Category: Announcements

I hope you readers are reading the comments on this blog. There are some incredibly bright people leaving comments here. Not only are they bright but they are eloquent and passionate as well.

I do not deserve the privilege to call these people friends.

I don’t know … maybe I’ll start posting the comments on the face of the blog. These guys are making points that are far better then much of what I try to communicate.

In order to keep in some semblance of condition I ride a bike. Typically I try to do a modest 100 miles a week. Usually I do that in 25 miles intervals. The best I’ve ever averaged for 25 miles is 16.5 miles per hour and usually I come in at about 15.5 mph. Almost always I ride by myself but today I had a riding partner. That may have been the difference as I averaged 17.2 miles per hour over 25 miles.

Now I feel guilty for not pushing myself harder when I ride alone.

This morning I had the treat of watching a man begin to navigate manhood. A 18 year old friend of mine, Matthew Potter, embracing the roll of fledgling entrepreneur, held the first slaughter of the chickens belonging to “Pottervilla Pastured Poultry.”

Matthew, opting out of the route of college, investigated the ins and outs of processing pastured chickens and then purchased and built all that was necessary to launch into this business. First he built a portable chicken pen so that the chickens could have constant fresh pasture and live like God intended chickens to live. Next Matthew ordered the necessary parts to build his “Whizbang Chicken Plucker,” a device that automatically plucks the feathers off the chickens. Somewhere in this process Matthew ordered, via the mail, his first batch of chickens, some layers and some roasters.

Last week I was notified that Matthew would deliver up his first processed pastured chickens. Now, I grew up a country boy and I remember the way we used to process chickens when we use to lay them on the block and take a hatchet to their necks. Matthew’s process is more controlled then that. Matthew took three standard orange road cones and cut them off about 25% down and then took those and bolted them, narrowed end pointed toward the ground, and left to right to a wooden stand. The bolted cones stood about four foot off the ground. The process begins with Matthew fetching a unstressed chicken that has led the good life and sticks it, head first, into the cone so that its head pokes out the bottom with its feet poking out of the wide point of the cone. With the chicken stuck in this position, Matthew cuts the main arteries so that the chicken completely bleeds out. From here Matthew scalds the chicken in boiling water for a few seconds. From here Matthew introduces his piece-de-resistance, the Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker.

The Whiz Bang Chicken plucker is a device set in a plastic barrel that has been cut in half. Inside the barrel, strategically placed soft rubber fingers project five inches from different points all over the barrel. Matthew places two chickens that have been scalded into the Whiz Bang Chicken plucker and hits the power and the barrel begins to vigorously rotate much like your washing machine on spin cycle. In less then 10 seconds the birds are plucked and naked. From there Matthew cuts the head off, guts the bird and passes in on to his erstwhile Vanna White assistant (his Mom) in order to salvage the gizzards, livers, and hearts for those customers who have developed the acquired tasted for such chicken entrails.

What he offers to the consumer is a chicken that a normal person would want to eat. This is a chicken that isn’t factory produced. This is a key distinction since the chicken you buy in the grocery story is anti-biotic and broth injected, fecal bathed, and chlorine saturated. Matthew is offering a chicken that a human would want to eat.

I cannot begin to express how impressed I am with Matthew’s entrepreneurial initiative. If Christians want to build a parallel culture they have to work to become financially independent from the present culture. Matthew isn’t just raising and killing Chickens. Matthew is modeling how Christians can achieve a certain leverage over this culture precisely because they are not beholden to it.

I hope that people who want to eat decent chicken will contact Matthew at potter@pottervilla.net. Matthew is giving a good product at a competitive price.

Now, if I can just convince him of covenantal theology complete with infant baptism and communion.

Obama Loves America The Way O. J. loved Nicole

A banner slogan on the Pemberton Republican Club’s Web site

I wish I could be that witty.

I won’t have to worry about spending time weeding my garden this year.

I love gardening. Every year we plant around 100 tomato plants and 50 assorted pepper plants plus rows of green beans. We do broccoli, cauliflower, eggplant, cabbage, brussel sprouts, turnips, beets, radishes, watermelon, various kinds of squash, cucumbers, etc. Then in harvest time we can and freeze to beat the band.

Well, for 2008 all of that is history. We had a beautiful garden growing but what surely must pass as the worst flash storm I’ve ever seen in my life all of our garden is toast. We had buckets of hail that just destroyed all of our plants. Kind of sad to see all those naked plants.

God does all things well.