final toe update

It's official!

no leakage

ugly, but no wound

So I did a 14K walk tonight from my office to Jamshil Bridge to my apartment building. My feet are achy (as I continue to recondition after nearly a year of not walking), but they're otherwise fine. No leaks, no bleeding, no nothing. I might celebrate by doing something girly like paying a visit to the mani-pedi lady in the building where I work. Maybe she can de-uglify my toe a bit. Once I get my taste and smell fully back, I'll have a larger celebration. This might be a knock-on-wood thing to say, but my frozen shoulder is almost gone, COVID has come and gone, and the toe that has plagued me since last October is now healed. (Watch me get taken down by a heart attack—ha!) I've been stroke-free for two years, and while my toe was healing, no other diabetic ulcers appeared, so I must be doing some things right. Sure, I still have a long way to go, but the road ahead doesn't look quite as rough. So maybe there's hope for a peaceful few years before the next problem rears its head.

I won't be showing any more new toe pics, but I might show some old ones, at some point, maybe for entertainment's sake. (Like my favorite of the bunch.)

off to take a walk

It's hotter than Hillary's sweaty ass crack right now, but off I go on my third long walk. 

Pray for me.

really cool interview with a right-wing comedian

Nicholas de Santo was born in Italy, then his family moved to Iran, where he was once detained and roughly questioned for two weeks. He is now a British citizen and standup comedian with a deep appreciation for classically liberal Western values. I've found that it's usually the people who escape oppression who have the greatest love for Western liberal values—"liberal" in the classical sense, of course, not the twisted, "radical left" sense.

ridiculous

Just how fucked up is my country? This fucked up:

Headline:

Non-Citizens Can Now Become Police Officers in Illinois

Illinois Gov. Jay Robert Pritzker has signed into law a bill allowing non-citizens to become police officers over the objection of the biggest police union in the state, which called it a "potential crisis of confidence in law enforcement."

Mr. Pritzker signed HB3751 into law on July 28, allowing non-citizens to apply to become police officers in Illinois with immediate effect, provided that they're legally authorized to work in the United States.

Foreign nationals who are legally authorized under federal law to work in the United States or any foreign national who "is an individual against whom immigration action has been deferred by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) process" but who is authorized to possess a firearm can now apply to become a police officer in Illinois, according to the text of the bill.

Federal law states that only U.S. citizens can serve as police officers and deputies[,] but laws and legislative efforts in a number of states have changed that in the face of staffing shortages.

So that's what this is really about: staffing shortages. The left: "How can we take Defund the police and make things even worse for ourselves? Hey, I've got an idea!"

the one thing I didn't do this weekend

I got a lot done this weekend, but there's one thing I didn't do: my distance walk—third out of three to determine whether I'm officially healed. I might do the walk tonight even if it rains (AccuWeather is forecasting rain at around 4 p.m., then nothing the rest of the day). I tried to be as restrained and conservative as possible regarding the healing of my toe, not wanting to declare victory too early, but I already know that the long walk, whether I do it tonight or some other night, isn't going to produce a bleed or a leak. Still, I'm practicing prudence, so despite my body's shouting, I'm healed!, I'm going to wait until everything's "official."

assembly-line education

The Prussian model. I've heard this before.

Bill Burr on trans athletes

Here.

"corn ribs"

This looks nifty:

figure it out

Another ridiculously easy one:

My answer will be in the comments.

images

Do you really expect AOC to learn?

when you have that talk with your parents

As a commenter noted, she started off on Willie Brown's staff.

Just give me the ass and some responsive nipples.

If that is your destiny.

I keep hoping for California to break off and slide into the ocean.

I feel guilty for putting this one up. Can't believe this happened twice.

An astronaut on the Rogan podcast cracked that he was perfectly aware he wouldn't see any borders from orbit.

I hope I die in a titanic explosion.

We've had a few mid-90s days of late. Heavy-rain warnings today, though.

