low-carb bagels compared

But can they really be considered bagels?

chippie/chippy/chipper

bagelses, Precious

They look good. For a Texan.

Dave Cullen on "Ares": anatomy of a failure

that's a crackin' thumbnail

some primates are toolmakers

"Grace Kelly" with Ryan Reynolds and... Will Ferrell?

This is four years old but still hilarious.

I could be brown
I could be blue
I could be violet sky
I could hurtful
I could be purple
I could be anything you like
(repeat)

Woke-istan, not awake yet

And those idiots, insulated by all of their cash and large properties, will never learn.

"linner" prep

My friend Neil is coming up from Masan, so I'm prepping Thanksgiving leftovers and also making a simple carrot-raisin salad. I have enough dough and filling to make another, smaller pot pie; I'm thinking of baking such a pie for Neil. We'll see. He won't be here until around 3:30 or 4 p.m., so I have time to ponder this minor dilemma. 

There may or may not be photos.

"Having enough dough is tough," the Hominid thought. "I need to be thorough so as to see this lunch through, preferably without coughing, and with no drought in the forecast."

UPDATE: Neil has come and gone, having arrived right on time, just after 4 p.m., as he'd said he would. He might be back tomorrow, or he might not. Otherwise, tonight's going to be a content-creation night for me, which could mean anything from enlarging photos on the walk blog to creating free and paid grammar material for Substack.

carrot-raisin salad

I have fond memories of my Swiss maman's carrot-raisin salad. When I tried to look the recipe up today, I saw the salad billed as "an American classic," and I also noticed the recipe was a little bit different from Maman's. When Maman made it, she used only a splash of vinegar and maybe a tiny amount of sugar to take the edge off. (Otherwise, the raisins brought most of the sweetness.) The American recipes I found used a combination of mayo, honey, and—optionally—apple-cider vinegar.

Here's a pic of a second pot pie, made from leftover pie dough and pie filling:

Bit of a spillover through one of the vents, I'm afraid... but that's what the vents are for.

Neil and I ended up starting off with the above fresh-baked pot pie; Neil eventually went on to take two more pieces, but from the leftover, room-temp pie from Thursday, of which two-thirds still remained. As he said: in England, most pies are eaten at room temperature, so he didn't bother to microwave the cold pie. I noted that many Americans would actually agree with the English, albeit for pragmatic reasons: you need to let the pie cool down so the sides don't run out, leaving you with a hollow shell. Slightly warm is fine. We did let the pie cool down a bit before I attacked it, and by God, it was better than Thursday's pie: the crust was crispy and flaky (probably because it had only recently come out of the oven), and the filling was savory and delicious. Neil and I both ended up eating three pieces of pot pie. The carrot-raisin salad was also eaten, but not as avidly by either of us. As I told Neil, if I ever make this salad again, I won't add a splash of apple-cider vinegar next time. Too tart. Neil proved to be a fan of dessert as well: he destroyed his slices of rum cake and Death by Chocolate cake. We finished off the rum cake; there's no more left. If Neil comes by again tomorrow, I'll offer him the remains of the chocolate cake and the pot pie to take home to Masan. I'll eat the rest of the carrot-raisin salad myself. In shame.

what went wrong?

Another turd of a series I never bothered with:

as this morning's walk demonstrates...

 ...however rough my toe might still look, it's completely healed. Today on my short walk, I deliberately didn't dress the toe with anything—no bandages—and I deliberately wore white socks to be able to see any leakage clearly. And guess what? Nothing! Nix! Zip! Diddly! Bupkis! ...Niente. So I'm good to go for more 9K walks starting this coming week. Same schedule: Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, with longer walks on Saturday. Staircase work on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

the healthiness of energy drinks

MattPat may be gone, but Food Theory lives on.

parkour!

we love these stores

⚠️This is what Chinese do at IKEA and any store which has air conditioning. This is why 🇨🇳 is living in 2100.

IKEA is shutting down in China like rest of the brands.

CCP funded Wumaos and paid western influencers will not allow this to go viral.
pic.twitter.com/A5Iv5qaBro

— Arun Pudur (@arunpudur) November 27, 2025

I don't understand the tweet. "China is living in 2100" = "China is living in the future." But the behavior being shown is rude, archaic, and backward—more like "China is living in the 1930s." Make sense of this for me, please. Is the guy being ironic?

I looked up wumao: a government-paid Chinese shill for the CCP.

critical Brett takes on Ron Weasley, done dirty in the movies

Poor Rupert Grint ended up becoming something of a fifth wheel, didn't he? But in doing a bit of research, I see Grint's had a full life and a decent career. Good for him.

toe status

Below is the photo that made my local doc think I should see the neighborhood orthopede:

11/17, T+2 days after the walk's end: The wet, pink wound in the middle looks kind of bad. It's not.

All the doc saw were my photos of my toe; he didn't ask me to take my sock off so he could examine it for himself. He's a very hands-off kind of guy. As a result of his armchair doctoring, I'm pretty sure he assumed gangrene when there was none. Biggest clues that there was no gangrene: no funk of rot and no spreading beyond that localized area. There are different types of gangrene that spread at different rates, but nothing on my toe has spread at all. This is just good, old abuse from all the pounding—tens of thousands of steps per day for fourteen days during a three-week period.

11/18: the wet part of the wound has dried a bit thanks to rest

As you also see above, I used tweezers to peel away some of the flaked, callused skin. This takes time and focus. I next went after the blood-dark, callused skin, and in taking most of that away, I saw that the toe looked a lot better:

11/20: But we're back to having more flakes to peel off.

