who doesn't like a good toffee?

another Chrissy meal with Chef Andy

Again, save it for later this year.

Minority Report: review

Tom Cruise as John Anderton

A 2002 science-fiction actioner directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, Minority Report is a near-future tale about freedom versus predestination, societal intrusiveness and oppression, and survival versus self-sacrifice. It's based on a 1956 Philip K. Dick novella, The Minority Report. The film also stars Max von Sydow, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Neal McDonough, Patrick Kilpatrick (playing a heavy as usual), Lois Smith, Kathryn Morris, Tim Blake Nelson, Peter Stormare, and Mike Binder. This was my introduction to Colin Farrell, whom I casually thought to be American.

John Anderton (Cruise) is a neuroin-addicted cop in 2054. Six years earlier, his young son Sean was kidnapped and never found. Devastated and motivated by the loss of his son, John works with Lamar Burgess (von Sydow) to take an idea developed by the geneticist Dr. Iris Hineman (Smith) to create Precrime, a system that takes advantage of the clairvoyant gifts of three genetic mutants who are blessed or cursed with the ability to see future crimes, especially premeditated murders. Sudden crimes of passion are harder to predict. Precrime has gotten crime-prediction down to a science: the "precogs" have a vision that is transmitted to the officers, led by Anderton, who decipher the images' clues, then rush to the scene of the imminent murder in time to stop it from happening. As a direct result of this agency, crime in Washington, DC (where much of the story takes place) has dropped by 90%, with murders becoming so rare as to be almost nonexistent. But there are people who have trouble with the idea of arresting someone for a crime that hasn't been committed—among them is Agent Danny Witwer (Farrell), a young and ambitious Department of Justice functionary and former seminarian who sees flaws in the Precrime system and has grave philosophical misgivings about Precrime's role. Anderton, by contrast, is a believer in the system, so he and Witwer take an immediate dislike to each other. Lamar Burgess, the head of Precrime, is about to take the program to the national level, and as Precrime's nationalization is on the verge of coming to a vote, something happens to John Anderton.

What starts off as a routine Precrime case goes haywire when Anderton discovers, to his horror, that the precogs have named him as an imminent murderer of a man named Leo Crow (Binder), whom Anderton has never met. Immediately suspecting that he has been set up, Anderton evades attempts at arresting him and goes on a search that takes him to the residence of the now-reclusive Dr. Hineman, where he learns that, on occasion, the three precogs occasionally disagree in their visions of the future. Two of the precogs are male, but the strongest precog, Agatha (Morton), is usually the one to produce a minority report. Per Precrime policy, minority reports are generally purged to keep up the appearance of infallible predictive ability, maintaining trust in the Precrime system at the cost of total honesty. Anderton is desperate to find out whether a minority report exists for him, and Dr. Hineman confirms that, even if the record has been destroyed, Agatha still retains her own imprint of the future crime. Anderton must somehow infiltrate Precrime headquarters, kidnap Agatha, and persuade her to give him her alternate visions—assuming she does, in fact, possess a minority report in her head. Infiltration of Precrime will be a messy business: the world of 2054 is one of total dominance by both a governmental surveillance state and utterly intrusive corporations that use your personal data to target their marketing right at you. (Sound familiar?) Much of this is done by an advanced form of ubiquitous retinal and facial scanning, so Anderton realizes he will have to switch out his eyes and alter his face to be able to go anywhere without being scanned and identified. How far does the mystery of the setup go? Does Anderton end up killing Leo Crow? Does he succeed in extracting Agatha and acquiring his own minority report? Who, ultimately, is the person who set Anderton up, and why?

Minority Report doesn't lack for action, mystery, thrills, dystopian futurism, and philosophical questions about fate and freedom. Coming hard on the heels of Spielberg's unsuccessful 2001 A.I., this much more successful 2002 effort features magnetic cars; newspapers and cereal boxes covered in marketing-driven animated imagery; creepy eye-replacement surgery in filthy conditions; modern, engineered drugs; and a futuristic Washington, DC that combines grimy retro architecture ("the Sprawl") with sleek, futuristic home designs. A kind of rudimentary, not-quite-3D holographic tech serves as entertainment, but there are still recognizable elements of our era's civilization, such as huge department stores and, out in the countryside, quiet farmhouses. Minority Report succeeds with its washed-out, futuristic visuals; nifty sci-fi gadgets (wouldn't we all want a sonic shotgun?); fast pace; and the emotional motivations of its main character.

But the movie fails on multiple levels—something I either didn't see the last time I saw this film years ago or just didn't remember. On the basic, superficial level, there's the problem of Spielberg's perennially sloppy "movie logic," which takes away the seriousness of scenes that could have been more impactful had they been scripted better. Why do the precogs, who are a hive mind when together, occasionally sink under the water of the pool they're lying in ("the Temple")? How does Anderton, during a chase scene, manage to survive the car-assembly factory without getting entombed inside the car he's hiding in while it's being assembled by robots? Where are the assembly line's guards? More importantly, how is Anderton able to use his original eyes—now in a Ziploc bag after his eye-switching surgery—to penetrate Precrime's eye-scan security? Wouldn't Precrime have locked him out as persona non grata the moment he became a suspect? Even Anderton's ex-wife (Morris) uses Anderton's eyes to break into a detention center to rescue her ex-husband. None of this should be possible. At the detention center, which is run by the organ-playing guard Gideon (Nelson), the prisoners are held in a dreamlike state of suspension similar to a coma, unable to move and trapped with their own thoughts while Gideon plays his organ to soothe them (and why are they standing?). When Anderton first visits Gideon as a non-prisoner, Gideon guides Anderton to a particular killer who had supposedly murdered a woman named Ann Lively (Jessica Harper). What struck me about this scene was the unnecessary bizarreness of it: To access the relevant prisoner, Gideon and Anderton telescope out on a gantry that moves among the prisoners, who are stored in vertical columns that can move up and down, obligingly dodging out of the way, like a slow-motion game of Whack-a-Mole, as the gantry moves in and swings from side to side. While this spectacle looks very pretty, it's strikes me as utterly unnecessary: why not just go directly to the prisoner in question? Why wade through an undulating sea of prisoners to get to him (see the scene here; ignore the added music)?

