I'm off! All posts at the Hairy Chasms until November 5 (US Election Day!) will be scheduled. Follow my walk blog here for my three-week-long adventure as I lumber from Busan to Andong, preferably without dying.
Posts will continue to appear here, less frequently (3 a day like last time), to entertain the five people who are too attached to this site to abandon it.
It appears that this has infuriated a few far left groups… so I will repost it. Can’t lie your way out of this one. Biden and Kamala were using FEMA dollars to help illegals. Not Americans. pic.twitter.com/OoD15eOHeu
— Anna Paulina Luna (@realannapaulina) October 8, 2024
ADDENDUM: FEMA and the cultural illnesses of the age.
The SRT is billed as faster than the KTX, but it's apparently also prone to overbooking, and when regular seats are sparse, couples can end up separated.
This older pair of people came aboard a couple stops into this trip. The old lady was directed by the gentleman to sit at the window seat next to me.... then he just hung around, standing there in the aisle and looking rather sad. He was obviously expecting me to give up my seat so he could sit with his wife or mother or whoever she was, and I tapped him on the forearm and gave him my seat.
I had a ticket for Car 5, Seat 2B; he had a seat for somewhere in Car 2. We traded tickets, but I could see it was going to be awkward trying to get my bag and trekking pole down from the shelf-like storage rack from the way the old lady had awkwardly jammed herself into her seat with her luggage next to her instead of being stowed. I didn't want to be separated from my possessions, so I elected to stand in the "cattle" section between cars with all of the overbooked people.
At several stops, the gentleman got up and showed me that a seat or two had emptied out, but each time he did that, I smiled and shook my head. I had paid for Car 5, 2B, and not some other damn seat.
We've gone a few more stops, and the "cattle" section has emptied enough for me to sit on one of those folding chairs attached to the wall, which I guess is where I'll be for the next hour. Enjoyable ride, this SRT!
A long tweet (click over, read, and watch the vid) that explains everything that went wrong with Tim Walz's recent "hunting" trip that was more like a photo op gone askew.
Tim Walz’s Hunting Gaffe Explained:🧵
— Larry Alex Taunton (@LarryTaunton) October 13, 2024
I’ve done a lot of pheasant hunting. As a high schooler, I made extra $ assisting guides on pheasant hunts: getting the hunters in the field, flushing game for them to easily shoot, and making sure they are safe. And much more since those… pic.twitter.com/IlyEQ7zAAn
In theory, my SRT departed at 6:24 (right now), and I'm on my way down to Busan. So how about some entertainment, ja?
This security video got passed to me by my brother Sean back in early August. It shows the moment I fell into the steps in the building where I work, got up with difficulty, dismissed some people who wanted to help, stood there stupidly for a while, then collapsed backwards as the infarction really hit.
A dramatic old lady at the real-estate office by the stairs claims that, when I fell, there was a loud Crash! Maybe there was, but from the look of things, I kind of rolled backward and fell at an angle, thus not falling too hard. I don't recall any of the above, and thank God I don't recall things like the CPR and the intubation, but when Sean showed me the video in August, one thing I noted was that the back of my head was just fine—no tenderness, no bruising, nothing. It was about as safe of a collapse as one could have. A lot of factors militated in my favor that day: the presence of people who knew how to do CPR (one of them a retired doctor), a nearby hospital, and timely admission to the ER, for starters. I'm thankful to everyone who helped me, and for everyone else's concern. People and circumstances came together.
My T-Money Go app is apparently unstable and likes to conk out. I got to Suseo Station early, and it refused to activate, so I asked a staffer for help. He couldn't get the app to work, either, so we went to a third person at an information desk, and she printed me out a ticket with a QR code. I've seen no place to scan the code, so they'll either scan it manually on the train, or they'll simply check the ticket, or they'll do nothing. This may be the last time I use the T-Money Go app. Too much of a hassle if it doesn't even work when you need it.
Leaving in a few minutes.
A screen shot of the 2-do list on my phone:
You can ignore all that nonsense at the top about carnivore buns, bagels, beef, and burgers. That's all happening when I get back. I discovered those carnivore (well, "carnivore") buns on YouTube and made a batch; I've been wanting to make them again in bulk so I can eat my favorite burgers at will. With non-sugar sweetener, they are plausibly good as burger buns. As you know, I hate onions, so in terms of toppings (or Alton Brown's "bottomings"), it's lettuce, tomatoes, and pickles. In terms of other things you put on a burger, my two favorite combos are (1) cheddar, bacon, BBQ sauce, and mayo; and (2) bacon, bleu, and mayo. I'll do other styles now and again; I've done Hawaiian (with the pineapple); Tex-Mex (with salsa, guac, etc.); vaguely Asian burgers like teriyaki, bulgogi, etc.; and I have nothing against a Burger King-like combo of American cheese, ketchup and mayo. Anyway, those checklist items have been up there for weeks with no movement, so they'll be there for me to tackle when I'm back. Once I'm on the train, I'll delete everything that's been checked off.