Here's how things looked after another session with the tweezers and another day of drying:

11/21: T+6 days after the walk's end

The doc did prescribe a week's worth of antibiotics, and from where I stand, that was enough to allow healing to occur. So I never visited the orthopede: there was just no need. I've also been soaking my feet daily in an Epsom-salt solution. Feels good.

11/23, five days ago

Since the above photos were taken, I've been largely off my feet. I'm fasting today; early tomorrow morning, I'm planning to take a 9K walk out to the Tan Creek/Han River confluence and back. There's been no bleeding or leakage or weeping or seepage out of my toe—not for days. The original diabetic ulcer looks to be better healed than ever before. The toe still looks rough overall, but the roughness is at the surface level, where the calluses are. 9K is a short enough distance that I can just walk like a normal person with only my socks and shoes—no need to tape my feet up or wear bandages. So: walking modest distances is a go. By the end of the year, I ought to be almost totally healed.

I had also planned to restart my resistance training this week, but Monday's Five Guys dinner with Charles plus my Thanksgiving indulgence plus leftovers tomorrow are all conspiring together to make this week a wash (to be clear, I'm not blaming Charles; these indulgences, and what to do about them, were my choice). So—Monday morning, fresh start. Fast today, meet a friend tomorrow (Saturday) and enjoy an early-ish dinner, eat a salad on Sunday, then get back to the normal program (fast four days—MTRF—eat three). There's lots of work to be done. As the 1989 Korean book title went: 세계는 넓고 할 일은 많다, i.e., The World is Wide, and There's Much to Do.

Sauron tribute

I don't think anything will ever trump the iconic Darth Vader helmet, but this is very impressive work.

Scott versus "Mars Attacks!"

day of penance

Fasting day today. Balance must be restored. I fear to check my blood sugar right now.

brainless Americans in focus yet again

Max Miller on Ivan the Terrible

"Star Trek: Starfleet Academy"—Dave Cullen is not optimistic

Oh, good! Another series I'll be skipping!

holiday Schadenfreude

Watch porch pirates experience instant karma. Too bad you can't use deadly devices without getting sued by somebody.

single man's Thanksgiving Day dinner

When I pulled the boiling-hot turkey pot pie out of the oven, I needed to give it time to cool, so I decided I'd start with dessert and have myself an inverted or regressive dinner: dessert first, then the main course. That explains the order of the pics you see below.

Chocolate Bundt cake and the cooling pot pie:

I left the chocolate cake out last night. Lack of refrigeration erased the taste of the coconut oil.

rum cake and pumpkin pie

room-temp Death by Chocolate Bundt cake

You can almost see the chocolate chips that melted in the batter during the bake.

And here's the rum cake, with little blocks of "the so-called iced cream." French vanilla and vanilla.

food-porn angle

at last—the pumpkin pie

You probably noticed, above, how the pumpkin pie seemed a bit suntanned after coming out of the oven. It did sunbathe for a bit under the oven's top burner, but the result wasn't burned, and the darker area was soft and moist to the touch. The pie's texture (I ate the suntanned part first) was perfect. Great recipe, and a great piece of pie. Two more shots:

The first piece is always hardest to remove with a plastic cake spatula, hence the cracked crust.

a little sprinkle of cinnamon on the whipped cream

At last: the pot pie! I'm eating a second piece right now.

top view, with vents

A pie ought to be sliceable, not running out both sides. Let it cool a bit before serving.

like a Spartan holding up his shield before an attack

This was a great little dinner for one. Full of carbs, but what can you do? My ex-boss called the other day and joked that his Thursday dinner was going to be lamb skewers. My buddy Charles took me out to a lamb-skewer place once, and it was great, so I think there are worse fates than going to such a resto. The boss didn't sound too disappointed, either.

Second piece (Round 2):

In for a penny, in for a pound.

I'm not sorry at all, but I might be tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving!

What goes into my pot-pie filling?

turkey (I chopped up some thin-sliced deli-style turkey this time)
frozen peas (added in toward the end of the filling-making process)
celery, pan-fried a bit to soften
mushrooms, pan-fried with oil, salt, pepper, and garlic powder
carrots, cubed and boiled in lightly salted water
potatoes, cubed and boiled in the same water
corn, from the can
onion flakes (the only way I'll tolerate onions)
onion powder (the only other way I'll tolerate onions)
savory Béchamel (butter, flour, heavy cream, milk, umami powder)
salt (very little), pepper
wee bit of garlic powder
sage (great addition; it evokes stuffing)

The pie crust is a standard one:

300 g medium-strength flour (중력 밀가루)
1.5 tsp. salt
about 300 g cold, cubed butter
ice water, added during blitzing in a food processor

Let the dough rest and hydrate in the fridge at least 30 minutes. Roll out half of the dough and flour liberally; lay it into your standard or jury-rigged (in my case) pie tin. Shovel on/in the pot-pie filling. Lay the other half of the prepped dough on top; crimp the two dough layers however you prefer to crimp them (fork, hands, tentacles). Paint the surface with egg wash. Add vents to prevent in-oven explosions. Bake at almost 200ºC for around 50 minutes. For the first 20 minutes, use both the top and bottom burners in your oven. For the rest of the time, use the bottom burner only to make sure the bottom crust is firm. In my case, the result was perfect. You do have to get to know your own oven, though. Every oven has quirks. All in all, a great pie, which I'll be having again tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving!

