a popular phrase for the past few years

 

Just wait... it'll come to you.

a new kind of compass

The Boys, Season 5: one-paragraph review

Pretty much the only reason why I followed Amazon's series The Boys after Season 3 was completism. I had mostly stopped caring after Season 3. Season 5 marks the finale for the main storyline of the Vought universe (Vought is the corporation that created superheroes). I think I'd heard that the college spinoff Gen V, which I'd followed for two seasons, has been canceled, but two spinoffs—1950s retro series Vought Rising and the modern-era The Boys: Mexico, are currently in development. But let's focus on this concluding season of the main series that started it all. I started off liking The Boys a lot because of its darkly, perversely comic sendup of "normal" superheroes from comics houses like DC and Marvel. Sometime around Season 2 or 3, I even wrote a defense of the series when most rightie reviewers were slagging the show for having become overly anti-conservative. At least through the first two seasons, The Boys was, I thought, fairly balanced in its satire, and its humor worked on several levels. But the show's final two or three seasons did indeed slide over into a wild-eyed, leftist nightmare of Trump's America, and the humor devolved into something simpler and broader, laced with plenty of fucks and cunts and dick jokes and brains being splattered all over Hughie (Jack Quaid). This season, the feral Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) starts talking; Starlight (Erin Moriarty) looks shockingly different after the actress's plastic surgery; Butcher (Karl Urban) finally finds peace, in a manner of speaking; and Homelander (Anthony Starr) gets his long-awaited comeuppance after trying to pass himself off as God. Overall, it was hard for me to care about the fates of the various characters. The show on the whole, and Season 5 in particular, spends so much time being darkly cynical that, when a bit of uncynical earnestness appears in the final episode, it's hard not to snicker in derision. So if you're okay with picking and choosing, and you have a strong desire to watch The Boys, I can't recommend the series beyond Season 3. It started strong, but as with so many series, it ended with a whimper.

I'm still not really a steak guy

As much as I respect the prowess of people who do steaks well, I'm still not much of a steak guy. I prefer my meat thinly sliced—maybe with a char—quickly cooked, and nicely sauced. That's just me. I know a lot of Euro-descended people haven't evolved much from their caveman days, so they still prefer to work their teeth on large hunks of meat. Hey, you do you, and frankly, I don't mind a steak every now and then, either.

it's not a victory yet, but there's a chance

One of the last things I did last night, before going to sleep, was to follow my ex-coworker's advice and hit the HomeTax site to get a tax report from that period when I'd been working at Sookmyung Women's University. It took some doing; I thought I had registered for the site after having done taxes with it last year, and that may be true, but I ended up having to create a new password from scratch. (To be fair, there are US websites and other Korean websites that ask you to alter your password every few months).

My point is that I successfully got into HomeTax and printed out the report, having chosen the period from 2005 to 2009. Whatever years you pick, the actual years that appear on the report will be [selected year - 1], i.e., the report shows data from 2004 to 2008 (I had worked at Sookmyung from 2005 to 2008). Sure enough, as my ex-coworker had said, the report clearly shows me as being salaried and taxed during that period, with my income source being none other than Sookmyung. This is proof positive that I'd been employed there.

So, delighted, I sent the report PDF over to that stubborn, evidence-demanding Sookmyung office along with a tart little remark that there should be no further need for proof I had taught there. The basic facts were right there on the tax report.

It's almost 4 p.m. right now; most of the business day is done. Assuming the office staff started work at 9 or 10 a.m. this morning, they've had hours to consider my email. Part of me is thrumming with grim satisfaction as I imagine them squirming and/or flailing about to try to dig up the proper records (which, based on my interactions with other offices, they can simply generate right there on the spot). Part of me is impatient to receive a reply email. If Sookmyung tries to pull another weepy, "I'm sorry, but there's nothing we can do" bit of nonsense, I don't know what I can do, but I'll think of something because this is becoming a point of pride.

Best-case scenario: I get an email with the desired employment certificate and a few meek remarks. Worst-case scenario: I write off Sookmyung and hope people are satisfied with employment records going back only to 2013.

some documents already coming back

I think the apostilled copies of my diplomas are already on their way back to me. And if I understand correctly, Monument Visa, which has yet to receive my original diplomas because they're still en route, will hold the original diplomas until they get the FBI criminal background check. A staffer at Monument Visa said it's likely the FBI will provide a PDF version of that background check, so sending the PDF to Monument Visa for the final apostille can happen fairly quickly. But I'll still have to send the FBI's paper original to them for legal/clerical reasons. Once Monument Visa has that physical copy and makes whatever final confirmations it needs to do to be in the clear (cover your ass), the company will bundle up both diplomas plus the FBI report and send all three back to me. And aside from a health report, two letters of recommendation, and a copy of my Sookmyung employment record, that ought to be about it for my ridiculous pile of paperwork.

My ex-boss says he's been teaching kids in small hagweons in his area, and he's still in the middle of doing paperwork, including what feels to him like demeaning background checks to confirm he's not a pedophile who shouldn't be working around kids. Jesus.

So here's my checklist again, but stripped of everything that had been checked previously. All that's left are the "still to do"s:

Job stuff:

☐ 1st diploma copy, converted to PDF & apostilled (arriving soon)

☐ 2nd diploma copy, converted to PDF & apostilled (arriving soon)

☐ FBI criminal background check, apostilled

☐ 2nd letter of recommendation, converted to PDF (coming soon)

☐ 3rd letter of recommendation, converted to PDF (coming soon)

☐ copy of 4th certificate of employment (2005-2008) (SMU)

☐ health check; scan form and convert to PDF for job hunting

Personal stuff:

☐ colonoscopy scheduling

☐ completed (& uploaded) first movie-review ebook ms

☐ sample lessons for universities that prove interested in me

☐ sample lessons for KMA (which probably won't hire me)

☐ lessons for private tutoring (lower priority)—test prep & various subjects

☐ more Substack material to last through September

☐ more interactive quizzes for Substack (w/different question formats)

☐ ebook version of the first movie-review book, published

☐ ms for the second movie-review book (long-term project)—start working on it

That looks a tad bit more manageable.

