egg prices(!) are coming down now

Johnny Somali invites another streamer to Korea

As if it weren't enough that Johnny Somali has been charged with three to four counts of criminality ranging from obstruction of business to "minor crimes," with more charges pending in a separate case, he is now inviting "copycat streamers" to come to Korea. If Korea doesn't punish Somali severely, this nonsense will continue and only get worse. It's basic human psychology: discipline must be speedy, must be stern, must be clear in its reasons, and must leave an impression. And people need to verify that the discipline has in fact been learned. The state of California still doesn't get this, nor do "sanctuary cities" across the US. Nor do most liberals, for that matter. Soft-on-crime policies only lead to more crime. Johnny Somali is a big case in point. At the very least, if he gets deported instead of imprisoned, he shouldn't leave with all of his limbs. And by "limbs," I don't mean fingers and toes.

don't talk—just do

🚨 #BREAKING: The US House just EXTENDED the statute of limitations for people who committed COVID fraud, allowing those who stole COVID relief funds to continue to be prosecuted.

DOGE is coming for these criminals.

Democrats are apparently VERY afraid of this, considering 127… pic.twitter.com/3EZ69bUh4Z

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) March 11, 2025

the checklist

Today's project is a simple one: organize my trip-prep checklist. Since this trip won't involve any camping, I can cut a lot out of my standard checklist, which I'd copied over to a special "2025 US Trip" folder. We'll see whether I have room in my backpack for everything. If not, I guess I'll need at least one check-in bag.

Neil deGrasse Tyson's "takedown" of Konstantin Kisin

Warren Smith seems to be doing well for himself since getting kicked out of his school.

oh, now they come around

This is what happens when idiots elect idiots.

another movie I probably won't see

Pitch Meeting: "Love Hurts."

JP says: "Brett Cooper won!"

"Cobra Kai," Season 6: review

Top: Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio)

[WARNING: one or two spoilers.]

I've reviewed each season of "Cobra Kai" faithfully.

Season 1

Season 2

Season 3

Season 4

Season 5

And here we are at last.

Season 6 of "Cobra Kai" is the final season of the show, which started on YouTube Red (now YouTube Premium) and ended up on Netflix (thus finally forcing me to subscribe to Netflix). Given the show's tendency to bring back characters from the movies (which got all the way up to "The Next Karate Kid"—i.e., Part 4—before the bizarre kung-fu reboot with Jackie Chan and the upcoming "sequel" starring Chan and Ralph Macchio titled "Karate Kid Legends"), I would have thought that Season 6 might bring back Julie Pierce (Hilary Swank) from "The Next Karate Kid," but that didn't happen. But the show did bring back, from the movies, grandma Lucille LaRusso (Randee Heller), evil sensei John Kreese (Martin Kove), arguably more evil sensei Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith), ex-flame Ali Mills (Elisabeth Shue), minor-flunky-turned-pastor Bobby (Ron Thomas), nemesis-turned-businessman Mike Barnes (Sean Kanan), ex-rival/nemesis Chozen Toguchi (Yuji Okumoto), second ex-flame Kumiko (Tamlyn Tomita), and others. Ralph Macchio continues to star as Daniel LaRusso, a successful car-dealership owner, husband, and father, but the show, per its name, really belongs to William Zabka as Daniel's old nemesis Johnny Lawrence, who over the course of several seasons becomes Daniel's friend and even partner, but not without continued friction as they run up against each other's wildly differing philosophies of and approaches to karate.

