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| Too bad that this... |
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| ...doesn't come without a dose of crazy. |
At twenty, they bounce and they flounce.
At thirty, they've still got a jounce.
But as time crawls its loop,
and the boobs tend to droop,
you'll be forced to accept or renounce.
Choose wisely.
It's kind of nice to watch Colion Noir get hot and bothered when he meets a woman more capable than he is. And as the video shows, she's obviously the real deal.
That heavy-cream powder goes fast. I made my second and final batch of "carnivore" buns today using the same procedure as the one I'd used yesterday. I switched up the protein, though, and decided to make myself some PLTs: pepperoni, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. I ate three PLTs, then split the fourth bun in half and made myself a no-sugar-added blueberry "shortcake." It was good despite my not having added any sweetener to the bun batter (that's an experiment for later; I have no idea whether a sweetener like BochaSweet will prevent the buns from rising or what).
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| Yeah, yeah—I did the "croissant" cut again. Twice. |
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| The "bottomings" go on. |
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| Next is the 'roni. |
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| Pretty please with cheese on top. |
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| lettuce on top for two; lettuce on the bottom for one (what was I thinking?) |
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| cross-sectional bite |
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| blueberry "shortcake"—the sugar granules are actually BochaSweet |
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| Damn—I should have dusted the top layer of whipped cream with a bit of cinnamon. |
The whipped cream was under-whipped. I normally use either my regular food processor or my hand-held one. I still don't have the timing right. I used the regular food processor today and went for 90 seconds, which was enough to make me fear the ire of my net-door neighbor. But 90 seconds proved to be enough only to whip the cream partially; some of it was stiff while other parts of it were runny. Still, it came out fine taste-wise, and even the runny parts were somewhat thick. As in viscous, not stupid.
Here's a progression from my first carnivore-bread recipe to my latest:
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| the Chris Cooking Nashville recipe |
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| Victoria's Keto Kitchen recipe |
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| the lilsipper_official recipe—winner! |
I was looking over the Chris Cooking Nashville recipe last night. It's so damn complicated. Not just the soufflé-like procedure of separating the egg whites and yolks, then whipping the whites into a froth, but also the sheer number of ingredients needed, some for stability—things like gelatin, baking soda, vinegar (to activate the baking soda), cream cheese, and egg-white powder. That's just five of the eight ingredients I'd used to make Chris's recipe (I added a non-sugar sweetener). Compare that to the lilsipper recipe—three ingredients, simple procedure, better results. Just mix the two dry ingredients together, scramble the eggs separately, then pour the dry ingredients into the eggs while stirring. There's just no comparison.
I had four almost-keto hamburgers yesterday, and when I checked my blood sugar this morning, I saw that it had risen only 8 points from the day before. I think that that carnivore-bread recipe is a keeper.
Below is Jeremy Jahns's review (it only just came out!) of Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ. This movie apparently fascinated the Muslim world. Word is that Muslims in Muslim-majority countries quietly obtained DVDs of the movie to watch it secretly. While I doubt it affected any Muslim's fundamental outlook, I hope it provided at least a glimmer of insight into what Christians think of the one they name their savior. Muslims, of course, don't believe that Jesus was anything more than a great prophet. They also subscribe to the heretical notion that the corpus upon the cross was not really Jesus, and that there had been a sort of divine substitution. Last bit of Muslim-Christian trivia: Jesus (Isa) is named in the Qur'an more often than Muhammad is.
Jahns, in his review, does mention the idea that some saw Gibson's movie as a kind of "torture porn." Thanks to a class I had taken on Catholic sacramentality, and thanks as well to the philosopher Dr. Vallicella's writings, I understand that Catholic sacramentality sees a unity of flesh and spirit: spiritual agony is reflected as physical agony, and vice versa. By this reckoning, the suffering of Jesus had to be portrayed by Gibson—a conservative Catholic—in all of its awfulness, as a symphony of rent, pierced flesh and cries of anguish. So what non-Catholics see as mere "torture porn" is seen by Catholics as a proper reflection of Christ's spiritual pain and desolation. Hence the movie's title.
Dr. Vallicella's contribution to my knowledge comes from his various discourses on and critiques of St. Thomas Aquinas and his "hylomorphic dualism," which comes down to the idea that the soul is the form of the body. I'm at least nominally Presbyterian, yet the notion makes a weird kind of sense to me even though I don't believe in souls. My buddy Mike, in the States, rediscovered his Catholicism years ago, so I can only imagine (if this isn't too presumptuous) that he subscribes to something like a Thomistic view of hylomorphic dualism.
