satire: "Puppetgate"

Chuckle-worthy:

what is ragù?

Pasta Queen brings the zaniness. 

morning numbers

blood sugar: 108 (thanks to fasting plus walking)
BP: 104/63 (sure to be way higher at the hospital, especially as the meds wear off)
weight: 113 kg (again, fasting)
pulse: 65 or 73 (BP cuff or oximeter; they always give different numbers)
pulse-ox: 99
estimated A1c since 4/15: 7.14

The A1c number is in no way accurate: at the hospital, when they do the blood work, it'll be much higher because A1c is a three-month average. The date of April 15 just happens to be when I started measuring my numbers in earnest again. Last time I had my A1c officially checked, I was at 10.2, which is scarily high (under 5.5 is ideal for normies; I've never been that low). In a few months, though, I ought to be in the 5 or 6 range.

So far this morning, I'm not feeling faint or woozy, so I should be able to survive into the afternoon with no problems. I'd been worried about taking my meds on an empty stomach, but truth be told, my stomach wasn't entirely empty: before midnight last night, I indulged in a mug of coffee with a ton of cream and some artificial sweetener.* Despite the sweetener and its BS/insulin spikes, I woke up to a blood-sugar reading of 108, which is a major step down from previous numbers.** That's definitely because I've started walking again. For the moment, these are relatively short walks of about two hours. At my currently slow speed, that's not even quite 8K in terms of distance. I just walk out to the Han River and back to my place. This weekend, I'll do my first long walk, maybe down to Bundang (18K).

__________

*The hospital said I needed to fast nine hours before coming. My appointment today is at 4:50 p.m., so I need to be at the hospital two hours earlier, i.e., by 2:50 p.m. I've had nothing since that coffee, so by 2:50 p.m. today, I'll have fasted at least 14 hours—more than enough time by hospital standards.

**From April 15: 

165 (4/15, then skipped a few days)

178 (4/18)
190 (4/19)
175 (4/20)
157 (4/21)
163 (4/22)
152 (4/23)
140 (4/24)
155 (4/25)
108 (4/26)

See the sudden drop at the end? That's fasting plus walking. I'll start eating again later today, so the number will go back up, but as you see from 4/15 to 4/25, there is a slight downward trend from 165 to 155. That's the important trend to note amidst all the fluctuations.

Matt Walsh vs. Greg Abbott

Texas governor Greg Abbott has a new executive order targeting campus antisemitism:

better than planks, he says

faces in the concrete

Demonic "faces" seen during my walk Thursday night. Some don't look like faces at all, so you'll have to use your imagination to see anything. Think of the less human "faces" as the result of having lost fights, with some or most facial features having been mangled or ripped off. Enjoy the gallery.

Thursday-night walk

Same route as before, and I did manage to do one fairly puny staircase of 30-40 steps. No chest pains at all tonight. I guess all I needed was to fast.

Doctor's appointment tomorrow afternoon, 4:50 p.m. I have to be there two hours early for blood work, an x-ray, etc. The boss told me not to bother coming in to work.

More hours to make up later.

your "old man yells at cloud" moment

Let him have his crotchety-old-man rant:

We've talked about one of those idiots before. Our ranter has a point.

what real anti-colonialism looks like

last night's walk, tomorrow's appointment

Last night, I walked from work to the Han River, then home—same route I'd walked the other day. I'd planned to include some creekside staircase work, but as the walk started out, I began experiencing some minor chest pains, and that was enough to warn me away from the stairs. After about ten or twenty minutes of walking, though, the chest pains disappeared, and the rest of the walk went fine. I recall feeling resentful, as if the hospital had done something to me, making my recovery this time slower than it had been after my stroke. Honestly, I'm still not quite sure of the nature of what afflicts me. Simply saying "heart failure" doesn't tell me much; the term is just a label covering a spectrum of symptoms and conditions.

I think part of my resentment had to do with the fact that the chest pains' appearance and disappearance followed the same pattern as from before I'd been hospitalized. I'd thought the hospital treatment and the new meds might do something to break the pattern, but apparently not. So I'm stuck in some sort of medical samsara.

Today's a fasting day: my first follow-up appointment at the hospital is tomorrow, and my paperwork says I have to fast for at least nine hours before arriving. To my delight, I saw that my weight had gone down when I weighed myself this morning: I'd dropped from 115.5 kg to 114 kg. That's undoubtedly thanks to walking yesterday. Since I'm fasting and walking today, I expect to drop another kilo. It's all liquid weight, of course, but as long as the trend keeps going down, then I don't mind. My only worry is that I might get woozy tomorrow if I go too long without food, and the appointment is at 4:50 p.m. I can say that taking meds at night has been a good strategy thus far: when I wake up in the morning, I'm not woozy at all. Then again, I do have a diet smoothie for breakfast after waking up and recording my numbers. Tomorrow, my worry is there will be no breaking of the fast until much later in the day. I guess we'll see how it goes.

