time to diaper up!

A stray comment seen over at ROK Drop led me to a bizarre news item:  Chinese airlines are asking (or, depending on the article, urging) their flight attendants to wear diapers during long flights so as to avoid using the lavatories, which are presumably a SARS-CoV-2 infection risk.  I suppose it's fine, by contrast, to run the risk of urinary-tract infections.

I was 7 and 10 years old when my little brothers David and Sean were born, so from a very young age, I learned the harsh realities of cleaning up someone else's puke, piss, and shit.  From what I recall, diapers aren't very good at preventing smells from emanating into the public realm, so if you'll pardon the airline pun, I don't see how this policy is going to fly.

If a person is old enough to have to contend with age-related incontinence, that's one thing, and I pass no judgment on people who must simply respond to a particular need (lookin' at you, Biden!).  But asking or demanding that younger people pad up and "go" while working strikes me as an unnecessary indignity.

Diapers.  Really.

"Fatman": review

[NB:  spoilers.]

"Fatman" is a 2020 black comedy starring Mel Gibson, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Walton Goggins, Chance Hurstfield, Deborah Grover, Eric Woolfe, and Robert Bockstael.  Somewhere in or near the Arctic Circle town of North Peak, Alaska, Chris Cringle (Gibson) lives and works with his wife Ruth (Jean-Baptiste).  Together, they are Santa and Mrs. Claus, working with a team of elves led by a foreman named Seven (Woolfe).  Unfortunately, kids over the years have become meaner and viler, which means that Cringle is getting less and less business.  The US Army, in the person of Captain Jacobs (Bockstael), comes to Cringle with a proposal:  a lucrative two-month contract to be fulfilled in the non-Christmas portion of the year, during which Cringle's elves will devote themselves to producing weapons-guidance systems for a new line of fighter jets.  (Why the US Army is proposing a contract that benefits the US Air Force is never made clear.)  Cringle has misgivings; he's a proud man who doesn't want to compromise his morals just to be able to make ends meet, but his wife, ever the pragmatist, gently persuades Chris to accept the contract.  Meanwhile, Cringle sends out his usual gifts and lumps of coal for Christmas, but when rich, spoiled Billy Wenan (Hurstfield) receives a lump of coal for having been a bad boy (remember:  Santa sees all), Wenan orders his family's personal hitman, Jonathan Miller (Goggins), to kill Santa Claus.

Such is the setup for a strange and often frustrating black comedy.  I can't say that I laughed all that often while watching the movie, but at the same time, the story was weirdly compelling, mainly for what it was hinting at rather than for what it was actually showing us.  Tone and character development were uneven, and the writers didn't know what to do about old Santa himself:  was he an immortal, metaphysical, near-omniscient being gifted with tremendous strength, or a mere mortal who could grow fat from eating too many of Mrs. Claus's cookies, and who could be wounded by regular bullets?  Was Santa a moral paragon, or did he whore himself out to the US government just to get some extra cash?  And if Santa had been morally compromised, what leg did he have to stand on when he gave that angry speech to nasty little Billy at the end of the movie?

So the main problem with "Fatman" is definitely the writing.  Ideas are put out there for us to chew on, and some are, frankly, brilliant.  The problem, though, is the execution:  none of these ideas is developed into anything satisfactory—except, perhaps, for Chris's relationship with his long-suffering but tough-minded wife Ruth.  We get a scene in which Chris is talking with his foreman, Seven, and we can tell that Seven is super-competent at his job.  We can also see that Seven and Chris have worked together for a long time, and they've reached a point where each can read the other's mind.  I would have liked to see that rapport—which felt like a true friendship—developed more fully.  It would also have been nice to flesh out the elves, who are presented to us as both traditionally magical and decidedly mundane.  (We never see them working on those high-tech guidance systems, but Captain Jacobs pronounces himself impressed with the elves' work.)  The movie has a hard time trying to figure out whether to portray the elves in a comical light or in a dead-serious fashion.  I was glad to see that Walton Goggins's assassin is given a personal motive for wanting to kill Santa, but when he and Cringle confront each other, Jonathan Miller's ugly past is only hinted at and glossed over, not presented with any detail.  That's a shame:  Goggins is a fine actor, and he could have used his skill to convey the pain, anger, and grief that gnaw at his character's heart.