Interestingly, Mike's wife is a Christian Scientist, and in Christian Science, it's taught that there is no matter: there is only a monism of spirit, therefore no hylomorphic dualism. I once told Mike that Christian Science sounds a lot like Greek idealism. It could also be seen as a species of panpsychism, but Greek idealism generally reduces the cosmos to Platonic Ideal Forms while panpsychism reduces the world to mind or soul (noūs/νους "mind" or psyche/ψυχή "mind/soul/spirit"). But both of these views share with Christian Science a resolute immaterialism. (And yes, despite their fundamental religious differences, Mike and the Missus make their marriage work, and quite happily, too.)
Well, whatever perspective you come from, I wish you a Happy Easter. May it be a good day for you, however it is that you define "good," Jesus or not.
The standard benediction from my old church:
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all, now and forever. Hallelujah and amen.
—variation of 2 Corinthians 13:14
Success! It seems rare, these days, for me to be able to crow about a culinary victory, but here we are: it's Saturday, and I've eaten dinner, my only meal for the day. I'd like to say it was 100% keto hamburgers, but the BBQ sauce was a half-and-half mix of keto BBQ sauce and regular sauce, so there was a wee bit of real sugar in every burger.
The crucial thing I was testing today was a new "carnivore" recipe for burger buns (and possibly hot-dog buns). Long story short: this new recipe is much, much better than the previous carnivore recipe I'd used for my 2024 batch of carnivore burger buns (recipe by Chris Cooking Nashville... bye, Chris!). I had also made keto burger buns thanks to a recipe from Victoria's Keto Kitchen. That went pretty well, but I have to say... this newest recipe produces buns that are just as soft, and that taste way better than either of the other recipes. This newest recipe comes from a lady who goes by the moniker lilsipper_official on YouTube. Her recipe is a three-ingredient one, and for once, it's literally three ingredients (a lot of YouTube chefs will claim their recipe has X number of ingredients, then it turns out that they're not mentioning salt, pepper, water, etc.—ingredients you're assumed to have around the house). I had put up a link, before, to lilsipper's carnivore-bun recipe, but here it is again, and here's the video where she shows how the buns are made.
I know I said the previous carnivore buns were victories, but this newest recipe definitely takes the cake. Downsides first: Like the Chris Cooking Nashville buns, these new buns also taste a wee bit eggy, but the egginess isn't anywhere near bad enough to be off-putting. Also: The buns actually taste good, and I think there's room to take them in both a sweet and a savory direction (I can even see parfaits, shortcakes, or even sponge cakes). Another downside: Also like the Chris Cooking Nashville buns, these new buns tend to deflate after cooling (or if cooled too rapidly). That doesn't matter to me as long as the buns don't deflate to the point of becoming tortillas. (They don't.)
Advantages: This new recipe is extremely simple to put together, and unlike with the Chris recipe, there's no need to try to create a soufflé by separating out the egg whites and whipping them into a foam. This means I don't need any special equipment. The new recipe is as light as the Chris recipe's buns, which means it's not as heavy as the buns from Victoria's recipe. Like other faux-bread recipes that I have, this recipe results in a scoopable batter that isn't really a dough. Which is fine. I made the batter and didn't have to worry about the soufflé-foam deflating if I waited too long (but since the rising agent is baking powder, one can't wait too long because the baking powder starts reacting to its moist environment immediately). I panicked when I couldn't find my little, nonstick burger-bun baking tins at first, but I finally found them, hiding in plain sight. It was then only a matter of scooping 80 g of batter into each tin and cooking the buns for the requisite time (about 12 minutes) at the requisite temperature (about 177ºC, with a little top-burner action toward the end of the bake to brown the buns' tops). It was a delight to watch the buns puff up as they baked, looking almost like real hamburger buns. But I knew that, with so much egg in the recipe, the buns would eventually have to deflate the way a quiche does. You can minimize the deflation by prepping the buns a day in advance, then letting them just cool slowly inside the oven until the oven itself has cooled down. But I was impatient and wanted dinner tonight, so here we are.
