she would've been 81 today

 Happy Birthday, Mom.

I'm out meeting that older couple this morning—the couple who are walking across the Four Rivers trail from Busan to Incheon, i.e., backwards from how I normally do it. They started out at San Gwa Gang Pension, so the big, 5K hill will be the last obstacle of the day for them, which is a depressing thought. This blog post is appearing at 8 a.m. Saturday morning; I arrived in town the night before, slept overnight in the Saejae Park motel, then trudged up my side of the mountain to meet the couple at the top, at a landmark called Ihwaryeong/이화령. The plan is to meet the couple, let them rest a bit, then trudge down the side I came up so they can finish the day's segment. I told them that I hope we can get a meal while we're in town. I have one restaurant that I always go to, but the town (Yeongpoong-myeon) has several eateries, and I'm open to whatever. It ought to be a nice, relaxing day, and it'll be good to meet the couple, with whom I've been corresponding since last year. I was supposed to meet them before their walk, but I ended up being hospitalized. So this has been a while in the making.

See, Mom? Still making new friends after all these years.

"Civil War": a review by The Critical Drinker

I have no interest in this movie.

numbers

From almost two weeks ago. Is there a trend among previous non-voters who will now vote?

The above video also talks about minority voters.

in Yeonpoong-myeon

The bus to Goesan took a million years to get there because of Friday traffic jams. I took a cab to Yeonpoong-myeon, and since I got to the motel so late, there was actually someone there in the office! Saejae Park Motel is spare and simple; there aren't even any towels in my room for a shower, so I won't be showering until I'm back in Seoul tomorrow afternoon or evening. 

Meanwhile, as I left the cab and walked to the motel, I saw that there'd been some new construction: Yeonpoong-myeon is growing.

what appear to be condos (these are new)

Saejae Par...k (the "k" isn't lit up)

So many towns have murals.

I'll be up at 3 a.m. and at the top by 5.

what hope does Ukraine have?

You have to feel sorry for the regular citizens of Ukraine... but you also have to realize that throwing good money after bad isn't going to help the situation:

construction along the creek

This week, I walked on Monday, then Wednesday, then yesterday. I'm taking a bus out to Goesan this afternoon, and I'll be in Yeonpoong-myeon this evening, so no walking tonight. My current practice walks, which are merely to build me back up to something like my former self, are only 7K or so in length. I often have chest pains at the beginning of these walks, but when I sit down to rest for about ten minutes and get back up, the pains are gone, and I'm fine as long as I'm not on stairs or a steep incline. (Tomorrow morning's walk is 5K up a hill, but the hill isn't too bad, and I'll be stopping frequently along the way.)

Anyway, the 7K walks I've been doing take me right up to the Han River, then I turn around. Most of the route goes alongside the Tan Creek (탄천/Tancheon), where construction continues apace. They're building some sort of off-ramp, and it's a mystery as to where exactly the ramp is going. Here are some pics from along the Tan Creek route:

sandworm 1

sandworm 2

Guess I'm not sleeping on that surface.

I wonder if this dirt expanse will turn into something permanent.

the lights of the nearby stadium... with all the shouting and chanting

off-ramp column peeking out (middle of the pic)

It's going to be ugly for a while longer.

at long last: waffles

I'm pretty sure you've seen waffles before, so I doubt there's anything in the photos below that will explode your brain. But these are keto waffles, i.e., they're made from almond flour—twice the calories of wheat flour, but a third of the carbs. Keep in mind that any almond products are so-called "keto" only when eaten in moderation. If I were to eat twenty almond pancakes in a single sitting, I wouldn't be doing myself any favors.

Below is my little waffle iron, ordered from the US, which means it has a US plug and needs to be hooked up to my "down" transformer (converts from 220V to 110V). The blue light on top was broken when I got the product, but the waffle iron makes an audible clicking noise, a bit like a clothes iron, to let you know it's hot enough to use. After that, it's up to you to control the timing. Pancake batter serves perfectly well as waffle batter; just be sure not to pour too much batter in the iron, or you'll have a spill on your hands as the batter puffs up from the heat. When laying down the batter, don't pour all the way to the edge: let gravity do the work of filling out the iron. I find that anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes is enough cooking time. The waffles never come out crispy, I've noticed, but they do stiffen up once they cool down. For true crispiness, you have to run them through a toaster. Like Eggos.

not the top brand of individual waffle irons

With the recipe I had, I made six waffles. Here they are, just out of the freezer.

And here's what my breakfast-for-lunch looked like today at the office:

That's scrambled egg with melted American cheese in the middle.

I made my own keto maple "syrup" out of maple extract, erythritol, water, and a teeny bit of xanthan gum. The xanthan gum gave everything the consistency of snot, so if I ever need a gooey movie prop, I know how to make it. The butter on the waffles is bubbling because the plate just came out of the microwave. The "syrup" is nice and glossy because the sausages were still very hot when the shot was taken. Except for this past Tuesday, when I fed galbi to the troops, I've had an American breakfast every day this week, and it's been awesome. I've occasionally backslid and had regular blueberry jam on my pancakes, but the jam didn't seem to affect my blood-sugar numbers as long as I ate nothing for the rest of the day.

