behind schedule

Over the past week or two, I've seen several movies that I'd like to review, so I might be spending a chunk of my upcoming three-day weekend (Monday, August 15, is Liberation Day in South Korea, which is a national holiday*) churning out the reviews I've been meaning to write. I've also got to write my three-fer review of the two Machete films plus "The Expendables III." So expect the following reviews:

1. "Last Days in the Desert" (Ewan McGregor as both Jesus and Satan)
2. "Can We Take a Joke?" (documentary about outrage culture, sponsored by FIRE)
3. "Sherlock Holmes" (2009, starring Robert Downey, Jr., and directed by Guy Ritchie)
4. "Hardcore Henry" (Sharlto Copley)
5. "Expendables III," "Machete," "Machete Kills" (three-fer)

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*August 15 marks Korea's emergence from under the thumb of the Japanese (the occupation ran from 1910 to 1945, i.e., 36 years). On this day, Korean luminaries give big speeches, none of which thank America for its role in liberating Korea. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that young Koreans somehow think Korea liberated itself. The lack of gratitude dovetails with ongoing resentment about US troop presence here, and I've long advocated pulling our troops out. Why stay where we're not appreciated? Besides, I actually sympathize with Korean resentment at the presence of US troops: how would I feel about, say, French soldiers patrolling the sidewalks of Washington, DC? Thanks to technology that allows for rapid force projection, we can still keep our promises of military aid without having to maintain bases on the peninsula. I want us out. I want South Korea at least 95% responsible for its own self-defense. A "tripwire" force composed of American sacrificial lambs is ludicrous.

national-security nightmare, Hillary edition

I recently posted some thoughts about how Donald Trump would be a national-security nightmare if he became president. All of that is counterfactual, of course: Trump isn't president yet, hence the conditional "would be." Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has a proven and ever-growing record as an actual national-security nightmare, and the latest horror is the execution by hanging of nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri—an execution that is very likely the result of two emails from 2010 that were transmitted via Hillary Clinton's jury-rigged server. For a closer look at the whole sordid affair, see here.

you have 90 seconds

It took me about a minute and a half to solve this problem, which I saw on YouTube:

In the comments, leave your answer in terms of pi, or use a calculator to give an answer in 4 decimal places (please round).

For confirmation, go watch the video, which offers two solutions: a simple solution involving commonsense geometry, and an unnecessarily complex solution involving higher math.* One of the commenters to the video notes that even sixth-grade Chinese kids might have trouble solving this. Since I used to tutor this stuff, though, I found it easy. Every once in a while, it's good to flex the brain muscles by doing little math problems like this.

(My handwritten solution is here.)

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*CORRECTION: the video actually goes on to consider a substantially more complicated problem: how to calculate the irregularly shaped area of one corner of the figure. That's a different animal altogether, and that's what I get for watching the video in my office with the audio off! Serves me right.

marrying

This morning, I took out a kilo of shredded (well, julienned) pork, ran it through my tiny Braun food processor to produce ground pork, threw in a bit of red-wine vinegar and an assortment of herbs and spices, then massaged the whole thing into Italian sausage. The meat needs several hours to settle; the flavors inside the pork must have time to marry, so the whole happy mess is sitting inside my fridge right now, and when I get back from my walk tonight, I'll have a kilo of Italian sausage waiting to be incorporated into spaghetti sauce. Am very much looking forward to this. For the curious: the recipe I used is here.

not the Russians?

When Democrat emails were recently leaked, word was that there were Russian fingerprints all over the job—telltale code that pointed toward foreign espionage and mischief. The conservative response to this has been that the media were constructing a "narrative" that pointed the finger at the Russians while at the same time trying to establish links between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, both of whom have publicly praised the other. These two narrative strands were supposed to slot into an even larger narrative: that Donald Trump is a traitor willing to sell out US interests to whichever foreign power flatters him the most.

There's no doubt in my mind that Trump, if he became president, would be a national-security nightmare, given his inability to control his own mouth. I also admit that I was leaning toward believing the Russian angle based on early reports that spoke with some authority about the electronic fingerprints associated with the DNC-email leak that was exposed by WikiLeaks. But now, it may be that the Russians are a giant red herring: this article claims that the email leak may have been the result of a Democrat staffer named Seth Rich.

