Tithing was More Fun Than we Know

I think I know why God wants me to make beer.

Yesterday, I wrote about the rapture. The birth of Jesus was the first Christmas. The rapture will be the second real Christmas, not just a yearly observation. The second coming, to rule the earth, will be the third Christmas. The Bible says we will know when the rapture is coming. People who don’t read carefully get hung up on a scripture that says only Yahweh knows the day, but the Bible also says it will not take us by surprise, and it’s clear we are expected to know the season, meaning we will have a good general idea of the timing, and this will help us prepare.

Look, Jesus told us there would be signs. That proves we are not to be taken by surprise. It serves no purpose to tell people about signs of an upcoming event if you want them to be ambushed.

So if we will have a pretty good idea that the rapture is nearly here, we will have reason to celebrate, and what did the ancient Jews celebrate with? Alcohol. Yes, they did. Stop with the legalistic teetotaling sophistry. What was the first miracle Jesus did?

I won’t tell you. You should know.

His first miracle took place at a wedding. The rapture will take us to heaven for the wedding of Jesus. It will be a celebration. There will be wine. Jesus said he would drink wine in heaven. The Song of Solomon, which tells about a man gathering his fiancee to him, is about the rapture. It makes sense that we would celebrate here on Earth before we leave.

I believe God told me another reason why he wants me to make beer. He wants to pick a fight.

I can hear people yelling at the screen. “The Prince of Peace doesn’t pick fights!” Sure he does. You should read the Bible some day. God picked a number of fights in the Bible, to glorify Himself. Read Exodus, if you want an obvious example. Let me spell it out. He picked a fight with the false gods of Egypt and their followers. He humiliated those spirits one at a time with plagues showing he ruled their supposed spheres of influence.

It appears God is picking a fight with Christians who worship men and rules.

We are supposed to be under the law of the Holy Spirit, not laws carved in stone. In law, there are two principles you need to know about: supercession and preemption.

Preemption means laws from high authorities outweigh laws from lower authorities. Federal laws sometimes outweigh state laws.

Supercession means new laws replace old ones.

The law of the Holy Spirit supercedes the written law, because it is newer.

The law of the Holy Spirit preempts the traditions of men because the source is God Himself, who has the highest authority. A lot of our religious rules are traditions of men with no authority.

What does “testament” mean? It means the same thing in the Bible and on Earth. It means “will.” What do we say in our wills? We say we revoke all previous wills. While the new covenant doesn’t exactly render the old covenant invalid, where it conflicts with the old covenant, the old covenant is superseded. This is why Messianic Jews can eat pork and drive on Saturday.

As for preemption, Jesus came and let the world know fabricated traditions of men had no validity, and when he gave us the Holy Spirit, he put the one who wrote the law inside us. That person has the right to overrule baseless tradition and tell us things that disagree with the written law.

When mom and dad go out and leave a list of instructions on the refrigerator, that list doesn’t have to be obeyed forever. It stays up until they come home, and then they tell the kids what to do in person. That’s the difference between the written law and the law of the Holy Spirit.

We are supposed to be commanded by the Holy Spirit these days. Very few Christians are. Most of us live by wacky traditions and rigid Old Testament laws. If you took the invalid traditions out of Catholicism, there wouldn’t be much of it left.

Jesus healed on the Sabbath. His disciples violated the Sabbath with his approval. He spoke disrespectfully to priests who were chosen by the Romans, not God. He interfered with a lawful stoning. The Holy Spirit told him what to do, so his authority was higher than the authority of the written law.

These days we have Christians who teach tithing, which is wrong. We have Christians who teach teetotaling. Some Christians teach that we can’t serve in the military, which is crazy. Many Christians think you get to heaven by going to church or volunteering. Many think we are supposed to obey a bunch of rules we do not understand, and God will tally up our scores and see who gets in. These things are not Christianity. They are traditions and legalism.

We can be very stuffy and pretentious. We often argue when we have no idea what we’re talking about. “The pope said THIS!” “Daniel Kolenda said THAT, and he works miracles, so he’s right!” “I rode around in Reinhard Bonnke’s bus for two years, so I’m right!” “God is going to get you for criticizing Benny Hinn because you’re touching his anointed!” “If you have a Christmas tree, you’re worshiping Satan!”

Christianity is actually a supernatural relationship. It’s like being inhabited by demons, except you’re inhabited by the Holy Spirit. Just as demons command and influence people who are depraved and make people similar to themselves, the Holy Spirit will influence and command you and make you similar to Him.

We argue because we are not in touch with the one who makes the rules. The Holy Spirit tells us all the exact–EXACT–same things. He doesn’t pit his children against each other. When God picks a fight, he picks it with other spirits and people who listen to them.

If you speak in tongues a lot, you will be brought into agreement with God over time. If not, you’re going to end up guessing, not to mention fighting with people who are right.

I think God is telling me to make beer for celebration and to provoke and expose the ignorant and proud. The rule-followers. The preacher-worshipers.

In the end, some people will win, and those people will be the ones who heard God in the first place.

I was talking to Rhodah about all this today, and she showed me something about a scripture I had mentioned to her the day before. Deuteronomy 14 says that Hebrews who were too far from the temple to take their tithes there (and tithes were not money) were to convert the tithes to money and then give the money to rich priests who could buy fancy chariots sheathed in gold.

NO! It says they were to convert the tithes into “‘anything you want — cattle, sheep, wine, other intoxicating liquor, or anything you please,’ and then feast before the Lord.”

How about that, tithe-craving preachers? God wants us to eat and drink your yachts and $7,000 basketball shoes.

It also says they were to store food and drink so the Levites could come and eat. Nothing in there about giving them money to buy jets.

A lot of Baptists would explode if they read Deuteronomy 14.

Maybe not the Forty-Gallon Baptists. My dad used to claim they existed. He said they were only allowed to drink 40 gallons per year. I think he probably got that wrong.

So this is where we are. I am brewing, and it’s going very well. Just slides along without any real problems.

Obviously, I don’t encourage anyone to get drunk or even to drink. That’s another subject.

I can tell you this: alcohol is perfectly fine. It’s not like tobacco or LSD or mushrooms, which have no place in a Christian’s life. People and demons are the problem. If you can’t drink safely, the problem is you. Most people can be surrounded with alcohol all their lives and never have any trouble, so it’s clear the individual is what makes the difference.

Some Asians can’t handle alcohol, and some can’t process it well. This is said to be a biological thing that can’t be changed. The rest of us aren’t like that. It’s all down to demons and character problems.

My grandfather, who died from drinking moonshine with methanol in it, was an alcoholic and a mean drunk. Family lore says he beat my grandmother on the steps of the courthouse where he lived. My dad was an alcoholic. When I was young, I did stupid things when I drank, but was I an alcoholic? I’m definitely not an alcoholic now. I barely drink, and when I do, it causes no problems.

They say there is no way to for an alcoholic to be free from alcoholism, so either they’re wrong, or I have never been an alcoholic.

The general rule is that when another person thinks you’re an alcoholic, there is no way to change their mind. It is not possible. They can always come up with an argument. I don’t have a drinking problem, and I never will again because it isn’t in me. When I did have a drinking problem, the problem was immaturity, not bondage.

I hope to be imbibing moderate amounts of the results of my labor and God’s grace very soon. Of course, you will read about it here.

Getting Ready for Next Year’s Christmas Party

Twelve days ago, I had nothing but a twinkle in my eye and a computer mouse in my hand, and now I have an AIO (All-in-One brewing machine), a fermenting freezer, a future keezer (freezer modified to hold kegs and dispense beer), and two fermenters, not to mention an ale in the keg.

Making this ale has been a fascinating experience. Tumultuous. Touch-and-go. I made several bad mistakes, and every time, I had to come up with a solution, like a paratrooper trying to splice cords on the way to the ground.

I put way too little water in the brew machine at first, so I had to bulk the wort up with extract. Because the machine was too dry, it burned the insulating jacket that helps it heat. I had problems using my new refractometer, so I kept opening and closing the fermenter, and that made me think I had let too much CO2 out, so I tried to solve the problem with a pellet gun cartridge.

A lot of pellet guns use tiny CO2 tanks the size of your finger, and they are called cartridges. They are also used in things like seltzer bottles.

Among homebrewers, there is a lot of mythology. Things that are known facts often prove to be fantasies propagated by the ignorant. There have long been questions about gas.

Homebrewers use tanks of CO2 and nitrogen to pressurize beer systems and carbonate beer. For years, people have argued about whether industrial gas from welding shops is the same as gas from beverage-gas shops.

In case you’re wondering, yes, it’s the same. Airgas, one of the leading gas suppliers for welders, confirms it.

I thought the fuss about welding gas was stupid, so I assumed the same was true about the cartridge controversy. Some people said cartridges for guns contained oil that would contaminate beer and possible poison people.

Yesterday, I decided to try using a cartridge to shoot beer into my fermenting bucket. I had a bunch of Crosman cartridges for pellet guns, and I had a little keg-charging device that used cartridges. I wanted to see if it would work. I shot gas into the fermenter, and then I shot some into a two-liter bottle of Coke that had gone flat.

Later, the Coke tasted gross. The gas stank.

I was not pleased. The Coke was worthless, but the beer cost money to make, and it also required a lot of work and time. I opened the fermenter, and sure enough, it smelled off. I thought I would have to throw the beer out.

I decided to use a CO2 tank to blow new CO2 in and displace the cartridge gas. I also shot a whole cartride into my utility sink with the charger held against the side. I did this to see if oil came out. To my relief, there was no residue on the sink after the cartridge emptied. That means the gas can’t poison me. A little gas floating above beer could conceivably flavor it, but unless oil got into the beer, it wouldn’t harm me.

I tasted a little bit of the beer, and I couldn’t taste anything unusual.

Today I kegged the beer, and it seems okay. I shot CO2 into the keg, and now it’s chilling to 38°. By tomorrow night, it should be carbonated, and then I can have a beer and see if it’s worth keeping.

Ordinarily, I would use tall, skinny Cornelius soda kegs to hold my beer, but when I got ready to brew this time, I decided to start out with a Megamouth Torpedo keg. This is a keg made for homebrewers. It’s short and wide. I bought it because I hoped it would be short enough to fit in my spare fridge.

I must have been confused about the measurements, because it’s not even close to short enough. I am keeping it, however, because it has another benefit. It will allow me to get more beer into my keezer (beer freezer), and it will probably let me keep one keg a little warmer than the others.

Chest freezers have steps or platforms inside them because compressors have to go somewhere. These steps, commonly called “humps,” reduce the floor space. That means tall kegs can only fit in the areas beside the humps.

A shorter keg can sit on the hump next to a CO2 or nitrogen tank. In my case, this should make it possible for me to have 4 Cornelius kegs plus a short keg. Humps generally give off a little heat in spite of being insulated, so a keg sitting on a hump may be slightly warmer than the other kegs in the keezer.

Different beers like different temperatures. I like lagers coldest. After that, most ales. After that, stouts. I should be able to have 5 gallons of stout at a warmer temperature than the beers around it. Even if it’s the same temperature, I’ll have a total of 5 beer varieties, not 4.

If I can pull this off, I’ll be the king of small keezers.

I have 4 used Corny kegs on the way, along with 4 beer faucets and 1 stout faucet. If the kegs will work with the Torpedo, nitrogen, and CO2 in the keezer, I’ll need to buy faucet number 5 and incorporate it in the design of the keezer.

Generally, a keezer will have a wooden collar between the body and lid. The collar is a frame made from things like 2×6’s on their sides. It sits on top of the keezer, and instead of having the lid rest on the keezer, it rests on the collar. This gives you additional internal height and lets you install your faucets, which people like to call “taps,” through the wood. If you do things this way, you don’t have to install taps on top of the lid or drill holes through the side of the chest.

I’ll need one hole per tap. I’ll also need a drip tray I can fasten to the front of the keezer. I can’t undrill holes, and I probably can’t make a drip tray longer or shorter, so I have to wait for the Corny’s to decide how to make the collar and which tray to buy.

Once all this is decided, I have to decide how to attach the collar to the top of the keezer.

I know a lot of people use Liquid Nails. I’m wondering if silicone is better, mainly because silicone will come off when you want it to.

I used to have a regular appliance repair guy, and I always pick tradesmen’s brains when they do work for me, so I peppered him with questions. I asked who made reliable refrigerators. He worked on everything from Haiers to Sub-Zeros. He said they were ALL junk, so I should buy whatever was cheapest. And there wasn’t a whole lot he could do when they went bad. They were all Chinese, and once the systems started leaking, they had to be replaced.