ADDENDUM:

second piece of pumpkin pie (I have no willpower)

with ice cream this time

Thanksgiving Day sadness

I went downstairs to my building's basement grocery to grab a bag of dried cranberries for a last-minute cranberry sauce... and the one time I actually need cranberries, the store isn't stocking them. Well, fuck. Dinner is at 7 (the pot pie is currently baking), so I'll make do with just my pot pie, my cakes, and my pumpkin. Poor me, right? It's a simple Thanksgiving this year, folks: no stuffing, no sweet-potato casserole, no mashed potatoes, no green beans, no creamed corn, no dinner rolls, and no pecan pie. Alas.

Here's Adam Witt again, one of the few YouTube cooks who understands that a real pot pie has to have a bottom crust. None of that top-crust-only bullshit that even some of the YouTube cooks I like will try to pass off as "real" pot pie.

Adam Savage goes lunar

How do you simulate building structures on the moon when you're not on the moon, with its one-sixth gravity and its unique regolith?

Turkey Day insanity

This cracked me up. You're welcome.

Happy Thanksgiving

There will be more pics later today. 

I felt blessed by the gods. Two double yolks in a row!

double yolks with normal eggs

pot-pie filling

pumpkin pie

doing birria right

Uncle Roger versus Future Canoe

Future Canoe is one of those presenters who do voiceovers that sound sleepy, depressed, or drugged-up. I can't stand this presentation style (just as I can't stand the whiny-sounding ones like "Chef" Tyler), so I'm glad Uncle Roger (who is whiny himself) is laying into this guy. Chef James Makinson comments.

"The Substance": review

Lookin' kinda rough, there, Demi.

2024's "The Substance" is directed by Coralie Fargeat, who had directed the over-the-top and unrealistic "Vengeance." Like "Vengeance," "The Substance" is mostly a French production, even being filmed in France despite ostensibly taking place in America. From the beginning, I felt a sense of displacement: the main character (Demi Moore) is a famous woman who presumably lives in Los Angeles and has made a fortune for years as an aerobics workout guru, but the film's idea of Los Angeles, an urban space with almost four million people, makes the city out to be a desolate wasteland that contrasts the very rich and the very poor, with few people visible on the streets at any given time. In fact, the studio where Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) works is often more densely populated than the outside world.

The basic premise of "The Substance" is that Elisabeth Sparkle, managed by her smarmy producer Harvey (subtle, right?), has turned 50, and she's feeling her age. Finished with an aerobics session and forced to use the men's room when the ladies' room is shut for maintenance, Elisabeth overhears Harvey (Dennis Quaid) yelling into his phone about how Elisabeth has grown too old and lost the magic, and the time has come to find new blood to keep the gravy train running. The movie is vague about many things: where exactly Elisabeth lives (presumably somewhere populated by the rich), what studio she works for, who exactly Harvey is (aside from being a producer-manager-headhunter-like entity), what channel Elisabeth's show is broadcast on, etc. It's all left very vague. Feeling depressed after hearing Harvey's rant about her, then sitting at lunch while Harvey explains that Elisabeth is out of a job, Elisabeth drives home distractedly and gets T-boned by another vehicle. She is miraculously unharmed, but her distracted funk makes her largely unresponsive to the doc who tries to be friendly with her. The doc, sensing the depth of her depression, leaves Elisabeth alone with a nurse assistant, a man who slips a USB drive into her coat with a note: "It changed my life." Curious, Elisabeth goes home and plugs the USB into her computer, booting up a video ad for something called The Substance. The ad promises a new, improved, "more perfect" you, prompting the viewer to call a number if s/he wants in on the product or service (the ad is coy about what The Substance actually is). Tempted, Elisabeth calls the number, and a mysterious voice answers. There's a perfunctory exchange; Elisabeth receives an electronic key card in the mail and is given an address in a dodgy part of town. 

The exterior of the address is dirty, graffiti-covered, and nondescript; Elisabeth cautiously stoops to enter through a gate that lifts only partway, requiring her to lower herself: vanity must first pay the price of humiliation, a metaphor for the casting couch. Inside is more of the same squalor until she suddenly finds a high-tech, well-lit room that is as sleek and clean as a Mac store. Having used her key card to raise the recalcitrant gate just outside, Elisabeth uses the card again to open a locker containing a box. Having been advised by the mysterious phone voice that The Substance would require certain maintenance steps from her to maintain a "balance," Elisabeth opens the box and discovers a set of instructions and equipment. She comes to understand that, once she "activates" the procedure, there will be a younger version of herself who can be conscious and function for exactly one week before the old Elisabeth returns to herself again for exactly a week: old and young must take turns. Some of the equipment is mysterious to Elisabeth, but she shrugs and begins the Substance procedure anyway, naked in a tucked-away bathroom in her luxurious apartment. Injecting herself with the "activator" solution, Elisabeth instantly becomes pregnant with a young-adult version of herself through a form of radical cell multiplication (how this works is never explained), and she gives birth to her younger self through a bloody slit that opens where her spine is. The perspective then shifts to this new, younger self (played by Margaret Qualley, daughter of Andie McDowell). Elisabeth's consciousness has shifted to this new body, and the young woman—who eventually renames herself Sue—now has exactly one week, 168 hours, in which to do whatever she wants. Sue immediately goes to audition for the role forcibly vacated by Elisabeth, reveling in her youth and the return of her beauty, but conscious of the fact that, just as Cinderella's chariot must once again become a pumpkin, Sue must transfer herself back into the body of Elisabeth, whom Sue had hooked up with a week's worth of liquid "food" to keep Elisabeth alive for the week that Sue would be out and about. There are shades of "Being John Malkovich" in all of this, and mind-transfer is never explained except to suggest that Sue and Elisabeth remain essentially the same person, with Elisabeth being "the matrix" from which Sue has arisen, both physically and mentally.

