the Babylon Bee strikes again

I'm not the biggest fan of the Babylon Bee's often-lame humor, but this video kind of hit home:

spot the error!

As the sun rose the following morning, Reece’s finger continued to stroke the trigger guard, his only companions the memories of the dead.

The above is from the novel Savage Son, which I'm currently reading. The error in the above sentence might be a little harder to catch than usual. Look at the word his. Grammatically, his is functioning as an adjective modifying companions. But his also has a pronominal flavor: like a pronoun, it replaces and refers to an antecedent. That antecedent should be Reece, the novel's protag, but the subject of the sentence is Reece’s finger. Starting to see the problem?

With apologies to author Jack Carr, maybe we can rewrite the sentence to make it better. 

As the sun rose the following morning, Reece continued to stroke the trigger guard with his finger, his only companions the memories of the dead.

Can you think of a better rewrite? I think with his finger still sounds a bit icky, so how about we take the phrase out entirely and leave the finger implied?

As the sun rose the following morning, Reece continued to stroke the trigger guard, his only companions the memories of the dead.

I think that's a lot more streamlined.

comparison

Don't look if you're squeamish, but I wanted to do a before/after because it's been a bit more than a week since I started my new toe-care regimen. First, the horror:

January 23, 2023... I keep expecting a worm or a spider to crawl out.

In the above grisly pic, you see a ton of callus ringing the wound, and the wound itself looks pretty cavernous although, as you can see, it's also pretty bloodless thanks to my constant cleaning regime at the time (regular clean wipe, alcohol swab, peroxide-soaked Q-tip).

One of the first things the doc did at the hospital was to whittle away most of the callus. That immediately made the wound look better, and I suspect it also gave any potential pathogens less of a cavernous space in which to settle and cause mischief. My new regimen no longer involves loading my toe wound up with astringent chemicals like isopropyl alcohol and hydrogen peroxide: the doc prescribed what is basically a burn cream (loaded with silver particles; silver has antibiotic properties) plus some oral antibiotics. Below is a shot of my toe that I took tonight, and it's quite a contrast from the above January 23 shot:

March 31, 2023... there's hope that this might close up eventually.

Note, too, how bloodless my toe currently is. I barely had to wipe it clean tonight. Oh, it's still bleeding: I still get blood-dots on my sock. But the bleeding is now greatly reduced, and while I'm not totally positive, it does look as though the wound is starting to close. I've also been more or less on the Newcastle diet again for about a week (9 weeks to go), the long-term effect of which is to get some circulation back in my feet.

I'm seeing my old doc this coming Monday; I'm going to recommend that he continue to prescribe me the meds prescribed by Samseong Hospital. While I'm not a fan of taking those meds, they represent one way to get my numbers back in order. Get the numbers low enough, and the doc might start taking meds away as I grow out of them.

So that second pic seems to show some progress. I go back to the hospital on April 6, and we'll see what the doc has to say about how far I've come.

Styx on the Trump indictment

"Donald Trump effectively just won the Republican primaries."

If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

The left can only win by cheating, so it repeatedly fails to understand the above.

"Almost 250 years of legal precedent has been thrown out the window."

"The Manhattan DA, for political reasons, just shit all over our republic."

"It's going to backfire in a spectacular fashion."

To me, "backfiring" means rounding up the likes of Pelosi, Schiff, Schumer, Bragg, Mayorkas, Biden, et al., and tossing them off a high cliff in a soul-cleansing Ättestupa.

It's too bad Gregory Itzin is dead. When he played the slimy President Charles Logan on "24," people commented on his resemblance to Richard Nixon. But that was before the US public knew about Adam Schiff, and Itzin could easily have played a Schiff parody on "24." Too bad we'll never get to see that.