Here's hoping for a chest-pain-free walk tonight. And maybe some stair work.

UPDATE: the message with my QR code finally arrived. I was getting worried.

not that I care, but...

Planet Fitness may not be for you.

some Euro news with the burly Michael Heaver

Poland in revolt:

The Reform UK populist surge:

Tough times in Holland:

what if we made everything gay?

The people I can't stand are the ones who can never see past their own demographic. As I'd ranted before, they start their sentences with, "As a [demographic]..." and can only see the world in those blinkered terms. Women who go into feminism studies, black folks who go into African-American studies, Asians who go into Asian studies—the list of insufferables goes on. Ideally, these people would all be rounded up and burned with flamethrowers, but as long as the twisted ideas live on, more such people will arise like an unending wave of zombies.

a slew from PJW

France's pre-Olympics "social cleansing":

News from a while back—PJW on NYC women getting slugged:

Following up on the above NYC problem:

The UAE and the recent wrath of God... or was this man-made?

Possibly repeated post: woke French actress won't charge person who ransacked her home:

bit of news

The Kakao message confirming my Friday appointment came in, so I'm now waiting for a second message containing my hospital-pass QR code and, I hope, a note as to whether to be there 2 hours in advance to get my blood work done before I see the doc. If Friday turns out not to be a blood-work day, I might not have to fast tomorrow. But we'll see. Everything often happens at the last minute around here.

2 from Styx

"SCOTUS: Where DEI Goes to Die":

"The Uniparty's Obsession with Gagging Trump is Clearly Backfiring":

wut ah it deez daze

Ah, the irony. 

I despise the Paris Baguette bakery chain for its poorly executed baguettes, but just like three years ago, the chain will once again be my savior, providing me the mostly iceberg-lettuce salads that will help me get my weight down: the opposite of calorie-dense.

If you look carefully, though, you might see some additions: bacon crumbles, bleu or Gorgonzola cheese, raisins, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, and mandarin oranges. That latter ingredient is carby, and so are the raisins, but in terms of overall volume, those two ingredients don't amount to much. 

Tonight, I'll be doing some creekside walking and stair work, then tomorrow, I have to fast for my Friday appointment. Still no text from the hospital. Maybe it'll come tonight or tomorrow.

found (thanks, Paul)

Click to enlarge:

No guarantees. When someone as gorgeous and healthy-seeming as the Duchess of Windsor can end up with cancer, no one is safe. You can live to 100 while smoking cigars and drinking scotch like George Burns; you can die of COVID complications in your 70s like Meat Loaf; you can end up with pancreatic cancer like Patrick Swayze (57!) and God knows how many other celebrities... ain't no guarantees.

the erosion continues

Biden's numbers continue to fall:

some numbers

My weight remains about the same, but that's partly because I haven't been walking. My blood pressure remains low, and that's entirely thanks to the meds. Many of my meds are devoted to BP; the docs really piled them on to get those numbers down, and the numbers are definitely down—ruthlessly so. Blood sugar is coming down, albeit slowly.

I have my first follow-up appointment at the hospital this coming Friday. Seems like old times.* My next appointment, after this week's session, is in late May. I assume the appointments after this will be spread out more on the calendar.

April 15, 2024 numbers
blood sugar: 165 (not tragic if you're diabetic, but ideally under 99 for normies)
BP: 127/89
weight: 116 kg
pulse: 74

April 24, 2024 numbers
blood sugar: 140 (creeping down)
BP: 116/75
weight: 115.5 kg (not budging for the moment)
pulse: 61

BP and pulse are always elevated when I go to the hospital—a fact I have to explain and reexplain to the diabetes doc whenever I go there. Clinics and hospitals stress me out on an unconscious level, I guess, and it doesn't matter whether I use breathing/concentration techniques. I've tried so many. No dice.

Side note: I'm looking into buying a home-use A1c meter. A1c is a three-month average of your blood sugar, and thus a much better indication of trend lines than a daily blood-sugar read: your daily number will vary hour by hour; all those fluctuations make it inaccurate. (I've discovered that there are fasting-glucose convert-to-A1c websites out there—even a mathematical formula that you can use—if all you have are fasting-glucose numbers. Still discovering new resources even after all these years.)

