Comments Posted By Kevin Kim
Displaying 2,191 To 2,220 Of 4,403 Comments
Good hike, good food… what more could you want?
Wait—don’t answer that.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 25/November/2021 @ 4:15 pm
As for back pain, well, I don’t know the exact nature of your particular pain, but my dad used to lie in bed or on the ground and bring his knees to his chest to stretch out his lower back. He’d stay like that for a few minutes, hugging his knees. When my little brothers were younger and much smaller, Dad would sometimes lie on his front and ask one of my brothers to walk slowly all over his back. Maybe Pearl could do that for you if she’s light enough. Nice way to get intimate. She just needs to watch her balance.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 24/November/2021 @ 6:09 pm
Meeting the mother already feels like a healthier step. So far, things seem to be going well with Pearl. Continued good luck, both with Pearl and with darts!
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 24/November/2021 @ 4:30 pm
Bars of Barretto: Mango’s Beach Bar
Sounds as if Mango’s deserves its high ranking.
Back when I was going out with Seung-min (called her “Ligament” on the blog back in the day), we once had a provocative conversation about slang expressions for pussy-eating. I mentioned “eating a peach” as one US English term for the act (do the Brits say that, too? dunno); Seung-min, who knew Japanese, said the Japanese slang was “eating a mango,” probably for the same notion of juices running down your chin as you gobble. As a result, every time you’ve mentioned Mango’s on your blog, that’s where my thoughts go.
As far as I can tell, the Korean slang is simply “eat pussy,” no fruits mentioned, although there is a Japanese-derived term for the act (sakachi, makes me think “suck-crotchy”).
Enjoy that mango!
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 23/November/2021 @ 2:41 pm
May your back heal up soon so you can do all the acrobatic kama sutra positions you normally do with your funny little honey.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 23/November/2021 @ 1:21 am
Bars of Barretto: Finger Monkeys
I wish them good luck, but “Finger Monkeys” calls to mind finger-banging.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 22/November/2021 @ 10:48 am
Signs seem good so far. She’s bringing you thoughtful gifts, even if they’re just meds, and she’s not begging for money. Boom-boom is happening too fast, but from what you’ve written about local Filipina ladies, they mostly seem easy like that, so maybe this is perfectly normal. I wouldn’t know. Anyway, continued good luck. Maybe she really does care. Wouldn’t that be a nice change? I’m cautiously optimistic.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 22/November/2021 @ 12:23 am
There’s a place in Virginia Beach that apparently functions as a regular, innocent restaurant by day, then becomes The Voodoo Lounge at night. At a certain time in the evening, the lighting changes, some curtains come down to give the walls a different color, the music changes, and the place suddenly comes alive as an “adult” establishment. I heard about all this from a friend; I’ve never been myself. Not my kind of place, but I’d love to visit right at the moment of transition. The Voodoo you visited sounds a lot tamer.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 21/November/2021 @ 1:31 pm
Dipping our Tibag in the creek
Quite a walking adventure! And congrats, once again, on your darts victory. I guess it’s nice to be able to walk away from a game without feeling the need to determine who the true winner is. I rarely get competitive, but in the rare cases where I do, I normally want to see the game through to the bitter end. Hats off to you for not being that way.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 20/November/2021 @ 11:59 pm
Well, “getting it right” will mean being loyal to one woman and not practicing the “friends with benefits” thing with others. Good luck. Just be mindful of Rule #1, I guess.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 19/November/2021 @ 5:43 pm
Bars of Barretto: Rock Lobster
Rock Lobster with Peter Griffin:
https://youtu.be/pn26ZJhSJ94Iraq Lobster:
https://youtu.be/2ZxdOeXUiJ0» Posted By Kevin Kim On 19/November/2021 @ 5:35 pm
What, no link to the “Rock Lobster” song (or to the various “Family Guy” versions of it)?
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 19/November/2021 @ 12:08 pm
Well, distance is distance, and your walks are all hillier.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 19/November/2021 @ 2:27 pm
Interesting. An acropolis that’s also a necropolis.
With a yearly total of close to 6.2 million steps, you’ve walked from Incheon to Busan along the Four Rivers path about six times. Good job. And the year’s not over yet!
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 18/November/2021 @ 5:41 pm
Congrats on the win!
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 17/November/2021 @ 6:06 pm
…it’s simply an erroneous modifier than contains a participle.
Whoops—”THAT contains”
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 18/November/2021 @ 10:28 pm
A dangling participle is pretty much the same animal; it’s simply an erroneous modifier than contains a participle. Here’s an example of a dangling participle:
Sitting obliviously on the branch, the dangers of the jungle were completely hidden from Ted.
“Sitting” is the present-participial form of “to sit.” It’s part of a modifier for the clause whose subject ought to be “Ted.”
Aside from present participles (which end in “-ing”), there are past participles, such as “driven” in the sentence “He has driven a long way to see you.” So those are your two types of participles: present and past.
If we were to rewrite the “Ted” sentence to remove the error, we might write something like:
The dangers of the jungle were completely hidden from Ted as he sat obliviously on the branch.
Or:
Sitting obliviously on the branch, Ted noticed none of the dangers of the jungle.
So, above, you have a participle that doesn’t dangle. Some dangling modifiers have no participles, though:
As a child, French was difficult.
This should be:
As a child, I found French difficult.
Or:
French was difficult for me when I was a child.
Other correct sentences are also possible.
I think I’ve dangled enough. Don’t want to scare Soju.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 18/November/2021 @ 12:53 am
Will try to avoid mention of “dangling” things in the future, Soju.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 17/November/2021 @ 6:07 pm
The error is called a “dangling modifier,” which sounds vaguely phallic. Specifically, if you start your sentence with the modifier “Having marked the trail on Sunday,” then the subject of the main clause needs to be the person doing the marking (see below, italics).
