Darwin comes for us all... but sooner for some of us

90s-era prescience

you will either laugh your ass off or have nightmares for a week

Someone combined John Bolton with Michael Bolton and I can’t unsee it pic.twitter.com/3gPTkpWWF6

— FilmX's Number One Fan (@GAltringham) March 2, 2026

the funniest tiger story you'll hear today

A hilarious tiger story told with gusto by the late Sean Lock. Oh, and the darts team in the story suffers a terrible fate.

I have mixed feelings

it's better to show you something fun

The other day, some Instapundit commenter had embedded a tweet showing a horrifying video. I considered embedding the video here as an object lesson in gun safety, but I decided not to give anyone else nightmares. So here's a description of what I saw: We see a small car and a black family that sounds as if its members are speaking an African language (I have no idea where this is happening). The right-rear door of the car is open; an adult male is sitting there, lecturing a child standing on the grass in front of him. In the adult's hands is a gun, and he's apparently telling the child about it. The man cocks the gun and hands it to the child, who looks younger than ten years old. The child says something to the adult while waving the gun about (a second adult is sitting in the car's driver seat); the waving stops, and the child points the gun straight at the adult who had been lecturing him. The adult puts out both hands and waves them back and forth in a warding gesture; the gun goes off, and the adult is hit square in the face. He falls back. The child has dropped the gun and now holds his head, aghast at what's just happened. People scream and run toward the car. End clip.

This was, frankly, fucking nightmarish, but it was also absolutely preventable. Responsible adults who train (train!) their kids on how to use firearms would never have allowed a situation like this to happen, and no rational, firearm-respecting adult would ever have placed such casual trust in a young child's ability to handle a semiautomatic. The entire situation was insane, and I knew within seconds that I was about to see something awful happen. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the video's been yanked even though the bullet impact is barely visible when it happens. Did the adult survive being shot in the face? What happened in the aftermath? Part of me doesn't even want to know. Jesus Christ.

So instead of showing you that bit of ghoulish business, I've got something fun for you instead. Another commenter suggested that this might be AI, but I recall wanting to make a video like this myself years ago. I don't think the action in this video requires AI to accomplish.

Hahah Legend pic.twitter.com/737MWa0JOC

— Enezator (@Enezator) March 5, 2026

one problem solved, another appears

I got a Kakao message from my bank, Shinhan, saying the time had come to renew the certification (injeungseo/인증서) on my phone. From past experience, I know that I can't do this procedure at home no matter how many times I try. This didn't stop me from stubbornly trying several times this morning, but in the end, as always, I failed and resigned myself to going to the local bank branch to ask a teller for help. It's always embarrassing to have to do this, but the teller was polite, and she herself had difficulty going through the procedure on my phone. Lots of long pauses and furrowed brows as she stared at my phone's screen. Well, the procedure took almost half an hour, and it involved my signing with a stylus on a touchscreen five or six times (print name, give signature, print name, give signature, print name, give signature, etc.) because of the Korean love for extra procedural steps and piles of red tape. I asked the teller whether this meant I wouldn't have to do this for another three years, and she said yes, but frankly, I don't trust her—not because I think she's a liar, but because I feel as if I've gone through this same fucking procedure every single year. Well, we'll see. If I have to do this again in early 2027, I will have forgotten that I'd written today's blog post.

So for a year at least, my certification-renewal problem has been solved yet again. But another problem has arisen.

When I left for the bank, I saw that the city gas (doshi gaseu/도시 가스) company that services our building had left a Post-It sticker saying they had come by for their inspection (usually two or three times a year) and to contact them to reschedule. So I texted the cell number given, and the person is coming back tomorrow at 11 a.m. This is bad for me because I had planned to leave tonight for an all-night walk from Yangpyeong to Yeosu. The walk would end around 8:00 or 9:00 tomorrow morning, and I'd take a bus back to Seoul as I usually do when doing this route. But the arrival time would be too close to the gas company's visiting time, so I've decided to put the walk off until tomorrow night, which is about as long as I can delay such a walk: my feet will need a few days to recover after 33 kilometers (almost exactly 20.5 miles).

