Comments Posted By Kevin Kim
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Whoa. Greg has a point.
You need to get that validity date checked ASAP, for both you and Swan (maybe there’s a reason why the dates are the way they are, but find out that reason and make sure it won’t bite you in the ass later). You might also want to blur or mosaic out your passport number and expiry date on your blog. You don’t want malicious parties to harvest that data. In this day and age, leave nothing private dangling publicly in the wind.
If you went to “the print shop” to get your visa, I assume this is an e-visa. Do you not have a color printer at home? I’d buy a B/W laserjet for normal home use and a color deskjet/inkjet for when you need to print special documents in color. (There are color laser printers, too, but they come with disadvantages.)
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 06/January/2026 @ 2:05 am
Is watching John’s resto wither and die anything like watching a sunset, just slower and sadder? Gonna be a shame when it closes down. Unless someone comes along to rescue it. I wonder what will take the resto’s place.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 05/January/2026 @ 4:15 pm
Lots of people dying early. A shame.
If those servings of ribs and filet keep shrinking, the PI will be the Land of Petite Meat.
Ask Swan to make you some ddukbaegi bulgogi. One of my faves.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 04/January/2026 @ 10:56 pm
It would have been better to write it as: The beach at Mango’s was busier than usual with a holiday crowd. Does that fix it?
The original sentence had “busier than usual” as a phrasal adjective modifying “holiday crowd.” Your change is fine, but all you needed were hyphens.
The beach at Mango’s with a busier-than-usual holiday crowd.
As for this:
I think calling my dream for the afterlife a “do-over” is a mistake. My fantasy [is more] about wanting to relive my life.
I don’t even know what you’re talking about here. Neither of us mentioned an afterlife. You’ve been going on and on about “my do-over life,” and that’s what I was responding to: the contrast between expressing self-satisfaction and still wanting to relive part or all of your life. Are you content, or are you not? You can’t have it both ways.
You sound at war with yourself. On the one hand, there’s all of the “I am who I am, and I’m never gonna change” rhetoric. On the other hand, there’s the “If I had the chance to do things differently, I would” rhetoric. You need to pick a lane and stick with it. Either really be content (in which case, stop talking about reliving life) or really go all-in on the regrets.
So: if you truly are who you are, and you’re never going to change, then any do-over life would end up being the exact same life. That’s the inevitable logic of your situation.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 04/January/2026 @ 1:22 pm
re: comma meme
You did that one on December 31.
This is when all the problems of aging start to come together into a perfect storm: the urge to crack bad jokes, the urge to repeat what you’ve said a thousand times before, and the inability to learn from experience thanks to ever-increasing forgetfulness. Yeah, it’s a good thing I don’t work in a nursing home: I’d be murdering patients. Until it was finally my turn to become one.
God, I remember one old guy at my church who would shake my hand every week as if it were the first time, then boom out, “Kevin! I don’t care what they say about you!”—and laugh at his own joke. Every. Damn. Week. I guess we’re supposed to treasure these behaviors as the old get older. I tend to be more jaded, seeing it as a sign of the machine just breaking down. And knowing that that’ll be my fate, too, one day. Unless I get smashed by a truck, fall down an elevator shaft, get hit by an RPG, have another stroke or heart attack, etc. I kind of hope for a sudden death.
Beached boats on the bay.
And trash day on the beach, it appears.
The beach at Mango’s with a busier than usual holiday crowd.
Spot the error!
And then it was time to go home.
Looking very sober.
…I came to terms with where I was in life and also accepted the me I was.
If you can accept your life and yourself, there’s no need for do-overs. Do-overs imply there are things you don’t accept and want to repair.
I don’t use much whipped cream these days, but I won’t be cowed from doing so, especially on pumpkin pie if I can ever find some here.
Whipped cream is easy to make at home. Got a blender or a food processor? Pour heavy cream into it, maybe 500 ml. Add whatever keto sweetener you’ve got (erythritol, allulose, monk fruit, Splenda, whatever)—it should be the sweetness equivalent of about a level tablespoon of sugar. Blitz the heavy cream on high speed for about a minute. Stop and check consistency. It should still be runny but slightly thicker. Blitz another 30-45 seconds. Stop and check again. Blitz another 30 seconds. Stop and check. Keep doing this until you’ve got whipped cream. Don’t go too far, or you’ll have butter. Whipped cream is absurdly easy to make. But feel free to buy sugar-free, pre-made whipped cream if you want. I think the unit cost is pretty similar.