In terms of the other stuff, though, I'm disappointed not to have finished the care package, but I did get a major component of it finished last night. The care package will, alas, have to wait another three weeks before it goes out. I might or might not have a chance to proof our workbook's PDF one last time today, and as for writing those reviews... well, I have draft pages for both "The Boys" and "Deadpool & Wolverine" ready to be filled in.
I arrived at work today about an hour later than I'd hoped. Technically, I fulfilled my promise to come here "early" today to do that final proofread, but I had hoped to get here even earlier. I was dead tired last night, though, so I overslept and was sluggish getting out of bed. Once I start walking, though, I'll snap right into "my best self" mode, and waking up will be absurdly easy. It's the happiness of being on a long walk that buoys me: as I've said many times before, life is simpler when you're on the trail: your mission is just to go from A to B every day; there's little to nothing else on the agenda.
Last night, I called down to our building's repair crew to have them look at the leak in my bathroom's ceiling. As they usually do, they made an unholy mess in my bathroom; I had to waste the better part of an hour cleaning up after them. Their conclusion was that the leak I'd heard wasn't huge, and there was no danger of the water accumulating and reaching the LED light bulb, causing a fire. They told me to call them again once I was back from my trip. I'll see for myself whether there's been any more leakage. After they'd left, and I'd had myself a rare dinner (leftovers from the office), I turned my attention to that care package... and found I didn't have the energy to do much. I wrote up a crucial letter, and that was about it.
I also did a final load of laundry. I'd wanted to take out one last load of garbage, but frankly, there wasn't much garbage in my cans, and I had nothing in terms of food waste, so I think I can leave my room alone for three weeks without any worries. This morning, I shut off my toilet valve, closed all my windows, turned off crucial power strips to minimize the chance of random fires, did a hasty preflight check, and boogied on out. I'm at the office now; will be here until about 5, then I'm taking the subway to Suseo Station for my trip down to Busan.
One bothersome fact is that eleven packs of Survival Tabs (vanilla, butterscotch, strawberry, and chocolate) are rather bulky. The Tabs are light in weight, but I look forward to eating my way through half of them and reducing the amount of room the Tabs are currently taking up. Oh, well... better for it to be bulk than for it to be weight.
In "The Bridge on the River Kwai," one character says, "There's always one more thing to do." I'm sure I'll discover I've missed something, despite my preflight checks, once I'm on the SRT and smacking my forehead.
Oh, she's a shill....
She's a fake....
She was never a Dem to begin with....
Hard to believe my brothers and my buddy since 3rd grade were here only a short time ago to help me through the early stages of my convalescence. October 15 is Sean's birthday; he's 10 years my junior, making him 45(!) this year. He looks grayer than I do
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| (L) Sean, my little brother, and (R) Michael, my boss |
I think one thing that amazed me was how app-driven and app-adapted both of my brothers, David and Sean, are now. (David is seven years younger than me, by the way.) When they came to see me at the hospital, they both found places to stay in Seoul and figured out taxis and such with ease.
I'm pretty behind even by Korean standards: I almost never use my phone's apps, nor am I normally inclined to download new payment methods that use QR codes and abstruse special arrangements. I'm a troglodyte, and this is only going to get worse. Even friends my age are ahead of the game, telling me all the time about new sites and new apps that can be useful for this or that purpose. I generally pay for things with cash or with my check card, and occasionally with a credit card. I use the credit card (which is American) for many online purchases; it's a constant revolving debt that I'm always paying down every month, but it's nothing compared to the monstrous scholastic debt I defeated in December of 2020. Adapt or die, they say, and as society evolves, and my health deteriorates, it looks like I've chosen the or die path. But not David and not Sean. They seem quite conversant with all the newfangled stuff. They're built for the ever-accelerating modern world.
Sean is also keeping very busy, as is his wont. He's a professional cellist, a private tutor, and a founder of several chamber groups. He uprooted himself a few years back to start again in the Chicago area; I hope he's safely away from all the "mostly peaceful" shenanigans, but he just rolls his eyes at my fuddy-duddy rightie thinking. Sean used to call himself a libertarian, but I've always suspected he's a flaming leftie. Not that I love him any less. We both at least recognize that brotherhood outweighs (dare I say trumps) politics.