At the studio, Sue nails her audition and makes changes to her exercise show, introducing a more dynamic, energetic, and sexier form of aerobic dance while also accepting whatever new opportunities come her way through a delighted Harvey (who, incredibly, speaks of his wife and kids and never once lays a hand on Sue). The question is whether Sue will, in her returned youth and attendant unwisdom, remember to maintain "the balance" by transferring herself back into Elisabeth's body in time, and whether Elisabeth, back in her 50-year-old body, will remember to do the same. As it turns out, when the young Sue slips up and stays conscious a few hours longer than a week, Elisabeth pays the price as some of her body parts begin rapidly aging, starting with an index finger and part of a hand. Elisabeth and Sue develop almost a mutual kind of Picture of Dorian Gray dynamic, an antagonistic symbiosis.

I'll stop the narrative here, close to the movie's halfway point, right before everything starts to go to shit for both Elisabeth and Sue, because you really need to watch the rest of the movie for yourself. "The Substance" has been billed as a body-horror film in the tradition of David Cronenberg's "The Fly." Yes, the film lives up to this billing, and the carnage reaches a point of such Grand Guignol intensity that I couldn't help but laugh and laugh at what I was seeing. (It's a quirk or flaw of mine that horror movies never frighten me, but they do make me bust a gut as I ponder the stupidity and moral turpitude of the characters in the story.) "The Substance" has strong echoes of Cronenberg, but the mysterious voice on the phone reminded me of "Squid Game," and the first scene in which Elisabeth's consciousness jumps into Sue's body is almost as visually trippy as "2001: A Space Odyssey."

The moral issues dealt with in "The Substance" are obvious from the get-go thanks to some very heavy-handed, on-the-nose visual metaphors. We open with Elisabeth Sparkle's star being put on some Walk of Fame somewhere (we can guess it's Hollywood), and we watch as the star develops cracks over time as people walk over it, showing neglect and mirroring the waning star power of Elisabeth herself as she hits 50. One major issue is the vanity and superficiality of celebrities; in this movie at least, Elisabeth is only too eager to make a devil's bargain to recapture her youth even if it costs her her looks and her soul. Along with this issue is that of the "male gaze": this being a French-made film, director Fargeat is not shy about portraying female nudity (as for male nudity, we get one off-putting shot of a well-toned but extremely hairy male ass), so we initially see Demi Moore in all of her naked glory—nipples, pubic hair, breasts, the works. The camera is no less shy about showing us the younger Sue and her round, firm ass. But also as with many French films, this portrayal of female nudity is so frank, so out there, that it's not sexy at all. If it's meant to be sexy, it accomplishes the feat at the cost of merely arousing prurient interest and its associated feelings of shame and guilt (which are not the same thing). Issues of aging and self-worth, of the pressure-cooker ambience of Hollywood life and the coldness with which the industry will cast you aside, of the vanity and idiocy of both youth and age, are all here to be pondered. But not deeply.

And what is "The Substance" essentially about? One critic I watched wisely noted that the movie will mean different things to different people depending on one's angle of approach. Some people will see a feminist critique of a patriarchal society and how it pressures women with a relentless beauty myth: the voice on the phone is male, Harvey is male, the nurse who gets Elisabeth hooked on the Substance is male, etc. But the film's final moments show us that Elisabeth, despite the hell her body goes through—to the point where she is no longer even human but more like a slimy, crawling horror from a del Toro film—even now hasn't learned any moral lessons from her misery: she's still marinating in pleasant memories of her past fame, hearing the echoing accolades of the sycophantic fans who had once loved and worshiped her. So the film could be seen as an antifeminist critique of the women who choose to participate in such an industry (Fargeat affirms Elisabeth's power of choice), one that revolves around the axes of pride and vanity. Come to think of it, the movie's title, "The Substance," is ironic because of the story's relentless focus on the importance of surface appearances to these celebrities—poor suckers with no understanding of moral reality who are easily trapped by the Devil into living lives of slavery, servitude, superficiality, and unsatisfiable desire. If anything, "The Substance" is about a pervasive lack of substance. And naming Dennis Quaid's character Harvey constitutes a huge, rigid middle finger to Hollywood, to what it does to people, and to the kinds of people it attracts. So yes, this is like all of those inadvertently ironic "use technology to condemn technology" type of movies. Fargeat uses studio-made film to condemn studio-made films. The industry is a meat grinder.