Someone else suggested adding journalists, but those "journalists" aren't really journalists.

I'm not sure Roseanne made her point clearly. Still, it's weird to see her on our side.

the AI Joe Biden can speak coherently

We're still in that naive, Edenic phase when AI is being used for jokes, parodies, and satire. One day, though, AI will be used to spark a war, and that day is not far off. Meanwhile, enjoy the humor in the video below.

haircut

The barber in my building isn't cheap at W15,000 a cut, but he's kept that same price point since I moved into this building back in 2015.

pushing the envelope (woof)

It's not enough to want to be the opposite sex. Some people want to be animals:

Headline:

Man who spent $14K to transform himself into collie steps out for first-ever walk in public

A Japanese man who [spent] more than $14,000 to become a dog has finally taken his first walk and immediately made some canine friends.

Known only as Toco, the man spent two million Yen, or $14,169 on a hyperrealistic collie costume to fulfil his lifelong dream of “becoming an animal”.

In recent updates shared with his almost 30,000 YouTube subscribers, Toco was seen playing in his backyard on all fours and performing tricks in exchange for treats.

But now he has ventured into public for the first time to reveal his new look.

In a pair of surreal videos posted to his YouTube channel ‘I want to be an animal’, Toco was seen being taken out for a walk on a leash, sniffing at other dogs in a park and rolling around on the floor.

Toco’s grand debut — which was captured while he was filming a segment for a German TV station — seemed to be well-received by passers-by and other dogs, who appeared curious.

It wasn’t clear whether they realised Toco wasn’t a natural-born dog.

“I became a collie, fulfilling a dream I had since I was a little child to be an animal!” subtitles at the beginning of the video read.

In an introduction to his YouTube channel, Toco explained via a series of written notes translated from Japanese (he doesn’t speak in the videos, since he wants to be a dog): “Nice to meet you. I became a rough (sic) collie because I wanted to be an animal … Please let me know your request for the video you would like to see in the comments!”

Toco says he hides his human identity because he doesn’t want to be judged by people he knows.

“I don’t want my hobbies to be known, especially by the people I work with,” he told the Daily Mail last year.

No shit, you don't want your "hobbies" to be known.

Okay, here's my problem with this: normally, I'd say that, if people want to identify as a "furry" or whatever, if people want to try to transition from one sex to another or whatever, then they should go ahead and knock themselves out as long as they're not hurting anyone else. I am bending over backwards to be as libertarian about this as I can. But while I think gender dysphoria is a thing, I have a hard time believing that these people who want to be or become animals actually have a real understanding of their target animal's true subjectivity. Who can truly claim to know what it's like to be a dog? Worse, if this Japanese guy is being taken out on walks, then that means he's involving other people in his folie. This isn't the same as "involving other people" via random encounters in the office or on the street: this guy is specifically involving someone else who must actively play along with this nonsense. You might argue that the person holding the leash is doing so happily and voluntarily, but I think we're straying awfully close to "hurting anyone else" territory. I find this somewhat disturbing. At the very least, we're looking at a folie à deux here.

I'm not worried that this catching, that millions of Americans will suddenly get the urge to put on dog costumes and try to act like dogs (which I assume would include leg-humping for the males if the goal is vérité). No, my worry is confined to the libertarian level: if this nonsense requires others to abet one's weird fantasy—and make no mistake, that Japanese guy in no way became an actual dog—then I think there's a real chance of harm here. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe just let these people live in their pretend world. But to me, what might be harmless on the scale of a single person becomes much more sinister when it starts involving other people.

ADDENDUM: I just watched part of the "viral video" of this guy in his collie suit. There is nothing truly dog-like about the man's behavior. His suit can't articulate, so the ears don't swivel, the tail can't wag, and the face is expressionless. I can only imagine that a dog will sense right away that this guy isn't a dog. I found the few seconds I watched to be off-putting. His accomplice in the video is a young white woman (the video appears to have been filmed in Japan). She not only "walks" the "dog": she also serves as a sort of ambassador, smoothing interactions between the fake dog and passersby with their real dogs. The whole thing is weird beyond words. At one point, the "collie" waves like a human. The guy's not even trying to put on a realistic canine performance.

figure it out

More racist math fo' yo' ass!