The three-part, fifteen-episode Season 6 (the previous five seasons were each ten episodes) picks up where Season 5 left off: with the students preparing for the Sekai Taikai, a worldwide karate tournament. I had guessed the Korean pronunciation for this event would be 세계대회/segye daehoe ("sehgyeh daehweh"), but as it turns out, the characters for Sekai Takai (a fictional tournament invented for the show) are 世界大赛, which in Korean would be rendered as 세계대새/segye daesae. It still means "world tournament," though. Daniel and Johnny's students are training together now, trying to absorb two very different, yet sometimes weirdly complementary, training styles, with Johnny focusing on the Cobra Kai way of aggression and offense while Daniel focuses on the Miyagi-do way of inner balance and defense. Meanwhile, John Kreese, who has escaped from prison after being convicted of a crime he hadn't committed, finds himself in Korea, where he meets old acquaintances Kim Da-eun (Alicia Hannah-Kim) and her grandfather Master Kim Sun-yung (CS Lee), the exponents of a dishonorable, aggressive form of the martial art dangsudo (often written as Tang Soo Do) that became the foundation of Kreese and Silver's training philosophy: strike first, strike hard, no mercy. Disgraced, Kreese confers with the Korean masters in an attempt to bring Cobra Kai back on the world stage as a competing team in the Sekai Taikai.

The teens, meanwhile, go through their usual waves of drama as the end of high school looms, bringing with it an uncertain future. Many of the kids will go on to separate colleges, but some, like Johnny's biological son Robby Keene (Tanner Buchanan) and his bad-girl girlfriend Tory Nichols (Peyton List), have no college prospects and might be facing a blue-collar future. Friends Demetri (Gianni DeCenzo) and Eli (Jacob Bertrand) think they're both heading to MIT, but Eli hasn't told Demetri that he never applied. Young Kenny Payne (Dallas Dupree Young), meanwhile, has little desire to join the now-unified Miyagi-do (Johnny conceded to having his karate under the Miyagi-do umbrella); it takes some persuasion to bring him in. The news comes in that this year's Sekai Taikai will take place in Barcelona, Spain; Terry Silver manages to get his own charges dropped and is on the loose again, but he discovers he's contending with a terminal illness, which makes him all the more desperate to make a name for himself by forming a team for the Sekai Takai.

Much of Season 6 is devoted to the question of which group of people will ultimately bear the name of Cobra Kai. Ostensibly, the name was given by a Korean branch of dangsudo (which makes no sense to those familiar with East Asian culture; kai is a Japanese particle). Also in question is what the latest incarnation of Cobra Kai will represent. The show resolves this and other issues in a fairly neat, if rough-edged, fashion (no spoilers), and the final few episodes are devoted to moments of triumph, loss, closure, and future horizons. Do Daniel and Johnny remain friends, or does Kreese seduce Johnny back to his old ways? Do Kreese and Silver make up, or do they stay bitter enemies to the end? Will Miguel (Xolo Maridueña) make it into Stanford? Will his girlfriend, Daniel's daughter Samantha (Mary Mouser), go to a local university or overseas? These and other questions get asked and answered by the end through a series of codas reminiscent of Peter Jackson's "The Return of the King."

The show manages its usual balance of comedy and seriousness (hat tip to Courtney Henggeler as Daniel's often-hilarious wife Amanda); it also does its best to balance Johnny's style of Cobra Kai with Daniel's style of Miyagi-do. The script still manages to pull a few surprises on us, but it's the final season, and since some plot lines have been converging for a while, those points of convergence become somewhat predictable. As always, the series has its heart in the right place; it wants to show that people (well, most people) can change; that karate can bring out the best in you; that martial virtues aren't always the same from school to school; and that life can often be a tangled mess. Although Season 6's first two episodes were disappointingly corny, the overall story ended up being funny, bittersweet, and satisfying. The show's final few moments came to a conclusion that was, I think, consistent with the show's overall tone since 2017.

While I'm still praising the show's good points, I should make a special note of William Zabka's performance as Johnny. Zabka's not going to win any Oscars with his acting (not that the Oscars are worth anything anymore), but Season 6 provides him with several opportunities to show he has more than a narrow emotional range. (For what it's worth, he's also got a great sense of comic timing and delivery.) In one sentimental scene, Johnny proposes to and marries his lady love Carmen (Vanessa Rubio) while she's in the hospital, and he has a final father-son moment with a deeply altered Kreese that ends in manly tears. Johnny spends time talking to his dead mom at her grave, too, a moment I couldn't help but be touched by. Zabka might not win any Oscars, but he's a very decent actor who held his own opposite Martin Kove's Kreese and Ralph Macchio's Daniel.