Back when the world was sane, freezers were made in Caucasian countries by skilled workers, and they were expensive. They ran forever, and when they broke down, they could be fixed. My grand mother got her deep freezes in the Sixties as far as I know, and they were running when she died in 2003. I suppose commercial freezers are still like that. Things are different now. If you get 10 years out of a refrigerator or freezer, you’ve hit a home run.

If what the repairman said was true, then it seems like a bad idea to fasten a collar to a freezer permanently. If I use something I can undo, and the keezer dies, I can take the collar off and put it right on the same model. 

I had an idea about using Velcro. I could rout shallow pockets in the underside of the collar, just high enough to keep the Velcro from lifting the collar off the keezer. Then I could run silicone around the joints. The Velcro would be invisible, and if the keezer expired, I would be able to get the collar off.

But maybe it’s a stupid idea.

I don’t like the idea of using silicone all by itself because it’s not much of an adhesive.

UPDATE: I consulted some people who had already built keezers, and their ideas are much better than mine. Really excellent. I think I’ll listen to them and adapt their concepts.

I would guess that by Wednesday night, I should know what to do. I should be able to have my second beer fermenting before then, too.

Again, I wonder why I felt moved to do all this. I truly think God is in it.

I wonder if it’s connected to the rapture, or at least to celebrating it. The rapture will be the second real Christmas. Jesus will be coming to Earth for us one more time. Recently, I got that revelation from God, and it made me feel like celebrating. Maybe when the rapture comes, it won’t be instantaneous, and we will have a little time to get together and vent our joy. A beer or two would certainly be in order.

This is a Real News Story

Sadly, it is time to take advantage of America’s fair use doctrine. I’m going to post an amazing photo.

I’m posting it to show how civilization has declined. The person in the photo is in Canada, which is somewhat more decayed than the US, but as everyone knows, there is really just one culture in North America, with variations here and there. Bad things that happen in Canadian culture are things Americans should be aware of, because they generally reflect problems that are developing here as well.

The person in the photo is a man named Kayla Lemieux. He teaches shop at Oakville Trafalgar High School. Oakville is near Buffalo. At work, Mr. Lemieux dresses like a woman and wears a long blond wig. That’s not all. He also wears two huge fake breasts that are approximately a foot and a half long, and as worn, the pair is about two feet wide.

To make matters worse, Lemieux’s fake breasts have large nipples, and he wears clingy tops through which the nipples protrude.

I’ll post a photo with the nipples blurred out. You don’t need to see everything to get the idea, and some of you may be eating. I don’t know how much the blurring will help.

If there is anything good about this story, it’s that some parents complained. And the school system told this sick man to stop wearing false breasts to school.

No, of course it didn’t. But it did say students who took photos of Mr. Lemieux would be suspended. The government has also provided Mr. Lemieux with bodyguards.

Here we see one of the big problems with leftist insanity. They start out with requests that seem reasonable, like, “Let us do what we want in our own homes.” Then a few years later, they’re forcing their disgusting ways on us. and on our children, in every part of public life.

There is a big difference between sexually normal people and perverts. Sexually normal people are not driven entirely by sex. Generally we don’t insist that other people become unwilling participants in our sexual activities. It would be very unusual for a heterosexual female teacher to dress like Mr. Lemieux in public, and for that matter, it would be unusual for one to do it in private.

Sexual normals don’t tell people they’ll commit suicide or cut themselves if they can’t indulge in their sexual activities in public. For example, if you like dressing up like a nurse, and you’re sexually normal, you’re not going to get your attorney to sue your employer to force them to let you wear your nurse outfit to work, based on the idea that forbidding you will cause you immense psychological harm.

I can’t believe I’m trying to explain this. Things that used to be obvious to everyone are suddenly hard for many people to understand.

Mr. Lemieux’s trashy prosthetics are like outrageous emotional support animals. Back when the world made a little sense, you could only take an animal on a plane if you were transporting it and agreed to house it properly, or you had a bona fide trained service animal with documentation. Then the nuts got to work, and suddenly, spoiled, attention-craving people started showing up at gates with things like peacocks and pigs.

Obviously, even if we pretend Mr. Lemieux is a woman and should be allowed to dress like one, gigantic false breasts with enormous visible nipples are not necessary to his female identity. Actual women manage to be female without these accessories.

If men can do this in front of kids, think what the women will be allowed to display. If you’re going to display an enormous false body part, there are things that would be more disruptive than breasts.

Come to think of it, those things are already being displayed to girls in locker rooms all over America, by legally-protected men and boys who claim to be women.

The other day, I was listening to the Bible, and I heard about Asa, king of Judah. He was one of the good kings. Look what he did when he was crowned:

And Asa did that which was right in the eyes of the LORD, as did David his father. And he took away the sodomites out of the land, and removed all the idols that his fathers had made.

In 1990, I would not have understood that, even though I was a Christian. I would not have understood why God’s prophets told Asa to get rid of sodomites. Now I get it. I see what eventually happens when they are mainstreamed. I see why gangs of pagan men and Jewish men roamed the streets openly, trying to rape other men in Gibeah and Sodom. Sexually abnormal people became emboldened because of their large numbers, and then they did what they were afraid to do when they were in the minority.

This is why we now have nude gay parades in major cities, accompanied by public sex. The sex won’t always be consensual in the future.

Sexually abnormal people are turning the world into a homoerotic performance art stage, and it’s very harmful. We are seeing not just the sexualization of minors, but their forced exposure to sexual deviation by authority figures who have the power to get them in trouble.

If you Google “trans teacher,” you will see that while Mr. Lemieux’s wardrobe choices are still pretty far out by the standards of American deviant teachers, he has many, many peers here. And if you can’t afford private school, your kids have to honor and obey them and use their insane pronouns.

Maybe you’re lucky, and you can homeschool. There is a movement to ban it, however. It’s illegal in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, and Sweden.

I can’t believe the world we live in now. It is astonishing that Lemieux is allowed on a school campus, even as a guest. To give him bodyguards and punish students for exposing him is something that shouldn’t even happen in an absurdist movie.

It makes me think about the rapture. How long will we have to wait? Life here on Earth is going to become very, very hard for Christians, very, very soon, and few of us are ready or even trying to prepare.

My wife and I are trying. God keeps talking to me about my own depravity and the need to clean up and attain humility, and I keep thanking Him. We keep interceding for others in hopes their eyes will be opened.

Of course, we will pray for Lemieux, too. He looks like the stubborn type, and those are the people who go to hell, but you never know.

Sehr Gut

My first post-2006 brew day is behind me, and it went great. Sort of.

I bought myself a used Braumeister 20L V2 brewing system, which does everything for you up to the point where it’s time to chill the wort. It mashes and boils, in other words. That’s a lot of help. You just put your water and grain in the machine, turn it on, pull the mash thing out when it beeps, throw hops in when it beeps, and drain the wort into your fermenter.

In the past, I had to mash in a huge kettle on the counter wrapped in towels. Then I moved everything to a big cooler and sparged with hot water I had prepared separately. Then I lifted the refilled kettle back to the stove and boiled. The kettle and cooler were too big to wash in the sink. I had to stand in the kitchen most of the time, because nothing was automatic.

Instead of typing “Braumeister” over and over again, I’ll just call the machine Helga. It’s much easier to type.

I made a major mistake this time. I read the manual, and it said to use 12 liters of water for mashing. This sounded crazy, because I was making around 20 liters of beer. I figured the Germans had come up with a way to use less water. Some kind of greeny thing.

As I was doing the mash, I heard weird noises from Helga. It sounded like liquid was hitting something very hot.

Helga mashes in the following way. She is a cylindrical kettle with a ring-shaped heater in the bottom. You put a smaller cylinder (mash pipe) inside the big one, with screens on each end and grain inside it. You add water. Helga heats up and starts pumping water up through the grain, so it overflows out of the inner cylinder, down to where the heater is.

It sounded like liquid was hitting the heater. Seemed to me the heater should have been submerged, so I added water until the noise stopped.

I got a bunch of error messages. They said, “Temp Err.” I Googled, and other people had had the same problem. There were no answers.

After a while, there was a burning smell. It wasn’t bad, so I let it go.

Helga has a cute insulating jacket she wears to make her more efficient. When I took it off later, I found a big burned place on the inside.

When I looked back at the manual, I saw that it recommended 12 liters of water for a smaller model. Helga was supposed to get 23. The heater was exposed part of the time, and it heated up one side of Helga so the jacket was scorched.

When all was said and done, I had a specific gravity (reflects sugar concentration) of around 1.040. I should have had 1.056. I turned up the boiling temperature, and eventually I added around 5 ounces of malt extract I had on hand for making yeast cultures. I got up to 1.054, which is good enough.

The lack of water prevented the mash from going as it should have, so I didn’t get as much sugar as I had hoped.

The funny thing is that before adding the wrong amount of water, I checked the manual several times.

Cleaning up was pretty easy. I took the mash pipe and screens out. I put the screens in the dishwasher. I washed the pipe and Helga herself in the kitchen sink. Not too bad.

I made the mistake of using loose hops instead of putting them in mesh bags, so I ended up with a lot of hop mush in the bottom of the kettle. I ran a lot of clean water through the pump to make sure there were no hops in it, and I tipped Helga over and rinsed everything down the drain.

When I was done, I drained Helga into my fermenting bucket, Franz, and put it in the pool, where the water was at 65°. Two hours later, the wort was down to about 71°. It only needed to be below 80° in order for it to be safe for yeast, so I suppose I can take fermenters out after an hour or so from now on.

I have gone back and forth about fermenting temperature.

I chose to begin my return to brewing with this recipe because it ferments at room temperature, but after buying the grain, I bought a little freezer for fermenting. I put a temperature control on it to get it to 68°. Fermenting at 75° can produce strange alcohols that cause headaches and hangovers, if certain people on the web are right, and I thought maybe I should ferment at a more conventional temperature.

Upon reflection, I decided to move the temperature back up but still use the freezer. Higher temperatures produce chemicals that can make beer taste better, and I didn’t want to miss that, nor did I want to violate a sound principle of cooking: never mess with a recipe if you need to learn something from it.

Brewing beer is a type of cooking.

I needed to know how the original recipe would work, and using a lower temperature would prevent that from happening.

I could have fermented on the floor in the house, but that could have caused problems. First, beers sometimes overflow when fermenting. Second, I am doing this fermentation with a loose lid to let gas out. Bugs could get in if I didn’t put Franz in a container. I don’t have a lot of bugs, but I do have a few.

I am using a brand new freezer to keep something at more or less the same temperature that surrounds the freezer. Sounds odd.

Now I’m waiting for my kegging stuff to arrive. I ordered something called a Torpedo Megamouth keg. It’s about 18″ tall and 11″ wide. Shorter than a Cornelius keg, which is what most people use. It will fit in my spare fridge so I don’t have to get a beer fridge yet.

I’ve also ordered a fancier fermenter. I chose something called a Fermzilla All-Rounder. It’s a clear plastic jug with a big mouth. The one I got comes with a valve on the lid, so you can do fermentation under pressure. My understanding is that this allows warmer fermentation, faster fermentation, and some other things I forgot. The All-Rounder is easy to clean, you can see what’s happening inside, and it’s generally better than a bucket.

Should I get a beer fridge? I guess. Not sure what to do. I don’t really want a big fridge with taps sitting out in my Christian house, scaring Christian guests, but if you’re going to make beer, you really need to be able to keep at least three types ready to drink.

I felt tremendous peace after brewing. The process was rocky when I got started, but as time passed, things went more and more smoothly, and I started to feel as though angels were doing things for me. When I got to the point where it was time to clean up, I was surprised to see how little there was to do.

I can’t explain any of that.

I still feel like God wants me to do this. I am not all that excited about drinking beer. I don’t look forward to being lectured by legalists. I’m enjoying myself, but I don’t know what it’s all about.

Beer With Me

My brewing system arrived yesterday, so today I’m brewing beer again!

No, I’m not. Of course I’m not. It’s never that simple.

Some poor guy had to give up brewing, so he sold me his 20-liter Speidel Braumeister for a small fraction of the original cost. It arrived yesterday. Since then, I’ve been working on getting it going.

The Braumeister line is German, so all of it runs on 220V. Guess what kind of power I have in my kitchen? Yes, 120V, not including hardwired 220V appliances. I really wanted to brew in my strangely enormous and comfortable kitchen, so I had to find a way to get 220V juice into it.

Yesterday, I bought a 14-gauge 50-foot extension cord, a NEMA 6-15R connector, and a NEMA 14-30/50P plug. I cut the ends off the cord and attached the connectors. I configured the plug for my 30-amp dryer socket.