Also: Filipino kalabasa/calabaza is a great replacement for pumpkin, so you can make pumpkin pie at home. And an easy crust to make is a graham-cracker crust (or whatever sweet crackers, wafers, or cookies you’ve got in your part of the world). Just put your crackers/whatever into a Ziploc bag, then gently bash/crush the wafers until they’re reduced to a coarse powder. Mix with sugar/sweetener and melted butter (about 200 g powder to 90 g melted butter and about 70 g sugar/sweetener, but don’t add sugar if you’re using Oreo-style cookies) until you have something roughly like wet sand. Lump into the middle of a pie plate, then use a glass with a flat bottom (or a measuring cup) to smoosh and tamp out the crust until it reaches the edges and goes up the sides of your pie tin or pie plate. See here for what I’m talking about. Pre-bake this crust for a few minutes if you want (you might need a second pie tin to hold the crust in place; it’ll slump and shrink otherwise), then pour in your pumpkin-pie filling and bake your pie. It’s not a lot of work; it simply takes some time and patience. I’m sure Swan can figure it out if you’re unable or unwilling. There are tons of pumpkin-pie recipes on YouTube; Swan can look for a recipe that uses kalabasa (known as kabocha squash in Japan and America; it’s called dan hobak in Korea). Or just click here.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 03/January/2026 @ 7:29 pm
When you have another hangover (as you will many times this year), visit your local Korean resto and ask for haejang-guk, known as the traditional Korean hangover soup. Here’s a recipe. Here’s a video.
Poor Vitaly. Lost without his steroids. Ha.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 02/January/2026 @ 9:19 pm
Let me clarify my thought on one point:
I thought English was an advantage re: tourism because Western tourists looking for an “Asian experience” could go to the PI, instead of to other SE Asians countries, and not have to worry too much about a language barrier. The PI is also largely Catholic, too, which pivots the country even more Westward than other SE Asian countries. In all, you’d think the PI could be a more “relatable” Asian country for Westerners looking to get a taste of Asia. Maybe the PI needs something like its own version of the Korean Wave to market itself better on the global stage. So far, all it seems to have—in terms of international marketing—is Jollibee, which many Foodtubers (like Joshua Weissman) are raving about in the States. Maybe that’s a start.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 02/January/2026 @ 2:06 am
Will tourists find their way back here in 2026? I’ve not seen any hopeful signs of that happening.
That 3.96M number seems anemic for the PI. I thought English was an advantage. But here’s what the AI god has to say:
Tourist arrivals in the Philippines showed significant growth leading to a peak in 2019 (over 8.2 million), a drastic drop during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2021), and a strong recovery post-pandemic, reaching around 5.44 million in 2024, with projections and early 2025 data indicating continued recovery towards pre-pandemic levels, though official full-year 2025 graphs aren’t fully released yet, but nearing 5.6 million by late 2025.
So AI, at least, is a bit more optimistic.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 01/January/2026 @ 5:58 pm
Question for @Kevin. Since you don’t really have your own domain, but rather a sub-domain on blogspot, do they have a cap on your blog size? Not being very savvy on web hosting, owning domains, etc, but I thought that one of the advantages of owning your own domain (thought having it hosted by someone else) was that you had control over the total amount of your content. Even if you wanted to move to another “location” that offered better pricing for more storage, all the content was yours. Is that something easily done with a website like blogspot?
I rarely to go back to read comments on comment threads; you’re lucky I caught this.
As far as I know, the only upper limit for a free Blogspot blog has to do with the storage of my blog’s images (photos, drawings, etc.). I pay for that now; I’m on Google’s two-terabyte plan. Once I die, and someone cancels my credit card or whatever, I imagine all of that will disappear—everything of mine that’s related to my Google account.
For me, the real advantage of moving to my own domain would be the freedom-of-speech/TOS issues. Because Blogger/Blogspot is hosting me, random readers can read my material and report me, which results in my having to waste time and lodge a dispute and a please-review, which usually results in the reinstatement of my perfectly innocent post. But I’ve been too lazy to gather the hardware to host my own domain.