So I can either eat my weekday salad today or wait to do it on Thursday. Walking in a fasted state is fine with me; I've done it many times before. But walking after three days' fasting (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday) might not be the greatest idea, so I think I'm going to go downstairs, grab my salads, and have a graze today. Maybe along with some chicken breasticles. The next time I eat will be Saturday.

partial victory

Remember my awful toilet disaster?

Below, you see the marks left by the toilet snake. This is "before," i.e., before cleaning. I then drained the toilet partway by shutting off the valve, flushing the toilet, and manually scooping out as much water as I could. There was still water in the bottom, and I wasn't about to go in with sponges to get the rest of the water out. I then used my Barkeepers Friend, an abrasive that's reminiscent of Ajax or Comet (my American readers will understand), and used my toilet brush to scrub, scrub, scrub away the marks. 

I was partially successful. Look at the second picture.

Here's what partial success looks like:

Basically, it was easier to remove the markings from the parts of the toilet bowl that were dry. Next time I get in there, I may have to do the sponge thing after all to dry out the bowl.

AI surreality haunts my dreams

tearin' up them tacos

"common sense" questions

What's being called "common sense" questions in this video are more like questions designed to catch you if you're not paying attention. Beyond that, the questions require you to be too literal or, contrarily, to think utterly outside the box.

Here are examples of "common sense" questions from my youth:

1. A rooster in the northern hemisphere sits on a north-facing barn's rooftop and lays an egg. Which side of the barn does the egg roll down?
   ANSWER: Roosters don't lay eggs.
2. A plane full of Californians is flying from DC to California. The plane crashes east of the Mississippi River. Where do you bury the survivors?
   ANSWER: Survivors are alive.

The point of the above two questions is to see whether you're paying attention. While paying attention is part of common sense, common sense is itself a fairly vague (albeit useful), broad notion. Is a question that tests your attention to words really testing your overall common sense? We haven't even defined common sense yet, so how would we even know? Or how about these questions and answers from the video? Look—

1. C is the father of D, but D is not the son of C. How is that possible?
   ANSWER: D is the daughter.
2. How can a man go nine days without sleep?
   ANSWER: by sleeping at night.

So (1) is something akin to a logic question. Is common sense therefore reasoning? And (2) requires you to be suspicious of the wording and not to take it super-literally, i.e., to answer correctly, you must think that days = daytime. Note the trick is made even more complicated by the fact that days is a plural countable noun while daytime is normally uncountable. (Who says "many daytimes ago"?) So question (2) requires out-of-the-box thinking. Is that what common sense is?

When I was a kid, and my dad knew everything, Dad's terse definition of common sense was: If it's raining, go inside or get an umbrella. Short, sweet, simple. I imagine that a lot of men of his generation would say that.

Whatever your definition of it, I reject the idea that this quiz is testing for common sense. It's testing for a vague set of skills that may or may not be applicable to the undefined faculty of common sense. If I were teaching a course on test design, I'd be tempted to use this video as an example of how not to design questions for quizzes and tests.

and on that same cop-hating note...

I think the AI thumbnail is hilarious.

the deed is done

I've bought my ticket for France, God help me. Used my credit card and the miles I'd accumulated from last year's trip to the States. I'm leaving on July 2 and arriving at Paris Charles de Gaulle the same day (around 6:40 p.m.), then leaving Paris on July 6 on a 2:40 p.m. flight. Auguste's wedding is on the 4th, which also happens to be the US's 250th birthday. I'm going to try to keep my head down while I'm in France; I've become a lot less sociable over the past few years, and it remains true, like a cosmic law, that no tourist should ever talk politics with the French. I don't want to be a burden on anyone, either, so I'll do what I can to keep quiet and keep away, but I suspect I'm going to be sucked into various activities. If it's wedding prep, that's fine: it'll be good to be useful.