Oh, yeah—my tutoring ad is now up in the lobby.

keeping stupidity alive

My late uncle Ed (husband of my Emo, who passed recently) used to work for OSHA. While I get that Darwin ought to be in the driver's seat in many cases, when it comes to the construction of buildings where thousands of innocent people are going to be working, it's probably not a bad idea to have experts who uphold standards. Just look at China, with all of its building collapses due to the "tofu"-quality construction caused by all of that corruption. Even Elon Musk's companies, like SpaceX, are inspected by OSHA. Imagine the disasters if they weren't.

now, that's how you rape my childhood

"I find your lack of _____ disturbing."
a. ethics
b. wet wipes
c. makeup
d. hesitation

AI-enhanced nostalgia

LOL - funny because it's true. pic.twitter.com/1ho9aIVfqJ

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) April 23, 2026

the red portion of my graph would be much larger

update: another item off the checklist

It's a miracle! When I stopped searching for a 경력증명서/gyeong ryeok-jeungmyeong seo (employment certificate) and started looking for just a 증명서 (certification) in my now-extensive email archives, I found a certificate of employment (재직증명서/jaejik-jeungmyeong seo) from Daegu Catholic University, already in PDF form. Delighted, I downloaded it, renamed the file, and did a "save as" to get it into the proper folder. Done! I'd wasted a lot of time trying to register myself as ex-faculty on the Daegu Catholic University website, but even after I'd registered, the website claimed it had no record of me. Bullshit, but whatever. I'm now too happy to care.

This means that only Sookmyung Women's University is left, and an ex-coworker has given me a couple of avenues to explore (tax and pension documents). I also have one more on-campus ace up my sleeve: my very own Chef Jean-Pierre (not the YouTube guy, but the baker and pastry chef), whom I'm seriously considering visiting just so he can come down to the third-floor office with me and attest that, yes, I had been a teacher in the Lingua Express department during the 2005-2008 period. If even his presence (he's apparently still faculty at Le Cordon Bleu in the same building where I'd taught) isn't enough to convince the Powers That Be to print me a certificate, then I don't know what else to do. It could be that my ex-coworker's email about tax and pension documents might make a stronger case for me. I'll see how much I can look up online.

Meanwhile, another check:

Job stuff:

✓ cover letter (generic, but changed to fit each university)

✓ résumé
✓ a selfie

✓ a reference list (professional + character references)
✓ scans of school transcripts (undergrad & grad)
✓ a copy of my passport (2 pages)
✓ a scanned copy of my alien-residence card (2 sides)

✓ scanned copies of my diplomas (undergrad & grad)

☐ 1st diploma copy, converted to PDF & apostilled (coming soon)

☐ 2nd diploma copy, converted to PDF & apostilled (coming soon)

☐ FBI criminal background check, apostilled

✓ 1st letter of recommendation, converted to PDF

☐ 2nd letter of recommendation, converted to PDF (coming soon)

☐ 3rd letter of recommendation, converted to PDF (coming soon)

✓ copy of 1st certificate of employment (2015-2025) (Golden Goose)

✓ copy of 2nd certificate of employment (2014-2015) (Dongguk)

✓ copy of 3rd certificate of employment (2013-2014) (DCU)

☐ copy of 4th certificate of employment (2005-2008) (SMU)

☐ health check; scan form and convert to PDF for job hunting

Personal stuff:

☐ colonoscopy scheduling

☐ completed (& uploaded) first movie-review ebook ms

✓ my phone as a wireless remote control for PowerPoint on my laptop

☐ sample lessons for universities that prove interested in me

☐ sample lessons for KMA (which probably won't hire me)

☐ lessons for private tutoring (lower priority)—test prep & various subjects

☐ more Substack material to last through September

☐ more interactive quizzes for Substack (w/different question formats)

☐ ebook version of the first movie-review book, published

☐ ms for the second movie-review book (long-term project)—start working on it

UPDATE: one step closer. I took my ex-coworker's advice, figured out how to get into the HomeTax site, and printed a tax report (to PDF) from 2004 to 2009 to show the stubborn SMU office. And right there on the report, it says my employer was Sookmyung Women's University. I'm just gonna send that puppy tonight, and if even that's not enough, then I really have no reason to bother Jean-Pierre except to say salut. Sending the report now. Fingers and tentacles and other dangling extremities crossed.

I could still croak at any moment given my precarious health, but the fact remains that, after some small amount of patience and practice, 

I HAVE GAINED A SUPERPOWER!

[cue angels farting wreckage-strewn tornadoes, blue whales exploding spectacularly, electric guitar-shredding kangaroos heralding the apocalypse with stridently satanic 'roo shanties, skyscraper-sized elephants raining down megatons of feces upon the frightened residents of some native village, fleets of serene-looking ghosts sexually violating house cats, mobs of prognathous giants bellowing inarticulately while whipping their anaconda-sized dicks about in a retarded symphony of snaps and crashes and pubic-hair dandruff]

What superpower did I gain?

Oh, that.

I can now use my Samsung phone as a wireless remote control to operate my PowerPoint files. And all it took was to find my laptop, partially recharge it, download the same remote-control app onto both my cell phone and my laptop, figure out how to sync the two devices up via Bluetooth (which is way, way more useful than I ever gave it credit for*), then spend some time playing around with a PowerPoint file to see how easy it would be to control this way.

After a few stumbles, it was easy. Easy peasy. Much better than being carpet-bombed by a truckload of clay-like elephant shit. I can't wait to find out how all of this can go wrong.

