I have braved the optician for the first time since 2021, got complimented on my 20/20 vision (I mean, with glasses, but at least they actually work…) as well as my accent and walked out without having to wear bifocals for the next two years. Hurrah!
(meanwhile, I’m reduced to “are we upset more about the one with white nationalist tattoos, the utterly insane one, or the nonce?", so that’s going well)
Stars’ third album, Set Yourself on Fire, is now twenty years old. I remember listening to it, on the streets of Chapel Hill in 2004. The day after. The day before, we started out at the infamous 112 N Graham St shared house, watching the returns come in and laughing along with Jon Stewart. Indecision 2004. And then the night turned. The laughter and chatter stopped and the party broke up and we slithered away.
I took a picture of this sign as I walked down Franklin Street the next day, every single person on the street looking shell-shocked and ruined. How could the country re-elect this person, this administration, given all the disasters of the previous four years?
What I didn’t know is that one day, I’d look back on that walk with something approaching nostalgia. That I’d watch returns coming in and see the country vote for an insurrectionist and mass internment camps. And not just in the places you’d expect. The entire country covered with red shift arrows, that they’d taken a long hard look at the two candidates and decided they wanted the one that gleefully talks about the execution of his enemies. This Is What They Want And By God Take Away Our Healthcare While You’re Dragging People Off The Streets.
Maybe it won’t be so bad; after all, 2004 gave way to 2006 and 2008. But I then read about the coming attempts to completely wipe out what’s left of the 14th Amendment and I start wishing for Robert L. Booth.
Meanwhile, all of my social media feeds have turned into the standard Democratic circular firing squad, although my ire is most reserved for the people shitting on the Democrats for the past year now telling people to get their passports renewed before the coming further assault on trans rights1.
God, that was strange to see you again
Introduced by a friend of a friend
Smiled and said, "Yes, I think we've met before"
In that instant, it started to pour
Captured a taxi despite all the rain
We drove in silence across Pont Champlain
And all of that time you thought I was sad
I was trying to remember your name
Back in 2004, I could not wrap my head around this lyric. How could you not remember? How could you not remember that name? A feeling made more acute by never having had a name to remember. Twenty years on…and I understand a lot better now. Some names stay, but many do not. That’s okay, because there will be names that last forever.
I’ve also been thinking about this speech again.
I don’t think progressives really understand the trouble they’re in concerning the direction of the party. Biden, to everybody’s surprise, actually governed closer to what a hypothetical Sanders administration would look like, given the makeup of the Senate and the Courts: stimulus and massive amounts of infrastructure spending, reducing inflation without the crushing unemployment of the 1980s, protectionism, kickstarting manufacturing builds, reducing the amount of Americans paid under $15 from 31% of the population to 13%, cancelling billions of dollars of debt, and the only reason he didn’t do more was because of the Supreme Court, saving union pension funds, and being the first President in the history of the USA to walk a picket line. And none of it helped. Do you honestly think the centrists in the party are going to look at that and suggest Medicare-for-all? When it turns out that people actually don’t care about soaring unemployment compared to the prices they confront weekly at the supermarket, how do you think they’re going to react to ‘we’re going to take away your health insurance’ even if the new thing is technically better? ↩︎
My current status oscillates between the above and the below:
Thankfully, this weekend Tammy is out of town, so my focus is on Maeryn, who is a) delightful, and b) an all-consuming distraction, which is exactly what I need on this weekend of all weekends.
Yeah, you all know I’m refreshing every feed every time I can, but trust me, it’s a lot less when you are trying to make sure Danger Baby isn’t Committing Crimes1.
I will see you all on the other side…
What I didn’t know, though, was that the final Selzer poll was dropping at 19:00 on Saturday night. So as I was rocking Maeryn to sleep via the gentle sounds of Björk’s Hyper Ballad, I may have sworn in front of her. But she was almost asleep, so it’s fine. Totally… ↩︎
Two books down this week. Firstly, Michael Palin’s new volume of his diaries, covering 1999-2009, and Nick Harkaway’s Karla’s Choice, the first foray into extending Le Carré beyond his death.
Considering I spent a good deal of this year reading the older volumes when I discovered that Palin was releasing this book in September, I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. It feels shorter than the previous entries, and a bigger sense of things and threads missing. Since 80 Days, there’s always been sections in the diaries that are basically “you should probably go and buy the book of the relevant series to find out what happened here”, but this time around, even things like a trip to India for Conde Nast and trips to film festivals are reduced to ellipses. This time period is also the point where the first volume of diaries is published and so things get a little meta…and I think some of the reaction of other members of Python to the first volume1 might be a reason why it also feel likes a lot (not all, but a lot!) of arguments and discussions that would have been present in the first few decades are no longer surviving the editing process. In fairness, it’s not like Palin owes us anything, and the series continues to be a revealing and honest account of a comedy and travel legend, but perhaps less essential than the earlier books.
Karla’s Choice opens with an apologia for everybody who thinks this is a really bad idea; Harkaway is at pains to point out he understands if you think he shouldn’t be adding to his father’s work. And yet the book mostly works — he’s got the mannerisms of all the characters correct, from Esterhase’s excited Hungarian-English to a pitch-perfect version of Beryl Reid doing Connie Sachs. There’s a spy plot, the rise of Karla, some papering over the continuity between the loosely-connected books. And of course, the Lady Ann.
I say mostly works because every so often you come across a section which screams “Look! This! Is! A! Reference! Do! You! See?!!” Does the book really need a gossipy aside early on from Roddy Martindale, for instance? But, considering I thought the entire concept of the book was a bad idea and that is was going to be a disaster, it is in fact, a good Smiley story. And that’s enough. Not essential, but for those of us that have exhausted Le Carré, a nice little addition. I imagine there will be more.
