Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
what... a... bitch
This is incredible. As in the Latin roots for unbelievable (in + credere = not + believe, same cred- root as in credit card, a card that operates on the trust that you will pay a sum back). As in I find it hard to believe this is real. If this is real, this woman is a soul-sucking bitch. And she's the witchy impetus behind the woman-rejecting MGTOW movement.
In happier news, I caught the wifely half of the husband-and-wife team that I'd wanted to catch yesterday (didn't see the husband anywhere), and I handed over four cookies her—one last almond-flour chocolate-chip cookie and three Toll House cookies. That felt nice. But after watching the above, I want to take a shower. Jesus.
I'm torn
This sketch is cute, but it contains all of the awful, low-hanging-fruit puns that don't require any cleverness or deep thinking to arrive at. That said, I want to like this video because, even though these are some truly lame puns, they come at the viewer in a barrage, which gives them some comic momentum. What do you think? Watch the video and tell me whether you found the sketch clever or just facile.
Honestly, I don't want to shit on this. The young lady made an effort to put together a fun little skit. But maybe because I traffic in language all the time, I'm just not as blown away by this as I should be. Am I just being an asshole?
vindication
I had to wait a bit for Foundation Day and the Buddha's birthday to be over with, but as she'd promised, Miss Cho at Sookmyung Women's University wrote back to me today... and her email included a PDF copy of my employment certificate, which I'm sure she simply typed up on the spot given the vagueness of the dates on the certificate: It shows only "2005 to 2008" and not "April 2005 to April 2008." Whatever. The document seems to have all the official trappings and stamps, so I can now say that, in the eyes of Sookdae, I did in fact teach there. It's nice to have confirmation that I existed.
Getting this document was like pulling teeth, but none of this would have happened had it not been for British my ex-colleague Zoe, now living in England, who had made the suggestion to dig up my tax documents as proof of employment. So thank you, Zoe!
That's one more piece of the puzzle.
Job stuff:
✓ 1st diploma copy, converted to PDF & apostilled (arrived)
✓ 2nd diploma copy, converted to PDF & apostilled (arrived)
☐ FBI criminal background check, apostilled (no word yet)
☐ 2nd letter of recommendation, converted to PDF (coming soon)
☐ 3rd letter of recommendation, converted to PDF (coming soon)
✓ copy of 4th certificate of employment (2005-2008) (SMU)
☐ sealed transcript from Catholic U. (grad school—on the way)
☐ sealed transcript from Georgetown U. (undergrad—on the way)
☐ health check; scan form and convert to PDF for job hunting (receiving 2moro)
Personal stuff:
☐ colonoscopy scheduling
✓ completed (& uploaded) first movie-review ebook ms
☐ get listed on Soomgo
☐ sample lessons for universities that prove interested in me
☐ sample lessons for KMA (which probably won't hire me)
☐ lessons for private tutoring (lower priority)—test prep & various subjects
☐ more Substack material to last through September
☐ more interactive quizzes for Substack (w/different question formats)
✓ ebook version of the first movie-review book, published
☐ dead-tree version of first movie-review book, ms prepped
☐ dead-tree version of first movie-review book, cover prepped
☐ dead-tree version of first movie-review book, published to Amazon
☐ ms for the second movie-review book (long-term project)—start working on it
I also went in for my health check at the local doc today; I can pick up my report tomorrow afternoon, so I'll be by around 2 p.m. for that. My BP this morning was low at 97/67 (123/63 at the clinic, a few hours after having taken my meds this morning), and my blood sugar was down to 108, which is a lot better than it had been. At the clinic, they did a blood draw and got my urine sample; I also got a chest X-ray that required me to remove my shirt and wear a smock. The nurses were all very friendly. Unlike the last time I'd done a health checkup at this clinic, I didn't have to fill out a long patient history, thank Cthulhu. They weighed me, took a measure of my height (I think I'm shrinking as I age), and gave me an eye test with my contacts still in. I think I did okay with those tests. I think. I'll know more tomorrow when I read over my health report. All that really matters is that I be healthy enough to teach.
Some universities require that you get a health check from a specific clinic, so we'll see whether I have to go through this rigamarole* yet again. I hope not. I hope this health report will be enough. One more document for the repertoire.