Happy 45th, Sean!
There's no Columbus Day in Korea, but it's apparently been going on all Monday in the US (it's Tuesday where I am). So Happy Columbus Day or Indigenous People's Day or Horrific Christian Oppressor's Day or whatever you're celebrating.
It's technically Tuesday, so I'll be leaving for Busan much later today. I'm going to finish hanging some laundry, do a little more packing, then turn in early, wake up early, finish the packing, take out my garbage to minimize the presence of bugs, then head on out to work with my pack and trekking pole. Once at work, I'll do a third proofread of the STP 10 workbook we've been working on, after which I'll leave the office around 5:00 or 5:15 p.m. so as to arrive at Suseo Station, about four stops down from where I work, in plenty of time to figure out the QR-code issue and reach my SRT's platform with time to spare. I'll board, head down to Busan, write maybe one or two more blog posts once I'm in my motel, sleep a bit, then wake up around 3 a.m. to grab a cab and head out to the walk's starting point: the Nakdong River Estuary Barrage Certification Center.
After that, this blog will be on autopilot, but I will probably add fresh posts now and then when big current events happen. I actually went a little overboard: on most of the next twenty days, the Hairy Chasms will feature the usual five basic, daily posts, not three. Anything more that I add (embedded tweets, links to videos, random stories or poems) will be icing on the cake. Otherwise, I'll let the scheduled posts unroll as they may, and all the rest of my active posting will occur on Kevin's Walk 8, this year's walk blog. On that blog, every day of the walk, I'll be posting in the afternoon or evening. At first, you'll get only ten pics per day plus insights and commentary, but once I'm back in Seoul, I'll go back to each post and upload the full complement of photos, adding captions and more commentary as needed. That process will take weeks, maybe months, and might even bleed into next year. We'll see.
Medically, I'll be taking my over-the-counter supplements plus my prescribed meds except for insulin, which I never liked, anyway. I can't store the insulin properly (in refrigeration) during the walk, so there's no point in toting it along. I'm going to have eleven days during which I'll eat little more than my Survival tabs (maybe a can of spam, too, if I happen by a convenience store), so my calorie deficit on most days ought to be huge, making my weight loss during the walk fairly significant (I'm hoping for at least 12 kg). If history repeats itself, as it usually does, I doubt I'll be able to maintain the loss; I normally regain my weight over the ensuing months, but this time, I'm going to try to break the cycle of weight gain, especially now that I know carbs can potentially kill me. More on that later.
So that's about it. There will be plenty of posts appearing on this blog, but most of the original content for the next three weeks will be over at the walk blog, so make your adjustments accordingly unless you hate walks and prefer the shit I do here.
Time to get a-moving. More soon.
And just like that, Kamala's entire bullshit campaign about being a "change agent" collapses. You can't call yourself a change agent when you not only agree with every single disaster Joe Biden is responsible for, but you brag about being involved in all those decisions! https://t.co/MWlXO4Ab4K
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 8, 2024
There's some debate about whether the following should count as an assassination attempt, per se, but read on.
Armed Man Arrested Outside Trump Rally in California Faces Gun ChargesCOACHELLA, Calif.—The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department arrested an armed man outside the perimeter of a Trump rally in the city of Coachella in Southern California, 130 miles east of Los Angeles, on Oct. 12.
At an afternoon press conference, the sheriff said he believes his deputies helped thwart an assassination attempt.
In a joint statement, the Department of Justice, Secret Service, and FBI said they are aware of the arrest.
“The U.S. Secret Service assesses that the incident did not impact protective operations[,] and former President Trump was not in any danger,” the agencies said in a joint statement.
“While no federal arrest has been made at this time, the investigation is ongoing.”
[ ... ]
The driver was taken into custody and booked at the John J. Benoit Detention Center for possession of a loaded firearm and possession of a high-capacity magazine.
He has since been released on $5,000 bond.
The suspect, in an interview with Southern California News Group, said he was “shocked” that he was arrested and accused of trying to harm the former president.
[emphasis added]
How on earth was he released? The mainstream media, meanwhile, is painting this guy as a conservative. If he's got a lot of guns and is honestly surprised to have been arrested, there's a grain of plausibility to that imputation. It's at least possible that he's a rightie (a rightie artist, though?*). But most rightie gun owners are responsible gun owners, i.e., they don't generally own unregistered weapons although they often joke that, should the gun-grabbers ever come, they might lose their weapons in an unfortunate boating accident.
“I’m an artist[;] I’m the last person that would cause any violence and harm to anybody,” he said.