Mike in his element

My buddy Mike recently had the honor of officiating a wedding—that of his nephew and fiancée (now wife). Here's a humorous picture from that event. The nephew was supposed to extend his left hand to receive his wedding ring, but he was so nervous that he insisted on proffering his right hand, prompting Mike to joke that the young man needed to study some picture books to learn to tell right from left. In the pic, the left hand (i.e., the correct hand) is out, and the nephew's posture seems to be exclaiming, "Oh, that hand!"

a laugh from the bride that says, "Took you long enough, oaf!"

The kind of moment that makes a wedding unique.

Mike says the ceremony went smashingly.

in the news

Donald Trump has been officially indicted.

Insurrection—or at least, screaming, mobbing protestors—at Tennessee's capitol building. I'm sure this will be described as "mostly peaceful."

via Mike

My buddy Mike Skyped these to me:

My state is the only one with boobs.

I'm going to have to confirm this translation.

something is missing

The lack of a beard is only temporary. Give me two weeks, and we'll be back to some measure of hairiness. I trim my beard with an electric razor, and when I put on the beard-trimmer attachment, I can adjust the length of the trim: 1 is the shortest setting; 5 is the longest. 

I'd been trimming my beard roughly every three weeks, and when I tried to trim my beard this morning, the trimmer had been accidentally set to 1 (because I'm senile), so when I took that first swipe at my face with the razor, I gouged out a lot of beard. With no way to repair such damage, I went Fuck it and shaved the whole thing off.

But as sure as the Easter Bunny will rise again and redeem us by shitting out its nuclear ass-eggs on that special Sunday, my beard will return. In two weeks, it'll be about halfway grown. In another two weeks, I'll be back to sacking British warships with a laser-guided parrot on my shoulder and a long, wooden dildo strapped firmly to my knee joint. Not because I'll be missing my lower leg, but because it'll look cool.

I haven't said anything all month, but...

Depending on what happens over the next day or so, I could be over 40K visitors for the month. I just hit 39K, and I might get a couple hundred more visitors before 9 a.m. tomorrow, when my site meter resets to 0 (I still don't know why it doesn't just reset at midnight; I set the time zone to Korea years ago). On March 4, I had nearly 5,500 visitors. No idea why. From March 6 to March 19, all my days were over 1,000 visits, with some 2,000-visit days and one day that was over 4K visits. After that, the streak ended (again, I have no idea why; these things come in random waves), and I've been hovering around my usual 600-ish visits per day ever since. Will I get enough visits to put my March numbers over the Warhammer 40K mark? I have no idea (he said, declaring nescience for the fourth time).

surprise, surprise

Headline:

World’s largest seller of carbon credits EXPOSED as scam operation

(Natural News) South Pole, the world’s leading seller of so-called carbon “credits,” is not what it claims to be.

When it was first hatched, the operation, co-founded by Renat Heuberger, branded itself as a solution to the climate problem of deforestation. By selling carbon offsets to businesses bound by “green” mandates, South Pole would generate a profit to funnel back into local communities and organizations aiming to conserve the environment – or so South Pole told its customers.

In practice, South Pole hurtled towards a valuation of $1 billion while its clients were left holding the bag. Such is the nature of the market for carbon credits and other green scams.

The company’s biggest project right now is called Kariba, located in Zimbabwe. South Pole claimed that it would help prevent the annihilation of a forest nearly the size of Puerto Rico, but this has not happened.

Several outside experts conducted an analysis of Kariba and found that it vastly overestimated the extent of preservation actually taking place. Companies like Gucci, McKinsey, and Nestle that purchased Kariba credits to offset their own contributions to “climate change” and “global warming” are now having to backtrack their own climate claims “because the Kariba credits they bought haven’t generated enough real atmospheric benefit,” to quote a report from Bloomberg about the scandal.

“Most of Kariba’s €100 million in proceeds have gone to South Pole and its project partner, a company called Carbon Green Investments, not – as both companies previously indicated in interviews and public blog posts – to people in the rural communities who do the work of fighting deforestation,” that same report indicates.

Read the rest. This just fuels my suspicion that many, if not most, "green" projects are scams.