On the brighter side, Mel Gibson makes for a likable, almost believable Santa—one who has become wearied and saddened and cynical over the centuries.  Marianne Jean-Baptiste feels absolutely natural in her role as Mrs. Cringle, who plays a decisive role in the final confrontation between her husband and Miller the Killer.  Walton Goggins does the best he can in a strange, strange role:  like those elves, his Jonathan Miller also waffles between comedic exaggeration and lugubrious gravitas.  Overall, whatever the script's many flaws, the actors are the best thing about the story.

But as I said earlier, too many good ideas go undeveloped, and ultimately, that proves to be the movie's downfall.  For a black comedy, "Fatman" isn't particularly funny, and it isn't even as grim as many black comedies can be.  There were many opportunities to go in a "Fargo"-esque direction, or to ratchet up the tension in Grand Guignol Tarantino-style.  In the end, the screenplay proves too confused and too timid, and the result is a mushy hodgepodge only partially redeemed by the actors' collective talent.  Ah, well.

and on a completely unrelated culinary note...

You may recall that I once slapped up a Binging with Babish video about the ambitious dish called a timpano (the name evokes the drum-like shape of the dish).  Well, YouTube suggested that I watch another timpano video, and it was definitely worth the time I spent:

Enjoy, and bon appétit!

beef Wellington on the brain

All the cooking channels I watch are doing beef Wellingtons now.  I didn't realize this was a seasonal dish; I thought we'd be seeing more recipes for Christmas goose* and figgy (a.k.a. plum**) pudding, at least among those leaning in a British direction.

Here's a quick tour of the various beef Wellington videos I've watched—many of them recent—followed by the one video to rule them all—that of Gordon Ramsay, to whom the hosts in the other videos tend to refer with varying degrees of reverence.  I've also included Sam the Cooking Guy's joke videos:  his Tomahawk Ribeye Wellington and his ridiculous (but strangely tempting) Meatball Wellington.  Enjoy this culinary tour.

Joshua Weissman's regular Wellington:

Weissman's cheaper version:

Chef John's rather unorthodox beef Wellington:

Babish's Wellington:

Jun from Jun's Kitchen with what I thought was an overcooked Wellington (too little pink in the center):

Sorted Food's "Italian" Wellington (actually from several years ago, and also looking rather medium-well instead of medium-rare):

Sam the Cooking Guy's Tomahawk Ribeye Wellington:

Sam's utterly ridiculous Meatball Wellington:

And finally, Gordon Ramsay's official, orthodox take on beef Wellington:

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*Google "traditional English Christmas dinner," however, and you'll be surprised to discover that at least one site, British Study Centres, claims that a typically English Christmas dinner has a lot in common with what Americans now consider a standard Thanksgiving feast, with turkey, stuffing, potatoes, gravy, and cranberry sauce being among the elements in common.  (The original Thanksgiving feast was more likely heavy on duck, venison, and seafood.)  The English also put some emphasis on Brussels sprouts, Yorkshire puddings, and pigs in blankets, which are bacon-wrapped sausages, not bread-wrapped hot dogs.  The English feast will also include mince pies (here again, the Brits play fast and loose with their terminology:  mince normally refers to ground meat, but in this case, a mince pie has a filling that is a mixture of dried and fresh fruit combined with beef suet), all of which makes an English Christmas dinner as carby and bad-for-you as an American Thanksgiving meal.