__________

*But I haven't gotten my Kakao message from the hospital that confirms the appointment and gives me my QR-code pass to allow me to enter the hospital. When I left the hospital a few weeks ago, I did get an initial confirmation message about the May 24 appointment. We'll see, in a day or two, whether the hospital forgot about this coming Friday's session. I'm tempted to let it slide, but I'm about to run out of some meds.

trying to find a cartoon

I had this conversation with ChatGPT:

You: Can you tell me what year Berke Breathed drew a cartoon (I can't remember whether it was "Bloom County" or "Outland") in which a jogger gets hit by a meteor after bragging about his healthy habit of jogging? And to whom was the jogger talking? Opus the penguin or Steve Dallas?

ChatGPT: That cartoon you're referring to is from "Bloom County." It was drawn by Berke Breathed and was published on October 5, 1986. In the cartoon, the jogger who gets hit by the meteor was boasting about his jogging habit to Steve Dallas, not Opus the penguin. It's one of the memorable moments from the strip, highlighting the quirky humor and social commentary characteristic of Breathed's work.

I'm still looking for the cartoon. If you find it, please link it to me, and please tell me how you found it. I tried a lot of search strings that I thought were clever.

blockchain...?

Call me old-fashioned, but I'm leery of this:

the "Great Woke Hollywood Depression"

Rage on, Nerdrotic:

should the right forgive Tulsi Gabbard for her former 2A rhetoric?

Tulsi Gabbard changed on many issues once she realized it was time to leave the Democrat party (she's an independent now). One major area of change was her stance on guns. While I don't think she's totally there yet, she now seems to have a clearer understanding about the left's desire to grab guns and severely restrict gun usage, and she sounds almost reformed. Do we trust her? Do we forgive her? The following video explores that question.

huff and puff

I've been a lazy shit in terms of walking and staircase work, but I do plan on doing both some walking and some stairs work tomorrow. We've got rain forecast through noon; that'll doubtless change. But after tomorrow, it seems the April showers will be done, and we'll soon be into the May flowers phase of spring, which is already starting to feel like summer. That means a switch back to nighttime walking... but I'm not sure I want to walk at night and do the apartment stairs in the early morning. I'd rather do the creekside stairs than the apartment stairs since I can do both—walk and stairs—at night and both along the same route (Yangjae Creek), killing two birds with one stone, and maybe occasionally doing the apartment stairs just to check on my pulmonary progress. No matter—I'll work things out somehow.

Tonight, meanwhile, more of "Picard," Season 1. I'm more than halfway through.

Vivek on public service

Vivek: "You should not be able to profit (above your salary) as a public servant."

Got that, Nancy Pelosi and all the rest of you dirty, insider-trading motherfuckers? This is a problem at the core of both major parties. How many of these people would be interested in politics if these and other benefits didn't exist?* What if politicians really did live lives of service, not rule? Hell, Vivek himself would be affected by this worldview.

__________

*Donald Trump may be one of the few politicians whose net worth went down while he was in office. Again, a good lesson for bottom-feeders like Nancy Pelosi, Joetato, et al.

obnoxiously American

World's biggest corn dog.

this is not reassuring

For those of us mired in the hospital system, this isn't comforting at all, but it dovetails with my own suspicions:

chef vs. the 1500-year-old recipe

Measurements are unclear, so there's a lot of guesswork. The goal is to make a primordial lasagna. Can Chef James do it, or will he crash and burn?

the same story, again and again

It's all projection.

how many ways into John Mac's home?

John,

I have questions. This was the thing that confused me when I saw your photo and caption: am I looking at one home or two? If it's only one home, does it have two entrances, upper and lower? Or am I looking at two homes with two separate entrances?

Sorry about the really shitty arrows.

my new favorite thing

This just might be my new favorite thing. I love this guy's hilariously over-the-top cooking videos. He definitely has a Texan's sense of proportion.

gaslighting and performance comparisons

Here's a chart based on recent data:

no source given, but a similar source is the Wilson Group, Bureau of Labor Statistics, from last year

The above chart comes from this video, which argues we're being gaslit about how good things are, how lovely everything is, and how bad the previous administration was:

David Hogg, another hypocritical idiot

Just watch the contrasting footage:

bet on the chromosomal male

Three weeks earlier, I'd put up swimmer Riley Gaines's tweet about this:

As I've said many times before, I see no moral problem with someone's having a bone-deep conviction that s/he belongs in a different body. If anything, I salute the sheer cojones it takes to want to undergo surgical alteration and hormone treatment in pursuit of that vision. But as I've also said, I have a moral problem with the athletes who go beyond that simple desire to wanting to compete with biological women in track and field, MMA, weightlifting, etc. Biological males shouldn't be allowed to win prizes meant for biological females. A biological male in the MMA octagon should never, ever be allowed to pound on a biological female. Women deserve their competitive spaces. For trans people, start a damn trans league.

Here's Pierre Poilievre's perspective.

breaking the culinary rules! (redux)

Are these culinary rules legit to you, or do you break them?

1. "Always sift dry ingredients."

