yesterday's sin

Bruxie is a chicken-and-waffle joint that opened up in the B1 level of Jamshil's Lotte World Mall a few months ago. I had gone to the mall to look for small carabiners for my dying shoulder bag: the shoulder strap's metal hooks have both given out, forcing me to use flimsy key rings to keep the strap attached to the bag. Alas, the camping store that I had wanted to visit has disappeared completely from the mall's Lotte Mart, which meant that my trip out to Jamshil had been in vain. As a way to make up for that loss, I decided last night that it was finally time for me to visit the chicken-and-waffle place. What you see below is my messed-up order: I had ordered a cheddar-bacon plate, but what I got was the "original" plate.

I decided not to complain; the whole thing looked and smelled amazing. Texture-wise, the meal was absolutely perfect, and the waffle came with an immodestly sized pat (chunk, really) of maple-infused butter. The breast meat was juicy and easy to cut with a dullish knife, and the first few bites of my messed-up order were glorious.

Unfortunately, the meal fell down in terms of taste: there was an underlying salty bitterness that built up over each successive bite of chicken. The waffle was absolutely unimpeachable, but the chicken's coating became less and less palatable as I dug into it. I began to think it might be necessary to do what my mother used to do, i.e., pull the crust entirely off the meat and just eat the meat. But I persevered because, as I used to say to Mom, what's the point of eating fried chicken if you're going to remove the breading?

I may still go back to try the order I had originally intended to eat. It could be that the cheddar and bacon might offset the crust's taste in some way. The meal was excellent in most respects, but sadly came up short in the most crucial quality: taste.

Cost for the 3-piece option: W13,900. Pricey, but not horrifically so.

UPDATE: my coworker tells me that Bruxie is a chain in the States. Sure enough.

winter comfort food: the garbage plate

A recent Binging with Babish video shows our hero making something called a "garbage plate," which turns out to be tremendum et fascinans at the same time. (Food Wishes also has a decade-old garbage-plate exposé.) After watching a few more garbage-plate-related videos, I acquired enough knowledge to have a vague understanding of the meal's history and significance: the garbage plate (also known in some non-Rochesterian locales by an unofficial alternative moniker: the "trash plate") originated at Nick Tahou Hots restaurant in Rochester, New York, and continues to be a source of Rochester pride. The de rigueur components are crispy home fries, macaroni salad, meat sauce, and Zweigle's whites, which are a Weißwurst-style American hot dog. (There's also a hamburger-topped variant of the garbage plate, which feels a bit redundant given the ground beef in the meat sauce.) There's wiggle room when it comes to condiments: you can add onions, ketchup, mustard, relish, and a host of other components. Hot sauce is often considered a must; beans are often in attendance as well. The idea is to produce a heart-clogging mess of a meal that most moderate-sized human beings will be utterly unable to finish. That's part of the mystique, too: when you make a garbage plate, you never make it small. This is Amurrican junk food at its unabashed best.

Or worst.

Anyway, having now watched several garbage-plate videos on YouTube, I'm inspired to make my own, but I think I'm going to wait for the dead of winter, in January, to invite some friends over and have a go at this. The garbage plate falls squarely in the category of comfort food, but because you're supposed to be served so much of it, the food may end up being more a source of discomfort. No doubt my meal will be a horror show, but that's part of the fun.

on Trump and his "Pocahontas" gibe

Donald Trump has been going after Democrat senator Elizabeth Warren, who famously or infamously claimed Cherokee heritage some years back. Warren refuses to take a DNA test to confirm her heritage, and doubts have sprung up—proliferated, really—that her claims are untrue, thus earning her the mocking monikers of "Pocahontas" and "Fauxcahontas." While speaking at a ceremony honoring Navajo "wind talkers"—who used their native language as code for transmitting messages during World War II—Trump once again uttered the "Pocahontas" gibe in relation to Warren. The left-leaning media immediately went into a tizzy about this perceived faux pas, but perception is the operative concept here. At least two people of American Indian extraction have come out to say they found the president's remarks not the least bit offensive: WW2 veteran (and wind talker) Thomas Begay reportedly said, "The Marines made us yell 'Geronimo' when we jumped out of planes, and that didn't offend me, either." Then there's Debbie "White Dove" Porreco:

It turns out that an actual descendant of Pocahontas does not take any offense to President Donald Trump jokingly referring to Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas."

In a September interview with Sky News, Debbie "White Dove" Porreco said that Trump once asked her if it offended her that he used the name "Pocahontas" to refer to the Democratic senator.

"I know that he uses 'Pocahontas' sometimes with Elizabeth Warren," Porreco explained. "He said, 'Well, does that offend you when I use that?' And I told him no, it doesn't offend me."

And now, Elizabeth Warren could be in trouble for more alleged fakery: a family cookbook she claims as part of her heritage may actually have been cribbed from a Frenchman's cookbook. Read the sordid story here, keeping in mind that the Daily Mail is a notorious tabloid, so the story may need confirmation.

asked to tutor

My coworker and I were barely out the door of our building for the first of our two daily walks when we were accosted by a distinguished-looking Korean woman in a fur-lined coat who asked in Korean whether I was indeed Kevin. I said yes, and she launched into an explanation of how her department wanted to start up an English class for its staffers, and how she hoped that I could be the teacher. I told her that I was very busy these days, and that I didn't do private tutoring anymore (which is true: my only other side job is KMA in Yeouido). She immediately said, "Oh, no, no! This would be during work hours!" I found that to be presumptuous: she was basically asking whether she could just scoop me out of my department to do work for hers. At the same time, she was being clever: having me teach during work hours meant this would be work-related business, so there'd be no need to pay me anything extra; my salary would do. I told her I'd have to ask my boss, but that I personally didn't think this was going to happen. Because the lady's face wasn't ringing any bells, I asked her for her business card; she gave me one.

And that's how we parted ways. After I was done with the walk, I approached the boss and told him about the encounter, handing the lady's business card over to him. The boss recognized the department the lady worked for and reminded me that I had done proofreading work for her a couple months ago, even if I hadn't met her personally. He also made a face at the idea of working for this lady's department, and he told me to just leave the matter at that. As a result, I haven't called the lady back; I guess the idea is just to let the matter fade.

DC vs. Marvel: response to Charles

[NB: this is in answer to Charles's comment here. This began as a response in the comment thread, then became a blog post in its own right, which is why I'm publishing it in this form.]

It's no contest between "Justice League" and "Thor: Ragnarok." TR is so, so much better. It brings the trademark Marvel sense of fun, and it benefits from superior scriptwriting (even though both the MCU and the DCEU generally suffer from poorly written villains).

Before I say more, though, I should note here that I'm an absolute newbie when it comes to the world of comics lore and its fanboy following. I have a coworker who lives and breathes this stuff; he has an encyclopedic knowledge of American comics that extends back to their beginnings—knowledge not just of the stories themselves, but also of the writers and artists involved in their creation. I've told my coworker several times that he should make a YouTube channel devoted to comics-nerd commentary (along the lines of Emergency Awesome or New Rockstars), but I think he's too lazy to take me up on this.