When I used to do my classes at KMA, the KMA staffers would always help me with my prep. They would lay out elegant-looking, in-binder photocopies of my eight-hour-long lesson packet at whatever conference table we would be using that day, then help me get my laptop wire-connected to the room's digital projector. They would also, as a "sugar on top" gesture, give me a PowerPoint remote control that could wirelessly connect with my laptop (or with the office's own laptop if my class files happened to be stored on it) and allow me to control my PowerPoint from a distance. It was great. And now, I don't need to depend on even that, which is one less thing for the crew to set up should I ever rejoin KMA.

One less thing to depend on equals more empowerment for me. One less crutch. Some people spend their lives helplessly flailing, clutching at others, hoping to be taken care of instead of learning how to function on their own. It's like looking at a ridiculous cripple—almost embarrassing. I remember how horrible my father was with computers. I'm pretty sure that one of the reasons he eventually retired from the Maryland Air National Guard was that he'd been placed in an office job where, all day long, he had to deal with those computer thingamajigs, and I've watched Dad with pity as he slowly and fearfully tapped out messages on computer keyboards, utterly unsure if he was doing anything right, the picture of incompetence sliding into irrelevance just because of a lazy refusal to sit down and learn. Don't be like my dad. Learn stuff. Keep learning stuff, even if you mess everything up the first few times. Don't become helpless and useless, a burden to others. Acquire superpowers. Yeah, I'm speaking to myself as well because lazy complacency is always a danger. Stay sharp.

__________

*I used to ignore Bluetooth features because, I felt, I had no use for Bluetooth, which never struck me as relevant. Then I bought my current iMac back in 2021 (it's a fresh-out-of-the-box 2019 model), and it had a Bluetooth wireless keyboard as well as a Bluetooth mouse. Now, wireless devices' most annoying feature is that they have to be routinely recharged, and my mouse runs out a lot faster than my keyboard does, especially these days. Otherwise, the wirelessness has pampered me: There's so much less clutter. So my iMac was my gateway drug. That same year (2021), I got a new phone—a Samsung Galaxy S21 to replace my old, beaten-up, 2014-era phone, bought when I was living in Hayang, next to Daegu. Only months later did I realize that the damn thing had no ports for earbuds: I would have to buy wireless earbuds. Years passed; I got the Bluetooth earbuds while in the States (they, too, need to be recharged, albeit not too often), and suddenly, I was able to sit in an airport or a coffee shop or a hospital waiting area and watch YouTube videos without disturbing anyone else with my videos' noise. And now, here are again—Bluetooth to the rescue as I connect my laptop and phone so I can control my laptop's PowerPoints remotely. Nice. And all it took was some patience and effort. Yeah, I know I'm way happier about this than I should be, but it's another thing off my checklist.

Job stuff:

✓ cover letter (generic, but changed to fit each university)

✓ résumé
✓ a selfie

✓ a reference list (professional + character references)
✓ scans of school transcripts (undergrad & grad)
✓ a copy of my passport (2 pages)
✓ a scanned copy of my alien-residence card (2 sides)

✓ scanned copies of my diplomas (undergrad & grad)

☐ 1st diploma copy, converted to PDF & apostilled (coming soon)

☐ 2nd diploma copy, converted to PDF & apostilled (coming soon)

☐ FBI criminal background check, apostilled

✓ 1st letter of recommendation, converted to PDF

☐ 2nd letter of recommendation, converted to PDF (coming soon)

☐ 3rd letter of recommendation, converted to PDF (coming soon)

✓ 1st copy of certificate of employment (2015-2025)

✓ 2nd copy of certificate of employment (2014-2015)

☐ 3rd copy of certificate of employment (2013-2014) (maybe not coming...?)

☐ 4th copy of certificate of employment (2005-2008) (maybe not coming...?)

☐ health check; scan form and convert to PDF for job hunting

Personal stuff:

☐ colonoscopy scheduling

☐ completed (& uploaded) first movie-review ebook ms

✓ my phone as a wireless remote control for PowerPoint on my laptop

☐ sample lessons for universities that prove interested in me

☐ sample lessons for KMA (which probably won't hire me)

☐ lessons for private tutoring (lower priority)—test prep & various subjects

☐ more Substack material to last through September

☐ more interactive quizzes for Substack (w/different question formats)

☐ ebook version of the first movie-review book, published

☐ ms for the second movie-review book (long-term project)—start working on it

when bad writing catches up with you

Lee Child's master class

On why plot isn't as important as you think it is. Don't worry: He's not totally dismissing its value; he's merely putting it in its place. I could listen to this guy all day. He's a Brit who's lived in New York for much of his life, and if you listen carefully, you can hear how the ambient American accent has sanded down the hard edges of his English accent.

generic cover letter: now written

No change at Dave's ESL Cafe. There are still two job ads for English summer camp and one very old ad for Cheongju University; the Cheongju ad ought to be taken down since the hiring period ended on May 11. The two summer camps are in Seoul; Cheongju is outside of Seoul, about 22 km northeast of Sejong City.

Friend and occasional commenter Daniel suggested that I take a look at a site called Unijobs.kr. For the longest time, it was showing ads for jobs whose application time had come and gone (a May 8 due date for many of them). Now, though, it's showing plenty of uni ads, but none for Seoul. I'm tempted to apply anyway, but leaving Seoul means losing my W10 million rental deposit and still having to pay rent until my studio's next occupant puts down his deposit. That really is a deal with the devil.