__________
*I grew up with riga-marole. The first time I heard rig-marole, I did a double take, then looked the word up. Apparently, both are legitimate—rigamarole and rigmarole. Which do you say? I think rigamarole rolls off the tongue more easily.
"Hurt": the story behind the Johnny Cash cover
I had heard this awesome story years ago, and I'm happy to see it retold here so I can share it. You may have to click on the tweet to see the whole story.
"Hurt" is not an original by Johnny Cash. The song was written by Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) in 1994 for the album The Downward Spiral. Rick Rubin had to insist several times on Cash recording his version, at first Johnny found the idea completely insane because the original… pic.twitter.com/nDP2BqIvzn
— Ladytron Fan Account (@Lady_FanAccount) May 25, 2026
This story is a reminder that, however goofy and misguided so many artists are, they can also be examples of great collegiality, openness, and humility.
is this a trend now?
Is this a trend now? People being snotty to each other at the grocery store?
There’s always a bigger brain… this cashier proved it! 😂 pic.twitter.com/R2kVcI6Yc1
— Be Believing (@Be_Believing) May 25, 2026
I really hope this was scripted and meant just for clicks.
Monday, May 25, 2026
batches and batches
When you've got a small oven and lots of cookies to bake, there's little choice but to bake the cookies in small batches. Many small batches. My almost-keto cookie recipe yielded 19 cookies today (three overbaked, so only sixteen, really), and my Toll House recipe (nothing keto about these) yielded 30 cookies—one of which broke, so 29. I can put in one batch of eight on the oven's middle shelf. It's been killing me all day long not to ingest even a single morsel of cookie dough or even a baked cookie. Didn't even lick my fingers. I hope this restraint is earning me some good karma, but the fight against my fat and my metabolism is an eternal one. And I need to be as "clean" as possible for tomorrow's doctor checkup (well, I'm going to try to visit the doc tomorrow, but I can easily imagine him taking an extra day off to lengthen his Buddha's Birthday holiday, so I may have to go back on Wednesday).
The final batch of Toll House just popped out of the oven; I need to start wrapping the cooled-down ones. I've already wrapped all sixteen edible almost-keto cookies; once I've got sixteen of the Toll House ones wrapped, I'll be able to give away ten pairs of cookies to the grocery staff (assuming the store is even open today; today is the extended holiday for the Buddha's birthday), then go up to the lobby to give away four pairs of cookies to the concierge staff. I might have one or two extra pairs of cookies to give away; there's a basement-resto ajumma and ajeossi (married couple) who've always been friendly to me; if they're around, I'll give the last two pairs of cookies to them. If I had thought ahead, I'd have bought some tiny, little gift bags in which to place the cookies in along with a message sporting my face so they know who this "Kevin" is. Here are some some shots of tonight's cookies:
 |
| sixteen keto-ish almond-flour cookies, all in a row |
 |
| one keto-ish cookie up close |
 |
| Toll House cookies in a small tray, having oozed into the tray's corners, guaranteeing strange shapes. |
 |
| Lots of Toll House cookies. Did you notice the broken one? Yeah, that one's mine. |
In theory at least, I'll be giving out 16 keto-ish and 16 Toll House cookies tonight, which will leave me with zero keto-ish and 13 Toll House cookies. For lunch with the boss this coming Saturday, I'll probably make more batches of the cookies, plus a rum cake, but I might go gentle on the rum based on my Korean ex-coworker's negative reaction to the alcohol.
UPDATE: I didn't see the restaurant couple, so I gave some cookies to the very undeserving sushi guy, whose resto I tried once (when he'd opened his place) and decided never to try again thanks to skimpy portions, poor quality, and over-fried prawns. I gave out ten pairs of cookies to the grocery staffers, then went upstairs and gave four pairs of cookies to the lone concierge—the friendliest guy on staff. I quickly explained that half the cookies were made with almond flour, and the other half were "regular" chocolate-chip cookies. So of the sixteen pairs of cookies, I came back with one pair left over.
IT IS HERE!
My newest ebook—Sights, Sounds, Words, Volume 1: Movie & Book Reviews, 2004–2015—is now available for sale on Amazon.com. I found a ton of goofy typos with the help of Amazon's e-text preview app and AI, and I found a few more random errors—misspellings that looked like regular words (e.g., at one point, I had mistyped single as singe). The latter type of error is much harder to catch, and before I put out the dead-tree version of this book, I'm going to have to comb through the ms very, very carefully to make sure every last error gets caught and corrected. I'm not looking forward to slogging through a 400-plus-page manuscript yet again, but I'm going to dive back into it later this week.