Better late than never, I hope—the pics of my waffles, I mean. They're nothing special, right? Aside from a different flour and sweetener (monk fruit), the rest of the keto waffle-batter ingredients are similar to regular pancake-batter ingredients: eggs, oil/butter, baking powder, salt. So the keto batter puffs right up inside the waffle iron. I just wish I had a better iron that allowed me to make several waffles at a time: the one-by-one method is rather slow.

Trump and New York

News from two weeks ago: this guy isn't the deepest I've seen, but he makes the valid point that Trump's net worth went down while he was president, so he's not in it for the money.

what's that all about?

My blood pressure this morning was 119/80, and I only just noticed that this put me in the yellow zone (on the screen, there's an arrow off to the side that indicates what "zone" your BP is in: green, yellow, red). I thought 120/80 was the classic normal BP. Shouldn't I be in the green zone? Or does my BP device know something I don't?

2 more Styx

Bernie Sanders and the four-day work week (which I actually wouldn't mind):

"Biden has Destroyed Our Strategic Oil Reserve":

the waitress's story

This is nice.

China versus India

This never really ended:

Trump trumps Biden in fundraising

Douglas Murray on a tear

Regarding "white privilege":

Touchy subject:

bus ticket

I went to the Express Bus Terminal to buy a ticket to the Goesan/괴산 area this past Tuesday, but the ticket machine didn't list Goesan as a possible stop, leaving me confused. I went back to my older blog entries to see what might be going on, but they offered no clue. So I did a Korean-language search for a Seoul-Goesan bus schedule, and aha—there's no bus from the Express Bus Terminal, but there is a bus from the East Seoul Bus Terminal.

So I'll be trundling out that way, probably by cab, and buying a ticket tonight. I'll want to leave in the early afternoon tomorrow, around 3 or 4 p.m. I'll get to Goesan-gun by about dinnertime, then take a cab the rest of the way to the Saejae Park Motel. I'll sleep and wake up early, meet the older couple, walk a bit, maybe do lunch if I can stand the couple for that long, and head on back to Seoul. I can think of better ways to spend my Saturday, but I made a commitment, so I can't weasel out of this. I might try backing out of my end-of-walk commitment, though: I had promised to cook the couple my Middle Eastern chicken, and we'd agreed to have lunch once they'd finished their walk. Now, I'm no longer so keen on such a meeting. With some people, small doses are best.

numbers

blood sugar: 158 (so I'm back down from the 240 spike)

blood pressure: 110/72

weight: 114 kg (2 kg drop from yesterday = water weight)

pulse-ox: 97%

pulse: 66

estimated A1c since 4/15: 7.34

I'm happy to see that my resting pulse remains down. Blood-pressure meds are also obviously working despite the reduction in meds. I wish my blood sugar were down further, but I'm glad I came right back from 240 the day before. Weight is, as we've established from my prodigious urine output at the hospital, mostly about the water right now. When I get down to 110 kg, we can start talking about real fat loss.

Yesterday was pretty ruthless: I stopped eating after lunch and had nothing at all from then until just now—true intermittent fasting. It wasn't all that bad; I entertained myself by watching more of Season 2 of "Picard," and I wasn't feeling all that happy after my phone conversation with M. (Being unhappy is a good way for me to stop eating. Unhappiness and outright anger both tend to chase away my appetite.)

Even though I'm back to injecting myself with insulin, I don't get the feeling that the injections do much, if anything. I might try a 3-day experiment in which I go off the injections and see what that does to my numbers.

My next hospital appointment is later this month May 24 (Fri.). Any experimenting will have to be well before then.

Scotland's hate-speech law

an old SFX technique, resurrected

Like every other guy, I'm a little bit in love with Jordan Coleman, who is not only cute but a talented actress who will almost certainly leave the Corridor Crew team once her Big Opportunity shows up. She can't labor in obscurity there forever.

연풍면 on my mind

I really can't say that goddamn name. It's like a tongue twister for me.

When I saw the village name Yeonpoong-myeon in Korean for the first time (연풍면), I was sure it was a Buddhist term: lotus-wind-village (蓮風面/연풍면). Then I looked the name up in Chinese, and it was not 蓮/연/yeon/lotus + 風/풍/poong/wind + 面/면/myeon/village or district. Instead, it was 延豐面—same sounds, totally different characters (except the third character). But even after looking at the Google Translate rendering of the Korean-dictionary definitions of these characters, I'm still not sure how best to render them in English, so someone more conversant than I am can leave a comment and set me straight.