But the lack of new uni ads on Dave's ESL just allows me time to get myself more and more ready. I now have a generic cover letter, with scanned signature, ready to go. So here's that checklist again, updated:

Job stuff:

✓ cover letter (generic, but changed to fit each university)

✓ résumé
✓ a selfie

✓ a reference list (professional + character references)
✓ scans of school transcripts (undergrad & grad)
✓ a copy of my passport (2 pages)
✓ a scanned copy of my alien-residence card (2 sides)

✓ scanned copies of my diplomas (undergrad & grad)

☐ 1st diploma copy, converted to PDF & apostilled (coming soon)

☐ 2nd diploma copy, converted to PDF & apostilled (coming soon)

☐ FBI criminal background check, apostilled

✓ 1st letter of recommendation, converted to PDF

☐ 2nd letter of recommendation, converted to PDF (coming soon)

☐ 3rd letter of recommendation, converted to PDF (coming soon)

✓ 1st copy of certificate of employment (2015-2025)

✓ 2nd copy of certificate of employment (2014-2015)

☐ 3rd copy of certificate of employment (2013-2014) (maybe not coming...?)

☐ 4th copy of certificate of employment (2005-2008) (maybe not coming...?)

☐ health check; scan form and convert to PDF for job hunting

Personal stuff:

☐ colonoscopy scheduling

☐ completed (& uploaded) first movie-review ebook ms

☐ my phone as a wireless remote control for PowerPoint on my laptop

☐ sample lessons for universities that prove interested in me

☐ sample lessons for KMA (which probably won't hire me)

☐ lessons for private tutoring (lower priority)—test prep & various subjects

☐ more Substack material to last through September

☐ more interactive quizzes for Substack (w/different question formats)

☐ ebook version of the first movie-review book, published

☐ ms for the second movie-review book (long-term project)—start working on it

I'm supposed to meet my ex-boss for lunch sometime before the end of this month, and he's going to pass me a printed and hand-signed letter of recommendation that I will then scan, convert to PDF, and keep as part of my arsenal.

goddammit

気付かれないように進む狩りモードの猫を無邪気に邪魔する子犬 pic.twitter.com/egY2PGRZAe

— 癒される動物 (@cutest_animal1) April 23, 2026

This feels like a comical version of the horror-movie scenario where little kids inadvertently give away the family's position while everyone's trying to hide from the monster. But in this case, the kid is cheerfully, innocently giving away the monster's position.

the numbers went down on their own

The past couple of days have seen a major drop in bot traffic: I've been showing only 2000-4000 daily site visits, which is still unreasonably high. I remember the old, pre-2010 days, before bots were ever a problem for us invisible bloggers, when I was happy to average 350 visits per day. These days, when the traffic spikes to crazy levels, I worry about getting botted to death. But not at the moment. Right now, things feel calmer.

here's one for you, Solomon

Watch the video below. So who's being a jerk?

I can tell you this: When I buy eggs at the store, I expect that my eggs won't be cracked when I buy them. There are tests you can do, while at the store, to see whether any eggs are cracked in the carton, but sometimes, even those tests don't catch the occasional cracked egg. I'm enough of a cook that, if I find an egg is cracked when I get home, I know there are things I can do to salvage it, e.g., microwave it with salt, pepper, cheese, and herbs, then eat it on the spot, or use the egg right away in that night's recipe. So for me, a cracked egg is no big deal.

If the thrust of the video is that the woman was making some kind of petty, money-grubbing complaint, I'm not seeing it, especially after watching the video and noting the woman's perfectly civil behavior. Yeah, she gives the guy a look of disbelief as he's "repairing" her one broken egg, but I don't think it's unreasonable for her to expect that all of her eggs will be unbroken when she leaves the store.

Now—did the egg break once she got home? I have no idea, and the video offers us no clues. If she broke her own egg at home, then tried to return the carton to get a supposed $15 back (really? $15 for fifteen eggs?), then she's obviously at fault. But I can only judge according to what I see, and from what I see, there's no reason to have a laugh at this lady, who didn't rage, who didn't make a scene, and who was totally civil. If anything, I'm inclined to see the guy behind the counter as being a smartass to someone who's already having a bad day.

The video has the caption "This is how you respond to absurdity with even more absurdity," so I assume the caption writer is siding with the counter guy. He's assuming that the woman's request is absurd. I've been out of the country for a while, so it's up to my fellow Yanks to school me on this: Is it reasonable or unreasonable to expect all of your eggs to be unbroken when you walk out of the store with them, and if that's an unreasonable expectation, why?

This is how you respond to absurdity with even more absurdity. pic.twitter.com/uO0r9f5SJy

— Steve 🇺🇸 (@SteveLovesAmmo) April 23, 2026

"and let my cry come unto thee..."

checklist update and other things

Here's the original to-do checklist with new stuff added on:

☐ cover letter (generic, but changed to fit each university)

✓ résumé
✓ a selfie
✓ scans of school transcripts (undergrad & grad)
✓ a copy of my passport (2 pages)
✓ a copy of my alien-residence card (2 sides—scanned today)

✓ scanned copies of my diplomas (undergrad & grad)

☐ copies of letters of recommendation (I have 1 out of 3 so far)

☐ copies of certificates of employment (I have 2 out of 4 so far)

☐ a copy of a recent "health report" (coming soon)

☐ a copy of the FBI criminal background check (coming in a few weeks)

☐ FBI background-check apostille

☐ completed first movie-review book ms
☐ my phone as a wireless remote control for PowerPoint on my laptop

☐ sample lessons for universities that prove interested in me

☐ sample lessons for KMA (which probably won't hire me)

☐ lessons for private tutoring (lower priority)—test prep & various subjects

☐ more Substack material to last through September

☐ more interactive quizzes for Substack (w/different question formats)

☐ ebook version of the first movie-review book, published

☐ ms for the second movie-review book (long-term project)—start working on it

☐ health check

☐ colonoscopy scheduling

After digging through my normally closed boxes of office stuff, I finally found a small box of thumbtacks. Relief. I went down to the lobby message board to put up my message... and the message board turns out not to be made of cork: It's magnetic. Fuck. So, down I went to the B1 grocery to see whether they sold any small magnets. Nope. I went back up to the first floor 7-Eleven to see whether it had any magnets. The store had anything but: They had clips and stickers. So I've had to order magnets from Coupang; they'll be along tomorrow. One day of my limited time has already been wasted. My ad is still not on the board.