Various online sources insist I need 12-gauge wire. Yada yada yada blah blah blah. Not listening. This is not my first rodeo. Those sources always seem to be written by lawyers and insurance companies, not engineers. I’m not paying $100 for one extension cord.

Today, I sat the machine on my counter, plugged it in, and added about 5.5 gallons of water. Right now, it’s running. It thinks it’s making beer. I wanted to make sure the electronics worked, and I wanted to see if the cord would burst into flames, so I’m running it with plain water.

The electronics are remarkable. It has wifi. I have not looked into the reasons for this. It stores beer recipes, too. You turn it on, choose your recipe, add your water and malt, and tell it to start.

Because it’s German, it has some annoying features. It keeps asking me to confirm things I’ve already chosen.

Braumeister: “YOU WILL TELL ME WHETHER YOU WISH THE MASH TO START NOW PLEASE.”

Me: “Yes.”

Braumeister: “YOU WILL TELL ME THE MASH TO START NOW PLEASE.”

Me: “I just did.”

Braumeister: “DO YOU WANT TO INVADE POLAND?”

Me: “No.”

Braumeister: “ARE YOU SURE? POLAND VERY NICE IS THIS TIME OF YEAR.”

The manual says you have to contact the German government and let them know every time you brew beer. I am not kidding. It even has a form you can use. Obviously, this does not apply to Americans. I’m pretty sure.

There is something different about the Germans. That’s all there is to it.

I do not understand why they would pass this law. It makes no sense. They have laws that prevent Germans from making bad beer for money, and I guess that is understandable given their mistaken belief that they make the best beer on Earth, but why they need to know about some guy brewing a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone in his living room is beyond me.

I can brew whatever I want without telling anyone, and from time to time, I open my bedroom sliding door and shoot squirrels with unregistered semi-automatic weapons while still inside the house. Go, America!

While the Braumeister is somewhat controlling, it is also very well made, and it does lots of stuff automatically. It’s sort of like a BMW or a Panzer tank, except it’s not hopelessly unreliable. As far as I know.

It looks like there is no problem with the cord I made. The 14-gauge part I added stays cool when the Braumeister is running, and the original cord, which is probably 18-gauge, gets slightly warm. That’s the Germans’ fault. I may replace it with a fatter cord. The original cord is like the cord you have on your PC, except it has a different plug. The female end is called C13, and you can get C13 cords in 14-gauge.

The cord I made is rated for 13 amps, and the Braumeister’s manual says it draws 10. Not a huge margin of safety, but enough. The manual also says not to use a cord more than three meters long. Okay, sure. If you use a scrawny German cord instead of a properly-sized cord.

Well, guess what? I just learned the above paragraph is wrong. The manual says the Braumeister calls for a 10A fuse, so it draws less than 10 amps. I didn’t notice this because when I looked at the manual, which was all serious and stuff, I chose not to pay much attention. Most of the time, this pays off for me.

Anyway, more reason to buy a cheap cord.

I made a yeast starter night before last. I paid $8 for exotic liquid yeast, and I added it to a malt extract solution in an Ehrlenmeyer flask. I put the flask on my laboratory stir plate and stirred it for about 36 hours. This created a huge quantity of new yeast. Now it’s sitting on the counter, waiting for me to use it.

The flask is a bad idea. It has a narrow opening so you can put a cork in it, along with a valve that makes the CO2 bubbles go out through water. This valve, or airlock, is supposed to keep bacteria out.

The instructions for the starter kit say to heat water in the flask in the microwave. As far as I know, there is no microwave oven on Earth that will hold a 2-liter flask in an upright position. It also says to add the malt extract to the water when it gets hot.

Malt extract is almost 100% sugar, and it’s very fine and gummy. When you get it near a flask full of steaming water, it turns to gum instantly and sticks to your funnel or spoon or whatever.

I had quite a time getting MOST of the malt extract, or DME, into the flask.

I have decided it’s stupid to use a flask and airlock. It’s overkill. Bacteria are a problem, but they aren’t Navy SEAL’s. You don’t need an airlock to keep them out. Anything that covers the fermenting vessel will work. I’m going to get a beaker and cover the top with sanitized aluminum foil when I make starters.

I think I’ll be okay from here on out. I just have to brew, pour the wort into my fermenting bucket, cool the bucket in the pool, add the yeast, and put the bucket in my new fermenting freezer. Then when my new keg arrives, I’ll stick it in there and move the keg to my spare fridge.

So far, I think the Braumeister is wunderbar. I am not brewing today, but if I were, I would already have saved myself considerable aggravation, and later on, the Braumeister would have saved me a lot of work. I kid the Germans, which is something history teaches us not to do, but I think they hit a home run with this thing.

A home run is a goal. In baseball. Which is a sport. Where you hit and throw a ball. “Throwing” means you hold something in your hand and…

Oh, forget it.

A-I-AIO!

Yesterday was pretty interesting. I drove to Orlando to get beer ingredients and equipment.

I used to have all sorts of brewing items. A fermenting fridge. A freezer turned into a kegerator. Brew kettle. Lautering tun. Stir plate. Kegs. Gas bottles. Measuring stuff. When I left Miami, I had no help and a parent with dementia, so I must have thrown out or given away $10,000 worth of belongings, and most of the beer things went. Also, my kegerator died one day without warning, so that had to be hauled off.

Over the last couple of days, I rooted around, and I learned that I had a cornucopia of brewing paraphernalia. Here is a comprehensive list:

1. A brew kettle I no longer need.
2. A wort chiller I no longer need.
3. A hydrometer I no longer need.
4. A mercury thermometer I no longer need.
5. A control to maintain a high temperature in a freezer.
6. A $6 handle for lifting carboys.

So all I lacked was the other $90,000 worth of equipment.

Brewing used to be cheap, apart from equipment. I used to spend $20 for 5 gallons of the best beer on Earth. Best to me, I mean. People like different things for some reason. I nearly always ordered ingredients online. I placed orders large enough to get free shipping, so all was well.

This week, I went to Morebeer.com, which has apparently absorbed and digested some of the other companies I used to use. The cost for ingredients for one beer had shot up to close to $50.

I realize Joe Biden is president, and this is the beginning of the apocalypse, but that seemed unreasonable to me.

The problem was made worse by their unwillingness to sell me the amount I needed at a uniform price. If you need 9 pounds of a malt, you can’t order it. You can order 5 + 3 + 1, with the per-pound price going up sharply as increments shrink, or you can order 10 pounds and either throw out or try to store the excess. Holding onto extra grain is not practical. It’s mouse bait, it takes up room, and you have only 6 months to use it. Basically, you have to pay for something you don’t want.

On top of this, Morebeer charges about 10% to crush the grain in preparation for brewing. You can spend $160 on a machine to crush grain–one like the one I threw out–or you can pay as you go.

The nice thing about Morebeer is that they kill shipping on big orders, but by the time you’ve given them a lot more money than you want to, you’ve paid for shipping.

The local place I found 1) charges way less for malt across the board, 2) crushes it free of charge, 3) lets you order malt and hops in tiny increments, 4) bags things separately and labels the bags, and 5) charges about 40% less for yeast.

I probably spent $30 or more in tolls and gas yesterday, but I saved about $30 on ingredients alone, I got exactly what I wanted, I got it fast, and I was able to look around the store and see if I needed anything else. Yes, you can do that at Morebeer.com, but it’s not the same as being there in the flesh. You don’t have to scroll and flip pages.

During the drive, I prayed and listened to the Bible, which is what I always do in the car unless someone distracts me. Guess who I heard about? Naboth.

Talk about good timing.

Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard, but Naboth didn’t want to see. Ahab started crying, literally, so his wife Jezebel paid two losers to accuse Naboth of blasphemy. Naboth was stoned by a mob, and Ahab took the vineyard.

Why is this interesting? Because Naboth, a man who made wine, is the good guy in the story.

Please don’t try to con anyone with the idea that “vineyard” was a mistranslation. The Hebrew word clearly means a place where grapes are grown. Naboth wasn’t growing tangerines.

I really feel that God pushed me back into brewing, and I find it confusing, so I have been thinking and praying about it. Very often, when there is something I need to know, related material pops up on my car stereo. Looks like it happened again.

A lot of Christians are intolerant teetotalers. They insist that no Christian should ever drink anything alcoholic. I don’t know where they get this idea.

1. Jesus drank wine. Hello? He also ate meat. In fact, it was a sin for a Jew to be a vegetarian because of the Passover requirement. Jesus drank wine during Passover, which was months after the grape harvest, so fermentation had to have occurred.

2. The Bible says wine is a blessing. Psalm 104 says God gave it to make man’s heart glad. And no, doesn’t mean we’re glad because we’re not thirsty. Come on. Don’t torture the text.

3. Losing a vineyard’s production is a curse in the Bible. See Deuteronomy 28:39.

4. In Deuteronomy 14:26 the Lord commanded the Jews to have a feast and have “wine, other intoxicating liquor, or anything you please.”

Back in Biblical times, Jews were not knocking themselves out in their vineyards because they liked table grapes or raisins. If they were excited about fruit, the Bible would be full of material about things like figs and pomegranates, and it isn’t. Wine and grapes are mentioned much more often. The Jews wanted wine. And God had no problem with it. Misuse of alcohol was what he hated. It has never been much of a problem among Jews.

Some Christians make the ridiculous claim that the wine ancient Jews drank was just unfermented grape juice. The problem with that is that ancient Israel had no refrigeration and plenty of hot weather. Heat plus grape juice and a couple of weeks equals wine. It takes considerable work for a low-technology person to eliminate or reduce grape juice fermentation in a hot climate.

It is very obvious that Christian teetotaling is a post-Biblical creation. At the same time, the Bible condemns drunkenness beyond any doubt.

Some of life’s pleasures are wrong all the time. Others are only wrong when they cause problems. Food and drink fall into the latter category. If alcoholic drinks cause you no problems, there is no reason to avoid them. If they do, you should abstain.

When I was young, I drank to get drunk. Often. It was one of life’s great pleasures for me. The thought of doing that now is repulsive to me. I remember the dizzy feelings and the way I smelled of alcohol. I remember the stupid things I did. I remember hangovers and vomiting. I don’t want any of that, ever. To me, now, alcohol might as well be mineral water, except for the taste.

Since the idea of returning to homebrewing arose, I’ve had several beers (never two in one day), but before that, I was having maybe two drinks per month. By “drink,” I mean a real drink, not a 14-ounce martini or a huge cocktail. I mean a small glass of sherry, a shot of expensive whiskey, or maybe a beer. If I couldn’t have another drink for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t be a huge sacrifice. I keep alcohol on hand primarily for cooking. I use sherry for pork roasts and soup, whiskey for barbecue, beer for barbecue, and wine for lots of things.

Actually, I should come clean. I forgot that I had several beers and one gin and tonic in Singapore last month. I was in a foreign country, and I wanted to see what the beer was like, so there were times when I had one beer with a meal. I had the gin and tonic because tourists in Singapore are supposed to go to the Raffles Hotel Long Bar and have cocktails.

Alcohol doesn’t cause me problems. It used to, but that ended a long time ago. There is no reason for me become a teetotaling legalist fanatic. Avoiding alcohol because it messes up your life is not legalism; it’s common sense. Avoiding it because you think God will put a black mark on a scoreboard in heaven is legalism. Christianity is not a game of points.

Listening to Naboth’s story made me feel a lot better. I don’t want to do anything God hasn’t told me to do, and alcohol has been involved in the destruction of many, many people. For example, my dad and his father were alcoholics. Also, I would prefer not to upset future guests any more than necessary. Sooner or later, I’ll probably have to get some kind of kegerator, and there it will be, in my house, staring people in the face.

You have to fear God’s disapproval, not other people’s.

I suppose many people think there is no reason to drink alcohol except to get drunk. That’s a problem of limited perspective due to lack of knowledge. If you’ve never had alcohol, or you’ve never drunk except to get hammered, maybe you could get the impression that alcohol has no other purpose. It’s not true at all.

It’s a lot like saying there is no reason to own more than one gun, which is like saying drugstores should only carry one medicine or there should only be one size spoon. It reflects unfamiliarity with the subject.

I have never been much of a wine person, but I know a little bit about beer. It’s an exhaustive topic.

Beers start with grain. Most beer is made from barley, but there are zillions of different barleys. Dark ones. Light ones. Barleys that provide sweetness to beer. Cheap, nasty barley for beers like Budweiser. Beers are also made with corn, oats, wheat, and rice. I’m sure you will find other things beer can be made from. Anything with starch should work. They all contribute different flavors and colors.