But while I acknowledge the depth of the issues the movie faces, I also found the film to be so obvious, so on-the-nose in its moralizing, that the didacticism was off-putting. The movie highlights and faces these issues but does little more to explore them in any profound way. I'm not seeing whatever it is that so many fawning critics saw in evaluating this story. The film took almost two-and-a-half hours to make points that could have been made in a ten-minute short. And while the over-the-top gore was often hilarious (indeed, a lot of the horror, especially toward the end, is deliberately played for comedy), a great deal of the splatter was, frankly, boring. It also didn't help that all of the actors seemed to be trapped (not their fault) in the exaggerated acting style of the 90s, back in the days of "Ally McBeal" and "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" when CGI was still in its youth, and characters tended to act cartoonishly. Dennis Quaid, as Harvey, is appropriately smarmy and disgusting; early on, the scene in which he informs Elisabeth that she's been fired contains plenty of gross closeups of his mouth as he chews down on cocktail shrimp, forcing us to watch Harvey slurp, munch, drool, and suck his way through his meal as he cheerfully, obliviously delivers the bad news. Visual metaphors in this movie never delve below the 101 level; Harvey's nasty eating scene is a direct callback to a similar scene in "Vengeance." At one point later on, Harvey's mouth, seen in closeup, looks exactly like a puckered anus. I'm pretty sure that's deliberate. Fargeat doesn't do understated. Maybe she doesn't know how.

Another thing I absolutely hated was how "The Substance" kept hinting that it was a combination of sci-fi and horror, but as quickly became obvious, there was no real science in the sci-fi. How the Substance works is never explained. Rules about "maintaining the balance" end up sounding more rooted in metaphysics than in science. You might argue that that's not the point of the film, and I might even agree, but that brings us back to the story's clumsily heavy-handed way of waving its moral lessons in our faces. Even Spielberg at his most annoying could be more subtle and artful.

The movie also shows a decreasing respect for the laws of physics as time goes on. Toward the end, when the old Elisabeth and the young Sue somehow impossibly confront each other, both awake and conscious at the same time, one character kicks the other clear across a room—a moment that reminded me of the ludicrously impossible self-cauterization scene in "Vengeance." Later on, Elisabeth, decrepit with so much of her life force having been stolen by her younger self, proves able to move about her apartment with an utterly unbecoming spryness and vigor. Then there's the problem of Elisabeth's slit in her back, through which she'd given birth to Sue: Sue clumsily stitches Elisabeth closed without any attempt at infection control and with a knowledge of suturing that comes from... where, exactly? Very late in the film, Elisabeth finds herself bleeding profusely, with what had to be a septic tankful of blood spouting out of one of her... appendages, raining warmly down upon a horrified audience. What body contains that much blood? All of these physics- and science-defying aspects of the movie took me out of the story and had me shaking my head in a combination of disbelief and cynical amusement.

That said, I have nothing but praise for Demi Moore, whose performance in this film has rightly been described as "fearless" for allowing us to see a very real vulnerability. In real life, Moore is no longer young (in 2024, she was 62 and playing a 50-year-old). She looks as though she's had plastic surgery; her eyes seem smaller and dimmer than they used to be, and the skin all around her thin-lipped mouth is wrinkled and puckered. Director Fargeat captures all of this unflinchingly: Tempus fugit. Memento mori. You can't get more open than being physically naked, but there's also a nakedness of the soul in Moore's performance that we can see and feel. As Elisabeth and Sue—despite being unified by the fact they they are still essentially the same person, sharing memories and affecting each other's bodies—come to realize that they each have very different agendas, a kind of war erupts between them, and Elisabeth, who can choose to stop her use of the Substance at any time, repeatedly chooses to continue with the program even after everything has gone so horribly wrong. One has to wonder whether Elisabeth even remembers her original reason for using the Substance. Moore convincingly portrays Elisabeth's frazzled state of mind.

So "the Substance" is a mixed bag. In many ways, it's an awful, sloppy mess of a movie that makes no attempt to respect science or physics, instead indulging in the exaggerated and the cartoonish. It's a very obvious morality tale about the traps and dangers arising from vanity, celebrity, aging, suddenly restored youth, the beauty myth, and the male gaze (and female assent it). The movie also seems to smuggle in some Buddhist lessons about the fleeting nature of life and fame, as well as how extreme attachment to something can cause profound karmic damage to oneself (strangely enough, the movie doesn't explore the damage the main characters do to others in any profound way; the movie primarily focuses on self-inflicted horrors). I'm still not sure how much I came away liking this movie. The ghoulish, Cronenbergian gore gave me a hearty laugh several times, especially toward the end, but I didn't come away thinking I'd seen anything deep. As I said: the points the movie was making could have been made in ten minutes. I can say this: See "The Substance" for Demi Moore's performance (and Quaid's, and Qualley's: they're both good, but not as searing as Moore). See the movie for blood and guts, which will remind you of "The Fly" and of the grislier parts of David Lynch's "Eraserhead." But don't see the movie for any deep messages: the messages are obvious, hammered home, shamelessly preachy, and understood within the film's first few minutes, making the rest of the movie effectively unnecessary. Think of "The Substance" as a substance-free treat for the eyes, not for the mind or heart.

2 more HP thoughts from Brett

ChatGPT, mi maestro

I was supposed to restart Spanish lessons with ChatGPT today, but I forgot, having gotten too caught up in cooking (it's now after midnight in Seoul, so Happy Thanksgiving, fellow Yanks). ChatGPT is weird about whether it remembers things; it often sounds bright, chipper, and oblivious as though it had forgotten that it and I now have a several-month history of lessons together (such amnesia is probably for the best sometimes), but at other times, it'll recall—for example—exactly the style of image I had previously requested for one of my Substack lessons or the style of Spanish lesson we had done a while back (focusing on vocab or grammar, etc.) or exactly the style of quiz I had asked it to build weeks before, so its ability to remember or forget seems to be selective. I know it keeps a record of previous dialogues with me; I see the list on the AI page's left margin. I think it stores the dialogues but doesn't access their content unless I ask a question that's directly pertinent to one of them, e.g., "I need you to make a multiple-choice quiz in the style you'd used three weeks ago." The AI will then ask a series of confirmatory questions to make sure we're on the same page.