ADDENDUM: Paul Joseph Watson only reinforces my opinion:

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my foot-ulcer meds

a day's worth of meds plus—and there's no non-vulgar way to say it—my tube of cream

Antibiotic pills and an antibiotic cream. Wikipedia doesn't have much positive to say about the cream (read the entry here), which is primarily for burns. But so far, the ointment does seem to be helping to keep me infection-free. I'm grumbling that my particular brand of this cream was made in China, but what can I do? 

True Believer: review

[WARNING: spoilers that will probably apply to Season 2 of "The Terminal List."]

Jack Carr's second novel in the James Reece series is True Believer. I assume this novel will form the basis for the plot of Season 2 of the Amazon series. I admit I'm curious as to whether the Amazon series will keep "The Terminal List" as its title or modify the title to something like "The Terminal List: True Believer."

You may recall that, in The Terminal List, James Reece and his SEAL team were the unwitting guinea pigs in a corporate-run, government-sanctioned drug trial that gave Reece and his team brain tumors. The SEALs were sent on a mission in Afghanistan (Syria in the Amazon-series version) designed by malicious parties to be an ambush that should have killed the entire team to cover up the botched drug. But Lieutenant Commander Reece and his buddy Boozer survived, with Boozer seemingly committing suicide upon his return to the States. Reece's wife and daughter were murdered around the same time, apparently by gangsters, and all of this suspicious activity sent Reece on a path of revenge going from the lowest wet-work lowlifes to the highest echelons of the US government. With the US government on his tail, Reece called in some favors and ended up at sea. The tumor in his head turned out to be a slow grower and easily removable—something Reece never found out because the cell phone with the doctor's voice message was being held by the federal government.

True Believer picks up with Reece at sea. The story involves several seemingly unrelated plot strands that all begin converging about halfway through the novel. As Reece is battling both his splitting headaches and the elements, things are happening all around the world. A Russian puppet master currently living in Switzerland wants Mother Russia to return to her glory days, which means killing the current moderate president of Russia. A rogue, sociopathic US ex-agent is manipulating Middle Eastern elements who believe they're still legitimately following US orders. An American CIA staffer who feels underutilized and disrespected is recruited by the Switzerland-based puppet master to coordinate operations. This staffer orchestrates a mass shooting in the heart of London that kills hundreds and almost kills the Prince of Wales. Reece, eventually ditching his boat, finally makes it all the way to Mozambique, where he finds work with the uncle of one of his SEAL buddies, protecting the local wildlife from poachers as he continues to deal with the grief of losing his family. Reece's SEAL background makes him a natural leader in this new environment, and he devises ways to reduce the poaching, much of which comes from Chinese demand for esoteric animal parts. It's Reece's proficiency at this task that catches the US intelligence community's attention (thanks to Chinese outcry as the supply of animal parts dries up), and another old SEAL friend flies all the way to Mozambique to offer Reece a deal: help Uncle Sam find the Russian puppet master (who is also connected to various Middle Eastern operations), and all will be forgiven. The people Reece killed on his "terminal list" all turned out to be extremely corrupt individuals, a fact brought to light by reporter Katie Buranek, making Reece a hero—and therefore untouchable—in the eyes of many Americans.

The novel starts off molasses-slow, and it takes almost half the story for things to speed up, but once they do, the story's pace is relentless and gripping. While part of me wishes the first part of the plot had moved a bit faster, the middle and end of the story were quite satisfying, and the reason for the slow plot at the beginning became evident as all the pieces fell into place. True Believer contains a lot of material on Russia and Ukraine that feels relevant to the point of prescience. Also of note is that Reece does eventually hear the voice message about his brain tumor, but by the end of the story, he still hasn't received any medical treatment, leaving it an open question as to whether he has some sort of death wish motivated by a desire to be with his wife and daughter again. Carr adopts a fairly no-nonsense tone most of the time; it's obvious he takes certain martial and patriotic notions extremely seriously, and his writing is meant to honor those who risk their lives defending the country, even when those defenders aren't acknowledged or appreciated. By the end of the story, most of the loose ends have been taken care of except for two (a sniper and one truly squirrely bastard), and those will, I assume, be dealt with in subsequent novels. We get the impression that enough time has passed for Reece to start possibly having romantic thoughts about Katie Buranek, but the novel ends with only tentative hints in that direction.