The next main ingredient is hops. There are many different varieties, and they taste different. There are American hops that taste like oranges, grapefruit, and lemons. There are European hops that taste like cloves. Using the wrong hop in a beer can ruin it. Adding the hops at different times during brewing also makes a big difference in what you end up with. Many recipes use more than one type of hop.

The last important ingredient is yeast. The Wyeast company, one of the two big suppliers, lists over 60 beer yeasts on its site, and there is a reason for that. They work at different temperatures. They produce different flavors. Yeast doesn’t just produce alcohol and gas. It produces chemicals that change the taste of beer.

With all the different ingredients and brewing methods, there are many, many very different types of beer. The range of flavors is staggering. They suit different occasions, seasons, and foods.

Anyone who thinks all beer is the same should try a weissbier next to an imperial stout and an IPA (India Pale Ale).

If you can understand why there are so many different wines in the world, you should be able to understand the reason for making different beers. No one with any brains would say champagne is interchangeable with chianti. You should be able to understand that it’s not about getting drunk. If it were, I wouldn’t ever have one beer by itself. Lovers of good beer are actually pretty sophisticated.

If I start believing God is against the brewing operation, I’ll sell my stuff and take the hit. I am not married to the notion. I can go either way.

My brewing appliance, a Braumeister 20L V2, should get here tomorrow. That means I may be brewing Sunday.

For anyone who is still reading, the Braumeister is a self-contained system, commonly known as a self-contained system or all-in-one. There are a bunch of these things on the market. I don’t think they existed when I quit brewing.

I picked the Braumeister because the others appear to have problems. The Braumeister is German and more expensive than most. Sometimes those things mean something. I have seen new ones prices at $3000, but the great thing about brewing is that guys give it up, so I found a lightly-used one for a small fraction of that.

AIO’s, to use brewer jargon, let you do everything but fermentation in one vessel. When I used to brew, I mashed first. This means I put the grain in a kettle of hot water so the enzymes in it would turn the starch to sugar. Then I moved it to another device, and I rinsed the liquid and sugar out, back into the kettle. This gave me a sweet solution called “wort,” which rhymes with “squirt.” Then I boiled the solution with hops and drained it into a fermenting container. After the first fermentation, I could choose to move it to a big bottle, or carboy, and let it finish.

This is how I remember it, anyway.

With an AIO, you dump the grain and water into the machine and leave it there until you move it to the fermenter. It controls the mashing temperatures and times (there may be several for one batch). When mashing is done, you remove the grain and boil the wort with hops and whatever else you want. The machine has a timer. Then you cool the wort, put it in a fermenter, and add your yeast. This is called “pitching.”

You end up with less stuff to wash, and you don’t have to stand next to the kettle all day. The electronics prevent a lot of fussing with a clock, turkey fryer, and thermometer.

Here is what people say: AIO’s don’t make better beer; they make better brew days.

I plan to make an ale I named “Senseless Cruelty.” Maybe I’ll change that. It’s a high-IBU (bitter) ale like an IPA. I chose it because this is the only beer I ever fermented at room temperature. To ferment cooler, I will need another fridge or a fermenter that will fit in the little one I have. I expect to put the fermenter on the garage floor. Sometimes fermentations go too fast, and things leak, so I want to make my return to brewing with a safe approach.

In order to be ready on Sunday, I need to make a yeast starter today. I have yeast, so I have to boil some yeast extract in a flask and add yeast. Then I’ll let it ferment until I brew. The more yeast you have when you pitch, the less likely a problem is.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I look forward to seeing what the purpose is.

Plus Unexpected Beer Content

Here is something I have believed for a long time: if you pray in tongues a lot, instead of hearing God’s truths for the first time from preachers, you will hear them from the Holy Spirit, and if preachers mention them later, it will just be confirmation.

This has been my experience, and there is also evidence for it in the Bible.

Here are some words from Galatians 1:

But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man.

For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.

For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews’ religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it:

And profited in the Jews’ religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers.

But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace,

To reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood:

Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus.

Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days.

But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord’s brother.

Now the things which I write unto you, behold, before God, I lie not.

Here is something John said:

But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.

This idea makes a lot of Christians angry because they have been raised to worship preachers, not the Holy Spirit. When Christians argue, they often say this preacher said this and that preacher said that, instead of referring to the Bible and the things they have received from the Holy Spirit. Because of this, one corrupt preacher can corrupt a lot of people.

Jesus said to avoid the leaven of the Pharisees for this reason. Leavening is something that grows in dough until the whole loaf is infected. “Infection” is the correct word. Brewers use it to describe things that grow in beer, including yeast.

The Jews fell into the same trap as Christians who rely on preachers too much. They are taught to rely on sages to tell them what the Bible means. When they discuss religion, they quote Maimonides and Rashi and so on, and they discourage people from forming conclusions without relying on learned men.

If everyone hears from the Holy Spirit, Satan has to deceive a huge number of people in order to get anywhere. That’s hard for him to do, because he is weak and small. If people listen to a few preachers instead, all he has to do is ruin the preachers. Then the rot gets into everyone else.

This is what has actually happened to the church.

Today I watched a recent Mark Hemans video, and I enjoyed it, because he confirmed things I had been telling people for years. He says that if you want to be Spirit-led, you should be praying all the time about little decisions. You shouldn’t divide your life into a secular part, where you do whatever you think is best, and a religious part, where you try to do what God tells you. You should pray all the time, even about things like ordering at McDonald’s or picking out new socks.

Even if the decisions aren’t that important, the practice is. And nobody wants unsatisfying socks.

A long time ago, God directed my attention to the fact that in the Bible, doing what you think is right is evil. It sounds strange, but it’s true. If you read through the Bible and look at the occasions when people “did that which was right in their own eyes,” you will see that those people were disobeying God. That’s what doing that which is right in your own eyes means.

I would hate to have to sit here and list all the verses that confirm what I’m saying. “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” That appears twice in Proverbs. “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes: but he that hearkeneth unto counsel is wise.” “There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed from their filthiness.” Moses said: “Ye shall not do after all the things that we do here this day, every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes.”

I could sit here for hours doing this.

We are supposed to do what God says is right, and while the Bible is helpful in determining that, its advice is general, and not every verse applies to every situation. If you doubt that, look at these consecutive verses:

Answer not a fool according to his folly, Lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, Lest he be wise in his own conceit.

How can you do both, in every situation? It’s not possible. Someone has to tell you which course is appropriate. You need the Holy Spirit, who wrote the Bible. Talking to the author is even better than reading the book.

It is tiresome, listening to people who say the Bible is perfect and that we don’t need any other guide. The Bible itself contradicts this belief. Consider what the Ethiopian eunuch said to Philip when he was asked if he understood Isaiah: “How can I, except some man should guide me?” Philip, who heard from the Holy Spirit, was able to interpret Isaiah correctly for him, which is something generations of Jewish sages have never been able to do on their own.

To me, the challenge is distinguishing what the Holy Spirit says from what my wishful flesh says. You can sometimes compare what you hear to the Bible, but that’s not always helpful. The Bible doesn’t tell you which socks to buy.

Your flesh, and demons, can pipe up and pretend to be the Holy Spirit. “Go ahead and marry another man; God loves you as you are.” “Marijuana is fine; didn’t I create it?” You have to speak in tongues a lot, remove corrupting things from your life, and cast out your demons.

Lately, I have been getting a powerful urge to brew beer again. I don’t understand it. I miss the astounding beer I used to make, but I barely drink these days. I think I’ve had one drink this month. Also, brewing is work, and it costs money. Part of me is interested in brewing, and the other part thinks about the work, expense, and my low rate of consumption, not to mention the awkwardness of entertaining other Christians with a kegerator in the house.

I prayed about this several times, and I finally decided to go with it. I ordered a modern machine that does a lot of the work of brewing. I plan to order ingredients for a wheat beer. We’ll see what happens.

Christians don’t have to be teetotalers, and Jesus certainly wasn’t one, but it seems strange for God to suggest homebrewing to anyone. A similar pursuit got Noah in trouble.

Hemans also talks about the problem with assuming you can handle things. It doesn’t work. I try to avoid it. I tell people that when you tell God, “I got this,” he folds his arms and stops helping you. It’s pride, and God fights the proud, according to his word.

This is one reason why I fight the self-reliance culture many Christian men have picked up from things like football and military service. God isn’t looking for tough guys who strive in the flesh, working hard to please him. That would be like running a construction company and hiring people who refused to use power tools. It would be asinine. But men’s groups all over America are using football and soldiering as teaching tools. God is not a sports fan, and soldiering is about using carnal tools to fix problems caused by carnal people.

Sports nuts and military people teach pride, and that destroys Christians. Armies are not led by God these days, and God has never been behind competitive sports, so they have to have something to compensate, and pride and toughness are their crutches. They are substitutes for God’s help. Like all such substitutes, they get us into trouble.

You can’t take a breath without God’s assistance. Telling him you can fix your complex problems, which involve other human beings, demons, and who knows what else, is extremely arrogant. You are weak. Nobody can stand up to the world without help.

I’m very glad to get confirmation that some of the things I believe came from God and not my imagination. It gives me hope that life will continue to improve in spite of my own efforts.

Frisky Persecutors Undeterred

I guess anyone who reads what I write about The Last Reformation will think I’m a hard core supporter who thinks Torben Sondergaard has all the answers mankind has been seeking. That isn’t true. I have never belonged to The Last Reformation, and I disagree with them on minor points of doctrine. I have some concerns that it could become a cult over time, and I think they may be making things too systematic. On the whole, though, I support them, and I know they do wonderful work.

All that being said, I am at it again.

Recently, TLR put up two videos about Torben, who is still in jail or prison or something. “Detention,” I think they call it. Makes incarcerating people who haven’t been found guilty of anything sound better. TLR is trying to set the record straight. I’m going to embed the videos here.

My only complaint with the videos is that comments are disabled. That’s a bad move. It makes TLR look like it’s afraid something will be exposed.

It’s fascinating how things unfolded. The videos contain new information. It turns out Danish TV, which belongs to the government, sent two spies to TLR’s facility, and they both told huge lies on camera.

The spies pretended to be Christians, and they asked to be baptized. They even went so far as to give false testimonies later to be used in videos.

As TLR’s second video says, these are people who have no fear of God. No one who believes in a just God would ask to be baptized while lying to the people doing the baptizing, and certainly, no real Christian would lie later in a video testimony.

The name of one of the spies is Sebastian Svensson. This man is accused of doing something so low, it’s hard to believe. The story: in private, he told Torben he had inherited a lot of money, and he said he wanted to give it to Torben. When Torben told him he could donate via the TLR website, he refused. He said he wanted Torben, not the ministry, to have it. Torben never took the money.

In America, this tactic is considered so unfair, law enforcement can’t use it. It’s called entrapment. Black’s Law Dictionary defines it this way: “a law-enforcement officer’s or government agent’s inducement of a person to commit a crime, by means of fraud or undue persuasion, in an attempt to later bring a criminal prosecution against that person.”

More simply, the cops aren’t allowed to go up to a person who has no plans to commit a crime and entice or pressure him until he commits one.

Svensson is a journalist, not a cop, and statutes barring entrapment don’t apply, but the principle underlying the prohibition still applies. Entrapment is a slimy thing to do. In some courts, a private party who entraps someone is considered guilty of the crime of aiding and abetting.

I don’t bring these legal points up to suggest Svensson broke the law. I’m just using them to highlight the vileness of the things TLR says he did.

Is entrapment considered ethical by journalists? If so, then a journalist’s job isn’t just to cover crime but to make it happen. Bribing a preacher with no record of dishonesty is like Woodward and Bernstein telling Nixon he should have people break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

When I was going to Trinity Church in Miami, a member tried to give the church a car, and Pastor Rich Wilkerson jumped right up and snagged it for himself. The church got nothing. Too bad Svennson wasn’t there.

Another journalist, Amalie Borup, filmed a private discussion with Torben and then published parts of it. According to TLR, she took things out of context and tried to make it seem that Torben had told her to stop taking a prescription.

TLR says he never does this, and I believe it. He’s not a moron. Obviously, telling people to abandon medical treatment can lead to legal problems, and aside from that, every Christian who knows anything about healing and deliverance knows that problems may return.

You can watch the second TLR video and see these schemers go under the water, wasting people’s time, and then testify about how it changed them.

Why believe TLR about the prescription story? Well, the journalists are proven liars, for one thing, and I have never seen anyone at TLR get caught in a lie.