But Minority Report, despite its timely warnings about rampant corporatism and government intrusiveness, fails on a much deeper level: It fails in its exploration of the philosophical question of fate and freedom. Freedom and foreknowledge cannot coexist: If you know—in the rigorous, philosophical sense of know, i.e., know infallibly—that some future event is going to occur, then that's possible only because the future event is already there to be known. This is what is known as the B-theory of time ("block theory"). When knowledge is diagrammed out, there's the knower, the act of knowing, and the thing known. If you're able to change the "outcome" of what you think you know, then that outcome was never predestined because it was never there to be known. You can't know what's not there to be known.*

The movie uses a kind of visual shorthand to demonstrate its own Precrime-justifying logic: Anderton rolls a ball along a curving console toward Witwer. When the ball reaches the edge of the console and is about to drop to the floor, Witwer catches it. John asks why Witwer caught the ball. 

Witwer: Because it was gonna fall.
Anderton: You're certain?
Witwer: Yeah.
Anderton: But it didn't fall. You caught it. The fact that you prevented it from happening doesn't change the fact that it was going to happen.

Do you see the flaw in Anderton's logic? The ball didn't fall, which already means there is no fact that [the fall] was going to happen. Witwer was there to catch the ball. Later in the movie, Agatha tells Anderton, "You always have a choice," something that Anderton later tells his boss Lamar. Precrime assumes a kind of metaphysical determinism that is necessary for citizens to believe that Precrime truly possesses reliable predictive power. As Witwer suggests, though, there's a paradox in claiming to be able to prevent the inevitable.

The movie ultimately agrees with my above argument, and it sides against this smug version of "early" Anderton and with the cause of human freedom. And the fact that the precogs can have alternate visions of the future means that the future isn't set. So it goes back to Yoda's wisdom: Always in motion is the future. This ties back into an idea that I have seen over and over again in books and movies, and which I've talked about in many previous reviews: Evil entities always talk and think in terms of destiny, inevitability, and inescapable outcomes; good characters always talk and think in terms of choice, freedom, and open futures. The idea that You can alter your destiny is incoherent: if you can alter your future states, then you don't have a destiny. By definition, a destiny is inalterable. Applied to Minority Report, this way of thinking about good and evil means that Precrime's emphasis on metaphysical inevitability makes it an evil entity.

As a result of all of these superficial and deep problems, I enjoyed Minority Report a lot less, this time, than I did on previous viewings. In many ways, it's still a "good enough" movie: well acted, bleakly color graded, creepily dystopian (we're living that future now), and disturbingly prescient in its extrapolation of certain economical and governmental trends into the near future. But the sloppy way in which the movie handles details and plot logic and the deeper ways in which the movie fails to grapple properly with the philosophical questions it seemingly faces mean that Minority Report, which I used to think of as an awesome film, is merely a good film—and good only for people uninterested in deeper questions of fate, freedom, and Orwellian trends. Even by the end of the story, the larger oppressive society in which Anderton lives hasn't been undone by the story's events. I've even seen fan theories speculating that the movie's conclusion, which bizarrely includes an out-of-nowhere voiceover narration by Anderton, is at best an illusion: Perhaps Anderton is still trapped in prison, living out a fantasy while in an induced coma. If that's true, then I have to tip my hat to Spielberg for being even darker than I ever imagined he could be. Years ago, Minority Report would have gotten an enthusiastic thumbs-up from me. Now, at best, it gets a thumbs-sideways.

__________

*Long ago, I saw a pastor on YouTube attempt to overcome the incompatibility of freedom and foreknowledge by arguing, "When I put a cookie on the edge of the dinner table, I know my son will run by and grab the cookie. My son has free will; he chooses to grab the cookie, so [my] foreknowledge and [his] free will can coexist."—thus preserving the theological notion that God knows your life "from eternity," that he knows every detail of your past, present, and future—and that you're still somehow free to choose your actions.

But the cookie illustration is a dumb argument when you think about it because it doesn't prove the son has free will. If the son reliably grabs the cookie every single time, you're merely reinforcing the case that your son is a prisoner of his compulsions, not a free agent who can choose not to take the cookie. Note, too, the pastor's philosophically sloppy, unrigorous use of the word know.

attempted suicide by cop: a lotta that goin' around

But the perp did not succeed in dying.

not my favorite curry

East Asian curry is definitely not my favorite. I'll eat it if you give it to me, but it's not my go-to. I much prefer the slap-yo-mouth curry straight out of India. Even the spicier types of Thai curry are better than the overly sweet nonsense they serve in Japan and Korea. But in the video below, Adam has a go at Japanese curry, and it doesn't look horrible.

nachos, reimagined (slightly)

Princess Mononoke: review

wolf-goddess Moro (Gillian Anderson) and San/Mononoke (Claire Danes), wearing the skin of her adopted race

Princess Mononoke is a 1997 Japanese anime film by famed director Miyazaki Hayao (surname first, Japanese style). Like a lot of East Asian films, the movie depicts a bewildering network of interconnected and not entirely symmetrical conflicts revolving around the themes of nature versus industry, the limits of compassion and forgiveness, and of course, peace versus war. The English-dubbed version that I watched features the voice talents of Billy Crudup (sounding remarkably like a young Tom Cruise), Claire Danes, Minnie Driver, Billy Bob Thornton, John DeMita, John DiMaggio, Jada Pinkett Smith, Gillian Anderson, Debi Derryberry, and Keith David.

Prince Ashitaka (Crudup) of the marginalized Emishi people encounters a cursed boar-god that has become a demon, utterly covered in wormlike tendrils of pure evil and hatred and initially invisible as a pig. The demon comes crashing through the forest near an Emishi village, and Ashitaka, who rides a fleet stag named Yakul, manages to kill the demon with some well-placed shots from his bow. But the demon's writhing covering of wormlike protuberances manages to catch hold of Ashitaka's arm during the fight, and the prince's arm is cursed. A village elder informs Ashitaka that the curse will grow and consume him, and he will die. Ashitaka also learns that inside in the corpse of the boar-god/demon is an iron ball—a round from a rifle and the reason for the demon's pain, suffering, and hatred. If Ashitaka finds the source of this rifle round, a mission that will take him into the forest of the gods, there may be a chance that he will solve the deeper problems of demonic attacks, the withering of the forest, and the deaths of forest creatures. Ashitaka must, at any rate, depart from his home, being cursed, and the Emishi rule is that no one may witness his departure.

