from over 30 years ago

Ross Perot's haunting prescience (credit to John from Daejeon).

dey krayzee

This is why you hear all those bitter, half-joking jokes about repealing the 19th Amendment:

RACISM: White liberal women calling a black man a ‘race traitor’ to his face is next level insanity. pic.twitter.com/ogUpaHfmpq

— @amuse (@amuse) April 8, 2025

Where does the hyphen go and why?

our brains are apparently full of microplastics

Hello, dementia! See here. It's not just in our balls.

sorry—I did it again

Dinner went great. There were seven of us at table. After eating her gyro, the Missus's mother, who had visited when I'd made my Moroccan-inspired chicken and has since become a fan of my cooking, said I needed to open a restaurant, which is the same compliment I'd gotten from an Aussie coworker in 2017. My buddy Mike, his younger daughter (not my goddaughter), and I all had seconds. Others may have done so as well. There was very little left at the end, but there's enough to make makeshift Greek salad if people want. And maybe one more gyro.

Alas, I once again forgot to take any pictures, so you'll have to use my blog's search window to look up "gyro," or "gyros" or "gyro meat" on your own. Sorry. Maybe I can make a gyro for myself for lunch tomorrow and photograph it. But I know it won't be the same.

from 2019, a partially made gyro

I used to prep lettuce as part of the array of gyro toppings, but I've concluded that lettuce is a waste: I myself have rarely ever put it on my gyros after the first couple of years of making the dish. So, for toppings, I stick to: tzatziki, feta, sliced olives, sliced cherry tomatoes, minced cucumbers, and sliced pickles. I don't leave out sliced onions unless someone asks for them.

ADDENDUM: since I'm using Charles's flatbread recipe, I can't take full credit for this meal. One day, I'll tweak the recipe or come up with something completely my own and more directly applicable to gyros. This flatbread, with its yogurt component, is basically repurposed/reappropriated naan.

Rand Paul stands firm

this happened a few days ago

I got my license in the mail a few days back:

The "C" restriction on the license means I wear contacts (technically, corrective lenses).

So mission accomplished, I guess. I like how my chicken-scrawl signature, never very neat, seems to say "Mugly" or maybe "Marly." The star (upper right) indicates the REAL ID.

I'm off to go walking at a nearby park Mike told me about. Back in a few hours.

Gyro meat is thawing slowly.

Tyler Fischer versus Joe Biden

morning slob-out, morning prep

I normally sleep very late and wake up very late in Korea—one of the perks of working as a "creative" is the weird hours, and it helps to have an American boss. This isn't to say that I sleep longer than normal people: I get about 5-6 hours of sleep a night, which probably means I'm sleep-deprived. Being housed with a family, though, means you don't want to look like too much of a slob even if you might be feeling the lingering effects of time-zone dislocation, a.k.a. jet lag. (Frankly, I didn't feel too much jet lag, which I've heard is common when you're flying east. It's gonna be interesting when I go back west to Korea.)

Anyway, my alarm got me up at 6:45. a.m., EST, so I drained the dragon and promptly went back to sleep until almost 9 a.m., which means everyone was out of the house: Mike to his property-management company, the Missus to her elementary school, and the son to his job (the nature of which I've already forgotten, dammit... the perils of aging). I made my bed (a complex ritual that, in my own apartment, is much simplified), brushed my teeth, did my numbers, re-bandaged my big toe (still leaky), started a batch of my laundry (almost done as of 11:50 a.m. today, Thursday), and finished most of the rest of the prep work for tonight's dinner. This means I diced or sliced or chopped or minced up a bunch of olives, cukes, pickles (yes, both cukes and pickles), cherry tomatoes, etc. If the family wants raw onions for tonight's dinner, I'll slice those up, too. (Note to self: buy Mike a mandolin.)

The last bit of prep is to take out the frozen brick of ground beef/lamb, let it thaw an hour, then slice it into strips that can then be pan-fried (what I usually do) or broiled on a tray. The meat-cooking can then happen maybe 30 minutes before dinner—or, hell, I can do it earlier and just store the meat in its rendered fat until dinnertime, then microwave it just before we eat. Whatever works.

So that's been my Thursday morning.

images

Reminds me of the urinal game.

Her professor is probably a white, liberal woman.

Suckers.

Where does the comma go?

Same people who personify the earth as Gaia.

Breeders are disgusting.

This, kids, is what perfect English looks like. (Or do you see a flaw?)

Brian "Bullethead" Stelter

"Remeber?" He has a stuffy nose. And don't capitalize "president." Learn the rule.

Same thing here. Learn the goddamn rule. And: comma + period.

At least he said "feel bad" and not the erroneous "feel badly."

Peanut gallery! Does he have a point? I don't think he's totally wrong.

Could be. Could be.

Where does the comma go? Why is "billion" capitalized? A lot of retarded apes think capitalize = emphasize.

a holdover from when Trump didn't know whom he was picking

But we're stuck with Amy for the duration. (from March 6)

bulletproof hay bales?

pics from today (Wednesday)

Today wasn't so much about walking (I walked around Historic Fredericksburg for maybe 30-40 minutes before sitting down to lunch with my buddy Mike) as it was about prepping for tomorrow's dinner. Mike's family has a housekeeping lady who is something of a hand-me-down from Mike's brother-in-law; she apparently comes by once every two weeks, and the prospect of her arrival today (she was to clean from about 9 a.m. to around 1 p.m.) prompted me to put on my introvert hat and leave the house earlier than 9 a.m. I regretted this since meeting the lady would have given me an opportunity to practice some Spanish with her. So I spent a lot of time driving up and down Route 1. I even stopped at a Starbucks to compare the experience of an American Starbucks to a Korean one. Conclusion: I really don't like either of them, and all those hypocritically anti-corporate liberals who love their Starbucks and their Apple products (full disclosure: I'm not a liberal, but my home desktop and laptop are both Apple products) can go hump each other.

