A really good, detailed initial report about the 7.5M Venezuela earthquake is here. While fewer than 200 deaths were initially reported, estimates could theoretically rise to around 100,000 deaths. The report notes that, 26 minutes after this quake, a 6.9M quake was reported in Japan. It's still unclear whether the first quake caused the second. For what it's worth, I'm not feeling anything here in Korea.
We've seen massive destruction like this before. Remember Bam, Iran and its 34,000 deaths?
I think I've moved beyond Chris Cooking Nashville and his carnivore-bread recipes, but it's good to see him tackling some of the issues with making it head-on. My problem with Chris's recipes comes down to how they're too much like making a soufflé, which is a volatile thing that collapses easily even if you try to cool it down gently.
A few people who are on my list of invitees do not have email accounts ending with "@gmail.com." You do not need to have a Gmail account to access my blog once it's privatized, but from what I'm reading, you will need to have a Google account. Here's the procedure as written by the AI god:
You can obtain a Google account without creating a Gmail address by using your existing third-party email address (such as Outlook, Yahoo, or a corporate domain) during the registration process. This grants you full access to Google services like YouTube, Google Drive, Meet, and Docs without adding another email inbox to manage. [1, 2, 3]Step-by-Step Guide
Just a quick clarification about the AI's above remarks on YouTube: If you don't have a Google account, you can obviously still visit YouTube, watch videos, and do other basic things. But without a Google account, you are locked out of YouTube's more interactive features.
If you're looking at the above procedure and thinking the whole thing is going to be a headache and not worth your time, I completely understand if you choose not to go through with getting a Google account. Absolutely no hard feelings. We'll just be thankful for the time we've spent together and move on with the rest of our lives.
Warning 1 that I'm about to privatize this blog.
Warning 2 that I'm about to privatize this blog.
Warning 3 that I'm about to privatize this blog.
You'll get two more warnings—tomorrow and Saturday. If I don't hear from you by Sunday, you will not be on the list of invitees. You can, of course, belatedly send me a personal email to request access to the blog, and I'll probably get you on the list. But don't be the foot-dragging, clueless dickhead who puts me in that position. Thanks.
I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to the silence. No goddamn bots.
This weekend, probably on Sunday, I will make the switch from having a free and open blog to having a custom-readers-only blog. The term custom reader is fairly new to me, but the concept isn't: The blog will become available only to the readers who receive an emailed invitation to access it. Those readers—who must all have Google accounts—will have to click on a link and/or type in a password only once, and after that, they'll have free access to my blog. I expect a huge drop in my visitor numbers as a result, with the number of visits I receive being roughly equal to the number of people on that email-invitation list.
Thus far, only two or three people have shown an interest by either leaving their email address in the comments or saying "You know what my email address is." Please don't assume, though, that just because I know your email address, I'll include you on the invitation list. If you don't actively express interest in being included, you will not be included. I'm being strict about this because I'm utterly sick of all the bots, and extreme measures now seem most appropriate. So speak up now or be shunned forever. And as I implied above, "showing interest" doesn't mean you have to leave an email. It's enough to leave a comment reminding me that I already know what your email address is. But still—do leave a comment, or you will be excluded. You've got until this coming weekend.
Meanwhile, over the past hour, my visit numbers jumped from 8900-something to 24,800.
Ridiculous. And this happens almost every day lately.
But none of this is happening to my walk blogs, thank Jeebus.
My new Chase Amazon Visa card arrived yesterday. The information on it is all the same as what's on the previous card except for the 3-digit CVV number. The other differences are that (1) the card needs no activation because it arrived "ready to use," and (2) there's no place to sign your name, maybe because people have come to realize that no one checks the signature anyway, and people use each other's cards all the time.
I wish the new card had come with a raised credit limit, but that's fine. The credit limit's already plenty high.
I had no idea about any of this. And shouldn't it be Tippler, with two "P"s?
George Washington bred his own pack of hunting dogs and named them like a man with zero supervision. We're talking Sweet Lips, Tipsy, Tipler, Drunkard, and one named Vulcan who was so big a kid could ride him like a pony. Vulcan once stole an entire ham straight off the dinner… pic.twitter.com/bdXOln8Ioi
— Echoes of War (@EchoesofWarYT) June 24, 2026
Louisiana pastor beats up a man who allegedly threatened to r*pe and kill his wife and grandchildren.
— Daily Loud (@DailyLoud) June 24, 2026
pic.twitter.com/nbbSUT73XD
Feels a bit like cultural suicide there, love.