With that as the preface, let's talk DC versus Marvel, keeping in mind that I'm still over 99% ignorant of the matter. The so-called "DCEU" (DC Extended Universe) era started up, I think, after Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, so even though Nolan's films are part of the DC brand, they're not part of the DCEU (see the list of DCEU films here). DCEU is the direct competitor with Marvel's MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), which had a head start on its stories, despite many of DC's stories being older in terms of dead-tree comics. (Example: Darkseid, one of DC's cosmic big bads, came before Marvel's Thanos, but because of the movies, the non-fanboy public has gotten to know Thanos first, so now Darkseid is going to seem like the copycat.)

The DCEU's other problem is that it's become closely associated with director Zack Snyder, who seems to have the opposite of the Midas touch when it comes to making anything other than "300." Snyder's films showcase his interesting stylistic sensibility, but aside from that aesthetic, the director doesn't seem to bring much else to the table. If he's not slavishly following someone else's (e.g., Frank Miller's) story template, he's prone to wandering into quagmires of his own making. "Sucker Punch," an enormous turd of a film, is an example of what happens when Snyder gets complete creative control: great imagery, suck-ass story. Partially following a template isn't much better: "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice" is a good example of that. Like Nolan, Snyder borrows heavily from moments found in Frank Miller's graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, but he botches the execution in his reinterpretation. People also complained about "Man of Steel" for similar reasons, and they're making the same complaints about "Justice League." The nightmare continues.

Along comes Patty Jenkins, director of "Wonder Woman." Jenkins did much to rescue the DCEU brand, but "Justice League" has yanked the brand back down under the water (per the Hollywood wisdom: you're only as good as your most recent movie, so thanks to Snyder, DC is in the doghouse again). There's grumbling, in the movie/fanboy world, about having Jenkins take a more prominent place in making DCEU films while putting Snyder on the back burner. I'd be strongly in favor of this. Snyder may think of himself as a comics lover, but I don't think he actually respects the original material the way he should. There's a certain unimaginative literalism in his approach: he's rendering images, not interpreting stories for the screen. He's also as bad at writing dialogue as George Lucas is.

Marvel, meanwhile, has hinged its strategy on finding fresh, new directors who aren't globally known until they have the chance to direct a Marvel hit. Tim Miller is a perfect example: "Deadpool" was his first-ever major film, and he hit a home run. (A shame he's been sidelined and isn't directing "Deadpool 2.") Taika Waititi, who did "Thor: Ragnarok," had done small-scale comedies and dramas before Marvel snapped him up. As long as Marvel's studio keeps finding this level of talent (and this may be the only time you ever hear me praise studio execs for anything), they'll keep clobbering the DCEU.*

So all in all, I look forward to Marvel films, but I sort of cringe whenever I hear a new DC film is out. That said, hope springs eternal, so I'll keep spending money on DC films, even if I don't enjoy them nearly as much.

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*Marvel works under several umbrellas, e.g., Disney Marvel, Fox Marvel, Sony Marvel, etc., and some branches of Marvel are far more successful than others. Fox Marvel, which controls the X-Men property, has been hit-or-miss with its X-men films ("Logan" and "Deadpool" are high points). Fox also controls the Fantastic Four property, and all three of those films (2005, 2007, 2015) have been abject misfires, so it's not true that all of Marvel is riding high.

"Justice League": two-paragraph review

2017's "Justice League" is directed by Zack Snyder and stars an ensemble cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, Connie Nielsen, and Ciarán Hinds. The movie's plot is fairly straightforward: an alien villain named Steppenwolf (Hinds) has boom-tubed* to Earth in the far-off past in an attempt to take over the planet. This attempt failed when a coalition of Amazons, Atlanteans, old gods (i.e., ancient Greek gods like Zeus and Ares), and humans beat Steppenwolf and his minions back, resulting in Steppenwolf's first-ever defeat. Now, in modern times, the angry alien giant has returned, and it's up to a league of superheroes to stop him. Batman (Affleck) and Wonder Woman (Gadot) head up the league, looking to recruit others. They eventually sign on The Flash (Miller), Cyborg (Fisher), and Aquaman (Momoa). Steppenwolf, meanwhile, tries to steal and unite three "mother boxes" (DC's analogue to Marvel's "tesseract") in order to subjugate the earth and terraform our planet to look like his homeworld. Batman, having had a major change of heart about blue-suited Kryptonians, gets the harebrained notion of resurrecting Superman by using a mother box; the Flash and Aquaman both think this might be a bad idea, especially if Superman reawakens with no memory of who he is—or reawakens, as the Flash puts it, "Pet Sematary"-style, i.e., as an evil undead entity. It's no spoiler to note that Superman does eventually come back to life, and the entire Justice League does do battle against Steppenwolf and his legion of zombie-dragonfly parademons.

I found the film generally watchable, if disjointed in pace and tone. You may have heard the behind-the-scenes story of how director Zack Snyder's daughter committed suicide a year or so ago, thus forcing Snyder to leave the film, which was completed by Joss Whedon, who is best known for helming Marvel films like "The Avengers." The end result is a clash of styles and visions, and it shows: the humorous scenes belong to Whedon; the Roland Emmerich-style scenes—in which shit is blowing up—belong to Snyder. With so many characters, characterization itself becomes a problem, and figures like Aquaman and Cyborg are woefully underserved. Ezra Miller, however, stands out for his youthful vigor and comic chops: his Flash is one of the best things about the movie. Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman also deserves a shout-out for being the moral center of the league, and there's a hint of a Batman/Wonder Woman romance lurking in the shadows, reflecting an ancient, pancultural fascination with how some immortals take mortals as lovers. Steppenwolf is played by the always impressive Ciarán Hinds, but Hinds's voice and body are so thoroughly distorted by computer trickery that the villain registers as little more than a video-game character with no depth and no development. Hinds, a powerful and talented actor, is wasted in the role. Danny Elfman scores the film (as he did with "Avengers: Age of Ultron"), but aside from a brief evocation of the 1989 "Batman" theme, there's little memorable here. The movie's funniest moment comes when the Flash, in trying to circle around Superman, realizes with horror that Superman is fast enough to see the Flash and make eye contact with him. It's a brief but delicious moment. Alas, beats like that come only rarely, and while "Justice League" is watchable, I fear that its flaws don't make it re-watchable.

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*A boom tube—the term comes from various DC comics—is basically a wormhole (more technically, a science-fiction-y sort of Einstein-Rosen bridge) that allows someone or something to teleport great distances. The recent "Thor: Ragnarok" featured its own version of a boom tube: the Devil's Anus on the trash planet of Sakaar.

what has Craig Ferguson been doing since retirement?

Craig Ferguson—who, despite years of flirting with gorgeous starlets on his late-night talk show, has so far managed to escape the wave of sexual-harassment scandals currently sweeping the nation—retired from the talk-show life a few years back and has been attached to this or that project ever since, with no huge projects aimed at re-inserting his star into the firmament. I recently discovered, however, that the Scots-American (he bragged about becoming a US citizen in the latter years of his talk show) has been working with a company called GANT to produce a series of videos collectively titled "Couple Thinkers." The concept is this: Craig and his wife Megan begin each show with a question/issue, then seek out some expert to help answer the question or settle the issue. As you might imagine, the issues discussed are never really settled definitively; the joy of the series lies in the discussions. Craig is, of course, his usual jokey self; his wife Megan brings her own unique wit to the table, and the experts we meet are charming and informative. The show leans decidedly leftward, for those who care about such things, but if you're a rightie viewer, and you have your principles in place, then there's nothing here that will shake you from your ideological tree.

