Saturday, August 31, 2024

party and walk

David and I cabbed out to Suwon to celebrate my 55th birthday with my boss and his family at his residence. Nothing untoward happened: my Korean coworker wasn't there; my boss hadn't called my relatives behind my back, nothing. Just a quiet steak-and-salad dinner (followed by a "Frankenstein" cake made up of several different cakes) with the boss and his family. His wife had obviously worked hard on meal prep and neatening the place up; she's a really good cook, and unlike me, the steak idiot, she cooked our steaks via a more classic pan-and-oven method—no sous vide. I did, however, sing the praises of the sous-vide function on my Instant Pot, so she may be lusting for one now. Maybe I'll get one for her as a Chuseok or Christmas gift. Least I can do for my boss's family given how much he's done for me.*

I'd mostly fasted for two days in preparation for eating a lot today, so I was a bit weak and faint on the cab ride over to Suwon, but by the time I'd finished dinner and dessert, I was feeling good enough to ask David whether he'd care to take a creekside walk (no stairs going up; just one ramp at the end). We walked from my apartment to the Yangjae Creek close to Daechi, the district where I work; we then went back to the confluence of the Yangjae Creek and the Tan Creek and headed home. That probably wasn't even 5K,** but it's more than I've walked up to now. This coming week, I'm going to try to get up to 9K before my buddy Mike arrives next Saturday the 7th to tag-team and take over for David. He'll be in Korea for a week, but I noticed he'll be leaving almost as Chuseok is starting. A shame.

I took two pics of David on the footbridge that leads to my neighborhood:


Why are David and Sean so much grayer than I am despite my being the eldest brother? One of those imponderable cosmic mysteries, I guess. David's got a bit of a Tulsi Gabbard thing going on with his gray.

Sorry for the lack of steak (and veggie, and cake) pics. My steak, a huge dinosaur slab of meat, was cooked perfectly, which isn't a skill normally acquired through cooking Korean food, where slices of meat are usually thin, small, and cooked through. The Missus is a talented cook with an American husband, though, so she's learned her way around Western cuisine. For veggies, the two verboten items were corn and mashed potatoes, but there were other items like mushrooms, asparagus, tomatoes, and salad, so I was just fine.

My boss was impressed that my brothers would drop everything to come all the way out to see me; he mused that, maybe only one or two of his brothers (he has several) might do the same. I told the boss about how Mom, during her cancer, had taught us the importance of presence (as opposed to an "Oh, gee, that's too bad" email or phone call) when a crisis occurs. I felt bad as I reflected that my buddy Mike is coming out to see me, too, and I didn't make the same gesture for him during his recent health crisis.

One thing I can say about the walk: the Joro spiders are out! It's late August, which seems to be about the time when I start seeing them. They'll be out from now through most of the fall before it gets too cold, and they have to retreat again. I was happy to point out two of them to David as we neared the end of our walk. They always seem to seek out the same perches as the previous year's crew, and these are surely different spiders (lifespan = about one year). Offspring, maybe? I don't know how that works.

David's currently getting ready for his return trip. He might stop by my room tonight, or he might come by tomorrow, and I'm debating whether to accompany him to the airport or see him off here: he's taking a cab in the morning, and I can jump in with him and see him off at the airport easily enough. I'm also planning to hit the States next year; it'll be interesting to see David's new-ish home in New Mexico, and I need to see Sean and Jeff in Chicago as well. I'll also skip over to see Mike and family in Virginia. Should I go exploring Wyoming, too?

I've officially removed the bandages from my stitch scars (inner thighs): there's no more bleeding and no signs of infection. Bruises all over my body are fading. And the last bit of big news: this morning, I tried rolling onto my side... and I did it with no pain! I can now roll onto both my left and my right sides, which means I no longer need my funky pillow setup to preserve my coccyx. I'll keep the pillows, of course, but I think as of tonight, I can sleep comfortably without them. This is a revolutionary step forward. I just hope I don't roll into an awkward and painful position tonight while I'm sleeping. But it'll be nice not to have to prop my fat ass up to protect my butt-bone. And to sleep in a more natural position for once.

__________

*I wouldn't have minded seeing my Korean coworker. He's a quiet fellow and a good colleague. If anything, I'm surprised he wasn't there.

**About 4.3K, as it turns out.



some Styx

Three important steps:

Tim Walz as a cheap version of Bernie Sanders:

Rogan vs. CNN:

The upcoming veep debate on October 1:

Defortified! Trump's chances in Virginia may have improved:

Pelosi's admission: yes, it was a coup against Biden.

Elon vs. the EU:

Trans(?) boxer's frivolous lawsuit:

Tim Walz... man of the people?