As is now tradition, I’ll be putting up my “books read in 2024” page in December. You’ll be able to tell when I idly googled Games Workshop’s Black Library and discovered the Horus Heresy sequence was finally over…
Idle appears to be the one most upset, which tracks with what we know of Idle, but when reading the first volume a few months ago, yes Idle is singled out for criticism here and there, but Palin always seems to be sympathetic to Idle’s odd position within the team (being the only one writing by himself), and honestly the diaries of that time probably paint the worst picture of Cleese more than anybody else. And Cleese in the 2000s doesn’t really seem to be fazed. ↩︎
The classic IKEA glassware has, for now, moved aside for something that’s essentially Ostalgie for a time and a place that I was never here for. Specifically, Pizza Hut in the USA during the 1980s. Almost indestructible. And sure, you might say that a toddler is going to test that theory. Which is why we have 24 of them.
I feel like I had a lot of fun ideas for this weekend’s post, but I didn’t write them down and my back pain has obliterated them from my memory. Apologies for that. I think I have one more tech blog post in me for the rest of the year, but if that’s going to be the case, I do want to make it a good one. Or at least somewhat comprehensive. Graphs and all that. Maybe even LaTeX.
Meanwhile, I stared at two new Lego sets this week, and I’m not going to buy either of them (in fairness, the X-Mansion looks so much like the Museum modular that it seems pointless to have both, and I already got the Lego Friends Botanical Garden, for under $60…so I don’t fancy spending $330 on a set that isn’t really much better…). Look at my self-control! Let’s not revisit this subject when the new modular set is revealed.
My prize for successfully completing Thank Goodness You’re Here. They even splashed out on the fancy Yorkshire Tea!
In the past 48 hours, I have been out with Maeryn and twice asked if I’m the grandfather. Less of that, please.
Back from San Francisco. One of my ears is still a little dodgy, and I still feel sunburnt from my 20 minutes in the Castro last Sunday. It was a weird trip, with seemingly half the hotels having strike action in front of them, having to move across the city, not being able to actually get into the office on Monday because there was nobody there, and then leaving the place on the evening of actually having the meeting I was flying out for instead of spending multiple working days in the Bay. Still, flying across the continent for one day to talk about artificial intelligence and search has to be pretty close to Living the Dream, I think…
…and then the tumble dryer breaks down when you get back to keep you grounded…
Apologies for the lack of posting for most of September! Good excuses, though - firstly, celebrating my Dad’s 70th birthday the first week, and then as the family’s visit came to an end I naturally fell so sick I had to be taken to urgent care - don’t worry, I’m fine, but it was a few weird hours where I was very cold and very unsure on my feet.
Anyway, a great visit, I think. Maeryn certainly enjoyed playing to a devoted audience every night, and hopefully we’ll be seeing them again in a couple of months for Christmas adventures! By which time, Maeryn will probably also be solving differential equations, based on her current learning trajectory. I think we’re about 24 hours away from her learning how to set locks on all the doors. Which is why we bought emergency lock keys yesterday. Always stay one step ahead!
It is probably going to remain quiet here for a little bit longer; I’m off to San Francisco at the weekend to visit the Lucidworks offices again, so no updates until I get back, I would expect. It’s been a bit of a lean year for the blog; maybe I’ll make up for it in the Autumn (stares at the way the calendar just turns to darkness on November 6th)…
Running around the house this weekend trying to get everything ready for the family visit next week. Which was ages away…and then it really wasn’t. As part of this effort, I got over my issues and we used a coupon for a cleaning service. My issues immediately came back after they stayed about two hours longer than intended, scrubbed the place from top to bottom (including areas that we’d told them they didn’t have to do!) and made our glass cooking hob look brand-new with some sort of cleaning sorcery that makes us mystified — we’ve cleaned, we’ve used products, we’ve used razor blades, even, and yet nothing as good as what happened this Saturday.
They even dusted my Transformers (to my shame).
Anyway, the house is amazingly clean now. Almost as if we just moved in. But we may have to move away to another state due to our embarrassment…
Okay, you know what? My first reaction to the Oasis reunion was, of course, this:
(in the great debate between Oasis and Blur, the correct answer is that Pulp’s Babies contains everything you could conceivably need)
But then I read this article from The Quietus, and well, if Gen-Z can move past the baggage of the era and love them, it’s not really my place to argue otherwise, I think. And Alex Niven’s article in The Guardian protests a little too much, but otherwise is a reminder that the high point of Oasis preceded New Labour’s ‘Cool Britannia’. So I can save my vitriol for the kind of fan around my age that complains about “21-year-old girls getting their ticket”. Not that it matters, but those girls are likely able to rattle off in-order setlists of their appearances at Tokyo’s Club Quattro. Which is more than you or I could do in our advancing years…
(my long-standing peeve is that Noel’s heel-turn against all things modern in the 21st century has just been so boring. I wanted to hear his rave tapes! More experimentation like using samples from NWA/the Amen Break on D’You Know What I Mean? Something else from working with The Chemical Brothers! Just anything except what we got from the rest of the third album onwards. And while I’m here, the dynamic pricing fiasco of the weekend reminds me that they’ve always been something of a…mean band. The “Cigarette Boxes” that contained the same interview CD, that it took almost 15 years for Whatever to appear on a compilation album, the editing of the Radio 1 Knebworth broadcast to skip over their new songs, Creation forcing Radio 1 DJs to talk over the first week or two of playing songs from Be Here Now in a bizarre effort to try and stop home taping. As if we didn’t all traipse down to the record shop to buy it on that day in August 1997…)