After wasting time tooling around, I went to take a short walk along the canal path in Historic Fredericksburg before meeting my buddy Mike at Foode, the restaurant in the building where he works, for lunch. I took a lot of pics of the spring blossoms prominently displayed all over the Fredericksburg Altstadt. Our seating at Foode was rather unique: Mike's building is venerable and has been converted or repurposed more than once; part of the first floor used to be a bank, and Foode preserved the actual bank vault, which is where we'd been given a table (Mike had made reservations). The vault had apparently held safety-deposit boxes, according to Mike. I was in a "to hell with it" mood, lazily promising myself that I'd take care of my utterly wrecked blood sugar upon my return to Korea, so I ordered the "Fredericksburger" (since it came with no onions) with tater tots. Mike got a fairly unhealthy (but apparently very tasty) omnibus breakfast sandwich... also with tater tots, which Mike had recommended. My burger was fantastic, as were the bad-for-you tater tots. Mike's sandwich, with its craggy-looking bread, reminded me of a keto burger. Our server had also mentioned an array of possible specials; I ordered the Bananas Foster on a vol-au-vent-style puff pastry as dessert. When it came out (we were given two spoons—how romantic), I immediately thought the puff pastry was nearly impossible to cut through with the spoon, so I used my knife to be able to pierce the resistant bottom. Otherwise, it was a great-tasting dessert, with the rum taking kind of a back seat (not a complaint! I liked that).

Upon returning to Mike's house after 2 in the afternoon, I saw that the housekeeping lady had left, and Mike's son had been placed in charge of making the night's dinner. Mike's son is talented in several areas, but he's also a good cook. He asked me to try his tomato sauce, and I found it delicious. I got to work prepping the gyro meat for Thursday's dinner—a 50-50 combo of ground beef and ground lamb, herbed, spiced, and seasoned with my generically Middle Eastern seasoning (the same seasoning I'd used for the previous meal of Moroccan-inspired chicken; see the spice combo below). I also made twenty flatbreads from Charles's eternally useful recipe. Normally, I make batches of four; this was my first time making so many at once, and it took me a while. While Mike's son cooked his sauce and added crumbled sausage to it, I finished prepping the meat and turned my attention to the flatbread. Prepping the flatbread was technically simple but time-consuming. I rolled out the twenty 80-gram dough balls and pan-cooked them in five batches; I finished after Mike and his wife had come home from their respective jobs. Mike's wife made a salad to accompany her son's meal (the pasta turned out to be penne, which Mike noted is not normally served with a meat sauce—a claim that seems to be contradicted online; I'd certainly never heard that claim before).

The beef/lamb combo was put in a Ziploc bag and left in Mike's meat freezer to harden up. Tomorrow, I'll bring it out, let it thaw for an hour, then cut it into gyro-meat slices for pan-frying. The flatbreads (technically naan, but now repurposed for Greek-ish food) are also Ziploc'ed away and will be reheated tomorrow evening at dinnertime. Tzatziki is already done; I tasted it again today, and it tasted about spot-on. Still to do: shred some lettuce (but lately, I never use lettuce myself), halve some cherry tomatoes, cube up some cucumbers, chop up some olives, put the crumbled feta into a bowl, and Bob's your uncle.

When I did my short walk earlier today, I took a lot of pics, and I took some pics, later on, of meal prep. Take a look:

My buddy Charles apparently watches over the dead.

Mike says this is a Masonic cemetery.

stormtrooper graffito

a Lady Banks rose...?

lots of tulips in Historic Fredericksburg

our bit of virtue-signaling for the day

Cherry blossoms... I wonder what's going on in Korea.

purplish tulips

"Feed me, Seymour!"

Cercis chinensis (Chinese redbud), like at Skyline Drive

We have this plant in Korea.

Nandina or sacred bamboo

lovely tree on full display

It's not just Koreans who love abstract sculpture: behold "Dancing Milkweed."

possibly a "lady tulip"

walking toward the trail

I barely had time to walk a short segment of the trail before I had to head to Foode for lunch.

a virtuous dog shits out Thor's hammer

Turtle... I've never seen one in the wild in Korea.

nice picnic spot, but no shade

Not the same thing, but this reminded me of all those 배수문/baesumun (drainage gates) in Korea.

quaint houses along Princess Anne Street, Historic Fredericksburg

human assholes

another house in what is sometimes called FXBG, i.e., Fredericksburg

Impressive wrought iron reminded me of a chick I knew who loved wrought-iron works.

more cherry blossoms

I guess wreaths aren't just for Christmas.

Fredericksburg Baptist Church from a distance

St. George's Episcopal again

Read some history.

the building where Mike works

My/our recalcitrant dessert.

But it tasted great.

spice/seasoning/herb combo for the beef and lamb

most of the flatbreads, done

a few still undone

the Missus's quick salad to supplement the son's pasta dinner

photo taken before I ate it all

Today was a carby contrast to my effort yesterday. I'll be paying for this, I'm sure. But I'm back in Korea on the 15th (leaving on the 13th), which means I'll be back to my weird existence as a jobless singleton, no longer a world traveler.

Tonight's agenda before sleeping: watch a few more episodes of Season 3 of "The Expanse," which has a lot of flaws but is admittedly engrossing. Tomorrow: finish up those veggies in time for Thursday-evening dinner for seven people.