Bollocks! Henry Cavill speakin' like a Scot? Well, he doesn't have to: In the original Highlander, Christophe Lambert—a French-American actor—played Connor McCleod as a man who had lived for centuries and had a "mixed" or "muddled" accent from all of the places where he'd lived. Cavill can easily do the same.
Sunday, March 29, 2026
Saturday, March 28, 2026
today's lunch (in part)
Saturday's lunch was a combination of keto breakfast sandwiches and two grocery-store salads (not pictured below), and I have enough sandwich material left over for tomorrow. I made my usual breakfast-sausage patties, but with regular BochaSweet instead of brown sugar (I'm out of BochaSweet brown sugar). I also cooked up some thick-cut bacon (sliced into lardons) and made some blueberry jam with cinnamon, lemon juice, and BochaSweet. Lastly, I used my waffle iron to make keto waffles from an almond-flour base (plus eggs, heavy cream, cream cheese, salt, baking powder, cinnamon, and yes—more BochaSweet). Oh, right: I also added a slice of American cheese to each sandwich. You can see the results below. My pancake/waffle recipe, found online, barely makes six waffles, i.e., three sandwiches.
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| sausage, egg, cheese, and bloob-jam sandwiches |
I see that the bloob jam isn't visible. I'll provide a picture tomorrow.
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| side view |
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| third sammich, with bacon |
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| horizontal view |
The sandwiches were good and filling. I then had myself a big salad (well, two small salads combined into one big one, with added leftover bacon). Tomorrow, since the grocery will be closed, I'll grab salads from Paris Baguette. Unless it's closed, too, but it usually isn't.
Normally, my meals on eating days are a lot simpler (Sat., Sun., Wed.): just my salads plus a 250-gram (half-pound) salmon steak that I poach by immersing in boiling water (still wrapped in its packaging), then allowing to simmer for 14 minutes before extracting the fish, opening the package, and enjoying the flaky perfection. I added only lemon juice, salt, and pepper, and that's a perfectly decent hunk of fish.
So today was and tomorrow will be something of a keto treat. And yes, berries in moderation are okay on keto thanks to their fiber content, which helps to protect one from their fructose content. Other keto-friendly berries include strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries.
There might be more pics tomorrow.
on FL teaching and learning
[from an Instapundit comment I'd left... here, slightly edited]
Learning English remains a mania here, but Koreans insist on backwards and antiquated ways of teaching and learning FL, which is why they continue to score around 2 or 3 (out of 5) on the two types of TOEFL essays (integrated and writing for academic discussion), and why they can learn English for ten years, then go to America, the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa and realize they can neither understand English nor speak it. The Koreans who do well with English are the ones who live overseas long-term in anglophone countries. And even then, many go overseas and isolate themselves in "Little Korea"s and never bother to learn the language of their host country.
Korean nationalism does come into play though. But it usually takes the form of wanting to replace those horrible foreign teachers with AI-driven robots. Foreign teachers here generally have the reputation of not knowing much about grammar (or much else technical about English); those teachers often correct the students while using vague justifications like "that sounds better" or "it's less awkward" or "it flows better" because they can't quote the relevant rules, and the students can smell this ignorance.
Also: most FL-teaching emphasis in the West, these days, is on oral proficiency to get students speaking coherently much earlier in the process. I'm in partial agreement with this emphasis, but I've seen the disadvantages: I learned French the old-fashioned way with grammar charts, choral repetition, scripted conversation, etc. One of my brothers went to the same high school I did; by that point, the old-guard teachers had been replaced by the oral-proficiency crowd, and I was really impressed with my brother's ability to speak French by level/year 2 or 3. But I quickly noticed that the quality of his French writing was utter shite, and that's part of the problem with not stressing grammar or correcting students' errors. Grammar is important because it aids in clarity of thought and expression.
I don't know what the answer to the teaching/learning problem is even after years of FL teaching. (I started off as a French teacher, then moved to Korea and used my FL-teaching skills to become an English teacher. I spent the last decade as a content creator, not a teacher, but I'll soon be going back into teaching.) I suspect the answer is some sort of middle ground: Korean students in particular need more emphasis on productive macroskills like speaking and writing; they do way too much listening and reading, and none of it is helping because the style of Korean instruction is to take a super-analytical approach to foreign languages. Compounding this problem is that the Korean analytical approach to English is often just plain wrong. Did you ever hear, for example, that there are only five sentence types in English (see chart below)? I can guarantee you that there are a lot more than five.
So a lot needs to change in Korea if Koreans really want to learn English fast and well. My own humble suggestions, after years in country, would be:
1. Korean instructors need to be fluent in English before they can teach, and their fluency should be tested by native-level speakers of English.2. The Korean curriculum needs to emphasize productive macroskills (speaking, writing) as much as it emphasizes receptive macroskills (listening, reading).3. The Korean curriculum needs to be stripped of false notions about English (like "There are only 5 English sentence types").4. The foreigners who are hired to teach English should pass rigorous tests of linguistic competency—not just grammar—before they ever step into a Korean classroom. Too many foreign teachers are just 20-something kids fresh out of college, just looking to earn money so they can backpack all over Asia. It's an old story. Yawn. And it adds to the already-bad reputation of foreign teachers in Korea. And since Korean "cram schools" (hagweon/학원) are fundamentally businesses and not centers of education, they don't care whom they hire—just put a white face in the classroom, preferably somebody thin and good-looking. And if the foreigner isn't white, well, good fookin' luck. I'd say hire only the linguistically competent.5. While I would never suggest an obsessive focus on grammar in particular (it produces a "missing the forest for the trees" effect), I should note the irony that many Koreans say, "We know English grammar better than Westerners do," then when they speak or write, 95% of their many, many errors are grammatical in nature. They've been trained to recognize grammar patterns but not to produce them in any reliable way, and these are two totally separate skills.
