Posts Tagged → heat
Potent symbol of freedom: A gas kitchen stove
Only in the purposefully chaotic and bizarre power politics of 2021 to 2023 do Americans discover themselves clinging not just to their Bible and their guns, but to the gas stove in their kitchen. Yeah, Ol’ Smoky is now a symbol of your personal freedom.
Why in God’s green earth is the federal government (and several state governments including New York and Washington) trying from several different angles (consumer protection regulation, legislation, and straight-up executive branch political fatwa confiscation) to eliminate stoves that burn natural gas?
Because of control! Of you! By the bureaucrats and the lawless control freaks in government!
They want you hooked up to the electrical grid matrix and completely dependent upon whoever controls that electrical grid. One false move by you, and -POW! – your power goes out and it won’t be restored until you delete that mean “right wing” tweet and stop attending that church down the street.
This debacle of bad governance and really bad government overreach is all because a gas stove provides Americans with independence from the electric grid. While the electric grid can be controlled with the flip of a switch or two, as can the power meters on our individual homes, a gas stove operates either from a huge natural gas main pipeline that takes a lot of effort to turn off, which effects multiple city neighborhoods, or from a large propane tank in the back yard.
Propane tanks for residences run from 100 gallons to 3,000 gallons in size, providing the careful homeowner with potentially several years of cooking and heating independence until a fill-up is needed. Hooked up to a non-stop 24/7 gas main, a home can heat and cook with a gas stove 24/7. And in fact, I have personally seen an elderly woman in my neighborhood huddled up in front of her gas stove to stay warm in the winter, while the electric power was down and unavailable. This ability to run your own kitchen and home disconnected from the electric grid is serious independence from control and monitoring!
And the control freaks hate it hate it hate it!
There is a good reason Barack Hussein Obama recently installed a 2,500-gallon propane tank at his luxury vacation beach front mansion on flood-proof Martha’s Vineyard Island. When you have a large propane tank and the power goes out, you can always run a powerful electrical generator off of that propane, as well as heat and cook with your gas stove. Some people even have the old fashioned style natural gas lights in their homes, and they work great! It is like whatever happens with the power grid doesn’t really apply to people with natural gas stoves. You are completely OK and independent.
Turns out, Obama did at least this one thing right in his life, although he won’t admit that he is a hypocrite about it, because the guy is constantly hectoring us about the evils of the propane gas in his tank. I say, if a serial liar Marxist Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama can have a gas stove and the huge propane tank out back to keep the stove fired up and cooking 24/7 off-grid, then an honest-to-goodness genuine red-blooded American like you can have one, too. Just on principle, no questions asked.
What is truly interesting about this subject is the bogus and openly fake “study” supposedly done by the Rocky Mountain Institute that the gas banners and book burners supposedly relied on for their screams of horror and outrage about “the dangers of gas stoves“. Click the link above and see for yourself. This is not a study, nor does it rely on real studies. It is a political brochure with pictures. The concerns that RMI lists are based on the improbability/impossibility of people sitting inside a gas-fired oven while it is on fire, and do not take into account ambient air dilution, stove top hoods and exhaust fans, or the risks from alternatives to gas stoves.
It is as if the only thing that RMI cares about are the potential risks (none of which are proven with actual long term study data showing a strong correlation between gas stoves and related health problems); they don’t even talk about the benefits of gas stoves. Not the least of which is that clean burning natural gas emits far fewer and less pollutants than coal-fired power from the usual electrical power plants where we get most of our electricity.
This gas stove banning business is all about bureaucrats directly controlling your home life, which means your personal freedom. They used a fake “study” by a 100% partisan and ideologically driven activist organization called Rocky Mountain Institute to “inform” their chums in the partisan and ideologically driven activist organization called the mainstream media, who in turn created the (fake) astroturf political target for partisan and ideologically driven politicians who don’t give a fig for the actual scientific truth or for you or for freedom.
Whenever we see so-called “science” claims like this gas stove ban hype that cannot be challenged or debated with its proponents, then we know it is not science, it is propaganda.
Cling to your gas stove for dear life. Do not let go of it, do not give it up, and vote out of office any elected official who supports banning gas stoves. These are bad people, controlling people, who believe they know best how you must live your life. Even the life you live in your own kitchen, frying up chicken and plantains and sauteeing vegetables, all of which really do throw up a whole bunch of oily particles in the air that can get into your lungs. And believe it or not, this is a subject I know a lot about, because after finishing graduate school I took several courses on this subject at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, and got “A” grades.
Take it from me, the RMI “study” is BS, the supposed health issue about gas stoves is BS, and I’m not even a doctor. Keep your gas stove, and toss out the RMI study and its claim that your gas stove is dangerous. Live free, my friends. Breathe that free American air and rejoice.