Otherwise, there is no known cap on my blog size, if by “blog size” you mean “number of posts.” I’ve been on the same blog since 2003, and there have been no usage-limit warnings.
As for moving content to another domain… it’s possible but a pain in the ass.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 03/January/2026 @ 7:53 pm
It’s the old “gangsters making you pay protection money” thing.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 01/January/2026 @ 4:35 pm
[second attempt—please delete the first]
Hopefully, I didn’t just get scammed.
Google the question, “Is [blog host] a scam?” Or—”Is [blog host’s Pro 200 Plan] a scam?” and I bet you’ll get some interesting answers. You can do that for anything that smells like a scam, by the way.
Otherwise, Happy New Year. Enjoy the final hours of 2025.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 31/December/2025 @ 10:49 pm
How do you spell “chow mein”?
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 30/December/2025 @ 2:03 pm
Swan opted for the chow mien…
Spot the error!
Have a great time out at Sampaloc.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 29/December/2025 @ 3:28 pm
re: that “Marry her” meme
Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn have been together for decades, and they never got married because both were convinced that marriage would ruin things.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 28/December/2025 @ 8:26 pm
re: sad dad, superficial daughter, happy/loyal dawg
That’s a nice, sad, quietly happy story. These are the reassurances we create for ourselves when reality doesn’t go the way we envisioned it going. It would have been nice for that dad to have had a better, less superficial daughter. But he did what he could to make lemonade when life gave him lemons.
I assume your hike with Scott went better, this time, than during that awful time that Scott described—exhaustion, dehydration, getting lost, and a possibly connected stroke later on. What did you do differently this time to avoid the mistakes of last time? I’m especially sensitive to that right now, having only recently done my “redemption walk,” in which I prepared for and (mostly) avoided the mistakes of last year.
For what it’s worth, that flower:
gaenari/개나리 = forsythiaAs it turns out, forsythias usually pop up in the spring, and they normally have four petals, but five-petal varieties do seem to exist (if AI isn’t lying to me).
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 27/December/2025 @ 9:05 pm
Mat. I stand corrected.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 27/December/2025 @ 10:54 am
A big Happy Birthday to Mike. Born on Christmas, eh? He’s lookin’ good for 78.
I’m sure you’ve told the Matt/Sohee story before, and Sohee in particular was recently featured in a post. Sad story all around.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 26/December/2025 @ 9:25 pm
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…not!
I’ve trussed up your elf. Do you want front-door delivery? A precise airdrop onto your roof? Do you need a spit for roasting?
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 26/December/2025 @ 12:48 pm
While grocery shopping at Royal this week, Christmas carols played in the background.
Good God, errors even on Christmas!
So according to the above sentence, Christmas carols were grocery shopping. I’ll give you an elf to slaughter and eat as elf-lechon if you can name the error in question. Here’s a hint: da_________ mo_________ .
A real Christmas miracle would be an error-free post!
And while I’m at it:
Going to spend some time with my neighbor and high school alumnus, Mike, this afternoon, and enjoy the Christmas dinner he prepared.
You’ve got a comma before the “and enjoy,” which interrupts a compound predicate, but the parenthetical commas around “Mike” make it awkward to just remove the comma in front of “and.” Also, calling Mike a “high school alumnus” doesn’t tell me anything about him since most of us are HS alumni. The important thing is that he’s a fellow alumnus, i.e., graduated from the same HS as you.
So I would rewrite the whole sentence as:
Going to spend some time this afternoon with Mike, my neighbor and fellow high school alumnus, and enjoy the Christmas dinner he prepared.
Now the parenthetical commas make sense, and since it’s a pair of commas interrupting the compound predicate, it’s now okay.
Damn… makin’ me work even on Christmas.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 25/December/2025 @ 6:02 pm
It’s OK to take a break on Christmas Day. Just enjoy yourself. We’ll all still be here on the 26th. Merry Christmas.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 24/December/2025 @ 7:11 pm
Where did you get #1633? That was run #1685.
Sorry if I made a mistake, but I got it from your photos in this post, like here. If these are pics from the latest Hash, then I have to ask why so many people (18 people in one photo) are wearing the wrong-numbered shirt. (Do you all make tees for every single Hash, i.e., weekly?)
