Living High on Pork Avenue

Today I had a traditional meal I had not had in a while. Cornbread and vegetables. I fixed green beans and collards, and I served them with a sliced Vidalia and a sliced tomato. Very, very nice.

Yesterday, Mike made BBQ chicken, and I made greens. Because the chicken came out of the smoker faster than I anticipated, the greens had been cooking less than three hours when dinner was served. For this reason, they were practically raw by Southern standards, and the flavor was substandard. They were probably better than the collards in 99% of America’s restaurants, but then restaurants make them badly.

I had hoped to make the greens with neckbones, but my local grocery was out of neckbones and hocks. I grabbed some fatback, but when I got home, I decided not to use it because it wasn’t smoked. I used half a pound of fried bacon instead, along with most of the grease. I also added a garlic clove, salt, MSG, butter, pepper, and a few squirts of hot sauce. In retrospect, I think half a can of chicken broth might have been nice.

Mike put vinegar in his greens, and he raved about them. I kept telling him they were garbage compared to the real thing, but he didn’t seem to think that was possible.

After we ate, I boiled the greens for maybe 90 more minutes, and they finally gave up. They wilted completely and gave up all their flavor. Instead of salad in hot water, I had sweet, wilted, wrinkly greens swimming in an acidic, aromatic reduction you could sell by itself in a high-end restaurant. Call it soup.

Yesterday, when I realized I wouldn’t be able to use the fatback in the greens, I put it in the smoker with the chicken. When it came out, it was gorgeous. It had a golden glaze on it. It was tender. It smelled like heaven. Today I used it in my beans.

Pole beans are the best green beans. They have lots of flavor, and they take a long time to fall apart when you boil them. You can boil them with pork for hours without ruining the texture. I did not have pole beans, so I put my regular beans in water with salt, garlic, pepper, sugar, butter, and MSG. I sliced the fatback into the pot.

After a couple of hours, the beans were getting soft, but there was still too much liquor in the pot, so I removed the beans and boiled the snot out of the liquor and pork. I reduced the liquid by a factor of maybe three. Then I put everything back together. The blandness was gone. The flavor was even better than the flavor of the greens.

I made cornbread using my standard recipe, which is 2 cups Martha White, 1-1/3 cups full-fat buttermilk, 2 eggs, 1/4 cup bacon grease, 1 tbsp. sugar, and 1 tsp. salt. I had to replace about two tablespoons of grease with butter because I was running low. I baked at 450° in a #6 skillet. The cornbread came out with a dark brown bottom and lots of crunch. It was beautiful.

I will explain how I eat this stuff. I slice the onion and quarter the slices. I slice the tomato. I butter the cornbread. Then I go at it, and most of the time, I try to get a piece of Vidalia on my fork with whatever else I’m eating. I dip the cornbread in the liquid from the greens and beans.

If that sounds weird, you may be one of the millions of people who don’t like vegetables much, or maybe you’ve never had greens or beans cooked correctly with pork.

Mike is a real challenge. I made hoe cakes, which are small fried cornbread pancakes, the other day. They were supposed to go with chili. Mike grabbed a squeeze bottle of cheap jelly and blasted some hoe cakes with it. I nearly died.

Today he said he thought the undercooked greens had been great, and he said he didn’t understand dipping cornbread in the juice from greens and beans. He can’t even understand why a person would put Oberholtzer’s Kentucky sorghum syrup on cornbread instead of store brand grape jelly made from dye and corn syrup.

He has a date in another city today, and he didn’t manage his time well. I sat down and ate like a king, and he had to get in the car to drive across the state. He was not happy when he saw the food.

In these apocalyptic times of Bidenian inflation, supply chain problems, and disease, it’s good to remember that the price of a dish and its sophistication are totally unrelated to how good it tastes or how good it is for you. One day people who can do wonders with collards, corn meal, and salt pork will be living much better than urbanites and suburbanites who think they can’t eat anything Gordon Ramsay doesn’t eat.

Cut Big Wood for Small Money

Continuing the practice of blogging about inconsequential matters, I am about to divulge a couple of helpful tool-related things.

First, it looks like the lives of old car batteries all over the world may be extended in the future. Someone somewhere has invented a device that takes worn-out batteries and makes them usable again. It’s not a gimmick. It works.

I have done nearly nothing since the pandemic started, and I am only now coming out of my catatonia. I am trying to fix things I shouldn’t have allowed to have problems in the first place. I let the batteries in my truck, farm tractor, motorcycle, and garden tractor run down, and I had to do something.

The motorcycle and farm tractor responded to ordinary charging. The garden tractor did not. Putting a charger on it for a day would get it to the point where it started, but if I stopped the engine, I couldn’t start it again.

I got myself a NOCO Genius. This is a strange device that will charge various types of batteries and repair certain batteries that resist charging due to abuse. It’s about the size of a tender you would use on a car in storage. It has two leads with clamps. It will charge any kind of 12-volt battery, it will also charge 6-volt batteries, and it will often successfully repair 12-volt batteries.

The Genius did not work on my friend Mike’s AGM motorcycle battery. He had forgotten to attach the tender’s leads, and the battery had gone dead. We tried the Genius but got nowhere.

The Genius revived my garden tractor’s battery. I had to charge it conventionally in order to get the Genius to realize it was there, and after that, the Genius took over. The repair cycle lasted 4 hours, and after that, the tractor started repeatedly. Will it last? Not sure yet.

The Genius also worked on my truck’s batteries, although, to be honest, I didn’t try the conventional charger, so it might have worked, too. I didn’t feel like wasting my time. I gave the batteries a repair cycle, and then I left a conventional charger on them overnight. No problems yet.

Here’s what I wonder: should I use the Genius prophylactically? All of my batteries are getting old. Maybe I should give them a repair cycle once every few months, sort of like shipping Keith Richards to that clinic in Switzerland where he gets an annual total blood transfusion. I should do some research. If I can get 8 years out of a battery instead of 4, why not do it?

Here’s the other tip: whenever you install a light bulb with a threaded base, you should grease the threads lightly with Vaseline.

I have ceiling fans, and a couple are pretty cheap. Each of the cheap ones has 4 deep shades attached to it, and each shade contains one bulb. The bulbs on one started fizzling, and I decided to take a bulb out so I could identify it and replace it. When I started turning it, it turned and turned. The socket came loose from the shade, with the bulb stuck inside it.

I eventually managed to get the bulb out, but that left me with a lamp which was not in great shape. I didn’t know whether the wires had been broken by the twisting, and the socket flopped around loose in the shade. I was concerned that even if the wires worked, I would never be able to install another bulb.

Mike and I fixed the lamp. He removed the lamp unit from the fan, and I repaired it. I learned that the sockets in the fan were held in by right-hand threads, which is very stupid, because the bulbs also had right-hand threads. When I put torque on a bulb to remove it, I also put torque on the threads that held the socket in the shade. In a situation like this, when the bulb doesn’t want to come loose, you can end up unscrewing the socket instead, which is what I did.

Obviously, the shade should be attached to the fan with a left-hand thread. When installing bulbs, you don’t put enough clockwise torque on the socket to loosen a left-hand thread attaching the shade to the fan, but when you try to loosen a stubborn bulb, you may apply more than enough torque to remove the socket.

I Googled around, and I learned there are special greases for light bulb bases. They prevent bulbs from seizing in their sockets. I also learned Vaseline works just as well, and most American houses already contain Vaseline. From now on, I plan to use it.

I have some LED bulbs on the way from Amazon. Home Depot could not match the price.

Taking a fan lamp shade off the fan and reinstalling the socket is not fun at all, so my advice is to do anything you can to avoid loosening the socket. When I reinstalled the socket, I tightened it pretty good, and on one of our trips, my wife made me take a jar of Vaseline for dry skin, so I shouldn’t have to reinstall any more sockets. Assuming I can get the bulbs out of the other cheap fan when they fail.

I still have dry skin, and I’m not sure where the Vaseline is. Don’t tell the wife.

I might as well toss out one more tip. I learned there are Chinese companies making credible clones of high-end professional-grade Stihl chainsaws. Pro Stihl saws are great tools. You can’t get anything like them at Home Depot or Tractor Supply. A pro saw will make short work of things a homeowner saw will take a long time to cut.

No, I am not excited about buying more Chinese stuff, and it would be nice to support companies that invent things instead of imitators, but you need to hear me out.

1. I would never buy a $1300 Stihl chainsaw (or any other kind of Stihl chainsaw), so suggesting I go with the real thing is just plain dumb. It will never happen. Yes, I could get a used one, but it would take a long time to find it, and God only knows what would be wrong with it. Since I would not buy a real Stihl, I am not costing Stihl money by going Chinese. In fact, I would be making them money, because I would probably replace a few of the Chinese parts with OEM.

2. My biggest homeowner-grade saw is a 20″ Echo with a 59cc motor. It’s very nice, but I get some big, nasty downed trees here, so it can be quite slow. The Stihl clone would have 92 cc’s and a 28″ bar, and they scream through big logs. A larger saw would be a big help.

3. The patents on the original Stihl saws have expired, so I wouldn’t be supporting IP theft. If you want, you can go out tomorrow and start an American company making Stihl clones, and Stihl won’t be able to stop you. Expiration is a patent’s most important function, because the purpose of a patent is to get new inventions into the public domain. Using other people’s unprotected ideas is not immoral or illegal.

For about $360, you can get yourself a monster Stihl-like saw that will do a phenomenal job by homeowner or farmer standards, and all the parts are replaceable and easily sourced, so if you have a problem, you will be able to fix it. In fact, as noted above, you can replace iffy parts with Stihl parts.

You can spend more and get a Chinese saw with upgraded non-Chinese parts if you’re really worried about China quality.

You can also buy a parts kit and assemble your saw yourself, learning a lot in the process and saving maybe $80. If you build the saw, which supposedly takes less than a day, you will presumably develop the ability to repair it if it breaks, and that should calm your Chinese-warranty concerns.

The two Chinese companies I know of are Farmertec and Neo-Tec. Farmertec’s Stihl clones are called Holzfforma saws. I guess some Chinese guy thought that sounded German. People who have used both saws say neither is better than the other. Each one has pros and cons. Both are a whole lot better than Home Depot saws.

In some Youtube videos, the Chinese saws cut slower than Stihls, but a guy who did the intelligent thing and did tests using the same bars and chains found no significant difference. Testing using two different chains is ridiculous. Chains get dull fast, and when they do, cutting slows down.

I may build a saw. It sounds like fun, and given the problems my mid-grade saws have given me, I would like to know more about fixing saws. It would be great to have a saw that would cut a big oak log without me having to walk around and cut from both sides.

A Stihl would last me 50 years, because I’m not a pro. What if a Farmertec only lasted a quarter as long? Gee, that would be awful. I would still be dead long before the Stihl became cost-effective.

As long as I’m talking about chainsaws, I should let you know I have learned that premixed gas–the stuff that sells for $40 per gallon and promises no carb clogs–isn’t completely reliable. Sometimes it clogs saws. I thought I’d toss this information out for people who are trying to fix dead saws and who are convinced the gas isn’t the problem. Sometimes it is.

More inconsequential matters will be discussed here as they present themselves.

Home Furnishings for the Aesthetically Flexible

Forgive me readers, for I have neglected you. It has been one week since my last blog post.

Things here are going well. Having a friend living in the house with me has been a blessing. It motivates me to do things people have stopped doing during the pandemic, such as showering and getting dressed before noon. I have also resumed looking after practical obligations around the house. I changed my A/C filters, changed the oil in my car, fixed the batteries in my truck and garden tractor, and attended to some other things I had been ignoring.

I have procrastinated because I keep feeling like nothing people do now matters, apart from drawing close to God. I believe the apocalypse is here, so the main thing people need to be concerned about is qualifying for the rapture. Short of dying and going to hell, it is hard to think of any fate worse than missing the rapture. The plagues of the tribulation will be a lot like the plagues of Egypt, but they will cover the entire world, and the only way to escape will be to out yourself as a Christian and be executed.

Most people don’t know what “apocalypse” means. It means “revelation,” which is why the Revelation is so named. It doesn’t mean “disaster” or “doomsday.” It’s probably inaccurate to refer to the hard years at the conclusion of the end time as the apocalypse, even though I do it. The word “revelation” seems to refer to the revelation John received; God revealed what would happen in the future. We have gotten used to calling the end of the age the apocalypse, though, and we use the word more generally to mean any extremely difficult period that would end the world or at least the current age.

Do you know what this means? It means the apocalypse is over! It already happened. About 1900 years ago, on Patmos. What great news!

Maybe I shouldn’t joke. People are going to beg for death.

I have put lots of things off. Maybe it matters, or maybe I’ll be removed from the earth before there are any consequences. In any case, it’s nice to get up and get things done.

I was delivered from a spirit of laziness years ago, but it returned, and I have learned I have to keep casting it out. When it’s gone, I get all sorts of things done. I’m like a slingshot someone has just released. I feel I’m fighting it successfully this week.

I’m getting rid of my awful living room chairs. I have a cheap lift recliner I got for my dad, and I used it when I’m watching Youtube with Marvin. It’s the best chair in the living room. The other two are horribly uncomfortable armchairs with Queen Anne legs. I knew Mike was not happy in them, and he would be here a while, so I said he ought to get a recliner of his own. He could take it with him when he got his own place. We went and picked up a Craigslist beauty, and now I can get rid of the armchairs. I’m not changing anything else until Rhodah gets here, because she will want a say in decorating.

She’s not hard to get along with. I told her we had to choose between comfort and elegance, and she picked comfort instantly. She is actually interested in setting the living room up with twin recliners. Most women hate recliners and would threaten divorce to get rid of them.

Why do women hate so many fantastic things? Recliners, suspenders, overalls, deer mounts…

My mother didn’t like convertibles. Unbelievable. She said we would roll over in a canal and die. Convertibles are among life’s great joys.

Mike thinks he can sell the recliners on Craigslist. I wish him luck, because I tried. I see us hauling them to the Salvation Army with one month.

The armchairs are torture devices, and they’re ancient. My late aunt had them in her house, and when she died, for some unfathomable reason, my mother took them and moved them from Kentucky to Florida. They’re like a curse that follows the family.

The main reason I’m blogging today is to share testimony, not to ramble about chores and chairs.

Yesterday, Rhodah had a vision. She was in bed in the morning, awake, and suddenly, she saw two angels beside her bed, hosing it with fire. The bed was covered with some kind of elegant comforter or something. It was white. She was wearing some sort of beautiful white gown. She said the vision showed her how God was looking after her.

It’s funny that the angels used fire. Rhodah says, “FIRE!”, all the time. It means she’s calling down fire on things. She uses it seriously, for things like coronavirus. If I said I thought I were getting coronavirus, she would say, “FIRE to coronavirus!” She also says it when she doesn’t mean it, though. “FIRE to getting to the airport late!” “FIRE to sitting in the middle seat!”

It’s wonderful to have occasional signs and wonders. When I say that, people with little pinchy faces like to say, “We are not supposed to follow signs and wonders!” Welllll…the Bible says signs and wonders will follow US. See Matthew 16. Put that in your pipe and smoke it a while. If you’re not getting any signs or wonders, something is wrong. Shouldn’t you be looking into it?

Today my friend Leah asked if we needed prayer for anything. She didn’t know about Rhodah’s vision. Rhodah and I visited Ireland last month, and her luggage is still in France. We are getting no help from Air France, Aer Lingus, or South African Airlink, even though they are all responsible. I asked Leah to pray. She said she would ask God to send two angels to protect and return it.