I had purchased only a one-pound bag of heavy-cream powder (454 grams), which means I have just enough powder to make two four-bun batches. The powder isn't cheap, either, but when I tried a heaping spoonful of it out of monkey curiosity, it tasted pretty good on its own, and that's probably why these buns taste so much better than either Chris's or Victoria's.
From your perspective, the buns won't look that impressive. They will, in fact, look almost exactly like the buns from Chris's recipe. But for me, the simplicity of the recipe and the better taste make this new approach a winner in my mind, and I think my search for a decent keto/carnivore burger-bun recipe is now over.
Enjoy the photo essay below.
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| shredduce |
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| unsweetened dill pickles from my downstairs grocery |
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| surprisingly meaty and ripe tomatoes, bought at a discount because they were a little old |
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| tonight's local-grocery cheese of choice |
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| home-ground, homemade burgers |
As you might already have guessed, the midget burger in the middle was a sacrifice to the gods. It died first, allowing me to taste-test whether the patties were any good.
I make my patties from skirt steak, which is not very fatty but is pretty juicy. I did my usual herbs and seasonings, but next time, I'm going to try something simpler: just salt and pepper for a more classic burger taste. These were 90-gram patties (90 g before cooking). Except for the midget patty, of course.
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| buns, just out of the oven and still looking puffy |
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| food-porn angle |
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| Six minutes later, and the buns have had a chance to collapse since I took them out of the oven. |
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| You can see how they've fallen in on themselves. |
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| But there's decent browning on top. |
I was originally going to follow the lady's instructions and put the patties straight onto a parchment-paper-lined tray, but once I saw how goopy my batter was, I elected to scoop the batter into my burger-bun tins to give them some shape. 80 grams was the perfect amount of batter: nothing spilled over. I also ended up putting the tins onto the tray anyway.
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| bun bottoms (sounds a bit redundant) |
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| The one in the middle looks the best, but they all tasted the same. |
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| burger patties, fresh off the frying pan (midget already eaten) |
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| I put the cheese on a bit late, so I used the microwave to get a slight melt. |
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| These are almost, but not quite, smash-burger patties. I'd need a lot more heat for proper smash burgers. |
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| Okay, yeah, I fucked up splitting one of the buns in half. Sue me. Mayo on the bottom buns. |
I did figure out a better bun-splitting method (stop snickering) for the next pair of burgers: Rotate the buns while cutting carefully to avoid that spiral-cut-ham effect.
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| mayo, patty, cheese, 'maters |
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| pickles on top |
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| shredduce next |
The burgers were juicy, but not juicy enough to justify putting whole-leaf lettuce on the bottom to prevent drippage ("bottomings," as Alton Brown calls this reversal of toppings). One more thing left: BBQ sauce.
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| Half-real BBQ sauce is better than no sauce at all. |
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| Prepped and ready for consumption. I'm almost getting croissant vibes from the top bread. |
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| food-porn side view |
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| second pair of burger buns, sliced better and more carefully this time |
For Easter Sunday, I'll try making some different things with my second and final batch of this bread. I've also got another experiment planned for my tried-and-true keto "baguette" recipe, another scoopable batter that turns into a loaf with some outside assistance. I'm thinking that that recipe might make for a really good pizza crust if I get the timing right.
Okay... back to digesting and feeling smug.
Spoiler: David did not end up beating Avatar at the box office. I'd still like to see it at some point. David, I mean.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
...when we allow freedom [to] ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
And how are we doing as a nation today? Any better than in the 1960s?
In my grad course on ecclesiology, Father Komonchak flatly asked, Since Jesus, has the world become a better place?
A cynic will talk about how these edifices took money, forced labor, and political savvy to build. But there was also artistic motivation, focused conviction, spiritual vision, and a desire that perdured over generations—a truly human, truly civilizational effort.
I saw these keto-ish noodles over at Justin's blog, so I was inspired to buy some for myself. The box arrived looking ripped-up (see the sad pic below; the box was inside a large, padded envelope and obviously got dinged around a lot), but the contents were undamaged. Not that it matters: Out of curiosity, I ate a one-serving package, and... I'm not sure how much I like these noodles, which are an unholy fusion of konjac and oat fiber.