And now, we turn to my complaints. Season 6 continues the trend of Korea-bashing, with the focus being relentlessly on dangsudo and not the more popular taekwondo. Despite that focus, we learn little about what dangsudo is really like, and how it contrasts with the Okinawan karate that Daniel was taught. One of the younger antagonists in Season 6 is Kwon Jae-seong (Brandon H. Lee), who is essentially channeling the sneering vibe of the young Chozen Toguchi (older Chozen is much wiser and is now Daniel's friend). Kwon's character isn't given any real depth, and his ultimate fate is, at least for me, inadvertently funny (some will think I'm mean for saying that). Korea in general gets a bad rap in this show; I began to think it would have been nice for Chuck Norris to guest star as a good practitioner of dangsudo (since that's Norris's background). It would also have been nice, with so much of Season 6 being set in a mythical, timeless, and rather caricatured version of Korea, for the show to reveal more of what modern Korean society is like. Australian actress Alicia Hannah-Kim, as Kim Da-eun, doesn't seem too comfortable speaking Korean; aside from the younger Korean cast, the only actor who seemed to have a halfway decent, authentic Korean accent was CS Lee as the evil grandfather Kim Sun-yung (or in official romanization, Kim Seon-yeong). But old master Kim's problem was the way he looked: like a villain straight out of a bad Hong Kong action flick—covered in old-man latex and a fake wig, with a fake mustache and beard. Kim Da-eun, the granddaughter, ends up doing two things that are hard to believe: (1) she falls for the charms of Chozen Toguchi, and (2) she ends up murdering her grandfather in a Darth-Vader-kills-Palpatine moment, possibly as a result of her exposure to Chozen and the philosophy of Miyagi-do. Both of these plot points ought to have repercussions, but they occur too late in Season 6 to be explored. While Japanese/Korean romances do occasionally happen, they're fairly rare (especially among older folks) given the countries' bitter history with each other. And murdering a relative in modern South Korea isn't an act that one can just sweep under the rug. People will ask questions, and the police will find out.

The fight choreography is still a sore point for me. While some of it looked like real karate, a lot of it was overly stylized, lacking grit and brutality. There was also way too much gymnastic helicopter kicking (this kind, not this kind) during the Sekai Taikai bouts as a way to move around the mat, and way too many jumping somersaults (which were obviously done by stunt doubles). Some of the less major characters that we meet at the Sekai Taikai tournament are legitimate martial artists in real life. Before I watched Season 6, I happened to stumble upon some videos of taekwondo practitioner Rayna Vallandingham, a talent who has been doing martial arts since she was five or six. By all rights, Vallandingham's character, the vain social-media whore Zara Malik, should have been the ultimate winner, but as the kids say these days when someone's abilities or powers are reduced so that someone else can shine, Rayna/Zara got nerfed. (Comics nerds say, for example, that Dr. Fate got nerfed in the "Black Adam" movie. Fate is apparently a cosmically powerful character in the comics.) And some of the actors have, over the years (I won't say who), swelled up a bit as they've become fat-assed adults, making a lot of their gymnastic moves look laughably implausible.

Overall, I thought that Season 6 started off on the wrong foot, and there were annoying problems along the way, but the way the show wrapped up was satisfactory. If you've followed "Cobra Kai" this far, you'll see the same blend of comic and serious, realistic and unrealistic, philosophical and pretentiously dramatic, that has propelled the series forward to this, its crowning moment. There were plot elements that I would have liked to explore more deeply, and some I would have done differently; I could also have done without the CGI Miyagi who appears a couple times toward the end in Daniel's dreams, but all in all, Season 6 was a better finale than what I've seen with other series. It helps, I think that the showrunners are on record saying they're fans of the original movies, so they wanted to respect the characters and the world as much as possible. They did, I think, an imperfect job of it, but there are definitely worse ways to spend your time than to watch Season 6 of "Cobra Kai."