As Ashitaka journeys to the forest of the gods, he begins to learn about the wider world and the various conflicts happening around him: another boar god (David) is preparing to lead his boars to war against humans in the region of Iron Town, where metal is collected and smelted, and the smelting fires are supplied through the chopping-down of large swathes of forest. A tribe of apes is also looking to go to war against humanity, and a wolf goddess named Moro (Anderson) has adopted an abandoned human girl named San (Danes), known to the citizens of Iron Town as Princess Mononoke (a mononoke is a general term for a vengeful spirit). San thinks of herself as a wolf, and she shares the forest creatures' grudge against the humans, who have despoiled the land in their lust for metal-smelting. But it is becoming obvious that, as the human industry gathers strength and size, the creatures and spirits of the wood must inevitably lose their conflict with the humans. Ashitaka learns all of this and is alarmed: he wishes for all factions simply to live in peace. Lady Eboshi (Driver), leader of Iron Town, claims to be the one who shot the boar god; she is uninterested in peace with the animals and spirits, but she is also not uncompassionate as she has taken in many lepers and others, whom she cares for and who help with the smelting, tool-making, and gunsmithing. And at the heart of the woods is the mysterious Forest Spirit, which takes both the form of a human-faced deer and the form of the Night Walker, a gigantic, Wendigo-like spirit that wanders the land, presiding over life and death. How will these conflicts play out, and will Ashitaka find a way to remove the curse that's slowly killing him?

I'm not the biggest fan of anime, and I've never been a huge fan of East Asian story structures, either, with their often dizzying and labyrinthine crosscurrents of conflict, shifting alliances, changing motivations, and obscure goals and purposes. That said, it was easy enough to suss out this movie's major themes, which are what I'd laid out at the beginning of this review. Westerners might have a hard time relating to Japanese notions of spirituality and divinity; the gods and spirits in this anime universe possess properties that we don't associate with gods in our own modern, Western concepts of theism. In Princess Mononoke, gods can be shot and killed; they can even be beheaded by shots from rifles, but the act of beheading, instead of killing them, just motivates them to go looking for their heads, sowing destruction in their wake as they search. How much of this comes from actual Japanese mythology and how much is made-up "theology" for this specific film, I have no idea. How satisfying the film might be for a first-time Western viewer is anyone's guess. While the visuals are rough but beautiful (for a 1997 film), it's often hard to know what rules and principles are governing the main characters' behavior. As with many East Asian movies, there's little to no romantic potential between Prince Ashitaka and San, a.k.a. Princess Mononoke. There's a vague hope, at the conclusion, that the two might become friends who visit each other on occasion.

While I think the film tried to convey a good message about the eldritch power of nature and the need for human civilization to strive for greater harmony with it, I found the complex conflicts and sometimes obscure character motivations to be a bit off-putting. I also found it ironic that a major part of San's clothing is what looks a lot like a wolf pelt that she almost always has slung across her shoulders. What does her adoptive mother, the wolf-goddess Moro, think of her adopted daughter wearing a wolf pelt? The issue is never even raised. I also didn't like how San was drawn in general; she comes off looking like a 1700s-era European's generic depiction of overseas "savages."

In conclusion, I don't think Princess Mononoke is for everyone. There's a good message about loving nature buried somewhere in the plot, but the vast constellation of ever-colliding characters (I haven't even mentioned Billy Bob Thornton's faux monk Jigo, who is in league with Lady Eboshi, and who attempts to abscond with the Forest Spirit's severed head) crowds this message out in a tangle of plot-related contrivances. I, for one, am in no hurry to see this movie again, and the story doesn't heighten my appreciation of anime in general.

I've never had a proper porchetta

change of plans

not the "meme" I'm talking about, but one like it

Finishing up the final three Bad Online English entries for my The Superficial publication on Substack took longer than expected today because one of the "memes," stolen from John McCrarey's site (and more of a joke than a meme), was so long and had so many errors that it took a big chunk of my day to get through it. My work rate slowed to a crawl. I doubt I'll be doing those sorts of "memes" ever again: They're written by and for illiterates, and they're annoyingly formatted: long jokes that are center-justified for some odd reason, which makes them visually annoying.

Nevertheless, on Wednesday, I did successfully get through all three remaining Bad Online English posts, so that's now covered through the end of April. And I did get through two out of three of my intended The Profound posts (on interjections) for the day, and while I might be able to keep up a three-post-per-day rate for the remaining sixteen posts, I'm thinking that I might want to change my plans.

What I'd like to do instead is generate enough Profound posts to get me through my upcoming walk, then do the rest of the posts once I'm back. That means generating five more posts, which can be done in two days, then using the rest of my time from February 28 to March 14 to do other things. It occurs to me that I ought to generate more interactive grammar quizzes since I'm very behind on those, and I can get back to creating my movie-review book, adding around five chapters per day. I ought to be more than halfway through the book's creation by the time I go down south to do my walk, and the book—ebook version—ought to be done and ready for self-publication by the halfway point in April. The dead-tree version ought to be ready by the end of April, by which point I'll once again have to generate another couple months' worth of Substack material and, come May, start looking for steady work, assuming Substack and self-publishing remain a bust.

Once I'm back from my walk, I'll need less than a week to finish making The Profound posts that will see me through May.

think about using this for this year's Christmas

would Dr. Ekberg agree?

aroused garden gnome

Right there, almost dead center, hips thrust forward, huge boner:

Come see my wood elf, honey!

Maybe you think all gnomes wear pointy hats. Bigot.

farmer's carry vs. suitcase carry

People who are masters of weightlifting will scoff at this, but I just discovered this truth for myself: there's a marked difference between a farmer's carry and a suitcase carry. There are too many variations of each exercise to count (sets, reps, arm position, dumbbell vs. kettlebell, time vs. step number, banded vs. stable, etc.), but the fundamental difference is that a farmer's carry involves both of your arms while a suitcase carry, as the name implies, involves only one—as if you were lugging a heavy, wheel-less suitcase through an airport.

Up to now, I've been doing even and uneven farmer's carries routinely. Both work your core and increase your back strength along certain planes of movement. Neither is really a rotational exercise; I've got other exercises to deal with that issue. The variations I've been doing, in what are admittedly minimalist workouts (enough to rebuild lost strength after a stroke and a heart attack), are as follows: 10-kg/10-kg (left/right hand) farmers carries, and 20-kg/10-kg alternating farmer's carries (I do marches in my apartment). And that's it. 