In Korean, konjac is hangeulized as 곤약/gonyak, which means that Koreans pronounce the word like cognac. But according to the YouTube pronunciation guy, it's pronounced somewhere between "con Jack" and "cone Jack" in the West. So take your phonetic pick. The noodles can be eaten straight, no cooking, according to what it says on the box; they can even be pan-fried (which I might try next), boiled, or whatever. I tried them cold, which might not have been the best idea. They tasted funny, and the texture is like a combination of Korean dotori-muk/도토리묵 (acorn-starch jelly) and earlobe cartilage: there's a stiff, rubbery give to it, along with an unpleasantly cartilaginous texture when you bite through. Yeah, I definitely want to try frying these noodles up, but if you like cartilage, you'll be in heaven. I doubt they'll behave like rice noodles or Korean vermicelli pasta (dang-myeon/당면), but I hope that, when I fry them, they crisp up at least somewhat (a possible vision of the future here).
I had hoped to use these as a substitute for regular pasta for things like spaghetti, but I suspect that these noodles go a lot better with an Asian flavor profile.
So along with keto burgers, look out for some kind of Asian-ish preparation.
Want good fish and chips? I watch these England videos and mentally build up a list of places I'd love to visit.
I almost feel bad mentioning this once more, but... It Happened Again. You know what. Lately, it always seems to happen on fasting days, when my body takes advantage of the break from consumption to try to get rid of, shall we say, prandial buildups. It was another prodigious one today, too. I can hear Jacob Marley's ghost yelling about how "It was a ponderous chain!" But do you know how ponderous, dear Jacob? I once again feared I would have to bring out the heavy artillery to dislodge the demon-child of my loins, but like last time, my smaller, concave companion was able to handle the problem deftly.
As a result, the world can exist for another day.
Various AIs are put to the test with the famous "trolley problem" and the larger issue of self-sacrifice. At this stage in development, you do not want AI to be put in charge of life-and-death decisions for human beings. But the reality is that AI probably already holds some of those levers of power despite the fact that it has no mind and doesn't really care. How blithely we give up our own autonomy, privacy, and authority—our own freedom—in our pursuit of dependence. Psychoanalyst Eric Fromm was a partial Marxist, but maybe he was right.
The more I think about it, the more I think I should never have started the Substack section on verbs with Action and Stative Verbs. The distinction between these verbs is subtle and often lawyerly, and I can't say that, even with the several definitions/parameters I've seen, a truly clear and satisfying explanation of these verb categories exists. Here's how I concluded my lesson on the topic (in a rare display of paid content on a free format like my blog!), with some recent rewriting:
NB: Although it might seem like a stative verb because it denotes moving from one state (life) to another (death), perish is actually a dynamic verb because of that very process of physical transitioning. So remember that fact for perish and all of its cousins: die, croak, buy the farm, cark it, check out, bite the big one, etc. But don’t lean too hard on that logic: some such verbs are stative, but when they denote a transition from one state to another, the verbs could be active. Even this logic, though, can be problematic: agree is a stative verb, but your mind is moving from a neutral or negative state to a state of being actively in accord with someone’s claim or opinion, so wouldn’t that transition make agree an action verb? It’s a philosophical can of worms. So there are plenty of edge cases where you may have to use your discretion in determining if a verb is active/dynamic or not. It may be better to think of action verbs as more external/empirical (“Can people see me doing it?”) while stative verbs are more internal. But again, even this guideline should be taken with a grain of salt. Edge cases.
Because the line between action and stative is often blurred, especially when talking about cognition, I would recommend not worrying too much about the distinction in cognitional contexts. I found an online example of how to think can be either dynamic or stative. Look at this:
I think that’s a good idea. (stative: just holding an opinion)
She is thinking about her next holiday. (action: actively contemplating)Note as well that, in example (2) above, the verb is in the present progressive, which is usually reserved for action verbs, so that’s a hint for you. Still, all of this is a subtle, lawyerly distinction, and whether you go to heaven or hell probably won’t depend on your ability to tell action from stative verbs. So as I wrote above, don’t worry too much about this particular distinction except when it’s clear (eat vs. know, for example).
I give up. And if I were teaching this to a class, I doubt I'd test the class on the distinction.
Some of the ways that action verbs and stative verbs are distinguished from each other:
1. physical/objective vs. mental/subjective—Action verbs supposedly deal mostly with dynamic physical transitions while stative verbs deal mostly with subjective mental states (or physical qualities).
