How to Use IT Processes to Shoot Yourself in the Foot

I work in the Information Technology Department at a large regional teaching hospital. A colleague and I were recently automating a management function for one of our larger servers and we found ourselves in need of a service account to run some scheduled tasks overnight without human intervention.

If you're unfamiliar with Windows service accounts, they're basically a login to the server or domain that background or system processes use to implement the many different functions of a system. There are some built-in ones that Windows uses for all it's built-in background tasks, but if you want to add some software that runs in the background you need a service account to run it. In our case we needed a domain account because our software needed to access multiple servers. A domain account is used to log into multiple servers. A local account is good only for one specific server.

About two years ago our Information Security Department decided that engineers like me would not be allowed to set up service accounts anymore and that we would need to request all new service accounts through them. There was a lot of grumbling over that decision. Previously we had a script that we could use to create them in about two minutes.

We had also implemented a workflow management/help desk/request system called Service Now. This system is supposed to do everything but make coffee and, presumably, it was flexible enough to integrate with popular coffee makers and other kitchen appliances to make their operation much more efficient. It was also supposed to save us a ton of money. They didn't tell our management that they would need to hire a whole separate IT staff to configure it and keep it running.

Back to the service account. So now we have to request service accounts through Information Security. InfoSec had supposedly implemented a “Service Catalog” within Service Now where we could just select an item we needed from them and fill out a form. Then Service Now would generate a Service Now Request and route it to whoever needed to approve it and then after it was approved it would automagically be routed to the person within InfoSec who needed to fulfill the request.

This is where the problem started. It all sounds pretty great. Click on whatever you need, fill out a short form, click “OK” and then you get what you want. Unfortunately it didn't work out exactly like that.

Right out of the box Service Now doesn't know anything about service accounts or anything else so you have to get the Service Now IT staff you just hired to customize Service Now and implement the functionality you want. This process is apparently pretty difficult because it took them 18 months to implement an InfoSec Service Catalog with about a dozen items in it. On top of that, they used a development methodology popular for a short time in the 1990's called “Agile.”

I won't go into Agile in detail, but the idea of it is basically that developing something that's 100% perfect is a lot of hard work so it's better to implement something that's half-assed in a short timeframe, get paid for it, and then spend the rest of your natural life fixing the things you should have done right in the first place. Software companies largely abandoned Agile when they realized that it really pisses off your customers when they pay you a million dollars for software and you give them something that doesn't work. I'm not a genius, but I think that's a bad move that will cause your customers to never trust you again.

So, after 18 months, we had a Service Catalog with a lot of half-baked items in it that really didn't do much. As you can imagine, a teaching hospital doesn't stop everything and wait 18 months for software to be built.

While we were waiting, anything we needed from InfoSec had to be entered as a problem ticket and assigned to InfoSec. They have a guy in that department who is known as “The No Guy.” I wrote a whole blog post about him in 2019. Any work you send his way gets pushed back to you with a “Not my job” or an “I don't know” or an “I don't know what you want.” Once he surmises that you need him to actually do some work, he will simply reassign the ticket back to you with one of those short notes or perhaps just put an ambiguous comment and just close the ticket. Anything you need him to do usually requires management intervention. I've been dealing with him for ten years.

So for this particular service account we had a Service Catalog item that we could use and everything should have gone smoothly once that was done. It didn't. The first problem was that the InfoSec Service Catalog is not available to everyone. Access is granted on an “as needed” basis. My colleague and I spent about 2 hours searching the vast landscape of Service Now and never found it. I figured that for either of us to locate the elusive InfoSec Service Catalog I would purposefully enter the Service Account Request incorrectly as a Problem Ticket and the No Guy, not realizing that he was being played, would send me the correct link. It worked like a charm. Within 20 minutes I had the super secret highly classified link to the InfoSec Service Catalog along with a snarky message from the No Guy telling me my request was closed because I had entered it incorrectly.

Armed with the precious link, my colleague and I opened the elusive InfoSec Service Catalog and immediately found the Service Account Request item along with several other highly sought after request items. It took all of 30 seconds to fill out the fill out and submit the request. We thought we were home free. Not even close.

Once a service account is requested, it apparently gets automatically routed to a committee of InfoSec student interns and newly-graduated security engineers for their review. It is called the GRC committee. I don't know what that stands for and I really don't care. If it passes their intense scrutiny they send it over to the No Guy's team to possibly do the actual work.