But just the other day, I randomly discovered something while I was holding only a 20-kg weight: the suitcase carry, for me at least, fires the opposite core muscles more than a farmer's carry (balanced or uneven weights) does. So today, I added 20-kg suitcase carries to my regimen, and damn, I can feel it in my core. For a guy still dealing with frozen shoulder, the 20-kg suitcase carry is the vertical answer to the side plank—no joke.

So that's my underwhelming discovery. Just thought I'd share the lameness.

stand back

cocoa deity

It's not just Amaury Guichon.

architecture geekery with Dami

only three more to go

found here

While I'm not a whole day ahead, I'm most of a day ahead of schedule with Substack-content creation. I'm probably going to need the extra time: With The Superficial almost all done, I have The Profound still to do. The original plan was to do three posts per day and be done in six days since there are 18 posts that need to be done in total to get me through April. But that might prove to be an insane pace. At my current speed, given what I've already done and assuming I do three Profound posts on Wednesday and all of the days after that, I think can be done with everything by March 6, which will give me plenty of time to get back to my movie-review book as well as to start prepping in earnest for my upcoming Geumgang walk. Even if I end up finishing The Profound on March 7, it's not a tragedy. That's still a large time margin and a lot of breathing room.

I'm glad I ordered my Substack work in the way I did, starting from the easy material to the harder material. Psychologically, it brings a feeling of accomplishment and encourages a can-do spirit for when the more difficult material comes around, as is happening now with The Profound. Also, if I have time, I might vibe-code some more quizzes via ChatGPT to reinforce my Substack material. Quizzes are easy enough to code; I had reached a sticking point when I tried vibe-coding my Do You Deserve to Vote? app. I'll get back to that, though: I've had a few ideas in the interim.

As always—there's plenty to do. But first, The Profound. 18 entries' worth. Let's see whether three entries per day is even possible.

he starts off with a dangling modifier

mountain-cow AI art

How now, carabao? Sure enough, there are free "convert photo to Chinese brush art" sites online. I saw this nice photo of a mountain and a cow/carabao* on John McCrarey's site and made it into color and B&W brush art. Here's the original image:

And here are the brush-art conversions—color, then black and white:

color, but not much color

Is it just my dirty mind, or does anyone else see a garden gnome with a boner almost dead center?

Which do you like better? (I bet you're gonna say, "The photo!")

*It's got the prominent, curved horns of a carabao. But I could be wrong: Maybe it's just a cow.

I'd love to try this

ululate!

Robert Carradine, 1984 and more recently

A sad ending for Robert Carradine, dead by suicide at age 71. Carradine is famous for his leading role as Lewis Skolnick in Revenge of the Nerds. He was apparently bipolar for almost twenty years. Part of the Carradine acting family, Robert is the second Carradine (half-)brother to kill himself, the first being older brother David Carradine of Kung Fu and Kill Bill fame. In David's case, the suicide might not have been intentional since the sordid circumstances involved autoerotic asphyxiation. (What good is all of that kung fu discipline if it doesn't help you resolve your kink?) In Robert's case, it sounds as if this was simply a matter of crushing depression. The only time I've ever been that depressed was right after my mother died, and I do remember asking myself why I was still alive after I'd woken up from a long sleep the day after her death. But for most of us, life after such a tragedy goes on, and we make our way through the world—maybe stronger, maybe just scarred. But clinical depression and bipolarity, which I admit I don't understand that deeply, can apparently pull a person into some very dark places. While part of me still sees suicide as a selfish and shortsighted act, another part of me has grown to realize that I live with—and haven't yet mastered—my own compulsions, so maybe I'm not in the best position to judge others who, for chemical or other reasons, can't seem to see any way forward. RIP, Robert.

why the mailing difficulties?

The Hanjin Shipping Service has been telling me that I need to reregister my personal information for them to be able to ship an Amazon book down to Masan. This problem has been going on for more than a week. A Hanjin staffer called me Monday morning; Amazon emailed me last night (Monday night); today, I've been in contact via email with Hanjin again, and they're now telling me I need to reregister my information at the Korean "Unipass" website. The fun never ends. When did mail stop being a straightforward thing?

UPDATE: (5:00 p.m.) I just got a Kakao message from Hanjin that my book was finally released from Customs and is now on its way to my friend Neil in Masan. Next time I order a book copy, I'll have it delivered to me since that sort of book delivery has happened twice this year without a hitch, then I'll mail the book myself to Masan or to whatever in-Korea destination is in the cards.

signs of spring

It's still February, but South Korea is warming up, and the ROK Drop blog has a photo of spring blossoms in Busan. 

I hear the US east coast, from the mid-Atlantic to New England, is getting beaten down by a "bomb cyclone" that's brought lots of snow. Normally, I'd say that Korean weather roughly mirrors mid-Atlantic weather since we're at similar latitudes (Seoul = 37.5ºN; northern Virginia = 38.6ºN), but I guess this is one of those times when there's a radical difference. Good luck to my fellow Virginians, both with the weather and your new governor.

Freudian subtext?

roasting a Tim Allen movie (low-hanging fruit)

we all knew

And the one reason why she got famous is now a huge, ponderous mess.

more Star Wars shenanigans

whoa—am I ahead of schedule?

If I'm ahead of schedule, it's by only a day, but it still feels good to be on top of things. I want to get back to completing my movie-review book. You may recall the schedule I'd laid out:

This weekend: Work on five weeks' content for The Entertaining (through April).
Also this weekend: Repopulate scheduled posts for the blog.
This coming week, Mon-Tue: Create eight weeks' content for The Creative.
This coming week, Wed-Sat: Create eight weeks' content for The Superficial.
3/1-3/7: Create eight weeks' content for The Profound.
3/8-3/14: Get back to creating the first movie-review book.
3/16-3/20: Walk the Geumgang bike path. (This year's "long" walk, only 146 km.)
3/21-end of March: Finish creating the movie-review book.

I've now gotten through all of this:

This weekend: Work on five weeks' content for The Entertaining (through April).
Also this weekend: Repopulate scheduled posts for the blog.
This coming week, Mon-Tue: Create eight weeks' content for The Creative.
This coming week, Wed-Sat: Create eight weeks' content for The Superficial.
3/1-3/7: Create eight weeks' content for The Profound.
3/8-3/14: Get back to creating the first movie-review book.
3/16-3/20: Walk the Geumgang bike path. (This year's "long" walk, only 146 km.)
3/21-end of March: Finish creating the movie-review book.