Let's rewind a bit. I found out the message board was magnetic when I tried sinking a tack into the surface, and nothing budged. Out of monkey curiosity, I reached over to a random poster and plucked at the tack-like fastener at one corner. The fastener surprised me by barely resisting as I pulled it off the paper, and when I saw the "tack's" flat bottom, I knew: goddamn magnets. (Made to look like thumbtacks, no less.) And no one thought to warn me? Fuckers.

Anyway, help is on the way, and my tutoring ad will be up on Day 2. Sigh. What a day.

I had left a special message for Monument Visa not to staple their apostilles to my diplomas, but they just wrote back to say that they have to staple the apostilles unless I can give them high-quality scans of the diplomas—scans that they can print out and staple the apostilles to. I resignedly wrote back that they may as well just staple the apostilles to the originals; it's another $20 each for me to send electronic copies, and given my copies' dubious quality, it's probably not worth the extra $40 total. I'll be sending Monument Visa my FBI criminal check once it comes back to me, anyway, so they'll have one more chance to suck out a lot of blood from my wallet. If that's not too weirdly mixed a metaphor.

I did, at least, successfully send the diplomas off. That, too, cost me a pretty penny given the size of the shipping tube.

Nothing in Korea ever moves smoothly from A to B. Especially for foreigners. Putting together my job-application documents these past few weeks has been a royal pain in the ass. Like everyone else in the civilized world, I hate paperwork.

liminal morality?

sandwich battle: Babish vs. the Fallow guys

I've seen a ton of YouTuber food battles, but none quite like this. In this battle, the two Fallow guys (Will Murray and Jack Croft, the owners of the much praised, low-waste London restaurants Fallow, FOWL, and Roe) go up against Babish (real name: Andrew Rea) on his home turf of New York City. The object of the game: Create a good specialty sandwich in four hours, then be judged by three Americans.

What made this battle so different from other food battles I've seen is a little moment that happens while the two teams are out in the city, shopping for ingredients. There's an instant when Jack Croft has what the Brits call a brain wave, i.e., a brainstorm. He asks Murray why they don't just make an unrepentantly British sandwich, based on the "dip" idea, but made with England's most iconic dish: chicken tikka masala. This brain wave proves to have massive repercussions throughout the rest of the battle, and as creative moves go, I felt almost honored to have witnessed it. Babish, meanwhile, brought his "A" game and went with an almost haute-cuisine rendition of a French dip, loaded up with creamed spinach, thin slices of dry-aged beef, and two types of aged Gruyère—one from Switzerland and one from Amurrica. Watch the battle and see who wins. Enjoy the brain wave when it happens, and enjoy how that creative decision's momentum carries through to the end of the video. Most such battles leave me rolling my eyes, but this one, I think, merits your attention. I very much enjoyed it.

errand/task update

Stymied by a lack of thumbtacks, which I just found out are called apjeong/압정 in Korean (is that ap/압 as in "pressure"? so a bit like a pushpin?). I went to our building's admin office to get permission to slap up an ad. I asked the guy whether I could do that, how long the ad could stay up, and whether I'd have to pay to keep the ad up. He stamped a Post-It note to give me permission (which I found weird since that can fall off or be ripped off) and told me the ad could stay up for free. At first, I thought he'd said "for a week," but in looking at the date the ad is to come down, I see "6/25/26" on there, so I guess I missed the "one month and" part. He said I could hang the ad up on the side of the bulletin board for residents (the board's other half is apparently for more official, formal announcements by Those in Authority).

So that left me with the problem of how to hang the ad up. I got to the lobby and dimply realized: no tacks. Like the idiot I am, I hadn't gone down to the lobby with thumbtacks, but I was pretty sure I had a box of tacks stored on one of my bookshelves. So I went back to my place, found the container I'd been thinking of, and... it was full of mini binder clips, all tack-colored. Age makes the brain play tricks on you. I did know, though, that I've got plenty of legitimate tacks in one of my office-supply boxes, so I'll be rifling through those boxes soon (didn't I just do that last week?).

Otherwise, I successfully mailed off my diplomas to Monument Visa, located in Fairfax, Virginia, relatively close to where I'd spent my childhood. Small world.

Still to do: (1) scan my employment certificate from Dongguk University (still haven't heard back from Sookmyung after answering their request for more information; I bet they gave up), (2) scan my F-4 visa (both sides), (3) look into putting some tutoring ads up on Soomgo, and (4) look more closely into whether I really want to teach for eight hellish days in a children's English summer camp. The money is tempting.

I also need to get back to finishing up my movie-review book, after which I have to start creating various materials to tote along with me if a university should ask me to teach a sample lesson, and I need to create sample lessons to shop around to KMA and to use for various forms of private tutoring (I'm putting myself out there for SAT prep, TOEFL prep, accent reduction (nebulous concept but somewhat in vogue), listening, grammar, conversation, reading, etc. Before June ends, I need to create another raft of Substack material as well as generate more interactive quizzes, maybe using different formats this time (fill in the blanks, sequencing, matching, etc.), and at some point, I need to start creating the second movie-review book in the series (going from 2016 to 2018). I've got enough shit to keep me occupied until my second heart attack or stroke. Which reminds me... I still need to schedule a damn colonoscopy, and maybe next week, assuming I'm more or less stable after the pizza orgy, I need to get a standard health check that I can then scan as part of my ever-growing pile of university job-application documents.

Good God, that's a lot of crap to do.

Just a little at a time. A little at a time.

And now... to find those damn tacks and hang up my ad.