In all, I found True Believer to be a worthy successor to The Terminal List. Not quite as action-packed, perhaps, but by the end, the narrative choices all made sense, and most of the bad guys have gotten what was coming to them (one torture scene involving piano wire around the genitals was memorable). In his introduction to both novels, Carr describes The Terminal List as a story of revenge, while True Believer is a story of redemption—the re-humanizing of James Reece as he copes with grief and moves forward into the future. I've already bought Savage Son, the next book in the series, so we'll see where James Reece goes from here. Jack Carr remains a good and compelling writer.

can't believe I did it

Never expected to find her.

coming soon

I can imagine a real baker being revolted by this, but if you're going low-carb, then the following recipe for a keto baguette may be one of your few options:

The above could use an egg or milk or butter wash for better browning.

As you might imagine, this is nothing like how you make real baguettes. Literally slopping the baguette "dough" into the baguette tray (which gives the bread its vaguely baguette-like shape) would probably elicit cries of anguish from actual bakers. For a contrast, watch Brian Lagerstrom demonstrate the making of a "beginner-level" baguette:

A real baguette is a yeast bread. The keto baguette, which uses baking powder for the rise, is closer to a soda bread. So this is not a baguette in any orthodox sense. This is a baguette-shaped thing meant to alleviate the bread joneses of the low-carb crowd.

I've got all the ingredients to make the fausse baguette except for the whey-protein isolate. This is annoying because I've bought a ton of different keto ingredients, but I keep having to buy more because every recipe specifies some esoteric thing ranging from flaxseed powder to allulose to whey isolate. Once the whey isolate arrives, I'll try my hand at making this baguette-like object. If it works, I'll be able to make keto versions of beloved sandwiches ranging from hoagies to meatball subs (using low-sugar tomato sauce, of course).

Stay tuned.

ADDENDUM: a potentially better baguette recipe, using yeast, is here:

And I think I may already have all the ingredients for this one!

so much less blood

With the introduction of antibiotic pills and an antibiotic ointment, my toe-cleaning procedure has been drastically simplified. Before, the procedure involved washing the toe with a cleaning wipe, swabbing the wound area with an alcohol wipe, using a Q-tip dipped in hydrogen peroxide to clean out the wound, drying the wound off with a Kleenex, then applying two bandages to the toe: a little bandage to protect a part of the skin that had a habit of tearing, and a bigger bandage that covered the toe wound. Now, I clean the wound with a wipe (unless I'm just stepping out of the shower in the morning), pat the wound dry if needed, apply my ointment directly to the wound, bandage it with a single gauze bandage, and I'm done. Oh, and I take my pills, once in the morning and once at night.

One thing I've noticed with the change in procedure is how much less bleeding there's been. Blood was leaking routinely out of my bandages before, but now, I get only modest, dime-sized blood spots on my sock. It's not simply the change in bandages that's reducing the bleeding: when I peel the gauze bandage off, there's simply less blood on my toe. So maybe something is working now. I'd like to think there's actual healing going on, but it's been barely a week (with another week to go). The ointment I have isn't the one I'd hoped to get: my ointment is merely another disinfectant; it doesn't contain hormones to promote healing. Treatment in Korea feels a bit behind treatment for diabetic foot wounds in the States, but you work with what you've got. For the moment, I do seem to be seeing some sort of result; we'll see what the doctor says when I go back on April 6.