Now comes the hard part—content for The Superficial and The Profound. I may as well take a short break, then start on The Superficial tonight. While I'd love to be done with The Profound before March rolls around, that's probably not going to happen: The posts I do for The Profound are lengthy and detailed. They also contain quizzes, and you can't just write out quiz questions willy-nilly: you have to follow certain criteria to make sure your questions are fair, and that you're quizzing your learners on what they've actually learned.

Anyway, I have to whip up 18 posts each for The Superficial and The Profound. If I do nine posts of the Superficial by tomorrow (Tuesday), then another nine by Wednesday, and if I somehow manage the miracle of creating three posts per day for The Profound, I can be done by March 3, putting me way ahead of schedule. From March 4 to March 14, I can get back to working on the movie-review book, then do my five-day Geumgang walk, then finish the ebook version of the movie-review book a few days before the end of March. A week or so after that (early April, theoretically), the print version of the book (print-on-demand) ought to be ready at Amazon. Fingers and tentacles crossed.

let us revisit the horror that was Cats

wow—a new paid subscriber!

Starting in March, a lot of my paid content on Substack will include free previews for my free subscribers. But it seems I've already snared an extra paid subscriber, and it's not even March. I'd like to think that this is the beginning of a cascade, but Murphy's Law says otherwise. That said, anything is better than nothing.

And if I do end up moving out of Seoul to pursue university work somewhere, I will continue to post on Substack, but I might have to reduce my volume somewhat. There will still be a ton of content, and for $5 a month, you'll get more than your money's worth.

beware the stink

I haven’t laughed this hard 🤣🤣☠️ Omg 😆 pic.twitter.com/rJ1FbZaXKl

— G-PA (@IndianaGPA) February 22, 2026

did you even notice?

There are things I do on this blog that often matter only to me. For example, I've explained why I defy convention when it comes to how I use ellipses or how I used to use em dashes (back when I wrote em dashes as a double hyphen, i.e., before figuring out em dashes on both Mac and PC). Ellipses are normally supposed to be three or four periods* with spaces in front and behind each of them:

She gave Brent a smile . . . then pulled the trigger.

What I normally do is:

She gave Brent a smile... then pulled the trigger.

This is to avoid the weird, "non-breaking" property that ellipses possess on certain platforms like Blogger. If I didn't put a space after the ellipsis in my version of the sentence, the phrase smile...then would be treated as a single, long word, and at the end of a line, if that "word" was too long, the whole thing would spill over to the next line instead of just the word then. That's why I put the space after the ellipsis. I also write my ellipses the way I do (... , not . . . ) because the "space between every period" convention isn't universally agreed upon. In fact, some word processors, when you type out three periods, will automatically group those three periods together tightly into a single ellipsis "character." Try it out sometime on your word processor: type an ellipsis, then see how many times you have to hit the delete key to erase it. If it's just once, the ellipsis has been changed into a single character. If it's three or four times, then your word processor is a libertarian when it comes to punctuation.

Back when I used to make my em dashes with two hyphens (--), I would put a space after the two hyphens for the same reason: Blogger is weird that way. Now, of course, and for many years, I know how to make proper em dashes (—, for dramatic pauses, etc.), and I no longer insert spaces anywhere. On a Mac, it's a simultaneous keystroke combination: shift-option-hyphen. On a Windows PC, you hold down the alt key and type 0151.

my old way: Frances gripped the heavy barbell-- with her crotch. 
my "new" way (for years now): Frances gripped the heavy barbell—with her crotch.

So with ellipses (normally . . . ), I have my quirky, maybe-acceptable way of handling them. And for em dashes (—), I changed how I handle them. 

For the longest time, I've also had my own convention for handling movie titles: I surround them with quotation marks. Many news and magazine articles also reflect this convention (see here; I'm not hallucinating this). Technically, the title of any completed creative work should be italicized. Movies, once they're released, are completed creative works. A book of poetry, once published, has a title (Leaves of Grass), but each poem in that collection is cited with quotation marks around the poem's title (a work within a work, like "Song of Myself"). The same would be true for a compendium of short stories, like Stephen King's Four Past Midnight (the collection title) and "The Langoliers" (a story within that collection).

Starting with my recent review of The Last Samurai, I finally decided to bow to proper convention and italicize movie titles. Did you notice? Look at my reviews for The Fall Guy and Nosferatu. The major reason for this is the movie-review book I've been working on: Part of my editing involves stripping away the quotation marks and italicizing all the titles I find. It's a pain in the ass. So as an investment in the future, I'm bowing to convention and italicizing movie titles from now on.

I lose something, though, when I do this: I lose the ability to distinguish between a book title and a movie title, as when I wrote this sentence in my Nosferatu review:

One theme of the movie is about how science fails in the face of pure evil, a theme also touched on in both the novel The Exorcist and the movie "The Exorcist."

With everything now italicized, that distinction will be lost, which is a bit sad. On the other hand, I'll have one less distinction to worry about for future reviews.

But sad or not, I'm now sticking with italics for all titles of completed creative works. Come to think of it, I watched the English-dubbed version of Princess Mononoke again over the weekend—a film I hadn't watched in years. So a review for that will be coming down the pipe this week. Another chance for you to notice my newly italicized movie titles.

__________

*Use three periods for sentence fragments and four periods for complete sentences.

a change (for the better) in solar might be nice

Ave, Dr. Gilleland!

Life is one long disease.

And who in this life is not sick? Is there anyone who does not have to drag his way through a long illness? Even to be born here, in a mortal body, is the onset of our maladies. Our needy condition is supported by daily doses of medicine, for the means we use to relieve our wants are like remedies applied every day. Would hunger not kill you if you did not treat it with the appropriate medicine? Would thirst not destroy you if you neglected to drink? Yet your drinking only keeps thirst at bay; it does not quench it entirely, for after that temporary relief thirst will return.

Go over and read the rest. There is no relief from life except death.

...and what are your feelings on this?

Lupita Nyong'o is reputed to be Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan's new version of Homer's The Odyssey. Is this more Netflix-style race-swapping meant to troll rightie audiences? Yet another salvo in the ongoing, tiresome culture war? Before I say anything more, I need to be clear that race-swapping doesn't always hit me the wrong way, and I think a lot of us are still forming opinions about the rightness and wrongness of engaging in the practice. For the most part, my own judgments are more on a case-by-case basis and less rooted in some unchanging, bedrock principle. Sometimes, the race-swapping works; sometimes, it doesn't.