**The Brits misname everything.  The word plum was apparently a generic reference to dried fruit, and the name stuck.  The term pudding, in British English, applies to all sorts of food items that don't qualify as puddings in America:  a Yorkshire pudding is more of a bread than something approaching a chocolate mousse; the same goes for a figgy pudding, which is cake-y; the same also goes for black pudding, which is little more than congealed blood in sausage form.  An American pudding is simply a sweet dessert of soft, mushy, spoonable consistency:  think chocolate pudding, tapioca pudding, or even bread pudding, which is indeed soft, mushy, and spoonable.  What unifies the various puddings in the United Kingdom?  As far as I can tell, nothing.  Dictionary.com notes that the Brits also use the term pudding to refer to any dessert course.  Given how much I know about the British hatred of commas, I can't trust the Brits when it comes to matters of language.  Not anymore, anyway.

some bits of humor

Bill Burr is still the man

Here's a snippet from an interview with Bill Burr, who started out as a stand-up comedian who ragged on everybody—especially Star Wars nerds—and ended up becoming a prominent character in Jon Favreau's series "The Mandalorian":

Trivia hounds know that Burr also had a bit role in "Breaking Bad," and he was the creator and star of "F is for Family," a Netflix animated series for adults now in its final season.

toon hyoomr

A hilarious sort-of recap of "Star Wars":

A morbid take on the Rudolph story that desecrates one of my most treasured childhood memories: the 1964 animated special "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer":

the Hunter Biden scandal and the death of journalism

The media lie to protect the Democrats.  It's that simple.

re-redesigned

I left work early on Friday night at the behest of my boss, who still hasn't signed his new contract yet.  (He's been wrestling with the wording, much of which he deemed "bullshit."  He's lucky to be able to specify his own terms and conditions, though; in the end, the contract will be rewritten to his satisfaction.)  Leaving the office and grabbing a cab, I headed uptown to the Jongno district to look, once again, for an award-plaque maker.  And this time, I found one, tucked away in an alley not far from the main street.  The older lady who greeted me seemed to be of sour and dour temperament at first, but she eventually proved to be friendly enough.  I had apparently arrived after the place's purported closing time (7 p.m.; I arrived around 7:30), but she allowed me to stay and pepper her with questions about my plaque's design and what sort of plaque I was looking for.

Ultimately, I was looking for a plaque that was simple in shape and able to stand on its own without the need for an extra stand.  The lady showed me everything she had on display, and she told me that choosing something not on display was also possible.  She asked me what my "budget" was, i.e., how much I was ultimately willing to pay.  I told her I could go as high as W200,000, which made her a lot more friendly.  "Oh, for that amount, we can give you something really high in quality," she said.  I saw plaques in all different shapes and sizes, including some bizarre ones, like a Bible-shaped plaque to be awarded in a churchy context.  Ultimately, I showed the greatest preference for a simple, unimaginative crystal rectangle that was thick enough to stand on its own on a shelf without the need for a stand.

When the lady asked me whether I had a design on file with me, I said yes and pulled out my thumb drive.  My design's image was uploaded to the office's computer, and we began discussing how best to render the design on a plaque—especially a crystal plaque.  There are several possible approaches when it comes to adding text and images to a plaque's surface:  you can simply print the contents flat onto the surface; you can engrave the contents; you can also engrave the contents and fill in the engravings with paint.  We tossed around several ideas and came to no firm conclusions.  I could feel myself moving toward the idea of removing most of the color from my design (thereby sacrificing the Korean-flag color scheme that I'd talked about previously) and simply engraving everything into clear crystal; the only thing with color would be the dojang, which would be engraved and also painted red and white.  In every single photo of a Korean award plaque with a dojang on it, the dojang is always red (or red-and-white) and always in the lower-right corner.

The lady made a remark about my design that I interpreted as a complaint:  "That's a Chinese dragon," she said.  It was indeed a Chinese dragon (I'm the one who put it in the design, so I should know), and I hadn't thought about how a Korean might react to seeing something non-Korean on a plaque designed with a Korean recipient in mind.  I doubt JW would be so picky about his plaque, but as I gauged the lady's reaction to the Chinese dragon, I decided that a redesign would mean ditching the Chinese lung and finding a Korean yong to put in its place.  In the end, I said nothing about my redesign plans to the lady, and she told me to email her shop a copy of my design file—preferably as a Photoshop document (.psd format) and not as a PNG.  As of a few minutes ago, I have done just that.  The lady promised to get working on the files come Monday.  She was also happy to know that this plaque was to be a Christmas gift, which meant her office would have plenty of time to work on the plaque.