The sheriff’s department said the “incident did not impact the safety of former President Trump or attendees of the event.”
Earlier in the day Bianco told The Epoch Times in a text message: “We arrested a man trying to get in the perimeter with two firearms who ended up saying he was going to kill the president.”
Bianco confirmed at the press conference that he believes his deputies helped thwart a potential assassination attempt but declined to comment on the alleged statements made by the suspect regarding Trump.
The sheriff said the man arrested is suspected of belonging to a “sovereign citizens” group that doesn’t believe in the authority of the government.
How stupid do you have to be, though, to try to get through a checkpoint with a bundle of fake IDs, a fake license plate (inside the vehicle?), and a bunch of unregistered weapons? I'll be curious to see what happens next. One thing I've learned from years of hastily (and wrongly) reporting and judging current events: things are rarely what they seem at first blush.
__________
*Sure, righties can be artists. But let's be real: what percentage of all artists, of every type, lean right? That's what I'm trying to say here.
UPDATE: an article that gives names and more specifics:
The suspect — identified as 49-year-old Las Vegas resident Vem Miller — was caught at a checkpoint about a quarter-mile from the rally with fake VIP passes to the rally and fake press passes — as well as unregistered weapons, including a loaded shotgun, a handgun and a high-capacity magazine, according to the Riverside County sheriff’s office.
UPDATE 2: this is already getting good:
The man they just arrested for supposedly "trying to kill" Trump in Coachella....is my good friend and business partner for America Happens, Vem Miller.
— Mindy MF Robinson 🇺🇸 (@iheartmindy) October 13, 2024
Vem had just exposed a huge Deep State cover-up involving the Feds and the Bundy Ranch scandal. So I firmly believe this is… pic.twitter.com/yYYaZIJYf1
The reply to this is easy enough: Trump hasn't served a day in the military. But the reply to that is: you can't bring up something macho now when your side is so devoted to tearing machismo down. Exhibit A:
OMG HAHAHA 😂🤣💀
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 9, 2024
Trump just played this epic clip of our old military vs our new woke military: pic.twitter.com/RlLdutL2jc
Here are the keto-ish cookies:
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| the grand view of all three batches (rather modest yield) |
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| second batch: five cookies that needed to be separated (a tiny offset spatula did the trick) |
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| third batch: nine cookies that mostly didn't need persuasion to be separated |
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| first batch: as with pancakes, this is the sacrifice batch, but the cookies actually tasted good, not burned |
These can be made totally keto by using Swerve brown sugar (which I don't like) and sugarless chocolate chips; I used Truvia's brown-sugar "mix" of Stevia plus regular sugar. It's more carby, but with way fewer calories, and half the carbs don't need to be counted, i.e., the net-carb count is half the real-carb count. Also, by using almond flour, there's only a third the carbs of regular wheat flour. I did use cashews, which are carby, and I used real chocolate chips because I couldn't bear to inflict sugar-free chips on my boss and coworker, so the chips carry the full impact of their carbs and calories. Overall, it's a somewhat healthier cookie, by which I really mean it's less damaging to your health. But it tastes awesome as a result; you wouldn't think diet cookie at all, expect maybe for the slightly more pliant texture.
This recipe, from the All Day I Dream About Food YouTube channel, is different from the one I'd used last time. That recipe had come from Joe Duff, and the result was a cookie that, despite cooling, was still too weak and flexible to be held by the edge without bending and/or crumbling. This cookie, by contrast, hardens up like a teenage boy at his first strip club. The batch made 16 cookies, all uniform thanks to my trusty, small ice-cream scoop. 4 disappeared today; the remaining 12 were taken to work and repackaged in smaller plastic containers, 4 each for a total of 12. I gave myself the worst of the remaining cookies; the two absolute worst cookies (which weren't bad at all, as I said above) disappeared in a tragic oral accident this morning.* Two more disappeared when I brought 14 cookies to the office, and the remaining 12 are now divvied up, 4 to a person, and have been placed at my boss', my coworker's, and my work stations for devouring tomorrow.
The ADIDAF recipe is by far the superior one. Joe Duff's isn't bad, but the result is just too soft to be practical for shipping or even room-temp storage.
I'll be heading out to the nearby Suseo train station on Tuesday straight from work. I'll likely leave around 5:15 p.m.; it's a 6:24 p.m. departure to Busan, and I need some Murphy's Law time to figure out the QR-code situation. It shouldn't be hard, as I've said before. But you never know. And that's it: I'll have finished my 2-do list, and I'll be enjoying simplified, streamlined bliss for three weeks before I'm back in time to watch my country explode in the aftermath of what will be an ugly, ugly election. If he wins, Trump should go all Demonic Donald on his enemies, knowing what he now knows about the nature and vastness of the swamp. If he wins. "Mostly peaceful protests," my ass.