For example, when Dr. Kynes was portrayed as a black woman in Denis Villeneuve's 2021 Dune, Part 1, I didn't see how the doctor's race affected the story being told, so I really couldn't care less. And I had no problem with the decidedly off-white Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho ("Native Hawaiian, German, Irish, and Pawnee"); if anything, I look forward to Momoa's return in the third Dune movie (book review here). 

But when race is swapped for a role in an established "canon," that's a very different matter. Think: black Snape in the upcoming Harry Potter HBO series (Snape is undeniably described as white in the books). Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies (but not his later Hobbit movies if the demographics of Esgaroth/Lake-town are any indication) respected the spirit of Tolkien's canon even if the movies radically changed many of the story details, and part of that spirit involved keeping the fantasy story consistent with the northern European traditions that it is/was tied to. So, yes, that meant there'd have to be a lot of white people. And it meant risking the irrational attacks that predictably arrived: "The darker-skinned orcs represent black people! That's racist!" 

The counterargument against making your cast "look like Los Angeles," as the Critical Drinker sneeringly puts it, is an easy one: just turn the race-swapping around. Should we make a movie about a cherished African myth in which we portray all of the black characters with white and Asian actors? How about a Japanese movie in which all of the main cast is white? (Actually, something like this may have been tried with the "Chinese" movie The Great Wall. I never saw The Great Wall, so I can't say, but many US critics and moviegoers were shouting "Whitewashing!" at the time. Or a more extreme example might be the "white" remake of the Japanese horror movie Ringu, which got turned into The Ring with a largely white cast.) What if KPop Demon Hunters had been race-swapped in both its visuals and its voice cast? 

Here's the flip side of the flip side, though: Nolan's The Odyssey, which stars Matt Damon as Odysseus instead of a more authentically Greek actor, is already racially compromised, so casting the Kenyan-Mexican Lupita Nyong'o as Helen, an Anatolian, may have been a case of In for a penny, in for a pound. And when Zack Snyder's 300 came out years ago, Greek audiences apparently loved the hell out of that movie despite King Leonidas' being played by a toothy Scotsman, and the rest of the Spartans' being played by non-Greeks. Race-swapping—a feature of old and modern Hollywood—and people's attitudes toward it, can't be judged by a simple set of principles or properly viewed through a simplistic lens.

It's also fair to say that the issue of race-swapping didn't suddenly appear with the arrival of Netflix and its version of Cleopatra. White Jesus appears in paintings all over the American South, but he was appearing in European images as early as the 6th century. Black Jesus has been a thing in America since the 1800s. Reasons for race-swapping vary with context. When it comes to religious figures, the common refrain is that "we create God in our own image." I can buy that. Modern Hollywood reflexively inserts people of certain demographics into movies and TV/streaming shows because of an unsatisfiable need to cater to "modern audiences" (the Drinker's much-beloved term) and a desire to have an ethnic- and gender-balanced cast, often referred to as "representation." This isn't always evil. And I fully admit that, when watching older films, I do notice the unrealistic whiteness of certain tableaux—something a less racially aware America took for granted long ago. There was definitely a time when minorities of all sorts were underrepresented in movies and on TV. These days, though, overrepresentation may be the problem.

So while I'm not ecstatic about Lupita Nyong'o's casting as Helen of Troy, I have to be fair and say I'm also not ecstatic about Matt Damon's casting as Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes, at least, came equipped with an aquiline nose for his role as Odysseus). In 2026, we're globally hyperaware of the massive dramatic talent that exists in all countries, so it should have been easy for Nolan to find Greek and Anatolian actors. Instead, he stuck with Damon because, well, Damon is a Christopher Nolan flunky (Interstellar, Oppenheimer). If I have a problem with anything about the upcoming movie, it's less about how it plays fast and loose with history (race-swapped cast, screenplay in modern English) and more about Agamemnon's stupid helmet design which, according to one archery channel that I watch, will simply funnel arrows into one's face. I'm not sure whether I even want to see this movie. I totally missed Tenet, after all, and I don't feel an ounce of guilt about that.

so bad it's good

more animated havoc

Spencer tackles some "pretty rough" surfaces

Spencer doesn't just do lawns: he also does power washing! And it's all for free since he makes his money via YouTube. I wish I'd thought of that business model years ago.

I am bechaired

See the screw holes for the headrest?

My new, el-cheapo, made-in-China office chair arrived today. No more scratching up the floor now that I roll on wheels (for office chairs, they're called casters). About those scratches (which appeared only recently): I've lost all hope of getting back whatever damage deposit I'd left last year when I'd made my rental contract... if I'd left any deposit (I'm too lazy to look at my rental contract). More likely, they'll just charge me for repairs. 

So far, I'd say the major problems are:

1. faulty light sensor (door light got old)
2. ruined wallpaper under the A/C (my fault)
3. small scratches on the floor by my desk (my fault)

I could probably go out to Euljiro's lighting district, describe my problem, and buy a new light that I would then ask the building repair guys to install. As for the wallpaper... there's a place on the first floor that looks as though it sells housing accessories, so I might talk to them about re-papering my wall (frankly, I hate wallpaper and prefer paint). And as for the new scratches on my floor... I can pray that no one notices them, but they're not exactly invisible. I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and pay the cost for reflooring when the building people see the damage as I'm moving out. If only there were a way to buff the scratches out...

Since I tend to ruin whatever chairs I sit in for months and years, I don't expect this new chair to last very long. Assembling it was a bitch, and part of the problem was the poor quality of the factory assembly: I saw screw holes where the screws wouldn't go through because the plastic molding was uneven. As a result: no headrest for uncle Kevin (see above photo). Not that I ever use a headrest anyway. And I made an active choice not to slap on armrests since I never use those, either. I'll accent the new chair with my usual double layer of ass cushions, then Bob will most decidedly be my uncle.

It feels weird to purchase a new chair when I might finally be moving out of this place this coming summer. I've been in this building for almost eleven years; up to now, I've been fine with Costco folding chairs that had cost me only W17,000 apiece. But I guess those chairs have been feeling their age (and my weight) because two of them recently popped out their backs when I sat in them—a sure sign that (1) I still need to lose another 20 kg, and (2) these chairs have been with me for a long time.