This is where the Agile methodology hit us hard. After I submitted the form, instead of being routed to the GRC for approval, it was routed back to me for my approval. Therein lies the problem. I don't have the application permissions to approve anything. Unfortunately my colleague and I thought that we were home free so we patiently waited 10 days for InfoSec to spit out our service account. At that point I started asking questions and was told by InfoSec that I would have to approve the request so routing could continue, but they refused to give me approval permissions even just for the one minute it would take to get the ticket moving again.

We engaged the expert Service Now Team and they worked on it for a couple of days but could not free the ticket to get it moving again. I tried claiming extenuating circumstances to get the service account created but they weren't having it. After 19 days and about 50 man hours I was able to coerce someone with administrative privileges within Service Now to give me the necessary permissions for a few minutes so I approved the ticket. It immediately continued on it's seemingly endless journey and we are presently waiting to see what the No Guy does with it.

Remember: We used to be able to create these accounts in less than 2 minutes with a simple script. Now we're going on 21 days. Now that's efficiency at it's very best.

Alexa Really is Listening

Something happened this morning that made me angry, nervous, and seriously creeped out.  I want to tell you about it, but first here's a little background.

Back in 2015 or early 2016 I bought an Amazon Echo when they first came out.  We still have the same one.  In case you're not familiar with the Echo, it's a small cylinder shaped electronic device that you use to access Alexa, Amazon's personal assistant.  Once it's set up you can give it voice commands by saying things like "Alexa, what's the weather for today?" or "Alexa, set a timer for 40 minutes" or "Alexa, what's the news for today?"  You can ask it just about anything and usually it can give you a pretty reasonable answer.

Alexa works by using your Amazon login to access all the voice processing programs and search facilities running in the Amazon data centers worldwide.  As soon as you plug it in and link it to your Amazon account it instantly knows a lot about you.  You can enable ordering on Amazon and tell it things like "Alexa, reorder toilet paper" or "Alexa, add whole wheat flour to my shopping list."  It already knows everything you have ever ordered from Amazon and you can reorder those items with just one voice command.  At first it was just a curiosity, but eventually we started to use it for small tasks like kitchen timers, getting the weather for today, or finding the capital of Montana.

At the time we bought the Echo this was pretty amazing technology to have in your home.  I decided to find out how it works.  Basically, the Echo listens for a wake-up word and then sends the audio of whatever comes next to the voice recognition systems running at Amazon before sending your command to whatever needs to act on it for you.  The wake-up word for the Echo is "Alexa."  As soon as you say Alexa it lights up a blue bar at the top of the device and listens for whatever comes next.  After your command has been processed by Amazon a result is sent back to the Echo and a friendly female voice tells you the result.  Pretty simple stuff when you think of it, but it's not quite that cut and dried.

As soon as the Echo with Alexa was introduced there were concerns about privacy.  Amazon assured everyone that they were not capturing all the conversations happening in your home and sending them to their data centers.  The said that the only time Alexa is listening to you is when you say the wake-up word.

That's reassuring but it's impossible if you really think about it.  Alexa has to be listening to everything constantly in order to listen for the wake-up word.  There's no way around that.  For nine years now people have been suspicious of Alexa.  Amazon has vehemently insisted that Alexa was not actively listening to us all the time.  What happened this morning says something entirely different.

This morning we were sitting in our living room having some morning coffee.  My wife was browsing through Facebook on her phone and saw an ad for a sale at a company called Sak.  There was a purse she was interested in.  Alexa was in the next room and within earshot.  She mentioned that she really liked a particular purse and she showed me a picture of it on her phone.  We discussed it for a minute while she rationalized the purchase.

Now a little more background for you.  I have never ordered anything from Sak.  I have never even visited their web site.  As far as I know I have never ordered a purse online.  We have separate computers and our own phones and she has never used any of my devices to communicate with Sak.  I don't have any connection whatsoever with Sak.  Alexa uses my Amazon account, but my wife has never asked Alexa a question about Sak or even about purses in general.  My wife has her own Amazon account and never uses mine.

What happened next was truly creepy.  My wife got up to go refill her coffee and I immediately received an email from Sak telling me about their sale.  Remember, I have no connection of any kind with Sak.  I think my odds of winning the lottery are greater than the odds of a company I have never had any contact with before sending me a random email about the very sale my wife and I had just been discussing.

I thought about it for a minute and I came to the conclusion that Alexa really is listening all the time and is parsing what she hears into marketing leads for Amazon to sell.  Think about it for a minute.  Amazon could make a lot of money sending sales leads gleaned from supposedly private conversations to various companies who sell the products being discussed.  That, combined with all the information that Amazon already knows about us, would be very valuable.