VFX artists react!

images

"Loan sharks with frickin' laser beams!"

the proper way to look at it

animated pics here

Robby Starbuck needs two commas and a hyphen.

The left doesn't understand all the cheering. x_Coffeecup doesn't understand vocative commas.

I'm glad all that's over. I hope Warren gets brutally questioned.

I don't think the left understands what fascist means.

in the name of diplomacy...

four years of being upset... like what I just went through

But Trump is, at best, a small-fry billionaire. Keep perspective.

Visit the DOGE website, everyone. Stop claiming "there's no evidence."

This was the cue.

In French, and maybe in other Romance languages, avocado is the same word as lawyer. See more here.

What an irrelevant sissy.

Ladies? Is this true?

The face on the left actually looks a bit altered: they turned up the red color level. Look at her neck. Note, too, that the shadow patterns on the two images' necks look about the same but shaded slightly differently. I think this whole thing was Photoshopped.

Yes, that was a linguistic roller-coaster ride.

And here's more unpredictable language.

What do you call it when people fail to capitalize a party's name?

Judge Elon and DOGE by whom they piss off.

keto quiche: night 2

I put the remaining 3/4 of the keto quiche in the oven for a 20-minute bake just to firm it up a bit more, and... it didn't firm up much more, so the next time I make the custard for this quiche, I'm going to either add more eggs or reduce the amount of cream I use. This time around, the custard was 500 ml of heavy cream plus five medium eggs (I'm not sure that my grocery even sells large eggs). I might up the egg count to seven and/or lower the heavy-cream amount to 300 or 350 ml.

looks and smells great, though

I'm happy to report that the keto crust survived the extra bake just fine. No burning whatsoever. And I'm liking the generally thin crust which, as I'd mentioned in my previous post, is quite well behaved compared to a regular, non-keto crust.

As I work my way through the Victoria's Keto Kitchen channel, I see that she's evolved her keto-flour recipe to move away from bamboo fiber (dammit... I have a big bag of it now) from psyllium fiber (which tastes like sawdust when there's too much of it in your recipe*), and more toward oat fiber, which I also have a lot of. Her pasta and burger/dog-bun recipes both use her new, perfected keto flour. Just something to note. I'll be curious to try the perfected recipe when I attempt her pasta and burger-dog buns.

__________

*There isn't too much psyllium in Victoria's old keto-flour recipe; it's well proportioned. But from my experiences using psyllium fiber as both a laxative and a stool-solidifier, I'm well acquainted with psyllium's sawdust taste.

I'm still glad I'm not on X

Headline (probable paywall):

X Rocked By Major Outages, Elon Musk Says ‘Massive Cyberattack’ To Blame
"There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X."

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk responded after X, the social media platform he owns, faced multiple outages around the world on Monday.

Outage-tracking website DownDetector.com tracked outages beginning just before 5 a.m. ET and lasting until past noon. At 5 a.m. ET, the total number of outage reports was more than 20,000. Another spike in reports occurred around 9 a.m. ET, and reached nearly 40,000. A third prolonged spike in outage reports took place just over an hour later, peaking at just under 30,000 reports and sustaining that number for nearly two hours.

“First, protests against DOGE. Then, Tesla stores were attacked. Now, X is down. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that this downtime is the result of an attack on X,” DOGE Designer posted.

I'm a Daily Wire subscriber even though I almost never visit the site (I subscribe for the movies, none of which I've seen as of yet). I had to log in to see the above article, so it's possible the above article may be blocked/paywalled if you're not a Daily Wire member.

a Johnny Somali roundup

Personally, I'd like to see this idiot whipped until bloody, then given time to heal, then whipped again. Repeat 666 times, with frequent dousings of rubbing alcohol and lye. He's a self-admitted psychopath, so maybe he'd enjoy that.