Here are the questions that the Fergusons have taken to the experts:

1. Can real food feed the world? (feat. Kimbal Musk, brother of Elon)

2. When do we have to leave this planet? (feat. Neil deGrasse Tyson)

3. Can we stop aging? (feat. Dr. Daisy Robinton, who has done a TED talk)

4. Can you spot a psychopath? (feat. Jon Ronson)

5. How do you dare to follow your dreams and visions? (feat. Jo Nesbø)

6. What is a successful life? (feat. Arianna Huffington)

If I have any complaint about the series, it's that it's so painfully Californian. I'm an East Coaster, and we East Coasters tend to be a bit less airy-fairy in our worldview. This series is all sunshine and West Coast idealism, but if you can look past the unicorns and rainbows, you'll have fun watching Craig and Meg do their thing.

"Justice League": 3 takes that are not mine

Here's a generally positive review:

Here's a scathingly negative review:


Here's a generally fair-minded review that notes positives and negatives:

not served on a dirty ashtray

I brought my "bad ham" in to the office today for the Saturday crowd: about half the regular staffers are here, plugging away on projects in an effort to stay ahead of impending December deadlines. Thanks to a coworker who had bought some delicious Korean-style dinner rolls for our Thanksgiving celebration this past Thursday, I was inspired to buy those same rolls today and use them to create ham sliders. The "bad ham" was my overly slow-cooked ham, which turned out not to be too bad. I spread mayonnaise on the buns, placed some pickles on the bottom halves of the bread, sprinkled black pepper on the top half of each bun, then placed a thick slab of ham in the middle. Everyone loved the sandwiches, which was a relief. "Not dry at all!" a few coworkers said. I still felt the ham had been way overcooked, but apparently, I can do no wrong with this crowd, and all ten ham sliders were gobbled up with glee.

Stay tuned for my review of "Justice League," which I finally saw this morning.

whoa

I'm not a friend of Saudi Arabia, but if this is true, that's a blot on the US... or at least a blot on US private-security contractors.

brothers at Thanksgiving

What the hell is up with those beards, guys?

A reminder of my own scraggly attempt at a beard here.

seen on Gab

one last way to celebrate Turkey Day

Celebrate the glory that is Turkey Day by enjoying this over-the-top death scene from some long-ago Turkish action flick:

The actual scene apparently didn't incorporate the lovely screaming. You can watch a longer "uncut cut" of the scene here.

the Thanksgiving spread

Sorry for the fuzziness. Lens was smudged.

boy, how they grow

My buddy Mike's children, home for Thanksgiving:

At the top of the totem pole is my goddaughter Rachael. Next down are Emma and Iain.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The turkey roulade was a success. I have other pictures, but I think my cell-phone camera's lens was smudged, so the images all look fuzzy. Here are two pics of the roulade, followed by a pic of yours truly. The pic below looks a lot like a vomiting larva.

Making the roulade was actually kind of fun. I took the turkey-burger patties, mushed them together, mixed them with salt and pepper, then laid out the meat in the bottom of a large, rectangular baking dish lined with cling film. On top of that, I layered the prosciutto, followed by the roulade's filling, which was a mixture of spinach, mushrooms, crushed pine nuts (crushed in my mortar and pestle! my first time using it!), crushed garlic (mortar and pestle strike again!), sea salt, pepper, shredded Gouda, some thyme, and a good quantity of olive oil. Because white-meat turkey has a dangerous tendency to dry out in the oven, I deliberately included the above ingredients to up the fat content of the roulade. This turned out to be a good move: everyone at the office thought the turkey was tender and juicy. I also layered the outside with bacon, thereby adding another source of moisture. I didn't have a clear idea as to baking time, but for a one-kilo roulade, the baking time turned out to be around an hour at 200°C, with the final 20 minutes spent using the top burners of my oven to broil the bacon.

I based the roulade on several porchetta recipes I had encountered on various recipe websites and on YouTube, but in the end, the creation was my own. Below is a pretty decent shot of the roulade's cross section:

I brought too much food, of course, but everyone got stuffed, and the turkey—all 2 kg of it—is almost gone. This was my first roulade; it wasn't perfect, but it was pretty damn good, and I'm now inspired to try making other roulade-ish dishes in the future.

UPDATE: almost all of the food sold out when two-thirds of the staffers told me they wanted to take some food home with them. I have very little left—just some gravy and some choux rouge, and that's it. Today was amazing: this was the largest amount of food I've ever cooked at one time. It took two trips to bring all the food to the office, but in the end, all that effort paid off, and my reputation as the office's resident cook remains secure.

NK: terrorist again (at long last)

From the inimitable ROK Drop: NORTH KOREA IS UNHAPPY WITH BEING RELISTED ON THE US STATE SPONSORS OF TERRORISM LIST

more dogbloggin'

Husky therapy:

Man... I keep thinking about getting a dog, but with my often-crowded work schedule, I don't see how that's possible.

half a load

Today, I brought in half the food I'll be serving at lunch in the office tomorrow. I'm a bit behind schedule, but I think everything will be ready by our 1:30PM start time. I had to bring the food in today because this is the largest amount of food I've ever made, and the burden would simply be too heavy if I tried to carry in everything tomorrow. Just coming home from Costco last night, my huge Costco shopping bag was so heavy that I thought it must have weighed around seventy pounds.

What I brought in today:

- cider
- chicken mushroom gravy
- cranberry sauce
- peas
- sweet-potato casserole

I began with the sweet-potato casserole. Actual sweet potatoes, as Americans know them, are hard to find here on the peninsula, where one is more likely to encounter the local cousin of the sweet potato, i.e., goguma. The problem with using goguma as a surrogate is that the tuber's flesh is much paler, being somewhere in the white/grey/brown region—a far cry from the orange-ish flesh of the standard American sweet potato. I wanted my casserole to look American, so I had to get clever.

This was a Korean problem, so it required a Korean solution, and the answer to my dilemma was to buy carrots and ripe persimmons, both of which are readily available in Korean groceries. The persimmons, in particular, were a solid addition because they added some necessary sweetness: goguma aren't as sugary as American sweet potatoes. I peeled and chopped the carrots and goguma and boiled the hell out of them. I extracted the gooey flesh of the ripe persimmons, removing the seeds and placing the orange goo in a bowl.

Once everything was cooked to fork-tenderness, I extracted the veggies, dumped them into a bowl, and went after them with a potato masher. I had a small tub of leftover ricotta cheese, so I shrugged and dumped that in, too, in lieu of butter. The smell coming off this ensemble was weird: it smelled almost as if I had tossed in some chicken or turkey. Nonplussed, I tasted a spoonful of the carrot/tuber mixture, but all I tasted was what I had expected to taste. I had no idea where that aroma was coming from. Anyway, I dumped in the persimmon flesh and continued mashing.