Having marked the trail on Sunday, we had nothing left to do except give last-minute instructions to the Hashers…
Since we did the marking, “we” needs to be the subject of the clause.
Dangling modifiers are tricky, and they usually come from a place of, “Well, I know what I meant when I wrote that.” Sometimes, the brain skips ahead of the fingers on the keyboard.
Your second correction is okay except for the comma error you introduce (comma after “Yesterday”). Your first correction shows you didn’t see the dangling modifier: “all” is still the subject of the clause.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 16/November/2021 @ 6:09 pm
Looks to have been a good walk. I’m glad the Hashers enjoyed the trail, and that no one got lost.
Spot the error:
Having marked the trail on Sunday, all that was left for us to do yesterday was to give the last-minute instructions to the Hashers and send them on their way, then wait for their return.
Hint: not a comma error.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 16/November/2021 @ 5:15 pm
Sorry to hear about the Quora asshole, and to hear that Quora keeps deleting your replies while leaving worse responses up.
Are you somehow contributing to the continued misery of Filipinos? It’s a complicated question, but the short answer is: I doubt it. I do know this, though: throwing money at a widespread endemic problem might salve the conscience, but it does nothing to solve the problem.
I used to work extensively with the homeless in the DC area, especially along the Route 1 corridor in northern Virginia. The homeless deal with all sorts of issues, chief among them being mental illness. Years later, I moved away, but one thing I know is that the homeless problem remains, despite the constant actions of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who have tried (and still try) to help these folks. Poverty can be thought of as a bell-curve phenomenon: it affects real people, but statistically speaking, there will always be poor folks, and there will always be folks flush with money, and we normies occupy the fat part of the bell curve. For every person I might help, there are a hundred more needing help, and this will always be the case. “The poor you will always have with you,” Jesus famously said. It’s a line in the Bible that makes liberal Christians uncomfortable because they think, in Marxist terms, that we can eventually reach a point of egalitarian bliss (through revolution), and Jesus is specifically denying that possibility. Because he understood human nature.
That said, it’s possible that your presence in the Philippines feeds an ongoing dynamic, a post-colonial cycle of poverty. But people who think in this aggrieved way (“You owe me!”) are engaged in systems-thinking, not individuals-thinking. Any individual can, even with the odds stacked against him, rise above his station. It takes time, effort, focus, and force of character, but it’s possible. This is certainly the American ideal, not the idea that we are all trapped where we are (which is the leftist message of movies like “Parasite”—try as you might, you’ll never leave your socioeconomic stratum, not without violence).
Your nasty critic is obviously a systems-thinker who can’t see past post-colonialism to the idea that an individual Filipino/a might work hard and make something of him/herself. And your acquaintance Maris fits the schema I’m talking about as well, giving up too easily and too early. She obviously lacks the will, and the character, to truly succeed, and in her case, it’s doubly a shame because her little restaurant seemed to be on a positive track. I’d been rooting for her. Now, I have little sympathy.
And that’s why I made my “walking ATM” comment on your other post. You might think of yourself as helping the poor, and maybe you are, but the help is only momentary, and ultimately, those good folks need to help themselves. As for helping the one woman with surgery, I’d call that an unequivocally good deed: real help leading to real results. Her hospital sucked, for sure, but she got treated. Hopefully, she’s doing better.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 15/November/2021 @ 3:22 pm
Does the circularity of the bar change the ambiance in any way?
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 15/November/2021 @ 1:03 pm
Am only now beginning to realize just how many of these bars are in your area. That’s a long list, and I assume it’s only gonna get longer.
What, in your opinion, makes for the perfect bar? (Or should I just reread your entry re: It Doesn’t Matter?)
Will you be reviewing any local bars that you’ve never been to before, or have you visited them all at this point?
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 14/November/2021 @ 10:29 am
“Grass without Dan” cracked me up.
Congrats on the darts win.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 13/November/2021 @ 8:11 pm
re: “literally”
One of the few times when I’d agree a comma is marking a pause, and that that pause alters the meaning of the sentence.
re: giving
I think a lot of ladies are happy to have a walking ATM to help them out, but if you’re happy, too, then it’s all good.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 12/November/2021 @ 6:22 pm
187 floors = up only, or up and down, total? If it’s up only, that’s pretty impressive. At 14 feet per floor (source), that’s a change in elevation of 2618 feet.
As to that house in the middle of nowhere—how do you suppose they deal with garbage? Does a garbage crew come around, or must they tote their trash down the mountain to a dumping point?
Wings look good.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 11/November/2021 @ 5:29 pm
Here’s hoping the bar’s future continues to look bright. Good luck with that kitchen!
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 11/November/2021 @ 2:59 pm
You okay with the level of health care they provide in the Philippines? For yourself, I mean? Korean health care still leaves me leery, despite a week in a hospital (or maybe because of that week), and I can’t help thinking the quality of care would be better in the States, even if it’s not stellar.
On a totally different topic: what makes a Salisbury steak different from a hamburger patty? The presence of gravy and mushrooms?
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 10/November/2021 @ 12:27 pm
Really felt those ups and downs in this set of photos. How do you make different-colored routes on that map at the beginning?
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 09/November/2021 @ 6:38 pm
«« Back To Stats PageYou could, arguably, put a comma in front of “either,” but it’s not really necessary, as the style on that point has been changing. Sort of like “Me too” versus “Me, too.” When comma-related styles change, it’s usually to the detriment of the comma. Here as elsewhere, the Brits lead the Americans. They really hate commas over there.
» Posted By Kevin Kim On 08/November/2021 @ 6:41 pm