Mike has some health problems, and they make life very unpleasant sometimes. Yesterday, I got him to let Rhodah and me pray for him on WhatsApp. I got him to say he forgave everyone who had sinned against him, and I got him to say he believed he would be healed. We told the disorders to leave him, and we commanded his body to be healed. He felt strange pulsing waves going through his back and arms. Today some of his symptoms are gone. We are going to continue.

In the morning, before we prayed, he told me he had been praying on his own about his blood sugar, and afterward, he had checked it. The value was lower than ever. He was extremely excited.

I have been asking God to make my home a house of prayer, and he is doing it. What a relief.

This is all I have right now. Hope people find it helpful.

Near-Divine Food for a Divine Occasion

My friend Mike arrived yesterday. He is moving to the Ocala area, and he just sold his house in New England. He left on Wednesday, and he arrived on Saturday. It was a horrible trip. Car problems. Bad hotels. No one to share the driving. He should have arrived Friday, but his Mercedes had to make most of the trip in limp mode, and he stopped in North Carolina overnight for an unsuccessful repair.

The night after the failed repair job, he went to a hotel in South Carolina and found it too filthy to stay in. Someone had even left him a little gift in the porcelain receptacle, if you get my drift. He drove to another hotel, and a shabby pickup kept following him as he tried to park. Obviously, it was some white-trash dirtbag hoping to loot his trailer. He called the cops, the trailer left, and a beat-up Pontiac showed up to continue the game.

He checked out and gave up on hotels. He ended up stopping periodically to sleep in his car’s front seat.

Of course, demons were resisting his move to Christian Northern Florida. But they failed to achieve victory. They are, after all, losers and the children of losers. Losing is what they do.

We had to move maybe a thousand pounds of stuff into my house today, and there is still a lot left on his trailer. He had 20 pounds of yellow grits with him, because he didn’t want to throw out everything from his kitchen. They got out and went all over his lawnmower. He had similar problems with sugar and a big bottle of Mexican vanilla extract. And a bottle of liqueur someone gave to his late father.

The good news: we’re working on Passover dinner. Let’s go ahead and call it Passover, even if Christians celebrate on the wrong day. Jesus is our Passover lamb, and he was killed on Passover. No chocolate rabbit ever died for anyone’s sins.

Local stores put rib roasts on sale, and I picked one up Tuesday. I covered it with salt, butter, and garlic, and stuck it in my spare fridge under kitchen towels. I wanted to roast it in my new oven, but Mike got all excited about the Showtime rotisserie, so that’s where it is.

I told him I’d handle the baked potatoes and Caesar salad if he cooked the roast. I cut a baguette in pieces and roasted them. Then I tossed them in olive oil in which I had fried garlic. Very nice. I dried the romaine as well as I could and cut it in suitable pieces. I finally found a very good dressing recipe. You can look it up over at Serious Eats. I used to use an Epicurious recipe, but it was disgusting. I kept forgetting it was bad, and I ended up using it more than once. I also used a Bon Appetit recipe. Forget both of those. It’s Serious Eats Caesar from now on. I had to use more lemon and Worcestershire than the recipe called for, but the dressing is perfect.

Now I just have to fix the potatoes and horseradish sauce. I now rely on Mike’s potato method. He covers his potatoes with oil and salt, nukes them, and toasts them in a toaster oven. They’re better than potatoes cooked in a regular oven from start to finish. Really easy.

Yesterday, we ate leftover pizza, and Mike made garlic knots. I also had some homemade ice cream from my fancy Italian machine. Vanilla with Grape Nuts. Sounds terrible, but it’s delicious.

In an hour or so, we should be eating. The only disappointment is that Rhodah can’t be here with me.

Hope everyone else is having a wonderful Passover or Resurrection Day.

You Can Keep It

I am still wondering about my future in blogging. I feel like I’m not doing much good when I blog about important things. On the other hand, blogging about trivial things is still a good way to pass the time on the rare occasions when I get bored.

Today I did something very unimportant. I made Sicilian pizza again. This time, I put cheese on half of the rim of the pizza so it would melt and burn against the pan. It was very nice. I may cheese the entire rim of the next pie.

I tried Bridgford thick pepperoni. I usually use Hormel pepperoni, which is thinner. I don’t have easy access to high-end pepperoni here.

The Bridgford was good, but it seemed to taste too much like salt and not enough like pepperoni.

This pizza got beaten up a lot while I was handling it. I removed it from the pan and set it on my steel to see if it would improve the crust, and I made a mess. It didn’t improve it, so I won’t have to do that again.

I dropped a slice of pepperoni and some cheese on the hot steel. No problem. I scooped it up and dropped it back on the pie. It made it better. The fact that the pizza was manhandled didn’t hurt it at all as a dish.

Someone suggested I buy a whole Bridgford pepperoni, wrap it, and leave it in the produce drawer of my fridge for a few weeks. Supposedly, aging improves it.

I have realized pizza can’t get significantly better than what I make now. That’s how good it is. I have started experimenting with variations just for the sake of variety. I’m making 3/4 height pies. I may make a 1/4 height pie. I would just reduce my original dough recipe by 75%.

My pies are darker than they used to be. I kept seeing videos of charred pies on the web, and they got to me. Now I’m starting to like them.

So where is the best pizza in America? Youtube personalities seem to think it’s in New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University. I have not been to New Haven. When I was in college, people said it was a dangerous ghetto.

New Haven drew a lot of Italian immigrants. Supposedly, a New Haven company recruited them in Italy and helped them move. They went straight from the docks to the company’s plant. Eventually, some of them decided cooking was better than industrial work. This is the legend, anyway. They started making big, thin, well-done pies similar to New York pizza.

In New Haven, people are forced to call pizza “apizza,” which is Neapolitan slang for “la pizza.” They pronounce it “ahbeets.” I can certainly understand why the local Italians would pronounce it that way, but everyone else should be permitted to pronounce it correctly.

There are three big-name places in New Haven: Sally’s Apizza, Modern Apizza, and Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napolitana. People argue about which is the best. They originally used coal-fired ovens, but Modern uses precious oil. Must stink to be them under Joe Biden. They bake their pies at somewhere around 1000°, whereas New York pizzerias run about half that hot.

People swoon over their pizza, and they wait in line. Pizza “experts” rave about these places.

I have been curious about “apizza,” but I knew I would never go to New Haven. I wondered if I could learn to make New Haven pies.

My friend Mike is driving to Florida right now. He sold his house up north, and he will be staying with me for a while. I have been calling him to help him kill time on the road. Today I called and told him he should have stopped in New Haven on the way.

He said he had been to Frank Pepe’s Massachusetts location about 5 times. I was surprised. I asked him how the pizza was. He said it was very good, but not amazing. He said his pizza and mine are better.

If Frank Pepe’s is merely very good, then apizza is a hollow legend. Mike knows a good pizza when he eats, or bakes, one.

I went to a pizza forum and told everyone what Mike had said, and people there seemed to agree. Their lack of awe is evident in the scarcity of forum posts asking for help making New Haven pizza. If it were really that good, people would be trying to replicate it. They work hard to make Chicago pizza, New York pizza, Detroit pizza, and Neapolitan pizza, but New Haven doesn’t get significant attention.

This experience reminds me of something I already knew: people who can’t make pizza have lower standards than people who can.

Mike and I once toured Miami, trying slices at various places that were highly regarded, and none of them could sit beside our own pies. I think it would have been different had we been unable to make pizza. We would have been dependent on professionals, and they would have seemed like miracle workers to us. Having made extremely good pizzas for a long time, we were not easily impressed during our tour.

I don’t plan to try to make apizza. Mike says my pizza is better, and I know he’s right, because his opinion can be trusted. I don’t need to go to New Haven and find out what I’m missing.

The more pizza I make, the more confidence I have in my ability. Today on a forum, I stood up to a guy who sells steel pizza pans. These pans are all over New York City. They’re used to bake Sicilian. They’re heavy and expensive.

He was pushing his pans, as well as a small plastic spatula for scraping pizzas out of them. Other people were suggesting ridiculous ideas like paint scrapers.

I put up a post saying I didn’t understand why people used steel pans. I said I used seasoned aluminum quarter sheets. I have tried steel, and it doesn’t brown pizza well. It also rusts, and small steel pans are square, which is stupid, because it reduces the number of edge pieces you get. No one wants an inner slice.

I also posted a photo of a tool I made to get pizzas out of pans. I’ll post photos here. I made one of these over a decade ago when I was stupidly making pizzas for the inept and corrupt people at Trinity Church in Miami. I make the mistake of leaving it in the church kitchen when I left, and I’m sure it has never been used since. Their pizza operation ceased permanently the minute I left, even though I had taught people how to make it.

The tool was cut from a tray for 14″ round pies. I cut it on the table saw, and then I ground the corners off, sanded the edges, and bent it using a Moxon wood vise.

Unlike a tiny spatula, this thing will lift an entire 9.5″ by 13″ pizza without bending or tearing it. It’s fantastic. I own one of the only two in the world.

It’s amazing that experienced pizza people would suggest terrible tools like scrapers and spatulas. It’s amazing no one could figure out a better way. Meanwhile, a hobbyist who makes pizzas in a home oven made the perfect tool for $5.75.

The guy who sells pans came back and said something about how I needed to try steel pans, so I posted a photo of the ones I have, sitting in a cupboard behind some cake pans I never use. I let him know they appeared to be exactly what he sold: American Metal Spinning pans with wire in the rims.

I said they appeared on the web for $28 each, which was ridiculous, since aluminum quarter sheets sell for around 5 dollars on restaurant supply sites. Aluminum is a lot more expensive than steel. I put up a photo of one of my Sicilian crusts.

I know what I’m doing. Sometimes you have to admit you know what you’re doing. My Sicilian is as good as anyone’s pizza, or AHBEETS, anywhere. The pan guy should have kept quiet, but of course, he’s trying to make a living. You can’t blame him for trying, even though his product is pretty much worthless.

A law school friend of mine moved to Hollywood and became a Fox executive. She told me people there kept saying this: “No one in this town knows what they’re doing.” They meant they were all winging it, pretending to be sure of themselves. The same thing is true in most fields. It’s true in the pizza game.

I make great Sicilian. I made a fantastic tool for moving it around. I chose the best pans.

Deal with it!

“Breakfast” means “America”

This post will repeat things I wrote in an earlier post, but that’s okay, because I want it to stand on its own.

I just had my first decent breakfast in weeks. I had my last good breakfast in Ireland, during my recent trip. Every breakfast since then was lame. Until today. I just visited McDonald’s.

I don’t know why people don’t man up and admit McDonald’s makes some of the best breakfast food on the planet. It must be snob anxiety. They’re afraid of what other people will think. I remember seeing Candice Bergen brag that she had never had a McDonald’s hamburger. She sounded like a fool to me. Sure, she said the right thing to avoid raising the anemic eyebrows of her elitist vegan peers, but she sounded like a snob who was more interested in currying favor than in enjoying good food. For all she knew, McDonald’s burgers were wonderful, but she was afraid to try them because the unwashed intracoastal masses ate them.

I know Mcdonald’s burgers are NOT wonderful, but then I’ve eaten them. I gave them a shot. I didn’t sneer at them in proud ignorance.

Today I had a sausage and egg McMuffin, a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit, and hash browns. I mixed Hunt’s All-Natural ketchup with a little Frank’s Red Hot, and I dipped liberally. I’m still basking in the afterglow.

You may wonder what I had in Ireland that constituted my last good breakfast. Simple. I went to the McDonald’s on Dublin’s O’Connell Street.

I think the first breakfast Rhodah and I shared in Dublin came from Keogh’s, a cafe in the Temple Bar area. They sold us two scones; cranberry and raisin. We paid over three Euros each. The scones were cold and dry. The butter was cold and hard. Rhodah’s scone had no raisins in it. We sent it back. The waiter returned our serve, unaltered. They had a big pile of scones with raisins in them, but they insisted a raisinless raisin scone was normal.

Not long after that, we went to Bread 41, a hipster bakery that sells the kind of food people describe as “artisanal,” which means it looks good. Bread 41 had a lot of great Internet reviews, and people on a forum recommended it.

Here is the problem with food: most people have the palates of goats. If you put three people at a table, you serve them horse manure on cold bagels, and you pay two of them to say the bagels are great, the third will almost certainly agree. The third person is not likely to know the difference between horse manure and good food, and even if he does, he’ll probably want to fit in with the other two. For these reasons, it’s not really possible to get good advice from people you don’t know. When it comes to the Internet, the problem is compounded by fake reviews. All over the world, people are making good money recommending things they haven’t tried.

We were told Bread 41 was so good, we needed a reservation. We were told people lined up around the block. We walked in anyway, during peak breakfast hours, and there were about three people in front of us. That should have told me something.

I ordered pain au chocolat (“chocolate croissant”), a croissant, and hot chocolate. Rhodah ordered something called a morning bun, along with a roll that had been sliced in half and filled with some kind of cream. She also ordered coffee.

The food looked marvelous. The croissants (I will call both of them that) had all sorts of flaky layers in them. The items Rhodah ordered were very appetizing. Then we tried to eat our purchases.

The croissant tasted like burnt egg wash and not much more. A true croissant is made with milk, sugar, and salt. It should be very flavorful. It should not be dry. It should not be harsh. My croissant had very little flavor, except for tasting burned.

I have managed to enjoy a lot of bad croissants. Burger King croissants are not impressive, but they taste like bread and butter, so they’re pleasant to eat. Publix croissants have a nice buttery taste. Walmart croissants are no worse than a good slice of bagged white bread. In Egypt, at a hotel buffet, I had croissants which pretty clearly arrived at the kitchen in a bag, but they weren’t offensive. Bread 41’s croissants, I could not finish. I mean, I could have, but I didn’t want to. They were that bad.

The chocolate one was just like the other one, but it had chocolate filling installed WAYYYY down in one end. This made it look very stylish, but it was a stupid move, because you would have to eat most of the croissant before tasting chocolate.

Rhodah’s morning bun was fine. It was sort of a glorified pecan twirl kind of a thing. Spiced dough rammed into a mold and baked. Imagine a really good cinnamon roll, and then imagine it dryer and with less flavor. She shared it with me, and it was the only thing we finished.

The cream roll was horrendous. Rhodah complained about the flavor. I tried it, and it had a bitter taste. There was a spice in it that belonged in something like sausage or Indian food. Ruined the whole thing.

Her coffee was lukewarm and not very tasty. My hot chocolate was fraudulent in that it was not hot at all. It was tepid, and it tasted as though it had been made with spoiled milk and water. It wasn’t very sweet, either.

I think the Irish dislike hot beverages. This wasn’t the only time we were served lukewarm coffee or cocoa.

I was afraid the chocolate was spoiled, so I barely touched it. I didn’t want to spend my vacation throwing up.

This is how post-Food Network foodie hipster food is. It’s supposed to look perfect, and you’re supposed to rave about it even if it tastes bad, which it often does.

I wrote an honest Internet review, and someone from Bread 41 had a conniption and responded with a total lack of professionalism. This says a lot about the restaurant. A professional never berates a diner. They say they’re sorry the diner didn’t like the experience. They say they will try to do better. Or they ignore the complaint altogether, sure that it’s a fluke. When you go after a dissatisfied patron, you show that you can’t improve because constructive criticism infuriates you.

I’ll go through the employee’s claims.