2. static nature of the state—It's often said that, with stative verbs, the state is unlikely to change, which is one clue that it's stative. Example: I know you're a virgin. The knowing isn't likely to change until the objective facts get updated.
3. progressive tense—Stative verbs supposedly don't get expressed in progressive tenses. We say, for example, that We understand, not We are understanding. Or we say We agree, not We are agreeing. Or we say The human body consists of a collection of cells, not The human body is consisting of a collection of cells.
But...
Rebuttal to (1): See my agree example above. To agree is to move from a neutral or negative mental state to one that is in accord. So why is agree often listed as a stative verb? Think about the verb to die: this, too, is a transition from a state of living to a state of being dead. By this standard, to die is considered an action (dynamic) verb. Whether your mental state is also physical (electrochemical) depends on your personal philosophy of mind. So whether agree is an action verb or a stative verb may depend on what you think consciousness is!
Rebuttal to (2): Again using agree: Has there not been a change in one's mental state? And how necessarily permanent is an agreement? I frequent a certain restaurant because I like the food, the ambiance, and the service, so I agree to patronize the place. But when there's a sudden drop in the place's quality, I'd say the agreement no longer stands: I no longer agree to frequent that place. So what is fundamentally static or permanent about the mental state of agreement? This standard strikes me as shaky at best.
Rebuttal to (3): As I mention in my lesson, it's possible to say I am understanding in Indian English. But you don't even need to reach as far as India to find counterexamples to this supposed "rule/criterion." In US English, for example, you can imagine a situation in which a father is yelling at his son about some point, but the son had sullenly come around to the father's point of view five minutes ago. Still, the oblivious father keeps yelling, and his wife finally storms in and shouts at her husband, "You idiot! Can't you see that he's agreeing with you?" That strikes me as a perfectly natural example of using the progressive tense with what is supposedly a stative verb.
Basically, I apologize to the two or three people following (or, really, not following) my paid curriculum on Substack. Forcing you to go through the action/stative distinction—especially as the very first unit on verbs—probably caused you nothing but headaches. It's still causing me headaches.
So my challenge to my readers is to find an airtight definitional distinction between action verbs and stative verbs for which there are no possible counterexamples. Can you do it?
As with other places around the world, food's getting expensive in Korea, too. Sounds like the perfect opportunity to go on a starvation diet. Save some money. Anyway, the belt-tightening has created a necessity, and necessity is the mother of invention, hence the "beggars' map." If it's a app, I couldn't find it at the Google Play store. I do know, from the linked blog post, that it's at least a website. And out of curiosity, I looked up whether there were any cheap places close to me, and there's one. So to anyone in search of a cheap meal: Happy hunting.
Warning: The map itself warns that some more expensive eateries are submitting their own names in an attempt to appear on the map, so proceed with caution. The map is crowdsourced, and there are apparently ways for the mapmakers to vet any given place being submitted for consideration, so expect this to become an ever-escalating arms race as vetting methods improve. People really do ruin everything, don't they?
I guess it was a pretty deep strain: It's still with me. My back hasn't flared up since Tuesday, but I can feel that it's one false move away from flaring up again. Move slowly, keep the core braced, hope for the best. I'm still staying off the weight training: it's best not to tempt fate.
The quiz for Verbs, Part 2 is done. As always, please leave a comment or send me an email if you try the quiz out and find problems.
I'll be announcing these quizzes on Substack after April 10, but you blog readers get the announcement first: The quiz for Verbs, Part 1 is now up. I didn't check it through quite as thoroughly as the previous quizzes, but I did run through variations of the quiz eight or nine times, and the "game play" seems all right. But you can help me out by trying the quiz out and seeing whether it works. Of course, to access my Verbs, Part 1 article to see what the answers are supposed to be, you'd need to become a paying subscriber, so if you don't do that, and you think you've found something wrong (or if you dispute something that the quiz has deemed wrong), leave a comment, and I'll either reply with quotes from my Substack article to justify the quiz's reasoning or affirm that you've found a legitimate mistake that needs correction.
My toe is healing up nicely. I haven't put up any update photos, but it's been almost two weeks since I returned from the failed walk, and things are looking great. I didn't even have to visit the doc for antibiotics. I basically just clean and dress the toe, and every couple of days, I give it a nice soak in an Epsom-salt solution, and that seems to be doing the trick. My foot had been slightly swollen when I first got back, but the swelling is almost all gone now, so things are definitely on the mend.
