today, and I don’t feel totally right, but my nose works, and beer no longer tastes like seltzer with hops.

I don’t know what to say about the many, many people who started having symptoms, hoped they wouldn’t get really sick, and then went to the hospital or died. It has to be terrible, slowly realizing you’re one of the cursed ones. If you’re not fat, sick, or old, you’re very unlikely to get sick, but if you’re in the high-risk group, you have no idea whether you’re facing a cold, a couple of amputations, or death. You just have to wait and find out.

This illness is taking a long time, but on the other hand, it has amounted to nothing. For the first two days or so, I just felt like something wasn’t right. I wondered if I was dehydrated from drinking beer. Then I had chills for one night, and I actually enjoyed them. Then the fever broke, I had a very mild cold and a slight cough, and from time to time I coughed something unpleasant up while I was trying to talk. For one day, I could not smell anything at all, and then my sense of smell started coming back.

There were a couple of afternoons when I very suddenly felt like I had to go to bed right away because staying awake took a lot of effort.

I feel like Thucydides describing the plague, but my story is dull compared to his.

When I was in Egypt, feeling just like this only a little worse, I walked around all day on cloudless 114-degree summer days, looking at pyramids and temples. Rhodah could not keep up. I could do it right now.

God has been extremely good to me, as always.

Night before last, I had a dream. I was in bed, and a little transparent spirit was on my chest. It was about like a terrier. I couldn’t see the shape of it clearly, but it acted like a terrier trying to maul me. I felt nothing at all, and I kept telling it I spoke failure to it in the name of Jesus Christ. It didn’t run off, but it didn’t accomplish anything, either. I looked beside the bed, at the baseboard, and I saw big creatures like daddy longlegs, also transparent. They stood about 6 inches tall. They seemed confused. They were wobbling around, trying to walk. I hated them. I hit them with a gun and made them explode.

My experience with covid has been a lot like the dream. Harassment that hasn’t harmed me at all.

I hate to think about what I deserve. Different story.

In other news, the stout I kegged is finally showing signs of carbonation. I put it on 20 psi of CO2, and that was day before yesterday. That’s a lot. Stout is supposed to require only a tiny amount of carbonation, and I was warned to be careful, but it took maybe 36 hours before I got enough foam to feel like I could remove the CO2 and hook up the beer gas.

The stout tastes almost exactly like Old Rasputin imperial stout, except it contains a lot less alcohol. Except for the differences in ABV and intensity of flavor, these beers taste the same to me. I can’t complain about that, because Old Rasputin is the best factory beer I’ve ever had. I set out to brew something slightly dryer, though.

This beer may still have some fermenting to do, so maybe all is well. Past versions have dried out with time.

MORE

Funny; my comments quit working just as I tried to answer a question about ivermectin. Suspicious, but I suppose the leftist nuts who are killing freedom of expression have better things to do than interfere with my blog.

Anyway, here is the answer I was going to give:

I think I went with the dose the Indians claimed to get good results with. Twelve mg per day, I believe. Unless it was mcg. Anyway, it worked out to be what a horse takes for worms, corrected for my weight.

Not recommending ivermectin for anyone but myself. For all I know, you will die hideously.

Plus Hard Times for the Venereal Girl

The news makes me hope God pulls the plug on this planet quickly. What we are going through is too much, and it’s going to get worse.

I guess everyone knows about the Grammy awards. They’re like Oscars for musicians. The Grammys have a history of producing disgusting spectacles that insult God. In 2015, aging songstress Madonna sang and danced amid a throng of shirtless homosexuals made up to look like demons. Their costumes included fake horns. They worshiped her. In 2017, Beyonce did a ridiculous number in which she and other women had halos appear around their heads.

Now the Grammy people have outdone themselves. We were just subjected to an act featuring an obese homosexual dressed as Satan, dancing with another homosexual who had himself castrated and claims to be a woman. The one dressed as Satan is Sam Smith, the man who made people gag by singing a Bond movie theme song. Bond title sequences have historically featured songs performed by women, accompanied by lewd dance routines performed by dancers shown in silhouette. The other man in the act is Kim Petras, a German whose parents let a doctor castrate him when he was a minor.