But I despair of ever seeing major changes like the above. There's a pervasive cultural conservatism/inertia here, and not the good kind of conservatism. Koreans will continue to want to learn English, to learn it badly (because that's how it's always been done), to suffer at the hands of incompetent Korean and foreign teachers, and to pine for the ever-hoped-for AI robots so they can chase the fuzzy little furriners off the peninsula.
Oh, yeah—that sentence-type chart:
[new material starts here]
Want me to list off some sentence types for you the way Americans learn them (or at least used to learn them)?
- simple sentence
- compound sentence
- complex sentence
- compound-complex sentence
- interrogative sentence (verb-first form is not even shown on the above chart)*
- infinite combinations of the above joined by conjunctions, etc.
That's just off the top of my head. The AI god adds moods and clause types:
English sentences are categorized by structure (simple, compound, complex, compound-complex) and by purpose/function (declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory). The four structures mix independent and dependent clauses, while the four functional types determine if a sentence makes a statement, asks a question, gives a command, or shows emotion.
Once you start mixing, matching, and adding complexity, the number of English "sentence types" is uncountable. To reduce them to only five types, and to use a weird typology in doing so, is at best vaguely insulting, and at worst harmful to EFL students. What would Koreans think if I presented an oversimplified chart of supposed Korean sentence types?
__________
*Interrogatives can be written as declaratives, but with a question mark on the end.
• You're going fishing?
• He said what?
—but where in the above chart do you see the grammar for
Do you have a name?
The Vaux + S + Vmain + Odir structure is not on the chart. Interrogatives are sentences, too. I would humbly submit that the chart is crap. And if there's one chart like this, there are others.
ululate!
You're a slacker! was a much better line than Your ego is writing checks your body can't cash. That latter one gets my vote for Stupidest Line of the Century. In the late 1980s, if you needed someone to play the quintessential irritated hardass, Tolkan (whose name I didn't know until just a few minutes ago) was your man. RIP.
James Tolkan, best known for his roles in “Top Gun” and the “Back to the Future” franchise, has died. He was 94.
— Variety (@Variety) March 28, 2026
He famously played Mr. Strickland in the “Back to the Future” trilogy and Commander Tom “Stinger” Jardian in “Top Gun.”https://t.co/NNxgVfFnTL pic.twitter.com/QaTiDuRy8p
how about this for a restaurant idea?
You're Korean. You come into my restaurant, the Grammar Hut (name subject to change). You see from the signs and posters that you get a 10% discount for ordering in English. There's also a chance for you to get a 20% discount on your next order if you take and pass a grammar quiz, one that is different for every person and changes daily. You order in English, receive congratulations and your 10% discount, then eat your meal. After the meal, you go over to the carrel- or arcade-style booth to take the grammar test (maybe it's on a touch screen; maybe it's more old-school), which is relentlessly in English. A proctor is there to monitor that you're not cheating. You take the quiz and pass. You receive a chit with a QR code and instructions to go back to the counter and have it scanned. You're told not to throw the QR code away so it can be re-scanned the next time you come in to order your food and confirm your 20% discount. If, next time, you order in English and bring your QR code, you get a 30% discount. This cycle can repeat until you hit ten "passes" of the grammar test. Since you are scanned in and on record, if you take and pass the quiz ten times, you will get a 50% discount off your next order. At 100 "passes," it's a 60% discount off the next order.
The menu is good but eclectic. Basically, it's the shit I cook: burgers, shoestring fries, potato chips, Moroccan-inspired chicken, spaghetti, chili, chili dogs, lasagna, tacos, nachos, ddeokbokgi, gyros, boeuf bourguignon, various soups and stews (some Korean), breakfast items, and desserts (cakes, pies, cookies), maybe some keto selections. A happily varied menu that doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up. Think: Silver Diner in the US. Or the Cheesecake Factory.
Does this sound like the start of a decent business model? Poke holes in my idea in the comments. This grammar-nerd stuff would probably work in Korea. Not so much in the States, where people just don't give a fuck.
trending recently: "seahorse emoji" and AI hallucination
"Yes, you're right. It never existed." Creeping ever closer to "I'm sorry, Dave."
I absolutely agree
Everything this guy says is spot-on. I completely agree with his entire spiel. It's at the heart of the problem with Korean English testing, and it's a problem for the years-long trendy thinking in FL-teaching circles that tra-la-la oral-proficiency curricula can just rely on people "watching soap operas" to really learn a language. He's also right that language learning should involve stress, effort, and discipline, and that the priority shouldn't be to try to make the learning (well, "learning") as smooth and easy as possible. You can't really learn or improve on anything unless you pressure-test. Sure, learning shouldn't be a thoroughly unpleasant experience, but it also shouldn't be absolutely free of pain and effort, either. Develop your active macroskills along with your passive macroskills. Yes—that's the key.
One thing, though: I'm not sure I agree with how he reckons with Stephen Krashen. I may need to watch the video again to see whether I've understood him correctly, but it sounded to me as though he were making Krashen out to be someone he's not. Otherwise, in terms of language-learning philosophy, I think everything this gentleman says is absolutely correct. What a relief to know I'm not the only one thinking this way.