On footwear: the hospital didn't recommend or give me any special footwear, so on my own initiative, I ordered a pair of rubberized flip-flips from Coupang and mutilated one by cutting off the big-toe part of the sole. Wearing the flip-flops is tedious; I generally prefer just to curl my toe back to keep it from touching the floor. I have yet to mutilate my nicer pair of sandals for outdoor wear, but that day is coming. I'm trying to think of those sandals as just things—fungible.* But mutilating them is going to hurt my heart all the same. I'm still wearing regular shoes to work, which means the callus around my wound is likely to thicken again. When I revisit D&F Hospital on April 6, the doc will likely have to shave off the new callus.

So far, there's been no hint of infection since the start of this new regimen. I'm cautiously optimistic that this state of affairs will continue. My nightmare would be to get infected sometime between now and April 6. I stay off the wound as much as I can, but some amount of walking on it is inevitable, at least until I perform surgery on my nicer sandal.

And that's the progress report for now. More later.

__________

*Fungible, as applied to physical things, means "exchangeable" or "replaceable by the same thing." Children and pets aren't fungible: you can't lose a child or a dog and just "replace" it with a similar one as if nothing had happened. Cash is technically fungible to a point: if you use up the 20-dollar bills in your wallet, you can go to an ATM and get more as long as you have funds. Most inanimate objects are arguably fungible: total your car, purchase another one. Use a toilet brush until it's too gross to keep using, buy another one from Target. Walk across Korea in a pair of New Balances, get new New Balances after the walk.

when the enviro-loons take over

Mind-boggling footage of environmentalists thinking they can set up barricades and control neighborhood traffic:

The moment you go from merely preaching your green gospel to infringing upon the lives of others is the moment you lose any sympathy I might have for you.

Doug in Exile on Trump's Waco speech

Doug's remarks indicate that he likes DeSantis, but he wonders whether DeSantis will be as open as Trump about wanting to dismantle the Deep State.

just the French being French

The French are known for their joie de vivre, their love of wine and women, and their appreciation for the need to stop and smell the roses. What they're not known for is a can-do, industrious attitude when it comes to work. (My buddy Dominique once told me, "Les Français ne sont pas des bosseurs," i.e., "The French aren't hard workers.") Years ago, the French complained that their 35-hour work week was too long. It is now illegal in France for a boss to call an employee after work hours. And in a recent twist, the French have come out in force against a raising of the retirement age (l'âge de la retraite). Krystal Ball (yes, that's her name) and Sagar Enjeti talk about recent riots in France:

Krystal and Sagar's Breaking Points channel is their independent foray into YouTube content creation. They used to be commentators for The Hill. I'd classify their point of view as left-leaning but self-aware, putting them on the edges of Tim Pool/Joe Rogan territory. Maybe a little too lefty for my taste, but they do frequently get critical of the left, and particularly of Joe Biden these days. Rogan has interviewed them multiple times.

Chris Chappell on a tear

Chris Chappell runs both China Uncensored and America Uncovered on YouTube. His channels are constantly demonetized. Here he is, on a tear:

there's always a trick

I solved this problem in seconds just by staring at it. Another easy one. I'm no good at the problems requiring even a modicum of thinking, but this sort of challenge is a piece of cake. See how well you do just by looking at the video's first few seconds and pausing.

PJW on the left's priorities in the Nashville shooting

We're supposed to respect a mass murderer's pronouns?

Steven Crowder re: Nashville shooting and "assault-style" weapons

I used the phrase "assault-style" in a previous post on the Nashville mass shooting, so maybe I'm among the guilty here. Steven Crowder, in the video below, comments on the irresponsible journalism surrounding the event and argues that the weapon held by the shooter, and seen in security footage, was not an AR-15 at all but a pistol carbine.

There's a lot of beside-the-point commentary, coming mostly from the left, about how the shooter has been "misgendered," seeing as she was a biological female and trans person who identified as male. Yawn. I'll have a PJW vid about that up shortly.

