Midweek Madness

A slightly earlier update this time as I’ll be in San Francisco without my computer until the middle of next week. I haven’t been doing a good job on getting ready, which means I have spent Thursday afternoon into the evening wandering around the house with enough nervous energy that makes everybody else nervous. I think I’m packed now, though. Honest. Really. Look, I’ll be right back.

Been ploughing through Michael Palin’s diaries this month — I think I’m somewhere in 1983 at the moment. As part of that, I’ve also watched the first two Ripping Yarns, and…oof, I didn’t expect to bounce off them as hard as I did. They’re not terrible, but it was just a few smiles here and there rather than actual laughter (except for the icebreaker model joke — that was silly enough and a completely extravagant use of filming time and money that you couldn’t help be moved by it). The versions I saw had the audience laughter that Palin was adamantly against, and far be it for my to argue with a Python, but although the mix could have used a little fine-tuning here and there, no laughs at all would have surely sunk them on first broadcast. Anyway, as you’d expect, he comes across as Great Bunch of Lads Python, who refuses to cross picket lines, worries that he’s no good at what he’s doing, and slowly accumulating houses along his street.

(I’m also reading Owen Hatherley’s new book, which opens with the same complaints I always make about JFK and the subway, before actually making me want to go back to check out some of the places he talks about, damn him)

I know I’ve been teasing all sorts of tech posts and then not actually doing them. I’ll continue at least the first part of that - I hope to finish off the project that goes live in August next weekend, and I’m finally collating the datasets for “Rude Title For A Paper That I Can Never Use”, and I may reuse some of that work for an idea I have about embedding…so there are real things coming up, I promise. Oh, and after six years, I’ve finally updated my about page to reflect that I now live in Cincinnati. Oops.

Right, it’s time for ambien and bed, I think. If you hear of a British person next week being forcibly removed from Alcatraz shouting “Glass or plastic? GLASS OR PLASTIC?!?!”, then it’s probably me.