The cease-fire deal falls through:





birthday numbers

blood sugar: 111 (after two days' almost-fasting)
blood pressure: 116/73 (systolic is up a bit)
weight: 108.5 kg
pulse-ox: 96%
pulse: 73
estimated A1c since 7/29: 6.06 (finally moving in the right direction)

I've somehow managed to survive to 55. I'll be off to my boss's place soon. Blood sugar is still kind of high, but under 120 is the current goal. Ultimately, I want to average below 90. Weight continues to trend downward; my eventual goal is 90 kg, which is about what I weighed upon leaving Switzerland in 1990. Lots of 90s, there.



some videos on the state of sci-fi

"Star Trek: Section 31"—yikes:

Nerd Cookies on whether the movies nerfed (i.e., gentled) the Sardaukar:

Basically, why I never watched "Strange New Worlds" beyond Season 1:

RDJ and life at Marvel after "Endgame":

On creative writing and narrative hooks for short attention spans:

Disney, the money-loser:

On legacy:

A retrospective on "Minority Report":





some PJW

The UK's double standard(s):

More on double standards, post-riot:

The Afghanistan paradox:





more slo-mo bullet collisions

Hitting bullets with bullets has become a popular pastime on many channels devoted to bringing you slow-motion footage. Among the more talented slo-mo teams is Ballistic High Speed, which focuses on slo-mo footage of what guns can do. Watch:





Friday, August 30, 2024

Styx weighs in on Kamala's (and Walz's) first interview

"Kamala Harris was unable to answer even basic-bitch questions":

Styx sees the interview as helping Trump's chances immensely.



August 29 & 30 numbers

I guess I forgot to note my numbers for the 29th.

8/29
blood sugar: 137 (down from 142 the day before despite carby leftovers)
blood pressure: 113/68 (systolic is up a bit)
weight: 110 kg
pulse-ox: 97%
pulse: 77 (a bit high)
estimated A1c since 7/29: 6.08 (still moving in the wrong direction!)

And here are my numbers from this morning:

8/30
blood sugar: 131 (after fasting; down from 137 yesterday)
blood pressure: 124/71 (systolic is up a bit)
weight: 110 kg (holding steady)
pulse-ox: 97%
pulse: 73
estimated A1c since 7/29: 6.08 (unmoving, but still in the wrong direction!)

A1c is frustrating, but I expect my numbers to settle down soon. BP is also slightly up; my machine categorizes the classic 120/80 as slightly high (yellow zone), which is also frustrating. Weight is about the only truly reassuring thing right now; even my resting pulse is bothersome since it's not in the 60s. Extended exercise, when I'm finally up to it, will get that back down. Or so I hope. We'll see in the coming weeks as I lengthen my walking distances.



kind of dreading my birthday celebration

If I had my druthers, I'd celebrate my birthday quietly with my brother David, especially since he's about to go back to the States this Sunday. Instead, Saturday afternoon, I'll be cabbing out to the nearby city of Suwon, where my boss lives, to celebrate with him and his family. I suspect the boss has gathered more than just his family, though: along with my brother, my Korean coworker, and the boss's immediate family (wife, sons), I'm betting he'll have some of his friends, and I wouldn't put it past him to have invited some of my own relatives: I know he'd been in touch with my #3 Ajumma during my time in the hospital, and that her younger son was scheduled to arrive in Korea from Germany around the end of the month. I don't know... I could be wrong about all of this (Ajumma is only just getting over enteritis, after all, so she might not be fit to travel to Suwon), but I can't shake the feeling that the boss is planning more than just a little get-together. I should've had the wit to say no when I had the chance and just celebrate my birthday with my brother before he leaves.



nearing the end of Charles's meal

In the pic below, the kale doesn't look so great (when does it ever?), but what you see is the salad component of Charles's vegetarian meal, mixed up with a carb called farro, a generic term for several varieties of wheat. The veggies are chopped cukes, chopped tomatoes, chopped bell peppers, and chopped kale. The dressing is a vinaigrette, and the cheese was originally feta, I think, but I added cheese that I had bought at my own building's grocery—a Spanish combo pack that included a kind of queso de cabra, or goat cheese—a cousin of some types of feta. The salad was very good, very fresh, even after a few days in the fridge. Surprisingly, my blood sugar wasn't as high as I'd thought it would be despite the farro.

There had also been a "warm" component to Charles's feast, involving chickpeas and squash and so on, but I ate that part up faster than the salad.

I've still got Charles's yogurt, a cuke, and an eggplant. Part of the cucumber will be integrated with a souped-up caprese (basil, mozzarella, tomato) that includes cukes and tuna along with the standard balsamic-vinegar dressing. There may be hard-boiled quail eggs as well. The yogurt and the other part of the cuke can be repurposed to make a tzatziki. I have ground lamb, and I can combine that with home-ground beef, spices, and seasonings to make gyro meat that I can then use with some leftover, pre-heart-attack keto tortillas (stored in the freezer at my office). I can take some leftover cottage cheese, jazz it up with some leftover Middle Eastern-style oil, and turn it into a wannabe feta-ish something-or-other. 