2. "Don't cook steak from fridge cold." (i.e., from fridge-cold temperatures)

3. "Never cook with cheap wine."

4. "Don't mix salt into burger-patty mixture."

I can give you my answers:

1. I think sifting is way overrated. I do understand that it can affect the perceived volume of a powdery substance like flour (sifted flour looks fluffier), which is why it's better to measure powders by weight (e.g., grams) and not by volume (e.g., milliliters, cups, etc). But I measure ruthlessly by weight where I can, so that's not an issue. Does not sifting result in lumps? Well, in some cases, as when you're making pancakes, lumps in the batter are actually considered a good thing. In other cases, if you use a Chef John rule like Hot roux, cold milk, no lumps, you don't even have to worry about lumps. And then there's just the idea that you can mix your dry ingredients thoroughly enough to achieve a no-lump mixture. So if the point of sifting is to avoid lumps, I'm here to say that, 9 times out of 10, you're not going to get lumps, anyway.

2. I'm not enough of a steak connoisseur to say, and ever since I discovered the fire-and-forget ease of sous-vide cooking, the question of fridge temp is irrelevant to me.

3. I use cheap wine with my beef burgundy all the time. Except for that one time. That said, I do subscribe to the Use a wine you would drink rule, whether the wine is cheap or not.

4. I've always found this to be absurd. Season it all up from the beginning, for God's sake. Don't listen to Babish; listen to Gordon Ramsay.

Here's Sorted Food, experimentally breaking rules to see the results:

Ave, Dr. Gilleland!

Dr. Mike Gilleland puts up a quote about why people balk at learning languages. My reaction was partly "Guilty as charged" (regarding my middling Korean) and "I know assholes like that" (regarding those I know who never get beyond pidgin level).

Partial quote:

Friends sometimes ask me why I like learning new languages. I always feel like asking them why they do not like learning new languages, but I never do. For one thing, it would be too much like asking a tone-deaf man why he does not care for Debussy. For another, I know that many of them are actually afraid, and it would be embarrassing to expose their fear. They are timid about sounding like fools or small children while they are learning, and they are reluctant to remold their thinking and their habits of speech. I sympathize with this. Every human being has some inhibitions about learning certain new activities: skiing or dancing, diving or acting, public speaking or private thinking, all repel some of us. Then again, some people of a conservative bent believe subconsciously that there is only one language, their own; and that all others are silly monkey-talk not worth learning. They will not make the effort, any more than they would learn to bark and mew because they had a dog and a cat.

from Vivek

Respond to the Great Reset with the Great Uprising:

How to get term limits:

Good money after bad:

"Two-tiered, Third-world Justice System":

On the need for debates:

obnoxious influencer and karma

These idiots never learn.

meds at night: a winning strategy?

I tested my numbers just now, and the strategy of taking my meds at night seems, at least for now, to be paying off: my weight is down from 115.5 to 114.5 kg; blood pressure is 116/75 (slightly better than the classic 120/80 without being worrisome); pulse-ox is 98%; and finally, fasting glucose is 157, per the downward trend going from 190-something to 170-something to, now, 150-something. So this is all good news, and I might not have anything to report to the doc this coming Friday. Then again, I still don't enjoy the quantity of medicine I'm taking, so I might lobby to have my meds reduced. Mentioning faintness might help my case. Will I get my way? Only the Shadow knows.

the Rock and buyer's remorse

Some guess that Dwayne has political ambitions of his own, hence the return to the center:

Then there's this:

is English just a form of French?

In recent news, a French scholar declared that English is merely badly pronounced French. But is the reality really that simple? Despite the numerous Latinate words, English is usually classified as a Germanic language. The following video takes a reasonable stance on the issue:

the hate-watching has begun!

I just watched the first episode of Season 1 of "Star Trek: Picard." I didn't think the episode was all that bad, to tell you the truth. It didn't introduce all of the main characters in the series quite yet, but it laid out the basic premise and seemed to have a lot of potential. I assume the rest of Season 1 and all of Season 2 will drop the ball, though, so I'm bracing for impact. I'll be sure to write a review once I've made it through the first two seasons. I can say, though, that I now understand one of the main complaints about "Picard," Season 3: the Borg are apparently front and center in this story. They seem to dominate each season's storyline, and Episode 1 of Season 1 ends with a shot of what appears to be an abandoned and refurbished Borg cube being used as a research facility.

Expect a review in a few weeks.

a message for Trump: "I'm sorry for believing the lies"

Plenty still believe those lies.

BP meds at night?

Regarding whether to take blood-pressure meds at night,

...the Mayo Clinic says:

In the past, many doctors recommended taking blood pressure medication at night because heart attacks happen most often in the early morning hours. However, since blood pressure typically drops at night in people with normal and high levels, it is unnecessary to drop it further.