But will I be healed enough to try that walk again later this month? I don't know. Maybe. I'll keep checking my toe, which is no longer bleeding, but which is still seeping/weeping fluid. If I were to go on a long walk right now, I'd end up reopening the various little wounds. So I need to see what state I'm in two weeks from now. If I judge that my toe isn't sufficiently healed, I'll try this walk in the fall. In the meantime, I'll start walking again but will keep the treks short and limited in scope, e.g., my 9.5K route up to the river and back and the occasional longer walk (25-35K) on weekends.
So—provided that my toe is healed enough, I'll walk later this month. Otherwise... autumn.
And I still need to figure out a re-plotted route with different stopping points.
I think I'm going to try the Geumgang route again later this month, but I still need to re-plot my course so I can do it without needing to camp.
I also want to divide the course up into shorter segments (18-25K) so my feet don't get quite as abused. And when I arrive at the Shintanjin Station area, I'm going to include the walk from that neighborhood to the trail's starting point as part of my overall walk. That way, I won't have to worry about stupid, assholish taxi drivers. Also: since I'm doing this walk so soon after my recent failure, I'll be chronicling this latest attempt on the same walk blog. Think of this as... Kevin's Walk 10a if you will.
Re-plotting the course will be a task for this weekend.
I'll just have to watch out for those April showers.
That word—assholish. Weirdly reminds me of a French verb, assoler, which has nothing to do with assholes, but which means to organize land into parcels for crop rotation. The noun is assolement. Just another one of those uncomfortable phonetic resemblances to naughty English words, like la phoque, which doesn't mean "fuck" but does mean "seal," as in the marine mammal. Tu vois cette petite phoque-là? See that little phoque there?
What could I possibly be making this weekend with just these three ingredients?
The answer is here. And see here for details. And once again, keto leads me into the weeds of alchemy as I discover the existence of heavy-cream powder. It's mostly butterfat, and less than a single gram of carbs per 6-gram tablespoon.
I asked the AI god where man buns are most likely to be found. It said:
Man buns are most frequently spotted in trend-conscious urban environments, creative workspaces, and places associated with leisure, fitness, and hip counter-culture. Based on typical sightings and styling trends, here are the most likely places to see them:
Urban and Neighborhood Hotspots
Brooklyn (NYC), Shoreditch (London), and Berlin: These areas are considered the "cultural ovens" where the style was popularized.
Artisanal Coffee Shops & Cafes: Casual, hipster-friendly cafes are prime spots.
Speakeasy-style Bars & Pubs: Common among bartenders and patrons in trendy nightlife areas.
Leisure and Retail
Disneyland: The park became famous for "man bun" spotting, with many appearing on Instagram.
Trendy Shopping Districts: Places like All Saints or artisan markets.
Art-Sociology Buildings/Campuses: College areas often host trends.
Professional and Fitness Settings
Creative Offices & Co-working Spaces: Tech and creative industries often allow for more relaxed grooming.
Gyms & Fitness Centers: Popular among men who work out frequently and need to keep long hair in place.
Barbershops: Specifically those offering "undercut" or "taper fade" services, often paired with a well-groomed beard.
Appearance Variations
The "Top Knot" or High Bun: Often seen on the crown of the head, favored for a "pineapple" or trendy look.
The "Low Bun": Located at the nape of the neck, often worn by men with a "beach bum" or "casual" style.
Undercut/Fade Bun: Shaved or closely clipped sides with a full bun on top.
Best Times/Conditions to See Them
Sunny weather: Often paired with a "disheveled" look.
"After-work" hours: In metropolitan cities, they are sometimes worn as a sophisticated look for the office or a night out.
Yes, the pressure-washing guy also does mowing. It's a great business model: He does his services for free and makes money from his YouTube videos (578K subscribers so far) and from merchandise sales on his website(s). A life of service. Can't knock that.
I need to stop focusing on generating more units in my grammar curriculum so I can concentrate on vibe-coding more quizzes. How many quizzes "behind" am I? It seems the answer is sixty. I've done quizzes for all of my Nouns sections. Here's what's left for the moment (assume one quiz per unit):
Verbs: 9 units
Verb Tenses: 5 units
Grammatical Mood: 6 units
Pronouns: 10 units
Adjectives: 7 units
Adverbs: 6 units
Conjunctions: 3 units
Interjections: 3 units
Prepositions: 11 units
That's a total of 60 units, and with a quiz per unit, that's 60 quizzes(!!) I need to make. So far, I have only quizzes for the Nouns section—six units, so only six quizzes done. That's a real imbalance, one I hadn't been keeping track of.