I'm waiting on responses from my brothers to see whether they might be interested in attending the wedding with me, but I doubt either brother will say yes... if they say anything at all. They tend to be uncommunicative.

bits of wisdom from the old man

A photographer talks with an 88-year-old man.

"the NRA promotes gun violence!"

If you're one of those idiots who think the NRA promotes anything other than responsible gun ownership, you need to stop chewing on your own colon polyps. Look at these sterling examples of humanity and ask yourself whether they're members of the NRA.

"Frodo deserved to be hanged"

But that's a bit clickbaity. Just watch.

War Machine: one-paragraph review

Alan Ritchson as unnamed recruit #81 in what's supposed to be Colorado but is actually Australia

Alan Ritchson, known for his role as Jack Reacher in the Amazon series Reacher, stars in the 2026 Netflix movie War Machine, a story about RASP trainees at an Army Ranger camp in Colorado who suddenly find themselves faced with an alien invasion. The title could be a reference to Ritchson's unnamed character (He's a war machine!) or to the alien device that morphs from an aircraft to a walking tank before wreaking havoc on the team of Ranger finalists who had thought they were simply on their final training mission. The first part of the movie is about our main character, who joined RASP in memory of his brother (Jai Courtney, cameo), who had wanted the brothers to become Rangers together. Our protag joins the program to fulfill a promise to get "across that finish line." Taciturn and antisocial, our RASP trainee, now known as 81 (all the soldiers in the program are given numbers), refuses opportunities to lead and simply wants to complete the program. Prior to RASP, he had been on a mission in which his brother was severely injured, but after trying to carry his brother back to base, he had passed out short of the base's perimeter; he was rescued, but his brother proved too injured to save. This guilt at not making it to the finish line is what drives 81 now, and the incident also explains his reluctance to lead since he had been platoon leader in the attack that had killed his brother, a fellow soldier. During the final RASP exercise, the team of recruits stumbles upon unfamiliar wreckage that looks to them like some kind of DARPA device but turns out to be an alien walker that immediately targets the troops and begins to eliminate them one by one. The rest of the story follows a formula you've seen a thousand times before in movies like Aliens and Predator, with our hero having to figure out ways to defeat the mysterious machine without any hi-tech weaponry (for the final mission, his team had been given rifles with blanks). War Machine is pure sap and formula; with most of the characters sporting numbers instead of names, it's hard to bond with anyone and equally hard to care when they die. The movie ends on a grim note: it turns out that the wave of machines that had landed all over the planet was merely the vanguard of a massive attack by some malign intelligence. We never discover the aliens' purpose, nor do we learn whether the deadly flying/walking machines have organic pilots; they could be drones for all we know. For me, the most ridiculous aspect of War Machine is the alien's utter obsession with finding and destroying every last member of 81's team. True, the mountainous region depicted in the movie isn't exactly a target-rich environment, so maybe the alien is just bored. In all, I'd say that War Machine isn't worth your time. It also stars Dennis Quaid and Esai Morales as sergeants leading the RASP exercises, but like Jai Courtney's character, they appear mostly as bookends, with most of the plot being devoted to RASP training and human-alien violence. With so little information about the aliens given to us, and with so little information about the human players aside from 81, the entire movie is hard to relate to. Give this one a pass.

don't see this movie! (but they live!)

I need to see this.

when the future weighs on you

My buddy Charles sees the sand running out of his hourglass: his career is now half over. Go read his post and commiserate.

On my own wistful note, I wish I'd had cojones like these back in high school:

When the dad is laughing you know you did it rightpic.twitter.com/SucW2KbpJd

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) March 6, 2026

Hot Ones: Zoe vs. Sam

Notorious Foodie does lahmacun

And just what is lahmacun?