Obama installs a 2,500-gallon propane tank at his luxury beach front mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, and so should you
Just so we are all on the same page about what a racist disgrace Obama is, here he is happily posing with racist disgrace Louis Farrakhan. Don’t listen to anything Obama says, he is a racist dirt bag.
A breezy summer day
One of my most enduring happy memories is actually not just one distinct moment, it is the aggregated beautiful summer days of my central Pennsylvania farm country youth.
As far as I can recall, Happy Valley did not get much sunshine throughout the year. Our glum, overcast days stretched from Fall through Spring. Instead, we saved up every drop of sun for June, July and August. These summers were sunny, usually gently breezy days, with mostly blue skies and flitting clouds, occasional sun showers, temperatures in the 70s and maybe 80s.
A trip to Whipple Dam State Park or a local swimming hole would cure the worst of the heat.
Perhaps youthful memories are clouded by adult cynicism, or more likely, by adult rose-tinted glasses. We prefer in our old age to recall only the good times and bury the rest. That is possible here when it comes to recalling the perfect summer weather of my youth.
However, it is also a scientific fact that Planet Earth is getting really close to having its polarities flip. Very close. As those polarities get close to switching (magnetically speaking, the North Pole becomes the South Pole and vice versa), Planet Earth’s magnetic shield gets weak. So weak that a lot of ultraviolet rays get through to the surface, and our skin, thereby heating things up.
It is one of the reasons for sun burns worse than usual and for really hot, windy weather over the past twenty-five years. It is a fact that some plant and animal species have been moving northward, too, as northern climes warm up, even ever so slightly.
Earth’s magnetic field acts as a filter for harmful UV and other cosmic rays. Our magnetic field is one of the reasons Planet Earth has life on it. When it gets weak, our own experience outside changes.
After a very wet and rainy Spring, we are now experiencing some easy-sleeping cool evenings, and breezy, gently sunny days. The kind we have not seen in decades.
What a wonderful feeling.
If I go in the back yard and work in the garden, and close my eyes, I am transported back to the wondrous summer days of my childhood. They were colored by the ultra-green environment that surrounded me, too, I admit that.
It is doubtful these perfect days in the 70s, with a refreshingly gentle breeze, will last much longer. After all, the poles have not yet fully flipped and returned Earth to where its magnetic shield was much earlier in my life. But I am reminded of how it used to be, and how pleasant it was.
Aaaahhh…summer time, central PA style.
Has anyone considered unplugging Spring and plugging it back in to see if it will work right?
Not my creative headline, unfortunately, but a good one nonetheless, and well put in terms of how odd this Spring has been.
Except that this Spring has not been odd, if my memory serves me right. Not in the context of Spring happening over millennia and even over decades. Spring used to be a lot like the on-again-off-again odd weather we have experienced the past month.
When I was a kid, lo these many decades ago, Spring was a process. It was not a moment in time.
Spring took time to become Spring. It was the spaced-out staging of leaves and buds emerging, green poking up through the soil a bit at a time.
“April showers bring May flowers” went the old adage. Meaning that as a precursor to the warm weather with flowers was a sustained period of rain and cool or cold weather. That was Spring, spanning cold, rain, cold rain, and the gradual emergence of green things and then the crowning sign – flowers!
Showers, heck, I recall a snow blizzard in early April as I was casting a small dry fly on the lower reaches of Big Fishing Creek in Clinton County, near the Lamar trout hatchery. In my early twenties, in fact I might have been just twenty years old, I was stubbornly casting to “rising” trout despite a white-out snow storm blanketing the air and the stream’s surface with big white snowflakes. That a trout could tell the difference between a huge plump snowflake and a measly morsel of a vague-looking aquatic insect landing briefly on the surface was a leap of faith I was fully committed to taking, and making with every cast.
My youth’s crowning moment arrived when a much older man, probably someone my age now, stopped to watch me casting the dry fly amidst the snow storm.
“Pretty ambitious, dontcha think?,” he humorously called out from up above.
And right then a big fish whacked my drifting fly, and I hauled in one of the most colorful symbols of Spring, an iridescent rainbow trout. The guy looked at me slack-jawed, eyes wide in amazement, like I was some kind of fishing genius, and I looked up at the snowing heavens and mouthed a “Thank You.” One of the more memorable fish and fishing moments in a lifetime of fishing.
That day the air temperature was still spring-like, but the obvious above-ground temperatures were cold enough to generate snow. It was a classic symbol of the kind of gradual and slowly shifting, two steps forward one step back warming change that Spring used to be.
But that was thirty, forty years ago. A different world, a different climate.
Apparently the earth’s switching magnetic polarity is now playing a big role in the Winter-to-Summer “Spring” times we have experienced for a long time now. This switch happens naturally every 200,000 to 300,000 years.