A few years ago, no one disputed the fact that the age of castrati was over. Now it’s back. We used to look back on it in horror and disbelief. Things have really changed. In 2010, people generally agreed that castrating minors was barbaric. In 2023, people who object are considered barbarians.

Ever wonder who the greatest soprano of all time was? It wasn’t Beverly Sills or Kiri Te Kanawa or Leontyne Price. The greatest sopranos were men. As late as the 1800’s, greedy parents were having their sons castrated so they could become singers. Men, even eunuchs, have a stronger vocal apparatus than women. They’re a lot like the men who pretend to be women in order to win athletic contests.

Kim Petras looks like a woman if you don’t stare too close, but he’s a castrato.

It’s interesting how men are replacing women. Trannies are better athletes. Castrated ones have the potential to sing better. They are now taking over women’s role in feminism. It seems like we are constantly hearing from men who feel their mental aberrations and surgical successes entitle them to speak for actual women born with ovaries. The other day, one told the female author J.K. Rowling he was more of a woman than she would ever be, and people, including women, applauded him.

The Grammy performance was done by two men. If there were any women on the stage, and that would be hard to prove these days, they were relegated to supporting roles. Hollywood’s new take on barefoot and pregnant.

Smith and Petras sang a song with an extremely appropriate title: “Unholy.” I read the lyrics, and they are close to gibberish. Basically, it’s about people fornicating. That much I could figure out. It looks like it’s about a married man who has sex with female strippers or maybe other men who just claim to be female.

By “married man,” I mean a man who is actually married, not a man who pretends he’s married to another man.
A man who is married to a woman. Who was born with ovaries. An actual woman.

Here is what lyrics look like when intelligent people with talent write them:

And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows of my heart
High up in the sky the little stars climb
Always reminding me that we’re apart
You wander down the lane and far away
Leaving me a song that will not die
Love is now the stardust of yesterday
The music of the years gone by
Sometimes I wonder how I spend
The lonely night
Dreaming of a song
The melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you

Here’s a little bit of “Unholy”:

Mummy don’t know daddy’s getting hot
At the body shop, doing something unholy
He’s sat back while she’s dropping it, she be popping it
Yeah, she put it down slowly
Oh-ee-oh-ee-oh, he left his kids at
Ho-ee-oh-ee-ome, so he can get that
Mummy don’t know daddy’s getting hot
At the body shop, doing something unholy (woo)

See if you can see the contrast.

People think Christians are crazy for saying Satan is real and that he is taking over the world. Okay; let’s try to imagine what he might do if he were in charge.

How about having two homosexuals (including a transvestite castrato) go on an award ceremony televised globally, dress like Satan and a damned soul, dance on a set designed to look like hell, and sing about a husband who has sex with strippers?

If what we’re seeing now doesn’t look like Satan’s work to you, what will?

It’s funny how women don’t see the threat feminized men pose. Women do more to promote them than anyone, but these men are replacing them. Gays are envious of women. They resent them and want to take their places. They are moving into fields women used to dominate. They are shaming women who disagree with them. They are taking achievements and income away from women.

Don’t be mad, ladies, but men are just plain better at a lot of things. It becomes more noticeable when they decide they’re women and compete with women.

I think the world is finished. Revival is going nowhere. Churches are drying up or endorsing perversion. Clergymen are being fired for refusing to endorse perversion. Imagine that happening in the time of David. What would David have done if the chief priest had expelled someone for not endorsing queer theory? What would Paul have done if the church of Philadelphia had insisted on ordaining homosexuals?

The rapture can’t come soon enough for me. What are God’s children doing here? Not increasing their numbers. That’s obvious. More of us are falling away than receiving salvation. The kingdom is running at a loss. At least it looks that way. I can’t really know.

Today I had what I think is a revelation: while the kingdom of God is about love, and while God only leaves us in the world to reach others, your primary job is to look out for yourself and make sure you don’t go to hell. It does you no good to serve God all your life if you end up in the lake of fire. There will be no reward while you’re burning and screaming. You won’t be comforted by the thought that it was all worth it because you helped other people avoid the flames. Your consciousness is all you have, and if it’s in hell, what happens in heaven is of no importance at all.

I’ll be honest. I would rather see everyone I have ever known go to hell than go myself. Everyone who has ever been born, for that matter. That’s just common sense. I might be willing to die for someone, but I would have to be nuts to choose to burn for eternity.