An even more troubling scenario would be if, instead of sales leads, they were parsing random discussions about a crappy president or a discussion of how we wish a big meteor would land in Washington and take out the capitol or the White House.  A government agency could subpoena this data and use it to proactively suppress people who were perceived as unfriendly to the current administration.  It could happen and Amazon would most likely just hand over everything rather than getting into a legal pissing match with a President with the maturity of a seventh grader and the mental capacity of a houseplant.

What happened this morning has really made me think.  I'm angry that Amazon has apparently lied to us.  I'm nervous that it's possible that the government already has knowledge of the many private conversations had between us and our friends.  I'm leaning strongly toward unplugging our Echo and landfilling it, but that raises the question "What if Alexa is innocent and it was really the blender? Or the TV? Or maybe even the microwave?"  All I know is that one of our devices ratted us out and I think it's most likely Alexa.

UPDATE 3/26/25

Amazon announced last week that Alexa enabled devices would be storing EVERYTHING they hear to the Amazon cloud and that information would be used to train their large model AI system.  Alexa will no longer wait to hear its alert word before starting to process what it hears.  Now it will capture everything it hears and send it to the cloud.  Everything.

After hearing them admit what I already suspected, I unregistered all of our Alexa enabled devices and powered them down.  This morning I watched the city's garbage collectors dump them into their garbage truck and haul them all away with our kitchen trash and everything else we threw away last week.  My next step will be to wean myself off Amazon completely over the course of the next few months.

My Pizza Journey

I couple of years ago I decided that I wanted to learn how to make pizza.  Really, really good pizza. It seemed like whenever I made it at home it was good, but never really excellent.  I found this ironic because I have owned two Italian restaurants that served pizza.  The first place served a ton of pizza and we had a huge customer base that came in just for the pizza.  It was probably the best pizza I have ever tasted.  Crispy thin crust and many items that could be ordered on it.  The pizzas were topped with some mozzarella and pecorino Romano cheese.  Absolutely delicious.  I decided that this was what I wanted to make at home.

After experimenting with different dough recipes, sauces, and toppings I still couldn't quite get it right and for some time I resorted to using Trader Joe's rectangular flatbread for the crust.  I decided that I needed to get my shit together and figure out how to make pizza like what we served in the restaurant.  I did some less than thorough research on the web and decided that what I wanted to make was Neapolitan pizza.  As a retired professional chef I should have known a lot about pizza already but I didn't.

As luck would have it, I have a friend who was even more obsessed with pizza than me.  He had been experimenting with pizza for quite some time before I decided to get serious about it and he gave me a ton of pointers.

My friend had built a wood burning pizza oven in his back yard out of fire bricks and used it to develop his technique and dough recipe.  We don't have much of a back yard and I didn't want to build an oven in the front yard.  We have a small dog with limited common sense who would almost certainly become entangled in the oven or possibly even wander into it while it was ripping hot.  So the front yard was out.  The brick ovens use a ton of wood to get up to the required temperature of 900 degrees, so cooking even one small pizza would be prohibitively expensive.  The oven on my stove in the house only went to 550 degrees so it wasn't hot enough.

By this time my friend was almost totally immersed in learning the pizza craft and he had purchased a small tabletop propane powered pizza oven.  I wasn't excited about it but I bought one too.  And a propane tank.  And propane.  And a portable table to put it on.  And two pizza peels -- one for launching the pizza into the oven and another one just for turning the pizza while in the oven.  And an infrared thermometer.  And an oven brush.  And a digital scale. And a special pizza cutting knife.  My wonderful and very understanding wife bought me some imported pepperoni and Italian olive oil.  As you can imagine, this project was getting very expensive.

While I was waiting on all the necessary pieces to arrive, I went to look for flour.   Neapolitan pizza requires "00" flour.  This is not the flour you find at the grocery store unless it's an Italian grocery store.  We don't have one of those in Omaha, Nebraska, so it was another Amazon order.  Caputo makes a flour for pizzas cooked at a higher temperature such as Neapolitan, so I ordered a small bag of that and some Caputo pizza yeast.  It was expensive.  By now I figured that I would have to make my own Neapolitan pizzas for about 15 years and we would need to eat about 20 of them each week just to break even on the whole deal.

While all the pieces were coming together I was reading every Facebook pizza group I could find to learn more.  Eventually I decided that I needed a really good pizza book.  I had seen references to "The Pizza Bible" by Tony Gemignani so I ordered a copy and began to read it.

Eventually I was ready to make my first pizza.  The dough is more complicated than you might think.  You have to make it one day and let it sit in the refrigerator for 24 hours before shaping it into pizzas.  I won't bore you with the details of making good Neapolitan pizza dough, but I'll tell you that it's complicated and it isn't easy at first.  There's a lot of technique involved.