Of the 60 units mentioned, I have only one more Prepositions unit to write up, so I've already done 59 out of 60 units. That's a book's worth of work in and of itself, with only two paying subscribers to see it (yes—I lost my third paying subscriber, maybe because he got bored, maybe because he didn't want to do the work; there was no explanation given). The curriculum is already big and it's only gonna get bigger: With Prepositions out of the way, I'll eventually be working on Punctuation next. On the original calendar, that would've taken me through July (going by release dates). If I switch to this new routine, though, I'll be pushing Punctuation back by a few months to vibe-code all of these quizzes.
If I manage two quizzes a day, it'll take thirty days to get through them all, but I've got other projects to work on as well (like the movie-review book, various videos, more images, and other book projects), so I'll need to figure out a way to juggle all of this work. Still working on that. But I confess that the prospect of not working on new grammar units—which take all day to make—is something of a relief. I suspect, though, that making quizzes is going to become a slog as well, especially the way I do it. We'll see. But starting tomorrow, I'll finish Prepositions and be vibe-coding quizzes for the Verbs section. That's all I can say for the moment. When I have a clear schedule worked out, I'll slap it up on the blog.
I'm kind of rooting for Adam to get bigger. He's got over 500K subscribers on YouTube. Maybe he can reach a million by the end of this year or sometime next year.
I'm not a fan of most Korean bread, and a lot of bread that's considered "Korean" is actually ripped off from Japan. Many of the "Korean" breads I like come from elsewhere, like "milk bread," with its almost baguette-like interior, or the bready "cheesecake" that also came to Korea via Japan. Now, you could argue that all bread in Korea has foreign origins, and I don't know enough about the history of bread in Korea to rebut you. Maybe that argument is correct. But calling Korea the "kings of bread" seems a little much and a little premature. Meanwhile, enjoy your carbs and your extra pounds, Korea!
Absolute bombshell in the culinary world. South Korea just went to Paris and WON the global baking competition, beating the French at their own game. Korean bakers are taking European styles and adding local twists. The new kings of bread! pic.twitter.com/YE78P8zFym
— Furkan Gözükara (@FurkanGozukara) March 30, 2026
You could also argue that, once the concept of bread came to Korea, the creative possibilities for cultural mingling exploded. Like the Vietnamese with their bánh mì baguettes, Koreans have recipes for bread that also include rice flour; down the street from me, Kim Young-mo Bakery has a weirdly chewy-yet-charming baguette that's partly made with rice flour and covered in black-sesame seeds. Is this baguette in fact Korean, or was it imported from the Japanese? Probably the latter, but when I've bought the baguette, it's always been from Kim Young-mo (Kim, and maybe his sons, too, trained in Paris). Koreans love multi-grain rice, which probably explains why so many Korean sandwich breads are covered in crazy constellations of grain and often shot through with same: The multi-grain concept already existed in some form on the peninsula (think: ogok-bap/오곡밥, or 5-grain rice; there's even ten-grain rice) before multi-grain breads rose into prominence here.
Honestly, I have mixed feelings. All cultures borrow from each other; all cultures appropriate non-native things and make them their own by putting their own local spin on them. This isn't evil: It's only natural and normal, and I wish all of the oversensitive Americans who think cultural appropriation is a sin would just explode into bloody spray and leave the rest of us alone. To that extent, whether Koreans are borrowing and then riffing off bread that has come to Korea via Japan or Europe or the States is irrelevant. But the simplest question for food is: Do you think it tastes good? And sadly, I have to say that, in Korea, bread has been seized upon and, in many cases, buried under the addition of so many local-culture flourishes and curlicues that most of it just doesn't have much appeal to me. Simpler is usually better, which is why I love a good, old-fashioned jambon-beurre or—even better—saucisson-beurre.