The video also tells about random Internet warriers who put out rumors claiming Torben makes a lot of money from TLR and only cares about getting rich.

Is this true?

TLR is transparent, and no one has ever published a story saying he or she looked at the books and found wrongdoing. But apart from that, they don’t behave like greedy preachers.

I have been to several TLR events, I have received lots of their group emails, and of course, I have seen their website and videos. Here are my observations.

1. If they have asked for money, apart from taking quiet, unpressured collections at meetings, I am unaware of it.

2. I have no recollection of ever seeing a TLR person draw a connection between giving TLR money and receiving financial prosperity from God.

3. Torben and his family look like they dress from Kohl’s and Marshall’s.

4. Torben criticizes the prosperity gospel.

TLR also complains about people who call it a cult. The big problem with the proposition that TLR is that so far, no one has produced any evidence.

What are some things cults do? They control people. They isolate them from other people. They don’t permit dissent, so there is no accountability. They may expect people to turn over assets. Cults are often led by individuals who are considered infallible.

Now that I think about it, this describes the Catholic Church, back in the days when they still burned people alive.

It is true that TLR has enforced some annoying rules at some of its live-in retreats. For example, they have required people who live close by to sleep in dormitories and be in bed by a certain hour. These things did not sit well with me. I have enough problems sleeping at home, and I’m not excited about using a community shower or toilet. On the other hand, if you go to a TLR meeting, you will notice the following things:

1. You don’t have to pay a dime. You may be required to give a refundable deposit in order to reserve a spot, but they do this because people who hate them used to take up all the spots in order to kill attendance and leave them holding the bag when paid venues expected payment.

2. You can come and go as you wish. They don’t even notice. If you only want to see the second day of a three-day event, and you want to show up two hours late, that’s fine.

3. No one pushes you to join. They tell you how to do it, and they leave it at that.

4. People in attendance run around healing, praying, and casting demons out without direct supervision. If you want to cast a demon out of someone, you can walk into a TLR meeting from the street, find a person, and go to work. No one will question you. I’ve seen people ministering spontaneously, and I’ve done it, so I know what I’m talking about.

5. Torben is not the only one doing things, as #4 suggests. In fact, the other people there will correct you if you think you have to deal with Torben directly. You may, if you want, but they make it clear he’s not God’s unique emissary. A guy who prayed with me somehow got the idea that I thought Torben had to do it, and he gave me a little lecture. It is true that a lot of misguided people put him on a pedestal, but that’s their own fault. He doesn’t attend every event. Especially now, while he’s in jail.

6. TLR gives things away. They give away water, snacks, DVD’s, and books.

7. They have never told me who to associate with, although the Bible itself makes it clear we need to cut certain types of people off.

If this is a cult, it’s the sorriest cult in human history. They’re doing everything wrong. In comparison, Orthodox Judaism, the Masons, and even the Boy Scouts look like the Branch Davidians.

I have tried to find eyewitness testimony proving TLR is a cult, but I can’t come up with anything. I keep seeing Google results that look promising, but when I click on them, it’s usually some fringe kook claiming TLR is a cult because it disagrees with him about doctrine. Cessationists really love to call TLR a cult. It infuriates them when anyone claims to have received a healing, and talking about tongues is like jabbing them with a pointed stick. Some atheists also hate TLR, but what preacher don’t they hate?

A ridiculous site ironically labeled Rationalwiki says TLR is a cult, but all it publishes is innuendo. “Professionals” have criticized TLR! Professional what? Ballroom dancers? Drywall installers?

A former member says TLR is heretical! What? By whose standards? Jesus was labeled a heretic. Protestants consider Catholics heretics. Again, disagreement over doctrine does not form a basis for labeling TLR a cult.

Irrationalwiki says TLR “abused” a handicapped woman who developed psychosis caused by the abuse. It says she had to receive 24-hour care for years. Who defines “abuse”? Not Rationalwiki. What was the abuse? What were the symptoms of psychosis? Who made the diagnosis? Who says it was caused by TLR? Rationalwiki does, and that’s good enough for you. It provides a link to a Facebook post to prove it. If you don’t have Facebook, too bad.

The psychosis claim comes from an entity called InsideOut. This outfit claims Torben performs “violent” exorcisms. Excuse me; I’ve been there. The only thing resembling violence comes from the people being delivered. They often thrash and yell. There is no violence. The people around them comfort them and help them not to injure themselves.

Try to find information on InsideOut. You’ll find it’s extremely obscure. TLR-bashers call it “a Danish anti-cult corporation.” People love using words like corporation and coalition to describe a nut with a Wix website. The leader of InsideOut is named Camilla Johnson. Try to find her on the web. Good luck, because I got nowhere.

My bet is that InsideOut’s headquarters is her apartment.

A number of the powerful arguments Rationalwiki confidently presents are simply references to people who think Torben is wrong to believe basic Christian tenets. In other words, atheists. To most atheists, I guess every religion is a cult.

Here is a quotation Rationalwiki presents, approvingly, on its page about Jesus:

“Jesus was no perfect man, no meek or wise messiah: in fact his philosophies were and are largely immoral, often violent, as well as shallow and irrational.”

“Rational”…wiki.

You should always look out when a person claims to be rational. It’s funny, but people who claim to prefer logic and science to religion never seem to notice that science has proven that human beings can’t be rational. Look up “Clever Hans.” Look up “double blind.”

Too often, “rational” really means, “motivated by an irrational hatred of religion.”

Persecution is amazing. It doesn’t have to have a single grain of truth in it to motivate people.

I have a relative who is convinced TLR is a cult. Strangest thing. She doesn’t actually know much about it. She thinks its leader is a criminal, and she hasn’t even heard about the immigration thing. She doesn’t know TLR’s name. The other day, I heard she was concerned I was running around with “NRA.” I wish she would read up and find out how mistaken she is.

Maybe some preacher she likes, who sees Torben as a threat, said some bad things about him. Torben is definitely a threat to big, profitable churches.

I have wondered why Torben ended up in jail, given that you would expect God to look after him. I wonder if it has to do with putting his trust in carnal people and the United States government. It’s just my impression. Maybe he would have been jailed no matter what.

His US asylum case has been rejected, and many people think it’s unfair. I have no idea whether that’s true or not. I don’t know the law surrounding asylum. Maybe his case is completely normal, and he doesn’t meet the criteria for asylum. I know it’s a big mistake for laymen, and lawyers who are not familiar with a case, to draw conclusions.

TLR is no cult, so don’t be nervous about visiting their meetings. The rumors about leather straps and electrodes are grossly exaggerated.

Jesus Jesus Jesus

It’s very bad when we think Christmas is about elves and an imaginary nutcase who climbs down chimneys to give gifts to other people’s children. It’s bad when we think it’s about money and gifts. It’s terrible when we call Christmas “season” or “holiday” in order to accommodate a minority’s phobia of the word “Christ.”

It’s also bad when we think Christmas is about getting together with our families and sharing love. Love without Jesus is one of the Antichrist’s favorite themes. He is always trying to push an alternative righteousness, telling us we can be good people without Jesus, and that this is all that matters. These are toxic lies.

Yesterday, I got supernatural revelation about Christmas. The reason to celebrate Christmas is that Jesus chose to come down here, to this filthy world, and give us eternal salvation.

Every Christian knows this, but it’s different when you get a revelation from the Holy Spirit. You don’t just know it. It becomes part of you.

If more of us had a heartfelt revelation, things would look very different in December. People would be overjoyed at Christmas celebrations, thinking about the gift they’ve received. No one would care about those stupid, idolatrous elves or Black Friday or Cyber Monday or Special Extended Cyber Tuesday or any of that. No one would be thinking about new cars with big ribbons around them. No one would hold drunken Christmas parties where people find other people to fornicate with.

There definitely wouldn’t be a big audience for dirty Christmas movies made by Hollywood pagans, perverts, sluts, and addicts.

It is amazing that God Himself came down to this rotten place and let the people who rejected him torture him to death so He could save them.

Yesterday when I prayed, in my mind, I kept hearing, “Thank you for coming for us!” Today, I kept hearing, “You came for us!”

Sometimes people feel let down at Christmas because they’re alone or they didn’t get presents. No one should feel bad today. Wherever you are and whatever your circumstances are, you can have the biggest present of all, right now. You may think Christmas has been a bust, but it’s really an unqualified success. It’s a complete victory. It worked.

I hope this helps people who feeling bad today. Snap out of it. You won. You just have to claim your present.

Plus a Much Better Gift

It’s Christmas Eve, and I am all by myself except for Marvin. But don’t pity me. I spent a lot of the day communicating with close friends and my beautiful wife, and I made Marvin and myself a pretty decadent dinner. Now I’ve decided to come here and save the world. I will tell you how to make creme brulee very easily.

My wife loves creme brulee, so I decided I should learn how to make it. The other day, I made my first batch, using a surprisingly clumsy recipe from The New York Times. Even in its withered state, this major metropolitan newspaper has ample resources to find a good creme brulee recipe, and they didn’t do it. There is no way to justify that.

The recipe required me to use a water bath, and that doesn’t work for various reasons. Mainly, it requires you to use tall dishes. Creme brulee should be served in a shallow dish, and the dessert itself should be one inch deep at the very most.

Today I made Caesar salad with homemade croutons and anchovies, potatoes au gratin (sort of), a standing rib roast, and I felt it would be a crime not to have a dessert, hence the creme brulee.

I roasted the beef at 175° on a lark, and it worked beautifully. When it got over 100° inside, I cranked the oven to 550°, and I took the meat out at an internal temperature of 115°. It was nearly perfect. Pink nearly all the way to the edge. Tender. Not that juicy, though. I dry-aged it, and that removes some water. I think that may be a mistake for a roast. Next time, wet aging.

To age it, I salted it and left it in the fridge for something like 10 days. It was wrapped in plastic for the last three or maybe 4 because I was concerned about dryness.

I did something else that was new. I rinsed the excess salt off the raw meat. This turned out to be a great idea. I applied butter and pressed garlic before roasting.

This was not the greatest piece of beef. I cut a steak off of it a week ago, and it was not as juicy or tender as it should have been. Publix always puts rib roasts on sale at this time of year, and that’s why I bought this one. Unfortunately, just about all the roasts I saw at the store lacked real marbling.

Aging it made it tender and flavorful, but I should have wet-aged it to keep it as juicy as possible.

I used the Caesar recipe from Bon Appetit. It’s the best one I’ve found. You still have to increase the lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, and anchovies to make it work. The recipe calls for canola oil, but I avoid that stuff. I used cheap olive oil.

I took the NYT creme brulee recipe and more or less halved it. I increased the ratios of egg yolks and sugar to everything else. I doubled the vanilla extract. I skipped the water bath and 325° recommendation and baked at 205°.

The texture was perfect. The flavor was intoxicating. Better than restaurant creme brulee. Could not have been better except for the caramelization. I am not all that skillful with a Bernzomatic torch. I may buy an attachment called a Searzall to improve my work. The caramel tasted fine, but the browning looked uneven.

Here you go.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup cream (I used regular whipping cream)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract or fake vanilla extract
pinch salt
3 egg yolks
3/8 cup sugar

Heat your oven to 205°.

Forget all the stuff about heating this or whisking that. Dump everything into a bowl and mix it with a mixer on a fairly low setting so you don’t beat a lot of air into it. You do not want a foamy creme brulee. Just make it smooth and dissolve the sugar.

This makes 4 small servings or two fairly large ones. Your call. Size your dishes appropriately. Fill them up and put them in the oven.

Here is the uncertain part: I think this takes 90 minutes to cook, but I’m not positive, because I kept fooling with it. When it’s not jiggly any more, it’s done. Don’t wait for a knife to come out clean. I don’t think that will ever happen.

When it comes out, sprinkle sugar on top and roast it with a propane or butane torch. You can use a broiler, but they say the results are not as good.

Chill until…chilled.

That’s it. Very simple.

I spent some time thinking about Jesus today. This is his day. Why aren’t we excited about that?

If he had not come down from heaven and endured life in this miserable place for our sake, we would all be going to hell. Heaven was the first Christmas gift. What greater gift is there than eternal salvation in the presence of God and people you love?

I turned on a long Youtube of old Christmas songs. I did not have to deal with any wokeness. I did not have to hear anyone rap about Santa Claus. I didn’t have an elf on my shelf. I didn’t have to sit at a table with vegan killjoys or angry same-sex couples with multicolored hair and vape pens next to their plates. No one lectured me about Christmas being a patriarchal white supremacist holiday. It felt a little bit like Christmas Eve at my grandfather’s house in the 1970’s.