We also discussed how the plaque would be contained.  Did the plaque's price include some kind of fancy box?  "Yes," the lady said, and she showed me several styles of boxes that could hold the plaque.  You've probably seen such boxes before:  they're usually made of polished, lacquered wood, with soft, molded interiors to hold the award—velvet-lined, of course.  "We box the plaque up for you," the lady reassured me.

Although we hadn't truly settled on a specific plaque (I knew it'd probably be rectangular and able to stand on its own), and we hadn't talked price, the lady and I (and the resident designer, a quiet, nerdy-looking young lady) had an idea of where my thoughts were trending.  I promised to send my design via email, then I went home and began working on a redesign.

The Chinese dragon is now gone; it's been replaced by a Korean dragon.  I tried to find a Korean dragon that was positioned in the same kind-of-horizontal way as the Chinese dragon was, but the best Korean dragon I could find was more vertical than horizontal, clawing its way up an imaginary sky.  I decided to stick with the vertical dragon, but that meant a major reconfiguring of the plaque's text.  I also moved the dojang to the lower-right position based on what I'd discovered during my research.  While Korean brush artists stamp their dojang images all over their works of art, in the world of award plaques, the dojang can appear only in the lower-right part of the piece.

I made two versions of the image.  One version is meant to be etched onto a white surface, like a block of acrylic or resin; the other can be placed on (and etched onto) either a black-surfaced plaque or a clear-crystal (or clear-acrylic) plaque.  The black/crystal version of the image is done up with a black background, but that background would obviously have to be digitally removed:  there's no reason to paint black onto a black surface, and for crystal, the only thing to be painted would be the red dojang:  everything else would simply be laser-etched into the material.  I trust the in-house designer to have the common sense to remove the black background when designing my plaque (if she goes for either black or crystal, that is; if she goes for a white surface, then I hope she preserves the Korean-flag color scheme).

Anyway, here are the two designs:

Epilogue:  before I left the Jongno area, I visited two establishments that billed themselves as dealing with acrylic (i.e., the heavy plastic, not the paint).  The proprietor of the first place simply shooed me back out, telling me I couldn't come in.  The proprietor of the second place, who looked disturbed that I had interrupted his dinner, told me that I needed to go across the street if I was looking to have an award plaque made.  Neither establishment was particularly helpful, and I'm beginning to think that places that do artistic laser-etching of acrylics don't exist.  I'd probably have to visit an arts-oriented university like Hongik and ask some art students whether they'd be up to the task of etching out an award plaque on bone-white acrylic.  The very thought of expanding my search to universities tired me out, and in the end, I decided I'd just stick with the award-plaque shop I'd found.  So the image files have been emailed, and if the plaque-shop folks have questions for me, they know to text or email me.

a walk and lunch with JW

JW told me he was in a bit of a rush:  he was taking his family down to Jeju Island—today—for a crazy little winter vacation.  According to him, airline ticket prices have cratered, as have hotel prices on the island, which is normally an expensive tourist trap.  JW plans to take his family there, hike a few trails alone, and report back to me on whether it'd be a good idea for him and me to go there to do some hiking.  (A few years ago, Jeju Island was marketing the fact that it had created a segmented loop trail, called olle-gil, totaling 425 kilometers.  Jeju Island is small enough to walk the circumference in a short amount of time; the total network of trails is subdivided into segments, no single segment of which is longer than 20 km.)