Luckily, Oz, you're defended on all sides by the ocean, so you won't feel the consequences of having such a person at the reins too acutely.
The mystery to me is why this is funny. Am I missing something? This isn't like those jokes about how the tyrannosaur couldn't answer his cell phone because of his short arms. So why did Godzilla have a stroke while trying to read "this"? What's the "this"?
I got the above image, like most of my stolen images, from an Instapundit comment thread. Maybe the image was meant to be a response to a previous bit of text—maybe something lame, and the lameness is what caused Godzilla's stroke. Hmmm.
I found myself out in the Seoul National University neighborhood Wednesday evening, having dinner with my buddy Charles and his wife HJ. They're prepping for a trip to the States that starts next week (read more about it here), and they told me about some of the difficulties they're going to face in the States since HJ isn't American: according to Charles, the top eleven national parks in the US have a policy of charging foreigners (i.e., non-Americans) an extra fee on top of the entrance fee to get into the park, and part of the couple's trip involves visiting some of these parks.
When I was recently in the States, I got charged to enter Shenandoah National Park, so I ended up just forking cash over for a year-long pass, which made random visits easier. It's too bad that foreigners at these parks are being charged extra.
In that spirit, I just now asked the AI god whether this was a Trump-era policy:
Yes, this is a policy enacted under the Trump administration. Stemming from a July 2025 executive order, the Department of the Interior introduced a surcharge for international tourists.The policy outlines specific surcharges for non-U.S. residents (ages 16 and older) at 11 of the most popular U.S. National Parks (Acadia, Bryce Canyon, Everglades, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Rocky Mountain, Sequoia & Kings Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Zion):
Full details on the affected parks and passes can be viewed on the National Park Service Nonresident Fees page.
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| our resto: Chang Hyeon Tonkatsu |
Interestingly, it was suggested that we order our meal via phone since HJ had, I think, already done the work of reserving a table for us as we were walking. I can feel myself slipping behind when it comes to modern tech. When my brothers visited me after my heart attack, they were able to navigate Seoul like pros, with no help from me, thanks largely to AI and various helpful apps. Charles and HJ seem just as capable, leaving me to feel like a fogey.
Here's the happy couple, smiles pasted on for the photo:
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| I didn't ask permission to put this photo on the blog, so I might be in trouble. |
We all decided to order the pork tenderloin. I didn't say anything about it while we were talking at the table, but it was pretty fucking incredible: perfectly cooked, perfectly tender. I do recall tossing off a stupid joke—before we got our meals—about how the chef might be gunning for a Michelin star, and HJ mentioned that a building next door had a Michelin-rated resto in it. And if I'm not mistaken, Charles said that the chef here was pretty serious, too.
We'd all ordered the same thing. Tenderloin on any farm animal is called anshim-sal in Korean, and we all got the pork tenderloin (the ton in tonkatsu comes from a Chinese character for "pork"). Each of us got six tenderloin medallions (see below), some shredded cabbage that served as the landing space for an addictive salad dressing (cream, herbs/spices, and an immodest amount of sesame oil, also visible below), some tiny sprinkles of salt, a small lump of wasabi (Charles said to put it straight on the meat since there was no soy sauce to mix it with), some julienned and pickled radish (I think... look next to the chopsticks in the image below), some mugwort tea (surprisingly good), and some rice and soup, which I apparently failed to take a picture of.
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| most of the meal (minus the rice and soup) |
I did the crass thing and dumped my rice into my soup. This was a carby meal, so In for a penny, in for a pound.
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| mugwort (ssuk/쑥) tea |
Ssuk is not to be confused with 쑥갓/ssukgat, or crown daisy, whatever the AI god says—
I asked Charles and HJ about 쑥 versus 쑥갓, and they both affirmed those are different things. Do not trust the AI god, which is a trickster.
I had a second helping of shredded cabbage since I loved the dressing so much. Soon enough, though, the wonderful meal was over, and HJ—who, by the way, teaches Korean to foreigners—took her leave. Three became two; Charles and I adjourned to a nearby gelato place where you can order tiny or huge containers of gelato (W5,500, W19,000, W31,000 sizes) in two or more flavors (depending on the size of the container), plus an extra spoonful of another flavor you might be curious about. So I got mint chocolate chip (regular chocolate was sold out), pistachio, and a tiny sample of tomato-basil at Charles's insistence. Frankly, I hadn't been looking forward to the tomato-basil, and while it turned out not to be as terrible as I'd thought it would be, I doubt I'll ever go for that flavor ever again. (I'm remembering the moment in Defending Your Life when Albert Brooks digs into a piece of something resembling burnt shit, tastes it, coughs, then demands, "This is what smart people eat?" No, the tomato-basil wasn't as bad as burnt shit, and I didn't hate it at all, but I did have to wonder how anyone could actively like that taste... for which there is no accounting, or so I've heard.)