After some time, it became obvious that the carrots weren't mashing as well as the goguma were, so I brought out my immersion blender and tore into the mash with a vengeance. A few minutes later, and the whole mix looked properly orange, just like American sweet potatoes. Neither the carrots nor the persimmons intruded in terms of taste, and once I added brown sugar, molasses, and a bit of cinnamon and nutmeg, the casserole tasted like a proper casserole... only now, the problem was that the whole thing was too runny. (At a guess, I didn't let the tubers and carrots drain for long enough before I began mashing them.)

To surmount that obstacle, I turned to my old friend, panko (Japanese bread crumbs often used for frying, and called bbang-garu, or "bread powder," in Korean*). As I've noted in previous posts, bread is actually an ancient thickener, and the panko—once I dumped a large bowlful of it into the mix—solved my consistency problems nicely, without altering the casserole's taste. I dithered over whether to top the casserole with some sort of marshmallow coating, but I eventually decided against it. I plan to toast some leftover macadamia nuts and create a sugary topping that people can spoon onto their servings of casserole.

Next up was the gravy, and I have to congratulate myself for having capitalized on happenstance. While I was working on the casserole, the water in my two pots—one in which I'd boiled carrots, the other in which I'd boiled goguma—cooled down, and the goguma water actually seized up and became a kind of gel. At a guess, this is because the goguma had released a ton of starch and/or pectin into the water. I saw this and knew instantly that this would be an excellent starter for my chicken gravy, so I took out some frozen chicken chunks that had served me in making chicken stock a few months back, added my mushrooms, set the whole thing boiling, pulled out the chicken chunks after forty minutes, added a bit of bouillon cornstarch—et voilà: a velvety chicken-mushroom gravy that was thick without being either too goopy or too runny.

I reused the carrot water to boil a bagful of frozen peas, which I then lifted out of the water with a slotted spoon and dumped into a large plastic container. I then added salt, pepper, and butter, allowing the peas' residual heat to melt the butter and spread the salt and pepper. The peas were probably the quickest thing to cook.

Cranberry sauce was also easy to make: I dumped the berries into my bokkeum pan, then added sugar, water, cinnamon, lemon juice, and a splash of orange juice. After a few minutes on high heat, the berries began to burst and release their pectin, thereby thickening up the mixture and forming a sauce. Like the peas, this was a fairly easy, straightforward prep.

Lastly, there was the cider. The traditional 70s-era recipe calls for orange-juice concentrate, but I didn't have any of that. Following an online recipe straight from my childhood, I realized that the apple juice/orange juice ratio was 4:3, so I poured the juices into the pot in those proportions. The recipe called for the addition of spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves, but I soon discovered that the simple mixture of apple and orange juices was enough to produce a drink that was pleasing to the taste. I mixed up a gallon of the plainer cider, pouring it into the large Costco/Kirkland jug that had so recently held only apple juice.

Lugging all of the above to work today was a chore, but I'm glad I did it. Tomorrow, I'll be bringing the rest: turkey, stuffing, ham, corn pudding, choux rouge aux marrons, and homemade pumpkin pie (which will actually be a dan-hobak/kabocha pie).

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*A bit of linguistic trivia: the "pan" in Japanese panko and the "bbang" in Korean bbang-garu both come from Romance-language words for "bread," which is called el pan in Spanish, le pain in French, and o pão in Portuguese.

harmless-seeming Charlie Rose joins the list of harassers

Apparently, the behind-the scenes version of diffident, innocuous-seeming TV personality Charlie Rose—he of the softball interviews—is a far cry from the on-camera version. The American public knows Rose as a calm, gentle, soothing voice, a man content with asking superficially probing questions that put no pressure on the interviewee. As it turns out, though, the Rose we don't see has been, for decades, a horny pervert with itchy fingers who is also cursed with a fiery temper. Eight women have come out against Rose, and they're telling similar stories about him: the unsolicited massages, the groping, the so-called "shower trick" in which Rose urgently beckons a woman to come into the bathroom while he's showering. This feels like a lesser version of Bill Cosby's predicament: in Cosby's case, dozens of women came out of the woodwork to tell curiously similar stories, thus reinforcing the idea that Cosby has indeed been guilty, over decades, of drugging women, raping or otherwise having his way with them, then dismissing them from his premises. Rose's eight women are only the beginning, I imagine: the above-linked article suggests that Rose's misbehavior has gone on for years and years, so there are likely to be more accusers. Many more.

I shouldn't be surprised at this point, but I had always thought of Charlie Rose as incapable of hurting a flea. I now realize that, as with many public personalities, this is merely a cultivated image. Outing Rose feels a bit like outing Fred Rogers, but as far as I know, Rogers was a decent human being despite the urban legend about him being a ruthless sniper.

Ave, Charles!

My buddy Charles, still in the States but coming back to Korea in a few weeks, sends me this humorous link to the "Celebrity Perv Apology Generator."

Just as pedophilia is now collecting defenders, I think we're going to learn, soon enough, that whacking off in front of female employees and assistants, rubbing one's erection against a woman's leg, and raping a woman while she's asleep are all just legitimate lifestyle choices.

A hilarious example of an apology from the above-linked site:

As the father of daughters, I feel tremendously guilty now that the things I did have been made public. I imagined that any woman would have been thrilled to see a tiny penis peeking out from below my pasty, middle-aged paunch like the head of a geriatric albino turtle moments from death, and of course now I realize my behavior was wrong. In conclusion, I will get the help I so desperately need because this isn’t actually my fault, I have a problem so I’m not responsible for my actions.

(apologies for punctuation)

And courtesy of Dr. V, we have this blog entry from fellow philosopher Keith Burgess-Jackson about how men ought to conduct themselves around women:

In light of recent events, I have some advice for men:

1. Don't touch a woman without her specific consent. Consent, to be consent, must be informed. Don't resort to trickery, subterfuge, dissimulation, or manipulation (including getting her drunk or high).
2. Compartmentalize your life, difficult though that may be. No flirting, romance, compliments, or sexual jokes or comments at work.
3. Don't make women feel uncomfortable, even in a public place where you are equals. If she rebuffs your advance(s), leave her alone. She is not interested in you as a romantic or sexual partner.
4. Stay away from underage females. Nothing good (and much bad) can come of it.
5. Be a gentleman, not a brute or a lout. Think courtship, which is respectable, not seduction, which is sleazy. Real men respect women, which means respecting women's autonomy.
6. If it's hard for you to imagine how a particular woman feels while she is interacting with you, imagine that she is your sister (or mother) and ask whether you would want a man treating her as you're thinking of treating her.

Good advice.

roulade

I went shopping for Thanksgiving ingredients last night, but was unsuccessful in finding legit turkey (admittedly, I didn't look very hard). At High Street Market, I found patties of ground turkey that I plan to flatten out and turn into a roulade filled with some sort of mushroom-and-nut-and-spinach-and-maybe-cheese stuffing wrapped in bacon like a porchetta. I asked the High Street cashier about where I could find actual turkey turkey, and she said that High Street was indeed selling whole turkeys... but not until the next day. Another employee came up and gave me an order form to order a full-on Thanksgiving meal, but when I got home, I saw the form said it would take at least a week to prep any order, which pretty much made the notion of ordering turkey by Thursday useless and irrelevant.