Because the earth’s polarity is switching, which means the North Pole becoming the South Pole and vice-versa (but what we arbitrarily call North and South remain the same) the earth’s magnetic field-cum-shield is at its weakest. Earth’s magnetic shield is at its weakest because the poles are swapping positions and the magnetic field strung up between the two poles is stretched to its thinnest. The earth’s magnetic field-cum-shield is one of the reasons our planet has so much life on it; a great deal of harmful cosmic rays and powerful solar ultraviolet (UV) light are caught in the magnetic “net” and they are blocked from reaching the earth’s surface.
Therefore, a lot more solar radiation has penetrated to the earth’s surface over the past few decades, with the kinds of unusual heat, warming, and strong winds that we have witnessed. As well as a lot more quick sunburns under what appear to be pretty normal sunny conditions. The sun is not necessarily stronger, but a lot more of its energy is reaching us. For now.
And that takes me back to that unplugging Spring. For about 35 years Spring has been kind of unplugged, in a way, and it will remain so for about another decade, until the polar switch is complete. And then these gradual Springtimes, like the one we just had, will become normal again.
I can’t wait for that to happen, because I enjoy a real Spring so very much, the change from one season to the next. Normally temperate climes like Pennsylvania appeal to me for that very reason.
Everything hinges on the nickel-iron core inside the earth. And we won’t be unplugging THAT any time soon.
Maple Syrup 101
Maple syrup is really neat, a big treat, and a royal pain in the butt to make.
It is expensive to buy, running from $45 to $60 a gallon.
Modern machinery and technology have combined to turn most sugarbushes (stands of large maple trees utilized by the big maple producers) into a maze of blue tubing and pumps, efficiently moving sap from tree to tank to evaporator. No hauling sloshing buckets hooked on spiles in these forests!
The thing is, today’s evaporators are increasingly using reverse osmosis. This is fantastic for efficiency and keeping energy costs low in what is always an energy-intensive process.
However, having tasted a lot of the newer maple syrup production, one thing is missing: Intense maple flavor. Oh, it is maple syrup, for sure. But it seems that the thing that makes the process so costly is also the thing that is so necessary, and that is heat.
We have been making our own maple syrup for the past five years, something I did as a kid each winter out at Penn State’s recreation area, Stone Valley. Each year we have experimented with different fuels, different evaporators, different amounts of sap. And we have finally arrived at a simple set-up that works well for us.
We use a 28×44 stainless evaporator pan, made well by a young guy in Iowa.
Under it we have two large propane burners.
We gather about five to twenty gallons of sap a day, and when we hit 20 gallons, we start boiling. It takes about six to eight hours to carefully boil that 20 gallons down to a one-gallon “liquor” that we spirit into the house and carefully simmer on the stove top until it reaches its finished stage.
Final quality is determined by taste-testing by all in the house, though Mom usually has the last say.
Old whisky bottles with cork stoppers are used to store the syrup, usually in a fridge or freezer.
The real lesson we have learned is that heat is one of the factors in giving that old fashioned “Grade B Dark” full flavor. And this is why we make our own maple syrup. It is nigh impossible to find the old dark Grade B syrup any longer, and the darkest now produced, that we can find, is a shadow of a maple syrup’s true glory, a result of death-by-technology.
Heat is necessary to make that rich flavor. And a lot of careful hovering to make sure that heat doesn’t burn that sap.
My antidote to the heat
Several years ago my family bought me a Hamilton Beach smoothie maker (model 56222) for Father’s Day, and it long past earned its price. It has a pour spout which makes smoothies a lot cleaner to make, pour, and drink.
Fruit smoothies are a summertime daily staple of our family, and they can be made lots of different ways, with all kinds of natural ingredients (fresh and frozen blueberries, strawberries, citrus fruits, etc), for far less money than you might pay at a Rita’s or other ice cream venue.
Here is my antidote to the heat:
1) One 20-ounce can of Dole pineapple slices in heavy syrup or in natural pineapple juice.
2) One cup of Cabot Greek-style lowfat yogurt, vanilla bean flavor.
3) A quarter cup of water
4) 2-4 tablespoons of granulated sugar (more or less to taste)
5) lots of ice cubes or crushed ice
…….Pour the pineapple into the blender, juice and all. Spoon in the yogurt. Pour in the sugar, to taste. Pour the water over the sugar to help it dissolve. Fill the blender to the top with ice cubes or crushed ice, and put the top on. Pulse or use the smoothie function for 30-60 seconds.
The sliced pineapple blends better than the crushed pineapple, oddly, at least in our machine.
Plenty of times we skip the yogurt and just use water and a splash of lemon juice, along with frozen berries. Other times an old, mushy banana with pineapple, or some coconut milk with pineapple, and suddenly you are into daquiri land… Depends on what you are in the mood for. They are all refreshing. The world is your smoothie!
And not to take away anything from Rita’s: When our clan is in the mood for a cold, icy snack, places like Rita’s have far more flavors than we can come up with at home.