For the character 延/연/yeon, Naver's definition is translated as:

1. extend, connect
2. lay out, spread out
3. attract, attract
4. Bring in
5. Lead, lead (引導--)
6. Connect with each other (通--)
7. Expand, spread
8. To go crazy (to reach a certain line such as spatial distance or level), to go crazy, to reach
9. Long, long lasting
10. Delayed(遲滯--)
11. High
12. Far, length, width
13. Length
14. Area
15. Crown cover

For the character 豐/풍/poong, Naver's definition is translated as:

1. A good harvest
2. Name of the trigram (卦)
3. Cup stand (a vessel used to hold a drinking glass)
4. Cattail (perennial herb of the Cattail family), cattail (annual herb of the Cyperaceae family)
5. A good harvest
6. Lush, lush (茂盛--)
7. prosper (盛--: full of energy or power), prosper
8. Thick
9. Lively (fleshy and sturdy), voluptuous (豐滿--)
10. Plenty
11. Abundant (豐盛--)
12. Full
13. Big

And for the character 面/면/myeon, the only one I guessed right, the definition was:

1. face
2. Expression, facial color
3. Shape, appearance
4. External, surface
5. Pretense
6. Mask, mask
7. In front, in front of you
8. Direction, side
9. Plane
10. Myeon (administrative district unit)
11. Myeon (unit of counting items)
12. Flour
13. Barley flour
14. Noodles
15. Meet
16. Face to face (對面--)
17. Turn your back, turn away (外面--)
18. Head(向--)
19. Face (-面: one of the minor parts)

I hadn't realized that this was the same myeon meaning "face" (see definitions 1, 3, 4, 8), as when you talk about the front and back sides of a piece of paper (앞면/ap-myeon [front], 뒷면/dween-myeon [back]; in French, these are le recto and le verso), but there we are: the character means "face" or "side," and it also means something like "village" or "district," often when applied to very small towns.

So how do we translate this mess? Full disclosure: I'm not a certified translator of any languages, not even French to English, despite being highly competent in French, so I don't know all the ins and outs of translation. That's Charles's department; he was and is a professional translator who has taught translation courses and done translation work for government folks and other bigwigs. At a guess, I'd go with the first definition or so of each character (except for myeon, which is definitely definition #10 in this context), which gives us this maybe-plausible rendering: Extended (spread-out) Harvest Village, or maybe more loosely yet possibly more aptly, Bountiful Harvest Village.

My focus on this location name is purely because it's where I'll be staying overnight Friday night, at the Saejae Park Motel in Yeonpoong-myeon. Saturday morning, very early, I'll start up the mountain, Joryeong-san, and be at the top, Ihwaryeong, by the time it's starting to get light. And not long after that, I'll be meeting the older couple (I'm more and more interested in the husband now; he hasn't uttered a peep this entire time), and we'll walk down the mountain, have lunch, and go our separate ways. Maybe they'll somehow end up ascending the same side of the mountain as me, but I seriously doubt it if they're coming from the Mungyeong side. (I just checked my text archive: they are.)

By the way, one problem with the official Roman-letter rendering of Korean is the confusion that can be caused when, say, "n" and "g" are collocated, as in the city name Mungyeong. In Korean, the pronunciation is clear from the spelling: 문경, but in Roman letters, what's going on is less obvious. You should mentally divide the syllables into "moon-gyeong," but because the "ㄴ" (nieun, or letter "n") abuts the initial ㄱ (gieuk, or letter "g") in the next syllable, the nieun's sound changes to an "ng" [ ŋ ], so what you really get is "moong-gyeong." You can probably get away with saying it as "moon-gyeong," and no one will hear the difference. But if you look at Mungyeong and read it as "muhng-yuhng," rhyming with "young lung," then you're not reading the name correctly. My point is that such an error is understandable: the romanization doesn't really clarify the situation. Once you're immersed in Korean sounds, though, you can more easily figure out how to parse romanized Korean syllables. It can still be dicey, though, even for veterans. Unless you're Charles, who is beyond errors.

"has to win"

Even Joe Rogan thinks Trump has to win. He also thinks Biden won't be the nominee. I think Biden's cluelessness and ego are enough to ensure he stays on the ticket, but I don't have a read on how strong the Democrat forces arrayed against him are. Can they push hard enough to knock Slow Joe off the ballot?

looking forward to this even less

Koreans can be difficult, and the problem gets worse as they get older. There's a lot of interrupting on their part, and a lot of loud, "I know, I know!" showing off the Korean ego. I usually try to go the Taoist route in such cases, getting quieter and letting my interlocutor have the floor until he or she is spent. Talking with M tonight was a lot like that: she's an experienced distance walker, and she knows it, and she thinks she knows this route, and she wants to show that knowledge off even if it means blaming me and my itinerary for being "confusing" (it's not), and while I haven't talked to her husband, I expect to meet someone quiet and henpecked while M blusters away like a typical, pushy ajumma (to be fair, some ajummas are exceptions).

Tonight's phone conversation was courtesy of my Talkatone app, so the connection, while stable, was a bit staticky, and then there was all the interrupting and "I know, I know"s mentioned above. I got through the conversation with patience and a lot of inward sighing, and we've resolved to meet at Ihwaryeong on Saturday morning, although M is convinced that she and I will be going up the same side of the mountain in order to meet, so she thinks she'll see me as I'm making my ascent. She says she's coming from the Mungyeong side, though, which makes sense; I normally walk toward Mungyeong from the Saejae Park Motel in Yeonpoong-myeon. She's starting from the Mungyeong Arirang Hotel if I've understood her correctly, which means she'll be coming up the eastern flank of Joryeong-san while I'll be coming up the western flank. Opposite sides, not the same side. I think she has her signals crossed, but maybe there's still something I don't understand about her situation. We'll see.