On the day I was finally going to make pizza I got all my ingredients together and set up the oven on the front porch.  The oven fired up pretty easily and in about half an hour it was at a little over 900 degrees.  So far so good.

I got one of the dough balls and after a few minutes I was able to shape it into a somewhat round circle on the counter.  I put on the sauce and the toppings.  The next task was to get it onto the pizza peel and then take it outside and slide it into the oven.  This is not as easy as it sounds.  Neapolitan pizza dough is a little sticky so getting the peel under it was very difficult.  By the time I got it onto the peel it was nowhere near round anymore.  I took it outside and figured it would just slide off the peel onto the pizza stone in the oven.  I figured wrong.  Despite my best efforts, the pizza was sticking to the peel.

If you've ever used an oven running at 900 degrees you probably know that once something is in there you can't just reach in for a second and adjust it.  The wave of heat that was coming out of the front of the oven was so intense that it would simply melt the flesh right off your arm in a few seconds.  You have to get it where you want it on the first try.  For pizzas if you happen to get it a little over to one side you can wait about 30 seconds and possibly reposition it with the turning peel.  If you get it too close the the burners in the rear then your pizza will burst into flames in less than 5 seconds.

After some amount of struggling I got the pizza off the peel and onto the stone.  It was no longer round and about a quarter of the toppings had fallen off in the oven and burst into flame.  I was able to put out the flames from the toppings, but by this time the part of the crust in the back of the oven was on fire.  I rotated the pizza several times before pulling it out of the oven.  It was by this time a smoldering black thing shaped like a deflated football.  Not exactly what I was hoping for.  My wife was trying to be encouraging, but she was getting hungry and was not too happy about seeing our dinner in that condition.  I cooked three more pizzas that day and some parts of them were edible, but the whole effort was pretty much a disaster.  Back to the drawing board.

After some more research I made several more attempts and eventually made some pretty good pizzas.  Not stellar, but pretty good.  The thing about Neapolitan pizza is that it's cooked from start to finish for only about 90 seconds.  This leaves the edges thick, puffy, and bready and the center thin, barely cooked, and limp.  and you can't load up a Neapolitan pizza with lots of toppings and cheese.  They usually have a little tomato sauce and only one or two ingredients plus cheese.  Less is more.  This is not what I was looking for.

Over the next year I tried my hand at Detroit style pizza.  If you haven't tried Detroit pizza then you should.  There's a guy here who converted an old school bus into a food truck specializing in Detroit pizza.  It was wildly successful and he later opened a small pizza restaurant for takeout orders of his Detroit pizza.

Detroit pizza requires a special pan.  The one I bought is and 8"x10" heavy carbon steel pan with slightly slanted sides.  It is made specifically for making Detroit pizza and it is very expensive.  On Detroit pizza you use brick cheese.  It is not available anywhere in Omaha so you have to order it.  What makes Detroit pizza so good is that you use a lot of butter or shortening in the pan and spread cheese all the way to the edges of the pan.  As it cooks the cheese makes a caramelized "crust" along the edges.  It's delicious, but the crust is thick and bready so you can't eat too much of it in one sitting.  The dough is similar to focaccia.

Recently I discovered a pizza dough called piadina.  It's apparently very popular in Rome.  It's different in that it uses milk instead of water and for leavening it has a little baking soda in it instead of yeast.  Once the dough is mixed you let it rest for 20 minutes and then roll it into balls.  You let the balls rest another 20 minutes and then you roll it into crusts with a rolling pin.  Each crust is cooked on top of the stove in a frying pan with a little olive oil until it is lightly browned.  This whole process for 4 crusts takes less than an hour from start to finish.

Once the crusts are cooled you can top them with whatever you like and finish them in the oven for a little while just like you normally would cook pizza.  This yields a thin and crispy crust that doesn't wilt while still remaining pleasingly tender.  This is what I was looking for all along.

My friend who built the stone oven in his yard has made his pizza obsession into a successful business.  He and his partner converted a trailer into a mobile pizza kitchen and they serve excellent Neapolitan pizza all over town.  I wouldn't be surprised if their next move was to open a brick and mortar location.  I just hope they open in an area where their customer base lives and works.

So that's about it.  Now I keep a few piadina crusts in the refrigerator so we can whip up a great pizza in about 15 minutes when we want one.  I'm thinking about selling my propane pizza oven and all the accessories since I may not use it again.  Then again...you never know.

