I’m a junkie. Dunno what makes me this way, but I accumulate junk.

I spent the better part of Memorial Day working on my junk. Specifically, I have a collection of old toilets and parts thereof in my back yard. I call it Old Time Pottery. My wife calls it grounds for divorce. I spent a few hours cleaning the pots up, making a detailed inventory, and finding a place in our storage building to house them in an organized fashion. When I need a certain item that is otherwise extinct, I draw from my stockpile. I sell it for a good profit and the customer benefits because he avoids the cost of a new item and, often, the associated labor. For instance, replacing a tank lid requires much less labor than pulling an entire toilet and replacing it. That’s the beauty of junk.

Of course, it’s not all that beautiful sitting in the back yard with weeds growing around it. Hence my Memorial Day Inventory. Now that the pottery is ensconced in its fortifications, the yard looks much better. My wife is only mildly palliated, but that’s still progress.

Yesterday, having worked on plumbing jobs until past suppertime and having then mowed the grass, I drew out an old faucet I’d pulled from a remodeling job last year. It was a good old faucet that the customer wanted to replace, so I had saved it in my faucet collection. (I have about ten or fifteen.) I cleaned it up last night, replaced nearly everything in it, and bagged it nicely for this morning’s 9:00 customer. I got to bed at about 11:00 last night, but I was proud of myself because I had reclaimed a fine old faucet, I’d sell it for a profit of about $35, the customer would save about $40

After an hour or two of struggle this morning, I had the new/old faucet installed. As I was putting it through its paces before leaving, I found that it was leaking internally. It was, in other words, no good. I pulled it and installed another rebuilt faucet in its place. Total time on the job: three hours.

What does a rational person do after a faucet disappoints him like that? He throws it away and says, “Bad faucet: I spent a lot of time preparing you and a lot of time installing you and and it was all a waste because you have a flaw internally. I never want to see you again and I’m not going to invest my time in junk any more!”

But we’re not dealing with a rational person here; we’re dealing with a junkie. As soon as I can get around to it, I will take that faucet apart so far as is possible and I will take a torch and repair that internal flaw.

No, I can’t get rich this way. But I can be happier than any rich person I know. In fact, I am!

I’ve posted a couple of new things to my web site. One is a short announcement of a free Bible Study software package called e-Sword. The other is an essay about salvation, the most important topic in the world.

Today is May 25th. Thirty five years ago God had mercy on a thirteen-year-old kid in Houston and took away my sins and guilt for Jesus’ sake. I was born again during the altar call at a Sunday morning service in a Baptist church. It has been the defining moment of my life.

Here’s a hymn I memorized long ago:

All praise to God who reigns above, the God of all creation
The God of wisdom, power, and love, the God of our salvation
With healing balm my soul he fills, the God who every sorrow stills.
To God all praise and glory!

Then come before his presence now and banish fear and sadness
To your redeemer pay your vows and sing with joy and gladness
Though great distress my soul befell, the Lord our God did all things well
To God all praise and glory!

Don’t eat knives, either.

Do not–I repeat–do NOT eat raw frogs.

I’ve never installed one of these, and I’m not sure that want to.

Nick Berg was murdered last Saturday. The videotape of his slaughter appeared on the Internet this week.

Our generation of Americans is woefully ignorant of the real history of warfare. The recent photos of Americans mistreating Iraqi prisoners provokes massive revulsion, but the reaction is out of proportion to the offenses. (Yet the most recent reports indicate that there are even worse photos emerging now; so I’m not referring to them, only to the earlier ones.) Nobody approves of Americans mistreating prisoners, but what we’ve seen in the earlier photos was mild compared to warfare as it really can be.

More typical of real war is the murder of Nick Berg. The militant Muslims are facing hopeless odds against the Americans. Their only hope is to break American morale. Public slaughter is a time-proven method of doing just that. As you can see from the American reactions, it works.

In 1565 the Muslims were winning the world until they were defeated in their seige of Malta. The Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, Jean de la Vallette, commanded a force of about 8,500 men, most of whom were not real soldiers. Only 541 were his Knights or servants-at-arms. The invading Turkish force numbered around 50,000. How could the Christians win? Only by intimidation.

After four months of besieging the Maltese fortifications, the Turkish commander offered favorable terms of surrender to the Christians. La Vallette responded by gathering up his Turkish prisoners, who had been captured in earlier conflicts, and ordering that their heads be struck off. Their headless bodies were then dumped into the sea in full view of the invaders. And their heads were loaded into cannons and fired like cannonballs into the midst of the Turks.

The Turkish invaders did not appreciate this at all.

The seige was resumed, but the Turks could not prevail. Upon hearing that the Christians had received reinforcements, they decided to abandon the effort and sail away. This was just in time for the Christians. Unknown to the Turks, La Vallette only had about 600 fighting men left and Malta was on the verge of collapse. But just as the Turks had gotten into their ships, they received word from their intelligence sources that the Maltese reinforcements were only a handful of men, not nearly enough to make any difference in the battle’s outcome. So they decided to resume the seige after all.

As they were leaving their ships to take up their former positions, La Vallette ordered a charge. His men came pouring out of their fortified positions and threw themselves furiously at the thousands of Turkish fighting men. This so intimidated the Turks that they fled. They had already lost at least 30,000 troops by fighting with these Maltese madmen and they had no more heart to pursue the campaign.

Thus was Malta saved from Muslim conquest, and Islam was turned back from its European campaign.

Butchering the enemy in order to demoralize the survivors is nothing new. In Viet Nam, I think it was, a Viet Cong jungle fighter would sneak into a camp where two Americans were sleeping side by side and silently cut the throat of one. Why not both? Because the second one became nearly useless from the terror of waking up and seeing what had happened, and his condition demoralized others as well. More bang for the buck, so to speak. [Note: I have learned from my uncle, a machine gunner in the Pacific during WW2, that Americans used the throat-cutting trick back then. So the Cong didn’t invent it.]

Our opponents in Iraq are not sissies. They intend to defeat us. If their will is greater than ours, they’ll succeed.

Added note: the Left around the world are blaming Berg’s death on G. W. Bush or a CIA plot or even on Berg himself. See this article.

Thinking back to April 14th, I recall that I waited until the last minute to prepare my tax return. My accounting is pretty rudimentary, so there’s every motive for procrastination. �How can one get excited about wading through 400 little receipts and coughing up $5,000?

Big government has a stranglehold on business. �Comparatively few businesses can navigate the web of regulation and taxation successfully. �I refuse to involve myself in the mess, so I remain a sole proprietorship. �Were I to grow, the friction from the government would increase exponentially.

New topic: a small mistake can be costly. �Recently I inadvertently broke the side mirror on a customer’s Mitsubishi Galant. �That cost me two hours and $30 to repair. �I’m glad that I wasn’t booked solid with jobs that day, so I could take the time to drive to the auto glass shop.

Would the customer have let the average plumber drive off with her car? �Personal attention is the killer app in a sole proprietorship, but I’ve seen plenty of solo guys who tried to run their business as though they were big and impersonal: not answering the phone when they didn’t feel like it, not returning calls, not caring for the customer’s property, not inconveniencing themselves. �Their customers find me eventually.

Bad driver drowns in sewage treatment plant. Centuries of plumbing for the public good were totally wasted on this guy.

This needs to happen a lot more.