The longer we stay here, the more of us will quit. Temptation is going to get worse and worse, and many of us will fall. The salvation of a few more souls does not seem worth the loss of so many people who have already been saved.

We have become such pigs. It’s astonishing. We barely notice blasphemy and obscenity that would have caused riots 60 years ago. We approve of these things. We celebrate them. We curse people who warn us about them.

Why hasn’t God destroyed us already?

Well, he has. In Noah’s time. But why has he let the current age continue so long? His patience is astounding.

Even if I were not a Christian, I would not want to live in this world any more. There is no place for sane people. We hide in the corners. We keep quiet. We hope no one will notice us. We hope they won’t come and make trouble for us and our children until we’re dead. It’s a sad way to live. Like a scared cockroach.

Certain types of things recur throughout history. Based on what we know of societies that become depraved, there are certain things we should expect to see. Sexual perverts should come to rule us, and they should start roaming in bands, raping men as well as women, with the government’s consent. Homosexuality should become the majority orientation. We should see more rioting. We should see more mobs looting stores and homes. We should see Holocaust-style persecution of Jews and actual Christians (not nominal Christians who support perversion and idolatry). Cuban-style confiscation of wealth must be on the way, too.

I think tattooing and mutilation will continue increasing. I believe demons use these things to deface the image of God and make people look the way they look.

One interesting casualty of the Grammys: Madonna. People are commenting on her looks. Her face is swollen and grotesque. The end has come. She’s shooting the messengers, claiming ageism and misogyny. That’s crazy. They’re just reacting to a freakish spectacle.

Rhodah and I were talking about her today.

I always think about Madonna and Cher when I think about people who have no hope for the life to come. Things went their way on Earth, while they were living in perishable bodies that had the potential to be attractive for 30 years at the most. Then their looks faded, and they scrambled to hire surgeons. They held onto youth every way they could. Who can blame them? If you’re a rich female sex symbol, no matter how well things are going for you, you are just a few years away from ugliness and rejection, and when you die, your wealth will vanish. In the afterlife, no one will give Cher a table at an expensive restaurant when it’s already full. No one will pay her just to show up somewhere. No one will care about her opinions. She’ll be just like everyone else around her. No one will know her name, because she won’t have one.

People call Madonna the Material Girl because she had a hit song called “Material Girl.” In the song, she confirmed everything I say about her, decades before I said it.

Some boys kiss me
Some boys hug me
I think they’re ok
If they don’t give me proper credit
I just walk away
They can beg and they can plead
But they can’t see the light (that’s right)
‘Cause the boy with the cold hard cash
Is always Mister Right
‘Cause we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl
You know that we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl

Rhodah said people like Madonna have to buy men when they get old. Guess what? It’s in the song.

Boys may come and boys may go
And that’s all right you see
Experience has made me rich
And now they’re after me

Imagine what dating is like for a single woman who looks just like Madonna and has no money or fame. Imagine Cher, working as a TJ Maxx saleslady and trying to find a husband.

Madonna relied on her body, which is a material object. Now she’s angry because the thing she used to manipulate people repels them. If she used it to build a following of people she knew were shallow enough to be manipulated by sexual temptation, why should she be angry if they drop her when she becomes sexually repulsive?

Look, if I baked a cake to get people to come into my house, I wouldn’t expect them to stick around after it got moldy.

Life is fleeting, and our bodies fall apart and die. We should look at our lives here the way kids look at McDonald’s jobs. They don’t provide security for the long term. They are stepping stones to better things.

Madonna is trying to turn McDonald’s into a career.

I wonder how Satan is going to top the Sam Smith act. Whatever he does, it will have to be something very, very special.

5,000,000 Dead Irishmen Can’t be Wrong

Brewing is going well.

Today I kegged a dry stout. To me, “dry stout” means something that isn’t a syrupy, overpowering imperial stout or a gross sweetened stout. I guess you could call it an Irish stout. Something that would please a Murphy’s drinker.

It was supposed to attenuate down to a specific gravity of about 1.012, but it got to about 1.016 and slowed down to the point where it barely moved. I am desperate to fill kegs, so I kegged it anyway. Today I stuck it in a new Torpedo Megamouth keg, and I put it on 20 psi of CO2. Tomorrow morning I plan to switch it to beer gas. My hope is that a night on CO2 will get enough CO2 into the beer to allow me to dispense it tomorrow.