I'd try it without the sliced onions.

correcting an oversight

Over on Substack, I'm nearing the end of my syllabus's run through parts of speech, but I somehow failed to include, over the past several months, an explicit lesson on the three kinds of objects: direct, indirect, and prepositional. So I spent some time today making up a lesson, and it'll appear tomorrow alongside the regularly scheduled lesson for tomorrow, which is: Intro to Prepositions + Prepositions of Time/Sequence. I've named this new, special lesson, creatively enough, Nouns/Pronouns: Special Lesson—a focused lesson on three kinds of objects. Prepositions will take us to about the second week of April.

My back is also a bit achy today (am I doing my core work wrong?), so I won't be doing the Yangpyeong-to-Yeoju walk tonight. I've rescheduled that walk for Tuesday night, when I'll be nice and fasted after not eating all day Monday and Tuesday. In all likelihood, when I hit Yeoju's bus terminal Wednesday morning, I'll slip into a nearby convenience store and buy myself a snack or three to break the fast. I'll be back to fasting on Thursday and Friday, then eating a small, modest meal on Saturday, then training down to Daejeon on Sunday (no eating on that day); while on the trail, I'll revert to my usual on-the-trail eating schedule, i.e., eating in the afternoon when I'm done walking both because I'm used to doing things that way and because I avoid the potential for postprandial angina while walking. 

In less than two months, I've got a doctor's appointment to consider, so I need to make sure my A1c score, a three-month average—is down to a reasonable level.

Otherwise, I'm back to working on the movie-review book; it's been a weird experience to go back and read all my old prose, a lot of which makes me cringe. I've been proofreading more than editing, though, correcting obvious mistakes and reformatting text where it needs reformatting. I do occasionally add, subtract, or alter content, but I try to keep the prose as faithful as possible to its original form. This first book is going to be clunky as a result; anyone who reads it through chronologically will see how rough the prose was back in 2009 or so, and how I was still flailing around to find my voice as well as a proper movie-review format. (Some might argue that I'm still flailing, which may be true.) I was less rigorous about noting things that I note automatically now, like the year of a movie's release and the name of the film's director. These days, release date, director's name, and list of stars are almost always all noted in the first paragraph of every review I write. For some odd reason, though, I still only rarely mention screenwriters, which is probably an oversight on my part.

Righto—back to the grind.

ADDENDUM: I got my train ticket yesterday.

another contender for world's best hot chocolate... sigh...

This might be the best hot chocolate ever.

Skall on "tactical" swords

yeah, Gen X!

 

Better hurry up. Swayze's been dead a while. Who's next to kick off?

maybe tonight, Precious

This arrived a couple days ago:

Sure enough, the brand name is mis-written without an apostrophe. Oh, well: I guess that's the brand name, like it or not. Maybe it's following the same not-quite-genitive-case grammar of "Veterans Day," which also lacks an apostrophe, albeit for different, nobler reasons.

So I'll drain my toilet tonight and see whether this product actually does anything. Preliminary reports suggest that it's perfect for "buffing out" scratches in porcelain left by a toilet snake, so I guess we'll see.

Starfleet Academy: the dumping continues

I agree: You don't want to see a bunch of fatties on Trek. Especially if they're young.

I don't normally watch this science guy

There are a lot of ballistics channels. This one's a science/engineering channel that happens to be doing ballistics in this video.

Even with protection, though, would you really want to be hit by a .50 cal?

perfect hot chocolate?

duuuuuhhhh...

Friday's 18K walk to Bundang

Yesterday's walk took me from my place at Daecheong Station all the way down the Tan Creek to Seongnam City and the Bundang district—specifically, to Jeongja Station (Jeongja yeok/정자역/亭子驛). I incessantly joke that jeongja/정자 is also the Sino-Korean term for semen or spermatozoa, but that's actually from a totally different pair of Chinese characters: 精子/정자/jeongja. So no, Jeongja Station is not drenched in cum. Sorry, ladies.

The walk was cool and cloudy—too cool, in fact: my fingertips were freezing for most of the walk. The starting daytime temperature at 3 p.m. was around 4.6ºC, or about 40ºF. Had the sun been able to shine through, the cold wouldn't have been so bad. As it was, I regretted not taking along gloves and/or chemical hand-warmers.

I walked from 3:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at my slow pace. For 18 kilometers, that's exactly 4 kph, which is about the best I can expect from myself on flat ground. No angina to speak of (more thanks to my meds than to diet/exercise). My feet were achy by the end, but that's not a tragedy. Except for one sit-down to rest, it was a good, steady walk.

Shutterbugging became a compulsion: once I started, I couldn't stop. Many details along that path, which I hadn't walked in a while, had changed. Much of the construction along the creek has been completed, but there's one little bit close to the end of my route that remains to be finished off. A couple new buildings seem to have sprung up, too, including a major building on the air base that I pass by.

Below are pics from the walk—a bit over 200. Enjoy.

As I said: 18K.

Ignore the distance shown. The step count is disappointing.

Lotte World Tower in the distance (Jamshil district)

a warning that wild animals roam here

With all the dead and living snakes I've shown over the years, you know this sign isn't kidding.

"Walk right"—a sign that's routinely ignored

Danger Guy!

Tan Creek east-side road under construction

crossing to the east side

looking south

They've covered the space between the bike and pedestrian bridges.

Danger Guy again! Even if you don't read Korean, you know this is warning about bumps on the road.

about how my toilet looked the other day

Songpa Loop, 21 km—I did a segment of this and found it boring and lame.

a new certification center, and the only one I saw along my route

Sutnae Plaza

Sutnae (charcoal creek) may be a reference to the creek's name: Tancheon. The word tan means "coal," "carbon," etc.; and cheon means "creek." Sut also means "charcoal"; nae means "creek." Tancheon is Sino-Korean; I assume Sutnae (spelled Sunae on maps) is pure Korean. There are often pure-Korean equivalents of Sino-Korean terms.

a Tan Creek story

stairs, restroom, bridge

Jangji Creek, a tributary of the Tan, where the Songpa Loop goes. This is the stretch I'd done. Lame.

sign for Jangji Creek

heavy bird, leaving footprints in stone

Daegok Bridge

record water (flood) height: 6.74 m in 2009 during intense downpour

Daewang Bridge (Great King Bridge)

Thus begins a stretch of relatively new park-golf courses. Sigh...

Empty real estate almost always ends up getting developed. I have mixed feelings.

Lots of older people kicking my ass, walking briskly.

magpie nest

(right-side up sign) Seongnam City, starting point

an old man brushes by me

Danger Guy demonstrating "Don't lean! You could fall!"

course info for one of the enclosed park-golf courses: hole number, distance, par

more magpie (ggachi/까치) nests

I was happy my camera captured the sun.

With my balance shot, I wouldn't cross without the help of a trekking pole.

The extra stones are for standing aside to let people pass.

a sign about the building of a footbridge in the park-golf area

stairs to mystery (or at least up to street level)

The magpie nests lend character to the bare trees.

The air base I'm walking beside goes on for several kilometers.

sign for Tan Creek eco wetland, with freshwater fish

same sign, but closer

more ggachi nests

restroom and shwimteo

The relentless stretch of wall defining the edge of the air base; it runs for kilometers.

fascinated by the light streaming through the clouds

a congregation of female mallards, gathering to complain about their husbands

fairly recent construction: tennis courts

almost looks like a stone table for sacrifices

coming up on the shallow swimming pool (not open yet)

coming up on the area where I can turn left into the city and head to Taepyeong Station

I've stopped my walk short and headed to Taepyeong Station only once or twice over the years.

beyond the trees, a new building on base

This must have been built only within the past year or so.

I did worry about whether it would be legal to photograph the building. I swear I'm not a spy!

This is where I cross despite the signs warning against entry. Hey, it's a rule-ignoring culture.

on the creek's west side now, still going south

This bare area, above, is normally full of equipment and activity. It often serves as a combination parking lot for trucks and storage area for unfathomable equipment.

the ol' fish ladder (eodo/어도/魚道, lit. "fish-way," pronounced "aw-dough")

swinging right and picking up the bike path again

Moshi Footbridge (sounds vaguely Jewish)

"Absolutely no motorbikes!"

Dunjeon Bridge ("doon-juhn," not "dungeon")

the split: pedestrians left, bikes right

asshole

The asshole above was biking on the pedestrian side when I started swearing in English. He crossed over to the bikers' side, and I have no idea whether that was the result of my swearing or his intention all along. If I'm charitable, he had made a mistake and blundered onto the pedestrian side. But I'm not inclined to be charitable. This sort of intrusion happens way too often in my experience.

Don't worry: I photographed at least one example of pedestrians in bike lanes. That happened a few times during this walk as well.

I sat here and rested for five minutes.

Under-the-bridge benches might not seem like much, but on sunny days, they're a welcome respite from the light and heat; and on rainy days, they're a place where you can rest and stay out of the rain.

We've been in Seongnam for a while now, but we're heading into downtown, a few km from Bundang.

I remember when I suddenly noticed this building a few years back.

The above building has always been hard to take seriously because it reminds me of this.

Sasong Bridge

another jinggeom dari (stone footbridge)

tennis, not jokgu

an interesting-looking modern shwimteo

I only just noticed how the painting of the bench is right by the real bench.

Lots of these quaint little footbridges cross over the Tan Creek in this area. It's a nice walk, made for walkers.

sun's gettin' real low

"Let the old people take over these gyms and pump the iron," rumbled the king.

Bang-ah Bridge

Maesong Bridge

Tan Creek Underground Walkway #3

It's not East Asia without something's being painfully, cornily cute.

You may have noticed it's now dark enough for the walk lights to have come on.

Up ahead is a little rise that marks an important point on the walk for me.

When I reach the little rise up ahead and look forward into the distance, I see, faintly, a huge apartment-building sign that says PARK VIEW. When I'm standing on that rise and looking at PARK VIEW, I know I have only 3.5 km left for this walk. So I allow myself to feel a sense of relief. It's all downhill from here. So to speak. (The walk is actually flat.)

what I see, digitally zoomed

Imae High School, never photographed before

This short stretch is the last bit of creekside construction after years of blighting the creek.

flood detour

I think the green sign is saying, "Pedestrians left; bikers right," but it could also just be saying, "This passage is for both pedestrians and bikers." Sometimes, it's hard to know.

Here, though, the signs are clearer. Walkers left, bikes right.

a small jinggeom dari

a closer view of PARK VIEW

This was a rotating projection of flowers. Right after this were cherry blossoms.

Annoyed by PARK VIEW yet?

Well, suck it.

Baekhyeon Bridge.

almost at the final stretch

one last view as I pass by

Baekgung Footbridge, which used to be called Baekgung Bridge. Baek means "white," and gung means "castle," which always evokes burgers for me and makes this my favorite bridge.

A bit less than a kilometer to go.

aeration over rough stones

Gungnae Bridge (Castle Interior Bridge?)

Gungnae Bridge sign up close

Here's a rude bitch running along the bike path.

I saw three different pedestrians being rude in this way. Only one biker.

See her off to the right?

Spermatozoa Bridge (Jeongja gyo)

I went up these steps, but they were the wrong steps.

In theory, I could ascend to street level at any point along this part of the path, but there's a particular staircase that I usually go for, and the one pictured above wasn't it—my staircase was farther down. Just goes to show that I hadn't been by this way in a long while.

the final bit to the subway-station entrance

Shin Bundang Line

...and we end on Entrance 6

So that was my 18K Friday walk. I might've gone faster had I not stopped to take over 200 pictures, but it was a good walk all the same.