Begone, Drywall!

As I’m turning 45, I can say that the thing I’m most excited about is that this week I will get rid of the last bin bag containing parts of the garage ceiling. It’s only been five years. Important Dad Goals!

Back to the nostalgia well this week, as I have final got around to watching Michael Palin’s Eighty Days Around The World (I was too young to stay up to watch it on first broadcast). You can clearly see that the time limit was the first thing Palin dropped from every documentary following - the pace is relentless and most of the time he doesn’t even get a chance to see the new country he’s in. The worst example is Singapore, where he basically lands and then gets on another boat (to catch up with a ship that has already sailed (!)) instantly. It also has that weird issue with endings that a lot of multi-part UK documentaries of the time did; I have absolutely no idea why the Reform Club wouldn’t let him film on return, but it makes for a bizarrely downbeat ending.

Having finished the series, I did wonder about whether he’d be up for a remake in 2028 (age permitting). Some things would be a lot easier - almost everybody has the internet at their fingertips these days, but I wonder if some of the routes that only barely existed in 1988 would still be viable. At least he wouldn’t have to suffer Pacers when he got back to Britain this time…

Finally, I did G O O D N U M B E R S this week with a post on LinkedIn. I wasn’t really expecting almost 2,000 people to read my complaints about the LLM2Vec paper, but there we are. I will probably copy the text over to here later in the week, because it’s nice to have as much as possible of my long-form writing over here rather than on somebody else’s platform[^1].

[1]: It is amusing to think that I currently have one of the longest-running blogs still going on the net…