All of which is to say that I don't mind if Koreans keep trying to find new, breakthrough tastes and shapes and whatnot as long as Koreans don't mind that I think 95% of their efforts in this direction are crap. I'm not saying that to be bitter, haughty, or snobbish: Mother Nature herself works in much the same way, relentlessly producing variations of life, most of which prove to be unviable or just more of the same thing, and only a tiny fraction of which will ever prove superior to what has come before. So I hope Koreans do keep innovating, but I also know I'll have to wade through a lot of shit to find the good stuff.
While I wasn't exactly in excruciating agony yesterday, I did strain my back a few hours before I had planned to go across town, and that experience left me walking around gingerly, wincing. The inciting incident happened when I leaned over my bed to pick up the 10-kilo dumbbells I had left there to take a break from my exercise set. When the spasm and the pain hit, my first emotions were annoyance and anger; when I slowly realized how deep the spasm had gone, I began to wonder whether I should cancel dinner with Charles and his wife. I stiffened and braced my core (which is something I must still do consciously because, despite my various exercises, I've got a long way to go to repair my core); this reduced pain, and for the next two to three hours, I did everything gingerly and found my brain stuck in Cancel with Charles or not? mode. By the end of that time, I felt good enough to override the hesitation with a Fuck it, I'll go, and so I went. Dinner went more or less smoothly, as did the taxi ride back to my place. And today, I feel a bit better, though still far from 100%. Today's a fasting day, so I'll just take it easy, sip some liquid, and try to remember to keep my core braced (I have to remind myself every thirty seconds). I ought to be much better in a day or two.
These sorts of back spasms are rare, but when they happen, they can be big. No spasm has ever been debilitatingly, flat-on-your-back bad, but I often wonder when the Big One is going to hit. On that day, I'll undoubtedly have to cancel my plans.
Spring has sprung. While I waited for a taxi to ferry me over to the Seoul National University neighborhood, I took a few pics of the cherry blossoms on my street:
I met my buddy Charles and his wife for burgers at a place called Daily Fix. My smash-style double burger was good. Charles got some sort of truffle burger with thick-cut steakhouse fries; I got regular fries, and the Missus shared Charles's fries and drink. I had a Coke all to myself. It was a good meal. We talked about Project Hail Mary.
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| burger and fries |
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| burger, side view |
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| fries (which had a little onion dust on them) |
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| Charles's steakhouse fries |
The Missus left us to keep working on a bespoke couch the couple had purchased. Charles and I headed elsewhere for dessert. There was a quiet, little place along Shyarosu-gil, a system of back streets lined with shops and eateries not far from SNU campus. We settled in; Charles ordered a minuscule tart and a fruit-themed tea: I got a frothy hot chocolate that was surprisingly excellent and a slice of Basque cheesecake, which was good but which also tasted a wee bit of the refrigerator it had been sitting in—which can be a problem when you sell desserts by the slice (although, frankly, I didn't see how the cheesecake was being stored).
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| the "ba-chi-ke," Korean abbreviation for Basque cheesecake |
Charles is the one who taught me ba-chi-ke.
Along with the East Asian tendency to take Western words and chop off phonemes and syllables to "Koreanize" or "Sinify" or "Japanify" them (e.g., rimokon/리모콘 for "remote control"), Koreans also tend to run words through something like a polysynthesis filter, reducing them to abbreviated forms by retaining only key syllables, thus making the words easier to remember and handle. Think of meokbang, for example, which I think comes from meongneun/먹는 (eating) and bangsong/방송 (broadcast). Take the meok/먹 from meongneun/먹는 and the bang/방 from bangsong/방송, and voilà: meokbang/먹방 (often badly romanized* as mukbang in the West).
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| I ended up liking the hot chocolate a lot more. |
It was good to sit down with Charles, whom I see only a few times per year. All told, today's meet-up went for about two-and-a-half hours. So my "eating day" changed from Wednesday to Tuesday, which means I get to fast for three days until the weekend! Yay!
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*"Badly romanized" because of that damn u. Damn you, u! If a girl is named Sunhee, the u is an American short u (i.e., it's an "uh"), rhyming with the English word sun. But in the famous admiral's name Yi Sun-shin, the u is an "ooh" sound, as in food. This inherent vagueness makes it hard for an anglophone Westerner to know how to pronounce mukbang: is it "mawk-bahng"/"muhk-bahng," or is it "moohk-bahng"? The proper romanization for the Korean vowel "ㅓ" is eo, which is something like the eo in George (says my old boss).