Museum Obscurum

 I recently saw a news story about a place in Denmark called Museum Obscurum.  During the story they showed all kinds of creepy artifacts, including a werewolf-looking thing that was partially mummified.  They also had all kinds of preserved dead things floating around in big jars and a ton of different artifacts that are supposed to be haunted.  Apparently the Danish take this shit pretty seriously because the curator and a few random people on the street were all super excited about it and they kept proudly saying that people came from all over the world to see this collection of haunted and macabre items.  Ok.

I decided that I better check it out and find out what's going on over there.  Rather than getting on a plane and going directly to Nykobing Falster, Denmark, I opted for Plan B and just opened my computer's browser.  A lot of interesting info popped up and I began to diligently sift through it.

Although Museum Obscurum is the actual name of the museum in Denmark, the term can also be used to describe a type of creepy and sometimes haunted museum containing strange artifacts.  I never knew this.

After a little scrolling I had a surprise.  There is a Museum Obscurum right here in Omaha, Nebraska.  In fact, it's located less than a mile from my house.  The business name is Museum of the Shadows.  They also have a second location in Pensacola, Florida.  There is another, but unaffiliated, one in Oklahoma City and another in Allergan, Michigan that recently closed permanently.  When the one in Michigan closed I wonder what they did with all the stuff inside.  Maybe they auctioned it all off or maybe they just opened the front door and released it into the night.

From what I can see on the web sites, the one in Denmark looks like the best one.  I can't see paying several thousand dollars to fly to Denmark and see that one, but we may try out the one here in Omaha.  Admission is $25 per person, which isn't too bad I guess.

It seems like those Nordic countries really like their museums.  There are many different ones in the larger cities and some of them are pretty unique.  And then there's the penis museum in Reykjavik, Iceland.  That's right.  They have the world's largest collection of penises from all kinds of living creatures.  Elephants, mice, chickens, dogs, cats, and even a few from famous or infamous humans.  I wonder what one would have to do for his penis to be worthy of display in a museum? Mine has served me well but I don't think it belongs in a museum after I'm gone.  It's never been remarkable in any way and it certainly isn't famous.  Nevertheless, I'm happy with it.

The link to the Museum Obscurum in Denmark is https://museumlollandfalster.dk/en/museum-obscurum/

If you're ever planning a trip to Omaha then you can check out this link before your trip and see if you want to visit Museum of the Shadows.

https://www.museumofshadows.com/

There are probably many more Museum Obscurums throughout the world, but I just wasn't interested enough to keep looking for them all.

Active Listening

Are you familiar with the term "active listening?"  I wasn't either until a psychologist told me about it in the mid-1990's.  I hadn't really thought about it much in detail until I had to work with a guy in our office who obviously doesn't understand the concept.

You are actively listening to someone when you concentrate on the exact meaning  of what they're saying and you don't try to build your response to them before they finish speaking.  Active listening tells the other person that you value what they're saying and it's also common courtesy.  It's an incredibly useful skill, but for most people it doesn't come naturally.

When you're having a conversation with someone and they're not actively listening to you, they tend to interrupt you a lot before you finish your sentences.  By not listening to your entire sentence they miss the meaning of what you're trying to say.  It can be extremely frustrating if you're trying to convey some important information and they just seem to be missing the point entirely.  It makes sense that they don't understand you if they interrupt you before you've completely conveyed your point.  It's impossible for a person to listen to you for comprehension when they're speaking at the same time. 

So, when I first met this guy at work (we'll just call him Alex), it was because he contacted me to find out about a computer system that I manage.  He asked a question about the configuration and I started to answer.  I was about halfway through my first sentence when he started speaking again.  It was clear that he hadn't understood the concept I was trying to convey.  This was no surprise because there's no way he had heard any of the information contained in the second half of my sentence.  This went on for about 10 minutes before I was completely fed up with it.

I just stopped speaking altogether.  After another 5 minutes of Alex talking to himself and not understanding anything I had told him, he stopped for a couple of seconds and then asked if I was still on the call or if we had been disconnected.  I assured him that I was still there and then he asked why I wasn't talking.  So I told him.

"Alex, first let me say that if you interrupt me again I'm hanging up and you're on your own with this system.  I've answered your question at least 4 times already, but you started talking over me so clearly you didn't hear my answer.  If you would like me to answer your question again then I need a promise from you that you won't interrupt me again and that you will listen until I finish speaking.  The answer to your question is simple so it will take about 10 seconds for me to give it to you.  After I finish I will listen to you in the same manner and not interrupt you while you're speaking.  Will that work for you?"