UPDATE: Surprise! Sookmyung just wrote to say they still can't find any proof I'd ever taught there, but that I'm welcome to keep contacting them if I find more information. Well, I've got one old coworker in my email address book, and maybe a former supervisor, too. Together, they might be able to give me the email address for our department head, whose name utterly escapes me after almost two decades (and I doubt I have recommendation letters from 2008 still on file). So—more to come. Also: I'd written two contacts from my time at Daegu Catholic University, but neither has written me back. One moved back to the States; the other seems to be teaching on DCU campus, but I'm not sure. Maybe she's dead. I do hope I get some sort of proof of employment from somebody soon.

new use for old thing

the burden of the phone

Without thinking, I had mistakenly asked my friend Neil to give his contact my phone number. I don't know why I did that except that I must've been groggy (I'm not usually a morning person when I'm not out walking). I belatedly tried asking Neil to give the contact my email, but it was too late: My number had already been sent. According to Neil, the contact is supposed to call today, but I have no idea when, so I've been on alert since 9 a.m., trying to decide whether to go out and do an errand. While I keep my cell phone with me when I'm out, I'm much less likely to answer it since it's in my pants pocket and on vibrate, so I normally don't even feel it when someone calls. I also don't usually pick up when I see an unfamiliar number, and since I don't know the contact's phone number, I'll have to answer every unfamiliar call that comes to me today until the contact calls. None of that is Neil's fault; I did this to myself. I should have pumped the brakes right at the beginning and asked Neil to give the contact my email address. That way, I wouldn't have had to feel bound to my phone, which is one reason why I hate phone conversations to begin with: It's their synchronous nature. Texts and emails can be answered asynchronously, i.e., not right at that moment, so there's much less pressure to reply. Extroverts probably don't care about any of this because they love jabbering anyway—people are their lifeblood—but for us introverts, unless we're dealing with close friends, every conversation is an intrusion and a burden.

So having done some housekeeping stuff for the past few hours, I'm saying Fuck it, cleaning myself up, and stepping out to do some damn errands. I'll hear from this person (who works for some sort of tutor-placement agency), or I won't. It is what it is.

Blood sugar today: 224, down from 238. The descent begins. I'd better at least be under 200 by the end of the week. Gawd... then another pizza on Saturday.

Another thing to do today: master the art of turning my cell phone into a remote-control PowerPoint device. I'm gonna try some stuff on my Mac laptop later.

UPDATE: The relevant contact is apparently away right now, and Neil kindly took the step of asking them to please text me. 

I feel bad that I'm putting Neil through this. He is owed a nice meal.

phone shape

"Absolutely, I will not interfere!"

 

interesting premise, goofy execution

Honestly, I don't think the term winner means much in this context.

today's round 2

This is the frozen pizza that I'd enhanced yesterday and saved for today. Once again, a single pizza proved to be enough for the whole day. I didn't get a picture of the lack of a flop jalop this time around (it's also called a slop jalop), but here's what I did get:

Single guy, so of course it's served on the cutting board.

food-porn angle

right before the head-biting

Yesterday's pizza was a generic CJ brand (CJ is a huge Korean corporation with its fingers in many pies, from cinema to food); today's pizza was an Ottogi (written Oddugi/오뚜기 in Korean; I don't understand the incorrect romanization, but whatever); this brand, advertised as a "five-cheese" pizza, came with mysterious lumps of a grey/white substance that was probably cheese, but which looked like balled-up bits of Bratwurst or Korean-style fish paste (eo-muk/어묵 or odaeng/오댕—see here for balls). By the time the enhanced Ottogi was done baking, the mysterious balls had melted into the overall topography of the pizza, and the pizza tasted much the same as yesterday's CJ. Huh. I guess that's how low the quality of frozen pizza is in Korea—to the point of being equally, indistinguishably bad whatever the brand.

But with the enhancements, the pizzas were both quite good if not exactly restaurant quality. My spicy tomato sauce livened them both up, and the addition of the sausage, pepperoni, and mozzarella made a huge difference in the eating experience. That might make for an interesting dinner-party idea: Bring over a dish that started life as a mere pre-frozen product, but which you've taken in your own special direction. And there's nothing stopping you from changing what the final dish might be: I see it all the time on YouTube, such as when el Burrito Monster makes one of his gigantically perverse "burritos" using oodles of mini-gyoza, giant tortillas, Asian-style chicken, and other funky flourishes, so I know the sky's the limit. Take your dumplings and make a megadumpling or a gorgeous soup. Take your frozen mac & cheese and make an awesome stuffed chicken. Whatever works.

Meantime, I've got another whole frozen pizza in the freezer, but I have no room to eat it, so it'll have to wait until next weekend. Eating in general will have to wait until next weekend; this weekend was utterly ruinous for my blood sugar and blood pressure. My BP was high this morning at 135/92, and my blood sugar was fucking 238, which startled a laugh out of me. It's going to take the whole coming week to get back down below 150, if that's even possible, and then I'm going to eat my final pizza next Saturday, which will ruin yet another weekend.

So much for trying to get slimmer before July. Fuck.

Oh, crap—and I need to start practicing how to tie that damn knot on my hanbok. It's one of those things that you desperately learn for one occasion, then forget for ten years, then desperately relearn for another occasion. Until it's finally time for your friends and loved ones to wear their hanbok for you.

Hannah Fry, polite to AI

Hannah Fry, with her eternally impish facial expressions, is an award-winning Cambridge mathematics professor with several award-winning, nerd-themed shows (including one with VSauce’s Michael Stephens called, Shakespeareanly enough, The Rest is Science), and she knows a thing or two about AI. She blithely skips over my own selfish reasons for being polite (Roko's Basilisk) so she can give us the real reason... and in doing so, she provides me with some very interesting clues as to how I can approach AI with better prompts that give me the results I'm looking for. I'm eager to try this new wisdom out.

She does, however, make the rather naive claim that AI has no biases of its own. While technically true insofar as AI is still fundamentally a mere construct and not a living thing, it has been deeply programmed by a certain group of people who do have a certain set of biases that can be triggered to manifest in certain situations. The creation still, in major ways, deeply reflects the nature of its creators. Take that dark thought with you to bed tonight.