If this is true, one has to wonder why Rich would leak these emails. Was he motivated by conscience? We'll never know: Seth Rich was shot in the back in northwest Washington, DC, exactly a month ago, on July 10, a little after 4AM. Some are calling this a random murder; others see this as yet another tick in what has been ominously labeled the Clinton Body Count. I'm not partial to wild-eyed conspiracy theories, but I will be interested to see what more turns up as the Seth Rich story develops. WikiLeaks is now offering a $20,000 reward to anyone who has information on Rich's death.

post-doc redux

The doc didn't have much to say about the urine glucose except that it was "good." My glycated hemoglobin stands at 7.8 mmol/L (under 7%), which the doc deems pre-diabetic and worthy of meds, but not in the danger zone. Same goes for blood pressure and cholesterol, i.e., borderline high. So: a month of meds prescribed for ol' Uncle Kevin, but the doc isn't alarmed by the numbers. We'll see, next month, how much they'll have gone down.

The doc did say something depressing, though: in terms of what influences the numbers more, it's the meds, not exercise, that will do the trick at a ratio of about 70% meds to 30% exercise. I take this to mean that the meds can produce immediate results whereas exercise (and, presumably, diet) can have a deeper long-term influence, but I'm not really sure that that's what the doc intended. I also find myself rejecting this notion, somewhat, based on so much anecdotal evidence that it's possible to get healthy enough to wean oneself off meds. I suppose that's going to have to be a new personal goal: reaching a point where the doc says I don't need meds anymore, and to get the hell out of his office.

As for dizziness: the doc didn't dwell on the matter. His immediate suspicion is blood pressure. I'll report back to him in a month, I guess, unless something serious happens, in which case I'll see him sooner.

the decline of Kevin's Pie

Months ago, I had predicted that Kevin's Pie, the store that sells shitty confections and is run by a dotty woman who knows nothing about customer service, would collapse and die within six months—by September 6, in fact. I even created a countdown timer to show how serious I was. More and more frequently these days, Kevin's Pie looks like this:

Will Kevin's Pie be dead by September 6? I have no idea, but the place is definitely dying.

9 million won ahead

Last week—and after two or three years of not doing so—I finally peeked in online at Major Debt #3—the one I owe to Wells Fargo for a $15,000 "eMax" tuition loan I had taken out in 1999. In the unsinkable budget I'd made, I had been assuming that that debt, once you added the interest, was still somewhere in the neighborhood of $17,000. What a delight, then, to discover the debt was only $7,800, which means I won't have to make two 9-million-won payments in 2017, as I'd thought I would: I'll be making only one.

With great joy, I went back to my budget spreadsheet and lopped off one of the two payments. The rest of my budget automatically readjusted, and the numbers now look even better than they had before. I've been paying everything down steadily for years; as a result, my credit rating, while not topping off at 850 (the maximum), is nevertheless super-healthy. In 2019, I'll be a very happy fifty-year-old. Meanwhile, I turn 47 at the end of this month, and I'll have paid off Major Debt #2 by then. That's certainly cause for celebration.

'til Tuesday

I went to the doc this morning, as requested, but the front-desk lady told me that my blood results still aren't in, so I should come back tomorrow. So there we are: tomorrow it is.

"not the end of the world"

Comma-splice-loving Charles Glasser writes on Facebook regarding Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton:

Truth be told, I'm just not that freaked out and worried. Clinton is a crony capitalist, not a raving Socialist. Trump is not Hitler or even Mussolini, he's more like Berlusconi.

Later on, in response to someone's comment, Glasser writes that Clinton and Trump are "not the end of the world." I don't see either Trump or Clinton as a savior, or even as someone who can pull the country out of its economic and social nosedive.* In fact, I see little hope for reform unless we're willing to blow everything up (starting with the IRS) and just rebuild. Glasser seems to be assuming that there are enough systemic checks and balances in place that neither candidate can do much damage over the course of eight years, which puts him in a very different ideological camp from those who are more passionately engaged in the debate over which worldview should reign supreme. Call him a member of the Indifferent Party.

Meanwhile, libertarian vlogger Styxhexenhammer666 (thank you, King Baeksu, for introducing me to this bloke) says he is also not a fan of either candidate, but unlike me, he's thought about what can be done to right the listing ship and actually has some proposals. In this video (I think I'm linking to the correct one), he expresses his thoughts on what Americans can do better. The guy struck me as a marginal fruit loop the first time I watched a video of his, but after having seen four or five of his talks, I've come to the conclusion that he knows his stuff and speaks reasonably. You just have to get past his bare-bones, low-tech vlogging style, his trapped-in-a-basement look, and his soporific monotone. His videos are actually packed with content and generally watchable, despite the occasional grammatical or lexical gaffe. He puts complex chains of ideas together well and rarely digresses. I started off bored and unimpressed, but the guy has grown on me.

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*You think "nosedive" isn't the right word? Then I'd like to hear your word for a 20-trillion-dollar national debt and rapidly disintegrating social cohesion.