Plenty of ways to get rid of leftovers before moving on to homemade sausage, thick-cut bacon, eggs, and keto pancakes. I had thought to do American breakfast next week, but that might have to wait until my buddy Mike is here the week after.

salad: veggies and farro

I was surprised by the lower-than-expected blood sugar the following morning, mainly because I also ate the last of Charles's dense buckwheat bread, which really grew on me. I made a Boursin-style cream-cheese spread, pan-fried the bread in butter, let it cool, then slathered the cheese on for a hearty end-of-meal supplement. It could simply be the timing: I ate dinner earlier than last time, so my blood sugar had had time to lower itself by morning. As you saw when I'd published those numbers earlier, by blood sugar was in the 130s, not the high 190s. Go figure.

heavy buckwheat bread with cheese spread

These were great leftovers, and they didn't leave me feeling any angina. Thanks again, Charles.



mystery plants

What are they? These grow in the park by my building. They're not bamboo.




Kamalawatch

Vince Dao on Trump's aggressive strategy:

Trump/Kamala impersonators debate!

Styx on Kamala on the economy 1:

Styx on Kamala on the economy 2:

Hidin' Harris—the Biden strategy:

Hidin' Harris 2:

How the media pivoted on Harris (new marching orders):

The "Kamala Krash" ad:

The "barbershop boys" interview:

Andrew Bustamante, former CIA:

Matt Walsh on that "barbershop" interview:

Kamala's free ride courtesy of the media:





Kamala's shit-show interview on CNN

Nearly a month and a half after becoming the Democrats' official nominee for president, Kamala Harris hadn't sat down for an interview of any kind. She'd made public appearances and given speeches, sure, and she even managed to pack in a few zingers against Donald Trump, but unscripted encounters? Nothing whatsoever. Well, she and her running mate Tim Walz sat down for a mere 18 minutes in what turned out to be a heavily scripted and edited interview with CNN's Dana Bash. And as they say about putting lipstick on a pig, no amount of editing or gussying-up could hide the fact that Kamala simply is who she is: an idiot who can't even hide behind age and senility to explain her idiocy.

You Had One Job: Comrade Kamala Blows Pre-Taped Interview Question With Tampon Tim Right Next to Her

...Fact-Checking Diversity Hire Harris’ CNN Interview

Play-by-Play of Harris’s Train Wreck Interview

And this is the creature they're going to fraud into office.





Hillbilly Elegy and "Hillbilly Elegy": a two-fer review

Glenn Close as Mamaw and Amy Adams as Bev
2016's Hillbilly Elegy is an autobiographical memoir by JD Vance, who is currently making news as Donald Trump's running mate in the tumultuous 2024 presidential election. The book was a bestseller when it came out, earning praise from both critics and regular readers for its unflinching portrayal of life among the Scots-Irish hill folk who largely populate the Appalachians, with a particular focus on Vance's own family—its history and demography—running from Kentucky to Ohio. Largely a sociological study with narrative elements, Vance's book surveys who these hillbillies are, what values they hold, stereotypes about the hillbillies (and the degree to which those stereotypes are true or untrue, e.g., the role of religion among these folk), and Vance's own existence, with his life from childhood through the military, college, and graduate school serving as a sort of framework holding all of this information together. Vance prominently mentions one of his law professors at Yale, Amy Chua (author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) as a major inspiration for writing his book.

In terms of the "characters" who figure the most in Vance's life, there's his mother Bev (never called Beverly in the book), his grandparents Mamaw and Papaw (Bonnie and Jim Vance), and his level-headed older sister Lindsay. Otherwise, very little about JD's life is stable or consistent—not even his own name, in which the JD varies from James Donald to James David. (Donald is his father's name, but JD's father abandoned the family early on, reappearing later. David is an uncle.) Bev went through a slew of men, many of whom already had their own kids, so JD grew up with a confusingly rotating set of "brothers" and "sisters" and "cousins." JD often found himself in the role of big brother, little brother, or whatever the current familial configuration called for.

The book explores the weird sense of honor that hillbillies have—their sensitivity to insult and their willingness to harm those who might besmirch their dignity, even if the slight is only a perceived one and not a real one. Stability comes in the form of Mamaw and Papaw's insistence that JD study hard, get himself an education, and make something of himself. JD's mom, with her addictions and her rotating stable of lovers, seems fairly hopeless as a parent, and big sister Lindsay—who ends up all right—does what she can to shield JD from the worst aspects of hillbilly existence. Vance also comes back to the theme that hillbilly existence doesn't necessarily prepare a hillbilly to handle the real world; it's only after he escapes his rural life to join the military and to study at college that Vance becomes aware of the true complexity of the human universe around him.