He said the bitter roll was a Swedish semla. I’m sure you’re all very familiar with these, since all Americans eat them several times a week. He said it contained cardamom, as specified in the traditional recipe. He seemed irate that I did not expect this.

Couple of things. Like 98% of the world’s population, I had never heard of semlas. If you’re going to sell people bitter cream rolls for breakfast, you should offer some kind of warning before handing them over, unless your business is in Sweden. On top of that, I tend to doubt the amount of cardamom was correct, because the roll was disgusting. It tasted medicated. Based on the chef’s inability to recognize a good croissant, which people in nearly every country on Earth can do, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he has no idea how much cardamom to put in a semla.

You don’t have to tell people what croissants are like before you sell them, because everyone knows what a croissant is. If you’re going to sell, say, an obscure Congolese pastry made with a tablespoon of mace, you should let customers know what they’re in for.

My wild guess is that he overdid the cardamom. The web says a proper semla is “lightly flavored” with it.

He also made it clear he thought I had no idea what croissants should be like, because I was American. He said American croissants were full of various unpleasant things, such as emulsifiers.

That was really dumb. America has the best food on Earth, because America is rich and able to pay for it. We have drawn all sorts of skilled immigrants over the centuries, and many of them are from France, the home of croissants. I know Ireland is the world’s French pastry mecca, so forgive me, but I think our French cooks, and the people who have learned from them, have figured out how to make croissants here.

When I say we have the best food on Earth, which is true, I don’t mean the majority of our restaurants sell great food. I mean our best restaurants, bakeries, butchers, and grocers are as good as anyone’s. Now that the microbrew revolution has blossomed, we also make the world’s best beer; no contest, even from the Belgians.

Obviously, our croissants are not all full of chemicals. I’m sure some are, but clearly, this country is full of bakers who would never use such things. And the unpopular truth is that sometimes, chemicals make good food a lot better. Try adding sodium citrate to mac and cheese.

He said I should continue eating at places like Burger King and Walmart, since their food was more on a par with my tastes. He was actually right, because a lot of the food from these places, unlike his food, isn’t so off-putting I don’t want to finish it. A good Whopper is better than a burnt croissant.

Go to Youtube and search for croissants made in Paris. You’ll see they’re not burnt. They’re not even dark.

I can’t believe an Irish person would dare make fun of another country’s food. Irish food has such a bad reputation, the government mounted a nationwide campaign to fix it, and it hasn’t been a great success. They don’t even do uniformly good work with fish and chips, which is a signature dish of the British Isles. Imagine going to Tennessee and finding that most barbecue restaurants were no good. Same idea. It could never happen. It’s nice that the Irish have made an effort, but I ate there for about 12 days, and I was usually disappointed, even in the Guinness, which they served incorrectly.

We never had a bad Thai or Italian meal in Ireland, but the Irish themselves nearly always let us down.

Two hungry people showed up at Bread 41, hoping to fuel themselves for a long day of walking, they were hungry enough to eat substandard food if necessary, and they left most of their items unfinished. The customers were not the problem. Case closed.

I really wanted to get some calories into me because I knew we would use them up, but it wasn’t worth it to me to finish my food, nor was it worth it to Rhodah. When we left, we joked about needing to find a place to have breakfast.

After this, we had breakfast at two B&B’s. One was in Dingle, and the other was in Inis Mor. In both places, I made the error of ordering the full Irish breakfast.

They gave me one egg, which is ridiculous, dry Irish bacon, fried mushrooms, white pudding (funky-tasting sausage), link sausage, and canned beans which were about like pork and beans. I also had toast. I passed on the black pudding, which is a giant scab of seasoned congealed blood.

I don’t know why people rave about English and Irish breakfasts, because they’re not very good. They’re kind of okay. That’s about it. Who pours beans out of can and microwaves them for breakfast? Who eats one egg? The link sausage was like finely ground mystery meat; it tasted cheap.

My advice is this: don’t try to like the full English or Irish breakfast. You may think you’re supposed to like it, because people who don’t know good food claim it’s good, but it’s not good at all.

I also had eggs Benedict; an AMERICAN dish. I couldn’t tell exactly what the object that was supposed to be an English muffin was, but it was dry, small, and hard. The egg was also small, which is weird, because Americans supposedly use smaller eggs than the British, who are right next door to the Irish. All the Irish eggs I saw were tiny.

In America, eggs Benedict is wonderful. You get two big eggs with lots of Hollandaise sauce. You get a big English muffin with butter. You get Canadian bacon, which is much better than Irish bacon, a drier, less tasty version of the same thing.

Eggs Benedict came out of Delmonico’s restaurant in New York, where it was named after a customer named Benedict. If it had tasted like Irish eggs Benedict, no one would know what it is today, because no one would have considered saving the recipe or naming it.

Here’s something else that’s bad about Irish breakfasts: they don’t provide cream for coffee. They use milk, which is completely useless. The fat in cream kills bitterness and improves the texture of coffee. How can people in other nations have failed to catch on?

I could have had French toast, but I opted not to. Why? Because I knew there was no way they would have real syrup. Maple syrup is a NORTH AMERICAN condiment. It would amaze me to learn it was sold anywhere in Europe. Ordinary pancake syrup is a chemical counterfeit better known as diluted corn syrup. I don’t understand why any serious establishment would serve pancakes, waffles, or French toast without offering real syrup.

In Dublin, we found a McDonald’s, and Rhodah loved it. The McMuffins were very good. The hash browns were a bit undercooked, but they were still better than Irish food.

The food I had this morning was great, and McDonald’s deserves some credit. They make beautiful biscuits; if you don’t believe me, order them a la carte, take them home, and put your own gravy on them. Their muffins can’t be criticized. They’re standard English muffins, smeared with real butter. Their sausage is just as good, or better than, anything you can get at your local grocery store. They fry their circular eggs in-house. Granted, the folded eggs are warmed up at their restaurants, but eggs take reheating very well. Waffle House cooks eggs to order, but McDonald’s makes a much better breakfast.

If you don’t respect the hash browns, try making them yourself. I have. You will fail. It’s very difficult to make a McDonald’s-style hash brown that isn’t soggy or brown inside. They do a beautiful job.

The coffee at McDonald’s is also excellent, WHEN they keep it fresh. They tend to let the decaf sit, and then it starts to smell like cat pee. I really mean cat pee. Not trying to be funny.

I am extremely blunt and honest when I write Internet reviews. Business owners seem to think the purpose of reviews is to flatter them and lure people to their establishments. It’s not. It’s to give people solid information so they can patronize good businesses and avoid bad ones. If a proprietor does a bad job, I’ll say so, and I don’t care at all how he feels or whether it costs him money. I’m not on his side. I’m on the side of other consumer. If he doesn’t like complaints, he should change his ways.

If the Bread 41 guy is upset, tough. Reviews are matters of business. We’re not buddies. If he thinks people who do business with him are supposed to go on the web and lick his ear, he needs to grow up.

The best breakfasts I’ve had in Europe were continental, i.e. a couple of baked items and coffee or chocolate. On the continent, you get excellent pastries and rolls, and the coffee and chocolate are just as good. When it comes to real breakfast, meaning a meal, I don’t know of any country that can touch America. If you have a Cracker Barrel and a McDonald’s near you, you are in pretty thin air, and there are many American restaurants that put these businesses to shame. Try a real Jewish deli that serves good bagels and smoked fish. Try a fancy hotel with a big brunch spread. I make country ham, scrambled eggs, biscuits and gravy, and fried apples that would bring most people to their knees. Americans do breakfast right. No getting around it.

Today’s Greek Lesson

I thought I was done blogging for a while, but a few minutes ago, I realized I had something to pass on.

The other day, I heard the word tetelestai in my head over and over, for no apparent reason, and I had to look it up to be sure what it meant. It turned out to be the Greek word Jesus used (assuming it wasn’t translated in the gospels) at the end of the crucifixion. It means something like, “It is finished,” although it can also be used to indicate the fulfillment of an obligation. You could use it to indicate that you have paid a debt, or to say you have finished a job you were paid to do.

Today while I was praying with my wife, I was thanking God for giving us what I had asked for, and I blurted out, “Tetelestai!”

By this I meant our prayers would be answered, because the answers had been paid for on the cross.

I didn’t see it coming. It just popped out.

Useful word. It seems you can use it to assert your rights when talking to God or evil spirits. It’s almost like a company credit card.

More

Forgot to add this.

The day before I heard “tetelestai” in my head, I dreamed I was cooking in my dad’s kitchen, and he came in, wrapped his arms around me, held me tightly, and said a nonsense word. Suddenly, I had the feeling the world was ending. I thought nuclear weapons were being used somewhere. I looked at a computer monitor on a nearby counter to see if there was any news.

I told my wife about the dream and the word. Afterward, she had a dream. We were together, and she was concerned because of my experiences. I told her God had given me a revelation, and it showed that the things he was telling me about the future were good, not bad.

Then today I had the revelation, fulfilling her prophetic dream.

It’s very nice to have a wife who hears from God.

I Can’t Stand the Heat

I feel like my enthusiasm for blogging is drying up. I think I’m just tired of this world. Seems like every time I turn around, I see an angry man in a dress or some other indication that we live in a world of unsavable people. I keep seeing indications that the system is increasingly rigged to exclude Christians and drive them to renounce their salvation in exchange for the ability to participate in our economy. Or in exchange for Facebook likes, which are extremely important.

In 2022, it is literally impossible to interact with many important companies unless you own a smartphone. Not just a cell phone; a smartphone. Of course, phones can be stolen and hacked, so chips will be next. It will turn out to be possible to hack and even cut out other people’s chips, but never mind. They won’t talk about that until after we have them. Articles are popping up on the web saying we will definitely be chipped; the only question is when.

They’re telling us a digital currency is in the works. I don’t see why that’s a big deal, because our currency is already digital. Yes, you can go to your bank and get cash, even though there is not much need for it, but most American dollars are imaginary. They don’t exist as gold, paper, or coins. Only a small percentage are in cash. The rest are moved around among computers. That’s digital, no matter what you want to call it. DIGITAL digital currency will simply be somewhat worse. They can already freeze, refuse, or confiscate your imaginary money, but you can store up cash as a defense. When we go full-throttle digital, the government will tell us our cash is no longer legal tender, so whatever you have in your mattress will be ready for the landfill.

Today my wife said something about the Euphrates drying up. She said it had been prophesied, and it was starting to happen. I looked it up. The Revelation says an angel will pour out a vial, and the Euphrates will run dry. News stories say both the Tigris and Euphrates are disappearing, and they are predicting the Euphrates will be gone in 20 years unless things change.

It’s really happening. The end, I mean. The apocalypse used to be fodder for kooks, but now it’s actually underway. Signs are everywhere. Satan is tightening the noose around the necks of sane people, and we are about to see a big showdown between the godless and those who refuse to become part of the new totalitarian cyborg world. People will be forced to choose, and those of us who don’t want to join will be characterized as haters of everything good.

I’m blogging right now because a couple of strange things have happened, and I felt I should report them. I blogged earlier in the day because I felt obligated to write about a recent trip. I don’t know when I’ll blog again. Maybe I’ll just write about trivial things. Pizzas and barbecue.

Night before last, I dreamed I was in my dad’s house in Coral Gables. I was at the stove, cooking. My dad came in, put his arms around me, and held me tight so I couldn’t move. He said a nonsense word: “ditewide.” For some reason, I believed this meant the world was ending.

It’s an anagram for “wide tide,” which could refer to the rapture, which will be a global tide that rises and lifts God’s children out of the reach of the godless and Satan. I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all.

My dad was holding onto me the way a father would hold onto a child while waiting for something like a fatal explosion.

I looked toward a computer monitor on the kitchen counter, hoping to see news. I figured there would be stories coming out if the world were ending. I had the feeling nuclear weapons were being used. I didn’t see any news.

Last night, before I went to bed, I started hearing something in my head, over and over: “tetelestai.” I wasn’t sure what it meant. I thought it came from the Bible, but I couldn’t remember. I had a feeling it meant, “It is finished,” and that it was what Jesus said just before he died.

I looked it up, and sure enough, it’s what he said. It’s a Greek word. I know I have heard it in the past, but if you had put a gun to my head yesterday and commanded me to tell you what Jesus said before he died, I would have come up blank. I would not have been able to recall. If you had spoken the word, told me where it came from, and asked me what it meant, I would have given you the right answer, but it would have been a guess.

According to a source I looked at, tetelestai is something a worker might say to his boss at the end of the day, indicating that his work is done. Or you might say it to indicate a bill has been paid. Both readings make sense in the context of the crucifixion.

Jesus said “tetelestai” because his job on Earth was over. He had completely defeated Satan and all his other enemies. He had provided salvation for all the people the Father had selected for him. Similarly, the job of the church will eventually end. We are living in the age of the church, which started when Jesus rose. Our job is to evangelize and fight Satan. One day, God will declare that our job is done, and he will rapture us because leaving us here no longer serves a constructive purpose.

Is God telling me our job is over? Is he telling me it’s very nearly over? I don’t know, but I know I didn’t start repeating “tetelestai” in my head on my own.

God tends to give people a lot of warning, so even if my experiences came from him, I don’t know when the end will happen. When God says “soon,” he may mean two centuries from now.

Oh, Look. More Sheep

I suppose it’s time to write about our Ireland trip. My bizarre conclusion: I would rather live there than visit as a tourist. The climate is mild. The landscape is beautiful. It’s safe. The people are wonderful. The cost of living is lower than it is here. You could probably grow your own food there. On the other hand, there isn’t much to do in Ireland.

As I have said before, I was not interested in seeing Ireland. I have a relative who thinks she is Irish, and she was very excited about visiting Ireland with her family. Sadly, she has nearly no Irish blood. My genealogy, which includes her genealogy, is available online, and I’ve seen it. There are probably recent immigrants from Somalia who have more Irish blood than we do, so I have no connection to the country. The only reason my wife and I visited Ireland was that the Irish were very nice about allowing her in. We really wanted to go to places like Israel, Switzerland, Greece, and Italy.

My mother had the same faux-Irish delusion. It’s common among Americans. I don’t know why people want to be Irish. Seems like every American wants to be Irish or American Indian.

If we had been going to Israel, I would have known exactly what to do. Stay in Jerusalem. Visit the sights. See Yad Vashem. Visit Jericho, the Dead Sea, Capernaum, Mount Hermon and Caesarea Philippi, see the kibbutz where I stayed…easy. Ireland…different. It’s one of those countries where nothing has ever happened, so it’s hard to think of things to do and see. I planned the trip by guesswork.

We went to Dublin. After that, we stayed in Salthill, which is just outside Galway. Then we stayed in Dingle. Then we spent a night on Inis Mor, the largest of the Aran Islands. Finally, back to Dublin.

Dublin was not great. I would say it’s like Philadelphia. By that I mean it’s a lot like New York, only without the positives. It’s a big city full of American businesses like Burger King and Circle K. It’s packed with immigrants, so it’s barely Irish. We interacted with Nigerians, Spaniards, people from little Eastern European countries that kind of seem Russian, Pakistanis, Thais, and Italians. I would say the Irish made up about half of the folks we dealt with. We heard lots of Spanish, which is disturbing to anyone who has been scarred by years in Miami.

I can only think of a few things to see in Dublin, and we didn’t see any of them. The Guinness brewery, the Irish whiskey museum, the immigration museum, Trinity College Library, and the Book of Kells.