Not that the wrong-numbered shirt is a mortal sin. I mentioned several times on my own recent walk blog that I’d been wearing the wrong year’s shirt for the current walk. I think the shirt I’d had on was a 2023 shirt (Four Rivers, not Nakdong River) because Teespring, the shirt-printing company, hadn’t been able to print my 2025 shirt in time for my walk, despite my having ordered the shirt a month prior.
Just curious as to what’s going on. Or am I now going to have to be killed for unearthing a Hash conspiracy?
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 24/December/2025 @ 5:51 pm
It wasn’t me!
I see six, arguably seven, errors in that texting meme. That’s a new level of illiteracy.
Well, she’ll be a widow soon, so he can marry his stepmom then.
I think I saw at least four errors in the stepmother meme.
It was great to see 18 Kilo Ass again…. He walked about a kilometer on his new knee.
May he heal completely. I guess he ain’t Santa this year.
Otherwise, #1633 seems to have been a good one.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 23/December/2025 @ 9:37 pm
The mountains, the women, the litter.
Swan didn’t have a “Filipina pride” moment where she thought taking pics of litter would somehow dishonor the country? Well, I guess that’s good.
There’s a lot of that “pride” nonsense here in Korea. If you don’t want people photographing your trash, maybe don’t make your trash so evident, i.e., don’t pollute. I saw recently that India has the same psychological problem as Korea: they’d rather blame the people photographing the trash than actually pick up the damn trash.
She also revealed that John’s was going to be closing at the end of the year. We asked John’s daughter whether they would be open next Sunday, but she wasn’t sure. So, it may have been our final meal at John’s place last night.
Your prediction from before sounds almost spot-on now. You saw the signs. I guess we’ll know more come January. A shame. John was a legit foodie, and his family and crew did what they could to be worthy of his ideals. In the end, though, I think the place needed John’s force of personality—without his health problems—to continue.
No complaints about my bulgogi.
So do you just not like birria, or will you always choose bulgogi over birria?
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 22/December/2025 @ 10:20 pm
Hmmm. And now, I see my comment published as “Merlin.” I think you can delete that comment as spam, AI, or both. You don’t want to indiscriminately publish all comments just to push up your comment numbers.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 22/December/2025 @ 5:02 pm
I don’t know how I managed to publish anonymously, but that previous “walking or driving” comment was me.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 21/December/2025 @ 11:05 pm
everyone finds their own path on life’s journey.
That doesn’t answer my question.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 20/December/2025 @ 1:36 pm
…kinda half suicide where you just dull yourself with substances.
Sounds about right. What is it about life that a person needs to be medicated and brain-addled to get through it? Are people really that miserable?
Enjoy the Christmas party. I hope you remember it the next day.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 19/December/2025 @ 6:18 pm
Above in your first sentence, you started off well but needed more hyphens.
WRONG: that phrasal-adjective requires hyphenation rule (not enough hyphens)
RIGHT: that phrasal-adjective-requires-hyphenation rule (more hyphens)The rule: hyphenate a phrasal adjective when it PRECEDES the noun it modifies. There are three exceptions to that rule. Using your new superpower, please look up the exceptions in my Substack material. Not all of my posts mention all three exceptions. (Maybe do a search on “exceptions.”) Anyway…
• The essay was well written. (no hyphen)
• This was a well-written essay. (hyphen)• He was six feet tall. (no hyphen)
• He was a six-foot-tall man. (hyphens)• In that fight, no holds were barred. (no hyphen)
• It was a no-holds-barred fight. (hyphens)Please also keep in mind that adjectives modify nouns.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 20/December/2025 @ 3:33 pm
Regarding your attempted corrections:
Goodbye, sweets and carbs!
Good. Success. Remember, that’s called a vocative comma. Use it when addressing things or people. From Latin vocare, to call.
In the good news category: my liver function is normal.
The original comma after an introductory phrase was just fine. No need for a colon. But “good news” functions as a phrasal adjective modifying “category,” so you need to hyphenate.
• good-news category
Just like:
tax-paying citizen, six-foot man, violent-weather seminar, well-thought-out planOne of my fellow floating bar mates didn’t see it that way; he tossed the balls overboard.
Semicolon is grammatical, but the original compound predicate was fine. You’re still having trouble recognizing what counts as a compound predicate and what counts as two independent clauses. With your newfound superpower of being able to look stuff up on my Substack, you can now search for “compound predicate” and “independent clause.” Please use that superpower often. Actually study. I know you’re lazy and prefer to slouch back and suck down your beers, but if you do nothing to maintain your brain cells, the beer will ultimately win. You might reach 83, but you’ll be a drooling, senile, mouth-breathing moron with shrunken, watery eyes and zero awareness.