So JW needed to be back at his place by 1 p.m.  He and I met at 9 a.m. to go do a walk, after which we planned to eat lunch at a riverside Chinese restaurant called Dong Bang Myeong Ju ("Bright Eastern Pearl"? "Eastern Silk"?).  I had originally wanted to meet at 11 a.m., walk up to Jamshil Bridge, and hit the restaurant during the return leg of our short hike.  JW, ever the negotiator, counter-proposed a 9 a.m. meeting and an early lunch so he could be back home by 1 p.m.  I counter-counterproposed walking a longer route if we were going to start that early, so I suggested that we walk up to Jamshil Bridge, cross the river by crossing the bridge, walk east to the next bridge, cross back to the south side of the Han, then make our way to the restaurant such that we'd arrive around 11 a.m. for an early lunch.  JW was amenable, so we met at the confluence of the Tan Creek and the Han River, right next to a drive-in theater.

JW ended up disliking both the route we walked (too noisy on the north bank thanks to traffic) and the Chinese restaurant, which he found too authentically Chinese.  JW suspects that the restaurant's owner had some fantasy in her head about bringing an authentically Chinese experience to Korea, but that she did this without really looking into the local Korean market first to understand people's preferences.  JW darkly predicts that Dong Bang Myeong Ju will be gone in a year.  He might be right:  I liked the food and the ambiance better than JW did, but I agreed that some of the dishes we ate seemed a little... off.

I had been excited about the prospect of exploring the bike path along the Han's northern side, but after seeing JW's displeasure today, I'm no longer quite so keen.  I might explore the north bank on my own, without JW, but I don't see him and me hiking the north bank together again anytime soon.

So at this point, it's almost 4 p.m., and JW's flight to Jeju left around 3.  It's a very short flight from Seoul to Jeju—no more than an hour or so, so I imagine JW's family is taking a cab to their hotel and maybe settling in.  I hope they have a good time enjoying the relatively empty island—a cheap flight, a cheap hotel, and cheap meals.  Must be fun.

award-plaque update

For the award plaque that I'm making for my buddy JW, I've made a couple tweaks for text alignment, plus one design change:  the dojang (stamps/seals) now have rounded corners, more in keeping with actual dojang.  I'm going to visit an acrylics shop tonight to see about whether getting my design printed as a plaque is even possible.  The boss let us all out early, so I'm off to Jongno.  More news as it happens.

the ultimate improv (I'm now a believer)

This motherfucker must have a 200 IQ:

And another one for good measure:

Dr. V talks about the perks of old age

Does this apply to you?

You now have money enough[,] and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other.

You are free to be yourself and live beyond comparisons with others. You can enjoy the social without being oppressed by it. You understand the child's fathership of the man, and in some measure are able to undo it. You have survived those who would define you, and now you define yourself. And all of this without rancor or resentment. Defiant self-assertion gives way to benign indifference, Angst to Gelassenheit:

Brief light's made briefer
'Neath the leaden vault of care
Better to accept the sinecure
Of untroubled Being-there.

You now enjoy the benefits of a thick skin[,] or else it was never in the cards that you should develop one. You have been inoculated by experience against the illusions of life. You know that the Rousseauan* transports induced by a chance encounter with a charming member of the opposite sex do not presage the presence of the Absolute in human form. Less likely to be made a fool of in love, you are more likely to see sisters and brothers in sexual others.

Read the rest on your own.

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*"Rousseauan"?  I always thought it was "Rousseauvian."

YouTube continues to slit its own throat

Acting like a repressive dictator is a great way to lose your user base, and YouTube is doing just that by following in the dictatorial footsteps of Facebook and Twitter, banning content that it (very subjectively) deems pernicious and misleading.  Specifically, YouTube is now banning all videos that question the legitimacy of the current election.  Gee—no anti-conservative bias there!  Here's Styx with a rant:

And here's Tim Pool on the same topic:

People are mad, and YouTube doesn't give a fuck.  Will it hemorrhage users?  Some will leave, I think, but other users won't care because they're not just users:  they're the used.  They're fine with being raped by Big Tech, and they live their lives in a bent-over, submissive, please-do-me-from-behind position.  I left Twitter, Gab, Parler, Facebook, and even LinkedIn because I saw the writing on the wall.  It's high time, I think, to leave YouTube.