So I'm going to stick with my porchetta-style turkey roulade for this Thursday's meal, along with making stuffing and a slew of other dishes. We'll see how it goes.

reconciliation

Here's an owner apologizing to her dog:

Here's a dog apologizing to its owner:

one of the biggest hypocrisies of the past year

In 2016, Trump originally said he'd question (or think about questioning) the legitimacy of the election if Hillary won. Hillary's camp decried this attitude as an attack on democracy.

Who's attacking democracy now?

(Credit where credit is due.)

seen on Gab

Saw this on Gab and had a chuckle:

a penny for your thoughts

I have no idea what to make of this. Your thoughts?

You should never let your opponents define you, because they’re not looking to do you any favors. That’s why Republicans, especially those who voted for President Trump, should object to being called populists.

Populism was one of the nastiest of American political movements. It was inevitable, therefore, that Trump would be called a populist. But that doesn’t describe Trump, or the Republican Party he re-invented.

It’s true that, like most populists, Trump thinks that tariff walls that keep foreign goods out of the country might help American workers. But then Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley thought so, too, and they weren’t populists.

It’s also true that, like most populists, Trump championed an underclass unjustly held back by an aristocracy of wealth. But then Karl Marx and socialist Eugene V. Debs thought the same thing, and they weren’t populists. And like most populists, Trump decried the influence of money in politics. But then so did Hillary Clinton and Liz Warren, and nobody called them populists.

Here’s what the accusation of populism really means. It’s a smear meant to link one to people like “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, one of the vilest characters in American political history. Tillman was the governor of South Carolina from 1890 to 1894 and served as the state’s representative in the US Senate for the next 23 years. He invented Jim Crow laws in his state, defended lynch mobs and boasted of the African-Americans he had killed.

Trump is something new in American politics. He’s not Andrew Jackson, or a plain-speaking Harry Truman. He’s not Ronald Reagan. He’s unlike anything we’ve seen before, for the simple reason that he’s up against something we’ve never seen before: a left that’s given up on the American dream of a mobile and classless society, that defends economic immobility and aristocracy.

Trump isn’t a populist. He’s a conservative nationalist. As a conservative he favors socially conservative institutions and free-market solutions to political questions. As a nationalist he is middle of the road or liberal when it comes to taking care of Americans who have fallen behind, through a generous safety net.

[...]

In a speech on the [1867 Reform] bill, Disraeli described what he thought the Tory Party should be, in terms that also define Trump’s Republican Worker’s Party:

“I have always considered that the Tory party was the national party of England . . . It is formed of all classes, from the highest to the most homely, and it upholds a series of institutions that are in theory, and ought to be in practice, an embodiment of the national requirements and the security of the national rights.”

As a nationalist, Disraeli and his party wanted all Britons to prosper. He could never have called one group of his countrymen deplorable, or ignored half the voters because they were in the wrong identity group.

By reaching out to all Britons, he took the Whig’s issues away from them, just as Trump did in dishing the Democrats.

Not much has changed, and the American who wishes to understand the shape of things to come might do well to read up on the “Tory Democracy” of Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston’s father) or observe the similarities between Trump’s agenda and the National Policy of Sir John A. Macdonald’s Tory Party in Canada.

Clickhole strikes again

Via Clickhole: a biting satire of the whole "apologizing for harassment" thing.

what I'd like to write about

We're in the midst of crunch time here at the office, which is why I'm once again piling on the overtime comp hours. I was here all day Saturday until 2AM Sunday morning, and now I'm back in the office for another 9-or-so-hour session. I'd like to write a review of both "American Gods" the TV series and American Gods the novel (which I've read several times over the past few years), but that's going to have to wait until I'm much less busy, which might not be for a while. So hang tight.

the extent of my curse

I live under a curse: whenever I sit down to take a shit in a public restroom, someone else will barge into the bathroom within sixty seconds of my ass's touching the toilet seat. Tonight, I was at the office until just after 2AM. As I was prepping to go back to my place on foot, I decided to take a pre-walk dump in what I assumed was a completely empty fourth floor. I went to the restroom, dropped trou, settled onto the target-reticle-shaped toilet seat, and began pumping out my glorious filth.

Not even a minute into my sin of emission, the restroom's door opened, and an old man shambled into the restroom—probably one of the nighttime guards who normally sit at a desk in the lobby and go on occasional patrols inside the building. I knew he was an old man by the grunting and sighing noises, but the robust, thunderous, youthful fart he let out while urinating came as a true surprise. The smell of the fart, however, was ancient: noisome and redolent of long-dead pharaohs.

Having shot most of my wad a second or so before the old man had barged in, I could only reply to this impressive micturo-flatulent display with a single lame, fecal plop. The old man left; I wiped, flushed, washed my hands, and departed the restroom, too, eager to put this incident behind me and just walk the fuck home in the below-freezing weather.

sad

I don't think I'd label myself an "animal lover," per se, but I found this story about a poor, abandoned dog to be quite depressing. Folks: don't abandon your dogs. They do feel love, and they are capable of missing you. Just go to YouTube and watch any number of "pets greet owners after long time" videos to see what I mean.

the ever-growing roster of harassers

Along with self-righteous, moralizing scolds like George Takei* and Richard Dreyfuss being taken down by the current wave of sexual-harassment accusations, we now have Sylvester Stallone and Senator Al Franken in the news as the latest harassers-from-years-ago.** Stallone has weathered all manner of controversy before, so this latest blow doesn't really come as a surprise to me, and I don't think it's going to affect the tail-end of his career that much, but Franken's credibility (such as it is) is definitely on the line, even if his accuser hasn't demanded that he step down.

With so many harassers based in Hollywood, people are beginning to joke about who might actually be attending next year's Oscars ceremony: there may be plenty of empty seats. I suspect the attendees will be nothing but grim-looking women. Heh.***

---

*Back when I was on Twitter, I used to follow Takei... but I unfollowed him when he called Clarence Thomas "a clown in blackface" in an abysmally hypocritical moment of Asian-on-black racism. Takei later apologized for his outburst, but that was the last straw for me.

**The accuser, Leeann Tweeden, tells her story here.

***At what point, though, does a cleansing become a witch hunt?

a war with NK would be nasty, brutish... and probably short

If this defecting soldier counts as some sort of random sample, then we can surmise the North Korean military is in sorry, sorry shape:

A North Korean soldier shot multiple times while defecting to the South is in a stable condition but riddled with parasites that could complicate his chances of survival, his doctor said Thursday.

The soldier dashed across the border at the Panmunjom truce village on Monday, as former comrades from the North opened fire on him, hitting him at least four times.

He was pulled to safety by three South Korean soldiers who crawled to reach him, just south of the dividing line. The young man was rushed to hospital in South Korea by helicopter where he has undergone two rounds of emergency surgery.

“Vital signs including his pulse are returning to stability”, attending doctor Lee Cook-Jong told journalists. However, he warned, the un-named soldier could rapidly deteriorate at any moment.

“We’re paying close attention to prevent possible complications,” said Lee, who on Wednesday said “an enormous number of parasites” including roundworms had been found in the small intestine.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 20 years as a physician”, he said, adding the longest worm he removed was 27 centimetres (11 inches).