ADDENDUM: I'm also seeing a lot of commentary about the contrast between the Nashville team that took the girl down and the cowardly Uvalde police.

footage of the Nashville shooter + commentary

Covenant School, a private Presbyterian school in Nashville, Tennessee, was the scene of a mass shooting on March 27 perpetrated by Audrey Hale, 28, and a biological female who identified as (a transgender) male. Hale murdered three students and three adult staffers before being killed by police. The following (right-tilting) video discusses why security video of the shooter was released so quickly; the conclusion is that it's good evidence for leftist arguments in favor of gun control, and for once, the shooter was using an assault-style rifle, the kind of weapon that the left has been keen on banning (in truth, most mass shootings involve the use of small arms—pistols, etc.). She had two other firearms on her person. Police took Hale down 14 minutes after her assault began. The commentator on the video below thinks the left will use the 14-minute time frame as justification for why people should leave mass shootings to the police, but to me, the time frame is further evidence for the truth of the proverb that when seconds count, the police are minutes away.

As Styx says in his own video commentary, it's probably wise not to act like the left and immediately draw certain conclusions about the shooter. She wrote a manifesto that I'd be very curious to read. And much more will come out about this, I'm sure.

images

The door only ever swings one way.

Zactly.

As they say: Nature is metal.

Yo mama's like a doorknob: everyone gets a turn.

I don't know... I've been in some rough Denny's restos before.

"Fweeeeeedom!" —Kamala Harris

Well, shit. I don't have much time left.

Weird grammar with this one. Must be a meme.

Top guy looks a bit like me.

It's the reply that makes the joke here.

ever seen a "hologram fan"? watch this

Fascinating stuff.

yet another derailment

Headline:

BREAKING: 70-Car Train Derails in North Dakota Causing Another Hazardous Waste Leak

There has been another train derailment leading to a hazardous waste leak. This time the incident occurred in North Dakota.

As reported by KFGO, several Canadian Pacific train cars derailed “with some spilling hazardous material in Richland County.”

“Authorities say it happened around 11:15 p.m. on Sunday, March 26 just one mile southeast of Wyndmere, ND,” the report noted. “31 cars of a 70-car train derailed, with some leaking petroleum used to make asphalt. At this time, authorities are saying there’s no danger to the public.”

[ ... ]

The train derailment draws further attention to the unsafe and deteriorating rail infrastructure in the United States. On February 3rd, a Norfolk Southern train derailed and caused a major environmental incident. Toxic chemicals were leaked into the air and waterways. Authorities and inspectors claim the environmental damage has been contained and toxicity levels for hazardous chemicals are within acceptable ranges.

"digital blackface": another lump of bullshit from the left

It's hard to keep up with the left, which is always inventing new bullshit terms for imaginary things. The newest is "digital blackface," when a white person posts a meme, video, etc., that contains black people. As Styx says, I guess the idea is that whites should post only white memes, blacks should post only black memes, and everyone should just stay in their lane, never interacting, never "appropriating" from each other. I guess that's what diversity means. In that case, people whose ethnic heritage goes back to non-English-speaking countries should stop speaking and writing in English so as not to commit the sin of Anglo-appropriation.

Just another example of the left manufacturing things to complain about.

flour macros

How carby is flour? Let's do a comparison between regular all-purpose and rye flour. All the following macros are per 100 g, which makes it easy to figure out percentages by weight.

AP Flour (source, which used per cup [125 g], so I had to convert)

Calories: 364

Fat: 0.96 g

Protein: 10.32 g

Carbs: 76.32 g

So AP flour is about 3/4 carbs.

Rye Flour (source)

Calories: 354

Fat: 1.77 g

Protein: 9.39 g

Carbs: 77.49 g

So rye flour is apparently more carby than regular AP flour, but there's a twist: you calculate net carbs by subtracting the amount of dietary fiber from the carb total. Per 100 g, rye flour has 14.6 g of fiber, so while the total carbs stand at 77.49 g, the net carbs are at 62.89 g, making rye flour somewhat less carby overall, although by weight, it's still almost 63% carbs—not exactly a health food.