In other news: I've done three out of five weeks' worth of Substack material for The Entertaining (games and puzzles). Two more to go. I'll finish those and spend the rest of the day continuing to repopulate my YouTube scheduled posts.

With February ending, temperatures are rising. Today is sunny and windy. I won't be going for a stroll (just ate—a stroll would give rise to angina), but the afternoon sun is shining through my westward-facing window. I do, however, need to start practice-walking for my upcoming hike along the Geumgang in mid-March. That'll begin this week.

I might have to try making these

the know-nothings

ha! I love it

Damn you, Rose.

3 from Gary re: Fallow

If I ever find myself in England, I'll definitely be hitting Fallow.

historian vs.(?) Ken Burns

martial munchies

Step 1 half done; that was the easy part

Yesterday, I decided to tackle the easy content creation for Substack first, and I now have four weeks' worth of content for my Wednesday posts (The Entertaining, i.e., games and puzzles). I decided to employ a feature that all Substackers have access to: the "insert paywall" option that allows you to give your free subscribers a partial free preview of coming paid content, a bit like the old gesture of the gorgeous woman in a slitted dress who eyes you enticingly and "shows some leg." Like that gorgeous woman, my goal is, of course, to suck your soul dry (if $5/month is soul-sucking), but I'm hoping you won't notice that as you're being entertained. Today, I'll be generating another five weeks' worth of content (enough to get me through April), and that'll be that for The Entertaining.

The next move is to generate content for The Creative, which normally publishes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This, too, should be easy to generate since I'm relying on a lot of old-but-original content from the blog. But unlike The Entertaining, which comes out only once a week, The Creative comes out twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays, as I said), so generating that content will still take up all of tomorrow (Sunday).

Either today or tomorrow, I also have to repopulate my scheduled YouTube posts. I need about three hours to schedule two weeks' worth of posts.

Next week, with The Creative and The Entertaining done, I can concentrate on generating posts for my flagship project—my grammar curriculum/campaign. That means generating posts for The Superficial  (a.k.a. Bad Online English) and The Profound. These both come out on Mondays and Fridays. With only a couple of exceptions, The Superficial has no quizzes and isn't really a curriculum—it's just random encounters with memes I find online (mostly at Instapundit) or on my phone (ebooks, etc.). This is why I call that section of my Substack "The Superficial": it's a mere series of glimpses into language, not building up to anything. There's nothing deep, meaningful, or coherent going on. In contrast is The Profound, which is an actual grammar curriculum (quizzes and all), currently being built from the ground up. As of now, this section has around 55 posts that cover nouns, verbs, verb tenses, grammatical mood, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, interjections, and prepositions. Coming soon: punctuation—periods, commas, hyphens/dashes, question marks, and other marks (quotes, asterisks, exclamation points). After that, we'll finally start the sentence-level grammar: types of phrases, types of clauses, types of sentences, and types of discourse. After that, there'll be material on common grammatical/writing errors, rhetorical devices (tricolon, hyperbole, etc.), poetical terms/devices (rhyme, rhythm, meter, iamb, trochee, spondee, anapest, etc.), and language quirks (different from, different to, different than). That should take us to about the end of the year and possibly into 2027, and all of that material ought to cover the very basics of good grammar. I'll have to decide whether to add units on writing technique after that, but I think that that might end up being its own curriculum (if I have the energy to write it). Aside from that, I also need to be generating interactive quizzes for every unit I create.

I can't afford to think too hard about the future of my Substack efforts, but if my target audience is younger folks in need of language help and blessed/cursed with a sense of humor, then Substack is, frankly, the wrong platform for me to be on: it's mostly crotchety old people like me, most of whom think they know enough about grammar and writing to get along just fine (which usually isn't true: old people tend to be sloppy, arrogant, passive-aggressive, and immune to correction). All the kids are on TikTok, despite TikTok's having started off as (and still being) Chinese spyware. Do I take the plunge and seal a pact with the Devil by joining the ranks of TikTok? I really don't want to, but if my target audience is there while I'm stuck here, I may have no choice but to hold my nose and do it. My instinct will be to maintain a minimal presence on TikTok because I'm a grouchy old fart with no use for the medium, but there's always the chance that TikTok will prove fruitful.

Meanwhile, with May approaching, I have to consider going back to university work. Yay. For the moment, though, I've got enough on my plate to worry about. Let's just try to get through March and April (oh—I've got a 146K walk in March!) with my sanity intact.

To sum up—

This weekend: Work on five weeks' content for The Entertaining (through April).
Also this weekend: Repopulate scheduled posts for the blog.
This coming week, Mon-Tue: Create eight weeks' content for The Creative.
This coming week, Wed-Sat: Create eight weeks' content for The Superficial.
3/1-3/7: Create eight weeks' content for The Profound.
3/8-3/14: Get back to creating the first movie-review book.
3/16-3/20: Walk the Geumgang bike path. (This year's "long" walk, only 146 km.)
3/21-end of March: Finish creating the movie-review book.

Right. Time to get moving.

no more superheroes, please

lawn ASMR (plus a sidewalk reveal)

I always wonder why this guy doesn't have a heavy-duty lawn vacuum.

breffus sammich

from junk to art

The guy's got talent.

when doing God's work gets you injured

This is the Scottish guy who goes by The Hoof GP and takes care of local livestock, with all of their myriad hoof problems. I've learned a lot about cows since then, and while I'm still not planning to become a vegetarian, I've nevertheless gained some respect for the bovines, as well as for the farmers who raise them and the hoof doctors who take care of their kine.

it's life for Yoon

I've been trying to stay away from politics and current events, but this is kind of important:

From a friend in Korea, about the conviction and sentencing of Yoon Suk Yeol:

“Today, February 19 (KST), a Seoul court sentenced former President Yoon Suk-yeol to life imprisonment in connection with his December 3 emergency martial law declaration.

The prosecution had sought…

— Gordon G. Chang (@GordonGChang) February 19, 2026

I imagine that that's a pre-arrest photo of Yoon. He hasn't been allowed to dye his hair while he's been detained. My guess is that Yoon will either serve his life sentence or be released early by the next conservative president—assuming that that hypothetical president is the next president because, frankly, I don't see Yoon lasting in jail much longer than a single presidential term (in Korea, a term is five years, and there's no second term).

My unprofessional opinion: Yoon should never have freaked out and declared martial law.