Anyway, the whole thing is very annoying, and I'll be happy to get this over with, even as I myself age into a crotchety old man. I hope I'm not quite as difficult as M is if/when I reach her age. Then again, at my rate, I think my old joke is going to come true, and I'm not going to make it much past 60. But if living a short life means not having to spend so much time around difficult people, then a short life is worth it.

if you're a North Korean who flees to China, don't expect a good life

a bit after 6, I'll find out what's up

I'm calling the older couple after 6 p.m. today to get some clarification as to what's happening this weekend. We'll see how that goes. I have a sinking feeling we'll be meeting somewhere other than Ihwaryeong. It's gonna be awkward: I'll be calling from my office, and my boss is just off to the side, an involuntary eavesdropper on my side of the conversation.

blood sugar way up this morning

Despite being back on insulin (I got a box of 100 insulin-pen needles via Coupang) along with my regular pills, my blood-sugar numbers were way, way up this morning: 240. That was for several reasons: (1) I ate galbi for both lunch and a very late dinner yesterday; the sugary glaze helped to spike my blood sugar, and the lateness of dinner (11 p.m.-ish, right as I was taking my meds) also contributed to sugar spiking; (2) I didn't walk yesterday, and walking is a sure way to lower your blood sugar. I also (3) snacked on some almond butter late at night, partly because I couldn't sleep, and my will was at its weakest. Tonight, I'll be walking, and I'm already done eating for the day—no dinner planned—so I'm hoping my numbers return to the 150-160 range tomorrow. Were I using my CGM (constant glucose monitor, which I've been too lazy to set up), I'd know right now how quickly I was recovering from sugar spikes; normal people recover in about two hours; we insulin-resistant folks take an hour or two longer, and we spike more easily, especially if we're eating things covered in a sugar glaze.

So I'll check again tomorrow, and we'll see. And I need to finally attach my CGM.

some Liberal Hivemind

Poll numbers:

How much is Mar-a-Lago worth, CNN?

More poll figures and some electoral-college talk:

"Saying the quiet part out loud"—begging illegals to leave the city:

Biden, too, sounding different long ago:

Patrick Bet-David and Steve-O versus Bill Maher:

RFK Jr. and who the real threat to democracy is:

Out of touch, with Trump derangement on display:

Jimmy Kimmel goes to Japan and still doesn't get it:

Ted Cruz versus Bill Maher on illegal aliens:

The red-pilling of Joe Rogan continues:

most Europeans publicly hate Trump, but privately...

Trump must win?

Former UK PM Liz Truss, who wasn't in office long (seven weeks!), gives a Fox News interview in which she seems to talk as much about herself as about Donald Trump. Well, I guess it's not surprising to see a politician engage in a self-insertion to stay relevant.

carbonara with breasts

If you're a man, it's hard to look away from those golden globes. Oh, and from the pasta.

can't go straight from A to B

I've talked a lot, on this blog, about the nonlinearity of Koreans. My friend JW is a great example of a Korean who initially says "yes" to my carefully thought-out plan for some Saturday, then when Saturday rolls around, hits me with a "Let's do something different," thereby rudely tossing everything I'd wanted to do out the window so that we can do his thing. (There's often an element of selfish inconsideration involved when people walk all over you like this.) Or we'll be strolling along the straight-line path by the Tan Creek down to Bundang, and suddenly, he'll be like, "What about that path?" as he points to a random, lame-looking path that branches off the main path and probably leads to nowhere (I've walked a few of those, and they are lame). Koreans are often this way: they get a sudden idea at the last minute that fucks up your plans, or they make a scheduling mistake and that fucks up your plans, or something. You can never go straight from A to B in Korean society—not with friends, and definitely not at work, where bosses can be even zigzaggier. So you either become bitterly cynical and mask it with humor, as I normally do, or you kick and scream and wonder why the fuck you're still in Korea. (Such people really should just leave.) 

And here's another harsh reality: you can take the Korean out of Korea, but you can't take Korea out of the Korean. I'm discovering this is true about the older couple I'm to meet this weekend: we were originally supposed to meet at the high landmark of Ihwaryeong on the Four Rivers trail this coming Saturday—arguably the trail's highest point. But the distaff half of the couple, M, texted me Tuesday afternoon to say she'd messed up and "accidentally" booked a particular hotel, which somehow altered the plans because she couldn't cancel the reservation. How do you "accidentally" book a hotel room? Granted, both members of this couple are in their seventies, so maybe senile accidents are possible. My mind is still boggled, though, because M had emailed me a PDF of her original itinerary, and I went through it line by line, checking distances and locations. It all looked immaculate, and I came away impressed. M and her hubby are veteran distance walkers, so planning and executing trips like the one they're on now should be old hat. The PDF made me think M was a pro.