Alex was a little confused at first, but he realized that the only way he was going to get his question answered was if he refrained from talking and just listened for 10 seconds so he reluctantly agreed.  It worked.  He understood what I said.  In another 10 seconds we had a game plan and we disconnected the call.  I immediately made the change he requested and sent him a message telling him it was complete.  End of story.  After that, every conversation I've had with Alex has been productive because he knows I will stop talking entirely or simply disconnect if he interrupts.

This approach does not work on drunk people.  It takes them longer to realize that you're just sitting there staring at them and not saying anything.  Then they decide that you're being an asshole and usually the result is some hurt feelings.  I'm still trying to figure out how to handle a drunk interrupter effectively so for now I just stop talking to them entirely and turn my attention to something else rather than replying to whatever they were talking about when they interrupted.

There is another type of someone not actively listening that is a little harder to spot.  Sometimes the other person doesn't interrupt, but after you're done speaking to them it's evident that they didn't understand a word you just said.  This means one of three things.

First, and most common, it's because the person starts building his response before you stop speaking so they miss half of what you're saying.

Second, the reason could be that you're explaining something in terms that they don't understand so they stop listening to you.  This is your fault.  Know your audience and use terms and concepts they can understand.

Third, the other person may just be dumb as a box of rocks and there's no chance that they will ever understand what you're saying no matter how you say it.  In this case I've been able to avoid calling someone stupid by suggesting that we bring a third person into the conversation to get their opinion on the subject.  Make sure that the third person is someone they trust and is more likely to understand what you're saying, like another member of their department.  This has been a good way for me to get through the conversation without saying anything that will hurt the other person's feelings or make them feel inadequate and still allow things to move forward.

I hope this post is useful to you in your various endeavors.  Learning how to practice active listening has been very valuable for me in both work and personal situations and I hope you will give it a try.  it just might make your life better.

"Contraception Begins at Erection" Law -- REALLY??

This morning as I was reading through the various newsfeeds I get every day I saw an interesting item.  The title of the article was:  "Mississippi lawmaker introduces 'Contraception Begins at Erection Act.' "  Of course I had to check it out, not realizing I was about to climb aboard the crazy train.

The bill, introduced by State Senator Bradford Blackmon, would make it unlawful for "a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo."  It would impose fines of $1,000 for the first offense, $5,000 for the second offense, and $10,000 for each subsequent offense.  I was stunned when I read this.

I immediately began to overthink it.  The bill, if it were to pass in Mississippi's legislature, would effectively ban male masturbation.  I don't think it would affect females because, to the best of my knowledge, females don't fire a stream of genetic material across the room when they masturbate.

Ok, let's talk about masturbation for a little bit.  We can talk about this today because the whole subject isn't taboo like it was when I was a teenager.  It's not uncommon today to see it discussed on television or on social media.  When I was a kid it was a shameful act and everyone denied that they ever did it.  Today it's recognized as a normal behavior that's just part of everyday life.  Incidentally, ladies, if a guy ever tells you he doesn't masturbate then there's a 99.99999% chance he's lying to you.  It's just something we do.  I think women are the same way, but since I'm a guy I can't say for sure.

So when does a boy begin to masturbate?  I did a less-than-exhaustive search of the web and the consensus is that they start at about 13 years old.  We'll use 13 years for the purpose of this discussion.  The next question was how many times a week?  Answers varied wildly, but the average seems to be about 10 times a week during the teen years.  Sounds reasonable so we'll use that number, too.

So, using these numbers we can calculate that by the time a guy reaches age 18 he will have masturbated about 2600 times.  So, if Sen. Bradford Blackmon of Mississippi can manage to get his bill all the way through the legislature and it actually becomes a law, the average boy living in Mississippi will owe the State of Mississippi a staggering $26 million in fines by his 18th birthday.

So, the next logical step on my quest for useless information was to determine what the financial impact would be for Mississippi if they were able to actually collect these fines.  I decided not to spend the next couple of days trying to determine how many males within my target age group live in Mississippi so I just asked ChatGPT.  It spit out a very long explanation of how it came to it's answer, but the bottom line was that 117,420 males in this age group live in Mississippi.  That would mean that in any 5 year span Mississippi would realize approximately $3,052,920,000,000 in revenue from masturbation fines.  That's over $3 trillion for those of you who can't deal with commas.

That's a lot of money.  The next question would be enforcement.  Not every teenage boy is going to go to the police station every week and swear out a masturbation confession for the week.  Mississippi would need to come up with some kind of monitoring and enforcement process.  With the very large amount of money we're talking about here the whole thing would certainly draw the attention of technology moguls such as Elon Musk.  My guess would be that Elon would have his engineers develop a device similar to the the ankle monitors you see on people arrested for drunk driving, but attached somewhere entirely different. 

