Weep, Hippies

I am still waiting for someone to tell me how bees, which are supposedly addled by nicotinoid pesticides, could set up housekeeping in a yard full of imidacloprid. It's in the lawn, the trees, the shrubs, and the vegetables I've planted. Yet the bees had no trouble making a home here and finding their way back to it over and over.

I think I'll be waiting a long time for that explanation.

A beekeeper came last week and plugged the places where the bees were getting in, and he blasted the cavity they were exploiting with poison, presumably doing in the queen and all bees inside the house. But the remaining bees--thousands--weren't ready to give up, and they swarmed on the chimney. I suppose they could still smell the queen, dead though she was. They make special poison that shoots a long way, for the specific purpose of killing bees and wasps, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper than paying a beekeeper. So the swarm got a good dose of it, and now there are dead bees all over the place. I only wish the ghost ants were as easy to slaughter.

The experience got me thinking. It would be nice to have a bee gum. Honey is expensive, and the bees will give it to you for nothing. But I wonder if it's possible to keep bees here. It's not that I wonder if they could survive. I just wonder if the honey would be worth eating. If you put bees around the wrong plants, you get pretty weird honey. I've seen very strange honey at my grandmother's house in Kentucky. Some was very dark, like dark corn syrup. I'm not interested in accumulating bad honey.

I am only familiar with the flavors of three types of honey. Clover, orange blossom, and sourwood. I like them all, but the last two are the ones I like best. I'm not sure how you get sourwood honey. The sourwood tree is not very common. Maybe there are beekeepers who plant groves of it. The honey is very clear, and it's bright yellow.

I learned about sourwood from my grandfather. We used to wander around in the woods from time to time, and one day, he pulled a leaf off a tree and told me to chew it. It had a very sour but not disagreeable taste. I suppose that's where the name comes from.

The bees down here are very small and dark. I didn't recognize them as honey bees. Evidently they all look like that here. The bee guy thought they were completely normal.

It's too bad the bees didn't tell me they were coming. They would have been welcome in a regular hive. In the walls? Not so much. It feels weird, exterminating useful bugs, but it beats having the house ruined.

Interesting news: the hippies are not as excited about imidacloprid as they used to be. Now there is evidence that a natural fungus is damaging bee populations. Also, the damage isn't as bad as some of the nuts would have us believe.

Glad to hear that. The global warming myth and the ethanol farce are about to drive us into a recession. We don't need any more Chicken Littles right now, removing wonderful pesticides from the market and driving food prices even higher.

Posted by Steve H. at 12:12 PM | Permalink |  

Bees Not Confused

Liberals told us DDT harmed birds by making eggshells weak. It's not true, but we banned DDT, and as a result, millions of human beings died of mosquito-borne diseases.

Now they tell us imidacloprid, a newer pesticide, confuses bees so they can't find their hives. They tell us we're going to run out of bees in a year.

Well I treat everything in my yard with heavy doses of imidacloprid. And I have a bee problem. As in a swarm I had to poison.

Funny, wasn't that NOT supposed to happen?

I guess hippies who see this entry will whine about how a beekeeper would have taken the bees for nothing. WRONG, patchouli-suckers. Here they charge you to pick the bees up. So the cute little bees got poisoned. Just like roaches.

Imidacloprid is a godsend, because it's one of the few things you can use on whiteflies, and whiteflies spread the new tomato plague: tomato yellow leaf curl virus. Florida growers say it will wipe them out if they can't use imidacloprid.

I think the hippies are going to lose this battle.

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I should make a correction. DDT is believed to cause some thinning in the shells of birds of prey, but the effect doesn't apply to birds in general. And I'll bet DDT kills fewer eagles and hawks than windmill farms.

Nuclear energy is safe, cheap, and inexhaustible. Too bad the hysterical hippies prevented us from doing the responsible thing and using nukes to generate our electricity. The backward socialist French are overwhelmingly nuclear, and we're not.