That said, do expand the tweet's text and read it in full. According to the text (which doesn't hide its right-leaning bias), the Korean left took some giant and ethically questionable liberties in how it interpreted law in order to arrive at the conclusion that Yoon had perpetrated an "insurrection" (반란/ballan) Can a sitting government do that? I thought insurrections, by definition, came from outside the government.

looking grayer (but better in my opinion)

"ball towel"

Do ladies have a coochie towel? How about a butt-crack towel?

Yes, the above face looks familiar:

I now know I'm not the only one who's dreaming these dreams.

"It's the dream again!"

"Battle: Los Angeles"—what happened?

I've gone back and forth about whether to see this movie.

historian reacts to "Death by Lightning" trailer

This is from a while back. I reviewed "Death by Lightning" here.

gifts given, gifts received, and sad news on the relative front

Thursday night visit to my #3 Ajumma's place.

Meeting #3 Ajumma means giving gifts and receiving gifts. She seemed happy to get my two types of cookies (I later texted her a warning that the oatmeal-raisin ones were fairly tasteless; she texted back that the chocolate-chip cookies were delicious), and she seemed delighted to receive my homeschooling book. I know she's a voracious reader: years ago, she grabbed my copies of Hyon Gak sunim's Korean-language book 하바드에서 화계사까지 (Habadeu-eseo Hwagyesa ggaji—From Harvard to Hwagye Temple), the story of the American monk's journey from an American Catholic background to Korean Seon (Zen) Buddhism. I'm hoping she'll read my book with equal zeal.

Being a dedicated Christian and the only relative who talks with me to any extent; Ajumma is my relative through marriage, not a blood relative: her equally Christian husband—one of my mom's cousins—had died a few years back from liver cancer (January 2019). Ajumma is now 82, and just this past December, she moved to a new apartment—one that's actually a couple of subway stops closer to where I am. I didn't ask her why she had moved, but I was worried, at first, that she'd been placed in an old-folks' home because part of her new apartment's name is 상떼/sangdde, a hangeulized rendering of the French word santé, which means "health." But her apartment's name also contained a more pedestrian 빌/bil at the end, the Korean rendering of -ville, a common ending for many apartment-complex names, big and small, in Korea. No senior-home vibe there.

I asked Ajumma whether family had visited her over vacation, and she said her elder son had come by with his wife and son, and so had some of her other relatives. Her younger son, who lives and works in Germany, will be coming by this August as part of a one-month travel plan. According to Ajumma, he'll be spending a week in Korea, then tooling off to Fiji (or somewhere) with his family, then visiting somewhere else, then spending another week in Korea before returning to Germany.

There was little I could tell Ajumma about my brothers because they almost never write back (I write them monthly). Since I hadn't talked with Ajumma since 2024 (when I was employed), I updated her on my current freelancer status and told her I would likely be returning to the university system later this year. I also had no updates on my dad, about whom she remains morbidly curious. I told her I have no idea whether he's alive or dead. She also asked about my aunt in Texas—my mother's ornery big sister. I passed along the sad news that my aunt's mind is going, and that she's forgotten that Mom died of brain cancer. This senility has been the case for a few years now; when my brother David visited my aunt a few years back, she happily asked about how Mom was doing. I don't know how David answered, but I imagine he didn't remind her of the truth. I told Ajumma that my aunt (the Korean title is imo/이모, i.e., mother's big sister), who had been combative all of her life, is probably happier now than she's ever been, now that her mind is going.

A tour around Ajumma's new apartment was part of my visit. The new place seems a mite smaller than her previous one but certainly spacious enough for just her plus whatever guests happen to come over. She even has room to store her many paintings, as well as a room now serving as her studio. I asked whether she was hoping to sell her art, and she said yes. I had to wonder how she planned to do that, especially since she has no computer.

Ajumma also gave me the sad news that my #2 Ajeossi just passed away. #3 Ajumma's husband was my #3 Ajeossi (which is why Ajumma earned the #3 label)—the one who died of liver cancer. Ajumma also told me that #1 and #4 Ajeossi didn't attend #2 Ajeossi's memorial service (he had converted to Christianity years ago—back in the day, a lot of Koreans did this to establish business networks), and neither did #3 Ajumma, who's been in a long-standing feud with #2 Ajeossi's family for years. I asked her why, and she talked about bad things people had done to her as well as money-related problems between and among the four brothers. But now, my #2 and #3 Ajeossis are gone; only #1 (who lost his wife some years back) and #4 (who had lost a son almost thirty years ago) are left. And so it goes in a family with a lot of siblings. You get old, then you drop off one by one, and only the Fates know the order in which you'll be toppling off the ever-advancing conveyor belt of life.

Before I left Ajumma's place, she loaded me down with carby gifts as well as the typical lunar new year's envelope of cash. I got a bag of frozen mandu (dumplings), a bag of frozen ddeok (rice cakes, important for the new year), a bottle of milk, and three big, fat oranges, probably from subtropical Jeju Island given that it's winter. As if she were talking to a teenager, Ajumma told me to keep the cash envelope out of sight, so I slipped it inside my coat.

Here's a partial shot, below, of the soup I cobbled together thanks to Ajumma's contributions. You can see the mandu clearly, but some ddeok is also visible. I have a ton of beef and chicken bouillon (both vegetarian and not), so I made a quick broth out of that, then added two eggs and a big glop of kimchi to give the broth a bit more character. A humble, not authentically Korean, but still rib-sticking late dinner. I pronounce myself stuffed.

very makeshift and inauthentic ddeok mandu-guk

And with that, I think I've discharged my visitation obligations to Ajumma for this year, but I do feel bad when I think of her sitting alone in her apartment—no husband, no kids, nothing but church and TV and her painting to comfort her. At least there's the painting, and she's a talented artist. She may be a relative only through marriage, but I still feel irrationally lucky to have artistic people on both sides of my family (my great aunt used to be a singer/performer, and my great uncle used to be a locally famous painter in Monmouth County, New Jersey). At 82, Ajumma is a year younger than my mother would have been. All of my older relatives and "relatives" (like my French Maman and Papa) are getting up there in years. They'll all be toppling over the edge of the conveyor belt soon. Then it'll be my/our turn.

But I can't dwell on that. It's now technically Friday the 20th, which means I must now switch gears and get back to creating content for Substack to last through April. I hope to finish this content creation by the end of the first week in March. We'll see how that goes.