But then, this nonsense happened, and I'm still not entirely clear as to what's going on. First, I'd heard that their stopping point the day before the Ihwaryeong ascent had changed. Then she texted me about what I assume was a change in the destination hotel, presumably after Ihwaryeong—the one she'd "accidentally" booked and couldn't cancel, and which was 31K away from Joryeong-san's peak.* Now, I'm all sorts of confused, partly because, even though M has lived in the States with her Caucasian husband for decades, her English still isn't quite up to snuff, which means it's occasionally a struggle to read through her texts. She's generally a clear writer, but in her most recent texts, she said some things that I found utterly confusing, so in exasperation, I texted back that I'm going to call her tomorrow at a time that's convenient to her so we can straighten all of this out. I did my diplomatic best not to make it sound as though I were blaming her, but inwardly, I'm cursing the Korean nonlinearity that led to the fuck-up of the "accidental" booking and what that's doing to my carefully laid-out plans. Looks as though I'm back to my cynical default mode of fuck it-with-a-smile. I'll just have to go with the flow the way I usually do.

But, God-fucking-dammit, I don't want to go with the flow. There'd been a plan.  What a nuisance. And up until today, I'd actually been looking forward to meeting this couple. Now, I just want to get this shit over with. I don't know... maybe it's just an honest mistake and not another example of Korean flakiness. Sigh... I'll know more tomorrow. Stay tuned.

NB: if you're new to my bitching and moaning, welcome to my blog. More than anything, this is a place where I vent. So get used to it or move on.

__________

*This meant, or so I thought at first, a 10K walk to the peak, then a 31K walk to their hotel for a 41K total. That's a nasty distance to walk in a day; I've done 42K, 44K, and 60K walks in a day, so I know this from experience. As I thought about what M was trying to tell me, though, it occurred to me she was saying they'd be avoiding Ihwaryeong altogether. Hence my need to call the couple and clarify what's going on.

two Styx

Oz apparently hates the internet and the free exchange of ideas:

More fallout from the Martha's Vineyard incident:

needles have arrived

I got my insulin-pen needles this morning, so my vacation from injections is now over.

the Solomons versus China

today's lunch

Despite not drinking any caffeine yesterday evening, I ended up staying up very late—probably as a function of the Newcastle diet, which kept me up late three years ago. Going to bed late meant waking up late, so I once again failed to make waffles. I did, however, prep the galbi for today's luncheon, then I bought some sides and some microwaveable rice. As luncheons go, this is one of my worst: two-thirds of the meal was not prepped by me. In my defense, April turned out to be a bit of a rough month, so my heart wasn't really into food prep.

main, L to R: galbi, 'waveable rice
sides, L to R: mixed veg, lotus root, chilies, doraji-namul (bellflower root, which I love)
not pictured: kimchi (the boss complained it wasn't out because of course he did)

Closeup, with sesame sprinklies. Click to enlarge further.

this occurred to me

In Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Bruce Wayne puts on the Bat suit one last time to fight his greatest battles as the Caped Crusader. At the end of the four-part story, a news broadcaster notes that this "old" Batman was 55 years old. I turn 55 this year. With my gray beard and people already guessing my age as 60, I guess there's no hiding it: I'm old.

could a piece of shit prove useful?

Sometimes, when you fight dirty, you have to bring out the big guns:

I don't trust that this will go well, frankly. Avenatti was Stormy Daniels's lawyer; he was even tapped to run for president at one point, with Chris Cuomo fawning over the guy. Then he turned out to have a ton of skeletons, and he became known as the "creepy porn lawyer." Would you trust your defense to a man like that? He's apparently turned against Daniels now, claiming that she lies for money every time she opens her mouth. While I don't doubt that claim, I doubt the reliability of Avenatti himself. Who's to say he wouldn't turn on Trump right there while on the stand? Trump has a history of surrounding himself with bad-quality people. This could be a huge mistake. Or, who knows? Maybe Avenatti's potential testimony is the result of a deal he made—something to motivate him to be a reliable witness. We'll see.

more flooding in China

We get floods here in Seoul; they're kind of seasonal, and I wish authorities could/would do something to avoid more damage (e.g., re-landscaping creek beds, introducing ways to control water flow, etc.). But China is a study in widespread mismanagement and coverups (then again, America is now rivaling China in its Baghdad Bobbing of the economy, foreign policy, etc.: "Everything's fine!"—we're becoming more like China every day), and it's flooding time again! Here's Chris Chappell with the sad story.

woodturning is fascinating

Nancy Pelosi channels Donald Trump

So many Democrats sounded exactly like Donald Trump back in the day. Here's Nancy Pelosi, from some years back, pretending to be a hardass about secure borders:

Here's even more of this nonsense:

is China's economy recovering?

jumping consonants in Korean

Have I never done a post on the phenomenon of jumping consonants in Korean? I could've sworn I'd done such a post years ago, but I can't find it.

Anyway, I'm a shitty speller in Korean, and part of the problem is how Korean syllables are subject to what in French is called liaison, i.e., when a phoneme ending one syllable becomes the initial sound of the next syllable. There may be another linguistic term for this in English linguistics, but liaison (explained in depth here) is what I know from learning French.

Some French examples of liaison:

les hommes ("ley zuhm," with the "s" in les jumping over to hommes)

mes amis ("mey zamee," with the "s" in mes jumping over to amis)

Here's an English example of what I mean phonetically:

Did you forget about it?