Today, though, I'm taking a break from walking and manuscripts to bake and distribute cookies to my building's staff (concierges and grocery employees, mostly). Tomorrow, I'm taking a very early-morning walk, then seeing my local doc about getting a health checkup for my hypothetical university job. Also later this week: I'm visiting KMA to see what I can see and looking into getting onto the Soomgo app, where I'll hang out my private-tutoring shingle. I've got a lunch on Saturday, May 30, with the boss and his family, and things just get busier from there. Disappointingly, I haven't seen anything other than summer-camp ads on Dave's ESL Cafe, and Unijobs.kr isn't currently showing anything I can plausibly sink my teeth into. Maybe my guess was wrong that university job ads would come out in May. Maybe I should've said June. All that said, go pick up a copy of my new ebook for only $2.99. If you find any further typos in it, email them to me, and I'll make corrections. If you've bought the book (and you must have if you're finding typos), then rest assured your purchased text will be updated with the corrections I implement. That's one of the nice things about Amazon ebooks.
ADDENDUM: If you're holding out for the dead-tree book, it'll be out sometime in late June.
remember
Memorial Weekend
— Tom Moore (@junogsp7) May 24, 2026
2026 🇺🇸 🫡
This is such a poignant and respectful remembrance for all 9,387 US soldiers who paid the ultimate price for our freedom on D-Day in Normandy.
French caretakers’ tradition of taking sand from Omaha Beach and scrubbing it into the letters of the… pic.twitter.com/f6Pn0zT9iW
when the skull is a glass house
When I was younger, I lived just a stone's throw away from a family who all died of mysterious head injuries.
— Weapon 𝕏 (@HellRaz0r1776) May 16, 2026
it's all about the waiting now
I've spent all day (and it's now technically Monday) finalizing my ebook manuscript, and I've uploaded the ms plus the front-cover art. Monday, I'm going to tear my attention away from the book so I can bake some cookies as a belated Buddha's Birthday gesture to our building's concierges and our grocery-store staff, who are almost all very friendly and helpful (except for one strange-looking lady who seems a little, uh, avoidant).
The process to upload a manuscript as a Kindle doc is complicated. First, you open the Kindle Create app on your desktop. Next, inside the app, you find the MS Word document that you want to convert to Kindle Create format. Hit "convert." Next, you have to comb through the converted document to unfuck all of the formatting fuckups in a 400-plus-page manuscript. This takes hours, and these errors can be anything from unnecessary font-size changes for chapter titles to text-alignment problems not found in the original document but generated simply by the act of converting the file from MS Word to Kindle. You are, of course, creating a "reflowable text" document from what had originally been a "fixed text" document, which may be one reason for all of the conversion problems.
After hours staring at your document and correcting all of those little errors, you must next export your Kindle document to its final format: KPF (also known as .kpf). That's right: Just because you converted your doc to the Kindle Create file format doesn't mean your file is ready for upload! The beast must assume its final form! So, .kpf it is.
Once that final conversion is done, and your cover art has the proper dpi and dimensions and file format (300dpi .jpg in this case, 1600 × 2560 so it looks good on tablets), you may now go to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and start the product-uploading process. Select "ebook" as the thing to upload, then enter the title, author, and ISBN information. Click off the SEO categories and subcategories by which to find your book, then start uploading (by the way, this is only a rough description of the process; I'm tired, so I'm not going to retrace it/relive it step by step). My cover art uploaded just fine, but when I uploaded my .kpf-formatted manuscript, I got a flag saying there were at least fifteen spelling errors.
I guess Amazon wants to make sure every ms it receives is letter-perfect to protect its company image. Whatever AI the company is using, though, is awesome. My own piece-of-shit MS Word for Mac did a final run-through evaluation of my document and told me there were no spelling errors at all, which turned out to be a load of shit. So I opened up the Kindle Create version of my document, the MS Word version, and activated the online Kindle previewer, which showed me every single spelling error it had caught. And wow, were some of those errors old. I know I make typos all the time, especially after my stroke, but fifteen, even in a 400-plus-page document, seems a little shameful. Still, I was too wowed by the Amazon AI's awesomeness to feel guilty. If anything, I was glad the errors had been caught: You don't want to look like a fool when you're first publishing something. Quality control matters.