Beer gas is a combination of nitrogen and CO2. Nitrogen makes stout silky and a little sweet, but it does not add the carbonation bite CO2 gives, and it leaves beer right after you pour it, so if you don’t have CO2 in your beer, and you dispense it with beer gas, it will go flat sitting in your glass.

In a perfect world, the stout would have been allowed to mature in peace. I would have given it maybe three weeks before kegging it. I just don’t have time. I’d rather have a somewhat imperfect stout than empty kegs. I can make the next one perfect while I drink this one.

I can’t be sure this one will not be excellent. It probably will be. But I am definitely rushing it.

I feel I should order more wheat beer ingredients. Between sampling and wasting beer to get my system working, I am running low. If I have wheat beer, my favorite ale, and stout on tap, I can relax and take time brewing other things.

I have ingredients for a lager and a heavy ale. The lager will take weeks, and the ale will probably be slow as well. I only have faucets for 5 beers, and it may be mid-March before I have the lager and heavy ale ready, so I have to keep reloading the three faster beers unless I want to run out of inventory.

My virus-related taste and smell difficulties are blowing over, but things still are not right. My ale tastes way too bitter. My wheat beer is good, but it should taste better. Another problem: beer seems to hit me way too hard. I had maybe a quart of fairly weak beer today, and I really felt it. Is that because of the virus?

The purpose of brewing is not to get drunk. I hope things go back to normal as this illness winds down.

I suppose coronavirus is also the reason it’s not possible to get every beer-related item I want in a timely manner. It wasn’t until today that I had enough parts to run 3 kegs at once. I still need two fittings in order to get two more kegs going. I expect to need to keg my latest ale in three days, and I ordered the remaining fittings today. They may be here in time. I hope so.

I started ordering dry yeast in bulk. I can pay $11 per batch or $5 per batch. I might as well face reality.

I think my best move right now is to give up on normal lager fermentation and use my pressure fermenter. If the stories are true, I can finish fermentation in under a week with no loss of quality. If I can pull this off, I’ll have an ale and a lager ready to keg in under one week. That leaves me with the heavy ale to work on, and with 4 other beers on tap, I will not be rushed.

After that, I should be able to slow down and act like a normal homebrewer, inventing recipes and making fine adjustments to my equipment.

If You Can’t Buy it, Mod it

God keeps giving Rhodah and me lots of revelation, and it gets hard to keep up with and document, so I write about beer instead.

I now have two beers fermenting, and I plan to brew another tomorrow or the day after. I am tired of fooling around. I have to put myself in a position where production is much faster than consumption and loss, or else I will always have idle faucets and frustration.

It appears the stout I brewed over a week ago still hasn’t given up. An occasional bubble still pops out of the airlock. Unbelievable. I checked the specific gravity last night, and it looks like it’s around 1.015, only .002 down from a couple of days back. I was thinking it would end up around 1.012. Am I asking too much?

On the one hand, it’s taking forever, but on the other, it’s still active, so I must be doing the right thing, waiting for it to die. It’s no good kegging a beer while there is still sugar in it.

My other beer may be a Belgian IPA. I learned this the other day. Before that, I didn’t know what it was.

I brew whatever I want, whether it fits a known style or not. Most guys choose a particular factory beer or style they want to brew, and they create or borrow a recipe within established guidelines. I think, “I’ll bet it would taste good if I did THIS,” and then I put together ingredients that sound like they would work. It annoys some people. I don’t know why. What business is it of theirs what I put in my beer? I can’t imagine getting upset at other people for creating recipes.

The grain bill I used is a lot like an IPA, only I added a little table sugar for some reason. Sugar increases alcohol without changing flavor much. I used Crystal hops for the finish. For IPA, you pretty much have to use something like Cascade or Centennial or people wonder what’s wrong with you. These are citrusy hops. To me, Crystal tastes very spicy. Somewhere in the realm of cinnamon and allspice.

For IPA, you’re supposed to use an IPA yeast like Wyeast 1056, and you ferment at 68 degrees. I use Belgian ale yeast. The stuff they use in tripels. I ferment at room temperature. Right now, the bucket is in my kitchen, burping away at 75 degrees, threatening to generate all sorts of aromatic chemicals and hangover-inducing heavy alcohols.