The above isn't pronounced did / you / forget / about / it ? It's pronounced:

dih / j(y)oo / forgeh / dabou / dit ?

See how the consonants jump over to the following syllable? And note, too, that if someone pronounces the sentence as did / you / forget / about / it ?, over-enunciating like that, it's probably because he or she is very angry.

In Korean, liaison, or something like it, is a thing, and it often expresses itself orthographically (i.e., via spelling). Take the verb "to fall," which is 떨어지다/ddeoleojida or ddeoreojida (with the "r" flapping off the tip of the tongue like a Spanish "r"). If you were to spell the verb out phonetically, you'd get:

떠 러 지 다 / ddeo reo ji da

...but then, you'd be spelling the verb incorrectly. So you can't always rely on what you hear to know how to spell something in Korean.

This is a rich topic that deserves a lot of space, but I'm going to skip right over to a peeve of mine: the frustrating way that consonants in Korean can "jump," liaison-like, when you go from one form of a word to another. This often shows up in Korean spelling, making things tough for us slow-witted Kevins. So, it's an orthographic liaison as much as it's a phonetic liaison. Right off the top of my head, I can think of a few examples:

1. When you want to say "a few days ago" or "several days ago," the word myeot/몇 ("how many" or "several") combines with the word il/일 to become 며칠, i.e., myeo-chil, not myeoch-il. Just look at the phrase 며칠 전에/myeochil jeonae, i.e., "several days ago." Note how the ㅊ/chieut has jumped from the previous syllable to the next one.

2. Another one is how the expression 밖에/bakkae ("outside," "outside of") has a consonant jump when you use one expression of "husband," which is 바깥 사람/bakkat saram (a husband can be called an "outside person" in Korean, based on the old idea that the worker or nobleman left home to go to work). Note how the ㄲ/ssang-gieuk (double "g") has jumped from the previous syllable to the next one.

3. A third example of consonantal jumping has to do with the verb 가지다/gajida, to have or possess. This can become 갖고있어요/gatgoisseoyo ("[I] have/[I] am possessing"). Maybe I should've written these examples in the opposite order, but note how the ㅈ/jieut (letter "j") jumps from the lat(t)er syllable to the previous one.

Can you Korean speakers think of other examples? I want to compile a list of jumping consonants. Leave your insights in the comments. And if you know the proper linguistic terms for what I'm talking about, please let me know. Also: I'm aware that hair-splitters might argue that liaison and consonant-jumping are not the same phenomenon, but I'd say the phenomena are awfully damn close and involve pretty much the same phonetic move, with consonants migrating from the final position in one syllable to the initial position in another or vice versa.

insulin-pen needle update

Feeling lazy, I had an idea and took a look at whether Coupang sold insulin-pen needles... and they do! This immediately resolved the question of whether you need a prescription just for the needles (you obviously don't), and it eliminated the need to go to the med-supply store, thus catering to my laziness. So I've ordered the needles (box of 100), and they'll be arriving tomorrow. I didn't use insulin last night, and this morning's blood-sugar reading, while a bit high because I'd eaten my breakfast-dinner very late in the evening last night, was only in the 160s today purely thanks to my pills. Not tragic at all, and tomorrow's reading, after tonight's long walk, will be even lower—at a guess, 140-ish if I behave myself for the rest of today. And we ought to keep going down from there. 

'Twould be nice to see 120-something by Sunday morning.

ADDENDUM: and to answer a question no one has asked yet: I did check to see whether there'd be any compatibility issues if I order a different brand of needle from the ones I had. According to the all-wise internet, most of these needles are interchangeable; just be mindful of their length (3-5 mm; mine were specifically 4 mm).

this is what you do when your dog suddenly turns on you

Kristi Noem's new book has some passages in it that may have made her into kryptonite for Donald Trump's campaign. In one passage, she talks about having shot one of her dogs, which had proved to be unruly, untrainable, and a terror to her neighbors' livestock. What do you do with an obstreperous animal like that? You put it down. That's life on a farm, folks. Liberals are apparently making a big stink about this, and the optics probably affect Noem's chances of becoming Trump's running mate, but it is what it is. Styx calls this a "nothingburger," which it is, but I suspect Noem has torpedoed her chances at the VP slot.

waffle update

I woke up too late to make waffles this morning, so I'll have to make them tonight. Sorry about that. Expect photos much later in the day. I'm off to the med-supply store in a few minutes.

even I would never go this far

What was he thinking?

5 days' food

I made a meal calendar, and this week, except for Tuesday, it's American breakfast! I'm varying between pancakes and waffles, with an array of different keto "syrups" to make things slightly more entertaining. I made a double batch of pancakes, but I'll have to make the waffles in the morning. The pancake recipe was new to me, but it tastes better than the one I'd been using previously. I did have to thin out the batter by adding more milk, but the neat thing was that each pancake, when flipped, had a very minimal splatter pattern. I'd had bad luck on that score with the previous batter, and I've suffered from batter splatter with certain "normal" batters as well. This was the first batter to behave itself during the flipping process; I might want to tweak it a bit more—maybe add more butter.