My uncle used to cook a rib roast and potatoes au gratin for everyone, and that’s why I like to do it now.

I say I made potatoes au gratin “sort of” because real potatoes au gratin isn’t really a great dish. I made something a little more like macaroni and cheese with potatoes instead of macaroni.

Next year, I’ll be doing this with my wife, and I hope to have a bunch of guests, as I often have in the past.

Merry Christmas, everybody. I hope you’re with family or friends you love, but even if you’re not, someone loves you, and you can still have the biggest gift of all.

One More Place to Experience Rejection

I hate social media, but I joined Reddit so I could get some help with Starlink. Since then, I have asked a few things about other topics. It’s not always easy to find a forum where you can get information, and Reddit has a lot of specialized groups.

I found out Reddit has a “karma” system, which is offensive, of course, to people who are not Hindus and do not want to be dragged into the Hindu religion. It’s amazing how Hinduism has somehow escaped being labeled a religion. You can talk about karma and do yoga all day and not be accused of promoting a religion when, of course, you are.

Imagine what would happen if Reddit gave people holy points and damnation points and said comments made Jesus smile.

Reddit karma is a social credit system. If people like something you say, they give you a karma point. If not, they give you a negative karma point. If you get enough positive points, you get the privilege of starting groups. If you get enough bad points, your stuff may be put where it’s harder to find, and Reddit has shadowbanning, although I’m not sure if karma is involved in that.

So basically, it’s a system that allows other people to persecute you anonymously. As a result, you feel pressured to say things that make people happy by reinforcing what you perceive to be the existing majority opinion. It pushes you to keep useful information they won’t like to yourself. It makes healthy dissent wither and fosters the overgrowth of disinformation. So it’s a lot like Twitter. And Facebook.

Reddit has confirmed some of my prejudices.

The sad thing about prejudice is that it is usually reinforced by experience. It works, except when a prejudice is based on irrational feelings. Prejudice is generally based on years of observation. It really is a bad idea to go to black neighborhoods at night. It’s a bad idea to start a big STEM company and insist all the engineers be female. It really is dangerous to drive in China.

One of my prejudices is that lots of Internet cooking people are jerks. Boy, did Reddit confirm this. In a food group, said it was a shame known outlets published bad recipes, which it is, and three guttersnipes voted me down without being man enough to say anything.

I don’t know why food people are so hateful, but they really are. The nastiest Internet troll I ever saw, which is saying a great deal, was a food guy who called himself Sheldon Martin. His email address was penmart10@aol.com. I still remember that address, because the things he said were so foul. You can probably find his old postings online. Search for “penmart10@aol.com” and “prolapse.”

I just found some of his material. Take a look at this really mild example.

I won’t dispute your knowlege of pottery, although I seriously doubt it’s been more than remedial, probably an ugly ash tray you once made during a therapy session in a mental institution, but I know with absolute positive certainty you ain’t any kind of cook, ‘specially not a baker.

Some guy disagreed with him, politely, about pizza stones. A lot of his stuff was extremely filthy.

Another valid prejudice: there is no way to deal with Musk fans without facing a wall of insanity. There are people who will praise Tesla and Starlink no matter what. If Starlink satellites went nuts and started shooting gigawatt lasers down into daycare centers, the Muskhive would lunge at the throats of anyone who complained.

I pointed out some bad things Starlink had done, and I got whacked with Hindu demerits. There went my chances of going to Internet Nirvana and getting high with Steve Jobs.

It reminds me of communism. Communists tell people to rat on their neighbors anonymously. They tell kids to do this to their parents, and some do.

I could not resist trying to game the system. I went to a couple of areas and made some comments I knew people would love, and now I have overwhelming credit in the eyes of Krishna Berners-Lee or whatever.

It’s pretty stupid, and it shows how Satan is using the Internet to brainwash us into conformity. I guess I’ll delete my account and start a new one if I ever need Reddit again.

Hack Chef Bests Pros Again

My wife loves creme brulee, so I decided to try to make it. It came out fine, but I learned a few things later.

I used the New York Times recipe, which you can find online. I’ll give the ingredient list.

2 cups heavy or light cream, or half-and-half
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise, or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon salt
5 egg yolks
½ cup sugar, more for topping

It doesn’t take a genius. Beat the eggs and sugar together. Forget the bean unless you’re a cork-sniffer. Combine with the cream and salt. Cook. Sprinkle the top with sugar and burn it with a torch.

Now I’ll add my criticisms.

The NYT says to cook at 325°, which is stupid. I did it, and the top of the custard came out with a brown skin. I made some more at 275°, and they looked perfect. Do not cook at 325°. I’m not recommending 275° either, though. See below.

Why do professional cooks publish dumb recipes? So frustrating. Whoever wrote this recipe must have tried it, and if they did, they saw that brown skin. Then they published it anyway.

The NYT says to use a water bath, as you would when making flan. I did this, but it sounded stupid to me. I checked around, and I found a French chef who worked at Le Cirque, saying to cook at 205°. He says to use shallow dishes at a low temperature. A bath is used to prevent uneven heating and curdling, and these things don’t happen with shallow dishes at low temperatures. I plan to take his advice.

My guess is that the high temperature recommendation comes from restaurants where they have to get things done fast. In your home, it doesn’t matter if creme brulee takes a while, so you can do it right.

A lot of recipes say creme brulee should be between 1″ and 2″ deep. This sounds stupid to me. I have had wonderful creme brulee in restaurants, and it was never that deep. If it’s too deep, it overpowers the caramel. The French guy says to keep it shallow so it will cook evenly. I say go for 3/4″.

If restaurants have served me creme brulee in shallow dishes, then clearly, they did not use water baths. It’s nearly impossible to create a big water bath for a whole bunch of shallow dishes and not have water get into everything. Why doesn’t the NYT’s writer know this? Probably does and did not care.

People who publish about food generally care about delivering content and getting checks more than helping people. It reminds me of something Sergei Rachmaninoff said. Someone asked him what one of his pieces was about, and he said something like, “Two hundred dollars.”

I have never been to cooking school, I have never made creme brulee before, and I have already corrected the NYT recipe very substantially. What does that tell you about their standards?

The NYT says to beat the eggs and sugar until they are light. Again, stupid. My creme brulee was nice, but it was too light. Not everything should be light.

Creme brulee has to have a little weight to it. Next time, I will just mix until the sugar dissolves.

Apart from being lighter than I liked, the texture of my creme brulee was flawless. More than I can say for the lumpy creme brulee at Lawry’s in Singapore.

I believe the recipe uses too little egg yolk, too little vanilla, and not enough sugar. Next time, I will use 5/8 cup sugar, 6 yolks, and 1.5 tsp. vanilla.

This recipe makes a ton of creme brulee, by the way. Too much for a normal creme brulee set of 6 dishes. I suggest halving it or even quartering it. I have eaten 6 creme brulees today, and I still have a giant overflow creme brulee in the laundry room fridge.

I used fake vanilla. Taste tests show that most people prefer it to expensive vanilla. I am fooling with it to see what I think. The price difference is unreal.

Fake vanilla supposedly comes from glands on a beaver’s crotch, so that’s the down side. Try not to think about it.

Beaver glands. In your food. Put it out of your mind.

Oh, wait.

WARNING! BLOG POST CONTAINS DISGUSTING INFORMATION ABOUT FOOD YOU EAT. READ WITH CAUTION.

There; that fixed it.

What about burning the sugar? I used a Bernzomatic TS8000, which turns out to be exactly what chefs recommend. I found it clumsy, though. I may get a small butane torch or do what the French guy says to do. He likes to use a heated cast iron disk. I found you can’t pour caramel onto creme brulee from a saucepan. I tried, and you get too much caramel.

Amazon sells creme brulee kits, which are pans with racks that hold little, narrow ramekins in a water bath. Stupid. The ramekins are too narrow, and I don’t want a water bath. I found 8-ounce ceramic dishes about like the ones at Ruth’s Chris. There are a lot of creme brulee dishes out there that hold 4 ounces or 6 ounces. Be real. Nobody wants less than a cup of creme brulee.

Creme brulee is easy, especially if you do it the French way and not the hard way. I guess I’ll make it again tomorrow, confirm that my way is perfect, and then file it away for the future when my wife is here.

Lions are Supposed to Have Teeth

I have an audio Bible among the files in my car’s stereo, and I keep it on all the time when I drive. I used to listen to different kinds of music, but over time, I moved to Christian music, and now I just listen to the King James. It bothers me to turn it off. Sometimes my friend Mike has turned it off while riding in my car. I told him to stop doing that. We would be riding along, and suddenly I would notice that the atmosphere in the car was wrong, and I would realize the Bible was gone. I didn’t like it.

I almost never select books or chapters because Ford’s system for doing that is useless. Whatever plays, plays. Yesterday it was 1 Samuel, which contains the stories of Samuel and Saul.

I made a Youtube video yesterday, and in it, I discussed the fact that Christians who are failures are often able to exercise divine gifts and authority. It’s very strange. My last pastor, Albert Santiago, was an unrepentant, active child rapist, but he cast a demon out of me, and sometimes God spoke through him. In the video, I mentioned Saul, who prophesied even after God cursed his kingdom.

It was later that I went on an errand and heard 1 Samuel.

I mention Santiago’s name a lot because men who rape little girls should not have cover. Secrecy let him put a little girl in his bed over and over, and honesty might have protected her and whoever else he has raped. Maybe someone will be spared in the future because I’ve spoken or written his name. He should have been executed.

Saul was actually a great guy when his story started. He was taller and better-looking than other men, but he was humble, and he wanted to please God. The corruption that ruined him came on over time.

Early on, Saul heard a story about an Ammonite named Nahash who planned to commit an atrocity against Israel. According to extrabiblical sources, he had a practice of gouging out the right eyes of the men he defeated, and he had done this to every Jewish man in the area where he did his conquering.

Nahash came against Jews in a place called Jabesh-Gilead. They agreed to submit, but that didn’t satisfy him. He told them he would let them live only if they agreed to let him gouge their eyes out. They asked for a week to think about it, and they contacted Saul.

Here is the interesting part: when Saul heard about it, he became very angry, and the reason he was angry is that the Holy Spirit was upon him. So the Holy Spirit himself made him angry. God, who is love, and who loves forgiveness, made Saul angry. Saul got the Hebrews together and defeated Nahash, and this involved killing a lot of people. For God.

I found this interesting, because anger is one of my big concerns. I always think about the way I felt when Jesus visited me. Love poured through me like microwaves heating up a turkey breast. I have concerns that anger at other people comes from self-righteousness, fear, and lack of empathy, so I always ask God to send his love through me. I question people who seem to be hooked on what they call “righteous anger.” I generally feel that they are using God to justify something that comes from another source.

I had a friend who seemed to be angry all the time. He was very proud of work he claimed to be doing for God. He wanted to be praised for it. He got angry at me because here on my blog, I said God was not interested in our hard work and wanted to do things for us. After I wrote those things, he vanished from my life, and since then, he has had a lot of problems.

It turned out he had filled people with tall tales about his adventures and abilities and grand plans. Most of it was just hot air. He said he was building a strange Christian compound with a hurricane-proof house and a big workshop. He was known for offering people jobs. He suggested I could be his in-house attorney. His projects never panned out, though.

He told me something weird. He held himself out as some sort of nuclear engineer. He said he had designed an atomic bomb in high school, and that a state university had admitted him purely on that basis. I believed it because I had no reason not to. Some people really are nuclear engineers.

Later on, though, he admitted he couldn’t do math. You can’t design or even understand an atom bomb without math, and you definitely can’t participate in an undergrad engineering program. It’s like joining the Bolshoi when you can’t walk. No university anywhere is going to let you study engineering if you haven’t done calculus in high school.

He was never an engineer. I don’t know whether he has a college degree.

Knowing I was a physicist, he once tried to give me the idea he knew more than I did about a hand-waving calculation I had done to determine roughly how many bombs could be made from the uranium ore Saddam Hussein had. He said I was pretty close.

It was an informal Chicago-piano-tuners estimate, and I figured a nuclear engineer would know more than I did. I have not been trained to build nuclear bombs.

In retrospect, I suppose he just made up a number. He lacked the mental tools to do a calculation, but he wanted me to admire him and think he was part of the STEM gang, so he said what he said.

The fact that he told me he couldn’t do math shows that he didn’t really take engineering courses, because even a failed engineer would know that a physicist would know an engineering student has to know a lot of math. He slipped up.