...and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) say:

This is a robust study that shows that people who take their blood pressure medication at night have better blood pressure control and have reduced risk of a cardiovascular event such as a stroke or heart attack.

I was woozy and feeling faint for most of Friday morning and afternoon after taking my meds, which I think might need to be dialed down. It's possible I'm doing something wrong in terms of timing, but I think it's also likely that, in terms of BP meds, I'm ingesting too much. It's not blood sugar: my BS readings are still high but slowly coming down. It's definitely BP, which was way low (87/67) early Friday afternoon. So, in exploring the logic of the situation, I started wondering about taking my meds at night. The Mayo Clinic's advice, above, makes it seem as if I might fall into a coma if I'm not careful, whereas the NIH's advice suggests there are benefits to switching to a nocturnal schedule. Obviously, I need to read more, but my own thinking is that I'm less of a mess if I take my meds after eating, and since my roughly 16/8 intermittent-fasting schedule (Newcastle-diet version) skews toward the late end of the day, there'll be food in my stomach* by the time I take my meds at night. We'll see how things are in a few days.

Note: this wouldn't even be a consideration were it not for the fact that the number of pills I now take has more than doubled. Before, when I had only six or eight pills (only!), I had no problem taking them in the morning, in the evening, or whenever. My body mass protected me. Now, though, with so many drugs coursing through my system, I can no longer rely on my body mass to blunt the drugs' effects. I also felt that my body needed a break from the onslaught, so I skipped my insulin and pills today and will restart tonight. No wooziness today at all.

__________

*I'd felt a bit woozy before Friday, but the moment I ate something, the brain-fog and vertigo lifted, and I felt somewhat better. Food helps.

UPDATE: I'm not asleep yet, but I took my meds tonight, and I'll be curious to see my numbers in the morning. I can already tell that taking meds at night is the way to go. With a more or less full stomach, I'm not suffering any wooziness whatsoever, and the meds, which have to fight through the food, aren't hitting my body with a sledgehammer. Hey, good call, Kevin!

some Rogan vids

I didn't really hear an active endorsement.

Joe won't get nominated:

a volley from Chris Chappell

Can illegals bear arms?

The Deep State doesn't exist. The Deep State is cool!

The sorry state of the nation:

A question already asked many times:

Squatters:

Disney's civil war:

Why it doesn't pay to be soft on crime:

the converts

"How are there still people who think the person running this country is doing a great job?"

"The precise moment I was no longer a Democrat":

What this second guy says how Obamacare fucked him is important.

girl bosses are at least partly a fantasy

Watch a woman's SWAT team get its ass kicked in competition. As before, this isn't to gloat about how guys are "better" than women, but rather to make a point that some feminists just aren't getting regarding the physical differences between trained men and trained women:

Judge Engoron admits his agenda

This is what they call judicial activism:

when you ban something and end up causing more problems

Stupid laws and bans originate in emotion and don't benefit from deep, long-term thinking:

a few from Doug

Michelle Obama won't be running for office and attempting to "save" the US:

The prospect of suing Letitia James:

When the leftie meets someone with facts at his command:

Joy Behar used to love Trump:

Democrat-on-Democrat rhetoric:

"Satanic agenda":

Trump and Mike Johnson to propose a bill to prevent non-citizen voting in federal elections:

the "world's hardest muscle-up"

A muscle-up is an exercise that begins as a pull-up, then turns into the pushing component of a dip. Here's a YouTube Short on a cruel variant of the muscle-up—one in which you have to stop and freeze at various points during the movement. This was painful to watch.

spot the error!

Seen at ROK Drop:

I wonder if he volunteered for this unit or the ROK military put him in it for publicity reasons?

Highlight the space between the brackets to see the explanation.

[If a sentence begins with "I wonder if/whether..." or "He asked if/whether...", it's making a statement via indirect discourse, not asking a question.

WRONG: I wonder where he went?
RIGHT: I wonder where he went.

When you say "I wonder," you're declaring your mental state.

And what's "indirect discourse"? It's when an utterance is embedded in another utterance. "Direct discourse" involves direct quotes. Here are some examples:

DIRECT: He said, "Sit down."
DIRECT: She wondered, "Would the party be fun?"
DIRECT: He asked, "Are you Sarah Connor?"

DIRECT: "Stay away from that dildo," he advised.

INDIRECT: He told her to sit down.
INDIRECT: She wondered if/whether the party would be fun.
INDIRECT: He asked if/whether she was Sarah Connor.

INDIRECT: He advised her to stay away from that dildo.]

A deeper dive on the if/whether question is here.

PJW on a host of topics

Violent crime by whom? They can't quite bring themselves to say it.