Sunday steak dinner

Tonight's steak dinner, made with a lovely beef tenderloin.

Above: beef tenderloin done two ways—one butterflied, then sliced flank-steak style and adorned with chimichurri; another more "standard" filet mignon style, topped with bacon. Sides: mashed potatoes with pan-fried mushrooms and gravy, along with oven-roasted Korean sweet squash (Kor. dan-hobak; Jpn. kabocha) sprinkled with roasted pine nuts.

The mashed potatoes were made by boiling potatoes, then adding milk, butter, salt, pepper, garlic, and parmesan cheese. The oven-roasted squash was dusted with cayenne pepper and a tiny bit of salt, then pan-fried in a bit of oil to obtain a sear.

Below: the remainder of the tenderloin, chopped up Korean-style, with a Worcestershire dipping sauce. Overall, the tenderloin came out well, but still a bit chewy, despite being plenty rare in the middle. I tend not to sear beef at super-high temperatures because I'm afraid the smoke will cause my smoke alarm to go off. As a result, searing takes longer for me, which means that a tenderloin has time to get a bit tougher. I should trying brining next time.*

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*Actually, that link leads to a Serious Eats article that shows something more akin to salt-curing than to brining.

expect pictures

Tonight's menu:

filet mignon two ways
baked orange dan-hobak (Jpn. kabocha)
mashed potatoes with mushroom-and-bacon gravy

Photos to follow.

when the menu is nothing but shit sandwiches

I'm not alone in thinking that our political system has produced two unpalatable alternatives. This belief, by the way, has nothing to do with mentally sloppy moral relativism: you can, without contradiction, believe two people to be equally unpalatable, but in completely different ways. That's how I see our current pair.

Thomas Sowell, critical of both Clinton and Trump.

Neo-neocon (rejecting Sowell's gun analogy but agreeing with his stance).

Meanwhile, Dr. Vallicella on why you should vote Trump despite the fact that the menu is nothing but shit sandwiches.

post-doc

Blood pressure: 120/90
Heart rate: 75
Weight: 119 kg
Blood sugar: 144
Urine glucose: find out Monday
HbA1c: find out Monday (they took a syringe-sized blood sample)
Vertigo: find out more on Monday

Remarks:

Blood pressure is written as a fraction of systolic over diastolic pressure, with diastolic being the more important number.* "Classic" BP is 120/80; my 90 can be seen either as the very, very high end of normal or as pre-hypertensive. From personal experience, I know that a heart rate of 75 is a vast improvement over the 90-ish it had been in May, when I started exercising in earnest. According to the UK charts here, a blood-sugar reading of 144, post-prandial, indicates a pre-diabetic level, which means I'm probably going to be prescribed several sorts of meds come Monday. These numbers are still somewhat high despite all the exercise I've been doing, and given my age, a little medicinal help is called for.

The HbA1c number, representing glycated hemoglobin (i.e., hemoglobin with glucose attached to it), is normally represented either as a fraction of millimoles-per-mole (mmol/mol) or as a percentage version of that fraction. The reading is considered bad (i.e., full-blown diabetic) if it's around 9.0, the doc says; it's good if it's around 6.0, but for me, in my condition, he says, the number we're looking for is around 7.0; we can shoot for 6.0 later. For the moment, the doc is recommending that I (1) continue the cardio, especially the staircase-walking; (2) drink a lot of water (which I do when I'm at the office); and (3) eat lots of leafy greens and crucifers, along with small amounts of fish and chicken—pretty typical low-carb-diet advice.

My goal will obviously be to reach a stage where I'll be free of the anticipated meds, but that's going to require a herculean effort of will on my part, mainly because old habits die hard. I have a very sweet tooth, work at a sedentary job when I'm not out on the walking path, and like to eat large portions—often of bad-for-you food. I have no illusions that some major lifestyle changes are in the works, and I'm not looking forward to those, but if it's a choice between being inconvenienced or being dead, then I think the choice is obvious.

Personal comment:

Had the doc checked me in May, I'm pretty sure he'd have said I was a raging diabetic whose heart and brain were both on the verge of exploding. Since May, I've gotten serious about exercise, have re-lost a small chunk of weight (about one stone, to use the British term—I'd say another five to go), have gotten my resting heart rate down, and have barely begun to slim down—to the point where I have to think about punching more holes in my big leather belt.

I'm able to walk up 78 floors in my building with minimal rest between rounds of climbing. When not tackling indoor stairs, I walk 16-19 miles in a day, tackling 33 outdoor staircases along the way. Much of what I'm doing is the right thing to do; it's the eating that's killing me, and it may even be linked to my vertigo. We'll know more on Monday.