He got in trouble for asking a huge, reputable company to move a ship for him. He held himself out as a successful entrepreneur when his company didn’t really have much in the way of assets or income. The company later sued him and won. They claimed they had lost nearly $800,000 preparing to do the job for him. They got a default judgment because he couldn’t afford an attorney.

Since then, he has had bypass surgery, his projects have failed to go anywhere, and I don’t think anyone would call him conspicuously blessed.

The ship was abandoned and broken up for scrap.

The story of the lawsuit is on the web, so it’s not exactly a secret.

I tried to get him to pray in tongues and basically fuel up with God, but I don’t think he ever did it. He once said, as an admission, that he was living on other people’s prayers, which is not really possible. He was way too busy for his own good.

He used to get very angry at preachers and other Christians, and he defended it. I thought he was wrong to justify his anger all the time. I felt God had used him to caution me about anger. Maybe I went too far in the direction of conciliation, though. Maybe I am fighting to suppress anger that comes from God. I am not sure.

In case anyone is wondering, while I do have the typical human desire to conceal my faults and failures, and while I have not revealed every disappointing thing about me, I am pretty much what I say I am. I do have a law degree and a physics degree. I did spend two and a half years in graduate school in physics, and I quit because I was burned out, not because I could not do the work. Although you could say I couldn’t do the work because I was burned out. You need enthusiasm to get up every day and do 6 or more hours of advanced math problems.

I was enrolled in classes when I quit, and I began trading stocks, which did not work out because it was a dumb idea.

I really did score over 150 on a battery of IQ tests, except for one where I got 142, but I give myself an asterisk for that one, because the lady who was giving the test didn’t tell me it was timed until I was way into it, and we were having a pleasant and engaging conversation while I worked. I got a perfect score on the something-or-other reading test, which impressed the lady.

The tests did not define scores above 150, so I do not have a number. Just “150+.” I have the papers somewhere to prove it. Many people are smarter than I am. I feel like I’m smart enough.

I haven’t done extraordinarily well on math tests. I got a 690 on the math SAT back before they dumbed it down. I have a history of locking up mentally on math tests, though. For some reason, I have aced practice tests and then choked when doing the real thing. I used to get perfect scores on practice quantitative GRE tests, but I got a 730 when I took the exam.

I have said I used to bench press 300 pounds easily, and this is true, but I did it on a machine, which I always point out. I also add that when I tried 220 on a real bar, I succeeded, but it was a lot harder. Machines don’t develop muscles used to balance things, and they let you put a lot more strength into movement. I maxed out most machines I used, but I didn’t impress anyone on the leg machines or the curl machine.

I wrote an article about training as a boxer, and the editor of the magazine I wrote it for didn’t believe me when I wrote that I used to do 25 one-armed pushups per side, with my feet on a chair, while working out, but I really did. I was able to do 30 or more, but I was not willing to keep going. I did 5 in his office, easily, quite some time after I had stopped exercising regularly. I know he and everyone else in the office had been talking about it and questioning my honesty, because when we came out, he announced, “He did 5.”

I think I could do one regular pushup right now if the floor was red hot and the reward was a pizza.

I did hit very, very hard as a boxer. I didn’t make that up when I said so. People who held pads for me were startled. Their eyes opened wide when I punched. I was not a good boxer, though. I did not train long enough because I got an injury, and for all I know, I would never have become any good. I didn’t skip rope well.

I practiced law successfully. I was very good at it. It was not hard for me at all. I quit to take up writing. Three books I wrote were published by a real publisher, even if they were stupid and did not make money. I chose not to return to law because I felt sure God was telling me to knock it off. I started applying to firms and doing interviews, but I quit. I did not fail. I made a choice. I was working when I decided to quit.

I really do live on a farm where I have a lot of tools and things. I built every single thing I have said I built. I really did marry a woman from Africa last year, and we did go to foreign countries to be together. When I say we are financially okay, I am not lying. I am not planning to run off to the Bahamas to get away from a pile of Mastercard debt.

I do make the best pizza and cheesecake on Earth, as far as I know. I am not lying about those things.

I have not accomplished anything in the way of a real career, what I have is mostly inherited, and I am no one to be admired, but anything I tell you I can do, I can do. I don’t make claims I can’t back up in order to impress strangers. I would be afraid of being exposed. I am not overly burdened with a craving for admiration, although I do have some desire, and I have never had much in the way of ambition.

I’m not building a big compound, and I am not going to offer anyone a job.

Now you know some good things about me, and some bad things.

Recently I wrote about an aunt who has extreme problems with insecurity. She is so hungry to be admired, it may amount to a mental illness. She has made wild, dishonest claims about her children which ended up embarrassing them; you would think she was talking about Niels Bohr and Queen Elizabeth the First. I like being admired, but I can’t imagine throwing everything else away for it.

The problem my aunt has is made even sadder by the fact that everyone knows about it. No one who knows her admires her. The things she says to gain admiration have led every one of her relatives who is still involved in her life to look down on her. They express their contempt and laugh behind her back. I guess that’s what usually happens to such people.

If she didn’t lie about her kids, people might be somewhat impressed, or at least not disillusioned, when they get to know them. Instead, people find them disappointing.

Spud Webb looks pretty good unless you’re expecting Wilt Chamberlain.

I don’t really understand narcissism, which is a root of ambition. I think you have to have a lot of ambition in order to understand ambitious people. I’ve read about men who drove themselves like slaves for years, not because they loved what they were doing, but because they wanted admiration and sex. Pete Townshend has said he became a guitarist just to get girls. I can’t grasp that mindset. I won’t even pretend I like a woman for 10 minutes to get sex! That’s too much to ask.

I don’t understand what drives Donald Trump. He was a great president, but he has done a lot of stupid things. He commits adultery with about as much hesitance as I have when I throw aluminum cans in the regular trash. He doesn’t think about his wives or kids when he cheats. He has completely neglected his children’s moral and religious educations in order to make himself rich and sexually busy. And he’s pretty typical of driven men.

I can get excited about making money for about 36 hours. After that, it wears off. I can get excited about promoting myself for about 15 minutes.

I am naturally lazy. I have told plenty of lies in my time. I am not brave. I fry chicken badly.

I think it’s better to surprise people by being better than they expect than to fail and hand them transparent excuses that make them look even worse.

I think about JFK sometimes. Democrats like to say he read 1200 words per minute, but in reality, he and a leftist journalist discussed false figures to put in a story, and JFK picked 1200 to impress them. Look it up. He was that dishonest, not to mention insecure.

He was just a fairly smart guy with a crooked family and a dishonest press establishment that backed him up. He would have been humiliated if someone had given him something to read in a short time and then made him take a test.

The other day I read that Jennifer Lawrence graduated from high school and entered college at 16. People repeat this myth. She never graduated from junior high. JUNIOR. She is out there lecturing high school graduates about how to fix the world, though.

The late Brian Dennehy lied and claimed he was a combat vet. Now it’s on his Wikipedia page forever.

A magazine said Benjamin Netanyahu had an IQ of 180. Turns out it’s not true. They recanted. But the myth is still out there. He’s a very impressive man anyway.

Radio psychology guru Dr. Laura Schlesinger is a doctor of nutrition or something. Qualified to work in a health food store, I guess. No, I’m wrong. Her doctorate is in physiology, says the web. Not psychology or medicine. So why behave like a psychologist and call yourself a doctor? I’m a doctor of law. I can literally call myself a doctor, and no one can contradict me. Should I get a radio show about medicine and bill myself as Dr. Steve?

Someone once told me that Menachem Schneerson, the rabbi some Jews thought would be the Messiah, was off-the-charts brilliant, and that he had stunned people as an engineering student at the Sorbonne. Not true. While he may have excelled at his religious studies, he had an ordinary EE diploma from the Ecole Speciale des Travaux Publiques, which is not part of the Sorbonne and is known for civil engineering, not electrical engineering. He was no Tesla. Maybe I shouldn’t mention Tesla in this context, because Nikola Tesla hated Jews.

Tesla himself, who truly did change the world with the AC motor and radio, both of which would been invented soon with or without him, has been overrated. A biography says he was 6’6″ tall, but he was really 4 inches shorter. People think he invented all sorts of currently-incomprehensible technology which will one day change the world, but that’s not true. We already have everything he invented, and some of his ideas didn’t work. He said he would prove relativity wrong and put Einstein, a Jew, in his place. That claim aged poorly.

Bill Nye calls himself the Science guy, but he’s an engineer with a bachelor’s degree.

I frequently feel annoyed at Massad Ayoob, a fading magazine writer who has a rabid following of uneducated gun nuts. Around half a century ago, he started publishing fairly useful books about self-defense, but he has made himself out to be things he is not.

He has no military background. He is not an engineer or gun designer. He has no scientific training. He has no legal training. He was a part-time cop in a microscopic all-white New Hampshire town with almost no crime, and he has never used a gun anywhere but the range. But he likes to give people the impression he’s Wyatt Earp crossed with Audie Murphy, John Moses Browning, and Gerry Spence.

He has worked as an expert witness, which a plumber or dentist could do, and which in no way qualifies him to talk about the law. He lies about his experiences in this line of work. He has argued publicly with some of the world’s greatest wound experts. He puts up Youtube videos in which he gives people legal advice which could put them in prison or execution chambers. Why not just bill yourself as a pretty good writer and competitive pistol shooter? Isn’t that enough?

Lance Armstrong’s whole life is a lie. I wonder who was really the best cyclist in the world all those years. Probably someone who ended up working in a bike shop.

It’s always irksome to read about overrated people with padded resumes. There have been people like Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and John von Neumann, who have lived up to and beyond their hype, and it’s a shame to put liars on their level.

To get back on track, a guy from Scotland has a Youtube channel nearly no one watches. His name is Gordon. I watch every video he makes. He hears from God. There is no doubt about it.

Today Gordon put up a new video, and he linked it to an older video.

In the new video, he talked about 1 Samuel and the way God made Saul angry. It made an impression on him this week, just as it did me. I was shocked to see him talking about these things exactly when I was thinking about them.

The earlier video was made when coronavirus had churches locked down. In that video, Gordon was somewhat angry with lukewarm Christians in big, complacent churches. He was a little derisive. He laughed. In today’s video, he gave some background information.

The first video was made after he had a vision. He was praying, and he started walking in circles, talking about Jericho and bringing Rahab out and destroying the walls. He then saw a woman on her knees with her hands up, as though chains had just come off. He saw a tower that had fallen around her. He passed out and then found himself on his couch, groggy and unable to get it together.

He made the derisive video while he was still under the effects of the vision, and the words he said in it were prophecy, not his own words.

The big message here is that sometimes God wants you to be angry and critical. These things are not off limits. God can give you commands, words, and feelings that make you uncomfortable because they put you outside a Christian’s normal ranges.

This makes sense, because if there is one thing Satan’s children love, it’s shaming us for being critical and angry. They ignore Christian charity and the inestimable number of things we do for others, and they focus on the small amount of time we spend in anger and correction. They tell us we are not allowed to be angry or give correction. They want to pull our teeth.

It’s ridiculous, how non-Christians are always giving us Christianity lessons. I don’t teach people how to be good at sodomy or smoking weed.

Gordon says church has to be different now because we are at war. That is true. I keep saying the time for cajoling and stroking is over. The ship is sinking fast, so patience has to be redefined.

I believe this is an area where you have to use caution and rely on tongues. If you rely on tongues, you will be guided, and the things you do will be God’s will and not your own, so you will not go off into anger and criticism that come from Satan.

I was amazed that Gordon and I had the same thing on our mind on the same day.

Now I have something new to pray about.

The Only Acceptance That Helps is Acceptance of Rejection

I heard something surprising today in a video by Mark Hemans. He said he rarely goes to church.

Hemans is a healer who goes around prophesying and delivering people. A lot of his videos are shot in churches. So how can he say he doesn’t go to church?

He said his small grandson was with him recently, and they were walking to a hotel where Hemans was going to have a meeting. The grandson said the hotel was where “church” would be that night. The point of the story is to show that “church” is any place where people get together with God.

It looks like Hemans is trying to say he doesn’t go to church buildings for regular services. I don’t, either. But we are still part of the body. I haven’t been inside a church for maybe two years, but I’m not excommunicated, estranged, defrocked, or whatever. I’m as legitimate as any Christian.

The word “church” is a translation of a Greek word that referred generally to any group of people who belonged to God. It doesn’t mean an organization, building, or denomination. If you have 10 people over for prayer, you are literally in church in your own house. It’s not an imitation of church. It’s not an unauthorized church. It’s not a lower grade of church. It’s plain old church; legitimate and fully accredited with God.

Yes, you can have a real church without TV cameras. Hard to believe, I know.