Remember that these calculations are just for one small age group.  I can tell you with 100% certainty that guys don't stop masturbating when they turn 18 and this law would still apply to them for the rest of their lives.  I didn't calculate those numbers but I think the amount of revenue generated would be huge.

So what did I learn from this exercise?  I learned that stupidity has no boundaries and that I would go broke living in Mississippi, so I won't be moving there anytime soon if this law passes.

Bulletproof Whiskey Set

 I don’t know about you, but every morning when I check my email I find 75-100 pieces of email waiting for me to read.  There are some that came from newsletters I subscribed to, but most of them are just junk that somehow slipped through my email’s spam filter.  I usually spend a few minutes deleting the spam and then go back and read the others before deleting them or filing them away in a folder that I’ll probably never open.

This morning as I was marking the spam for deletion there was one piece of junk mail that caught my eye.  It was from an online gun place advertising a “bulletproof whiskey set.”  I had never heard of such a thing and my curiosity got the best of me so I opened it.

Now, you might be wondering why I get email from an online gun dealer.  A few years ago I decided to get a State of Nebraska Concealed Carry permit.  I’m not exactly sure why, but I went through the training, passed the test, and received the permit in the mail after a few weeks.  The next order of business was to get a handgun that I could carry should I ever get the urge to do so.  I browsed several online sites where they sold such weapons and read a lot about them so I could make sure to get one that would work well for me.  I subscribed to a number of daily newsletters dealing with concealed carry and used them as a source of information to make my decision.  Today, despite having unsubscribed to all of them multiple times, they still show up regularly in my inbox.  By the way, I carried a handgun everywhere for a short time before deciding that it wasn’t worth the trouble.  I have a deal with the Omaha Police.  I let their highly trained officers protect me because that's their job, not mine.  In return, they don’t go around fixing computers because that’s my job, not theirs.

Anyway, I clicked on the bulletproof whiskey set and started reading about it.  It consisted of four rocks glasses and a decanter, all made of bulletproof glass.  It was on sale for only $150 today only.  If I really wanted to immediately spend $150 then there are a number of other things I would spend it on since I really don’t drink whiskey or scotch.  And if I somehow acquired a taste for it I would probably just drink some out of the same beat up old jelly jar I use for wine, tequila, vodka, and pretty much any other alcohol that comes my way.

Nevertheless, I read on.  The description said it was specially crafted to survive a “vigorous bugout.”  I wasn’t too clear on what that meant so I looked it up.  When you have to bugout it means that someone is after you intending to do you great harm and you have to leave your current location very quickly and flee to a different one.  I thought about this for a minute.  If Tanya and I had to bugout and run for our lives, we’d probably take a little food, our pets, maybe a gun, our phones, and some camping gear.  We wouldn’t be too concerned about taking along four rocks glasses and a decanter of bourbon.  It’s unlikely that when we reached a safe place we would set up our camp and then immediately pour a nice round of cocktails and invite some neighbors over.

And another thing.  Why would you advertise an alcohol-related item on a site where people buy guns?  It’s not like alcohol and guns go together like peanut butter and jelly.  When we go to our friend’s farm to shoot targets with them on the 4th of July, there is a lot of drinking but the rule is that all the guns are secured and stored away safely long before a single cocktail is poured for anyone.  It’s just common sense.

After deleting that message I didn’t think about it again until I was driving to the grocery store over lunch.  One of the reasons I canceled our membership at a nice gun range nearby was that we really didn’t like the gun culture that we found there.  After people finished shooting, they usually gathered in a common area in the showroom and discussed guns.  The conversations always turned into discussions of a particular caliber’s “stopping power” and how many shots it would take to kill someone.  And they discussed all the tactical gear they carried around all day.  And they discussed their second amendment rights and how they were preparing for widespread civil unrest and general mayhem that is sure to occur in the next few years because of the liberals.  We were there to shoot targets, not train for WWIII.  It doesn’t take a pistol and loads of tactical gear to subdue a target.  You can do that with a clothes pin.  When we were done shooting we usually just secured our guns, cleaned up our lane, and went home.

I think the gun culture has gotten a little out of hand.  There are too many people running around and trying to project an image like they are highly trained Special Forces operatives whose sworn duty is to protect our way of life from all enemies, foreign or domestic.  In reality I think they are just a bunch of tragically stupid, fat, balding, uneducated, middle aged white men who barely have the stamina to get off the couch and go to the refrigerator to get another can of Old Milwaukee.  Rather than learn about what’s going on in the world, they spend their time cruising the web for information on the latest ridiculous conspiracy theory and then go out in public trying to project some kind of hard-ass image.  It’s really very sad.