As per my earlier threat, I did indeed also cook up some sausage, bacon, and eggs. There's American cheese at the office, and I can add that if I want. The breakfast-sausage recipe calls for brown sugar; I have brown-sugar Swerve (mostly erythritol), so I was able to keep the sausage patties keto. I was also able to use my newly purchased patty press to make modest little 90-gram rounds. I can now see that the press will be too small for actual hamburger patties: they'll shrink to the size of sliders. If there's one intolerable sin in the burger world, it's having a beef patty that's smaller than the bun. 

Amurrican-style scrambled eggs

They look pretty good.

big ol' pile o' meat: sausage on the bottom, thin and thick-cut bacon on top

pulling back a bit for the wider shot

For years, we've had it beaten into us that dietary fat leads to body fat, but modern experts now say that "low fat" is a misleading label, not to mention a bad priority if you're dieting. The old way insisted that one's diet should be low fat and high carb, which is still suggested by the modern WHO/FAO "food pyramid": it recommends (scroll down to the ridiculous chart) that your diet be 15-30% total fat and 55-75% total carbs. Keto takes the opposite approach, recommending about 70-75% fat, 20-25% protein, and 5% carbs.

True, certain fats can be calorific and unhealthy, especially in combination with carbohydrates, but if you avoid the carbs, you can eat way more dietary fat than originally thought, and it won't clog your arteries. One source memorably talked about the magical thinking involved in the old paradigm: animal and plant fats somehow have to transmogrify into human fat cells in order to clog our blood vessels. How is that even possible? The old idea that Alfredo pasta is a "heart attack on a plate" is true, but not because of the Alfredo sauce: the problem is the pasta. Read Gary Taubes's Why We Get Fat for more on this.*

keto pancake batter before I thinned it out with a bit more milk

the first flip, with minimal splatter

a different pancake, with almost no splatter at all

yet another pancake, again with very little splatter

The stack grows.

Having doubled the recipe, I was able to make eight pancakes. This ladle is the final one.

dinner assembled, but not yet microwaved

By the time I'd made everything, a lot of time had passed, and everything had cooled down, so it was necessary to portion out my dinner—100 g of eggs, 2 sausage patties, 1 strip of thick bacon, 3 strips of thin bacon, and 2 pancakes—then heat everything in my microwave for 3.5 minutes on medium heat (lower heat at a lower temp for a longer time allows the heat to diffuse more thoroughly throughout the food). My keto "syrup" was strawberries with monkfruit sweetener and a teeny bit of "perfected" (lumpless) xanthan gum mixed with butter and spread over a pancake. Here's the "syrup":

Doesn't look very appetizing, but it tasted fine.

after microwaving

a slightly better shot

The strawberries have their own natural sugars, but the carbs are somewhat neutralized by the strawberries' inherent fiber. This is what "net carbs" are all about: total carbs minus fiber. Fiber is a carb, but it's not digested or metabolized: it passes through the system without breaking down into sugar, ideally cleaning your pipes on its way out. Fiber counts as part of your total carbs, so a lot of people subtract it and look at the net-carb figure when calculating their carb budget for the day.

I won't get bored of a week's worth of American breakfast (Monday, then Wednesday through Saturday) even if it's keto. Next week, I'll be sure to prep my meals Friday evening or on Saturday: doing it on Sunday is a bit stressful. This week, I've packed most of my breakfast-for-lunch elements into two large, plastic containers; the "syrups" will be packed in separate little bottles or snap-top boxes.

So let's go have a week. Expect waffle photos in the morning.

__________

*As a point of comparison, note that 100 g of wheat flour has about 61 grams of net carbs, whereas 100 g of almond flour has about 18 grams of carbs. I used 200 g of almond flour to make eight pancakes; I'll use another 200 g in the morning to make my waffles. A batch of pancakes made from 200 g of almond flour has a total of 36 g of carbs; divided by 8, that's 4.5 g of carbs per pancake, or 9 g of carbs per meal. With, say, 2 tablespoons of strawberries for "syrup," that's another 5 g of carbs. The meats don't add more than a further gram or two of carbs. So most of my carbs will actually come from the smoothie I have for breakfast. That smoothie is very carby, and it'll push me well over the 20-gram carb limit for strict keto, but recall that I'm on the Newcastle diet, not the full-blown keto diet, and it's more about eating healthily while also trying to keep my daily calorie count below 800. I think my breakfast technically takes me over the 800-calorie limit (almond flour has 1.5 to 2 times the calories of wheat flour!), but I'll be walking later in the day, so the math works out.

squirrels vs. Tannerite frag pellets

All the usual warnings apply.

Tulsi on 2020

But, Tulsi, how do you vote your way out of a rigged election?

food

I'm prepping galbi (beef short ribs) for the troops, to be served on Tuesday (my Korean coworker is moving on Monday, so he'll be out of the office). I'll be eating the meat and sides on that day, but not the rice, which I'll serve to my boss and coworker. There's a microwaveable rice that requires no prep at all, so the only real effort is in prepping and cooking the meat, which is marinating as I type this. I'll cook everything tomorrow, and we'll chow down on Tuesday.