Parasites, especially roundworms, are widespread in North Korea — as they are in many developing countries — where people eat uncooked vegetables that have been fertilised with human faeces, experts say.

—quoted here; found here

If one NK soldier is parasite-riddled, then others probably are, and probably for the same systemic reasons. The North's army is already known to be starving (except for its most privileged units, thanks to the seon-gun, or military-first, policy). What remains is the question of the sanity of the North Korean regime. Most of us Korea hands agree that, in general, the NK government, with Kim Jeong-eun at its head, is actually a rational actor despite the insanity inherent in oppressing one's own people to such an inhuman degree. We know NK is rational because of the strategic, methodical manner in which it plays other countries against each other, the way an aikido master faces three opponents and drives them into each other, deftly redirecting their attacks. However, even sanity goes out the window when things get desperate, and if a ground war were ever to break out on the peninsula, the North's use of nuclear weapons can't be ruled out in extremis. But if nukes don't enter the equation, I suspect a ground war would be fairly short despite the mountainous terrain and multitude of bunkers and tunnel systems... unless China decided to fight on behalf of the North—a prospect that seems less likely the more onerous the North becomes.

with thanks to Bill Keezer

Saw this linked in an email from Bill Keezer:

I think it's too little, too late when it comes to seeking justice from Bill Clinton, but it's nice to see that the current leftist-fueled moral panic is, at long last, claiming some of the right victims. Too bad this won't end with Wild Bill (or his wife) actually facing justice.

shake n' quake

South Korea experienced two earthquakes yesterday; the second was likely an aftershock.

Here's more:

A 5.4 magnitude earthquake struck the southeastern port city of Pohang on Wednesday.

It was the second-largest quake to hit the Korean Peninsula on record and happened just over a year after a 5.8 magnitude quake rocked Gyeongju.

The Korea Meteorological Administration said the quake was centered in an area around 9 km north of Pohang at a depth of only 8 km underground.

It happened just 43 km away from the tremor that shook Gyeongju and was followed by 30 aftershocks measuring between 2.0 to 4.3 in magnitude occurred until 10 p.m. Wednesday night.

Although the earthquake had only a quarter of the strength of the Gyeongju tremor, it was shallower and resulted in about the same amount of damage.

Locals reported shakes strong enough to move heavy furniture, and tremors were felt as far afield as Seoul.

You'll recall that I've been to Pohang. Also: students who are taking their college-entrance exams this week can rejoice: thanks to the earthquakes, exams have been moved to next week.

energy independence could be just around the corner

The not-always-trustworthy BBC: "US leads world in oil and gas production, IEA says."

International energy markets are set for "major upheaval" as the US cements its status as the world's largest oil and gas producer, while China overtakes it as the biggest oil consumer.

The predictions come from the International Energy Agency's annual energy forecast. It believes that global energy demand will rise 30% by 2040, driven by higher consumption in India.

At the same time, the renewable energy sources will become more important.

The IEA, which tracks the energy for 29 countries, said the US - once reliant on imports - is becoming the "undisputed global oil and gas leader". It expects the US to account for 80% of the increase in global oil supply to 2025, driven by increases in shale. That will keep prices down and help make the US a net exporter of oil - in addition to gas - by the late 2020s.

The US Energy Information Administration estimated that the US became the world's top petroleum and natural gas producer in 2012. The emergence of the US "represents a major upheaval for international market dynamics", said Dr Fatih Birol, IEA executive director.

This means a few things. It means Venezuela, which relies almost exclusively on oil to prop up its economy, won't be recovering anytime soon given the continued low price of fuel. It also means less leverage for OPEC nations, quite a few of which use their oil money to sponsor terrorism. Further, it means the potential to create new European trading partners (especially in Eastern Europe) who might want cheap US oil and not be at the mercy of Russia's Gazprom, which supplies fully a third of the EU's gas. On a stranger note, the US's new status might lead to a significant reevaluation of the country's relationship with Canada, from which the US imports the largest amount of oil. As much as we focus on Middle Eastern petrostates, it's easy to forget that our neighbor to the north is actually our largest source of foreign oil. I wonder how the US-Canada relationship might change if we took oil out of the equation.

al-tang redux

I purchased a bunch more al (fish roe) to stick inside my al-tang. I had bought two kinds of roe before: huge eggs sacs from some imported fish (Russia!), and much smaller pollock-roe sacs (also from Russia) that turned out to be better because they're a bit sweeter and far less salty. I cooked the new batch of roe separately, then loaded the stew up with it, such that there's now an insane amount of al in my soup. Today's lunch:

dog goes nuts when her favorite chew toy comes to life

Funniest thing I've seen all day:

Ave, Dr. Pepple!

John Pepple has written a long and interesting blog post on the beginnings of language. In it, he discusses Noam Chomsky's highly influential linguistic theory of transformational grammar and deep structures (although Pepple doesn't, to my knowledge, use either of those exact terms), and how that theory is being challenged by thinker Daniel Everett. The blog post is well worth a read, especially if you're in the language-teaching business.

I'm confused by Pepple on only one point, though: early on in his post, Pepple seems to take for granted the existence of "animal languages," but much later, he claims that animals don't use language at all, not even a little. I'm unclear on whether the "early Pepple" was merely conveying Chomsky's thinking or was weaving Chomsky's thinking into his own. A charitable assumption would be that the "early Pepple" was quoting/conveying Chomsky but was expressing his own opinion later on.

That confusion aside, the post makes for a very interesting read.

prudery and panic

These are strange times that we live in. Hard to tell if we're in the midst of a witch hunt or a righteous crusade. Here's Paul Joseph Watson on "The New Sexual Puritans":

And here, from a while back, is Styx on today's "moral panic":


Styx has done several "moral panic" vids. Here they all are.

"War for the Planet of the Apes": review

I've developed a very healthy respect for director Matt Reeves, especially once I realized that he had directed the latter two of the three rebooted "Planet of the Apes" films. Reeves (who also directed "Under Siege 2," "Cloverfield," and "10 Cloverfield Lane," and who will be directing Ben Affleck in the upcoming "The Batman") has pulled off the trick of directing two movies of similarly high quality—both with different casts, plots, tones, and themes—and he has somehow managed to keep the third movie in the series from falling prey to the usual third-movie curse of being the worst in the bunch. "War for the Planet of the Apes" is easily a match for its two predecessors; maintaining such quality is a feat worthy of early-2000s Peter Jackson and his Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Starring Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn, Karin Konoval, Amiah Miller, and Gabriel Chavarria, "War for the Planet of the Apes" is less about a war and more about the chimpanzee Caesar's attempt to lead his fellow apes, Moses-like, to a promised land without getting everyone killed. The film very early on reveals where its sympathies lie, and it's not with the evil, genocidal humans. The only human who is an exception is little Nova (Miller), a girl who has caught a mutated version of the pandemic virus that had wiped out of most of humanity in the first film, and who cannot speak, although she does learn to use the sign language that many of the apes use.

The film's basic plot is quite simple: a contingent of renegade US Army soldiers led by the Colonel (Harrelson) has been tracking Caesar. Caesar, meanwhile, gets word from patrols that there exists a place beyond a desert where the apes can live in peace, away from humanity. Some soldiers lose a skirmish after having tracked down Caesar's forces, and Caesar mercifully sends the few survivors back to the Colonel with the message that, if the soldiers desist and leave the forests, the killing can stop. The Colonel responds by finding and infiltrating Caesar's current hideout, then by personally slaughtering Caesar's wife and eldest son.