The other day, someone on a forum mentioned Belgian IPA, and I realized it sounded a lot like what I was making.

I pitched my yeast last night, and now the beer is burping like crazy. It may be done in 4 days. That’s how long the last batch took.

I don’t want an IPA. I feel like I’m drowning in IPA every time I go to the store. But BELGIAN IPA…that may be different. Because it’s not IPA.

Maybe it’s BPA.

My next beer will be either an amber lager or a very heavy Belgiany beer with some similarities to the one I just described. If Belgiany, it will be different from the quasi-IPA because of the weight and high alcohol content, not to mention several pounds of wheat. Also, I decided to use Sabro hops. This is a new hop which is said to generate creamy, coconutty flavors. Perfect for a sweet, heavy, aromatic ale. I hope. I don’t know.

My sense of smell goes in and out. A few minutes ago, I was able to smell Vick’s Vaporub. Maybe I can enjoy a beer tonight.

I am working on some cowboy mods to my Speidel Braumeister brewing machine. It’s great, but the user interface is garbage. The maker wants $400 for a wifi module so I can join their website, store my recipes there, and download them into the machine. That’s insane. I want a program on my PC or phone. I want to use wifi or Bluetooth like a sane person, for a few dollars. I do not want to join a manufacturer’s cult.

I have to be honest. The Germans are still a little scary. They seem to think customers should fall in line with the herd and do as they’re told. I’m an American. I eat things that travel in herds.

I guess Europeans think we’re nuts. They’re all standing at the government trough, eating that sheep feed and thinking how wonderful it is to be taken care of, have the government do their thinking, and to be just like everyone else, and many of us see it and want to throw up. It looks like a living death. My country isn’t my family. I don’t belong to it. I want to NOT fit in. I don’t want to melt into it. I just live here because God won’t let me move to heaven.

I spent a lot of the day looking at the Braumeister and the Internet.

I learned that the Braumeister only has three electrical connections other than AC in. It has a temperature probe, a heater, and a small pump. Simple. All I need is a bit of hardware that can run these things and connect to a PC. It has to have storage, like an SD card. A small SD card would give my machine millions of times as much storage as the manufacturer did.

I need a microcomputer that will operate two relays that turn the pump and heater on and off. I need it to listen to the temperature probe, because the temperature will guide the use of the heater. I need it to have a timer. I need it to be able to run programs I wrote. I need to be able to run the pump and heater manually.

I looked all over the place. I found what looks like a solution: Craftbeerpi. This is a program that hooks a Raspberry Pi up to a brewing system. You should be able to connect it to any system that has a pump and heater.

My heater, pump, and probe are modular. Among them, they use two types of connections. German and hard to source, of course. Stupid. Anyway, I can disconnect the Braumeister’s controller and rig up new cables coming from a new controller built by me. The Raspberry Pi will talk to a couple of big relays. The relays will turn the pump and heater on and off. The temperature probe will talk to the Raspberry Pi.

Craftbeerpi will let me use a program to store a limitless number of brewing schedules somewhere. On an SD card on the board, I guess. No more, “Drei zchedules iss all you get. If you have nussing to hide, ziss iss all you need.”

The only question is whether it will work. I guess it will.

I have some inquiries out.

I am convinced Germanness is the problem with Speidel, the outfit that made the Braumeister. I think these guys believe they know better than their customers. That’s almost never true. There are companies that have thousands of engineers but billions of customers. No matter which company you’re talking about, somewhere out there, there are a bunch of customers that make its engineers look like monkeys.

If an American company had made it, it would have Bluetooth built in. It would have a PC app and a phone app. The connectors would be mainstream. It would have gigs of storage, not bytes. If it needed wifi, it would include it, or it would use a $9 adaptor. If it needed a firmware update, you would use a $4 USB cable to connect it to your computer.

I think Germans may be overconfident when it comes to building things. There is a myth that says they do it better than anyone, but it’s a lie. Their cars are unreliable and impossible to work on. Their tools are overpriced and not the best. Their beer is very polished, but it tends to be boring and low on flavor and imagination. And anyone can make beer with finesse. It’s not like they figured out nuclear fusion.