One more thing. DDT can be used responsible and effectively without causing significant problems for birds, but instead, we limited it to applications that are nearly worthless.

Oh, well. The millions of folks who died were mainly Little Brown People, and the left owns them, so they can do with them as they wish. Sure, they died in agony, but it could have been worse. They might have survived, become Christians, ate meat, and bought SUVs.

Posted by Steve H. at 5:32 PM | Permalink |  

Cat 6

I have a Cat 6 socket on the floor of my office. But for months I've been using a cable lying on the floor, running to the router. Why? The guy who installed the sockets left a big coil of wire outside on the ground, connected to the system, and lighting strikes about three times an hour here, and at some point, a bolt of lightning managed to shoot current up that coil and into the house. It fried a good deal of cable, including the bit between my router and socket.

I thought I was going to have to go under the house to run the cable and use some kind of special tool to connect the ends, but I decided to try to fish the cable and open the connectors. I taped fishing line to one end of the old cable, pulled it through both holes in the floor, discarded the cable, saved the connectors, and hooked the new cable to them. It turns out you don't need any special tools for these connectors. They even have helpful decals showing you which color wire goes where.

I am now blogging without a giant cable running through the room. And I didn't have to call a guy to come out here and charge way too much for a one-hour job.

Tools used:

Klein flat screwdriver
Stanley needlenose pliers, small
Stanley diagonal cutters
flashlight
50# test
duct tape

Knowing how to tie fishing knots is very useful for this kind of thing.

I left maybe ten feet of slack under the house, and I'm going to leave the fish line in place. I am all done letting other people route ethernet stuff.

Those Stanley tools aren't great, but they're too good to throw out and replace.

Posted by Steve H. at 2:21 PM | Permalink |  

Or Next to the Steak

I just put up a shameful post at Manly Grub. It's about the healthy breakfast I eat most days. You can't eat pork fat at every single meal, unfortunately.

I put up my final recipes for pita and hummus.

Posted by Steve H. at 12:51 PM | Permalink |  

Comments Read

I decided to remove an entry I put up earlier today, but I wanted to thank everyone for the kind responses.

Posted by Steve H. at 10:25 PM | Permalink |  

Crap

Had a problem with the blogroll at Manly Grub. If your site fell off, it doesn't mean I delinked it. I am working to get all the links back up.

If you've ever heard of St. Louis gooey butter cake, go over there and tell me about it.

Posted by Steve H. at 7:20 PM | Permalink |  

How Wrong You Are

It's 9:16 a.m., and I'm already tired. Lots of things going on.

I'm too lazy to write a whole blog post right now, but let me point you to one. Longtime reader Wormathan used my recipe to make a blueberry cheesecake, and it's gorgeous.

You can see it here.

Don't forget to join the forum.

Posted by Steve H. at 9:16 AM | Permalink |  

EWWWWW

I did a radio show to promote the cookbook, and host Mike McConnell told me to steal his idea and write a book based on it: "Sounds Disgusting; Tastes Great."

So I put up a board in the forum, with exactly that theme.

I am sure you will have no problem filling it.

Posted by Steve H. at 12:44 PM | Permalink |  

Scones

I am now putting unpublished recipes up at Manly Grub. There is a link to them in the sidebar, and you can also find them on the forum.

Today's treat: scones made with bacon grease, cream cheese, and rum-soaked raisins.

Posted by Steve H. at 1:27 PM | Permalink |  

For a Weekend in the Hamptons

I was looking at the Drudge Report this morning, and I saw a photo from the new Batman movie, and I had to ask myself: have gays ruined Batman for everybody?

The photo shows Heath Ledger in his Joker suit, with makeup and a flamboyant hairdo, and behind him stands Batman, who appears to be a pencil-armed, out of shape guy of middling height. And what do they look like? A powerful superhero and an arch villain? No. They look like a couple of gay guys who work in cubicles during the week and dress up for raves on the weekend. What is Batman doing back there? Probably texting another gay guy who has a Riddler costume.