As I waited for my tiny cup to appear, I saw this guy:
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| What a way to die, eh? |
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| And I had to capture this bit of humor. Please do not tap on the glass. |
Afterward Charles, perhaps mindful of my heart, took us on a non-strenuous route out to the main road so I could catch a taxi back to my place. My section of Gangnam and Seoul National University's neighborhood are both connected by Nambusunhwan-no, a single street with a lot of traffic lights and a lot of traffic. It still takes a long time to get to Charles's place from my place. I normally budget a lot of time to get there.
Chang Hyeon Tonkatsu: an amazingly good dinner, all in all, and a place for me to revisit one of these days. The gelato place was excellent as well, and while I might not applaud the tomato-basil, I did love the mint chocolate chip and the pistachio. And I'll grudgingly applaud the gelato place's adventuresome spirit in concocting the tomato-basil flavor, which did taste distinctly of tomato and basil. Not for me, but it's for somebody.
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| Statue of Brothers (형제의 상/Hyeongjae-ae sang), central Seoul |
June 25 is remembered in South Korea as Yuk I Oh/육이오, or "six two five," the numerical date of the start of the Korean War. Technically, the north and south are still at war, so there is no closing date (although July 27, 1953 is accepted as the date of the armistice that halted major fighting). So: A mindful 육이오 to you.
My own dad was the son of two alcoholics, so he never touched alcohol (his little brother is a different story). I grew up in a house where we had a hutch cabinet whose bottom compartment was filled with a random assortment of unopened gift bottles of this or that whiskey. I wonder what happened to those bottles. Of course, Dad turned out not to need alcohol to reveal himself to be a lying, cowardly piece of shit.
Dad being dad pic.twitter.com/bIPfqu1ocV
— NO CONTEXT HUMANS (@HumansNoContext) April 19, 2026
Sea salt, now bagged up in Ziplocs:
I can't keep the bags open without letting in ambient humidity. But leaving the bags closed, even with paper towels inside them to act as desiccants, means the water inside can't escape. Solution: open the bags up periodically and change out the towels with new, dry ones. Keep the old, salt-covered towels, removing their salt, rinsing them, then dumping the removed salt back into the bags while letting the damp, used towels hang-dry. The final bag, also the lightest bag, is definitely the one with the most humidity in it. I should probably stick two towels in that one. I wonder how long it will take to achieve total dryness.
I can't wait for fall.
[Post from yesterday. Today's visit number is down by 10X but still a few thousand.]
The count for the past 24 hours won't be over until 9 a.m. It's 5:30 a.m. as I write this, and I've had over 325,000 unique visitors so far. That sounds to me like way more than 50% bots. That's closer to 90-95% bots. And it's not fun anymore. It really does feel like flies gathering on a corpse. Well, if I want to control the bot problem, the AI god says that there's one thing I can do about my situation:
You can make your Blogger (Blogspot) blog private by navigating to your Settings, selecting Reader access under the Permissions section, and choosing either "Private to authors" or "Custom readers."To get your blog securely hidden from the public, follow these steps:
If you selected "Custom readers," don't forget to click Invite more readers, type in the email addresses of the people you want to grant access, and send the invitations. Those readers will need to accept the invitation and sign into a Google account to view your blog.
I might do this. Stay tuned. Meantime, if you want to have access to the blog after I privatize it, then I need to be able to send you an emailed invite, so please write your email in the comments if you want to be part of the exclusive club with access to the blog. I'll wait at least 24-48 hours before I do anything, and I'll likely repeat this announcement at different times of day to catch the largest number of real, human readers.
If I do this, I expect my daily numbers to drop from 325,000 to about 10. If that. I doubt I've built up a loyal fan base after 24 years of blogging. The price of introversion.
Note to all of you years-long "lurkers" out there who read and never react: If you don't give me your email address, you will be shut of this blog forever.