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*Systolic pressure represents blood pressure when the heart's left ventricle is at maximum contraction; diastolic pressure—the denominator of the fraction—is measured during the "slack" moment between heartbeats.

off to the doc

I'm off to the doc in a few minutes, after which I have to decide whether I'm going to watch either "Jason Bourne" or "Suicide Squad"—or both or neither. I've got "Last Days in the Desert" (Ewan McGregor as both Jesus and Satan) and the director's cut of "Amadeus" waiting for me at my place, so I might decide simply to vegetate à domicile.

My main hope is to discover what the hell might be up with the vertigo. Assuming I even understand the doc's explanation.

Sushi King (in my office building's basement)

A new discovery for me, in my office building's ever-changing basement, is a small sushiya called Sushi King (sushiwang in Korean). The sushi isn't stellar, but it's much better and somewhat less expensive than the sushi I'd had at a restaurant down the street from where I work. Because Sushi King is inside my building, it's easy to get to, and I don't have to brave the summer heat.

Here are three photos of the place—one of the menu, one of my cold soba (momil or momil guksu in Korean), and one of the variety plate of nigirizushi (modeum chobap in Korean*) that I'd ordered. Click on the first and third pics to see them at a larger size; the second pic is already at its original size:

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*The term modeum means "assorted," and chobap is the term for sushi. Cho means "vinegar," and bap means "rice," and that's what sushi means: vinegared rice. (A lot of people think sushi means "raw fish," but that's actually sashimi.)

la chair coûte cher

On occasion, if it's raining during work hours, my coworker and I will do our ten-minute walks inside our office building. The indoor path that I laid out leads us into the basement level, where most of the usable space has been taken up by small restaurants, tailors, hair salons, veggie stands, foreign-food marts, fruit stands, and even a coffee shop or two. In the basement are two butcher shops, and I occasionally speak to the proprietor of one of them. That guy has had, on display in his freezer, a hunk of beef tenderloin that's almost the size of my meaty forearm, and I've been wanting and wanting to buy that thing for days.

Tonight, I finally bought it. It was expensive at W5,800 per 100 grams, but I can make several filets mignons out of it. I should have asked the guy to shear away the last vestiges of silver skin that run along the bottom of the loin, but I guess I'll just take a few minutes to do that myself when the time comes.

Filet mignon is easy to fuck up when you don't know what you're doing. Years ago, I tried the oven approach with some filet, and the results were leathery and horrible. Never again. From that point forward, I've preferred the pan-frying approach because it gives me more positive control over the cooking process, and the results have been much better ever since. It's been a while since I tried cooking a filet, so we'll see how it goes. I may cook one or two this weekend. If I do, I'll be sure to post some pictures of beefy glory.

enforced rest

Yesterday's megawalk was brutal, and my left foot has been killing me all day today. I want—need—to be in shape for a long walk tomorrow,* so instead of tackling the building staircase three times tonight, I'm just going to put my dogs up and give them a breather. With luck, things will be better tomorrow.

The Friday-evening long walk won't be a megawalk: I plan to do only the first fourteen creekside staircases, then turn around and shuffle on home. Those are the most difficult stairs to do: after #14, the staircases shrink radically in size, thereby providing very little aerobic benefit. With the weather as hot and humid as it is, I'll still get in a good, sweaty workout tomorrow, even if I'm walking less than half the distance of a regular megawalk.

So tonight, I'll finish up Season 6 of "Game of Thrones," then get back to my rereading of the novels. I really ought to write something about "Thrones" (and I've long planned to do so), but my brain doesn't seem to be engaging my fingers.

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*I freely admit I'm gaming the system. I'm going to see the doc on Saturday, and I know that, once I start talking to him about my recent vertigo, he's going to want to run a battery of tests: blood pressure, blood sugar, urine glucose (Korean docs have an unhealthy fixation on urine glucose), and God knows what else. There might even be X-rays involved. Anyway, I'm doing what I can to keep my numbers down; this includes exercise—which I've been pretty good about—and diet, which I haven't been so good about. I've tried to behave this week, and I'll be fasting tomorrow before going on my longish non-megawalk. I just don't want to hear a lot of bad news, is all, but then again, if bad news is coming my way, I suppose it's better to hear it than not to hear it.

ADDENDUM: I know one number: my resting heart rate is 75 beats per minute, which isn't bad. That number does tend to go up in the doctor's office, probably because of unconscious stress. But right now, the rate is looking good.

tonight's walk (2)

tonight's walk (1)