They seem to make things in an overthought way, and that creates the illusion of superiority while making things worse for everyone concerned.

Doing things differently without a good reason is incompetence in the tech world. It causes a lot of unnecessary expense and suffering. Ask anyone who ever needed an Apple cable in the middle of the night.

I will digress.

The other day, I asked some Internet beer people if they were their own favorite brewers. Did they like their own beer better than anyone else’s? One guy responded, “I live in Germany.” That was a stupid remark. He was saying German factory beer had to be better than anything he could make, because all German factory beer is perfect. Not true. And what he said would have been closer to true in the US than Germany. We make the best factory beer on Earth now. We have almost 5,000 breweries, competing hard to innovate and make the best beer possible. Germany has about 1500, and they crank out the same things they cranked out in 1800. Germany is a beer backwater. We’re the leaders now.

There are several companies that make small brewing machines for hobbyists, and as far as I know, they all have problems. Some have build issues. Speidel’s products work very well, and the construction is good, but they have serious user interface deficiencies. It’s like marrying a beautiful woman in a titanium chastity belt.

If Toyota had made this brewing machine, I would never have had a problem with it. Everything would have been worked out before I bought it. They would never have let it out the door with a user interface like this.

I hope to hear back about the Raspberry Pi solution tomorrow. If it looks good, I’ll go for it. Can’t be very hard. Two relays, a Raspberry Pi, a screen, a mouse, a keyboard, and some cables and connectors. If it works, I’ll kiss Speidel’s support team good bye, and maybe next time I’ll build my own machine. A lot of people do.

Nose Caught in Kung Flu Grippe

I have fantastic news to report! This morning, I smelled coffee! And that’s no metaphor.

Earlier this week, I came down with what I thought was covid. It wasn’t severe. Mild aches. A mild headache. A mild fever. A very runny, stuffy nose. Fatigue in the afternoon. Not that bad.

A couple of days ago, I noticed that things didn’t taste normal. A sandwich tasted funny. The beer I had made was kind of gross.

As of yesterday, I couldn’t smell much of anything. I put Vaporub right up against my nose, and while I wasn’t sure, I thought I could smell a very faint menthol aroma.

Sure looks like covid. Other things can mess with your sense of smell and taste, but covid is the worst offender among common diseases, and my symptoms don’t match other illnesses well.

The web says I could have sinusitis, but I don’t think that’s true. We’re in a pandemic, for one thing, and it’s not a sinusitis pandemic. Also, I’ve had all sorts of upper respiratory bugs during my life, including bugs that affected my sinuses, and I have never lost my sense of smell to the degree I lost it this week. Not even close.

The weird thing is that some things taste almost normal. People like to tell us most of taste is really smell, but that appears to be an exaggeration. Out of self-pity, I’ve been eating breakfast cereal instead of healthy food when I get up, and Grape Nuts taste completely normal. I made beer cheese spread which I eat with Ritz crackers, and those things taste fine.

I always lose weight when I have a cold or anything like a cold, and it doesn’t matter what I eat, so I am indulging myself. I got an Entenmann’s raspberry coffee cake. It tastes just fine. Today I decided to have some coffee with it.

For some reason, I really like instant decaf. I made myself a big mug a short time ago, with sugar and real cream. When I opened the coffee jar, I decided to see if I could smell it. I inhaled deeply, and I was shocked by a strong wave of coffee aroma.

It was exciting. I inhaled more than once, just for the joy of smelling anything.

The sad thing is that I have two homebrews on tap, a third about to go into the keg, and three more waiting to be made, not to mention three factory beers I bought because I thought I was going to have a homebrew shortage. Drinking this stuff is like drinking thickened club soda with an extremely high level of hop bitterness. A waste.

I bought Boddington’s Pub Ale, Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA, and Old Rasputin Imperial Stout. Boddington’s is a beer made with profit, not quality, in mind, but I still like it. Old Rasputin is extremely heavy and dark. It’s full of crazy smells and flavors. When you lower your nose into the glass, the aromas surround you and pummel you like an evangelist at an Antifa riot. Boddington’s is very mild.

Last night, Boddies and Old Rasputin didn’t taste much different at all.

The coffee I’m drinking tastes a lot like coffee, so at least I have that.

