Today included: a Christmas Carol party with hordes of cheerful people, mulled cider, mulled wine, a surprising number of children who somehow all fit into in the room with two small kittens, two hours or so of singing, and a "bonus reel" of songs including Tom Leher's Christmas Carol:

Also I walked to market, did a strategic run of 5? 6? errands by car, and took Rover to see the Christmas lights (and Christmas smells?) in Victoria Park.

To cap the evening off, I replaced the clogged freezer-drain tube in our fridge which was causing pools of ice and leaking water. For which I owe a debt of gratitude to Matt of ApplianceVideo.com for their youtube video which exactly described the fix; much more completely than the 1 page of instructions from Whirlpool. The video saved us over $100 on a repair bill- Whirlpool sent the part for free, so yay for that. But they were going to bill quite a bit to install it, and one of us would have to take time away from work at a busy time of the year.

So, yeah, I will happily install a fridge part at 8pm on a Saturday to avoid that hassle. And it didn't even harsh my holiday spirits. As Tom Leher put it so well: "Angels we have heard on high/Tell us to go out and buy..."

And Monday I hope to perform a similar operation on my Macbook Pro: the video describing a memory and hard-drive upgrade make it clear I have all the experience I need to do that myself, after hours using work tools, versus a considerably more expensive trip to the Apple Store. (The most important caution here is using anti-static mats and clips, so I don't fry the memory). Thank you macsales.com for your videos, even though I didn't buy anything from you either.

The Pope says we will see our pets in heaven, and that heaven is open to "all of God's creatures." No word on what happens if the chicken you just ate gets to heaven first.

By the time you get there the chicken has 1,000,000 Heavenbook friends and they all make pious yet passive-aggressive comments on your profile all day. You start wishing you were on TheOtherPlacebook.

A choir of pigs, cows, chickens and turkeys follows you everywhere. Their singing is impeccable and the lyrics are devout, but there's no mistaking the message.

Heavenly fowl are particularly disturbing, with a halo and a second set of wings. It's impolite to complain.

Good thing: wearing jeans fresh out of the dryer that feel a little bit loose. 

Something else: realizing that you've been walking around Target for the last half hour with your fly down. 

In other news: I saw this clip today, and it really makes me want to write a new play. (It feels a little like Traveling Light.) But, right now, I got NOTHIN'. 

In 1996 or so, I tried to install a *nix operating system for the first time. Up to that point, I had been using pico for editing on *nix systems. But then I learned that (at the time), when you first install a system, you need to be able to use an editor that is installed by default. And (again, at the time) as far as I could tell that meant I needed to learn ed, vi, or get really good at cat >>. I chose vi, and I've been using that as my preferred text editor, regardless of operating system, ever since.

At some point, probably around 2002 or so, it became easier to find vim than vi, so I started using that, but it seemed prudent to never actually learn anything about how vim "improved" on vi, since I didn't want to rely on that when I had to use vi. And now it's nearly impossible to actually find vi, so I clearly made the wrong choice there.*

Which is how it came to pass that I've been using vim for over a decade without knowing that "visual" mode exists.

* - yes, I know, I made the wrong decision back in 1996. It works for me, OK?

Arden House, Book Two is done.
It is BEAUTIFUL, and just in time for holiday gift-giving.

We're going to have two Open Houses: 
Saturday, 20 December and
Sunday, 21 December
Both days 2 to 4 PM at our house.
(IM me if you need directions)

We'll have crates of books, $15 each, and
I'll be able to accept credit cards.

I'm off today. Rain does that. Don't have the car, because the coworker is using it. Didn't want to let that keep me locked up in the hotel room, so I went for a walk anyway. What the hell - it's just rain - it won't hurt me.

That means that by the time I got to Perkins for my brunch, I was pretty thoroughly soaked. I'm ok with that, but it might have shifted my mood slightly. (Full disclosure.)

The annoyingly ubiquitous X-Mas music was being piped through the dining room. Many songs played. One stuck in my head, and I found myself analyzing the lyrics in a different way than before:

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, 
Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen., 
But do you recall?
The most famous reindeer of all?

I'm sure you're about to tell me.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (reindeer)
Had a very shiny nose

Dude has a drink every now and then. No big.

And if you ever saw it (saw it)
You would even say it glows (like a light bulb)

Actually, I wouldn't. At least (if I'm honest) not to his face. Come on - that's just rude!

And all of the other reindeer (reindeer)
Used to laugh and call him names (like Pinocchio)

The other reindeer sound like jerks. They're not even creative jerks.

They never let poor Rudolph (Rudolph)
Join in any reindeer games( like monopoly)

What exactly makes a game a 'reindeer game'? Sounds to me like the other reindeer are not only uncreative jerks, they're also biggoted douche bags.

Then one foggy Christmas Eve, 
Santa came to say, (ho ho ho)
Rudolph with your nose so bright, 
Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?

Oh, so you wouldn't lift a finger to help Rudolph with the uncreative biggoted jerks before, but now that you NEED something from him...

Then all the reindeer loved him, (loved him)
And they shouted out with glee, (yippie)

What shallow pricks these reindeer are! They're all about tearing good ol' Rudy down until Santa gives him the thumbs up and now he's better than sliced bread? This is starting to sound like an after school special about cheerleaders. Seriously Rudolph? Get a better class of 'friends'.

Rudolph the red-nose Reindeer (reindeer)
You'll go down in history (like George Washington)

Because being a slave and towing the line (literally) to the fat white dude is all it takes huh?

What? I'm not grumpy. Just disillusioned.

When I hear that scientific studies are untrustworthy, I ask "well... in comparison to what?"

I understand skepticism born of awful things like evidence being cherrypicked to support a study sponsor, at the expense of, you know, actual sick people. Ugh. But I also understand that while science doesn't resist these biases every time, other ways of learning about the world are usually even more subjective and biased.

I see other people make very binary decisions about this. "Science is always right!" Well, no, it's an iterative process, carried out by flawed human beings.

"Science is always wrong and changes its mind all the time!" Well, no, iPhones work as well as they did yesterday and they're chock full of bits that wouldn't work for beans unless gobs and gobs of science was correct to a tremendous degree. If you disagree, may I please have all your electronics and your car?

Science has the toughest time making accurate statements about big, complex, chaotic systems (like bodies) with lots of emergent behavior, with a lot of money on the line. It's challenging to eliminate both the "confounding factors" (everybody in the study was a bottle-fed white male) and the biases (the study was sponsored by Megafoodco). But nothing else is perfect under those circumstances either.