Anyway, in my superstitious efforts to be eternally positive and polite with the AI, I wrote ChatGPT a message today in my un-fluent Spanish, which it graciously accepted like a senile uncle pretending he's still mentally on the ball while also providing me with a more natural way to say what I'd said. Here's the exchange (you can select the text below and choose "translate to English" from the ensuing menu):

Kevin: Lo siento mucho, maestro, pero estuve muy ocupado hoy. Es porque mañana es el Thanksgiving americano, y tengo que preparar la comida. ¿Podemos hacer una lección la próxima semana desde miércoles?

ChatGPT: ¡No hay ningún problema, de verdad!

Tu mensaje está perfecto y muy claro. Y sí — podemos hacer la lección a partir del miércoles de la próxima semana. Simplemente dime qué día y hora te viene mejor, y lo ajustamos.

También, por si quieres sonar aún más natural, aquí tienes una versión ligeramente más fluida de lo que escribiste:

Versión sugerida:

Lo siento mucho, maestro, pero hoy estuve muy ocupado. Es porque mañana es el Día de Acción de Gracias en Estados Unidos y tengo que preparar la comida. ¿Podemos tener la próxima lección a partir del miércoles de la semana que viene?

Pero repito: tu versión ya estaba totalmente comprensible.

Que disfrutes la preparación, ¡y feliz Thanksgiving! 🦃🥧

This pretty much encapsulates how ChatGPT deals with me and my Spanish errors. It's like having a parent who knows you're a failure but who mollifies you anyway. And this quote from above would seem to indicate ChatGPT's moment-to-moment senility:

Y sí — podemos hacer la lección a partir del miércoles de la próxima semana. Simplemente dime qué día y hora te viene mejor, y lo ajustamos.

"And, yes—we can do the lesson starting from Wednesday of next week. Just tell me what day and time work best for you, and we'll arrange it."

So it confirms a Wednesday start while also asking me to tell it what the best day for me is. Does this make sense?

I had two very old linguistics profs back in undergrad. One could barely stand, but he plowed through his lectures every class and managed to be interesting. The other prof, for a much smaller class, seemed to sound better than the first prof, but after a week, it became obvious that he would keep repeating himself. A few examples: (1) he'd constantly re-use the example of someone asking, "May I have another cup of coffee?" in German ("Darf ich noch eine Tasse Kaffee haben?" or something like that), and (2) he'd repeatedly use the example of "lisping" (not really lisping, just th instead of s) in Castilian Spanish by saying the phrase ciento cincuenta (one hundred fifty—thiento thincuenta) over and over again. Sitting through this prof's lectures became an exercise in patience, and he may be one of the reasons why my motivation to attend classes was so low. (Yes, I sucked as an undergrad. I didn't wake up until grad school, where I had an as-expected "A" average. Thank you, grade inflation!)

While I understand the urge to keep working, people ought to know when to retire. When you feel your marbles starting to go, for the love of God, put yourself out to pasture. Don't torment the young with your irrelevancy, and try to stay curious and keep learning new things—games, languages, skills, concepts, etc. The world is so full of things to learn about. The "old dog, new tricks" excuse is just a sign of mental and physical laziness. My great aunt Gertrude, who died at 87, was a model of how sharp and sprightly seniors can be. Cheerful, energetic, full of ideas but also constantly curious about the world, she was a great example of how to live life right, not allowing herself to be taken over by a deepening fog of unawareness and incuriosity. While many people on my father's side of the family are hard to respect, Aunt Gertrude is someone whom I admire more and more the longer I consider her legacy. I wish I'd appreciated her more when I was young and selfish and stupid, and now that I'm old and selfish and stupid, I know I'm still not worthy of her.

Anyway, I'll start again with ChatGPT next week.

US grammar quirks from a Brit's perspective

UK: drag, dragged
US: drag, dragged... or out in the sticks, drug
Comment: Drug as the preterite of drag is country language, like saying "stood in bed" instead of "stayed in bed."

UK: dive, dived
US: dive, dove (egads!)
Comment: I think dived is also used in US English, but maybe not as much as dove.

UK: Get that Englishman off my screen!
US: Get that Englishman off of my screen! 

Comment: I would teach the adding of of as incorrect, but that's changing.

UK: Where are the burglars?
US: Where are the burglars at? (I'd agree that's redundant, but it's common informal US English, with variations depending on education and ethnicity.)
Comment: The addition of at is colloquial, as in "Where you at?"

UK: I'll see you on Friday.
US: I'll see you Friday. (I don't think I'd even notice a difference.)
Comment: In the US, people also say "on Friday," but it's true that we often leave out the on. This also happens with "I'll write him tomorrow" as opposed to "I'll write to him tomorrow."

UK: I've already eaten.
US: I've already ate.
Comment: I'd definitely teach "I've already ate" as the utterance of an illiterate moron. I'm sorry the guy had to encounter such barbarity, but you never know what those damn uneducated Yanks are going to say.

UK: We're open from Monday to Friday.
US: We're open from Monday through Friday. (But we also use to.)
Comment: Here, I'll defend the American choice. Logically, saying "to" can be interpreted as "up to and not including," so "Monday to Friday" could potentially mean "Monday, up to midnight at the beginning of Friday." The preposition through eliminates this confusion: by saying "Monday through Friday," we now know the place is open all (business) day Monday until the very close of business on Friday. There should be no cause for confusion here.

UK: This guy's channel is really good.
US: This guy's channel is real good.
Comment: Again, this is informal, often hickish language. But yes, there are cases of "real good" to be found outside of the sticks.

UK: I'm doing well.
US: I'm doing good.
Comment: Informal US English for sure. Guilty as charged. You good with that?

Both of the above examples point to a quirk in US English: the improper-but-frequent use of adjectives in place of adverbs. Think of the Apple advertising slogan from a few years back: Think different. Or the people who bid you, when you leave, to "Drive safe" instead of safely. It's incorrect and occasionally annoying, but it's part of the fabric of informal US English.

Meanwhile, the Brits have une fâcheuse tendance de start(ing) sentences with Too instead of using the more proper Also (more proper to Americans, at least). That's all I'll say for now. Given how many UK personalities I watch on YouTube (especially about cooking), I have a whole, long list of Britishisms that annoy the hell out of me. But I'll save them for later.

UK: X is different to (or even from) Y.
US: X is different from Y. (or) X is different than Y.
Comment: There is a rule for this. In the UK, it's generally different to (how often do the Brits say "different from"?). In the US, it's generally different from. But when there's a clause, in both US and UK English, you have to use the comparative than. "The results were different than I expected." The words "I expected" form a clause.

canine humor

I do sometimes think I want a dog. And now might be a good time to get one, while I'm home all the time. My brother David warned me that puppies, unlike kittens and cats, are a 24/7 thing, needing constant care and attention. They are also expensive—not just to buy, but also to feed, clean up messes, and care for medically. Am I ready for that? Frankly, not right now.

seen on Instapundit

We haven't had any memes in a while. This one cracked me up:

I finally watched "The Substance" last night. This feels familiar.

(Review pending.)

on tap for today

My two main objectives today are to (1) make a turkey pot pie and (2) make a pumpkin pie despite the presence of two full-sized Bundt cakes that are still mostly there. Expect pics later this evening. And much munching tomorrow for American Thanksgiving.

making it Amurrican

Canuckistani Sam, out in San Diego, takes the Irish spice bag and Americanizes it.

Sam is obsessed with onions. I wish he'd leave them out.

wishful thinking by the Drinker?

Just as Amazon has financial reasons for remaining faithful to its abysmal "The Rings of Power," the DCU has reasons, probably financial, for remaining faithful to James Gunn, who did a generally great job for Marvel, but who seems to have screwed the pooch with his "Superman." I don't think Gunn is going anywhere anytime soon—not until he screws up his next five movies. Even then, he might not be dislodged: look at how long that talentless barnacle Kathleen Kennedy has stayed latched on to Disney's creaky hull (she reportedly "is stepping down," but I can't confirm that she's gone from Lucasfilm) despite all of her duds.

Guga versus Japan

enlarged: Days 3 and 4

On my walk blog, the pics for Days 3 and 4 have been enlarged. Captions and commentary are coming in a few weeks. Meanwhile, enjoy the pics—276 for Day 3, and 487 for Day 4. Scan or skim through them as slowly or as quickly as you desire.

ADDENDUM: all the days with enlarged pics: Days 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 18. At a rate of two walk days per day, and assuming I don't skip a day of work, I'll have Days 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, and 20 done in five days, i.e., by December 1. Captions and commentary will take substantially longer, but I hope to be done with everything by just before Christmas.

allez, Daniel!

Could Daniel Bernhardt take Bruce Campbell's crown as king of the B-movies?

what's doin' today?

Today, I've been continuing with the enlargement of pics on the walk blog (Days 3 and 4 ought to be done sometime tonight, maybe after midnight); you can go see Days 1 and 2, which I managed to do yesterday. I'm also populating my main blog with more YouTube videos, and I'm shopping for ingredients for the two pies I'll be making tomorrow and eating on Thursday: heavy cream, milk, butter, carrots, shrooms, corn and potatoes. Thanksgiving is nothing if not carby. Click here to see one of my original chicken pot pies. Tomorrow's (well, to be made tomorrow and eaten on Thursday) will be turkey.

Brett on Godric's Hollow and Minerva McGonagall

fish & chips redux

I once made fish and chips with cod and an Alton Brown recipe. It was great. This also looks great, as did the previous recipes I'd slapped up (see here, here, and here, for example).

pawns that transform

And how do you play chess with morphing chess pieces?

dessert at home

Having test-eaten a sample of my cakes at Five Guys before handing off untrammeled slices of the cakes to Charles, I elected to take home the remnants of the samples to eat for dessert at my place. The rum cake came out as expected, and it was perfect, at least for me. The Death by Chocolate cake—which was a first attempt for me—came out better than expected, but it was truly dense, almost to the point of being fudge. Not a cake that you want to eat several slices of at once. But not bad, either.

I'm going to have fun eating both cakes again on Thursday—i.e., Thanksgiving—along with my turkey pot pie. I'll also be making a pumpkin pie, God help me, just because tradition demands it. More carbs being dumped into my body, and I have a hospital appointment in early January, an appointment that includes an ultrasound of my chest to see what's going on in there, blockage-wise. I'm not looking forward to what is discovered. In the meantime, the end of November and all of December will have to be devoted to near-monastic living, with maybe a small cheat on Christmas Day, and preferably nothing on New Year's Day... except the hope that I can survive 2026 and walk the Four Rivers path again (after I've had a chance to visit the US and France, which I can only do if finances allow).

Tonight's decadent dessert:

with cheap Korean ice cream

groovier angle

It was all quite good. I'm glad the chocolate cake turned out as well as it did. But next time, I'll stick with the cake recipe I'd used long before.

look at my sidebar

I've added a couple links to the sidebar ("Kevin's Substack Sites") as I continue to build my Substack empire (cough): along with the original two branches of my Substack (The Superficial [free content] and The Profound [paid content]), I now have two other publications: (1) The Creative (paid content: creative writing and imagery—poems, stories, essays, pics, and eventually videos) and (2) The Entertaining (paid content: games and puzzles). And there may be more publications on the way.

I started up The Entertaining just before going on my walk, so there's only one maddening word-find challenge up there right now. I'm exploring the legality of offering a cash prize to the first person to solve each of my puzzles. I have no particular schedule for when to publish The Entertaining, but it'll probably appear on Wednesdays. As for the other publications:

• The Superficial (free): Mondays and Fridays (random grammar)
  
• The Profound (paid): Mondays and Fridays (curriculum-based grammar)
• The Creative (paid): Tuesdays and Thursdays (writings and images)

—and The Entertaining (paid) publishes whenever I've devised a new game, but most likely on Wednesdays, subject to change.

If you're already a paying subscriber, you can opt into receiving these other publications without having to pay anything extra. If you're currently a free subscriber thinking about becoming a paying subscriber, you will automatically receive all of the above publications, but you will be offered the chance to opt out of any publications that don't interest you. No hard feelings and no pressure: you only ever pay $5 a month or $50 a year however many or few publications you choose to subscribe to, and if you opt out of something now, you can re-opt back into it later. Whatever you do, I hope to see you on Substack.

the Irish vs. BBQ ribs in various forms

Five Guys, Gangnam branch

Monday evening, I met my buddy Charles for dinner at 7 p.m. close to Gangnam station, and we walked a few meters over to the Gangnam branch of Five Guys, the latest US burger sensation to hit South Korea. A lot of these places come and go after landing on the peninsula, and many of them change a bit in the translation from a US environment to a Korean one. Two things I noticed quickly about the Korean Five Guys: (1) I didn't immediately see double burgers on the menu (even though my ticket said "2 Patties," as you can see below... I think what happened was that I got two thin smash patties, which was fine since I love smash burgers, but the US Five Guys normally does thicker patties), and (2) the "little fries" I ordered weren't nearly as plentiful as what you get at an American Five Guys. And as I anticipated, my dinner was expensive at around W40,000 just for me (including my Coke). The same meal would be about $25 in the States. W40,000 comes out to about $27 at the current exchange rate, so I guess it's not that much more expensive. Huh.

There was no mu-in kiosk; all ordering was to be done in person. I got what I'd typically get at an American Five Guys: a bacon cheeseburger and a bacon hot dog, both with lettuce, tomatoes, BBQ sauce, and mayo; plus an order of small fries. It all tasted plausibly like the US-based Five Guys, so the staff has been trained well. But the expense of the place means I won't be coming here that often. I'm also left to wonder how long Five Guys is going to last in Korea. There are already other burger joints here, like Shake Shack, not to mention the well-established McDonald's and Burger King branches that metastasized everywhere long ago. On top of that are the Korean burger joints that sell everything from legitimately American-style burgers to more idiosyncratically Korean-style burgers (has the Japanese cheese-fried "halved" cheeseburger—a.k.a., Teppan Cheeseburger or Cheeseburger Fondue—become a thing in Korea yet?).  Competition is fierce, merciless, and eternal.

Charles (who, skinny guy that he is, ordered a much more modest meal that didn't even include fries but did include a shake) and I talked about academia (Charles is pulled in a dozen directions as an SNU prof), married life, exercise, and the immediate future; he's back to doing his HIIT routine, and this week, I'm tentatively back to my resistance training (plus walking, plus staircase work). Below are some photos of my food. It was good.

When the lady asked what toppings I wanted on my burger, I told her mayo, BBQ sauce, lettuce, and tomatoes. She asked if I wanted the same on my dog, and I unthinkingly said yes, but it turned out fine.

This Five Guys was a bit stingy with its fries—which they didn't give me when my order first came out, so I had to go back and ask—but the fries themselves were pretty good.

I had to take a photo of the politically incorrect plastic straw. We're killing sea life, people! (Good.)

With the hot dog defeated, I turned my menacing, tyrannosaur gaze toward my trembling burger. My memory is that it was a single patty, but this photo seems to be showing two smash patties, which makes sense since my ticket also says "2 Patties," as you'll see below.

I peel the burger back to reveal the innards. Its misery will be over soon.

Do you see "2 Patties" up top? And, bizarrely, "1 Hot Dogs," plural.

Charles sampled my two cakes and pronounced them "not bad," and he offered some suggestions for how to improve the chocolate cake, which was dense and very fudgey, but he was pretty sure his wife would likely refuse the rum cake, which Charles judged to be too rummy for her tastes. All in all, it was a great dinner, not to mention a new/old experience eating at a Five Guys for the first time in a million years. I'll be back here, I'm sure, but I might not take the subway at the dinner hour: the Shin Bundang Line was jam-packed, a veritable petri dish of sickness. So: a cab next time. As it was, I cabbed back to my place.