Torn between his desire for vengeance and his need to guide the apes to a safer haven, Caesar sends the apes out toward the promised land while he and a small detachment of apes go hunt the Colonel. Caesar discovers the Colonel's stronghold, and to his horror, he sees that his entire tribe of apes has been captured and put to work building a wall that is meant to stop the attack of another human military division that has come to capture the Colonel. The reason for this can't be explained without leading us into major spoiler territory, so I'll leave off here.

Even though "War" is short on actual war, it does a superb job with characterization. Andy Serkis, who famously mo-capped Gollum for several of Peter Jackson's movies, does stellar work as Caesar. This isn't Serkis's first time in a primate role: you may recall that he mo-capped Kong in Peter Jackson's "King Kong" (2005). The ape effects, in general, are excellently realized, to the point where you, as the viewer, simply take for granted that you're watching intelligent apes. Steve Zahn also deserves praise for his comic portrayal of Bad Ape, a wily chimpanzee who can speak, but who doesn't know any ape-sign. Waifish Amiah Miller, meanwhile, does a fine job as a child actress, reminding me of no one so much as a combination of a very young Dakota Fanning and Amanda Seyfried. Woody Harrelson's Colonel radiates equal amounts of menace and pathos.

While the acting is unquestionably good, the plot does contain flaws. The Moses imagery is laid on a bit thick, for example, and if you know the biblical story, then you can predict how things are going to end for Caesar when the tribe finally reaches the outskirts of the promised land. The other major story problems are (1) the effects of the mutated virus aren't explained all that well, and (2) the story we see feels fairly parochial; it would have been interesting to get a glimpse of how the human-ape conflict was playing out in the rest of the world.

But the central drama unfolds well enough—the conflict between Caesar and the Colonel is what drives much of the film, and for Caesar, the risk is that he will turn into another Koba (the evil ape from the previous movies—and you might recall that "Koba" was a nickname for Josef Stalin). The movie traffics in deep themes and evokes plenty of other stories in both literature and film: "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "Apocalypse Now," parts of the Jesus narrative, and even "War of the Worlds." All in all, I think Matt Reeves's three films are a worthy reboot of the cinematic story we got in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While not absolutely perfect in terms of storytelling, all three films showcase fine acting and character development, and they don't shy away from heavy themes like the self-destructive nature of human hubris and the question of what it means to be truly civilized. If you've seen the first two of Reeves's films, I recommend this one, which works as both the capstone to a three-part tale and as the possible launching point for another sequel.

"Predators": one-paragraph review

If you saw the trailer for "Predators" when it came out in 2010, then you know that the preview gave away most of the movie. Directed by Nimród Antal and starring an impressive ensemble cast that includes Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Walton Goggins, Laurence Fishburne, Danny Trejo, Mahershala Ali, Oleg Taktarov, and Louis Ozawa Changchien, "Predators" is the story of a group of terrible humans—soldiers, thugs, and murderers—who are all knocked out and dragged off to some faraway planet that is basically a game preserve. A hunting party of three Predators goes after the humans, who begin the scenario confused as to why they're even on this world (at first, they don't even realize they're not on Earth until they get a chance to see the sky). Royce (Brody) quickly establishes himself as the group's gravelly-voiced leader, with Isabelle (Braga) quickly assuming the role of second-in-command. As with the very first movie, the group must figure out the nature of what is hunting them, even as the group's members get picked off one by one (unfortunately, the movie gives us two chances to witness the "black guy dies in science fiction" rule in action). And that's basically it: the movie tries to take some interesting twists and turns, and it's fairly entertaining on a pot-smoker's level, but I found the script to be somewhat poorly written and predictable, and I also had trouble thinking of milquetoast-y, watery-eyed Adrien Brody as a brawny leading man in an action-thriller. The characters get picked off too fast for most of them to form any meaningful bonds, and the film contains a few too many direct visual references to the very first "Predator," which came out in 1987: plunges down a waterfall, the use of mud for camouflage, etc. The Predators themselves never come off as more than big guys in rubber suits—a flaw that was inherent in the first movie in the series as well. All in all, "Predators" was watchable, but it could have been so, so much better.

Cambridge pussification

Cambridge students throw a hissy fit when a physics prof tells them they'll need to buckle down, work hard, and stop drinking and partying if they aim to succeed in his course. I guess it's not just American students and their childish need for "safe spaces."

finally: legitimate homemade al-tang!

At long last, I was able to make a decent, edible version of one of my favorite Korean soups: al-tang, which is a stew whose signal ingredient is fish-egg sacs (the Korean word al means "egg"). While these sacs often look ugly and veiny, like the ripped-out glands of some unfortunate land animal, I tend to think of them as salty hot dogs made entirely of caviar, and they are glorious. I based my recipe on the one found in this Korean video I dug up on YouTube. The video called for something called goni (곤이) in Korean: basically, fish guts, the brain-like hunks of protein that you can see in the video. My building's grocery didn't have any goni, so I added a tiny freshwater snail called ureong (우렁) instead, and that worked out perfectly, rounding out the stew's taste.

I made two huge pots of the soup. Some pics:

When I tried making a seafood stew a couple years ago, I proceeded on the assumption that I could use the same base as the one I use when making budae-jjigae. This turned out to be only partially true, and the wrongness of my assumption was enough to make the seafood soup taste weird and thoroughly un-Korean. So instead of making an ass out of you and me this time, I decided it would be best to shut up and listen to the masters, which is how I ended up on YouTube, watching al-tang videos. The above-linked video was one of the most straightforward; the simplicity of its recipe was what I found attractive, so I decided to risk following that vid's method for prepping the stew.

I altered some things, of course: as mentioned above, I used ureong instead of goni; I also changed the proportions of the red-sauce component (I did a 3:2:0.2 ratio of gochu-jang to gochu-garu to mirim, and I used mirim instead of matsul, although I suspect that mirim is a type of matsul); in addition, I splashed a bit of sesame oil into the red sauce. I added regular onions in with the dae-pa (large green onions that are almost leeks). I almost added carrots, but I chickened out at the last second, and I think that was the right decision: carrots would have added a weird sweetness to the stew that wouldn't have belonged there. Oh, yeah: I had leftover chili peppers, so I chopped those up and dumped them in as well.

The result was awesome. The taste of my stew rivals that of my favorite al-tang restaurant in the Chungmuro district. I'm very, very pleased with the result, and now that I have a good base for fish stews, I'm going to see what happens when I switch out the current proteins for something like shrimp, scallop, etc. I think that's going to kick ass.

INGREDIENTS

broth: water, laver (seaweed), dried-pollock "silk," fish bouillon, fish sauce

red-sauce broth component: gochu-jang (red-pepper paste), ground garlic, gochu-garu (red-chili flakes), mirim (Jpn. mirin), sesame oil

vegetables: white onion, dae-pa (large green onion), mu (large Korean radish), green chilis, oyster mushrooms (very fragrant and earthy!), jjigae (stew) tofu, ssuk-ggat (쑥깟, mugwort)

proteins: pollock roe in sacs, various other roes (frozen), ureong (freshwater snails)

PREP

Create broth by gently boiling water with laver, dried-pollock "silk," fish bouillon, and a splash of fish sauce. After 15 minutes, fish out the laver and pollock silk.