The brewery, which is not actually a brewery, is probably fun. We just didn’t get around to it. I didn’t visit the whiskey museum because Irish whiskey isn’t all that good. Scotch is on another level, and expensive bourbon is also better. I didn’t know the immigration museum existed until it was almost time to fly home. As for the library and the book, it’s hard to get excited about such things. I’ve been in big old libraries. Nice, but not worth buying tickets. My understanding is that you only get to see two pages of the Book of Kells, and neither of us thought that was a bucket list item.

Let me digress back to Guinness. The Internet says Guinness brews all over the world, and the US used to get its draught Guinness from Canada. Then Diageo took over and started selling Irish Guinness in the US again. Bottled and canned Guinness are not always from the same locations as draught. I can’t find out where the Irish brewery is. I would guess they moved it out of the big, expensive city, and they don’t want anyone to know.

What about the food in Ireland?

We had a surprising amount of bad food in Dublin. I thought they would make excellent fish and chips, but they don’t. Long John Silver’s is way, way better. I have had fish and chips in Ireland and at Long John Silver’s, and Ireland can’t compete, so if you want to find out what good fish and chips taste like, head to your local drive-through. Maybe the English do it better, but American fast food fish and chips beat all the Irish fish and chips I tried.

Most places in Ireland use frozen potatoes, and we all know how those taste. We tried a couple of places that breaded their fish. One did a great job. The breading was dry and seasoned perfectly. The other, Beshoff’s, gave me fish that was not quite as good as the fish in a McDonald’s sandwich. We tried battered fish, and it was limp, oily, and not seasoned well. Only two places gave us acceptable chips.

I know it would upset many people to see me say American Guinness tastes just like Irish Guinness and that a lowly American chain makes better fish and chips than famous chip shops in Ireland, but these things are true, and delusion is a bad thing.

Wait till you read my opinion of Irish sweaters. You’ll be furious.

We tried a bakery called Bread 41. It gets rave reviews. It’s one of those places hipsters call “artisanal.” They take reservations for breakfast. They sell big loaves of great-looking bread, as well as breakfast pastries.

The web advises people to book in advance, but we walked right in. I ordered a croissant, pain au chocolat, and hot chocolate. The wife ordered a morning bun (whatever that means), a bun that had been cut in half and filled with pastry cream, and coffee.

The croissant looked fantastic, but it was very dark, and it tasted like burnt egg wash. A croissant should have a buttery, sweet, slightly salty flavor. Croissants are made with milk, butter, sugar, and salt. I didn’t taste what I should have. I didn’t finish the croissant. That’s really something, because I have managed to enjoy croissants from Walmart, Burger King, and a breakfast buffet in Egypt.

The pain au chocolat was like the croissant. The filling was nice, but it was way down in one end, so most of the roll was just a bad croissant.

The morning bun was very nice. The other thing Rhodah ordered would have been excellent, but it had a strange spice in it. Something you would expect to find in a sausage, not a pastry. It may have been sage. I don’t know. It ruined the bun.

The hot chocolate was tepid, and it tasted as though it had been made from water and spoiled milk. I later learned the Irish don’t make hot chocolate well, and they don’t seem to like really hot beverages, so I suppose my experience was normal. I only took a few sips because I was afraid I was drinking angry bacteria. I can’t recall ever failing to finish a hot chocolate before. I will even drink Swiss Miss.

The coffee was also tepid, resulting in a very annoyed wife.

Everything in the bakery looked magnificent, and the food was obviously prepared with great skill. The problem was that it didn’t taste good. These days, people are in love with presentation. Like I always say, you can’t taste presentation. It’s for people who can decorate but can’t cook. Is that code for “gays and women”? Not sure.

Yes, I am. It is.

A chef has to have a palate. He has to know what tastes good. The other nonsense is much less important.

We went to a breakfast place called Keogh’s and paid a lot of money for scones. They were cold and dry. How can Irish people not know how to make or serve scones? I believe cold scones are considered normal, because we saw them elsewhere, but they should not have been dry.

While we were in Dublin, we learned something shocking. Famous chef Marco Pierre White is a total fraud.

White is Gordon Ramsay’s former mentor and employer. He is probably the most respected chef on Earth. He’s all over Youtube, pontificating about food. He has had a ton of Michelin stars.

While we were looking for a restaurant which turned out to be closed, we saw another place with “MARCO PIERRE WHITE” on the awning in big letters. I could not believe it. He had a restaurant in Dublin? We had to try it, just for the experience.

Rhoda had salmon and chips. We shared a scallop appetizer. I had a rib eye steak and an Absolut martini.

It was disgusting, and it cost us about $200.

The chips were frozen, unless White has used his gift to find a way to make fresh ones taste that way. The rib eye was half an inch thick, cooked badly, and covered with some kind of brown gravy that tasted canned. The scallops were dry and tasted like they had been on site for a week.

They could not make me a martini. They tried twice. I kept telling them to add only a couple of drops of Vermouth, but every drink tasted like Vermouth lightly seasoned with warm vodka. Which was warm. Warm!

I later learned that White has a chain of restaurants. I guess they’re all disgusting. Maybe he can’t really cook at all. In any case, he clearly has no integrity. If he did, why would he put his name on a bad restaurant? Obviously, he knows it’s bad, unless he’s not paying any attention. Either way, he’s a phony.

Dublin is much more expensive than the rest of Ireland, for no good reason, so if you get bad food there, you will pay a lot for it.

Strangely, we found the Thai and Italian food in Ireland to be excellent. Also, we had McMuffins in Dublin, and they were very nice. Irish bacon is a lot like what we call Canadian bacon, so if you want a US-style McMuffin, your best option is called a Bacon McMuffin.

Incredibly, the Irish do not serve cream or half and half with coffee. They use milk, which is awful. If you want coffee with cream, you have to buy cream in a store and carry it around. I had a decaf at McDonald’s, and the milk took much of the joy out of it.

My wife has not been what I would call “rich” her whole life, so when we get together, we have to do catch-up shopping. I brought a lot of stuff for her in my luggage, and we also shopped in Dublin. The prices and quality were fine, for the most part. We learned that Henry Street is a good place to look for things. There are also shops on Grafton Street, but the prices are jacked up for tourists.

Now that the subject of shopping has come up, let’s talk about Irish woolens. They are no good.

You may be amazed to see someone write that, because Ireland is famous for Aran Island woolens. Locals used to make heavy oiled sweaters for fishermen who worked out of the islands. Those sweaters were very good. The new ones are not. They are made for tourists, not fishermen.

The original sweaters were white, and they were oiled with lanolin to make them weather-resistant. The new sweaters come in all colors, they are generally knitted by machines, they have no lanolin in them, and they are so lightweight, they stretch and become useless.

There are sweater stores in every city and town in Ireland, selling the same things. The sweaters look fantastic until you hold them up to the light and see how thin they are.

The prices are alluring. You can get a gorgeous sweater for 65 Euros. The problem is that it will be a thin sweater. If you want a real sweater, think more in the range of 200 Euros.

If you look around in Ireland, you will see almost no one wearing Irish wool. They dress exactly like Americans. They wear warmup suits, basketball shorts, and so on. They look awful, just like we do. There is a reason why they pass those sweaters by. They know the quality is inferior.

Sorry if I’m bursting your bubble. Consider this an intervention.

The T-shirts they sell for tourists are also thin and useless. They’re like Kleenex. I couldn’t find a single one fit to give to a friend. The hoodies seem okay, which is hard to explain, given the poor quality of the shirts.

We stayed in an area near Trinity College, near a neighborhood called Temple Bar. Temple Bar, aptly, is named after The Temple Bar. Which is a bar. Tourists flock to Temple Bar to get drunk. It’s sort of like the French Quarter. A Youtube travel guy advises people, very seriously, to keep an eye out in order to dodge flying vomit. If you spend time in Temple Bar, you will see vomit on the ground and buildings from time to time. Apparently, the British use Temple Bar as a destination for pre-wedding parties, and we all know how well the British hold their liquor.

We didn’t see any obviously drunken people, but then we were always indoors pretty early.

I’m not exactly sure what people are supposed to do in Ireland, but I think they’re probably supposed to get drunk in pubs and sing. We saw a lot of signs advertising “good craic.” The word “craic” refers to drunken fun. Far as I can tell, you’re supposed to go to a pub, get a load on, listen to live music, and party with other tourists.

This is apparently a very, very important part of Irish tourist life. We saw references to it everywhere we went.

What if you don’t like partying with drunks? Then you’ll end up like us, in bed watching Judge Judy.

The Irish are obsessed with Judge Judy. Often, we found that her show was on three TV channels, simultaneously. They also seem to like Perry Mason.

Judge Judy is a nasty, rude old woman. It’s strange that the Irish would like her. We found the Irish to be extremely polite and patient. They were a joy to deal with. They reminded me of the people here in Northern Florida.

In the US, there are pretty much two Irish stereotypes. First, there is the coarse, violent, short-tempered, drunken, ill-mannered stereotype. Then there is the cute, witty, Leprechaun-like, Barry Fitzgerald-ish, also drunken stereotype. We didn’t run into people who fit the pigeonholes. I thought the Irish were wonderful people. I told Rhodah the French should be forced to visit Ireland for lessons.

Speaking of prejudices, we were told that the only way to distinguish the seasons in Ireland was by the temperature of the rain. We saw very little of it. We had one day when there were a few light showers. Other than that, we generally had dry, sunny days. I kept praying for God to keep it up so we would have a testimony, and as far as I can tell, he listened.

I think I’ll continue with this tomorrow.

I am back, even though only an hour has passed. I have restored my strength with delicious leftover Sicilian pizza.

Rhodah had a hair disaster in Dublin. She had a weave or something installed in Zambia, and by the time we got to Dublin, it was hurting her scalp. While we were struggling to eat at Bread 41, she saw a black woman, and she asked her where she got her hair done. This is how we ended up visiting the Nigerian lady on Moore Street.

Moore Street is pretty shady. It’s the only place we went where street crime was a serious possibility. Gypsies hang out in the general area, and they steal. Sorry if that hurts your feelings, but it’s true. The Nigerian lady with the hair shop told us the gypsies stole phones. One gypsy slaps your face, and another one grabs your phone while you’re in shock. Don’t blame me for being honest about gypsies. Their reputation is their own fault.

I’m old. I can say anything I want.

Before Rhodah got settled in to get her hair fixed, a young man had to be ejected from the shop. I thought he was Jamaican because he was wearing a lot of green, but later, I learned he was Nigerian. Nigerians like green because it’s in their flag. He was hopped up on some drug or other, and he was angry at people for no apparent reason. He smelled terrible, like he hadn’t showered in a week. The beautician ended up calling the cops on him.

At first, we were told it would take three hours to replace Rhodah’s hair, but in truth, she was there for 10. During that time, she got to talk to the beautician, and I got to wander around Dublin and sit in a hotel room.

It turned out the beautician was a fan of T.B. Joshua, Nigeria’s famous evangelist. He died unexpectedly last year. The beautician had had cancer, and she was healed through Joshua. That was interesting. My wife and I both enjoy his videos, although militant perverts got his main channel removed from Youtube because he cast a demon of homosexuality out of a man on camera.

While I was walking around killing time, I met Andrew. He was standing near a Starbuck’s I intended to visit, handing out pamphlets. Usually, I steer clear of anyone who wants to hand me anything, and sometimes I even say, “I don’t speak English,” in Russian, but I saw something interesting. He was holding a pamphlet about “the cashless society.” I decided to talk to him. I thought it was remarkable, seeing someone in Ireland who was concerned about the apocalypse.

Andrew is in his twenties. He is part of a sect that believes Christians should pool their wealth and live without working. At the time I spoke to him, he was living in a tent. He had coronavirus (something I didn’t learn until I had been standing too close to him for a while), but he said God had given him strength to get up and evangelize that morning.

His group has a website at this link, and he gave me a DVD and a pamphlet. Very interesting stuff.

I don’t think God has called on me to give everything I have to a fund for other Christians, and I’m not sure we should refrain from working, because as far as I know, the Bible doesn’t say those things are required. The New Testament specifically mentions Christians who are well off, and it doesn’t say they have to give everything away. It says we should treat our employers well, which is impossible for those who are not employed. Also, the believers in Acts who pooled their resources didn’t stop working. At least, Acts doesn’t say they did.

Paul worked.

I don’t believe everything Andrew believes, but I know what it is to live without money and rely on God, because I have done it. It works, and there are some very good things about it. I don’t plan to take that route again unless I have to, but I still wanted to find out about Andrew’s group. They are interested in the mark of the beast and the government’s efforts to control us and turn us into a big, filthy, fake family, and they also believe in prayer in tongues.

He said they took donations in order to survive. I told him I wanted to read the pamphlet before committing, so I took it and read it at Starbuck’s. Days later, during our time in Salthill, my wife and I watched the DVD.

Having read the pamphlet, I left Starbucks and found Andrew again. I thought his group was basically okay. I told him things I thought would be helpful. I told him how important it was to pray in tongues for long periods in order to be protected from deception.

The DVD contained two videos. One was about the mark, and the other was about human rights abuses. I felt the second video was about a political concern of limited relevance to Christians, so it didn’t do much for me.

The first video was interesting because in addition to telling people about the mark, it exposed a culture I knew nothing about. I know about preppers, but the video was about people who avoided using money, and that’s different. There is a culture of people who live simply, without jobs. They barter. They eat discarded food. They find all sorts of handouts most of us wouldn’t know anything about.

They have had fairs dedicated to their cause, and the fairs didn’t cost anything to produce. They used donated food, donated venues, and so on.

It doesn’t seem like a great lifestyle. For example, you can get free clothes and free food, but you can’t choose what you get, so you may end up wearing and eating things that aren’t your top choices. On the other hand, these people don’t fear the IRS. They don’t worry about credit. They don’t work soul-killing jobs. They aren’t trapped in a constant fight to impress others. They are free to go wherever they want at a moment’s notice. Provided they can find ways to get there without paying.

Here’s something fascinating about the video. The creators interviewed random street people in America and asked them about chips and the mark of the beast, and they knew more about it than most Christians. They didn’t want to be chipped. They said, correctly, that chips and cashless commerce were about control. So people who sit around smoking weed and asking for spare change know more about our times than most working people do. Sad.

When the mark rolls out, rejecting it will be easier for bums than it will be for the rest of us, because they will be used to living without being part of the system. They won’t have to choose between their membership in an affluent society and a cold turkey entrance into a faith-based way of life. I suppose the first will be last, and the last will be first, as Jesus said.

Andrew and the hair lady were not the only Christians we saw in Dublin. One night while walking to the hotel, we saw an African lady waving a pamphlet. I was afraid she was a Jehovah’s Witness, so I kept walking, but Rhodah stopped. I can’t teach that woman anything. The front of the pamphlet said, “Jesus said: ‘Behold I Come Quickly’ Revelation 22 v 7.”

The lady seemed shy, and I can’t recall her saying anything, but she was out on that corner anyway, handing out pamphlets to warn the world about the impending catastrophe. She was doing her duty. The pamphlet says her church is the Mountain of Soulution [sic] & Redemption Prayer Ministries Worldwide, in Dublin.

We ran into her on O’Connell Street, which is a huge tourist drag full of restaurants and bars. On another night, a group of young people accosted us farther down the same street, in front of a history museum. They handed Rhodah a pamphlet with a cross on it, announcing an April 15 gathering. A revival, I assume.

It surprised me to meet Christians in Ireland. I think of Ireland as a place full of post-Catholic leftists and freethinkers. I have always figured it was about like England, where Jesus is probably less popular than Jack the Ripper. The Irish are spiritual people, though, for better or worse, so I should not be surprised to find Christians in Dublin.