OJ Simpson and lingering racial politics:

The sex offender who couldn't be punished:

Yeesh... Lizzo:

Scottish hate-crime bill a "shit-show":

fixing the Terminator's unmoving eye

Nifty SFX video:

the painfully slow walk

Some walk stats for my Thursday-night stroll:

Starting in Daechi, finishing at Daecheong Station.

I wish the chart showed average speed, not pace.

This was a two-hour creekside walk (no stairs) at about a 3.94-kph speed. Not even 4 kilometers per hour: pretty slow. But this is only my first week back from my second trip to the hospital, so I'll cut myself a little slack. 

As with the Wednesday-night walk, my heart and breathing were both fine. The activity burned almost an extra 800 calories, and my pedometer says I burned 1100 calories for the entire day (over and above my 1800 calories for basal metabolic rate). 2900-ish calories burned can't be bad. And—I forgot to factor in the food I ingested. On the Newcastle diet, that comes to about 800 calories, so really, it's a 2100-calorie deficit per day. That's 14,700 calories per week, or 4.2 pounds of fat (1.9 kg) lost per week. I actually doubt I'll lose that much, mainly because I'm likely to ingest more than 800 calories per day. But I'll lose at least a pound or so a week. We'll see how I am when I do a weigh-in a few days.

And hey—my shoulders didn't feel quite so flabby during tonight's walk, either. The walking helps. It reminds my body what I can do, smooths out the kinks.

I forgot to write, yesterday, about all the frogs ribbiting along the trail. Must be mating season. The frogs were ribbiting lustily tonight as well. My Thursday-night route took me out toward the Han River; I stopped and turned around once I reached the confluence of the Tan Creek and the Han. There's more construction going on along the last kilometer of the Tan before the confluence; construction workers waved us bikers and walkers and joggers along a prescribed path with their stubby, lightsaber-like flashlights. 

This is the perfect moment to be out and walking at night: the air is pleasantly cool without the bite of winter, but it's not as warm as it's going to get once it's late spring. As I mentioned before, I might restart my stairs work this weekend; we'll see. But it's nice to know that life is realigning itself into something approaching normalcy again.

as predicted: wokeness will cost lives

health update

The pulse oximeter had me at 98% this morning. BP was disconcertingly low at 124/69; I think my meds may be too strong: I feel tired all the time, at a guess from either low BP or low blood sugar. I'm also not used to having my BP this low, and since this state of affairs is due to meds, I didn't earn this as I have in the past. Weight is holding steady at 115.5 kg. I didn't take my blood sugar this morning; I'll do it either late tonight or tomorrow morning. (Yes, I'm aware of the need to take stats at the same time of day.)

I'd be all for nuking Dearborn, MI at this point

As Walsh says: if you hate the US so much, then leave. And stop hypocritically benefitting from the privileges of living in America while trying to destroy my country.

from 1989: a rant directed at Joe Biden

how does this happen?

John Stossel reports on two equally bad phenomena: (1) how laws passed ostensibly to benefit "gig" workers end up making them poorer and more oppressed, and (2) how California's perverse, economically illiterate measures end up being adopted at the federal level:

Styx before the attack on Israel

A big-picture look at Biden's confusingly incoherent attitude toward Iran:

10,000 calories a day and no weight gain

This seems like something to envy at first until you realize it's its own sort of hell:

first attempt at a real walk tonight

Tonight (Wednesday night), I walked the long way home. The major takeaway is that my heart and lungs had no problems at all during the walk: there was no sensation of a skeletal hand squeezing my heart, nor was there any shortness of breath. It was still a tiring walk (I did feel something in my chest after I got home), but I wasn't over-tired at all. 

I'm going to build on this good news by walking every day if possible, and I'll begin rebuilding my heart's strength by restarting the stairs, possibly as soon as this weekend. Walking, combined with the Newcastle diet, will have me losing some weight, I think, if for no other reason than simple calories in, calories out. There's a limit to how effective this will be, but if this is like three years ago, it'll be weeks before I really start to plateau.

Lunch earlier today was breakfast bagels, but they were keto bagels (well, "bagels," really). Being made with a bread that's much heavier than the regular stuff, the resulting sandwiches were hard to choke down. I had to nibble at them. I'll also need to remember, in the future, to make my sandwiches open-faced. There's simply no need for that much bread. 

Here are some pics of what the keto "bagels" are like:

March 30, 2024—keto "bagels" made from keto "baguette" dough... heavy but delicious.

The dough for my keto "baguettes" seemed much more suited for "bagels."

The "bagel" bottoms are smooth...

...but the tops are fairly rough.

Fast-forward to April 17. I ambitiously lay out material for three sandwiches, but I end up eating only two.