I think Hollywood predestined this when they dressed Burt Ward up like a cocktail waitress in the old TV show. In what was basically a short red silk dress and little green panties. And "Robin"? How is that a man's name? I mean, sure, in England, maybe. But they tend to be a little ambiguous anyway. Would a professional wrestler call himself Robin?

Okay, bad choice of images. Wrestling is even more homoerotic than comic books. Hell, it's worse than NFL football. And that is saying a lot.

Before gaydom became so popular, we were not as used to seeing men running around in costumes. Now every Marvel movie looks like footage from Fantasy Fest.

Maybe the problem is me. Sometimes I feel like I'm over movies. Sometimes instead of suspending disbelief, I see a bunch of spoiled rich people with drug habits and multiple STDs, playing make-believe. This is especially true of science fiction. Once you've seen video of Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford reacting emotionally to big blue things that will later be filled in with monsters and whatnot, it's hard to take their agitation seriously in the final version. You think to yourself, "What idiots. How can a grown person do that for a living?" Acting seems exciting when you think of John Wayne as a guy who rode around on a horse shooting people, or when you think of Russell Crowe as a Roman general who fights tigers with his bare hands. It's a little different when you think of actors as they really are. People who sit around in RVs taking drugs and watching DVDs while stagehands prepare for ten-second scenes.

I think Reed Richards may be the gayest superhero. He stretches himself out and wraps bad guys up. Think about this. When Reed Richards wraps sixty feet of himself around you, how much of that amount is crotch?

See what I mean?

Also, how come his clothes stretch along with him? Where can I buy an outfit like that? I could really use one when I'm working on new recipes.

Life is getting weird. These days if you want manly entertainment, you have to watch Rosie O'Donnell or the LPGA.

Posted by Steve H. at 12:49 PM | Permalink |  

I want to thank everyone who joined the forum. It looks like it's going to get plenty of business. Now I have to worry about bandwidth expenses. The hosting company says bandwidth is unlimited, but I have a feeling that is something they only say until it starts to hurt them.

Ordinarily, I get around 340 page views per day. Today it's over 4,000. The unique visits aren't high, but maybe they will be in a month.

People are posting recipes and food photos. I have a beer board up. I'm now putting submitted photos in the Coppermine gallery.

Come on by, if you get bored.

By the way, a well-known Blogosphere personality will be starting his own forum pretty soon. I am not cleared to reveal the news, so I can't tell you who it is. But I'll pimp it when the time comes, and you WILL join or face my disapproval. I know that would just tear you up.

Posted by Steve H. at 10:08 PM | Permalink |  

Eat, Burp, Post

To stimulate participation in the Manly Grub Forum, I have created new ranks based on post count. Everyone starts off as a Tofu Eater. Then eventually you work your way up to Human Garbage Disposal and beyond.

I hope this is inspiring.

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Readers Aelfheld and Pepi have graduated from Smelly Vegan Hippie to Salad Boy! Congratulations!

Posted by Steve H. at 4:38 PM | Permalink |  

No Fuss

I keep meaning to tell everyone; I found a way to grow healthy tomato plants without much work.

First, you have to have a complete break in the waste line leading to your septic tank. Then you have to pay someone to fix it and re-bury it, using the same dirt that came out when he dug it up.

Do the math.

Posted by Steve H. at 2:18 PM | Permalink |  

Unbalanced

A bunch of people have signed up for the forum. And as far as I can tell, only ONE is a woman.

God help her.

I also tested the profanity filter, which substitutes terms of my choice for common bad words. Seems to work quite well.

Don't forget: if you have food pics you want the world to see, you can email them to me, and I may put them in the gallery.

Thanks for signing up.

Posted by Steve H. at 1:45 PM | Permalink |