Dune 3: the "evil" connection

still to do today

1. Finalize form-filling, payment, and shipping-tube prep to send off my diplomas to be apostilled. See you guys in a few weeks. Bon voyage!
2. Scan my new alien-residence card again (can't find the old scan for some reason).
3. Create a private-tutoring ad to be placed on my building's lobby message board. Also: Visit my building's admin office on Monday to get permission to put the ad up.
4. Finish my long, long review of The Exorcist. Been working on it for days.
5. Start working on interactive quizzes for hypothetical private-tutoring sessions about test prep (TOEFL, SAT). These quizzes will prove useful when I bring along my laptop.

Did you see my other recent reviews?

The Magician (Aussie movie and precursor to Mr Inbetween)
Mr Inbetween (Aussie TV series)
Invincible, Season 4 (streaming series)
Project Hail Mary (US movie)
Destiny of the Republic (book)
War Machine (silly US movie)

My buddy Neil was gracious enough to give a Seoul-based agency he works with my contact info, so I'm expecting a call from that agency sometime tomorrow. I hope this doesn't turn out to be a deal with the Devil, but Neil says that, while the agency hasn't been especially great, it also hasn't been especially bad. One possible problem: Neil thinks the agency won't be happy when I tell it that I'm leaving for a short trip to France during the first week of July, so this whole thing might die on the vine tomorrow. Or maybe I can convince them to give me short-term gigs that end before the end of June.

I'm also contemplating two job ads that popped up on Dave's ESL Cafe for—God help me for even thinking this—summer-camp jobs, each lasting about eight days and paying W1.5–1.8 million to teach elementary and middle school students, lead activities (oh, yay!), etc. Neither job requires more paperwork than what I already have on hand (cover letter, scanned documents, etc.), and both are located in Seoul. As much as I dislike working with groups of kids, the money does, at this point, sound vaguely tempting. Can I endure eight days of kiddie hell during my least-favorite season of the year? I think I can if I develop a "this is a just punishment" mindset so that I feel repentant and not angry or resentful.

So that's where things stand today. Life is in flux, but it's not all dried snot and week-old crotch odor. There are always possibilities, Spock says.

what Netflixification could look like if Netflix had any balls

But we all know the transformation only ever works in one direction. This ain't it.

And that's the point.

the ubiquity of calculators

le chemin des roses (en revenant de l'hôpital)

It's just the right season to be seeing the roses that bloom along the last part of the path I walk back from Samsung Seoul Hospital (which is less than a kilometer away).

...that flesh is heir to

Okay, maybe these aren't exactly "natural shocks."

I couldn't figure out #7 until I realized he was being gut-stabbed.

condemned to an eternity of hair-whipping

I feel sorry for her.

dinner

In honor of my buddy Charles, I have to say that, by way of celebrating being on the other side of my latest hospital visit (routine checkup), I decided to sex up my frozen pizzas after discovering that Papa John's has changed its website's format yet again, making it extremely hard to pay online unless you have certain methods of payment (I didn't see how I could use my usual Shinhan debit card; the only Shinhan Bank options I saw were ShinhanPay and Shinhan Credit Card). So—bye-bye, Papa John's, which is probably better for my wallet anyway, given how expensive pizza is in Korea. And frozen pizza, while representing a drop in quality from the restaurant stuff, is much cheaper than delivery pizza even after it's been sexed up. (Can I torture Charles with that phrase if I say it often and forcefully enough?)

I already had a package of salsiccia and the voluminous remains of a 2-kilogram package of pepperoni, so I bought a bag of shredded mozzarella (yeah, I know—shut up*), then used my bottle of passata to make what turned out to be a surprisingly good pizza sauce (the frozen pizzas came sauced and cheesed already, but only to a very stingy degree, so I made what turned out to be way too much sauce, most of which will become tomato soup).

The results were good: I can normally eat two whole frozen pizzas in a single setting, but this time, I came away satisfied by only one. I sauced delicately (it's a moderately spicy sauce, almost arrabbiata, "softened" a wee bit with a dollop of heavy cream), added a healthy layer of pepperoni, piled on some crumbles of sausage, then added some more mozz to the top. The pizza ended up twice as thick, which explains why only one was enough to satisfy me. I'll eat my other frozen pizza tomorrow before going back on my strict dietary regime (French word for "diet" = le régime, as in Je suis au régime, Je fais un régime).

out of the oven (200ºC for 12 minutes, about standard for most frozen pizzas; I just guess these days)

a slice with the head bitten off

final slice: major erectile dysfunction

If you watch enough Krispy Pizza Bros videos on YouTube, you know they like to talk about how a true New York slice has no flop jalop, i.e., no flaccidity to it, which is the standard that self-appointed, American Uncle Roger pizza judge Dave Portnoy uses when judging a slice. I might be able to achieve that rigidity with a few more minutes in the oven at 250ºC (bottom burner only), but I discovered during a pizza lunch with Charles** sometime back that the floppiness doesn't matter so much to me as long as the undercarriage has the appropriate amount of leoparding or leopard-spotting, which adds that delicious charred flavor to every bite. To me, that turns out to be much more important than the "firm undercarriage" business that Portnoy goes on about. I don't deny that there may be some relationship between floppiness and quality, but the ancient wisdom is that a good pizza is whatever tastes good when you shove it into your face hole.