I ordered myself two new fermenters, which means I bought buckets. They’re a like Home Depot buckets, but they hold almost 7 gallons. I make 5-gallon batches, and beer makes foam when it ferments, so it’s not wise to use 5-gallon buckets. You need extra space.

I can’t find bigger buckets locally, so I gladly paid about $20 each for buckets with lids, spigots, and airlocks. With tax and shipping, I was up around $55. Insane, I know, but there was no cheaper way to do it. Ebay had nothing. I could drive to Orlando, but then I would only save the shipping fee, and the tolls and gas would cost more.

I discovered Hearts Home Brew in Orlando, and it’s now my go-to supply store. For big orders, it’s worth driving or paying for shipping. Their prices are low, and they’re fast. I ordered buckets yesterday, and they will be here today.

This week will be Brewapalooza, AKA Brewing Man. Today I’ll make an ale that ferments at room temperature. Tomorrow, I’ll make a lager. At some point during this time, I’ll put a stout in the keezer. Before the week is out, the ale should ferment fast enough to let me make another ale; something wheaty but based on a tripel.

I think I need to face reality and get one more freezer so I can do lagers properly.

The word “lager” means “to store.” I guess this is why prison camps were called stalags. I don’t know. When you make a lager, you ferment it, and then you let it sit for a long time at a low temperature. This is the lagering process. It supposedly kills off-flavors.

These days, there are new ways of doing things. By fermenting under pressure, many people are making lagers at higher temperatures and in shorter times. They say it works. There are also new yeasts that work better at high temperatures. I’m not sure what to do. I would like to get a lager in the box, so maybe I should take a chance. I have a pressure fermenter. On the other hand, because I’m still working out the kinks in my techniques, it would be safer to use the old methods for my first post-comeback lager.

I can’t lager anything in my keezer because the temperature is wrong. If I use my fermenting fridge, I won’t have any place to ferment things while the lagering is going on.

It looks like a lot of the changes in brewing have been driven by Australians. They started Kegland, a leading manufacturer of brewing gadgets. They made my pressure fermenter.

Australians drink way too much. Many have a bad attitude toward drunkenness, like high school boys who never grow up, and their alcoholism rate is very high. It is claimed they drink more, and get drunk more, than all the other nationalities in the world. Think about that. The world includes places like England, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Germany, Russia, Finland, and the Czech Republic. When you’re drunker than the British, you need an intervention.

I guess it’s not good that homebrewing has taken off in Australia. It should be about making quality beer, not getting ripped with your pals and passing out face-down while singing “Waltzing Matilda.”

Homebrewing should never be about drunkenness, any more than French cooking should be about eating contests.

If you’re determined to be a drunk, you should probably drink wine or screwdrivers all day. Cheap alcohol buffered with a lot of liquid and maybe some nutrients. Pretending you’re a brewer just adds expense and effort, and beer makes you fat.

When my senses come back, I may make a Boddies clone with Amarillo hops and a little bit nicer grain bill. Amarillo hops have a strong lemon flavor, and that’s just what Boddies needs. The problem, though, is that Boddies goes well with beer gas.

I have a 4-body secondary regulator so I can dispense beer with CO2 at 4 different temperatures. I also have a beer gas tank with one disconnect, so it will only serve one keg. I plan to have stout in the keezer, on beer gas, all the time. If I start fooling with an ale that needs beer gas, I’ll have to fix things up so I can run another keg off the same bottle.

That would mean getting another secondary regulator. I think it’s fair to assume I’ll never have more than two beer gas beers in my keezer at once, so two bodies ought to get it done.

If trying to keep 5 kegs going sounds extreme, think about the guy I talked to the other day. He has 27 active.

Whatever this illness is, it’s progressing fast. Every day I feel much better than the previous day. My nose doesn’t run now, the stuffiness is nearly gone, and I rarely cough. I didn’t hit the energy wall until around 8 p.m. yesterday, so I’m getting two more hours than I did earlier in the week. No fever, either.

Maybe now Budweiser Will Taste Good

Well, this is interesting. I think I had covid last night.

A few days back I stayed up until three in the morning. Little tasks kept popping up, and I just went with it, even though what I really like is to be in bed by 9:30. The next day, I felt bad, and I thought it was because I needed sleep. I continued to feel off for the next couple of days, though, so something wasn’t right.