Sausage patties... but I used a bit too much xanthan gum in making a keto version of maple syrup (maple extract + erythritol + water + xanthan gum)—the non-keto version of these patties uses brown sugar. The xanthan gum left a slick and gooey texture. Next time, no xanthan gum at all.

"bagels," halved

two eggs over easy

before microwaving

after 'waving (and with a cheat: my boss's blueberry jam)

The blueberry jam turned out not to be so great. I should have brought my own strawberry jam, or I could have made some keto strawberry jam of my own.

I also learned a thing: if you're trying to use a metal cookie cutter as a mold to cook perfectly round eggs, you need to spray the cookie cutter with Pam or coat it with oil first—otherwise the eggs will bind with the hot metal, and when you try to lift the ring off the skillet, the egg will come with it. Double plus ungood. And a rookie mistake.

Taiwan, wargaming a China invasion

the dalliance is over, I think

I never mentioned how inflated my stats for March were: I was averaging several tens of thousands of daily visits, and by the end of the month, my visit total was 767,165 (24.7K/day). That's impossibly high and not at all the norm, but it built upon February, when I had 146,738 unique visitors (about 5,060/day). This month, though, I've gone from five-digit site-visit numbers to four-digit numbers, and it wouldn't surprise me if I ended April right back at my usual norm, i.e., a lowly 600-ish visits per day (so far this month, I have 199,454 daily visits over 17 days, an average of about 11.7K visits a day). 

The bots have gotten bored with me, I think, and since they were bots all along, I never really achieved blog-celebrity status. No one came knocking on my door to bask in my "fame," and no special status accrued to me. I continue to labor in obscurity, and my numbers will soon reflect that reality again. I think I have a small, semi-faithful core of viewers/readers who don't read the blog every day, nor do they comment every day, but they're at least a little loyal to what I'm doing, sticking with me through thick and thin... sort of. This really ought to feel like a relief; it certainly never felt the way fame is supposed to feel. That's because it's all artificial. Maybe this is the hollowness of AI.

saw "Dune, Part 2" again last night

I rewatched "Dune, Part 2," this time in the comfort of my own apartment, with no COVID-y people about.* A few scattered thoughts:

1. Sound design! The movie should definitely win an Oscar for amazingly evocative sound design that puts you in the world—subtle things like the echo-y sound of Harkonnen troops speaking from inside their helmets to the phatic noise of the lasguns (Frank Herbert's terminology, not mine) to the weird, almost Vaderlike noise of the tubes and other apparatus attached to Baron Harkonnen, still unrecovered from Leto's final, fateful, fatal poison attack.
2. Comedy that won't age well. Stilgar, our main source for humor, has a few scenes that, I think, are going to look cringe-inducing in a few years. Overall, Javier Bardem played the role excellently, so I don't fault him. This is more of a screenwriting issue.
3. Making Lady Jessica into something like a corruptive, or at least slyly manipulative, force on Arrakis is a mistake. In the book, her intentions are purer. If anything, she's been a rebel against the Bene Gesserit project for years. This change to Jessica's character also sets up a very immature dynamic between her and Paul—Paul, who is on his way to becoming a holy leader of the Fremen, is slotted into the role of the surly teen rebelling against his mother's wishes. It's not a dynamic that dominates the plot, but there's more than a whiff of it, almost as if this rewriting of the Jessica-Paul relationship were a sop to modern audiences (cue Critical Drinker echo).
4. Another book-based point about Jessica: like most Bene Gesserit, she's trained in scary forms of armed and unarmed combat—what the spooked and reverent Fremen call the weirding way. She has a general's knowledge of strategy and a queen's knowledge of politics, not to mention a trained psychologist's knowledge of the tiniest ins and outs of human nature. Leader, soldier, psychologist, linguist, and philosopher, a Bene Gesserit witch is one of the mightiest characters in Frank Herbert's galaxy. And yet—the most combat Jessica gets in the movie is when she inelegantly bashes a Harkonnen soldier with a rock. Rebecca Ferguson should have been at least as nimble and powerful as her character Ilsa Faust in the Mission: Impossible movies. She should have been tearing apart Harkonnen troops out in the desert sands.
5. Paul's sandworm ride is, by itself, worth the price of admission. Amazing scene.
6. I'm still trying to decide how I feel about the changes made to both Chani and the Fremen. Separating the Fremen into northern and southern factions—which doesn't happen in the book—is consistent with the novel's contention that not all Fremen were immediately believers in Paul. Making Chani the focus of the doubters was a plausible change to the story, but this change was made at the cost of making her less personally loyal to Paul. She makes clear, in the movie version, that her love of Paul is conditional, telling him she'll love him "as long as you remain true to yourself." The Fremen, in both the book and the movie, aren't initially that concerned with galactic affairs, and Chani's awareness of the struggle and politicking among the Great Houses is dim at best. Her knowledge of Bene Gesserit manipulation, in the movie, is also unexplained, uncanonical, and a bit problematic. I don't think Villeneuve did too much violence to Chani's character: at least she's no longer blindly loyal. But what we see in the movie is a radical departure from the Chani of the books.
7. What of Chani's future? In the next book, Dune Messiah, Chani is back with Paul and initially unable to conceive thanks to the contraceptives that Princess Irulan, Paul's wife, has been slipping into Chani's food and drink. Chani is eventually able to break through this attempt to keep her childless (in the first book, she gave birth to a son who was killed during a battle—another plot point that the movies leave out), and she eventually gives birth to Leto and Ghanima before dying in childbirth. Irulan, who had been part of a conspiracy to overthrow Paul, will renounce the conspiracy, repent of her ways, and promise to be Leto and Ghanima's teacher as Paul, blinded by a stone-burner, disappears into the desert and into legend. It will be interesting to see how Denis Villeneuve handles Chani in the third movie, which will be a Shakespearean tragedy.
8. I failed to note in my review how certain aesthetic elements from HR Giger made it into this version of "Dune," just as they did in David Lynch's version. I'm thinking specifically of certain outdoor scenes on Giedi Prime, the Harkonnen homeworld. Villeneuve's "Dune" was, overall, an immense visual treat.