I wrote to Soonchunhyang University to find out the status of my job application. They, too, had the decency to reply, but as with UNIST in Ulsan, I can tell they wouldn't have replied had I not asked first. As you might already have guessed, SCH also said no to my application, so I'm now 0 for 2. That's embarrassing, too, since SCH has been called a good place "for beginners" who are just embarking on a university teaching career, and I'm no beginner. I have a feeling, especially based on what Charles told me during dinner this evening, that Hanyang is also going to say no given that they're primarily looking for a researcher, which leaves Kyungpook National U. (KNU) as my last hope before I have to start looking in earnest for part-time hagweon work. I've seen no new university wants ads for work at Dave's ESL Cafe or Unijobs.kr or Koreabridge. So unless some miraculous uni job shows up at the last minute, I'm pretty much cooked and have to look at hagweon work soon if I plan to stay in Korea—either at the end of this week or, at the latest, the end of next week.
Fingers and tentacles crossed for Kyungpook. But honestly, I'm not really that hopeful.
And hagweon work is a game for the young. Sigh.
Even as little as I've been paying attention to the World Cup, I've been bombarded by videos from Europeans who are currently visiting the United States and proclaiming both their love for America and Americans and their shock at the extent to which their own media had been lying to them about the state of the United States—a land supposedly full of mean, violent people, constant gun battles, and war-torn conditions. Instead, what Europeans (outside of US big cities) are discovering is a land of friendly people, clean and safe parks, and—surprise!—great food served in ridiculous quantities.
And can it be? Can it be that even the French have shown the States a little love? Incroyable!
I feel sorry for the Europeans who've been exposed to the uglier, seedier side of American culture. If those people are putting out negative videos, well, those videos aren't popping up in my feed. I don't want to blame the victims, but they should've stayed out of the big cities and visited the smaller towns and 'burbs instead. One thing that makes me chuckle is all the remarks I'm seeing about the "miracle" that is air conditioning. Oh, and the other thing is Europeans finally being convinced that, yes, putting ice in your drinks makes sense during the summer. My French "brother" Dominique wrote to say that it's la canicule (heat wave, from the same Latin root as dog—cf. "dog days of summer") in France right now, with a string of 42ºC (108ºF!!) days in his part of France (Le Vanneau-Irleau). Dom has to worry about his parents, who live down the street, and no one in that neighborhood has air conditioning. What it's like to suffer from that heat, I can't even imagine. Dom also said that, at his second job at a wood-basket company, temps got as high as 70ºC (158ºF), causing fire alarms to go off. But the French will never learn. They will, instead, just learn to do without. And hey, that's character-building, too! Even if a few thousand old and sick people have to die of heatstroke.
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| 4:42 a.m., looking left and southeast (sunrise is northeast) while heading back to my place |
Another good 10K walk, but there was some angina plaguing me even after my initial five-minute rest. At the U-turn point, I rested another 15 minutes, and that seemed to do the trick.
I started at 2:30 a.m. and finished at 5:10 a.m., with 20 minutes of rest. So: 2:20:00 of walking for 10 km comes out to 4.26 kph, which really isn't bad for me. Slow by normal standards, but not bad at all for me. Then again, it was only 10K, and I wasn't weighed down with a pack.The count for the past 24 hours won't be over until 9 a.m. It's 5:30 a.m. as I write this, and I've had over 325,000 unique visitors so far. That sounds to me like way more than 50% bots. That's closer to 90-95% bots. And it's not fun anymore. It really does feel like flies gathering on a corpse. Well, if I want to control the bot problem, the AI god says that there's one thing I can do about my situation:
You can make your Blogger (Blogspot) blog private by navigating to your Settings, selecting Reader access under the Permissions section, and choosing either "Private to authors" or "Custom readers."To get your blog securely hidden from the public, follow these steps:
If you selected "Custom readers," don't forget to click Invite more readers, type in the email addresses of the people you want to grant access, and send the invitations. Those readers will need to accept the invitation and sign into a Google account to view your blog.
I might do this. Stay tuned. Meantime, if you want to have access to the blog after I privatize it, then I need to be able to send you an emailed invite, so please write your email in the comments if you want to be part of the exclusive club with access to the blog. I'll wait at least 24-48 hours before I do anything, and I'll likely repeat this announcement at different times of day to catch the largest number of real, human readers.
If I do this, I expect my daily numbers to drop from 325,000 to about 10. If that. I doubt I've built up a loyal fan base after 24 years of blogging. The price of introversion.
Note to all of you years-long "lurkers" out there who read and never react: If you don't give me your email address, you will be shut of this blog forever.