Last night, something hit me. My bones started to ache. I got a headache. I stopped sweating; my skin got very dry, so I knew I had a fever.

I went to bed, wrapped myself in an electric blanket, put it on the highest setting, and lay there. All night. Unable to sleep.

Of course, I took ivermectin, vitamin D, and vitamin C first.

I wasn’t very sick. Last night I had a runny nose for about 10 minutes. I sneezed a couple of times. I coughed a few times. My throat wasn’t quite right, but I can’t say it was scratchy.

In some ways, the experience was pleasant. I couldn’t sweat, so I lay there all night wrapped up comfortably in hot, dry bedding. It was like a long, padded sauna. If the aches aren’t too bad, a fever can have its enjoyable side.

I got up today and prayed with my wife. I put oil on myself, and she prayed for me. The dryness left my skin. Now I feel just about completely normal. My only problem is that there may be something going on with my sense of taste.

My understanding was that Omicron was not allowed to mess with your sense of taste. That’s supposed to be a Delta thing. I ate a slice of pizza and a ham sandwich this morning, because that’s the kind of junk I eat when I’ve been sick. The pizza was okay, but the sandwich seemed to taste a little metallic.

Here I am with three batches of beer on hand, a batch of grain in the spare fridge, and two more batches of grain on the way. What if I can’t tell if the beer is any good?

Yesterday I had a small serving of wheat beer early in the day, and then I had some more later. The first serving was a lot better. Was coronavirus messing with my perception? The second batch tasted odd.

The web says that if coronavirus changes your sense of smell or taste, it can take weeks to get over it. I would hate to have to wait that long to get back to work.

Whenever I start to feel sick, and I’m not very sick at all, I hope it’s coronavirus. If coronavirus can’t make me very sick, then presumably my immunity is good, and every episode ought to improve it. I’ve had three or four mild cold-like illnesses since the start of 2020, and all were very, very mild. I always test negative, but on the other hand, the symptoms always fit coronavirus better than a cold, and the tests are not very accurate.

A little part of me always wonders: “What if this is the first time I’ve had coronavirus? What if it gets really bad?” I must have had coronavirus by now, though. I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve been to restaurants. I’ve gone to stores. I’ve been on crowded trains.

I’ve listened too much to leftists who are pushing lies about coronavirus for political reasons. They want us to think everyone faces a high risk of serious problems, and that’s complete garbage. If you’re not fat, sick, or old, you are extremely unlikely to die and very unlikely to be really ill. I’m getting old, but I’m not in the age group coronavirus hits hardest. I’m not sick, and I’m not all that fat.

Young, thin, healthy people who have real problems with coronavirus are outliers. They’re like nonsmokers who get lung cancer. Leftists like to point to a few here and there, as though one robin made a summer. They did the same thing with AIDs. They tried to tell us it was going to be a big problem for heterosexuals, so we would clamor for research funding and so we wouldn’t rightly point the finger at the depraved homosexual lifestyle that spreads disease, but widespread heterosexual transmission never happened. Just about all the people who got AIDs from normal sex were women who slept with men who were closet homosexuals. It’s nearly impossible for a man to get AIDs from a woman.

People think Magic Johnson got AIDs from a woman. If that’s true, why didn’t it happen to the thousands of other sports figures and entertainment figures who have had sex with dozens or hundreds of women per year? Why just one?

I just saw an article with the title, “COVID-19 isn’t discriminating by age — younger people are dying, too.” That’s a lie, straight out. A tiny percentage of the dead died young, but coronavirus definitely discriminates by age. The CDC says about 19000 people in their twenties have died, but the number for people over 85 is nearly 300,000. What it doesn’t tell you is that there aren’t many people over 85. There are around 3 times as many people in their twenties. So Americans over 85 aren’t 15 times more likely to die. They’re around 45 times more likely.

A 45-fold difference doesn’t represent discrimination by age? Sorry. That’s a lie.

I still only know one young person who got really sick, and frankly, he’s obese. He has to be 80 pounds overweight.

My beer recipes are already fixed, so coronavirus can’t do any real harm while I’m brewing. It’s not like I’ll be tasting the beer and making changes. But I could be delayed in evaluating it.