__________
*Today is technically a fasting day, but I was impatient, hungry, and not averse to a little risk-taking. I had also spread my cookie-eating over several hours—2 cookies in the morning and 2 in the afternoon. Tomorrow, I'll eat my 4 allotted cookies along with a nice, salad-y lunch. Tuesday, when I go to Busan, is another fasting day, which I interpret to mean no solid food, but one smoothie plus diet sodas are okay (all of that technically breaks a fast, but my caloric and carb consumption will be way down). I'll be bringing along Survival Tabs for 11 of my meals during the trek. Gonna be brutal, but there should be significant (temporary) weight loss. I'm at about 108 kg right now; I could theoretically be well under 100 kg by the time I'm done. My goal weight has long been 90 kg, which is what I weighed in Switzerland as a college kid. I won't weigh 90 by November, but I might hit 90-something.
Awesome if true! Double taxation on the income of US residents in foreign countries is stupid. Article 4 of this document from 1976 doesn't look good for those of us in South Korea.
Watch K-slut make the same offer in 3... 2... 1...
Is it really persuasive to call a key cohort misogynistic?
“Black woman destroys all the arguments from CNN: Why are our black men being lectured to? Why are our black men being belittled? Nina Turner went off on Obama.
— 1776 (@TheWakeninq) October 11, 2024
• You could see it in some of their eyes; they didn’t expect what she said.” pic.twitter.com/vbsSlxKnKn
Maybe it's just plain stupid.
I fully expect there to be all sorts of shenanigans this time as well. In case you're wondering who Tina Peters is, she was just sentenced to nine years in prison for finding and declaring evidence of election fraud from 2020. The "justice" process around her case stinks.
Backup Data Proves Tina Peters Was Right: The 2020 Election Was Stolen by Democrats
Before getting hauled off to prison for allegedly “tampering with voting machines after the 2020 presidential election,” former Mesa County, Colo., election official Tina Peters backed up the proof she compiled showing that the 2020 election was tampered with and manipulated to produce a “win” for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
January 6 political prisoner John Strand tweeted the goods this week to prove that criminals deleted the audit trail and system logs before replacing real voting files with fake ones. This in effect rendered Donald Trump and other Republicans “losers” in 2020.
“Tina Peters backing up the elections data before they wiped the systems gave the public a rare opportunity to analyze before and after the tampering – and it shows clear and deliberate manipulation of the voting systems,” Strand explains.
“Now we know why the Democrat Judge in her case refused nearly all of her witnesses and excluded virtually all of her defenses, then sentenced her to 9 years in prison – because if this became a nationwide story the entire house of cards with Dominion could fall.”
WOW: Tina Peters backing up the elections data before they wiped the systems gave the public a rare opportunity to analyze before and after the tampering — and it shows clear and deliberate manipulation of the voting systems.
— John Strand (@JohnStrandUSA) October 8, 2024
-Audit trail deleted
-System logs deleted
-Voting… pic.twitter.com/OnBZEsczDi
Emphasis added. Read the rest.
ADDENDUM: a good argument for shenanigans: the Dems are panicking.
Sunday morning, at around 12:35 a.m., I took the elevator down to the B1 level, crossed the hallway into the stairwell, did some calf stretching, then clumped my way slowly up the stairs to see whether I could make it from B1 to 14 in one go, no stopping.
I did. So suck it, doubters!
I admit I sat and rested at the top, and I waited for a heart attack or some attack of lightheadedness or something, but all that happened was that my heart, which had been beating fast, started calming down as I got my wind back.
So I now know I can indeed go fourteen floors without stopping. And I also know I really need to work on my strength, which was much more of a problem than my cardiopulmonary fitness. I felt weak while walking up the stairs; my thigh muscles (on both sides of each leg—quadriceps and biceps femoris) bitched constantly after the first few floors. I hope the walk along the Nakdong River will help strengthen my legs. While the first major hill I face on the walk can be avoided by taking a tunnel through the bottom of the mountain, I think I might go over the mountain instead. We'll see. One more major hill after that, then as commenter Paul pointed out, there's a hill just outside of Andong City, but since I'll be traveling eastward at that point, it won't be much of a hill for me. Going westward is another story.
This is going to be a weird walk, taking everything backward up to Sangju. Then at Sangju, I'll pick up the trail I'd done in 2022. The route will be slightly different this time because I've picked different places to stay. But the end at Andong Dam will be the same, and that's an awesome place to finish a long walk.