When our time in Dublin was over, I had to rent a car to get us to Salthill. The whole business of driving in Ireland was very interesting, to put it unnecessarily nicely.

I thought I was renting a Ford Focus, which is an okay car, but of course, the rental people gave us something weird instead: a SEAT Arona. SEAT is a Spanish company, and the Arona is a small hatchback.

The Irish love manual transmissions, so if you rent, you will find there are few automatics available. Also, they cost more. I learned to drive on manuals, so I thought manual would be fine. This was a big mistake.

The speed limits on Irish “roads” change very, very frequently, so if you have a stickshift, you will have to use it a great deal. Also, there are a lot of twisty roads with blind curves, so you have to do a lot of downshifting. Because the Irish drive on the wrong side of the road, you will have to shift with the wrong hand. Add it all up, and it spells “automatic.”

On top of all this, shifting gears in the Arona was like buying a lottery ticket. I was never quite sure what gear I would end up in. In an American or Japanese car, the transmission will help you, steering the lever in the right direction. In an Arona, you are about as likely to end up in 1st or 5th as you are to find 3rd.

The guy at the rental counter did me one big favor. He upgraded me to diesel without charging me. I had rejected the upgrade, because they charged 70 Euros. I think he felt I was making a bad choice. The nice thing about having a diesel was that it gave me a wide power band. There were long stretches where I could leave the car in 2nd or 3rd and not shift at all, regardless of how many curves I ran into. The motor wouldn’t stall.

The air conditioning wasn’t functional. The car had a little button labeled “A/C,” and it lit up when I pushed it, but it didn’t actually change the temperature of the air. I’m not sure the car actually had an air conditioning system. Maybe the button was just there to impress passengers and convince people the Spanish were capable of building air conditioners.

The road to Galway and Salthill wasn’t too bad, because a lot of it was four-lane divided highways. Staying on the wrong side of the road was challenging, however. More than once, I found myself looking into the grill of a distant car.

The rental guy told me not to worry about tolls because they would photograph my tag and let me pay on the Internet. It turned out this was totally false. I had to pay in cash every time, and if I wanted change, I had to have small bills. If you give the Irish toll people a 100-Euro note, the machine will consider your change a donation to the treasury.

Once we were out of Dublin, we realized how dumb it had been to spend 4 nights there. The countryside was much, much better. Granted, all of rural Ireland smells like manure, but my own farm has the same issue, and for country people, it’s not a problem. The landscape was green, rolling hills dotted with fat sheep, as far as the eye could see. It reminded me of Kentucky, especially as we got close to Galway. We both loved it.

I was surprised the country was so empty. Ireland has a very small population, because most of the Irish left a long time ago. Most of them are here in America, mixed in among the people who merely pretend to be Irish. I suppose Irish cities hold most of the remaining population. Europe is generally crowded, and Ireland is very small, so it’s strange to see big expanses of open land there. Rhodah said we should move there.

Land is not very expensive. I checked. In fact, everything in Ireland seems cheaper than it is in the US.

Not in Dublin, of course.

In Salthill, we rented a top-floor apartment in a building with an underground garage. We paid about what we paid in Dublin for one room. The apartment was a joy. We had two big bedrooms, a big living room, two outdoor terraces, a big kitchen, a dining room, and two baths. The whole place was sparkling-clean. We had cooking tools. We had laundry machines. It was bliss.

Salthill is a touristy area by the sea. Touristy or not, I loved it. There were good restaurants a few feet away from the apartment, and we didn’t have to deal with Galway traffic. We also found another Nigerian hair lady to repair the repair the Dublin Nigerian lady did. The hair we got in Dublin didn’t suit Rhodah, and when it got wet, it left black stains on things.

Nigerians are everywhere. There is probably one within 100 feet of you right now, waiting to sell you something.

From Salthill, we drove to see the Cliffs of Moher. This is probably Ireland’s biggest tourist site. When you Google day trips from any Irish city, the Cliffs of Moher will pop up over and over. They go from Dublin. They go from Galway. Why? Because there isn’t much else to see.

The cliffs are several hundred feet high, and they rise vertically out of the sea. From the top, you can see Galway and the Aran Islands. You have to walk to see the cliffs unless you have some kind of motorized chair. A lot of Irish sites are like this. They’re not interested in entertaining the disabled. If you can’t walk properly, go do something else.

There are some smaller cliffs to the right of the Cliffs of Moher as you face the sea. I told Rhodah they must be the Cliffs of Less.

There is nothing at all around the Cliffs. They are not near any big towns. You go see them, and you drive home.

The walk was somewhat arduous, especially for Rhodah, who is not about fitness. Whenever we walked on hilly ground, I had to stop repeatedly to let her get her breath. I told her she needed to start walking regularly. At her age, she should be walking off and leaving me, especially when I’m carrying a backpack and she isn’t.

While there is nothing interesting around the cliffs, there are quiet, beautiful towns along the way. We took note, figuring we would stay there if we visited Ireland again.

The roads were horrendous. Some turns were so sharp that on the way out of them, I actually saw my own rear bumper. Irish roads are also very narrow, because Irish landowners were too stingy to give up enough land to build proper roads. In some places, two-lane roads are actually narrower than two cars.

To make the roads worse, the Irish have no idea what a shoulder is. A typical road has a ditch a couple of feet from it, with a hedge or a wall rising straight up from the ditch. You can’t see around curves because of the hedges and walls, and you can’t pull over. If another tourist runs you off the road, into the ditch and whatever else you go.

When you rent a car in Ireland, don’t be a fool. Pay for no-deductible insurance. I did. I ended up off the road three times, and I was able to laugh about it.

The first time, Google took us up a one-lane road, and a big truck approached from the opposite direction. I had to back up a couple of hundred yards in a manual transmission car, shifting with the wrong hand, keeping my feet on the clutch and the brake, while unable to see behind me. I went into the ditch twice.

I thought the car was damaged, but I turned to Rhodah and said, “Who cares?” Not my problem.

The second time, a tourist came from the opposite direction on a very narrow road, and she (I assume it was a she) neither stopped nor moved out of the way. I drove right into the ditch while she crept past, halfway into my tiny lane.

Automatic. No deductible. Diesel. Remember what I tell you.

After Salthill, we went to Dingle, because everyone said we had to. Dingle is a tiny town on the Dingle peninsula on the west coast of Ireland. It has a fishing fleet, but basically, it’s a tourist town.

Well, let’s be serious. Every town in Ireland is a tourist town.

We stayed at Greenmount House, a B&B which, in Internet pictures, looked like a big resort. In reality, it was on a small lot on a hill outside Dingle. For the most part, it was very nice, but they had some kind of weak geothermal heat, and it didn’t work too well. They supplied an oil heater to help.

The innkeepers were very nice, and they put on a big breakfast spread. It almost made me forget that the Irish can’t do breakfast as well as we can.

I guess people will get mad because I criticized Irish breakfasts, because they are legendary. Legends have a way of turning out to be disappointing. The “full Irish breakfast” is Irish bacon, one egg, canned beans, white pudding, black pudding, one or two fried mushrooms, a link sausage, and toast. The bacon is totally inferior to actual bacon. A one-egg breakfast is like a 15-second massage. Beans cause constipation, so they do the opposite of what breakfast food is supposed to do. White pudding is really some kind of bulk sausage, and it’s not too bad. Black pudding is made from blood, so it’s actually a seasoned scab, literally. Irish link sausage is somewhere between a hot dog and a Vienna sausage, and that’s not a good place to be.

I asked for two white puddings instead of a scab. It’s remarkable that Christians don’t know we are not supposed to eat blood. Look it up. It’s not like Paul hid it from us.

One place accidentally left a scab on Rhodah’s plate, and she was so disturbed, she couldn’t eat for a while.

It was during our visit to Dingle that I got the idea of bringing my own cream to breakfast. I let the innkeeper know Americans like cream in their coffee, but I doubt he took the hint.

The best breakfast we had in Ireland came from McDonald’s, far and away. We ate breakfast together about 12 times, so I think we gave Ireland a good test, and McDonald’s is superior, without question. I recommend avoiding Irish breakfasts entirely. If someone put a Denny’s there, it would have to take reservations a month in advance.

Don’t call me provincial. I’ve had wonderful breakfast food in other countries, like Austria and France. Irish breakfast food doesn’t turn me off because it’s foreign. It turns me off because it isn’t very good. And McDonald’s makes a really excellent breakfast, as long as you avoid the pancakes and bagels. McMuffins and breakfast biscuits are very good, and so are the hash browns. If you don’t think so, you’re a snob. The food is not the problem.

While we were there, we kept trying to figure out why we were in Dingle. Finally, the innkeeper told me we were supposed to drive around and see cliffs and beaches. We made a tour of the Slea Head drive, and along the way, Rhodah got to visit her first beach. Prior to the trip, she had never seen the ocean at all, so walking on a beach was a big thrill for her.

Granted, it was cold, and there was no one swimming except for a couple of lunatics trying to make a point, but it was very pretty.

The food in Dingle was generally bad.

We were told we should visit a seafood place called Out of the Blue, by the harbor. It had a “Michelin mention.” I am pretty sure Michelin will mention anything, including the International House of Pancakes, but the people at Out of the Blue seemed proud to have been included. A Michelin STAR is a big deal. I don’t know if a mention means anything.

Truthfully, I don’t trust the Michelin people. No one even knows who they are, so how can anyone judge their discernment? They may be complete idiots.

Rhodah had never had lobster, so we got her one. She didn’t think too much of it. We paid around $60 to find out she didn’t like it. I had a piece of fish fried inside a sort of giant potato latke.

I’m sure the lobster tasted fine, but it was small and hard to get into, and she said it wasn’t worth the work.

The rest of the food was disappointing. The potato shroud was oily and limp, and the fish itself was also oily, not to mention wet and overcooked. The dish wasn’t seasoned much at all.

The bread consisted of a few tiny, cold slices of white bread and strange brown bread, accompanied by cold butter. No good restaurant serves cold butter. It’s like serving warm Champagne. You just don’t do it. Cold butter proves you have no idea what you’re doing. If you serve cold butter, you can’t possibly be trusted to serve anything else worth eating. As for bread, if it can’t be good, there should at least be plenty of it.

I think the B&B people sent us to this restaurant because they were used to snotty tourists who preferred impressive food to food that tastes good. We spent a lot of money and left hungry.

We did find decent ice cream. A volunteer lifeguard runs a little place called Kool Scoops, and it was very good. There was also a nationwide chain called Murphy’s, and not even the locals would recommend it. One of our innkeepers would only say, “Murphy’s is Murphy’s.” Murphy’s has touristy flavors, like Aran Island sweater swirl and sea salt with potatoes. I may be slightly wrong, but you get the idea. Kool Scoops was a real ice cream place, with real flavors like strawberry and chocolate.

We also went to James Long’s pub, where we had a bowling-alley-quality pizza and two cheeseburgers that smelled like sheep. They claimed they would give me a burger cooked medium, but it arrived well done. I actually wondered if it had sheep in it. Maybe they overcooked it to kill the sheep taste. The texture was dry and sort of like wet sawdust.

I didn’t see a single decent burger in Ireland. Avoid. Even if they cook them properly, the ovine smell and odd texture of the beef will ruin them.

We drove to Killarney because people say you should. I didn’t get Killarney. It was a little town pretty much like any town in, say, South Carolina. It had a Tesco (supermarket), some Aran Island wool places, and a bunch of pubs.

We went to the Laurels Pub for lunch. The Murphy’s was perfect, and they did a good job with fish and chips, but their wings (ordered by Rhodah) had a very odd smell to them. She couldn’t finish them.

Pubs are not like American bars. In America, bars are for fornication and drunkenness, period. A pub is basically a restaurant that also has a big bar. The Irish take small children to pubs.

We visited Tesco. You can buy anything there. They even sell clothes. Rhodah insisted on picking some up.

Rhodah took a notion to visit the Aran Islands. I didn’t think this was wise, but I went along with it. In order to make it work, we had to spend the night there. Most people pick an island, take a ferry early in the day, and go back to the mainland before dark.

The only place where we could find a room was Ard Einne, a guest house on Inis Mor, the biggest island. “Ard” means “high,” and “Einne” is a woman’s name.

Ard Einne has a two-night minimum, which is ridiculous, because there is no conceivable reason to spend more than one night on Inis Mor. Rhodah really wanted to see the islands, so we decided to pay for two nights even though we would only stay for one.

We booked a ferry from the town of Doolin. Several companies operate boats there. They go to the Arans and the Cliffs of Moher. It takes around an hour to get from Doolin to Inis Mor. Along the way, you stop at Inis Oirr, a smaller island people may well be visiting by mistake. A bunch of people got off our boat at Inis Oirr (also spelled Inisheer), and we heard someone wonder aloud whether they knew what they were doing. The island is really tiny, so you really need a good reason do debark there.

The ferries have indoor and outdoor seats. Unfortunately, we did not know about the indoor seats until we were seated on the top deck. Luckily for us, I had brought Rhodah a Carhartt jacket and Keen hiking shoes, along with wool socks. I was outfitted similarly. While the other passengers froze in hoodies, we were almost comfortable in the frigid wind.

On Inis Mor, we were accosted by an old taxi driver named Joe. He had a little bus, and he said he would drop us at Ard Einne. Joe was not a big talker, so he didn’t make it clear we would be joined by several Irish people he was picking up.

They were taking the 15-Euro tour of the island, so we decided to join in. Joe showed us the sights.

We stopped at a seal colony. The seals were about 200 yards away, sitting on rocks about the size of seals. When a rock moved, you knew you were looking at a seal. Not the greatest photo opportunity.

We also stopped at the Seven Churches, a bunch of ruins that included small graveyards. No one except me wanted to get out of the bus, so Joe drove on. He seemed displeased.

After that, he dropped us at the entrance to the island’s main attraction: a Bronze Age fort on a high cliff by the sea. “Coincidentally,” he happened to let us off at a place where there were three sweater stores, an ice cream shop (closed), and a busy cafe. We didn’t buy anything. The prices for woolens were the same as they were in Dublin, and I assumed the food at a place where they dropped tourists had to be bad.

Joe didn’t tell us about the fort, or maybe he did. I couldn’t understand much he said. After a few minutes of looking at sweaters we didn’t want, we went outside and saw that he and our new friends were gone, along with our luggage. Another driver told us we were supposed to walk to the fort and back. Joe would return for us. The people we had arrived with were already walking.

The fort was basically two rings of crude stone, and I would say it was half a mile from the stores. All uphill. Rhodah got winded again, but we eventually made it.

When Joe finally took us to Ard Einne, it looked like a scale model of the place I had seen on the Internet. I was ready for that. I was not ready for the room, which was so small, we had to maneuver to walk around the tiny double bed. The room was also cold, because the proprietor had opened the windows to air it out. She said the heat would come on later, so all would be fine. She said the comforter was quilted, as though that solved our problems. We got her to give us a blanket anyway.

Next time I visit a cold destination, I am going to put a space heater in my luggage. The next parsimonious B&B proprietor will find out about it when he or she gets her electric bill after we leave.

The door to the room was immediately to the left of the front door. There was no foyer. Very strange. Ordinarily, you would find a closet in a location like that.

The door was thin, and the B&B’s common room was across the hall, so we could hear everything everyone said.