Using the Amazon Kindle previewer and error-finder as my guide, I then proceeded to correct (1) the uploaded .kpf manuscript showing in my preview screen, (2) the Kindle Create version of the ms on my desktop, and (3) the MS Word version, which I need in order to make the PDF for the dead-tree version of my book (out in a month, I hope). The process of correcting errors in all three documents took another two hours, but when I hit "upload changes," the .kpf document successfully uploaded this time. Cue my sigh of relief.
There was more stuff to fill out and enter, then the flag came up saying my book would take up to 72 hours to appear and be on sale. In my experience, ebooks appear a lot faster than 72 hours. All the same, I'll be sure to announce it when it shows up (it hasn't yet). It'll doubtless be there when I wake up in the morning.
There's already one little change that I saw I'd need to make (copyright page—not a major thing), so I'm going to have to reupload the revised .kpf file once the book is out (you can't reupload before then). Come to think of it, I'll do the reupload first before announcing that the book is out. It makes little sense to have customers buy the book before it's completely ready (even though changes can be made to the book even after a purchase, and the revisions will appear in the purchased ebook copy).
Oh, yeah—someone else bought a copy of my Think Like a Teacher ebook.
Sunday, May 24, 2026
he's very... polite
Americans—and it's not entirely their fault—have screwed-up ideas about Japanese food. Guilty as charged.
finalization day
Everything in the movie-review book is written. I have front matter, a preface, a table of contents, an afterword, and a bio, all now bookending the movie and book reviews that are the volume's main content.
I converted my manuscript to a Kindle-format file, but as Murphy's Law would have it, lots of little formatting changes crept in, so I have to go page by page through the thing and make fixes wherever I find problems. Better brew myself some dang tea. Shower first, though.
another walk today
Another 10K walk today, but no photos. Instead, I'm slapping up an image of a map showing me right at my turnaround point (exactly halfway), with the distance home shown. Multiply that distance times 2 to get the total distance I walk. I've seen that half-distance number vary anywhere from 4.5 km to 5 km, hence my constantly changing estimates of how far I'm walking when I go up to the Han River and back.
 |
| an image from yesterday's walk, from right at my U-turn point |
It was a hotter walk than yesterday; I can tell that summer is cranking up. Pretty soon, I'm going to have to make the terrible choice to walk either late at night or very early in the morning. The latter choice might be interesting if only because it would feel as if I were on one of my trans-Korea walks.
sagesse merdique
Do you know who Laocoön is? He's the Trojan priest who warned the walled city not to let in the wooden horse. His warning is normally paraphrased as, "Beware Greeks bearing gifts." (More literally, "I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts.")
Saturday, May 23, 2026
today's walk
Today was a gorgeous day for a walk, and it wasn't even that hot except when I was out in direct sunlight. In the shade, things were decidedly cool, and my walk to the Han River included plenty of shade. First—a parade of roses on the way to the footbridge that takes me out of my neighborhood and toward the Tan-cheon.
 |
| This bunch of roses was at an awkward angle, so I had to hold the camera low. |
 |
| roses hangin' out by a neighborhood park |
 |
| Gettin' a little tired in the direct sunlight... I can relate. |
 |
| Try not to think Georgia O'Keeffe thoughts. |
 |
| richly pink |
 |
| brazenly open—Madam! I do declare! |
 |
| Just how many roses are there? |
 |
| a sort of artsy, photo-op kind of trellis |
 |
| This one seems to have about had it. It's only spring, ma'am! |
 |
| deep red |
 |
| Hang in there. |
 |
| the pinker club |
 |
| This is a nice shot. |
 |
| There were white roses and ones that tended toward yellow/orange. |
 |
| nice, but looking a little frazzled |
 |
| pink, pink, pink |
 |
| We breed them for their proudly exposed genitals. |
 |
| Another halfway decent shot. |
 |
| shooting downward from the ascending footbridge |
 |
| I bet there was a cat involved. |
 |
| Tan-cheon fishy, fishy, fishy fish that went wherever I did go. |
 |
| It was big. Would you call this a carp? I bet it tastes like creek mud. |
The AI god guesses this is a Soragoi koi (a type of carp).
 |
| corn poppies, red poppies, or Flanders poppies (In Flanders fields...) |
 |
| el gato, seen on the way back to my place |
 |
| too intent on hunting something to care about me |
 |
| still stalking |
I'd had a bit of a rough night yesterday, but there was not a twinge of angina during today's walk despite my 4-kph pace (slow for the rest of you, but fast for me).