This makes Charle's rye scones awesome but not keto—which I already knew to be the case, and this past Saturday was an "off" day, diet-wise. We're back to the strictness now.

some disrespect for HR directors here

I'm sure you have a response, John:

The video is about yet another Kamala Harris word salad, but Sagar Enjeti compares the bumbling Harris to an HR director.

Saturday-night aftermath

How my sock looked Saturday night:

I didn't walk very much on Saturday: I had to walk out of my apartment to the street to catch a cab, then I had to walk from where the cab dropped me off to Charles's apartment. Once I got to Charles's place, I immediately checked my sock: no bloodstains at all, so Charles's floor was safe (right, Charles?). The above bloodstain, photographed around 11:30 p.m. Saturday night, is relatively small compared to the huge stains I normally get. I had double-bandaged my foot, and I put my silicone toe cap over the big toe pour faire bonne mesure, as the French say (for good measure). I was sad to see that the toe cap did not survive the day's abuse: it had ripped almost in two, which may partially explain why any blood leaked out at all. I'm a heavy guy, so whatever footwear I use is going to be treated mercilessly.

For the moment, I'm back to single-bandaging my toe wound, which means I'll have a bloodier sock tonight. I'm currently wearing my regular shoes to the office, but that'll change in the next day or so when I switch to my outdoor sandals. I'm now wearing my cheap rubber sandals (flip-flops) inside my apartment. It's a bit of a pain, and my soles sweat into the flip-flops, which is gross.

The toe cap was expensive, being around W11,000 from Coupang (nearly $10 US), so I can't keep buying toe caps every time one rips. I'm going to see whether I can find some other solution; then again, once I start wearing my mutilated pair of outdoor sandals, the bleeding from my toe will be minimal. It really does make a huge difference as to whether I walk on the wound or not. Such is the miracle of offloading.

Jay Kraemer

John Mac sent me a link to an Ann Althouse blog post about a guy named Jay Kraemer, now 72, who walked the equivalent of the earth's 24,901-mile circumference in 8 years and 10 months. That works about to almost 8 miles' walking per day (7.8 mi. = approx. 12.55 km).

...by traversing the Madison area... or going on hikes while visiting his son in Utah.... The 72-year-old tracked his walks meticulously via his [Fitbit], saying the journey took nearly 50 million steps to complete.... After [eight years and 10 months], Kraemer made it around the world while listening to 148 books, burning through an average of two pairs of shoes each year."

Of course, Fitbits are sometimes prone to inaccuracies (not that my Samsung-app pedometer is all that accurate, either), so there's no guarantee the guy walked that exact distance. He should walk until he hits 30,000 miles just to be sure.

I go through a single pair of shoes per year. It's rare for me to average 12K per day. I've done plenty of long walks, but also plenty of short ones. My daily average has always been under 10,000 steps. Until my foot ulcer, I tended to do long walks only on weekends unless I happened to be walking across the country.

spot the error

Just seen in the Instapundit comments section:

One is different than the other.

Do you see the problem? It's the word than, which is a preposition in this case (it can also be a conjunction in other contexts). Consider three expressions:

1. different from

2. different to

3. different than

In US English, we say X is different from Y. The UK equivalent is X is different to Y. But both the US and the UK agree that different than is used only before a clause.

The results were different than I expected. (the words in blue are the clause)

Est-ce que c'est clair?

any truth to the legend?

a whirlwind tour of Christianities

Grossly oversimplified but interesting all the same, the following video takes us on a dizzying, whirlwind tour through the various main forms of trinitarian Christianity out there (sorry, Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists).

offloading 1

The medical term offloading is used to describe removing pressure from a wound, such as a wound on the sole of the foot. For me, this means finding thick sandals or slippers and cutting off the big-toe area to allow my big toe to hang free while the rest of the sole is supported. Below is some of my handiwork. I ordered these Korean flip-flops, but the right one was too small for my right foot (which is apparently much bigger than my left foot), so I had to perform some crude field surgery on it. 

"Offloading 2" will feature a much more expensive pair of sandals, a pair I very much like, cruelly mutilated in the name of science.