Heave(r), ho!

2/7: Trump's exits spark worldwide withdrawals.

2/7: Germany's "remarkable verdict" with "gobsmacking numbers."

2/8: by-election victories for Reform in the UK.

2/9: Italy proposes an exit.

2/9: the UK's political revolution.

2/10: Farage tops the polls. Labour panics.

2/10: Germany does what it can to stop the "far-right" AfD.

2/11: Swiss democracy: a nightmare for globalists.

2/11: are Germany and other EU countries ignoring the voters?

2/12: Romania's presidential election canceled (for alleged Russian interference) and to be rerun despite popular sentiment against a rerun. American leftists aren't so different: rerun everything until you get the results you desire.

2/12: UK voters react to the "disastrous" Labour government.

2/13: the German left suddenly gains momentum.

2/14: Trump's withdrawals and rhetoric causing ructions in Europe.

2/14: an Austrian collapse?

2/15: UK by-elections—Reform defeats Labour. The people have spoken.

2/19: UK Reform "reaching new heights."

2/19: "devastating verdict" from Romanian voters, who are against rerunning the election

2/20: UK voters have turned against Keir Starmer's Labour.

2/21: Austria having the same troubles as the rest of the EU: the Trump-like party (right-nationalist—in this case, the Freedom Party) wins but gets excluded from negotiations because everyone else is desperately doing what they can to cling to power. It'd be nice to invent a plague that avoids right-nationalists and hits everyone else.

The overall impression I'm getting is that the right-nationalists in many European nations are winning elections all over the EU, but the entrenched, left-leaning parties are scared of what this might mean, and they don't want to lose their power. Germany and Austria seem the most Teutonically stubborn, but I expect the UK's Labour to try some wily tricks of its own. The UK really needs Farage at 10 Downing Street to beat some sense back into the country. As I've said many times, I love England—and Great Britain—and feel that American culture owes the UK a huge debt since we inherited so much of the UK's culture. But the UK, like the rest of western Europe, seems intent on committing cultural suicide in the name of political correctness. The reason for this is utterly beyond me. Ideally, a healthy country has a good dynamic tension between its left and right, but we live in an age when the right has flaccidly ceded all power to an insane left that is determined to swamp Europe demographically with unassimilated and unassimilating "migrants."

Consonant with this, here's John Stossel on the "death of Europe":

Credit to commenter John from Daejeon for the video.

are we cutting quickly, deeply, and exactly enough?

Interesting discussion at this post on Instapundit regarding whether the cutting of USAID is going as quickly and as thoroughly as it could. Some commenters had interesting sentiments (lightly edited for style):

1.

This is almost certainly just a first pass. The ones shut down were obviously scams or doing things not consistent with this administration's policies. The 1,000 that are left might be legitimate—spending money abroad CAN be in our national interest. Moving the remaining active programs under State means they will be subject to the direct review, and ongoing authority, of the secretary of state and his minions, who can decide at any time whether to modify or terminate them.

Remember that the House of Fraud has been created, expanded, modified, and tweaked over generations of bureaucrats, always with an eye to keeping things hidden from public knowledge and examination. It will take time to root [those things] out. And while the daily "Found Another One"-type headlines are refreshing and satisfying to those of us who voted for this, it doesn't mean that each new discovery has to be fixed the next day [You've got only two years! —ed.]. We should let the people working on the projects have enough time to figure out what the best fix is in each case, and how to make the fix as permanent as possible.

2.