As with the previous sentence, the problem is that you didn’t hyphenate your phrasal adjective. What’s frustrating is that you’ve gotten the phrasal-adjective thing right in other parts of this post. For example, you correctly wrote:
two-week millionaire
after-floater dinnerThe problem is that you obviously haven’t learned the rule but are still going by “what sounds right,” which is why you’re inconsistent with your hyphenation. “What sounds right” is not a rule. Grammar is rule-governed. This doesn’t mean there’s no room for creativity; on the contrary, people get more creative when there are constraints.
So if we follow the rule, we get:
• floating-bar mates
See how that works?
– tax-paying citizen
– large-breasted college girl
– big-ass ass cheeks
– floating-bar mates
– good-news category
– two-week millionaire
– after-floater dinner» Posted By Kevin Kim On 19/December/2025 @ 5:21 pm
«« Back To Stats PageMy dream cabin in the woods.
Wouldn’t you want a cabin with more features? It doesn’t look as though it has anything in it. It’s got no pipes/chimneys coming out of the roof, so no fireplace and no kitchen for heating things. It doesn’t look as though it has any kind of bathroom, so it’s just you and Mother Nature (hey, if you’re okay with that…). No plumbing, either, so no running water. Enjoy showering, washing your hands, and gathering more water.
But I’m sure you’d enjoy your dream cabin more if you had Amazon drones dropping off supplies every day.
Speaking of sweet, my visit with Dr. Jo revealed that according to my blood and piss, I’m a hell of a sweet man. If my glucose levels are to be believed anyway. More cholesterol than I need as well. As I understood Dr. Jo to say, “Urine trouble.” My kidneys are doing the heavy lifting, as indicated by the glucose discharge found in my piss. This will eventually damage my kidneys, and I’ll suffer a potential fate of the dialysis nightmare. That’s plenty enough to motivate me to implement some much-needed dietary changes. Goodbye sweets and carbs!
Very vague. So I’m guessing—with no numbers to go on—high fasting glucose (blood), high A1c (also blood), and high cholesterol (the only result you were even semi-specific about). That would all tie in with high urine glucose.
In the good news category, my liver function is normal.
Spot the error.
As for your normal liver function… That is astounding, what with all the drinking and the carb-ing. I’d have expected fatty liver and the beginnings of cirrhosis by now. But you’ve got those stubborn, Scottish genes protecting you like a guardian angel, I guess.
“Goodbye sweets and carbs” (spot the error in that phrase) means no more pies, no more ice cream, no breaded things like sandwiches or enchiladas, no pasta, etc. There are keto substitutes for these carbs, but they’re not nearly as enjoyable. Edamame pasta is a half-decent replacement for regular pasta, but it’s kind of boring. The same is true of most of the keto breads I’ve made, only one or two recipes of which are good. With keto bread these days, the problem is the texture. Originally, the problem was the egginess: first-generation keto bread went heavy on eggs to provide fluffiness and structure since these breads tended to lack gluten (which itself, being a protein, isn’t a problem on keto). Gradually, people started introducing vital wheat gluten into their breads (very low-carb), and with added artificial sweeteners, these breads now taste a lot better, and their texture has become more spongy and springy but still firm. There are keto-pasta recipes out there as well, but beware: if they’re made from almond flour, they’ll break apart too easily when cooked. Oat flour often tends to taste like something a horse would eat, and flaxseed meal is plain boring. But a mix of flours, plus vital wheat gluten, plus a sweetener like BochaSweet or erythritol or allulose or monk fruit, can produce something plausibly edible, be it bread or pasta. If you crave the real thing, have one cheat day a month. If you really want to bring your sugar levels down, do the obvious thing and stop drinking. Of course, I know you won’t.
One of my fellow floating bar mates didn’t see it that way and tossed the balls overboard.
Spot the error! (as before: it’s not a comma problem)
From the meme/joke:
They set-up their tent and fell asleep.
Spot the error. As for the joke… it only works if the tent has no bottom. Which makes it less of a tent and more of a tarp.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 18/December/2025 @ 6:32 pm