This is another easy one. My answer will be in the comments.

mystery puck

Can you guess what this is?

I told you before that I experimented with the idea of soft-packing a burger patty to get a juicier result, but after doing only one such patty, which turned out crumbly, I decided to make the rest of my burgers my way. I still had that one fragile patty, though, and it totally fell apart inside the Ziploc bag, so how does one go about fixing a wrecked patty? I used a crab-cake-style solution: I got out an egg and some panko bread, then mixed the crumbled beef into that to create a meat-loafy patty. And that's what you see above. How did it taste, though? As you might imagine, the egg made it a bit eggy, and the panko didn't enhance the flavor much, but overall, the patty had a good chew, and the beefy taste dominated. I won't be making such patties regularly (unless I want a breakfast burger or something), but this was, overall, a good solution to a serious engineering/architectural problem. It looked weird, but it tasted fine.

To the extent that I can taste anything. Still at about 10%.

earthquake on the peninsula

My cell phone started screaming this evening because it was broadcasting an especially urgent emergency warning. At 7:08 p.m., I got a message about a 4.1 earthquake in North Jeolla Province, which is straight down the west side of South Korea, due south of Seoul a few hundred kilometers, but not quite at the southwest corner of the country (the southwest corner is South Jeolla). The message said to watch for falling objects, to escape outside, and to beware of aftershocks. 4.1 doesn't sound that bad; I have to wonder what sort of damage resulted from the quake. I didn't feel anything up here in Seoul.

I was at the office, finishing up my translation work for the family friend (and enjoying leftovers from Friday's luncheon). I've sent off a PDF copy of the translation as well as a link to the Google Docs version, and I've told D that if she has any questions, she has but to ask. You'll recall that D emailed me totally out of the blue after years of not corresponding with me, and her only reason for contacting me was because she wanted something. There was no offer of pay; she probably has little clue how labor-intensive translation work can be. In the US market, translation work pays anywhere from 10 to 30 cents per word on average (or so says Google). The word count for the English rendering is 4474. If I were to split the difference and ask for 20 cents per word, then 4474 times 20 cents would be $894.80—a decent chunk of change. I'm pretty sure, though, that D knew I wouldn't ask her for money, and given how long this translation took, the effort involved, etc., I won't be doing this for her again. To misquote the proverb: Use me once, shame on you. Use me twice...

UPDATE: the Richter estimate was later revised down to 3.5.

heh... "Short Bus Biden"

Twitter rebranded to "X": clever?

I have my doubts, but watch this video:

the lowdown on wagyu

Long video but very educational:

Here in South Korea, you're much more likely to find home-grown hanu, a generic term for Korean beef, which comes in different grades. I'm not sure I've ever had the highest-grade beef from any country, including the US. And while I admit I'm mildly curious about wagyu, high-grade hanu, etc., I'm in no hurry to run out and buy some.

figure it out

This one's so easy that even I could do it:

I've been told by the best minds that math is racist, so that's all the more reason to keep practicing it, right? Anyway, my answer will be in the comments.

images

Not the way I normally think of Hillary, but whatever.

And no one wants to say this out loud.

what really happened

Spine... testicular fortitude... whatever you call it, the GOP has a problem with it.

I know a guy like that here in Korea. Former coworker.

"strongly worded"

if only

I generally agree, but maybe conservatives should stop saying we need a marriage amendment.

Fundamentally, Russia is in the wrong for attacking Ukraine. But Ukraine is corrupt, repressive, and arguably genocidal, so it's hard for me to feel much sympathy.

He doesn't look any less human.