Even if Trump and Elon manage to cut the federal government in half, a single Democrat administration would grow it all back. The people saying "we need a scalpel, not a chainsaw" fail to grasp the magnitude of the problem: it's not a human body—it's a redwood forest. Anything less than a wildfire will barely make a dent.

electric bill

My ondol (Korean floor heating) is electric, not gas, so using the ondol during winter to stay warm means a sharp rise in my electric bill. I'm now a rent-payer, no longer coddled by my place of work, so the bill I get is no longer just admin fee + electric, but a full-on utilities bill (my rent is separate and goes straight to my landlady). The bill I got at the beginning of March (presumably for February) was over W500,000. While I'm not totally surprised by the highway robbery—these are Gangnam prices, after all—I'm still disappointed. For all of February, which is the period covered by the March bill, my ondol was on level 2 out of 10. W540,000 for that? Seriously? So living in my place has jumped from a range of W200,000-W400,000 a month to nearly W1.3 million a month. Yikes.

The boss is telling me the place in Suwon will set me back a simple W1,000,000 for the deposit, then maybe (maybe!) W500,000 a month for the rent. I have no idea what the utilities might be. Surely not over W500,000 like here. I guess the nice thing about such a tiny deposit is that I wouldn't have to fork over much at the beginning, but the problem is that I wouldn't get back very much at the end.

Upshot: while I'm not thrilled about the Suwon apartment's location (old, noisy neighborhood on a steep hill, crowded local mountains), it'll be a financial relief to leave my current digs. Also: I'm currently relying on a third blanket at night instead of using an ondol at all. I'll be curious to see what a minimal electric bill looks like.

ugh... might need to get new contacts

My right-side contact lens has gotten irritating over the past few days, and this is happening right when I'm getting closer to flying to the States. I should never have gone to that old man's glasses shop in the basement of the building where I used to work. The whole operation feels suspect in retrospect: first, I got a ripped lens. Now, there's this irritation. I have a more legit, "go-to" shop that I've relied on for a few years; maybe I'll visit that place today.

Grumble-grumble W80,000 grumble...

in case you didn't get the memo

Everyone hates the "Snow White" remake with Rachel Zegler. Mainly because Zegler is a bitch.

Why the thumbnail misspells her surname as "Zeglar" is beyond me.

Vince Dao roundup

2/6: Federal workers resign en masse.

2/7: Trump orders an investigation into Gavin Newsom.

2/10: The Dems and Super Bowl Sunday.

2/10: Super Bowl—who's applauded, and who gets booed?

2/12: Government-shutdown ploy backfires on the Dems.

2/14: Federal workers get fired en masse. Judge allows buyback to proceed.

2/14: A mass audit of the IRS is coming.

2/16: Psaki vs. Stewart.

2/16: Trump fires woke judges.

2/17: USAID meltdown.

Honestly, who would be against any of this? Only idiots and criminals.

a must-try (both to make and to eat)

Chorizo potato "croissants":

images

Em dash, not hyphen. And whatever happened to that MMA fight with Zuckerberg?

Improve Skeletor's (or Kim Jeong-eun's sister's) English.

One comma should be replaced by a colon. Which one and why?

Why does Hegseth look evil? Or is that look supposed to be lean, mean, and predatory?

Fabulous!

But will the traitors ever be caught and hanged? Probably not.

two commas, one hyphen

"I'm as surprised as you."

Only the Democrats get quotation marks, and for US English, they're the wrong kind.

The bear is going, "What the fuck did I wake up to?"

I should do a special post about commas before because.

Musk hates the Oxford comma.

If this leads to white South African immigrants being granted asylum, I predict leftist cries of outrage.

"...but like a poor marksman, you keep missing the target!" —James Kirk to Khan

One soldier could use a little head.

Is the momentum sustainable, though? Or will Trump run himself ragged? (Oh, and dangling modifier. And don't use "like" when you mean "as.")

Adam Carolla long ago joked about the tendency of immigrants to clutch the flags of their former countries.

Dave Chappelle talked about this.

keto quiche is here!