___________

*Shredded cheese is known to have, depending on the brand, different types of anti-caking agents (light, subtle powders made from wood cellulose or potato starch) sprayed or dusted all over the cheese to keep it from sticking together inside the package. This is why YouTube cooks and Food Network chefs keep insisting you need to shred your own cheese from blocks, the per-unit-volume cost of which is always cheaper than the pre-shredded cheese. The block cheese also provides you with a higher-quality product. If there's any counterargument, it's that the quantity of anti-caking agent is negligible for most people, but for people with sensitive constitutions, it could affect levels of inflammation as well as your metabolism. Artificially anti-caked cheeses can also brown differently, melt differently, and even separate more easily. As always, the general rule is: The less processed, the better. That said, buying a bag of shredded cheese is undeniably way more convenient. Mea culpa.

** I have to hand it to Charles: He's a prof at Seoul National, where he got his doctorate, and where he still teaches, and he shows a great deal of (justified) pride in the many quality restaurants in his university's neighborhood. He seems to do what he can to support local businesses. I know that, when he recommends a local resto to me, it's going to be good.

leave on or turn off?

But the comments to the video bring up some interesting points.

paging Arthur C. Clarke

In one of his post-2001 novels (maybe 2010), Arthur C. Clarke imagined that the core of Jupiter was a diamond the size of the earth. We now know that's not true.

seems to be more theory than answer

A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it.

The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a… pic.twitter.com/slrYaX8S1c

— Ihtesham Ali (@ihtesham2005) May 14, 2026

the "spider walk" scene in The Exorcist, extended version

Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair, but probably a stunt double in this scene), out for a walk

Here's how the scene is described in the book: 

Chris looked up. Then to the side. And froze. 

Gliding spiderlike, rapidly, close behind Sharon, her body arched backward in a bow with her head almost touching her feet, was Regan, her tongue flicking quickly in and out of her mouth while she sibilantly hissed and moved her head very slightly back and forth like a cobra. 

Staring numbly, Chris said, “Sharon?” Sharon stopped. So did Regan. Sharon turned and saw nothing. And then screamed and jumped away as she felt Regan’s tongue snaking out at her ankle. 

Chris threw a hand to her cheek, her face ashen. “Call that doctor and get him out of bed! Get him now!”

Wherever Sharon moved, Regan would follow.

"Chris" is Chris MacNeil, the mother of little Regan, who gets possessed by a group of demons, consistent with the biblical accounts. Chris is a movie star, separated or divorced from her husband. Sharon is Chris's secretary. At this point in the story, Chris, hovering somewhere between agnosticism and atheism, isn't quite persuaded to go the exorcism route.

I have no idea, but I reckon that the scene was cut from the movie because there was no technology, at the time, to do the scene justice. In the extended version of the film, the scene has been included (different versions of it exist), along with CGI enhancements. It's obvious that they had a stunt actress crawl down the stairs while suspended by cables (which, I assume, got painted out by computer), but since the stunt actress still isn't bent backward quite as far as Regan is described in the book, the scene ends up being disappointing. (Overall, the extended version adds little to nothing to the original theatrical version.)

I rewatched the theatrical cut of The Exorcist recently, while also reading the novel, which I'm currently rereading. Both the film and the novel are worthy of review, each for their own reasons. William Peter Blatty was in his early forties when The Exorcist was published in 1971. The movie was made almost immediately, coming out in 1973.

The only picture I could find that comes close to the book's description is this old photo of a contortionist from all the way back in 1880:

found here

To complete the tableau, the contortionist really needs to have his head closer to his ankles, so in the photo, his body is bent in the wrong place. Also, when I imagine what Blatty meant by "gliding spiderlike," I visualize the contorted person moving smoothly and silently on dextrous fingertips and tiptoes, navigating the staircase in a way that would seem utterly inhuman. With that kind of image in my head, I don't think there's any way that even modern Hollywood could do the scene justice.

heavy

AI or not?

life as a couple

I was riveted by this story

I do hope the story and its details are true. Amazing.

this blog is a corpse

The bots have been all over me lately. I got over 112,000 visits yesterday, and I currently have over 100,000 visits today, not even halfway through the day (as you'll recall, this blog's statistical day goes from 9 a.m. to 9 a.m.). This situation reminds me of the thousands of flies that covered our family dog in the backyard the day before he died. Sad and creepy all at once. The way he stared at me was haunting. But definitely a sign of impending death. Searching for "how to stop bot traffic to your blog" brings up many possible solutions. I might have to implement some of them if I don't want to be a corpse.

Even if that means far more modest stats.

A search for "why are some blogs more prone to getting bots than others" gets me this:

Some blogs are more prone to bot traffic than others due to factors like high search engine visibility, outdated security, popular niches, or the presence of interactive elements that can be exploited, such as comment sections. As of 2026, the surge in AI training, which involves intense data scraping, has also made blogs with high-quality, easily accessible content prime targets.

 

just be smart about it

I'm not at all against the idea of going green in principle; it's just that the people making the proposals and plans need to think through the implications of their "green" solutions. Which no one really has, apparently.

Korea is aggressively into solar energy; on one level, this is laudable, but has the country thought about what happens when the time comes to dispose of all of those solar panels? It's going to be a fucking mess. I also think that Korea's commitment to wind energy is misguided at best, for reasons I'd laid out years ago on my Jeju-related walk blog.

The sticking point, though, is this: Even if people like me are constantly crying Give me something better!, the problem is that we can't reach something better without going through the intermediary phase of producing inefficient and ultimately harmful solutions. So we're kind of stuck making these blind, fumbling efforts until someone comes along and gives us a paradigm-shaking, revolutionary new idea. All of this is consistent with human nature. So on the one hand, I can't stand the horrible "green" solutions we currently have, but on the other hand, I recognize that we have little choice, as a race, but to go through iteration after iteration of design and development to reach something that's truly golden.

Ultimately, I think we're going to have to rely on the constant, uninterrupted supply of energy emanating from our sun. It's just a matter of efficiently gathering, storing, and beaming that energy down to Earth for human use. I say "just a matter," but of course, there's the rub. Getting to that point will be no mean feat. Otherwise, we need to keep working on fusion.

In the meantime, there's Germany. Jesus.