Ultimately, yes: JD Vance joins the Marines, goes to a decent college, then ends up at Yale Law for graduate school. His book argues, explicitly and implicitly, that hillbilly culture is mired in problems largely of its own making, but at one point Vance takes time to aver that he is "not a policy skeptic" and wouldn't mind seeing government programs that are actually helpful for his demographic. The memoir is a combination of cold analysis and heartfelt retelling of painful personal and social realities. I found Hillbilly Elegy to be slow going for about a third of its length, but once Vance had gotten most of the sociological material out of the way to concentrate on the more personal narrative (including meeting his future wife Usha, his "Yale spirit guide"), the narrative gathered momentum and became more interesting.

Vance is still fairly young; his book ends on a note of youthful optimism. He doesn't see hillbillies' futures as predetermined, and he also finds good things about the hillbilly existence that he has been able to carry forward in his own life—although how much these "good things" are products of hillbilly culture and how much are products of his individual existence are unclear. The book does a fairly good job of striking a balance between a soaring overview of a sociological phenomenon and an intensely personal recollection.

Having finished the book, I moved on to seeing Ron Howard's movie version of it: 2020's "Hillbilly Elegy," starring Gabriel Basso as the young-adult JD Vance, Owen Asztalos as young JD, Amy Adams as wayward mom Bev, Glenn Close as Mamaw, Bo Hopkins as Papaw, Haley Bennett as big sis Lindsay, and Freida Pinto as Usha.

While the movie mirrors much that is in the book, it largely drops the sociological commentary to concentrate on JD's own life. As in the book, the focus is mostly on JD, Mamaw, Papaw, Lindsay, and Bev, with Bev in particular being given more attention than the other adult family members—a fact I found bizarre given Vance's own stress on the importance of his grandparents (who did not live to see him join the military) in his life. Those liberties aside, I thought Howard's movie was fairly faithful to the book's overall tone: the self-inflicted misery of hillbilly existence and the poor life-choices made by everyone around JD, as well as by JD himself early on.

It would be easy and tempting to dismiss everyone in the movie as stupid, ignorant trailer-park trash, but the movie does try to put forward the idea that there are karmic forces at work, both at the personal and the collective level. Life is more complex than it might appear at first. Howard's film gives us a sense that hillbillies are a people, and they have a culture. While some of the vignettes shown have a ring of ridiculousness about them (e.g., Bev's operatic, theatrical, and narcissistic rages that occasionally risk JD's life), Howard doesn't drag the movie in the direction of parody, satire, or any other form of comedy. This isn't like the typical rural horror movie where all the locals are sinister inbreds blessed or cursed with low, predatory cunning. We can relate to the characters in Howard's film: people trying to get through the day on very little—little education, little money, and few opportunities.

If there's one area where Howard's film made an impression not made by the book, it was in how it drove home the fact that, despite what I just wrote above about being able to relate to the main characters on a human level, I found most aspects of hillbilly existence to be, well, repugnant. Granted, we are all a product of our own backgrounds, but my background includes some people—maybe you could call them family members—who had mannerisms and beliefs that reminded me strongly of what I was watching as "Hillbilly Elegy" unfolded. And it's a kind of existence I'm only too happy to have gotten away from—not that there was ever any danger of my being trapped by it.

Glenn Close as Mamaw is one to watch. I had worried, at first, that she'd over-glamorize the role of JD's grandmother with her sheer acting talent and star power, but Close plays the role with an earthy realism, showing on her face the pressure of trying to raise JD right as she teaches him a sometimes-contradictory set of values related to family, addiction, and education. Amy Adams as Bev is deliberately unsexy, and I had to wrestle with how much I pitied or scorned the character. Bev gets a character arc, though: a title card at the end of the film claims she's been sober for six years, implying that she's straightened out her life, and that happy endings don't just belong to JD.

Overall, both the book and the movie are fairly depressing, albeit ultimately uplifting, leaving the reader/watcher with a sense of hope, and a feeling that one's background doesn't have to be one's destiny. The movie is a Hollywoodized version of the book, but it remains essentially faithful to the book's tone despite some of the liberties it takes along the way. I'd probably recommend the book over the movie, mainly for the sociological commentary that Vance provides as he discusses hillbilly culture, but the movie isn't a bad distillation of the book.

And hats off to the makeup artists who made Glenn Close look so much like the real Mamaw. As the movie closes, we see video footage of the real JD Vance and his family. I have to wonder what people who read the book in 2016 and saw the movie in 2020 think of Vance now.



Thursday, August 29, 2024

images

But those are all white-supremacist values!