The YouTube channel Victoria's Keto Kitchen is proving to be quite a resource for keto bread flour, pie doughs, pastries, and everything related to bread. While I didn't remake the burger buns today, I did try out Victoria's keto pie-crust recipe, and it came out well as a vehicle for the remainder of my quiche filling. This time, the quiche was regular-sized and baked at a more reasonable temperature. This filling also came out a bit soft, but I think that was mainly because the custard needed one or two more eggs. Or maybe it needed a little longer in the oven. 40 minutes maybe wasn't enough, but at the same time, I don't want to burn the pie crust by overbaking it. I suppose I could lower the temperature (350ºF/177ºC this time) and bake the quiche for longer. Some recipes call for a bake time of 60 or more minutes (some call for much higher temps, close to what I used last time, and shorter bake times).

wide angle

closeup of the crust

food-porn angle

a quarter of a quiche tonight; enough for three more days

in-your-face closeup of the slice

Still, like at the get-together, the quiche was fully cooked if a bit soft. That said, all praise to Victoria's pie-crust recipe, which turned out to be so much better-behaved than a normal pie-crust dough. Patching holes was easy as I laid the dough in the pie plate, and since I used two sheets of parchment paper for rolling, I didn't have to flour any surfaces. The only thing was that the crust didn't puff very much. Then again, as you see in the above photos, I kept the crust very restrained this time compared to last time's apple pie. Not much room for puffing. 

Victoria seems to focus on bamboo flour, which is new to me, but the macros seem pretty good. This page claims the following for its flour:

100 g bamboo flour
Protein: 0.2 g
Fat: 0.3 g

Fiber: 99 g
Carbs: 0.1 g

Flour from bamboo fiber (via Coupang, I got the German Bambusfaser, which is the same thing) has less than 1% carbs by weight. Victoria's bread flour and pie-dough recipe both use what she calls "Victoria's Keto Flour," which is a mix of bamboo and almond flour (itself with a sixth of the carbs of regular flour), plus some other ingredients like egg-white-protein powder. I made bologna sandwiches with the last of the smallish keto bread I'd baked over the weekend; they were good. I won't do the burger buns until the coming weekend, but now that I know they need half the baking time of the loaf (something I should've figured out for myself), I bet they're going to come out great. Once I make my keto BBQ sauce, I'll be chowing down on burgers much more often. If Victoria's hamburger buns are any good, I'll abandon the carnivore buns, which are good, but which are a pain to make (making them is a lot like making soufflés). Who knew bamboo flour would be the solution?

Anyway, hats off to sprightly Victoria. She's married, seems to be a loud-and-proud Christian (without being obnoxious about it), and she has several kids who also act as her taste testers. Given certain background noises, she seems to live on a farm; I've heard at least one rooster. On top of this, Victoria isn't shy about mentioning that she has epilepsy, which can lead to grand mal seizures that affect her video-making schedule. She's a brave woman, and I think I'm going to be learning a lot from her channel. Her hubby's a lucky guy.

Matt Morse roundup

Biden judge loses to Team Trump.

Trump is getting revenge (the "agenda blitz").

The implosion of the California Democrats.

The press secretary catches the Democrats.

The "coup" has failed.

Is Hillary really going down? (I somehow doubt it.)

Adam Schiff and the Trump trap.

Upset about Trump's approval ratings.

Schumer ended? I can only hope, but I doubt this, too.

Call me skeptical about this, too: Bondi torches progressives.