via Instapundit

Instapundit says this was "seen on Facebook":

The above is funny, but I don't want this side of the aisle doing the rightie version of "Russia!" for four years, the way the left has done.  Can I be accused of loserdom as a result?  Am I advocating losing with dignity and honor versus winning through dirty pool?  Yes, I suppose I can be accused of loserdom, but I can't help reacting the way I react when I see the same attempt at a lame argument being done by the side that just experienced the business end of that wild-eyed style of argumentation.  There are other ways to tackle the left, and uselessly chanting "China!" doesn't have to be one of them.

sent via Bill

I've seen several variants of the sarcastic meme about trusting mail-in anything, but this one, sent by Bill Keezer, gave me a chuckle:

award-plaque design

I think I finally have a halfway decent award-plaque design for my buddy JW, whom I managed to get addicted to distance walking.  I want the design cut into crystal, so it might not retain the colors you see below (see here to understand why).  I've run the design through Photoshop in black and white to see whether I'd be okay with a monochromatic rendering, and in the end, I thought it'd be okay.  Here's what I came up with:

The black border won't be visible on the actual plaque.  I added it just to make the plaque's dimensions more obvious for my blog readers, given the otherwise white-on-white background.  Let me explain the design, whose elements might not have an obvious meaning.  First, you see a man walking across a dragon's back (I found the dragon online by looking up "Chinese dragon seal").  This is a reference to a phrase from the walking poem I'd written last year:  "so forth we go, friends:  stick and pack!/we walk across the dragon's back!"  The three Korean words inscribed in the dragon's image are, from left to right, "Incheon," "Seoul," and "Yangpyeong," representing the 120-kilometer axis that my friend walked in order to "graduate" and be thought of as a true distance walker.  

The English content of the award plaque needs no explanation, but the two red squares might.  They were designed to remind people of dojang, i.e., seals or chops that are used to stamp official documents.  The dojang on the left is in Chinese; you should read it in two vertical columns, right column first and moving leftward:  dobo yeohaeng, i.e., a trek on foot.  The right-hand dojang, meanwhile, is in Korean, and it says gukto-jongju, a word that ought to be familiar, by now, to readers of my three walk blogs.  The word guk means "country" or "nation"; the word to (pronounced like the English word "toe") means "land" or "ground"; the word jongju means "end-to-end path," so a gukto-jongju is a path across the nation's land.  The Four Rivers path is one such gukto-jongju.  Another is the east-coast path that I plan to hike next year.  The Chinese proverb about "a journey of a thousand miles" is written inside a blue field with an arched top, possibly representing the promise of a sunrise or of the future.  The choice of the color blue contrasts with the red of the dragon and the dojang; together, these are the colors of the yin-yang symbol at the center of the South Korean flag, which is a symbol-laden, philosophy-heavy standard (see here for an explanation).

I played around with and discarded all sorts of design choices.  What fonts to use?  Should the little man on the dragon's back be abstract (like a men's-room icon) or more realistic-looking?  Should he have a backpack and a walking stick, or would that connote mountain hiking instead of distance walking along a bike path?  (JW has never walked with a stick and pack, although he has done some day hikes with a shoulder bag.)  There were plenty of choices to make, and it might be that you, Dear Reader, see something about my design that doesn't sit right with you.  Feel free to comment if so.  Just know that I'm not lying when I say I went through a bunch of different designs before arriving at what you see.  