The bathroom was so small, I couldn’t close the door without crumpling the bathmat. There was a sign on the room door admonishing us to take quick showers, presumably to save the owner money. That went over poorly with me, and of course, I paid no attention to it. If anything, I felt motivated to take unnecessarily long showers in order to get more for my Euro.

I’ll say this for Ard Einne: we only saw one beetle in the bathroom. And he was small.

The place was nearly empty, so I’m not sure why she put us next to the front door. Rhodah wondered if racism was involved, but the innkeeper was very nice, apart from putting cash before our comfort, so I doubt that was the case.

At night, we were very cold. The weather was below freezing, and the radiators, which came on late in the day, were tiny and not very warm. Heating oil isn’t free.

Breakfast at Greenmount House consisted of a generous buffet, as well as a number of dishes cooked to order. At Ard Einne, there was no buffet. Each of us ordered something from the menu, and that was it. There was no one else in the room. We only saw two other people while we were there, so we didn’t understand why we ended up in such a bad room.

The strange thing is that Ard Einne got all sorts of great reviews. I don’t know if they were fake or not, but we barely slept, and we were thrilled to leave.

During our only evening on the island, we ate at Joe Watty’s Bar. It was a big surprise. Everything was excellent, from the Murphy’s to the chocolate brownie.

Watty’s is a typical pub. Unlike the B&B, it was warm, proving there was no impediment to heating buildings on Inis Mor. Rhodah had fish and chips, which were very nice by Irish standards, and I had lamb stew. The only way the stew could have been better was if it had been made with beef. I got a generous serving, and I enjoyed all of it. The desserts were top notch. The service was good. It’s too bad there were no Joe Watty’s branches in Dublin.

I don’t know who Joe Watty is, but Marco Pierre White isn’t fit to mop his floors.

We spent our last two days in Dublin. There isn’t a lot to say about that. We stayed in the Trinity City Hotel, which I recommend. Don’t splurge for the hotel’s big Georgian suites. They’re old and weird. Just get a nice room with a king size bed. Everything in the hotel’s more modern rooms works fine, and the beds are great. They even have modern air conditioning and heat, unlike the suites.

I doubt I’ll ever return to Ireland unless a strange sequence of events drives me to move there. I just can’t see paying to visit again. I would love to have a house there in a rural area on maybe 30 acres of land, where I could hide out and wait for the rapture, but I don’t want to go back for 10 days so I can kiss the Blarney Stone or see how Guinness is made.

While we’re on the subject of Gaels, I have no desire to visit Scotland, either, even though I have a lot of Scottish blood. There is something dreary and depressing about the Scots, and if the Internet and eyewitness accounts are any indication, they don’t do much other than get drunk, curse, and fight. Scottish food is terrifying, and as for history, even less has happened in Scotland than Ireland. They don’t even make good beer. I tried a McEwan’s Scotch Ale once, and it wasn’t an experience I would want to repeat. As I recall, it was like drinking a rancid fruitcake.

The Irish are very musical, but somehow, the gift of music appears to have completely missed their cousins the Scots. I can’t figure that out. Go to Youtube and search for Scottish music, and two things come up: bagpipe dirges and the Proclaimers. If you don’t remember the Proclaimers, do yourself a huge favor and don’t go look them up. There are some sounds you don’t want in your brain.

We are getting to work on Israel now, so we ought to be there in the worst possible season: summer. Which month will it be when the biting flies hatch? I can’t remember. I wonder if the food is like it used to be. Back in my day, the Jews couldn’t cook anything except cookies and sandwiches, so in order to survive, I had to find Arab restaurants.

Whatever happens, it should be a great trip. There is more to life than nice weather and good food.

Side note: don’t make the mistake of traveling to Ireland with Delta Airlines. They gave me a cheap rate up front, and then they charged me about $140 for my luggage. Also, it is literally impossible to get in touch with them unless you have an afternoon to kill. I called them for information, and they told me I would be on hold for 90 minutes. I can call obscure airlines from backward countries that just got telephones and have a real person on the line in a minute or less, so Delta has no excuse.

I guess I should also remind people to buy travel insurance. The best company I’ve found is Heymondo. EDIT: not true. Heymondo refused to pay every claim we made. Your American health insurance is no good in other countries, and airlines are extremely unreasonable about trip changes and lost luggage. Rhodah’s large suitcase got lost somewhere in Ireland, France, South Africa, or Zambia, and Aer Lingus, Air France, and KLM have been utterly worthless. Only South African Airlink has made any effort to help. I called Heymondo, and they got on the case, pun not intended. They will confirm the loss, meaning they will call the airlines and get respect we could not get, and that could result in a genuine effort to locate it. If they can’t get the bag, they will give Rhodah $1700, and that’s better than the pittance the carriers offer. Her insurance ran around $60, and it was a great investment.

Flying is a horrible experience now. They used to let you make reservations by phone, with no ID and no payment in advance. Then after you paid, if you canceled your trip, they gave you a full refund. They didn’t search anyone; I used to take a knife with me on flights. Islam put an end to that. I didn’t have to take my shoes off. I didn’t have to have my picture taken over and over. No one took naked pictures of anyone. The stewardesses were pretty young women. Now, they treat you like a bothersome object that might explode at any time. Then there is the moronic mask rule.

My dad used to fly all over the country for his law practice, and when he got older, he said he was glad he didn’t have to do it any more because it had become so unpleasant. He used to zip around in business or first class, and the airlines treated him like a human being, but when he made his last flight in 2007, they saw him as just another annoyance with a wallet.

During my return trip, I realized I had lost all enthusiasm for air travel. Rhodah wants to see the world, but I have had it. I suppose we will continue traveling until she gets her green card, and I know Israel will be worth the pain, but after that, I want to quit for good.

Look what we got during our Ireland trip. Multiple check-ins. Long lines. Repeated searches. Masks. Tests. Tourist food. Tourist sweaters so shabby they weren’t worth buying. Thin tourist T-shirts that rivaled Pakistani-made rock concert T’s. Lost luggage. Uncaring airlines. Airports full of bad, dirty, overpriced food. Trashy airline passengers that made our trips unpleasant. Cramped seats. The Irish were great, but that only counts for so much.

I don’t know what Israel is like in the summer now, but when I was there many years ago, summer was peak tourist season, and things should be even worse with travel opening up after a long prohibition. Ireland was slow because of the season, so we had that going for us.

I am content to wait out the rest of my life in America unless Jeff Bezos buys me a jet.

No Lie is too Big or too Small

Someone posted a comment, asking if I was okay. I am, indeed, okay. It’s kind of people to check up on me.

My wife and I just flew home from Ireland. Sadly, we flew home to different homes, but that will change soon.

I started writing a long piece about the trip, but I got a GSOD (“Green Screen of Death”), and I lost the whole thing. I’m too tired to start over today, but I will tell you this much: anyone who tells you Guinness is better, or even different, in Ireland is imagining things. It’s exactly the same, except some people in Ireland don’t know how to dispense it, so it sometimes tastes more bitter.

Stout is supposed to be dispensed using “beer gas,” which is a mixture of nitrogen and CO2. It makes the beer creamier and sweeter. My hotel in Dublin used pure CO2, so my first Guinness in Ireland was not very good. I did not have to ask whether they used CO2. I can tell. After all, I used to make my own stout.

Here’s where I’ll post a funny story about Barack Obama, illustrating a fact we already know: he is a silly and shameless liar. Read the remarks he made about Guinness in Ireland.

The first time I had Guinness is when I came to the Shannon airport. We were flying into Afghanistan and so stopped in Shannon. It was the middle of the night. And I tried one of these and I realized it tastes so much better here than it does in the States … You’re keeping all the best stuff here!

He had Guinness for the first time in Ireland, and he realized it tasted better than it did in the States. Where he had never tried it. He didn’t say what kind of occult process was involved in determining how a beer he had never tried tasted.

The amusing thing is that the liberal MSM repeats his remarks without pointing out the obvious lie.

I can pretty much guarantee you Obama can’t tell the difference between Guinness and ginger ale. Feminine men generally aren’t very interested in beer. He lied anyway, because that’s what he does. If you like your stout, you can keep your stout.

Maybe I shouldn’t criticize, because I loved Trump, and Trump lied constantly. The difference is that Trump lied about things no one cared about, while Obama lied about important political matters. Obama is the liar who increased the price of my medical insurance by 200% over 5 years. I was paying a little over $200 per month, and now I’m over $700, with no new health problems to justify it.

I had both Guinness and Murphy’s in Ireland. I like Murphy’s a little more because the balance of bitterness and sweetness is better. I didn’t try any lighter-colored Irish beers. Notice I didn’t just say “lighter.” Guinness is a very light beer apart from its color. It’s low in calories compared to many beers that aren’t as dark.

That’s all I have to say in relation to Ireland right now. I am still behind on my sleep, so I am going to go sit and do nothing.

This is What Saving $880 Looks Like

Day before yesterday, I made a repair. I spent about $20, and I saved myself somewhere in the neighborhood of nine hundred.

My mother bought my dad a giant Tumi suitcase. He didn’t use it because he liked garment bags. I inherited it in nearly-new condition.

Tumi makes expensive stuff. The current product which is closest to my bag runs $850 on Amazon. That doesn’t include tax. Tumi does not sell repair parts because, well, because their customer support is garbage. If your Tumi bag breaks, you have to ship it to a repair center at your expense. My bag is about a yard tall, so imagine what that would cost me.

When Rhodah and I visited Turkey, we used taxis. They were generally great. They usually provided two options for about the same cost: car or van. Obviously, we hired vans.

One day, we needed a ride to the airport in Istanbul. The company we chose assured us they would get us there very early. Then we sat in the lobby of our hotel and waited. “Very early” became an impossibility. I started calling them, and they were not very good about responding.

Eventually, they called the hotel, not me, even though they had my number. They said the driver had to park several blocks away. They said he had been held up by traffic. This was not a good excuse. If you drive a taxi in Istanbul, you know the traffic is bad, and you plan around it. It wasn’t a special day. Nobody set off a bomb on the highway. There were no earthquakes. The driver couldn’t expect anyone to believe his lateness was not his fault.

He was supposed to come to the hotel and move our bags for us. Instead, a hotel clerk hauled them a quarter of a mile or more, over cobblestones. One of the wheels on my bag came loose, and it fell off somewhere during the ride. Tumi bags cost a lot, but the wheel was held on by two small screws driven into plastic, so it wasn’t attached very well.

Later, I gave the taxi company a bad review. They had been late. They had parked far away. They hadn’t moved our luggage as they were supposed to. They caused my wheel to break, and there was no way to get Tumi to fix it. I was going to have to pay a great deal of money for a new suitcase or come up with my own repair.

They started emailing me, making excuses. They offered to refund my money. I said their excuses were just that, and I said the refund wouldn’t begin to pay for new luggage. I never got my refund. The refund should have been their first step, and they shouldn’t have asked for a good review in return.

Why did I give them a bad review? Aren’t Christians supposed to forgive? Sure we are, but the purpose of a bad review isn’t to punish. I posted my review to prevent other tourists from having problems with the company and to motivate the company to improve.

Anyway, I was looking at new bags this week, and it appeared I could get something decent from L.L. Bean for around $270, but I really didn’t want to pay. The suitcase is strong and spacious. Apart from cobblestones, it handles abuse very well. And money is money.

I went to Tractor Supply, where all great luggage repair stories begin. I got me a caster and some screws, bolts, washers, and nuts. I brought the caster home and drilled the axle to remove the wheel. I drilled holes in the plastic housing where the old suitcase wheel had been. I ran a 1/4″ bolt through the holes. I stuck the wheel in there and tested it.

The wheel dragged a little. I saw it was slightly too wide for the cavity it sat in, so the sides rubbed. I got some coarse sandpaper and sanded the wheel and cavity. Eventually, it turned fairly freely. I realized it would free up more after half a mile or so of rolling through airports, so I stopped. I mixed some 5-minute epoxy and applied it over the outer end of the bolt so it couldn’t turn or back out of the hole.

Guess how long it takes 5-minute epoxy to cure. Twenty-four hours. They should use it to seal up Grant’s Tomb. It takes about an hour for it even to harden partially. I’m not sure why the government allows them to call it 5-minute epoxy.

Now I have a better wheel than the one the suitcase came with. It’s a little taller than the other wheel, but suitcase wheels slip as they turn, so it doesn’t matter. The wheel I installed will be there long after the other one fails.

Two of the screws I bought were longer than they needed to be, so I’m going to replace them with shorter ones. I’m using lock nuts, so they shouldn’t come loose.

I learned a bit about luggage. For example, when it comes to soft luggage, you want Cordura, not ballistic nylon, even though Cordura is actually a type of ballistic nylon. If the specs on your new bag say “ballistic nylon,” it’s a cheaper fabric that isn’t as durable. When it’s Cordura, the manufacturer will be sure to inform you.

I have no idea how nylon can be ballistic. That’s a question for another day.

I learned a lot of people are buying hard-sided luggage these days. I didn’t want that. What happens when you put one ounce too much in a hard bag? Either you can’t close it, or you break something inside it. And hard bags sometimes crack.

Most people want luggage with 4 wheels. It’s easier to roll. Sorry; not for me. A 4-wheeled bag can roll away from you on a slope. You always have to hold onto it. Also, those wheels hang out there in space held on by weak spindles that break easily. And luggage makers aren’t helpful with repairs. My bag has two wheels. It rolls just fine, and the wheels are much less likely to break. If I have to stop on a slope, I can let go of the bag, and it won’t go anywhere.

These days, people make fun of travelers who use big checked bags. Chuckle all you want. I am not too sorry to stand at a bag carousel for 20 minutes. It’s not that hard. In exchange for this meager effort, I get three times the capacity other people get. I need capacity. I’m taking my wife a Carhartt jacket, waterproof hiking shoes, an assortment of wigs, long underwear, and a huge trove of makeup. If I used a tiny stewardess bag, I’d have no room for my own clothes.

Now I know more about luggage than I ever wanted to know. Maybe reading this will help someone else avoid problems.

Thin Pizza is for Apostates

Lunch was okay today, and by “okay,” I mean the closest thing to heaven I expect to experience in this life.

I have been making thin pizza after thin pizza, wondering why the pies didn’t make my eyes roll back in my head the way my Sicilians do. I finally realized this: thin pizza is inherently not as good as Sicilian. It’s not possible to make a thin pizza that compares to my Sicilian, so I have been wasting my time chasing a culinary unicorn. I’m wondering if I should ever make thin pizza again.

Today I decided to make a full-size Sicilian, meaning a quarter sheet. The measurements are about 9″ by 13″. It may not sound like a big pan, but a Sicilian made in it will feed three reasonable people or me and one of my friends.

I haven’t messed with my Sicilian recipe much, because it was incredible the first time I made it back in 2009. I have made little changes, but it’s nearly the same pie it was then. Today I decided to get brave and innovate.

I have been experimenting with twice-melted cheese. When you reheat pizza, the texture of the cheese is usually better than it was the first time around. With that in mind, I wondered why I shouldn’t melt my cheese, cool it, put it on the pizza, and bake it a second time.

I used twice-melted cheese today. I made a mixture of Boar’s Head mozzarella, Publix sliced provolone, and Cracker Barrel extra-sharp white cheddar. I used a quarter sheet as a mold and shaped a piece of nonstick foil around the bottom of it. This gave me a foil tray slightly larger than the bottom of a quarter sheet. I mixed my cheeses, put them in it, and heated them until they bubbled. With great care, I was able to get the foil out of the oven and chill the cheese without any accidents. At room temperature, it formed a sort of cheese placemat.

I used slightly more dough than I usually do, and I chose to parbake it. Ordinarily, I don’t do this. I put my stretched dough in a very oily pan and baked it at 500° for 9 minutes. I was surprised how long it took to start to look cooked.

I had 6 precious cans of Stanislaus Saporito sauce. I had been reluctant to use them, because the nearest source is 90 minutes away. I had been working with Cento tomatoes and Glen Muir paste to come up with an acceptable, readily available substitute, but today, I had to have Stanislaus.

I thought about the economics. I hesitated to use Stanislaus because the cans contain around a gallon, and the cost about $7 each. When I use Cento and Muir Glen, I spend over $5, and the amount of sauce I get is a small fraction of what a can of Stanislaus produces. I realized I was tormenting myself over nothing. Stanislaus is actually cheaper, even if you throw a lot out.

I broke the can into four nearly equal parts, took a little out for today’s pie, and froze the rest in bags. I should have good-quality sauce for a month or two, and even if it deteriorates, it will still be a lot better than Cento and Muir Glen.

I put 8 ounces of sauce on the parbaked crust, which is a third more than usual. I applied my sheet of cheese. I had a little bulk Italian sausage, so I put that on the pie, too.

When I baked the pie, it took forever to cook. I had added dough, I had interrupted the baking by parbaking, and I believe the twice-melted cheese took longer to brown than cold cheese. When I put it on the pie, it was already covered in fat, and fat slows browning.

I was hoping the cheese would crawl over the edges of the crust and burn against the pan, and that did happen, but not to the degree I had hoped.

After I pulled the pie out and cooled it a little, it popped right out of the pan. The crust was nicely browned. The cheese was limp, cooperative, and gooey. The sauce was a home run, plain and simple. I felt stupid for using store ingredients.

The crust could have been crunchier and lighter. The top could have been a little more brown. There could have been more browned cheese around the rim. The pizza was hard to handle, so it got a little beaten up. In spite of all that, this pizza was exquisite.

I don’t know if I’ll keep fooling with cheese sheets. I don’t think they improve things. Not sure yet. I will try to let the next crust blow up more so it will be airier; I was in a hurry today. I will increase the heat to get better crunch. Of course, I will use more sausage. Other than that, there is not much to say. I can’t get a pizza like this anywhere except in my kitchen. When I die, America’s best street-style Sicilian (to my knowledge) will die with me.

I’ve been watching pizzaiolos on Youtube, and some of them make Sicilian. Some call it “grandma pizza,” which makes it sound gross and inferior. I don’t think much of the way they make it. They make very thin crusts. What’s the point? If you like thin crusts, make a thin round pizza right on the stone. The joy of pan pizza is in the crust. It should be thick enough to give you the sense that you’re eating homemade bread.

I think my pizza is better than theirs. I’ve had Sicilian in Miami and New York, made by actual Italians. I’ve had excellent Sicilian in Hollywood, Florida, at a place called Vannucchi Brothers. I know what good Sicilian is. When I watch someone make a Sicilian on Youtube, I have a pretty good idea what the taste and texture will be like. I think they do it wrong.

Urban mythology says all pizza made in New York is perfect. That’s completely untrue. There are bad pizzerias in New York, and even the good pizzerias generally aren’t making astounding pies. New York pizzaiolos are stuck with ancient traditions that may or may not work, and which may be rooted more in economy or laziness than a desire to make excellent food. It shouldn’t shock anyone when I say I can make better pizza.

In Pennsylvania, there is an elderly lady named Norma Knepp. She took over a pizza concession at a farmer’s market a few years back. She had never made pizza before. She got some advice and worked up a recipe, and she ended up winning a big competition in New York City. If New York Italians knew everything, that would never have happened. They are beatable.

Along with the pizza, I had a Coke. I chilled the can in the freezer along with a very heavy glass. When I poured the Coke into the glass, ice crystals floated to the top. That’s how you serve a Coke. I want a special cooling device made with a Peltier cooler to keep my glass of Coke at freezing temperatures while I eat.

I still have enough pizza for a day or two of fine eating. I may fry the slices in a pan before or after heating them in the toaster oven, to make the crust crunchier.

I have pizza figured out. You don’t make thin pizza unless you have a special craving or a finicky guest. You make Sicilian, like a man. You use real tomatoes from a serious company. Thin pizza and store tomatoes are foods of a lower order.

I don’t think my thin pizza can get much better, because no matter what I do, it will always be thin pizza. The pizza of the undiscerning.

No Oil Crisis Here

When it comes to pizza dough, it looks like a small amount of oil goes a long way.

Day before yesterday, I made a 12″ pie with 225 grams of flour and no oil except for some applied to the outside. I found the crust leathery, which is what I wanted, but not quite as crunchy as I desired.

Having obtained the leathery crust I was shooting for, I started to feel I didn’t want it after all. I decided to try to make it slightly less tough, with more crunch.

The pizza before last was made with a teaspoon of cheap olive oil, and I thought it wasn’t tough enough. Pizza with no oil was too tough. I decided to try half a teaspoon.

I fermented the dough overnight in a fridge, and today I baked at 550° on a quarter-inch steel. I baked it slightly longer than usual. You can see the result below.

I think this is what I’ll stick with for a while. It was a perfect pizzeria-quality pie, except of course better. All of the ingredients are sold at my local Publix, so I don’t have to worry about local availability.

I used about 4 ounces of Boar’s Head sliced mozzarella and 2 ounces of Cracker Barrel extra sharp white cheddar. I cut the cheese in small pieces, tossed it to mix it up, and applied it.

The cheese was good. I found I wasn’t thinking about it while I ate the pizza, and that means I didn’t see anything wrong with it. I believe the cheddar loosened the mozzarella up and added some zing.

I also used big chunks of Publix bulk Italian sausage, which is now my default pizza sausage. Much less aggravation that sausage in a casing, and it cooks beautifully.

Next time, I’ll cook the pie for 8 minutes instead of 9. This one was wonderful, but it didn’t need to be quite so well done.

Now that I have a grip on dough management, I can make dough up to three days in advance. That will give me flexibility. I may make a ball now for day after tomorrow.

I’m thinking about making mozzarella. I read about making it at home, and it seems like a good way to get it the way I want it and save half of the cost. I learned that you need unhomogenized milk to make it, and that’s expensive, but you can make your own unhomogenized milk by adding heavy cream to skim milk. If I can make low-moisture mozzarella at home, I should be able to get a better product without shelling out 10 dollars per pound.

I have read that you can make mozzarella from queso blanco. Evidently, queso blanco is what you get if you start making mozzarella and stop before you’re done. If this is true, I could make nice cheese without all the work of starting with milk.

Once I can make cheese, I think I’ll be stuck. There won’t be anything left to figure out. Maybe at some point I’ll develop an interest in high-temperature pizza. That would supply fodder for new projects.

After writing all this, I had a revelation. I figured out why my thin pizza hasn’t been as good as my Sicilian.

Back in 2009, a recipe for astounding Sicilian pizza simply fell into my head, and since then, I have been making the best Sicilian I know of. I have never had a restaurant pie as good. I have improved my recipe a little, but even the first version was beyond compare.

Once I had Sicilian under control, it was natural to try to conquer thin pizza. I already knew how to make a pretty good thin pie, but it didn’t bring me the same level of ecstasy as my Sicilian. Over the years, I have made a lot of progress, and for a long time, I’ve been making thin pies better than restaurants do. I was still never quite sure I had the perfect recipe.

A few minutes ago, I had a revelation. I now know why I do better with Sicilian than thin pizza.

Sicilian pizza and other forms of pan pizza are objectively superior to all types of thin pizza.

Why didn’t I see this sooner?

Sicilian combines a crunchy, fried, buttery crust with a thick layer of delicious fresh bread. If you want, you can spread cheese all the way to the sides and get magnificent baked cheese all the way around your crust. There is no way to make a thin pie give you all that potential for joy. A thin pie has a small rim, a fat rim, or no rim, and it can be puffy and soft or crunchy. It’s not fried. You can’t make it buttery. The crust under the sauce and cheese isn’t crunchy and aromatic like Sicilian crust. It’s like burned leather. It has almost no bread flavor, because it’s so thin.

Sicilian pizza is Godzilla. Thin pizza is Japan. It’s that simple. It doesn’t matter how well you make your thin pizza. It’s still not going to be as good as Sicilian. Even Pizza Hut pan pizza, which is made with fake cheese and spray-on butter, is better than a really good thin pie.

I have been striving for a goal I had already reached.

I think now I have pizza peace. I’m sure I’ll keep messing with thin pizza variations, but I’ll give up the idea that it will ever make me as happy as Sicilian.

I had the feeling I should get a propane oven that reached high temperatures, but that’s stupid. The best New York pizzerias cook at around the same temperature I do. A hotter oven would not make things any better.

I already make the best garlic rolls possible, so I have nothing to strive for in that area. When it comes to pizza and rolls, I believe I can be content with small changes from now on.

Let’s just hope I don’t go Neapolitan. I don’t want to open that can of elmintiasi.

It’s not Something in the Water

Rhodah and I are going through the Bible. She decided she wanted to start at the Revelation and go backward. We are now on Romans. We haven’t discussed it yet. We will probably do it today.

While I was reading today, I came across a passage which is very relevant to our time. Really, it’s almost an entire chapter. It shows why America is in the state it’s in.

Homosexuals and the people who want to give in to them in order to have peace sometimes say Jesus never said anything about homosexuality. Of course, that’s ridiculous.

First, Jesus is not the only person who spoke by God’s inspiration in the New Testament. The entire Bible is full of the words of prophets and apostles, and these people spoke with God’s authority. It would be asinine to claim to be a Christian and insist on discarding the entire Bible except for the words Jesus spoke. Sexual sin is criticized throughout the Bible in both testaments, and Jesus approves of the Bible. If you doubt that Jesus approves of the Bible, and you insist you’re a Christian, you are beyond the reach of reason.

Second, people who had the authority of Jesus criticized homosexuality repeatedly in both testaments. Jesus is God. He has always been God. If you don’t believe that, there is no point in engaging you in an effort to determine which Christian doctrines are correct, because you deny Christianity as a whole. Jesus gave Moses the law. Jesus created Adam and commanded him. Jesus spoke through people like Elijah and Jeremiah. When any anointed person criticizes homosexuality, he speaks for Jesus.

Paul had the authority of Jesus and Jehovah, and he said these things:

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:

Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:

And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;

Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,

Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,

Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:

Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

It’s undeniable. Paul condemned homosexuality in both men and women. You can find other similar material in the New Testament.

What’s interesting about the passage is that it provides an explanation most serious Christians aren’t even looking for. Most of us are busy complaining about persecution from pro-perversion people, without trying to find the root cause. Romans 1 tells us the cause. Men rejected God, so God stopped protecting them from perverted desires.

I believe Christians tend to think of perversion as something that popped up on its own and motivated people to attack the church. The truth is that it became widespread because people gave up on God. The church helped that process along. If I’m a Christian, and I fail to help people avoid idolatry, and then they become perverts, I am responsible for the sin of not warning them and praying for them. I’m not responsible for their choice to be perverts or the things they do; that’s on them, and they have no excuse. But I have done wrong.

Paul says men turned to idols, so God gave them over to sexual perversion. Giving men over to something isn’t the same thing as inflicting it on them. When Paul gave a sinner over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, he didn’t invite Satan to attack him; Satan was already trying to do that. He is always looking for ways to attack every human being. Paul merely quit praying for God to spare the sinner the consequences of his sin, and then the man had no protection, so Satan had better access to him.

For a long time, I’ve believed the decline of England was caused by greed and pride. England was once a powerful Christian nation. The British evangelized the world. When they became wealthy and amassed an empire, they became proud and obsessed with wealth and power. I believe the men turned work into an idol and abandoned their families.

By the beginning of the 20th century, England was pretty godless. The English elites accepted perversion in private, regardless of what they said in public. The men had become effeminate, and they still are. A typical British man who is not from the working classes is hard to distinguish from a flaming American homosexual.

Put Elton John in a business suit and a fake beard and tell people he was a straight English businessman, and no one would doubt it.

It became common for British men to ship their sons off to boarding schools so they could succeed. A British boarding school is essentially a sodomy academy. British men made their sons fatherless voluntarily, and Satan stepped in and filled the paternal role.

English men have become effeminate. Even the straight ones seem gay to Americans. To me, it appears that the British received the punishment of Romans 1, and Americans are receiving it now. We succeeded them in evangelism, and we have also succeeded them as idolaters and perverts.

It’s as though Christianity were a wave that moved through nations. It starts small, builds to a peak, and then disappears. When it’s building, things are wonderful, but afterward come chaos, hatred, defeat, and depravity.

Gay activists, who somehow love to teach Christianity in spite of their hatred of it, like to tell us Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed for selfishness, not for perversion. That’s not true. They were destroyed for both. The Bible mentions both as the causes of the rain of fire. It makes sense. It is believed that their area was very wealthy, and that they abused the poor as well as anyone who came to visit. They became powerful, they made wealth and heathen deities their gods, they became selfish and cruel, and they became sexually perverted.

After they became perverted, they became so depraved God was no longer able to reach them, so he rained fire on them. He burned them all, including old people, babies, women, pets, and livestock. Just to get rid of them for the sake of future generations they were going to contaminate.

Now America is like Sodom. By and large, we have no interest in God or righteousness. We love money, power, and admiration. We are obsessed with pleasure. We are also so sexually perverted, about one quarter of our young people claim to be LGB-something. That’s a big jump from the 1% we dealt with in the past.

In addition to these problems, we are much weaker and more vulnerable than before. We have to bow and scrape for China. That could never happen to a nation that had God’s favor. We got hit worse by coronavirus than anyone else. We are watching our wealth evaporate under Biden, as he drags us into an unnecessary conflict and kills American jobs. Our government is paying millions to put illegal aliens on planes and fly them to cities where they can settle and work against us.

For decades, we’ve been marching to the top of a cliff, and I think we are finally in the process of sliding off.

As written previously, my wife dreamed she was in a field with another woman, running from vicious dogs. The world was falling apart. They saw people running in various directions. People were running from one place to another, thinking they were headed to safety, but they passed people running in the opposite directions. No matter where people came from, they thought things had to be better elsewhere, but things were just as bad in the places they were running to. There was no escape.

My wife and the woman tried to go through a gate and into a house where people seemed safe. The woman was allowed in, but when my wife begged to be allowed in, a tall man with goat’s horns and charred skin came out. He owned the house.

It was obviously a picture of the tribulation and the mark of the beast. Things are going to be very bad everywhere, and Satan will offer people false safety in exchange for taking the mark.

Money won’t protect you. Buckets of freeze-dried disaster food won’t save you. Underground bunkers, real estate, stocks, ammunition, solar power, private wells, and militias won’t save you. The beast definitely won’t save you. God is shaking the world to show us he is the only thing we can hold onto. He will show us none of our false gods can help us.

It’s just like what he did in Egypt, which was a picture of the rapture. He sent 10 plagues, and each plague was designed to humiliate one of Egypt’s false gods. For example, the plague of darkness humiliated Ra, the false sun god.

We wanted to have our own way. We wanted to find security through wealth and political power, not prayer and submission. We wanted to appease perverts and pretend their disgusting activities were not sins, contradicting God himself. Now God is showing us where our safety and stability really came from. He is showing us they can be taken away.

Patriotism can be idolatry. Many conservatives worship America. They think it can never fall. The Roman Empire fell, and so did the British Empire. The Ottoman Empire fell, too. The various empires based in Babylon fell. The monuments of the pharaohs ended up buried in sand. We can fall, and we are falling. Your collection of AR-15’s won’t help you in the long run.

Many conservatives want nothing to do with humility, prayer, patience, or love. Many conservatives are just like the people they hate. Tattooed. Pierced. Proud. Fornicators without shame. Eager to shoot and kill. Some even worship ridiculous European deities and pretend to be Vikings. Many of us have rallied behind homosexuals like Tammy Bruce and Milo Yannopoulos. Many people think the battle is between right and left, but fundamentally, it’s between God’s family and Satan’s. Conservatism is a natural manifestation of closeness to God, but plenty of conservatives have nothing to do with God.

In short, a lot of people aren’t getting it. Not getting it is what causes plagues and floods.

The church should be standing up for righteousness, confession, repentance, Bible study, and prayer in tongues. We shouldn’t be compromising, because compromise is idolatry, and idolatry leads to destruction.

We shouldn’t be so afraid of other people. The only power they have to harm us is the power God gives them.

We Should Switch Names

This was written on March 6, but I didn’t publish it right away.

I have no interest in coin collecting. When I was a kid, my mother tried to get me interested in coins and antiques. I never developed any enthusiasm for coins. I didn’t get anywhere with antiques, either, although I enjoyed going through The Antique Trader, looking for old swords and daggers. My mother should have encouraged me to collect them. I’d be sitting pretty now. She was more interested in things like plates.

It’s remarkable how rich you can get collecting almost anything. Just refuse to clean out your garage for 30 years, and you’re bound to end up with a sizeable pile of assets.

Although I didn’t become a numismatist, I ended up with a few coins, including junk silver, which is the common term for circulated silver coins. Before 1965, US dimes, quarters, half dollars, and dollars were 90% silver. My grandfather was very sharp, and when the change came, he instructed the toll collectors in his area to save silver for him. He paid the state back at face value. When he died, I got a share of the coins.

He was a judge, and he had a lot of clout, so he could do things like that.

Now you know about my history as a coin collector. It is sparse.

A year or two back, Youtube started recommending videos made by a collector. He calls himself a silver stacker, which means he likes to invest in silver bullion and coins. He talks about developments in the precious metals and coin markets. He shows people things he has bought. He interviews shop owners.

I wondered why I was receiving these recommendations.

He published some interviews featuring a man known as the Coin Guy. His name is Guy Ventre, and he has a shop in my area code. I would guess he’s in his late sixties. He moved to Florida from New York, and he has a son who works in the business. His son’s name is Nathan.

The interviews were fascinating. The Coin Guy is not a highly educated man, but he’s very smart, and he reads. He keeps up with various news sources, including The Wall Street Journal. He reads books. He loves history. In the interviews, he provides all sorts of historical insights into coins and metals.

The Coin Guy wears what looks like a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special on his hip, openly.

He talks a lot about the insanity of fiat currency. He reminds people of what happened in the Weimar Republic, where inflation became so bad, people had to carry bags of money in order to buy groceries.

As new interviews popped up, it became more and more obvious that he and the interviewer were both conservative and concerned about the zombie apocalypse.

The Coin Guy gives talks to kids, trying to interest them in what he does. He is very involved at his church.

I added all these things up. Coin dealer. Metals dealer. Believer in portable wealth. Doesn’t trust the government. Retailer. Born in New York. Smart. Erudite. Family-centered. Last name Ventre. Son named Nathan.

My conclusion: Messianic Jew. Had to be.

Why did “Ventre” make a bell go off? Because I knew a Jewish girl named Ventry.

I found out I was wrong but not far off. In an interview, Mr. Ventre said he had learned, as an adult, that he was part Jewish. Evidently, it was more obvious to me than it was to him. He’s not a Messianic Jew. He’s a Christian with some Jewish ancestry. Enough to be helpful, I think.

I believe I know why Youtube recommended him. I think conservatives and Christians are more interested in coins and metals than other people. I had always thought of these fields as areas that drew Jews, Middle Easterners, and Asians, but based on what I’ve learned, plain old conservatives are very much part of them now.

I took an instinctive liking to this man. He seemed like the kind of virtuous American male you don’t run into often these days. He talked a lot about honesty and reputation. He discussed his hopes for young people and his fears for America, which are, let’s face it, coming true.

A couple of days ago, he told a story about his daughter. She was getting married, so he bought her a bracelet with diamonds and jewels. He paid $2000 for it, and it appraised for more like twice that. When he had it appraised, his wife said, “Sell it.” He refused, saying it might be the thing that got his grandchildren across the Canadian border some day.

I started thinking about the apocalypse. What do we know about it? Here is one thing we know: when it comes, there will be no way to protect yourself. Only God will be able to protect people. If you have money, metals, junk silver, jewels, and securities, they won’t do you any good. No one is going to want to trade food for Bitcoin or Mercury dimes when people are starving.

Will food, land, and barter goods help people? My guess is that they will provide something of a cushion, but the problems of the apocalypse are murder, death, and lack, joined with delusion and a coercive one-world religion. Food and land won’t keep killers away. They won’t keep disease (death) away. When the government belongs to the likes of BLM and Antifa, and they serve the beast, the government’s agents won’t respect your locks and gates, so land won’t help much.

The only answer will be to know God through Jesus Christ. It won’t be enough to ask for salvation and try not to sin. You’ll have to communicate with the Holy Spirit every day and obey him. God is shaking the world so people’s hands will come loose from the things they cling to in vain. His hand is the only thing that will help us.

If we stack silver, silver can lose its value. If we try to grow food, it can be destroyed by bad weather, bugs, and disease. If we store things in our houses, those things can be taken from us. God is quite literally the only thing no person or spirit can take away.

Our enemies only have as much power as God allows them to have. Remember what the Bible said about Jesus. He wasn’t captured by hostile Jews. He turned himself in. He let them know they had no power except that which God gave them. When they approached him, he knocked them to the ground with supernatural power, showing he was God. They knew he was God, but they chose to arrest him, beat him, and have him killed anyway. The men who did this had no excuse when they died and were judged.

You may not be Jesus, but if you belong to God, Satan and his people can’t do anything to you unless God allows it. What he allows depends on your relationship with him.

Sometimes I think I should buy several buckets of disaster food, but I don’t think I’ll ever become a real prepper, because you can’t really protect yourself from the tribulation, and I don’t expect to be here when it happens. I expect to be raptured.

These things were on my mind after I saw the video.

Today, my wife told me about a dream she had last night.

The tribulation had come. She was with another woman. It wasn’t a person she knew in life, but she knew her in the dream. People were running to and fro, looking for safety. There was no refuge. People running away from one place would run past people running to the place they had just come from. People thought other places might be safer, but people who had been to those places knew better.

Vicious dogs were chasing my wife and the woman. There was a gate, and my wife wanted to go through it. She and the woman ran through. Behind the gate, there was a house. My wife knew people in the house were safe, but she couldn’t go in. The other woman was allowed inside. While my wife begged to know how to get in, a giant came out. He had goat’s horns. He was grey. His skin looked as though it had been burned. Suddenly, she knew she had to submit to him, or he would not let her in.

Of course, he was the beast. The house was a place of false safety, for godless people who accept his mark. The woman was a damned soul who submitted to him.

These are my interpretations.

It’s a lot like the Jewish temple, now that I think about it. The temple had an outer area for everyone, and it had areas deeper inside. The farther in you went, the closer to God you had to be. The most sacred place was the holy of holies, where only the high priest could go, and even he could only enter once a year. It makes sense that Satan would work the same way, since he copies God. The house must have been like the priests’ court in the temple. It was for people who proved themselves close to Satan.

God uses sheep to lure people to his altar. Why wouldn’t Satan use dogs and wolves to drive people to his? He used them to drive people into Hitler’s death camps, which were parodies of the temple.

The dream has me wondering: how close is the end?

In related news, I am no longer quite sure who has the moral high ground in the Ukraine/Russia dispute. I haven’t been keeping up with it. Americans on both sides of the political spectrum seem to be overwhelmingly against Russia, but I wonder how many of them know any more than I do.

It makes me uncomfortable to find out I’m siding with people like Bill Maher.

I don’t watch Saturday Night Live, but I decided to take a look at last night’s opening skit because of the war. I thought they might say something about Biden’s dementia and overall weakness encouraging Russia and China to take aggressive action, or maybe about Biden considering boycotting Russian oil and buying from the Venezuelan dictatorship instead of letting Americans drill, but instead, the skit was about Fox News and Donald Trump.

Apparently, some Fox personalities were supportive of Putin in the past, or maybe they didn’t condemn him strongly enough. I can’t really tell, and SNL is (putatively) a comedy show, not a news show.

Biden’s dementia and incompetence are clearly much bigger factors in our current predicament than the words of a few news personalities and a former president, but you can’t expect New York leftists to miss a chance to deflect.

Today, while taking a very brief look at the news, I saw a magazine opinion piece praising Biden for sticking to his guns regarding oil. That amazed me. The argument is that global warming is so terrifying, we need to do everything we can to stop it.

What isn’t so clear is how drilling for oil here instead of in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela will make the oil any more of a warming threat. We still have to burn oil, so it appears to me that the locations of the rigs aren’t very relevant. It seems to me that the main impact of restricting domestic production is to weaken America and strengthen our enemies. We send our money overseas, we kill our own jobs, and we give our enemies control of our oil supply, so we have increased incentive to kowtow to vile regimes.

But perhaps I am wrong.

Maybe the writer was pushing a toxic leftist talking point: emissions should be stopped by curtailing consumption. If so, it’s hard to imagine a dumber position. Consumption equals progress equals prosperity equals a better standard of living. Consumption equals better medical care, schools, and food. It equals peace through enhanced military power. It equals better times for people who rely on charities.

Rational people generally agree that poverty is bad, but there are a lot of people on the left who dream of $15 gas. They truly believe it’s a good idea.

Elon Musk, the foremost proponent of the so-far nonexistent electric revolution, is saying we need to drill more. That’s really something. This is the guy who was going to save us from carbon.

Most people don’t know it, but it is impossible to create a practical electric 18-wheeler. Tesla delivers its electric cars on the backs of diesel trucks. Tesla owners get furious when this is mentioned. Tesla makes big trucks, but truck production is really just a vanity project.

The batteries for a Tesla semi weigh about 7 tons, so they displace a lot of paying cargo. They provide little range. They wear out fast, and semis rack up miles quickly. They cost a screaming fortune: $250,000. I don’t know, but I’ll bet they’re also made with materials we have to get from our enemies. Let’s check.

Yes, China controls 80% of the market for battery raw materials.

The guy who says we have to go electric is clearly worried about the cost of the diesel he uses to deliver his cars, and it’s obvious he is aware his battery trucks aren’t actually useful. If they were, he would be tweeting about the need to get more of them on the road to make us energy-independent.

In any case, even he admits Biden’s policy is destructive and foolish.

The wacky beliefs people are falling for now are strong evidence that supernatural deception is more prevalent than ever. A sign that things are wrapping up.

I take prophetic dreams seriously. My wife has had them before, and so have I.

I got into a conflict with a woman I had dated. One night, I dreamed she was a giant cockroach in my kitchen. She was around a foot tall. She had strange packages attached to her under her wings, like bombs on an airplane. I knew they were full of her eggs; bad future developments she hoped to bring upon me. I knew who the roach was because she was the same color as the woman’s skin, and like the woman, she had a round belly and frizzy hair.

The roach got ready to fly toward me and attack me. I tried to discourage her, but she was too enraged to listen. She flew into the air and into a running fan. It destroyed her and shot her remains into the air, spraying me with her guts. The bombs, which were intended to hatch into problems for me (such as the awful children we might have had), were destroyed. I was unscathed, but I was still covered with brown slime. This is a very accurate metaphor for what eventually happened between me and the woman. I came out on top, but I was still defiled and embarrassed. When I awoke from the dream, I knew how things would turn out.

My wife recently dreamed a man she knew was having premarital sex with his girlfriend, and she called him to tell him. Eventually, he admitted the dream was correct. She also had a dream that correctly showed that the girlfriend’s sister and mother were witches and that they had had a supernatural battle.

I dreamed I took my dad to Chick-fil-A. He was very old and nearly bald. He was feeble. As we walked to a table, waiters cheered. They were elated to see him. I knew this meant he would be saved, and sure enough, it happened later.

In my most obvious rapture dream, I was lifted to heaven on an invisible tsunami that covered the world. Oddly, I had a little tray of roach poison pellets in front of me, and it went with me. Because of this dream, I expect to make it.

Yesterday, I felt an urge to watch a few minutes from movies about Noah. I don’t watch fiction now, but I felt I was supposed to see these things. Noah’s deliverance symbolized the rapture as well as baptism.

The first movie was the John Huston classic. I wanted to see it because I remembered the way Noah’s hostile neighbors looked. They reminded me of today’s hipsters. They were bald, and they looked creepy. They adorned themselves with skulls. Have you noticed all the bald men around us? It seems like half of America’s men are bald, with creepy convict chin beards and tattoos. I thought it was strange that the movie’s characters were so much like them, given that the movie was made in the 1950’s.

Modern Americans are determined to look the way losers looked in 1960. Here’s something God once told me: we become what we imitate.

I saw a funny scene. One of Noah’s sons was asking him if he was sure the world would flood. He said the crops weren’t being looked after, and the weather was dry. His mother scolded him for doubting his dad. Then she turned to Noah and said he needed to take one son off the ark project and send him to fix the roof on Noah’s house. She was worried it would let water in when the rain started. Noah looked at her in disbelief, smiled, and agreed.

When the flood came, there was a moment when screams could be heard coming from outside the ark. That is something I’ve thought about in the past.

The second movie was the Russell Crowe version. Not much of interest there. I saw some short clips.

It portrayed the fallen angels as saviors of mankind, which is obscene, given that all the evidence we have says Satan is their leader. Failing to appreciate your allies is bad, but giving credit to your enemies is beyond stupid. The purpose of the flood was to kill the descendants of the angels.

I feel like John Huston’s Noah. I just can’t believe the things I do now matter. Why bother fixing the roof? My inescapable, persistent feeling is that if I let nearly all my earthly responsibilities go, it will make no difference at all in the long run, because my wife and I will not be here.

Jesus showed the disciples where to cast their nets, and they caught so many fish, they realized they were seeing miracles. Afterward, they walked away from the boats and left the fish to rot. Check the Bible and see. It says that. Imagine doing that today. What if you owned a big grocery store? Would you be willing to walk away and follow Jesus, allowing the inventory to go bad and the building to fall apart?

When the rapture comes, that’s what will happen. No one who goes will care about their savings, their wills, their houses, their careers…none of it.

If the rapture doesn’t come soon, then I guess we’re just stuck here, and we’ll have to take it a while longer.

We have been cleared for a trip to another country: Ireland. They insisted on getting confirmation that Rhodah was really my wife, even though we sent a PDF of our marriage certificate. Barring a sudden ascent into the clouds, we will probably have to make two more trips before she comes to the US. Ireland is somehow connected with the Schengen-area countries, so we expect her Irish visa will give her credibility if we decide to try another country in Europe later.

Israel would be the best possible destination, but they’re so crazy over there, I don’t count on anything.

I have never had much interest in visiting Ireland, because nothing has ever happened there, but the people are said to be very nice, and they have great seafood. It should be fun. I wasn’t interested in Turkey, either, and I had a great time there.