trip prep continues

I went to the bank today and wired myself $3000 for use in my US account. I arrive in Virginia on the night of the 24th (local date/time); I'll stay overnight with my buddy Mike in Fredericksburg, then we'll hit an in-town PNC Bank the next day (the 25th), where I hope to pick up a debit card directly from the bank. Mike and I will then visit a local car-rental place, and I'll rent a car. After that, I'll drive out to my Best Western, which isn't too far from Front Royal, and the following morning (the 26th), at 8:15 a.m., I'll have my Front Royal DMV appointment to renew my driver's license (scheduled per Mike's advice). Before that appointment, Mike will have given me a lease agreement that I'll probably need to sign beforehand; the purpose of this agreement is to give me a real-world address and proof of residence; a lot of services and institutions don't accept "virtual" addresses for Americans with overseas residences. Mike also thinks I might be interested in getting a "Real ID," which is a measure being used by different states as a firmer proof of citizenship and residence. It apparently looks like a hologram on your license and once "regulations go into effect" (Mike's words), travelling domestically (by plane, I assume) will require either a Real ID or a passport(!). I initially rejected the idea of getting a Real ID, but I'm now thinking I might want to jump through the extra hoops to get one. I hope my lease agreement will be enough of a proof of residence for it. If not, I'm fine traveling the US with a passport.

I'm still debating whether I need more than a carry-on. I'll be carting over some gifts for Mike's family, but will they take up that much space in my backpack? I'm planning to fly with the same backpack I use when doing long walks these days: it's a large, black, squarish backpack, but small by the standards of my Gregory Baltoro 85 (85-liter capacity, which I use only when I know I'm camping; I bring along a shelter and other camping-related gear). I'm thinking it ought to be enough to hold everything as long as I bring nothing seriously bulky (like my new rain jacket/windbreaker, a gift from the boss last year). My MacBook Air won't take up much space; I just have to remember to keep it and my other electronics out and ready for security inspection before I can go to my departure gate at the airport.

I'll be buying a good bit of stuff when I get to the States (I have an ever-growing shopping list). The plan for that stuff is to box it up and send it to Seoul... but if it's under 50 pounds, I might just check it in with me for the flight back. And I'll try not to pack my passport into the package this time. Poor Mike; last time I did that, he ended up driving all over Virginia in a vain attempt to catch my package before it flew overseas, but for whatever reason, the US mail service was unwontedly prompt in sending my stuff out; my package went out without delay, and I had to resort to some sort of emergency document to be able to fly home. My boss here in Seoul laughingly gave me all sorts of shit about my mistake, which I had to endure with eye-rolling patience (or impatience). Lessons learned.

show your barrel a good time

nine episodes down, six to go

I'm close to reviewing the sixth and final season of "Cobra Kai." Each episode is anywhere from 35  to 45 minutes long, so it's been fairly easy to blow through several episodes in a binge. I might even be able to finish the series by tonight, which means a review ought to be up later this week. So stay tuned, Poison Girls.

one possible explanation for the demographic collapse in East Asia

Brought to you by AI voice!

dumpling soup from Chef John

I don't know why, but I've always found the term potsticker rather ugly.

That said, Google AI has this:

The word "potsticker" originates from the Chinese phrase "guōtiē" (鍋貼), which literally translates to "pot stick," referring to the pan-fried cooking method of the dumpling where the bottom "sticks" to the pot during cooking; essentially, it's a direct translation of the dish's cooking process into English.

The Chinese 鍋貼 is 과첩/gwacheop in Korean. Maybe I should learn to like the term.

images

won't be long now

These need fixing: capitalization, compound-word problem, and more. And where'd you get those stats?

I'm thinking wormhole. It's an Earth in a different galaxy. Skipper never noticed the change in constellations.

True. True.

One missing comma, one comma splice, a hyphen that should be an em dash... what else?

Ugh. I need zee eye bleach.

Remember when Scott Bakula was being called "the first female captain of the Enterprise"?

Photoshopped? Or just accidental irony?

Where's a good place to add the word "it" (or arguably "they")? (Hint: parallel structure.)

If only the real Arnold...

Fix the English.

Capitalization problem. Compound-word problem.

Where do the question mark and hyphen go?

You go, Mollie.

So... like Trump, Patel over-capitalizes. Also: "tax-payers." Add a "to." But, yes: term limits.

Put it in a language they understand, genius.

"Drop box" is usually not hyphenated.