Create red sauce by mixing gochu-jang, gochu-garu, garlic, mirim, and sesame oil.

Add mu, sliced about a quarter-inch thick, to the hot broth. Chop up and pile together all remaining veggies, which will all be dumped into the pot at the same time. Let mu boil until fork-tender. About five minutes after adding the mu, add the red sauce and stir until there are no more lumps and clumps of gochu-jang.

Add veggies into the boil. Stir. Let cook a few minutes.

Add egg sacs and ureong. Cook until the sacs change color, then cook another 3-4 minutes to make sure their centers are cooked.

Enjoy some of the best damn al-tang out there.

a line worth repeating

"Much ignorance there is, when it comes to guns."
—Yoda

Happy Veterans/Pepero Day

To all the Pepero that fight and die every day to secure freedom throughout the world, we thank you. To all the veterans who bring chocolatey goodness and a pretzel-y crunch into our lives, we thank you as well. Together, you are the forces that make the world go round.

ADDENDUM: for a serious and somber take, read "What's Killing America's Veterans?"

Suicide and drug overdoses are two of the biggest killers of veterans. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Office of Suicide Prevention, an average of 20 veterans committed suicide every day in 2014. In fact, 18% of all American adult suicides that year were committed by veterans, even though veterans made up just 8.5% of the population. Male veterans had a 19% higher risk for suicide compared to the general population while women veterans were 2.5 times as likely to kill themselves compared to the female civilian population, and suicide rates were highest among young veterans aged 18 to 29.

et tu, Louis?

The sexual-harassment scandal unearths another abuser: much-beloved comedian Louis CK, who has fully admitted to his misdeeds. Color me disappointed.

reviews

After lightening my foul mood by watching this hilariously filthy collection of Dave Attell routines, I sat down and took in "War for the Planet of the Apes." Just the previous day, I had seen "Predators," directed by a guy named—and I'm not kidding—Nimrod.

So expect two reviews to pop up sometime this weekend—one for "Predators" and one for "War for the Planet of the Apes." TL;DR version: I liked "Apes" a lot better. You have to try very, very hard to convince me that watery-eyed, milquetoast, big-nosed Adrien Brody actually works plausibly as a Schwarzenegger surrogate fighting hulking aliens.

fuck lunch

How to plunge Kevin into a bad mood:

1. Force Kevin to attend a luncheon with the department head (bonbujang-nim).
2. Have the department head beckon Kevin to sit right next to him.
3. Constantly elbow Kevin and pepper him with questions and jokey comments in Korean to keep him in the conversation, even though Kevin obviously wants nothing to do with the conversation, or with the luncheon as a whole.
4. Joke about the fact that Kevin is a talented cook who "looks like a chef," i.e., is fat. Further joke that he looks like a famously fat chef on Korean TV.
5. After being this insulting, urge Kevin to "eat a lot."

I should have gotten up and left the fucking luncheon. You'd think I'd have a thick skin by now, given that I encounter this shit nearly every day—and by "this shit," I mean Koreans who have no idea how to handle variety and difference except through jokes, insults, and otherwise awkward/stupid observations—but I guess, despite the thick layer of blubber, I'm still thin-skinned after all. Maybe I was just in a foul mood to begin with.

Next time, though, I think I'll beg off lunch or dinner or whatever the fuck the department head wants to do next. Not a fan of reindeer games and forced togetherness.

---

ADDENDUM: the food itself was good, but not good enough to be worth the shitty experience.

screech!

Paul Joseph Watson gives us his unsurprisingly (and hilariously) spiteful take on the recent "Scream Helplessly at the Sky" event:

Tantrum-ing your way to 2020 isn't the way to defeat the Orangeman. All you're doing, guys, is sapping away whatever credibility you have left.

UPDATE: another case of self-discrediting here.

two encounters on the path

I had a very nice, 21,000-step walk last night, all the way out to the Han River and along it a ways before I turned around and headed back. I'm feeling a lot better, and I think I'm recovering my senses of smell and taste, which means—mirabile dictu!—the return of my appetite. Still in a walking frame of mind, I once again walked to work today.

While en route to the office, I was accosted by a creepy gentleman in a long coat who said "Hello!" in English, followed by, "I just memorized this." At that point, he began a recitation of a couple verses from the Sermon on the Mount (which begins in Matthew, chapter 5), ending with the classic, "be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect." After that, he said, "Have a good day." As he turned to go, I smiled, bowed, and made the Buddhist hapjang gesture (bowing with palms together). It seemed fitting. In the end, the guy proved harmless and not as creepy as all that, although his intrusion on my privacy was still slightly annoying. That said, his recitation could be taken as a sort of magical gesture, an attempt to flick some karmic pixie dust my way (or, in Christian language, to share a blessing). No harm in a well-intended gesture.

The path was leafy: fall has come with a vengeance. The people who maintain the path have been raking the fallen leaves on a daily basis, and today I saw that some leaf piles had been shaped into hearts, so I snapped a shot of one such pile:

Right as I stopped to take the heart-shaped pile in, an older couple also stopped, noticing the pile at the same time. "Who did this?" the lady asked me in Korean. "I'm not sure," I said. "But I think the people who clean the path probably did this." I chalked this up to another spirit-booster. Thus did I continue on my way, soul-nourished by biblical verses and a heart-shaped leaf pile—reminders that there are always reasons to be happy.

Come to think of it, I think the first photo above also shows a heart-shaped leaf pile.

Styx with the election postmortem

I can't bear to look at Styx's chest hair, so I normally crank my laptop's volume up and putter around my apartment, just listening to his commentary. If you want to keep your eyes from bleeding, I suggest you do the same. Or simply tab away from the video while it plays.

the HISHE review of "Thor: Ragnarok"

A hilarious review by the HISHE* ("How It Should Have Ended") crew that makes a few points I didn't make in my own review, but with which I generally agree:

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*I used to pronounce HISHE as "hee-shay," but it's actually "hizzy," as in "his, he."

a culinary remembrance

Not far from the point where M Street meets Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, there used to be a small Chicago-style pizzeria with the unoriginal name of Geppetto's. As an undergrad going to Georgetown University, I used to love walking up the street to get the occasional pizza there, and I was sure to take all my friends to the restaurant so they could share in the deliciousness. Geppetto's pizzas were thick-crusted and soaked in butter. They also came piled high—ridiculously high—with thick-cut pepperoni unlike any pepperoni I've had anywhere else.* The pizzeria cared nothing for your cardiac health, and this was just as true for my favorite Geppetto's appetizer: mozzarella garlic bread. So simple in concept, yet so glorious in execution, this bread came piping-hot out of the oven with a crunchy crust and a soft center, slathered in a mixture of mozzarella, Parmigiano Reggiano, fresh garlic, and fresh herbs. Because today is my second day off, I decided to try and recreate that appetizer. I'd say I was about seventy to eighty percent successful.

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*The pepperoni looked a bit like this, but was piled even higher. No joke.