The Perfect Dinner Roll

 

I finally found the recipe for the holy grail of dinner rolls.  While you may not think baking a good dinner roll is a big deal, I assure you that it actually is.  Americans eat a lot of bread.  When you go into a nice restaurant they usually serve you some kind of bread with your meal unless you ordered a sandwich or something that could be considered lunch food and is already served on bread.  Eating bread has some religious implications, but I’m not going to discuss any of those here.  You can go read about them somewhere else.  At any rate, let’s just say that Americans eat a lot of bread because we like it.

I’ve always loved baking and did a lot of baking when I worked in restaurants and clubs throughout my many years in foodservice.  When I bought my first restaurant we purchased sliced Italian bread loaves and pizza dough from a local family-owned Italian bakery.  This bakery’s sliced white bread and dinner rolls had been a staple in Omaha’s Italian restaurants for over 50 years.  The bakery also made pizza, so I was able to buy dough from them to make our pizza.  My restaurant was far away enough that they didn’t consider us their competition in the pizza market, plus we sold a ton of pizza so they they made a lot of money selling dough to us. There were two Italian bakeries in Omaha at the time and this one was the smaller one.  I thought the bread tasted like sawdust, but my customers loved it so we kept using it.

One day the bread guy didn’t show up.  We had enough bread from the previous day so I wasn’t particularly worried about it.  Then he didn’t show up the next day, either.  When I called the bakery to ask when they would be delivering to us they transferred me to the owner.  He told me that they had decided to stop delivering  to our part of Omaha.  This was the first I had heard of their plan, so I was pissed off and I let him know about it.  He just hung up on me so that was the end of my business relationship with them.  Forever.

Now, baking Italian bread is not rocket science, but it requires a little planning to know how much to make and when to start making it in order to give the dough enough time to rise properly and develop the correct texture and flavor.  I was very busy with other aspects of reviving a previously failing restaurant, so making bread and pizza dough wasn’t too high on my favorite things to do every day, but I did it anyway.  The upside was that my customers liked our bread more than the Italian bakery’s product.  They often stopped by for a couple of loaves to take home in the late afternoon when it was fresh from the oven.  Our pizza dough was way better than theirs, too, and we saw our pizza sales quickly rise to over 100 pizzas per night and over 200 on our Tuesday Pizza nights.  We competed with all the Italian places in town, but we sold a shit ton more pizzas than anyone else.

I had always tried baking dinner rolls at home for family gatherings, but I could never produce a really good one.  I got tired of wasting a lot of time trying to bake rolls for every gathering and usually I just bought them at the grocery store.  Sadly, the grocery store rolls were better than mine anyway.

When I opened my second restaurant, much smaller than the first one, I knew I wanted to make my own baked goods there.  The Italian bakery that crewed me over in the first restaurant was just one block away and my new place would also offer pizza as a small plate appetizer or as a light entree so they didn’t want my business.  They loudly voiced their displeasure at the fact that I was going to sell pizza right in “their” neighborhood.  Anyway, I developed a pretty good recipe for dinner rolls and began making them for our bread baskets.  The Italian bakery wasn’t too happy about that either, but I got over it.  After a couple of months of making them I decided to just make a nice focaccia bread in large sheets and serve that instead of dinner rolls.  I realized that  after 30 years I still hadn’t found the perfect dinner roll.  I eventually retired from foodservice without ever finding it.

So, a couple of months ago I was looking for something on the King Arthur Baking web site and came across a recipe for Amish dinner rolls.  The picture in the recipe looked exactly like what I was looking for so I made half a batch to try them out.  Bingo.  Big, beautiful, buttery brown tender crust on the outside, pillow soft and buttery sweet on the inside.  The ones in the picture above are almost two days old, but you get the idea.  I remember eating these at those big cafeteria-style restaurants when I was a kid.  Delicious and pretty easy to make.  You don’t have to start making the dough the day before and they keep really well if you keep them tightly covered.

I’m not going to include the recipe here because I don’t want to do any more cutting, pasting, and formatting than necessary, but you can get it for yourself at this link:

https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/amish-dinner-rolls-recipe

Incidentally, there are lots of really good recipes on the King Arthur web site.  In case you didn’t know, King Arthur is a company that produces baking ingredients and supplies.  Lots of good stuff there.

Good luck.  I’m sure your family and guests will love these.