Anyway, it really was a perfect day for the walk I took. I'll likely walk again tomorrow. But I've also got some cookies to bake and to dole out in my apartment building for the Buddha's birthday. Happy Birthday, Shakyamuni/Seokgamoni!
the Bob, the pop
Fascinating, Captain. A form of Bob never before encountered.
 |
| balloon-popping compilation |
Pretty wild, what you can do with dedicated practice.
nearing the end
Tomorrow is the Buddha's birthday. I'll be spending it working on the finishing touches for my movie-review ebook. I've written an afterword and a bio, and I just finished a two-day slog through the 120-plus-chapter table of contents. It's no small thing to create 120-some links from each list item in the table of contents to its respective book chapter. While each part of the process is easy, requiring only ten short steps (some highlighting, typing, and clicking), I had to repeat this sequence over 120 times. Not fun. And it's easy to lose focus. Anyway, the link-installment is done, thank Cthulhu, and all that's left is to check the chapter numbering and verify that all 120-plus links work. Oh, and I need to write a preface.
Much still to be done, there is.
Friday, May 22, 2026
no, thanks—no summer camp for me
A bunch of summer-camp job ads are out now at Dave's ESL Cafe, and for a while, I seriously considered breaking one of my own rules and applying to work at a camp. Then I watched a video, linked on one of the job ads, that showed summer-camp activities from the previous year. And I quickly changed my mind.
If you like kids, have a lot of energy, and enjoy leading those wild, squirmy little creatures in activities like songs and games and other social activities, then summer camp is definitely for you, but it sure as hell isn't for me. I shriveled in fear when I saw what was going on in that video. Frankly, I have a lot of respect for people who teach classrooms full of kids. It takes a ton of energy, and you have to be "on" at every moment. Not to mention alert for shenanigans ranging from innocent to malicious.
So I'm still waiting for a decent university ad to appear. In truth, there have been a few, at both Dave's ESL and at another site called Unijobs.kr (thanks, Daniel), but most of those jobs require a Ph.D as well as a proposed research topic (if you write an article while you're a professor at University X, that's a feather in University X's cap). One Yonsei ad looked tempting at first, then I saw that the job wouldn't start until early 2027, and I don't have enough cash to last that long (plus, it's another one of those doctoral-level jobs).
Something will show up soon, I'm sure. It's the season for uni ads.
Meanwhile, in other news, the post office sent me an automatic notification that the FBI has received my fingerprints. I'm either going to get rejected when my prints prove unacceptable or going to get a criminal background check mailed back to me in a few weeks. (I hear the FBI, being a governmental agency, works molasses-slowly.)
For the moment, I'm using my time to complete my movie-review-book manuscript. I just finished the table of contents, the front matter, the afterword, and the ending bio. Still to do: the preface. Then I have to review the table of contents to make sure the chapter numbers all match up, and that none of the chapter numbers got skipped or otherwise miswritten in either the table of contents or on the chapters themselves. After all of that is done, I think I can convert the file to the .kpf format and upload everything. After that, making the dead-tree version of the book ought to be easy.
After I finish the ebook and get it published, I'll turn my attention to registering on Soomgo, the find-a-tutor app used by Korean mothers to locate area tutors (Soomgo is for a variety of services ranging from EFL tutoring to housecleaning to car repair). I had put my in-apartment ad up a few days ago, but there's been not a single nibble thus far. Soomgo, despite online chatter about how competitive it is, looks more promising. We'll see what happens. I'm not too hopeful; summer is the a major time for Korean families to go together on major trips. Then again, I've been away from in-home tutoring for years, so I need to relearn the market. I'm sure there's plenty that I don't know.
another one that would kill me
It looks good and hot and delicious. But it would definitely kill me if I tried to eat the whole thing. Ridiculously decadent. But is that homemade Nutella?
when waffles meet geometry
But from the look of it, I'm seeing a 5-by-5 grid reduced to only 17 squares.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