I'm also prepping for the rest of the week, making myself the keto version of an American breakfast: sausage, bacon, eggs, and pancakes/waffles* with keto syrup (strawberry, blueberry, or maple). Four days of that ought to be awesome. And this is a new recipe for keto pancakes, so my fingers and tentacles are crossed in the hope that the recipe works out.

It's a lot of cooking, but once it's done, it's fire-and-forget, like a Sidewinder missile.

__________

*I have a mini waffle iron!

Ozempic side effects

Ozempic is a diabetes and weight-loss drug that's become very popular in Hollywood. It does seem to have a range of side effects, though, despite being considered "safe," whatever that means in this day and age. Here are some of the minor side effects, aside from so-called "Ozempic face" (see here, too):

• nausea
• vomiting
• diarrhea
• flatulence
• constipation
• stomach ache
• abdominal pain
• fatigue
• injection-site reactions

And some possible major side effects:

• vision changes
• kidney problems
• gall bladder disease
• severe allergic reactions
• increased risk of thyroid cancer
• hypoglycemia
• pancreatitis

Look deeply enough, and almost all drugs have severe side effects of some kind or other; it's a statistical game: do you fall within the narrow band of an unlucky demographic? At the same time, the taking of drugs can become a values question along the lines of, "If this magic potion cured all of your ills but gave you a 5% chance of being struck and killed by lightning within a year, would you still take the potion?" You know—one of those ethical posers.

And there's also the famous wisdom of Paracelsus: The dose is the poison. It's another way of saying that too much of anything can be harmful, even water.

Anyway, Ozempic is tempting—an easy way out, perhaps, but for the moment, I'm not at all interested in it, especially since I'm on enough drugs already. Maybe if I get desperate, but I'm an old man, now, and no longer so concerned about preserving my high-school figure (not that I ever had much of a figure in high school).

Speaking of being on drugs, last night was my first night of taking the new, reduced prescription from the hospital, and without an insulin injection (since I currently lack needles—to be resolved tomorrow morning with a trip to the med-supply store). This morning's numbers looked good except for blood sugar, which was back up in the 150s because I'd indulged on Friday after coming back from the hospital. (I fasted Saturday except for a single smoothie in the late morning.) BS ought to be down by the end of the coming week as I resume my walking. The slog continues.

E. Jean Carroll in hot water? we'll see

Yet another media-loving attention whore playing the victim:

E. Jean Carroll had absolutely nothing of substance to say about Trump (the "rape" wasn't even "sexual," whatever that means), and she got awarded $83 million, anyway. By rights, she should have been ridiculed, tarred, feathered, and sent on her undignified way as yet another fausse rape accuser. Her behavior since going public has been the exact opposite of a true rape victim's. True victims shy away from the limelight and don't act all happy, chirpy, and greedy as they think about their impending financial windfall. I hope she sees not a single cent of what she was unjustly awarded. She's as fake as Christine Blasey Ford.

By the way (and switching gears to another unpleasant woman): did you hear that Amber Heard, in a bid to avoid threats and bad publicity after her courtroom tussle with Johnny Depp (in which it was revealed she'd pooped in Depp's bed), has legally changed her name while she goes through the motions of becoming a Spanish citizen? She has to realize that, once the public learns her new name, it's all over.

the mainstream media hate RFK Jr.

...and we're back to this

Well over a month ago, I stupidly nicked my toe wound again—the right big toe—while trimming away callus. I never learn, it seems. The wound started bleeding, but only slowly, and only in small quantities. Sticking on a single bandage after cleaning the bleeding area was enough, and I could afford to forget about the wound for a few hours before the bleeding would soak through the bandage. Fast forward a bit, and I'm in the hospital. At least one of my meds is blood thinners (I'd been off my meds for a few months), and the nurses notice my bleeding. I tell them the wound's history and say that it's no big deal. But lately, it's starting to feel more like an annoyance than like an inconvenience every few hours: I now have to cover the wound with two bandages, and if I forget about my toe, there's a chance I'll leave blood spots on the floor, the way I used to a couple years back when the diabetic ulcer was far more serious. I'm confident the toe will re-heal eventually, but the blood thinners (which I'm still taking as anti-stroke meds) aren't helping. I've still got my Chinese burn cream (from my botched hospital visit a year ago) to stick on the wound as an ointment, I guess. Maybe I should start using it more often. In the cosmic scheme of things, a leaky toe isn't a big deal, but it's one more damn thing to be mindful of.

UPDATE: then it occurred to me: blood-stopper powder. I have some at work.

"If you strike me down..."

How true is any of this? Is this like, in 2022, when conservatives crowed there'd be a "red wave" that turned out to be little more than a piss trail? Or is there a real sea change happening as people look at their wallets and Biden's sorry track record? From my distant vantage in Korea, it seems pretty obvious as to what's going really going on.

how AI depicts liberals and conservatives

I don't like this guy's forced, fake laughter, but the AI-generated stereotypical images of lefties and MAGA types are hilarious. As the guy points out, AI trains itself on the data it's given, so it's merely reflecting human stereotypes that are already out there.