Friday, March 27, 2026
the rats find out
Too bad there was no English equivalent to Saint Patrick to drive all the rats out of England. Instead, it's up to the gunners. Or as they call themselves, the rat busters.
when you accidentally find a playground... in hell
Run away! Run away!
Never mind.. 😂 pic.twitter.com/GRuG6RLcVS
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) March 26, 2026
today's agenda
Now that I'm done with the blog-slog, and I've written my book review of Destiny of the Republic, it's back to work. I need to create the rest of the Substack material that'll last through April, then get back to working on my movie-review book. I also need to repopulate my blog's scheduled posts and, if possible, get cracking on making some videos. We'll see how all of that goes.
the turd attempt
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| Not mine, I'm ashamed to say. Image found here. |
The shittiest(!) part of using the plunger is having to clean it afterward. You hold it suspended in the toilet water, hit the flush, shake the plunger around while the "clean" water swirls around it, then move the plunger over to the sink to give it a working-over with soap and, if you have it, some sort of cleaning spray like Windex. Both the rubber head and the handle, which has been baptized with shit-water. Then you have to clean your sink.
With that problem out of the way, I can go about my... business.
slummin' with Sackhoff
Watch Katee and her Canuck hubbie react to a two-decades-old series, which Katee is only now watching through for the first time. Their leftism does slip through on occasion, but hey, it was a leftie show. I loved it anyway. My humongous, comprehensive review is here.
the promise of Dune, Part 3
Look at the poster image for Dune, Part 3 above. I didn't notice until someone pointed it out, but the horizontal solar flare inside the "E" in "DUNE" has three parallel lines representing the Roman numeral 3, i.e., this is the third movie. So I immediately checked the poster for Dune, Part 2, and sure enough, this has been a thing for a while. As graphic designs go, I'm impressed. This is very clever design language. I only wish I'd caught it earlier.
Destiny of the Republic: review
Since I had Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President on my phone's Kindle app, I finished reading it on the trip over to Daejeon right before I began my recent abortive walk. I've already reviewed the Netflix miniseries Death by Lightning, which is based on Millard's 2011 book, essentially a double-biography of the latter part of the intertwined lives of President James Garfield and his assassin, an insane man named Charles Guiteau. Like the miniseries, the book jumps back and forth between the lives of Guiteau and Garfield, showing with the benefit of hindsight how these men's lives are on a collision course from early on, what may be the true cause of Garfield's death, and what implications there are, after Garfield's assassination, for both presidential security and infection control in medicine.
We're given some of Garfield's background in terms of his earlier years, aptitude, education, thirst for knowledge, strong sense of family, and work ethic. Garfield becomes a professor of literature and ancient languages; later, he becomes the president of Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (Hiram College today). On top of that, Garfield serves as a general in the Civil War, then as a congressman for almost eighteen years. As the miniseries shows, he is indeed nominated for president at the 1880 Republican Convention in Chicago. After delivering an eloquent and captivating nomination speech on behalf of John Sherman, brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman (who had burned his way down to Atlanta in the Civil War), Garfield ends his address with the question, "What do we want?" to which a voice shouts, "We want Garfield!" And thus begins a process that culminates in Garfield's nomination and leads to his election as the United States' 20th president. Garfield is a good-hearted man with sharp people skills who always tends to build coalitions. His political enemies include corrupt, prideful, and stubborn New York Senator Roscoe Conkling and his henchman Chester A. Arthur. Arthur is chosen to be Garfield's running mate, and the two are often at loggerheads as Conkling tries to use Arthur as a way to influence presidential policy.
Charles Guiteau's story begins with the sinking of a ship he had been on: the Stonington, a steamship. Believing his survival to have been a miracle, Guiteau, already mentally unstable, begins to view his life as having some manner of sacred purpose or destiny. Talented in some ways but aimless, temperamental, and given to being a moocher, Guiteau spends time as part of a weirdly religious free-love commune before leaving and going back to doing various jobs. He is supported in part by his long-suffering sister Frances, but Guiteau's instability leads to his constantly getting into trouble. He often finds himself unable to pay the rent for whatever accommodation he's in, which means he quietly slips out and moves on to another unsuspecting landlord. Guiteau also borrows money from more parties than just his sister, but he rarely if ever pays anyone back. Initially coming to see his sacred destiny as somehow tied to that of James Garfield, Guiteau begins campaigning for Garfield during the election. He starts to see himself as instrumental in—even central to—Garfield's eventual electoral victory and thinks himself deserving of a high-level post, like ambassador to France. To this end, Guiteau often comes to the White House with a host of other petitioners in an attempt to see the president and present his request. In this effort, too, he fails, and his frustration mounts, which eventually leads to his purchase of a Webley British Bull Dog .442 pistol and his shooting of the president at a train station.
The miniseries covers Garfield's shooting in the fourth and final episode, but Millard's book covers Guiteau's shooting of Garfield at about the halfway point in her story. Much of the rest of the book is devoted to the horrible comedy of errors that ensues when Dr. D. Willard Bliss, recommended by Abraham Lincoln's son Robert Todd Lincoln, is requested to come and care for the wounded president, who is shot in July of 1881 and endures until September. At the time, European medicine is undergoing a revolution thanks to the work of Dr. Joseph Lister, a champion of antiseptics and infection control. Hand-washing, carbolic acid, and other procedures are found to radically reduce the rates of deadly in-hospital infections in Europe. But across the pond in America, venerable doctors are unconvinced that Lister's seemingly complicated procedures produce anything but delay and inefficiency. As a result, Dr. Bliss deals with the president in the manner of most of his American colleagues of the time: by probing the president's bullet wound with unwashed fingers and unsterile instruments. One embarrassing reality is that Bliss is unable to find Guiteau's bullet (Guiteau, meanwhile, is sitting in jail, with the American public loudly calling for his slow and agonizing death). The Scottish-born Canadian-American inventor Alexander Graham Bell does what he can to help by creating a device he calls an induction balance, which can essentially act as a noninvasive metal detector to find the embedded bullet. But Bliss is adamant that, as Bell goes through several iterations of this invention, Bell should probe only the side of the president's body where Bliss suspects the bullet to be.
After the president's death from severe sepsis, the autopsy reveals the bullet to be, frustratingly, on the opposite side of the body from where Bliss had thought it was. Not only that, but the bullet had nestled close to certain vital organs and become encysted by new tissue: the bullet, left alone, would have done the president no harm. Even though Guiteau's bullet instigates this horrible chain of events, Dr. D. Willard Bliss is arguably more directly responsible for James Garfield's death thanks to a combination of pride, stupidity, incompetence, and stubbornness about the need for antisepsis. In the wake of Garfield's death, changes are made to American medical procedures to reflect Lister's discoveries and imperatives. Changes are eventually also made to presidential protection (the Secret Service, already in existence in Garfield's time, becomes a full-time security detail only later, in 1902, after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901) despite a general public feeling that America is not a monarchy, and that the US president should be more readily available to the people than any king. But with Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, then Garfield's in 1881, those close to the president realize they have no choice but to bow to certain realities. Charles Guiteau, meanwhile, is hanged in front of witnesses in 1882, almost a year after shooting Garfield. After Garfield's death, Chester Arthur is elevated to the presidency, and he is a changed man, dissociating himself from his former master Roscoe Conklin and enthusiastically adopting most if not all of Garfield's policies and priorities. It's an extreme metanoia, and Arthur is inspired by one correspondent in particular—Julia Sand, a bedridden woman who constantly writes him, urging him to change his ways, to find his better self, and to lead a grieving nation with strength and wisdom. Sand is never mentioned in the Netflix miniseries, but according to Millard, she is a quietly enormous influence on the life, reformation, and spiritual redemption of Chester A. Arthur.
Overall, I found Candice Millard's retelling of events to be a compelling, lively, and detailed read. I did often wonder, though, how she was able to insert certain bits of fine-grained detail into her narrative. I realize that she worked extensively with voluminous amounts of correspondence, so she was doubtless able to plausibly deduce and re-create events and dialogue based on the letters she read. Millard succeeds in giving us a sad tale of wasted potential: Garfield was a fiercely intelligent and amazingly noble man, the likes of whom would not survive in today's dirty, truth-twisting political reality. For his life to be cut short was painful not only for his immediate family but also for the nation. Millard's narrative is also sophisticated enough to allow the reader to speculate as to who and what really caused James Garfield's death. Was it Charles Guiteau, who fired a bullet that would have done no harm had the bullet wound been left alone? Was it Robert Todd Lincoln's fateful recommendation of Dr. Bliss, the doctor who had been there when his father Abraham Lincoln had been shot? Was it the willfully incompetent Dr. Bliss himself—a man who, until his death, never backed down from his obviously errant conclusions and convictions?
On a personal level, the hubristic figure of Dr. Bliss reminds me strongly of certain types of Korean incompetence in important fields ranging from health care to aviation. Bliss enjoyed the same sort of benefits deriving from social hierarchy that older Koreans in prominent positions enjoy. With underlings unable to question decisions, with new inventions and techniques not being permitted to be used to their full potential (Alexander Graham Bell could have saved the president had he been permitted to conduct his exploration of the president's body on his own terms), with one's own pride, status, and ego being more important than truth and reality... Dr. Bliss's situation felt rather Korean to me. I'm not saying Koreans are generally incompetent (quite the opposite!), but in cases where tragedies or scandals occur (e.g., Asiana 214 in 2013, or Dr. Hwang Woo-seok's 2006 bioethics fraud, or any number of preventable disasters), they're often the result of the abovementioned social factors, and this was apparently also true of 1880s-era America (and, for all I know, still true in America today, though probably to a lesser degree than in Korea).
My buddy Mike had recommended that I read Millard's book, and I'm very glad I did. It's a worthwhile read—a compassionate, dynamic, well-written narrative, and I look forward to reading more of Millard's work.
Thursday, March 26, 2026
done
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| (from Day 4, Leg 3 of the recent walk) The cat sings its final note. |
I've completed Day 4, Leg 3 of the walk blog, so I think the blog is now complete. If you see any mistakes in facts or language, let me know with a comment or an email.
it's a rare thing
How bad or weird can it be? If you've had tartare or carpaccio, this is nothing unusual.
another pair of Dune videos
Dumping on the movie version of Chani! Yes, she's very different from in the books.
Paul/Anakin parallels:
I'd rather chill here
I was up at 7:05 a.m. today, which is early when I'm not out walking. I had considered going out to Jamshil Lotte World Tower to watch a matinee of Project Hail Mary, but a combination of lazy inertia and pragmatism kept me in bed: I realized that I'd actually rather sleep in a little more and work on my walk blog than go see a movie that I can see in a few months at home.
I had a further realization that might sound heretical to some, especially given the current wave of enthusiasm: I'm not nearly as excited as I'd thought I'd be about this movie. I've seen it getting rave reviews from my go-to circle of YouTube reviewers, but my own experience of the movie's preview trailer has been, at best, only the mildest quickening of the pulse. Rocky the alien doesn't look or move quite the way I'd imagined him, and while Ryan Gosling is likeable and seems well cast, something still feels wrong about his presence in the movie. So, frankly, I'm not exactly champing at the bit to see this film.
Which is why I'm still chilling at my place instead of leaping out to grab a ticket. Who knows? I might feel differently next week, and there's a chance the movie, once I see it, will utterly shatter my expectations. But I have a feeling that I can wait. At least another week. The movie seems to be doing fine without me.
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
to hold or not to hold the bowl?
Are you a dog? Are you a beggar? One of my Korean uncles, who had lived in Japan for eleven years, gave me almost exactly this explanation as to why Koreans don't hold their bowls when eating while the Japanese do hold their bowls.
it's gonna take longer than originally planned
I've been working on the Day 4, Leg 3 post on my walk blog, which has a host of errors, and to which I'd added a ton of captions and commentary... then I fucked everything up by accidentally right-clicking my mouse and inadvertently hitting some form of "translate" that turned my entire blog into a French-language blog, including the edit window where I write my entries. I fumblingly figured out how to reverse the damage for the edit window's language, but not how to reverse the damage to my blog's content, which all got automatically translated into French. I did eventually discover a way to get my written text back to English, but at the cost of losing most of the effort I had made today. I don't have to start from zero, but I do have to start from just before the halfway point, which sucks. I want to tear my entire apartment building down because of all the time I've wasted, so for now, the plan is just to leave off for tonight, allow myself to cool down, then maybe go see Project Hail Mary early tomorrow morning at the Jamshil Lotte World Tower multiplex. On weekday mornings, finding a seat for an early matinee shouldn't be hard.
Fuck my life.
the wound channel is the stuff of nightmares
I'd hate to have a bullet do that inside of me. But at least I could take comfort in knowing I wouldn't live through being shot by it... pretty much no matter where I was hit.
walk blog: Day 2 entry now done
I've completed work on the Day 2 entry of the walk blog—see here. All the pics are in place and captioned, and I've added commentary and made some revisions. If you spot any errors of fact or language, leave a comment or send me an email.
Day 3 might take two days, though: There are a lot of photos.
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
noble dawgz
the part they left out: these dogs were stolen for the dog meat trade in Jilin, China. Jilin province has 50+ slaughterhouses.
— shira (@shiraeis) March 23, 2026
they escaped from a moving truck, formed a defensive formation around an injured german shepherd, and a corgi navigated them 17km home over 2 days.… https://t.co/Y5jImOQce4
Monday, March 23, 2026
walk blog: Day 1 post is complete
Check out my abortive walk's Day 1 entry over at Kevin's Walk 10. Hundreds of pics, plus captions and commentary to fill in some of the gaps.
housekeeping notes
- My sources tell me that Project Hail Mary doesn't open in South Korea until April 17. I might have to heave my large self up in lovely spring weather next month and watch this movie some weekday.
- I had to kill (throw away) my lovely black jacket, gifted to me by my boss in 2024. It had a lovely, heavy-canvas exterior and was reliably water-resistant, but the interior lining might as well have been made of toilet paper. Despite knowing this, I decided to risk giving the jacket a gentle wash in my machine upon returning from my 3/5-completed Geumgang walk. Result: thousands of little, ripped-up scraps of fabric all over the place—all over my other clothes (I had put in only one other jacket in that load because I suspected trouble), and all over the inside of the machine. So I scraped out the machine and ran it while empty to rinse it out, shook the scraps off my other jacket (my old, blue windbreaker), vacuumed the scraps up (I have a hand vac now), bundled up the black jacket, and tossed it in the trash, where it now awaits its ultimate fate: disposal downstairs and, eventually, reintegration into the churning cosmos as it breaks down naturally. A sad end to what ought to have been a decent piece of clothing. And no, I'm not putting it in the clothes-recycling hamper downstairs so someone else can use it: the jacket has no lining now, and it's a mangled mess. If I didn't think it'd be expensive, I'd ask a seamstress or alterations expert to rip out the remaining lining and install an sturdier interior, but as I said, that'd be expensive.
- I'm chugging through my walk blog to finalize it. All the pics are installed and enlarged; the postmortem has been written and even revised; all that remains are the captions and extra commentary. I'll announce when I'm done.
- Otherwise, it's back to Substack-content generation, working on projects, and—if possible—some video-making. I really need to get into the video-making.
the basic human sin
Bill Cosby, in his one-man show Himself (1983), advising his kids about his mother who has become a doting grandmother after a life of being a relentless hardass to her son:
That is not the same woman I grew up with! You are looking at an old person who is trying to get into heaven now!
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| I'll be talking about the bad grammar on my Substack. |
Do-over fantasies, a cousin of the above desire to get into heaven (i.e., an end-of-life yearning for a longer, better future), result from a confrontation with mortality mixed with a fantasy-driven desire to right certain wrongs. Beyond that, motivations for such fantasies will vary from altruistic to selfish. Maybe the fantasizing old person feels genuine remorse for having ruined someone else's life. I can at least respect that sort of motivation. But the desire to repair one's own mistakes so as to make one's own life a better one next time around is rooted only in selfishness. I want a better life for ME. There's nothing to admire or respect about that.
Just try to live your best life now. Now is all you have. Even people who believe in reincarnation or rebirth would agree that nothing ever repeats itself exactly, hence the proverb about how history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. So even if you got your do-over wish, it'd go wrong in different ways.
What are the postmortem alternatives to living your best life now?
- There is no God or afterlife. You die, then—nothing.
- There is a God, and eternal heaven and hell do exist. The elevator goes up or down, and you get an eternity of whatever's on the roof or in the basement. No do-overs.
- Afterlife involves reincarnation or rebirth. In Indian thought, the shape of your next life is determined by the momentum of your previous existence, so you won't be starting from Square 1. And if your previous life was one of unwisdom, then your next life will carry that previous unwisdom over—all of your immoderate appetites and personality flaws and stupidity-driven urges and blindness to consequences and susceptibility to temptation. All of it—ported over. You can't shake karmic baggage.
- Afterlife follows some sort of science-fiction reincarnation scenario. You're miraculously born with the memories of your previous life, so you know what mistakes to avoid. This will make you weirdly old and wise in an infant's body, and as Q and Picard taught us, too overcautious to live a proper youth, to make the mistakes from which you're supposed to learn and grow. The further problem is that, the moment you correct your life's first major mistake, the future before you will be completely different. You won't have the chance to correct any of your other mistakes.
- More science fiction: Afterlife means getting to choose when to restart your life and at what age. It also means retaining memories of your previous life as a map of your previous mistakes. But this scenario immediately turns into (4), above, the moment you correct your first mistake. Have fun fucking up this new life.
Do-over fantasies lean hard on the lie that you'll get to correct most or all of your real-life mistakes in this new life. But you keep running into that wall: after you correct your first mistake, the life ahead of you will be completely different, so as the above meme/quote says, you will end up just ruining your life differently. Better to learn to live wisely, to profit from the wisdom of those who've gone before instead of pushing against that wisdom and constantly rebelling and resisting. There's nothing noble about rebellion and resistance for resistance's sake. It just looks lazy and childish and shortsighted.
It's like trying to teach proper grammar (see my Substack!) to someone who doesn't really want to learn and who passive-aggressively resists, either by "forgetting" the rules and concepts just taught or by actively and lazily disdaining the in-built constraints in language that channel one's self-expression. The unwillingness to yoke oneself to the discipline of learning, the desire simply to express oneself sloppily and be happy with only that, is an example of the "resistance for resistance's sake" that I'm talking about. Someone people adopt this rebellious disposition early in life and never grow out of it. It's sad to see how stunted they are now, fantasizing about doing their lives over but failing to understand that none of this works without wisdom and effort and self-discipline (which, really, is a child of wisdom).
I'm talking about myself as much as about Certain People I Know. We could all afford to turn inward and work on ourselves. Psychotherapist M. Scott Peck wrote a book a long time ago called The Road Less Traveled (1978). In it, he argued that the fundamental human sin isn't pride but laziness. The spirit (and you can take that term to mean something secular if you want) operates according to the laws of physics: it has its own inertia. And as we all know, an object at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. That's laziness: spiritual inertia leading to moral and physical inertia. It hardens and crystallizes, eventually becoming an active desire not to grow, an active preference for incuriosity and stagnation. But because the spirit also has its own natural élan and yearnings, this laziness is paradoxically coupled with a desire for things to be different and/or to have been different. Somehow, though, the mind fails to make the connection between (1) being in a situation that needs change and (2) being the agent of that change. I myself have come to this realization only belatedly. Cite your favorite moral story to describe my situation; for me, Aesop's The Grasshopper and the Ants comes to mind. Make the effort early or end up weeping and discontent later. It's trite, but you have to Be the change you wish to see.
"how's your diaper?"
Battle of the crips! She reminds me of a classmate I had in high school. I was never mean to her, but I wish I'd been more open with and friendly to her. How different would life have been if we had become friends?
Sunday, March 22, 2026
assessing Jim Carrey's Korean in Yes Man
The guy's a lot kinder than I would have been. I guess he comes from the "A for effort" school of thought, which I see as the enemy. Performance matters, not effort. Ask any Olympic judge of figure skating or gymnastics. "At least he tried" is what you say about failures.
Or am I being too mean?
Saturday, March 21, 2026
written in a comment elsewhere
I wrote this (slightly edited):
...there are a lot of people who think they can run from or at least drown out the voices in their heads. Maybe because most people are so social, they thrive on noise—the sounds of other people jabbering and blathering and singing and shouting and just filling the silence with ear garbage and other arrant bullshit. Getting these people together for a 20-minute meditation session—in which you just sit, drink in the quiet, and start to feel the oceanic rhythms of your consciousness—would drive them nuts because they're so superficial and so noise-addicted that silence actually makes them uncomfortable. So they're unwilling to face the silence. Because they don't want to confront the voices. A shame, really. It's like sitting with a chatterbox who doesn't know when to shut the fuck up. If he doesn't hear a voice, he'll talk just so there's sound. I've ridden with taxi drivers who, to fill the silence, would reflexively turn on the radio just to have the comforting presence of sound. For some people, silence is oppressive. I pity them.
The above isn't meant to say that no one should ever talk or engage in noisy self-expression. It is, however, a comment on the old wisdom that the babbling brook is shallow while still waters run deep. And I'm not making myself out to be an enlightened guru in this regard: hell, I talk out loud to myself during my long walks, sometimes to the point of telling myself to shut up.
I know someone who would appreciate this
Just seen on Instapundit. Here's a groaner of a dad pun for you:
I thought this was going to be a joke about massive fraud. Gimme my money back.
penultimate walk-blog post is up, sadly
Go check out my next-to-last post for what turned out to be an abortive walk.
But only if you dare. There be some serious toe pics.
ululate!
1. Chuck Norris doesn’t flush the toilet. He scares the shit out of it.
2. When Chuck Norris was born, he drove his mom home from the hospital.
3. When Chuck Norris slices onions, the onions cry.
4. Chuck Norris counted to infinity—twice.
5. When the boogeyman goes to sleep at night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.
6. Chuck Norris has a mug of nails instead of coffee in the morning.
7. Chuck Norris can clap with one hand.
8. Chuck Norris uses ribbed condoms inside out so he gets the pleasure.
9. Time waits for no man. Unless that man is Chuck Norris.
10. There is no theory of evolution, just a list of animals Chuck Norris allows to live.
11. Chuck Norris doesn’t actually write books. The words assemble themselves out of fear.12. Chuck Norris can divide by zero.13. Chuck Norris can delete the Recycling Bin.14. Death once had a near-Chuck-Norris experience.15. When God said, “Let there be LIGHT!”, Chuck Norris said, “Say please.”16. Chuck Norris can kill two stones with one bird.17. Chuck Norris destroyed the periodic table because Chuck Norris only recognizes the element of surprise.18. There is no chin behind Chuck Norris’ beard. There is only another fist.19. Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door.20. When Chuck Norris does a push-up, he isn’t lifting himself up: he’s pushing the earth down.
21. Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a watch. He simply decides what time it is.22. Chuck Norris built the hospital he was born in.23. When Chuck Norris turned 18, his parents moved out.24. Chuck Norris doesn’t sleep. He waits.25. Chuck Norris has been to Mars. That’s why there are no signs of life there.26. Chuck Norris once ate a Rubik’s Cube and pooped it out solved.27. The flu has to get Chuck Norris shots every year.28. The Dead Sea was alive before Chuck Norris swam there.29. Chuck Norris doesn’t fill out online forms because he doesn’t submit.30. Chuck Norris starred in Star Wars. He was the Force.
31. Chuck Norris likes his meat so rare he only eats unicorns.32. Chuck Norris doesn’t read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.34. If Chuck Norris were to travel to an alternate dimension in which there was another Chuck Norris and they both fought, they would both win.35. Chuck Norris can strangle you with a cordless phone.36. Chuck Norris can kill your imaginary friends.37. Chuck Norris can hear sign language.38. Chuck Norris tells Simon what to do.39. Chuck Norris lost his virginity before his dad did.40. If it looks like chicken, tastes like chicken, and feels like chicken, but Chuck Norris says it’s beef, it’s beef.
41. Chuck Norris does not own a stove, oven, or microwave because revenge is a dish best served cold.42. Chuck Norris has never blinked in his entire life.43. Chuck Norris can speak Braille.44. Chuck Norris once had a heart attack. His heart lost.45. Chuck Norris doesn’t cheat death. He wins fair and square.46. Chuck Norris is the reason Waldo is hiding.48. Chuck Norris sleeps with a pillow under his gun.49. MC Hammer learned the hard way that Chuck Norris can touch this.50. Chuck refers to himself in the fourth person.
51. The only time Chuck Norris was ever wrong was when he thought he had made a mistake.52. A bulletproof vest wears Chuck Norris for protection.53. Chuck Norris once won an underwater breathing contest with a fish.54. Chuck Norris narrates Morgan Freeman’s life.55. The Great Wall of China was created to keep Chuck Norris out. It didn’t work.56. It takes Chuck Norris 20 minutes to watch 60 Minutes.57. Chuck Norris once ordered a steak in a restaurant. The steak did what it was told.58. Bigfoot claims he once saw Chuck Norris.59. Chuck Norris can sit in the corner of a round room.
60. Chuck Norris can make a slinky go upstairs.61. Chuck Norris can squeeze orange juice out of a lemon.
62. Chuck Norris cannot turn left because he is always right.
63. Chuck Norris invented airplanes because he was tired of being the only person who could fly.64. Freddy Krueger has nightmares about Chuck Norris.65. Chuck Norris’ cowboy boots are made from real cowboys.66. Chuck Norris used to beat the shit out of his shadow because it was following too close behind him. It now stands back a safe 30 feet.67. Before he forgot a gift for Chuck Norris, Santa Claus was real.68. Chuck Norris doesn’t need to shave. His beard is too scared to grow.69. Chuck Norris had to stop washing his clothes in the ocean. Too many tsunamis.70. Chuck Norris can cook minute rice in 30 seconds.
71. Chuck Norris once made a Happy Meal cry.72. When Chuck Norris enters a room, he doesn’t turn the lights on. He turns the dark off.73. Chuck Norris can unscramble an egg.74. Chuck Norris can make a snowman out of fire.75. When Chuck Norris jumps into a pool, he doesn’t get wet. The water gets Chuck Norris.76. Chuck Norris can win a staring contest with his eyes closed.77. Chuck Norris can win a game of Connect Four in just three moves.78. Chuck Norris can lick a 9-volt battery and not get shocked.79. Chuck Norris knows Victoria’s secret.80. When Chuck Norris was in middle school, his English teacher assigned an essay: “What is courage?” He received an A-plus for turning in a blank page with only his name at the top.
I remember Norris got a "Chuckle" when reading a version of this one aloud:
Chuck Norris was bitten by a rattlesnake... after five days of pain and suffering, the rattlesnake died.
debating with academics is often useless
Maybe some academics listen to reason, but most don't. Most also think that their Ph.D. makes them experts in everything, including matters quite outside of their field. There's often a Dunning-Kruger dynamic at play, and in the exchange below, Friedman—a smart guy who happens to be right—seems to be wasting his time.
Friday, March 20, 2026
d'oh (sounds like a Steven Wright one-liner)
A documentary made by the Flat Earth society has been nominated for a Golden Globe.
— mariana Z (@mariana057) March 12, 2026
Thursday, March 19, 2026
it's a spectacular moment, but does it make sense?
I've come to like The Last Jedi less and less as the years have passed. And The Critical Drinker is right about Rian Johnson and his soccer-ball-shaped (the Drinker would doubtless say football-shaped) head.
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
\ tomɑ dɑkɛ̃ \
(In case you didn't figure out the above, that's the IPA—International Phonetic Alphabet—rendering of Thomas d'Aquin, the French way to say Thomas Aquinas.)
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
St. Patrick's Day limericks by a half-Korean, part-Irish bastard
My uncle eats nothing but gators;
he tries to sell meat to our waiters,
and they always say no
because business is slow,
but in truth, they're all just gator-haters.
he tries to sell meat to our waiters,
and they always say no
because business is slow,
but in truth, they're all just gator-haters.
A robber and witch were in trouble,
so the witch made a magic brew bubble,
then they drank the dose right,
turned to tall heaps of shite
—head to toe, covered with pubic stubble.
The Lord, He was taking a tally;
He saw a young maid, name of Sally
—so He changed to a man,
and He called himself Stan,
but the lass never showed Him her valley.
There once was a dragon named Pringle
who had the most ponderous dingle
all the people were wowed
and the prostitutes, cowed
—but the dragon remained ever single.
'Twas nighttime when Greyhair McFiddle
heard Margie his wife cry, "Let's diddle!"
And quite ancient, with rolls,
Margie unearthed her holes,
and so Greyhair aimed right for the middle.
Monday, March 16, 2026
Andong's Berlin food recommendations
To hear Andong tell it, Berlin is a real food mecca. The last time I was there was in 1989 for the fall of the Wall. I gather that a lot has changed since then.
do this for New Year's Eve 2026
I've never been a "huge slab of meat" kind of guy, but I don't mind a good steak now and then.
who farted?
Smell that? Seoul is currently 13 hours ahead of DC, but we can smell it from here. Later today, it's the Academy Awards. Are you as excited as I am, Poison Girls?
Anyway, here's Dan Murrell with a truckload of predictions. Not that I care. I suspect that the best way to pick Oscar winners is to use the politically correct-o-meter: the more PC-leftie a film is, the more likely it is to win an Oscar. I realize that that doesn't make most choices any easier since almost all of the films tilt left in some way or other, but can you think of a better metric? What's that you say? Actual merit?? Ha! Don't make me laugh. But your naïveté is adorable. Leave predictions in the comments. If you're interested. I doubt any of you are.
Sunday, March 15, 2026
when fetishes meet
The girl I was head over heels for in high school was cross-country team co-captain, and I discovered, thanks to her legs, that I have a thing for women's calves. Meaty, muscular calves.
departure time!
Ides of March! Watch out for multiple daggers.
My SRT train leaving for Daejeon from Suseo Station departs at 3 p.m. It'll take less than an hour to arrive at Daejeon's Shintanjin Station, and motels there are well within walking distance. The walk starts the following day and goes through Friday. Follow me over at my walk blog, Kevin's Walk 10. Leave lots of comments, but do read the comments policy under the comment window: No anonymous comments! You may sign in as "Anonymous" or "Unknown," but in that case, please leave a name or screen name at the end of your comment. I'll be deleting all anonymous comments, even the nice ones.
more Anatoly pranks with bodybuilders
You have to wonder, though, whether these guys are actually in on the pranks.
when it's too difficult for the native speakers
It's the day I depart for my walk, which starts tomorrow, so this blog is now on a reduced schedule. There will still be scheduled posts throughout the day, but not as many. In the meantime, please visit my walk blog, Kevin's Walk 10, for the latest updates on how the Geumgang walk is going.
Below, we have more evidence that Korean education is a joke—another case of designing a test that doesn't test for anything real or practical. In Korea, the English test for college entrance doesn't test for whether the student possesses any practical skills: the test is full of tricks, filled with twists and turns and traps. It has no connection to reality at all, and whether a student does well or poorly on the test (I imagine most Americans, who are language idiots, would do poorly) says nothing about that student's real English ability. The test is more like a logic test that uses English as its medium. Schools would be better off giving students a symbol-filled, non-linguistic IQ test (like this one) instead.
I hate seeing English used this way.
Saturday, March 14, 2026
Dr. Ekberg on what accelerates your dementia
You guessed it: carbs. Avoid processed foods, especially the sugary ones. Avoid alcohol. Avoid "low-fat" processed foods. Avoid smoking. Avoid a high-grain diet. Avoiding eating many times during the day. Sleep well. Don't be sedentary. Take in plenty of Omega-3, not so much Omega-6. Reduce your screen time.
think only happy thoughts
 |
| seen in Instapundit comments |
Such gleeful dedication.
The way he jumped in without hesitation 😭
— Interesting things (@awkwardgoogle) March 13, 2026
This is peak dog happiness.pic.twitter.com/kk0YuYklLp
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