In the same sermon, he talked a lot about getting impediments out of your life. As I listened, I felt like I was hearing myself. God tells everyone exactly the same things, so if you hear from him, and you listen to other people who hear from him, you will get confirmation of things you have already been told. My wife confirms such things to me every day.

He said it was important to get cursed objects out of our houses. Boy, do I agree. I threw out thousands of dollars’ worth of Cuban cigars. I threw out thousands of dollars’ worth of CD’s and vinyl. I threw out my dad’s Masonic garbage. I threw out heirlooms. I burned another religion’s scripture. I tore Rick Warren’s terrible, destructive book in half and threw it out so no one else would be hurt by it.

Unforgiveness and a desire to get reparations are like cursed objects. You have to dump them if you want to move on. It’s important to get used to being better to other people than they are to you.

He criticizes tattoos. Christians get really mad about this. They get gaudy tattoos of crosses, Hebrew words, and scriptures, and they claim God loves it.

God hates tattoos. They come from pagan cultures. American Indians, Africans, and Polynesians worship the devil, and along with other toxic cultures, they brought us tattooing. Post-Christian Europe doesn’t have much of a tattooing tradition. Apparently, once Europeans turned to God, they had more sense than to stain themselves. Tattoos are Satan’s parodies of torah verses written on animal skins.

Look up the history of tattooing. It’s about demon worship. It comes from religion, not the arts. Yoga is religion, not exercise, and tattoos are based in religion, not art. Many martial arts are religions. I had a karate instructor tell me I had to bow and make gestures when I entered his studio. A lot of things that come from exotic cultures are evil.

I’ve seen Hemans tell people the demons that were ruining their lives came in through tattoos.

Honoring God with a tattoo is like honoring him with a bong shaped like a cross.

I have no use for tattooed hipster preachers. First of all, hipsters are appeasers. They want to be cool, which is an undeniable symptom of the spirit of antichrist. If the spirit of antichrist has so much power over you he can make you turn yourself into a circus freak, the Holy Spirit is not dominant in you. He would never agree. Second, they have no knowledge. If you don’t know tattoos are bad, you are definitely wrong about a lot of other things, so I shouldn’t let you teach me.

Seems like tattoo preachers are always proud. They want people to admire them, not God. Why else would a person spend thousands of dollars decorating himself like a pagan prostitute, especially if he has a family to support?

Hemans says some people should get rid of TV and social media. He has a Facebook account, but he’s not using it to share stupid memes, read political indoctrination, or gossip. He quit using it for worldly things. He just informs people about his meetings and so on. He says he got a revelation that he should quit looking at the news, too.

I agree with all these things. In about 2015, I underwent what I call “the little rapture.” I quit Facebook and the other social diseases…I mean ministries…and I felt a whole lot better. I rarely expose myself to secular entertainment or even Christian entertainment, which is often the same thing. I think I need to keep looking for things to get rid of.

People are so ignorant and arrogant; it’s discouraging. You write about separating yourself from Satan’s world, and they call you a legalist. They have no idea what legalism is, but they’re sure that anyone who tells them to stop doing anything is a legalist.

Legalism is about substituting a game with a point system for a relationship with the Holy Spirit, who is God. You rack up points by doing things you think are good, and you avoid demerits by obeying rules that tell you not to do other things. God adds up the points, and if you score high enough, you get into heaven. Legalism is about pride. It’s about presenting God with a bill. “I did this, so you owe me help and salvation.” Job was a legalist until God corrected him.

Telling people not to do stupid things is not legalism. If I tell you not to walk through a minefield, it’s not legalism. Cursed objects, tattoos, and social sites are land mines. They give evil spirits access to you and your family.

My mother told me not to smoke. It was a rule she made. I obeyed it. My sister started smoking practically in the crib, and she got lung cancer. Was my mother being legalistic?

I wish she had made more rules, but she was a neglectful mother. I hate to say it, because I am used to idealizing her. It’s true. On the one hand, she loved me more than she loved herself, and she was extremely generous with me and she took care of me, but on the other, she and my dad didn’t teach me very much, and the neglect wrecked my life.

Hemans also talked about adopting the culture of heaven. I’ve been talking about this a lot this month. You can read things I’ve written about it recently. God really does tell us all the same things. The problem is that we reject speaking in tongues, so he doesn’t get many opportunities to talk to us. The ones who listen learn a lot, and when they try to share it, the others try to kill them.

Sooner or later, I will see some preacher somewhere telling people something else God told me: the rapture is not just a one-time event; it’s a process. God is not going to come down and pull you off the top of a whore. He’s not going to pull naked men out of a bathhouse. He’s not going to lift Christians out of yoga studios or Antifa meetings because at some point in the past they raised their hands for 15 seconds while watching Joel Osteen. He’s going to take people who are already sick of this place, not the ones who love it.

The Bible says God gives people the desires of their hearts. This isn’t just true for Christians. People who desire to be left alone by God will get their wish.

“He who loves his life will lose it.” This verse doesn’t mean you should be suicidal. It means you should love heaven and hate the culture of Earth. How can anyone question this? Jesus says Satan is the god of this world. How can you be conformed to God’s nature and not hate the culture of a world Satan rules? It’s not possible.

If you want to be taken in the rapture, you have to be ready to go. By the time Jesus comes, you should have gotten sick of TV, popular music, the culture of the Internet, drugs, drunkenness, lewdness, vengefulness, ostentation, pride, greed, leftism, feminism, and all the other nasty things worldly people love.

When I felt I needed to turn back to God, I resisted because I was afraid I’d become a fanatic again. In reality, fanaticism is the best thing that happened to me. It saved me and freed me from people and situations that made me miserable. The Bible says to love God with all your heart, mind, and strength. How is that not extreme?

I’m very glad to see someone confirm the things I’ve been told. I wish there was a way to convince more people to tap into the information pipeline. We could be much more helpful to each other.

Be Absent-Minded and Be Your Own Secret Santa

Should you buy yourself Christmas presents?

When I got out of law school, I was a disgrace. I only owned one pistol! It’s embarrassing to admit it. I owned a Glock I bought in case I had to kill one of my sister’s friends. This is true. I’m not trying to be funny.

She was enraged about something I did to help her, so she threatened to send some male junkie friends to take care of me. I got myself a Glock 22 and put my worries behind me. Fortunately for her low-life friends, none of them ever showed up to test my marksmanship, and I never had to go through the trauma of putting bullets into a human being. After that buy, I let myself down by letting maybe 9 years pass without another pistol purchase.

A Glock 22 is not a .22, by the way.

When I left school, I got myself a graduation gift. I went to Garcia’s National Gun in Little Havana and picked up a Smith & Wesson 686+ 7-shot, 6″ revolver in .357 Magnum. Very nice. Satin stainless with Hogue grips.

I frequented Garcia’s because I had bought into the myth that one should support local gun dealers. I bought several more guns from this place, and every time I showed up, they treated me like a stranger, perhaps because I wasn’t a Cuban. After that, I learned to love Internet shopping.

Yelp says Garcia’s is gone, which is not a surprise. Here is a quotation from a review a lady wrote:

“If you are not a 50+ year old Cuban guy you are invisible to these people. Terrible service. They treat you like you’re not there to spend money. I will take my business elsewhere.”

That is exactly how I felt. I would stand in the store while they talked to their pals en espanol, waiting to for my existence to be noticed so I could give them $700 or $1300 or whatever. It looks like their customer base decided to say, “Hasta la vista, baby.”

I think the revolver is the only present I’ve ever bought myself. I have certainly bought things for myself, but I don’t think I’ve bought myself anything for a special occasion.

Actually, I just remembered one, so I’m wrong. I bought a 2003 Ford Thunderbird and took delivery the day after my birthday. It was a silly, frivolous car, but I really enjoyed it.

I guess that counts. Sort of. I mean, I had to buy some kind of car, and I would have done it even if it had been during a different month.

Okay. It doesn’t count

Rhodah and I went to Singapore recently, and of course, I bought her stuff. She is still catching up from a lifetime of poverty. We bought clothes. We bought a nice Bric’s suitcase. There were other things. She managed to squeeze a big perfume donation out of me while she was on her way to her flight and the duty-free shops.

During our trip, I got myself a Singapore ball cap in the Bugis Street bazaar, and I also got a Levi’s-brand belt because I left my own belt in Florida. The belt does not count. In the airport on the way home, I realized I had nearly nothing to show for my trip, so I spent 22 USD on a Singapore shirt.

In Ireland, I got myself a Dublin hoodie I will never wear. I would have gotten a T-shirt, but the Irish sell incredibly cheap shirts that can’t possibly last a year. In Turkey, I got a hat. In Egypt, nothing.

It’s hard to buy anything in Egypt that is not related to idolatry.

Egypt is not the greatest tourist destination. If you go, stay in a very nice hotel in Cairo and get guides to take you to the sights. Then take a Nile cruise with guides. Then go home. You won’t be able to drive, and there is nothing to do except look at pyramids and temples anyway. See the old stuff and enjoy a cruise. If you limit your trip to these things, you’ll love Egypt. Don’t do anything else.

I feel like getting myself something, but I am not doing well at finding gifts for myself.

When I got the idea of getting myself a present, I immediately thought of a trailer with a gas-powered leaf vacuum on it. That is not a Christmas gift. It’s a tool for yard maintenance. A CNC mill I don’t need would be a good gift. Something I really need so I can do chores would not.

I’m not blowing $8000 on a mill.

I looked at my Amazon lists. They’re full of things I need. There are also things I merely want, but those things are too cheap for Christmas.

I bought myself two Shark vacuums this month. Cordless and corded. Spent over $600. Changed my life. Absolutely worth every penny. Recommended without reservation. But cleaning tools are not gifts. And Rhodah will probably be the one who uses them most.

I feel like I’ve turned into the aunt who used to give me socks.

How about another firearm buy?

The other day I was on the phone, and I saw an unopened flat rate box. I opened it up, and it contained a new Wilson rifle cartridge trimmer. The invoice was from August of 2020. This thing cost me over $130, and I had forgotten I owned it. Obviously, I have not used it. I haven’t fired a gun in maybe 6 months. I have enough ammo supplies backed up to keep me busy for a couple of months. I built a rifle I have not fired yet. I finished it months ago. I probably have 15,000 rounds of .22 ammunition. I don’t think this is the time to buy gun stuff.

Maybe a nice bottle of XO brandy. I barely drink, but a really nice brandy would be pleasant to have on hand. I have not had a really good brandy since before I left Miami.

How about a water-cooled TIG torch? Practicing TIG is no fun when you’re holding a hot torch. A new one would cost a few pennies, but it would encourage me to practice.

I would love to have a Langmuir Arcflat welding table, three feet by four feet. My Northern Tool table is astounding for the money, but it has about half the square footage of a Langmuir. I’m doing a project which is not going to fit on my table. It would hang off the ends and sides of a Langmuir, but I think I could make it work.

It would be great to have a table 6 feet long. You can weld nearly anything on a table like that.

A Langmuir fixturing table 4 feet long would cost more than I want to spend, sadly. It would be $1800, including tax. Cut that figure in thirds, and I might do it.

Like a leaf vaccum, a welding table is useful for necessary jobs, but you can also use one to make fun things like a shooting bench or a mobile base for a big table saw you don’t really need. I don’t think I’d put it in the same class as a leaf vacuum.

I’m going to try to get by without a vacuum. Today I took my giant blower and made a 10-foot-wide pile of leaves at the side of the front yard. I plan to burn them as soon as I can get a permit. In the past, I was determined to move leaves out of the yard before burning them, and that’s why I never got anywhere. Moving them an eighth of a mile to the burn pile is extremely work-intensive. If I am willing to have a black spot in my yard, I should be able to get rid of them without extraordinary effort.

I guess I’ve already bought myself nearly everything that would make a good present. I have a drawer full of nice knives. I have a Ruger RPR with a Vortex Viper scope. I have an ice cream machine with its own compressor. I have a 16″ lathe. Years ago, I got myself musical instruments.

To some men, or women who have a lot of jewelry, this stuff may seem insignificant, especially when spread out over decades, but I don’t live on a grand scale. I drive a Ford Explorer with 60,000 miles on it, and I plan to keep it for 10 more years. I use a cell phone made in 2017. I own a Rolex, but if my late father had not owned it, I would not have one. If I spend $500 on something, I feel like it’s a big deal.

A home waterjet would be nice. Really nice. Let’s see. A Wazer, the best-known small waterjet, would only set me back maybe 12 grand.

Dang it.

How about a plasma table? Let’s see. Over $1500. Geez.

I may as well clean up the brandy snifters.