__________

*That's my working theory: I caught COVID on the crowded subway rides to and from the cinema. It's hard to see another explanation: this was a major break in my commuting routine, and I think I paid the price for putting myself in the petri dish that is the Seoul metro.

Barrow-wights: the creepier side of Tolkien

begone, weakness

My shoulders continue to moan and cry as if they were being pushed to their limits despite the fact that I'm doing basically nothing to them. I'm supposed to meet that older distance-walking couple on Saturday, May 4, which is going to mean busing out Friday night (May 3), then taking a cab either right to the meeting site or to the bottom of the mountain. I told the couple I'd like to meet them somewhere dramatic, so I picked Ihwaryeong. Will I have the strength to walk up that 5K hill in almost two weeks? I wonder. But we'll see. More on this later when I figure out the logistics.

UPDATE: I'll take a bus out to Mungyeong, then a cab out to Yeonpoong-myeon, crash at the local yeogwan for the night, then do the 5K climb to Ihwaryeong the following morning. As I've said several times, the slope isn't that bad despite the distance, and I'll simply stop and rest as needed. The couple will be coming up the other side of the mountain, and we'll hang out at the summit until they're ready to continue. I might go back downhill with them (back the way I came), or I might catch a cab to the nearest bus terminal and let them do their thing. I won't be feeding them lunch on the mountaintop; based on my own experience, we'd be meeting at the summit way before lunch, and besides, I myself never eat a full meal until I'm done for the day: such is the timing of my bowels.

I suppose another option could be to escort the couple back the way I came, then have a meal with them in town if they're okay with that. I imagine this'll be a play-it-by-ear sort of day; the female half of the couple might have Americanized a bit, but I bet she's a nonlinear Korean at heart, so whatever plans I might make for the day will be altered upon first contact. As Mike Tyson said, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." His version of No plan ever survives first contact with the enemy. That casts my meeting with the couple in an overly sinister light, but it's true that Koreans generally improvise because so few of them are capable of linear thought and action when it comes to activities with friends. (To be fair, Koreans can be ruthlessly over-linear in other situations.) Maybe this is why you don't hear much about huge Korean communities in hyperlinear, regimented Switzerland.

E. Jean Carroll and the unregistered firearm

do you trust the polls?

now, here's a crossover

The description says this video was uploaded only two months ago, but I could've sworn I saw this same video several years ago. Here's Vader versus Batman (and friends):

the Swiss are big mad and lead the way

Switzerland has had enough of the EU's nonsense.

Reminder: Switzerland is not an EU member.

mediquipped

pulse oximeter, CGM (constant glucose monitor), CGM manual

CGM up close

It was a disappointment to pick up the CGM, which seems a little backward and wonky. It requires initial calibration during its first two hours of use, then calibration every 12 hours after that. At the 15-day mark, you have to get another monitor to attach to your arm, and I guess the calibration has to happen again. I don't recall hearing about any of this with the monitors you get in the US, but maybe clever US marketing covered these troublesome details up. I'll read slowly through the user's manual and learn the machine's ins and outs.

As you see, I also got a pulse oximeter, so I can measure my pulse-ox. I doubt I'll use it often, but at those moments when I'm breathing harder than usual, it might come in handy.

One of the shop staffers spoke broken English, and he insisted on English the entire time. I tried to get him to switch to Korean, but then I thought that it might be better for him to keep speaking in English. While his English could definitely have used some help, he got his points across just fine. His English seemed only a little worse than my Korean.