Initially, I wanted an image at the top of the plaque that would reflect (1) distance walking; (2) the number 120, given that JW had done the 120K span from Incheon to Yangpyeong; and (3) the names "Incheon," "Seoul," and "Yangpyeong," somehow connected by something abstract and map-like to delineate the route JW had walked.  My earlier designs had no dragon in them; they looked like hypertrophic versions of the tee-shirt design I had done for my walk, with the word "SEOUL" in the middle of a huge circle, and the words "Incheon" and "Yangpyeong" to either side, written in their own circles and looking like little moons orbiting Planet Seoul.  I tried connecting the three circles with straight bars and galaxy-arm-shaped swirly tentacles; nothing seemed to work.  I also gave up on including the number "120":  it seemed repetitive, given that "120" appears in the text portion of the plaque.  At one point, I made the center of the design a giant, abstract "walking man" icon.  I labeled his circular head "Seoul," then replaced his hands with circles that read "Incheon" and "Yangpyeong."  This proved to be ugly as hell—it looked like an angry boxer, gloves still on, stomping across the countryside in search of something or other.

Ultimately, the dragon came to me as an eleventh-hour flash of insight.  This often happens with the creative process:  you waste 99% of your time generating crappy ideas so that your one good idea can finally burble to the surface of your consciousness and save the day.  I'm still not happy that I didn't draw the dragon myself; I might do so for my ego's sake.  (It's a bit like promising to cook an entirely homemade, from-scratch meal, then cheating by using store-bought pasta.  The store-bought pasta isn't the problem—it's the promise to do everything homemade, then reneging on that promise.)

As for the blue field, I had initially created a blue sun that I placed behind the dragon, but that didn't work.  While blue and red work fine on the South Korean flag, they don't work well as a dark-blue sun behind a fire-engine-red dragon:  the color contrast was hard to look at.  I decided to honor the flag design by placing the blue at the bottom of the design, in the yin position, just as it is on the Korean flag (see the above link to review the ROK flag's design:  red represents fire, a yang force; blue presents water, a yin force, so this is why red is on top, and blue is on the bottom:  yang moves up, and yin moves down).  So the flag is now merely suggested or hinted at by my current design.  I imagine a professional designer could do a better job of incorporating the ROK flag more explicitly into the plaque's final look.

So there we are.  Lots of stillborn images, and finally, one image to rule them all (for now, anyway, unless my readers offer constructive criticisms that prompt further changes).  I hope JW will appreciate his plaque when he gets it this Christmas.

ADDENDUM:  the centering of the left-hand dojang might be a millimeter off when compared to the right-hand dojang.  Just so you know that I see the problem and will work on it.  There might also be some text-centering issues; I'm aware of those as well.

Fellater-in-Chief

I can say with metaphysical certainty that Joe Biden, as president, will strap on his kneepads and orally service China.  Congratulations to all the left-Dems who have pulled hard for a Biden victory, who naively believe this election was inviolable, and who think Biden will lead the US to greater prestige and prosperity:  you've fucked this country good and hard.

PowerLine Week in Pictures: a selection

Dial "H" for "hypocrisy":

Lazy-ass teachers.  Unions mess everyone up.

So that's where they went...

The Joker was right: put people under stress, and they'll eat each other:

I'm confused, too:

Oh, noes!

Impossible to un-see:

Again, dial "H":

Definitely a step down from Olivia to Uma:

This next one is sad and creepy at the same time—sad because it shows dead Star Wars actors as Force ghosts (David Prowse [glasses], who was Darth Vader; Peter Mayhew [tall], who was Chewbacca; Kenny Baker [short], who was R2-D2; and Carrie Fisher, who was Princess Leia); creepy because the scenario can be interpreted in a sinister "Who's Next on the List?" sort of way, and it appears that Harrison Ford (78, like Joe Biden) and Mark Hamill (69) are next.

Ultimate butt-dialing:

Does a bear _____ in the woods?

Can't say that I've ever read a single Brontë novel:

ADDENDUM:  I improved one of the pictures. See the difference(s)?

seen in Itaewon

This past Saturday found me in Itaewon to shop for a new shoulder bag to replace the one I've used for years. That bag had been slowly dying from wear and tear; it lost one of its handles over a week ago. Itaewon has plenty of bag shops, so I cabbed over to the district and got myself a bag that is almost exactly the same as my former one, only slightly larger. While I was lumbering down the street, I saw an old friend: