My Christmas Adam had recovery from a daytrip to NYC, a lovely Christmas gamer dinner party, discovering a new dive bar with an old friendly bass player buying shots, Santa selfies, and lovely nightcaps with the best of friends.

My Christmas Eve had visiting of newborns, wrapping of the gifts, free yams, tearing up at Christmas carols, and the watching of Doctor Who (the Christmas Special from some years back).

My Christmas had family visits, naps, snake cuddles, firepit mashmallows, and vodka infused gummy bears.

My Boxing Day had the ex's cat giving me $50 for the local bar, midol, Cabernet, pillow forts, play date planning, and introspection.

Who knows what tomorrow might bring. Living the dream.

I had to run out for a second, and Folkadelphia (it's a radio show) was on 88.5 WXPN. A song came on, and I listened to it on the short drive home and then couldn't leave the car until I found out what it was. 

It's a song called "You Missed My Heart," and it's performed by Phoebe Bridgers. It's a cover... but holy shit, the words, the performance, the arrangement just all took my breath away. 

Here's info about it. You can listen to the song there and also read the lyrics.

Just... wow.

The Christmas Plague

In other news, everyone around me has been sick with this two-week head cold of death. I've been feeling pretty cocky and invincible until yesterday when I woke up with a giant spike sticking into my throat from my inner ear.  

It wouldn't be Christmas without me having a friggin' cold.  Matt has it too... though I think he's a day sicker than I am.

We're supposed to be the in-studio on-air guests on WDEL's afternoon show this Friday to sing a few Christmas tunes and to plug our upcoming comedy show at Logan House on January 5th. Let's hope I have a voice that day.

Driveway Moment #2

Driveway Moment #2 just happened now. I am still in the car, now in a totally dark garage because the inside garage light timed out. 

I just watched Anne Mollo 's absolutely gorgeous story of Her Winter of Bill (as I call it).  I was absolutely enraptured. I got choked up. There were a few times I caught myself not breathing.  Thank you Annie-- really. Thank you. What a beautiful story. 

Watch it here-- she starts at the 37-minute mark. 

As I mentioned, I've been watching the new Twin Peaks...but very slowly.  The PVR has been a boon in allowing us to slack off on watching things, and sometimes we go a little overboard on it, but who cares, right?  (Spoilers probably follow for the new series, if you care...)

I watched the original Twin Peaks when it first came out.  Well, I caught the second half of the first season in reruns in the summer, and was hooked and had to watch the second season.  It was a few years before I even saw the pilot and the other first season episodes.  I had recorded a bunch of them on tape at some point, too, and eventually got the full series on DVD, and rewatched them over the last couple of years.

The new series is not like the original series at all.  Well, hardly at all.

The original series was quirky, sometimes brutal, a number of disagreeable characters, but with the axis of Cooper, Truman and even James, Donna and Audrey to show that there were people with, at least, good intentions.  There were the occasional surreal episodes--the dreams, and the excellent Black Lodge finale--but there was always some sense that people with discernible motivations were doing things.

The new series is a mess.  We're nine episodes in now, and the last few we've been watching with a gap of a month or more in between.  Episode 7 was particularly off-putting, with its extensive section in the middle dedicated to nuclear bomb footage and cacophonous music.  Plotting is barely coherent, with scenes from the first frickin' episode still incomprehensible.

I've watched some, but not all, David Lynch movies.  I enjoyed Mulholland Drive, and I like the "most of it is a dream" theory.  "Fire Walk With Me" was at times a bit off-putting, but it made a decent prequel/coda to the series, and it had a certain unity of place and time going for it.  "Blue Velvet" was...fine, I don't remember it much.  "Dune"...well, it was Dune.  "Wild At Heart" I don't remember much either, but I don't recall caring for it that much.

"Inland Empire" was a mess too.  I gather that he was writing scenes as they went, so it's no wonder it was incoherent.  There are sequences I remember, mostly near the beginning and near the end, but I couldn't tell you what happened in the middle.  And that's what the new Twin Peaks is like.

My theory is that David Lynch doesn't give a crap anymore, and is trolling the people who clamoured for a new Twin Peaks series.  He puts in as many of the old actors as he can (or will agree to it), but doesn't always give them much to do--Jacoby just gets to swear a lot on Youtube while Nadine watches his videos, Jerry gets lost in the woods...  His own character, Gordon Cole, is central to the closest thing we have to a plot.  There's what looks like occasional stunt-casting--Amanda Seyfried is wasted, Michael Cera's appearance as Andy & Lucy's son is excruciatingly painful.

And the best thing about the original series, the consistent throughline, the backbone, was Agent Cooper.  So what does the new series have?  First, we have the "bad Cooper", the evil version from the plot-twist ending of the origial series, who's grown his hair long and is now an amoral criminal and killer, who seems to have some weird abilities.  And then there's the "good Cooper" trapped in the Black Lodge for 25 years, who escapes through a sequence which is expectedly surreal, but generally good, and ends up replacing the hapless Dougie Jones.  And seems to have suffered a lot of brain damage in the process, because he's spent half a dozen episodes as someone who only repeats what you say to him, an "idiot savant" who can spot slot machines about to pay off and, somehow, insurance fraud.  Maybe he'll "snap out of it" and return to the old Cooper before the end of the series, but at this point I'm not holding my breath.

Lynch is screwing with us.  He's showing us that we really didn't want a new Twin Peaks series at all.  I'm used to, say, 80's bands getting back together and recording new material, and generally what happens is new music which is not like the music of their heyday that everybody loved, but like the latter-day stuff that they coasted on for a little while.  I would have been happy with a new Twin Peaks series that was up to the level of the second half of the second season, where they floundered a bit, but it was watchable and often funny.  Instead we get Twin Peaks filtered through Inland Empire, and it's kind of crappy.

Last episode we watched, #9, was full of angry white men beating women around and/or swearing vociferously.  I'm not the biggest fan of profanity myself, but it has its uses...and it was way overused.  I'm only really interested in about 25% of what's going on in the average episode (closer to 10% in episode #7), so why am I watching this?  In the vain hope that maybe it gets better.  But it's feeling like a goddamn abusive relationship at the moment, so I'm not sure I'm going to make it all the way through.

It's pretty and mild today. Just warm enough, you know? The smell of cold isn't really in the air right now. It will be in a few hours.

Have I said the cats are adorable? Well, they are.

In our house we don't watch as much TV as some people.  We make it a policy to not watch more than one episode per day, generally.  And my wife would often just rather read...so we tend to fall behind a lot.  At the moment, for instance, we are trying to watch Agents of SHIELD (where we still have one episode left in the last season, for heaven's sake), Supergirl (with Luke and Jinian), the new Twin Peaks series, Star Trek: Discovery, The Orville (a.k.a. the other new Star Trek show), The Big Bang Theory, and (when it returns) Timeless.  In addition, on my own, I am watching Doctor Who (about halfway through Matt Smith), Torchwood and Glee (finished the first season of each), and rewatching Star Trek and Star Trek: TNG.  Plus rewatching Buffy (and going past Season 2 of Angel for the first time) with Simon, and watching bits of Rozen Maiden with the kids.

Some of this has been complicated recently by the fact that the streaming service I use for watching the Star Trek series and Doctor Who on my computer still uses Silverlight, which no major browsers now support, so I have to watch it on the actual TV, which is less convenient.  But tonight I did get around to rewatching "The Immunity Syndrome" from the original series (with what I suspect is enhanced special effects, but I don't recall for sure). The last one, "A Piece of The Action", I remembered well, but found it a little too jokey.  This one was actually pretty good, with decent tension, not bad SF elements, good character.  I remember when I first watched it that I was surprised that such a thing as an all-Vulcan crew (on the Intrepid, which was destroyed near the beginning of the show, causing a disturbance in the Force) existed, but considering these days it's clearer that Vulcans were in space before humans, it's less surprising now.

I've been listening to the Mission Log podcast discussing Star Trek episodes, and I actually got a few episodes past their discussion of this episode before I stopped, deciding that I should rewatch these episodes.  Now I've been trying to make sure that I listen to the episodes only after rewatching (and with the TNG rewatch as well, where I'm still only in the first season), since I don't remember many of them very well.  And there's always the occasional episode that I never did get to see, too.  I can't appreciate Star Trek the way I did as a kid, the productions not always having aged well, but it's nice to revisit it anyway.

Or at least I haven't been.  Too many blogging platforms, too little energy to write.  I moved my Livejournal over to Dreamwidth, posted there a few times, and that was it.  Tonight for some reason I decided to click on the email reminders I still get, and here I am.  Read a little bit, but decided not to go all the way back.

If I want to keep posting and not get daunted, I guess I should write something quick off the cuff on some random topic, or a few.

Simon (eldest son) is now 18 and just finishing his first semester of university, taking computing science, but he's still at the stage where he's mostly taking other stuff, like physics and statistics and calculus.  And he's having more trouble with the calculus than the other things; luckily I remember a fair bit of calculus myself so I can help.  They're using this system called WebAssign or something where they submit answers online, and apparently it's both fairly capable of scientific notation and fairly forgiving of unreduced forms.  But it also only allows a certain number of tries (in this case three), and it doesn't give you the right answer when your guesses are exhausted (and it sounds like they didn't discuss them in class, either)...and usually he only comes to me after his first two guesses were wrong.  Hopefully he does okay in his final exam.

I was quietly happy to see him sitting with Jinian (his nine-year-old sister) on the weekend, working on a programming project.  I gather there's some framework for building Bullet Hell games (he told me the name, but I've forgotten) which features some programming, and he was patiently explaining the programming bits to her.  So that's nice.  Jinian's been struggling with math a little, but programming is easier than math, isn't it?  Or maybe it just seems that way.  I saw someone write recently that "talent" is just that stuff that you did a lot of when you were young because it seemed fun and easy...

Patty Lin is coming to town!

It's true. Patty is flying in on Thursday night, and her husband Mike is flying in on a Friday-Saturday red-eye because he has to work a full day on Friday before flying out.  They were originally flying out to see Hot Breakfast's Second Annual Very Dorky Christmas Show, but it has been cancelled because the venue sucked and basically didn't want our money.  So much for that.

So instead of having a Christmas gig, we're going to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi instead.  We're seeing the non-IMAX, non-3D version, because from what I could tell, that's mostly how it was shot.  (They said they shot a few scenes in IMAX format, but it was only a few scenes. Meh.) 

I bought tickets ahead of time on Fandango, and as of last week, we were the only people in the entire theater.  (All of the other theaters were almost max capacity... but that's because they were 3D and/or IMAX.)

In related news, two weeks ago was the 10-year anniversary of me buying this house. I still haven't had a housewarming party yet.  I still haven't hired a frau[1] (aka a cleaning lady / cleaning service).  I used to use a cleaning service when I lived in Arizona in the mid-'90s, and I kept using one when I moved back to DE.  When I bought this house, my fraus didn't want to clean my house, since they specialized in apartments, so I had to find a new service, and I never got around to it.  (Not entirely true. I brought one in, but I didn't trust her.  She didn't seem to be all there, and she told me that her husband worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and died on 9/11.  She told me about the enormous amount of money she received from it, both from his life insurance and also from some kind of government payout. She bragged about her huge new fancy house she had, and she never said "But I'd trade it all to have my husband back," which seemed strange.  Anyway, things didn't add up, and I didn't feel entirely comfy with her getting intimate with my belongings, so I after the initial "try-before-you-buy" clean, I didn't call her back. 

BUT!  Patty's coming to town, so Matt called around and hired a cleaning service that we both feel good about, and they're coming tomorrow (Monday) and I am excite to have a clean house again.  And I will gladly give them my dollars every two weeks to maintain a clean house. Hallelujah!

And in addition to the fraus, Matt also called Stanley Steemer to come clean the bedroom carpet, the great room area rugs and my grandmother's two green chairs.  I am very excited about that, too.

And maybe the plumber will actually show up and fix the basement pipes, and then my house will be as good as gnu!  Did I mention that I'm excited? Because I'm excited.  Yay!

Anyhoo, I need to get to bed because we have Bruce Springsteen rehearsal tomorrow and I have to be sharp for it (no pun intended).  

G'night!

-------

[1] When I worked at the law firm in the early '90s, my lawyer told me that the German word for "cleaning lady" is "heinemachenfrau."  I fell in love with that word.  Turns out it was wrong, and the right word starts with an R, so it's "reinemachenfrau." However, Google Translate doesn't acknowledge that word (probably because I'm likely spelling it wrong), and instead it wants me to use the word "putzfrau" which, dare I say, I almost like better. 

Advent of code is fun, if you like programming.

In December every day thru Christmas you get a little puzzle that you need to write code to solve. You get some text and some rules; a single value will be the answer.

I wrote a programming language (called SAI) a while ago and I'm using it to solve these puzzles. I may post a few solutions here, so if you want to solve them on your own, don't read further, or any other "Advent" posts.

-- spoiler --

Here's the solution to the first puzzle, December 1.

In the code below, source is the provided input to your puzzle solver and the two debug statements print out the solutions to parts 1 and 2 of the puzzle:

  set
    elements to source.split('') thru it-0 // note!
    previous to elements last
    result to 0

  each elements as elem
    if previous = elem 
      set result + elem 
    set previous to elem
    
  debug "Part 1: ${result}"

  set
    result to 0
    len to elements.length
  
  count 0 to len as pos1
    set pos2 to (pos1 + (len/2)) % len
    if elements[pos1] = elements[pos2]
      set result + elements[pos1]
      
  debug "Part 2: ${result}"

I designed SAI to be easy to read and with a minimum of punctuation and special symbols, so it looks more like pseudo-code than actual code, and in general resembles a typed out version of what you would verbally describe a program to be doing. Also, this program is certainly not as efficient as one could make it. But I believe that readable and maintainable are more important than efficiency, with very narrow exceptions.

Note that SAI compiles to Javascript, so is subject to some of Javascript's bullshit, in particular the strange handling of numeric values vs strings of digits. A simple and fast way of converting a string to a value (if you're sure it is convertible) is to subtract 0 from it; that's what is happening here.

The company car's transmission blew up. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but "it stopped working" isn't very sexy.

The shop says it should be fixed by late Wednesday / early Thursday.

Sucks that I'll be out of work most of the week, but it could be much, much worse.

That brings us to today. I'm actually kinda happy to be vehicle-less. When I'm done with work for the day, or on my days off, I try to leave the car parked and walk everywhere anyway, so this isn't terribly new territory. I try to pick hotels that are within walkable distance of 'stuff' thanks to my 'leave it parked' policy.

Today's walk via Google Maps:

After the park, and before returning to the hotel, I was walking through a residential area. About a block away from me (I was on 76th - a very busy road) I saw a dog running loose through the neighborhood. I stopped and watched him for a few minutes. He seemed very healthy, and I was pretty sure I could see a collar on him. When I saw him trying to (I assumed) re-enter a fenced in yard, I made my decision to try to help him out.

Clearly, he hated me.

He was absolutely charming. Still clearly a pup (though not a baby) he was youthful, but not wild/crazy. Once he'd decided that I wasn't going to hurt him, he cozied up to me and didn't leave my side more than for a second when he got excited.

I made some calls and someone came out to pick him up. Thankfully (?) they explained some bureaucratic bullshit about how I was technically over the county line and he had no jurisdiction and... yadda yadda.

He did do something mildly useful by giving me a leash for the pup which was little more than a rope lasso. He then went back to his truck to get the phone number of the folks I would have to call. They would have been my third shelter (SPCA, the local shelter, and then his recommendation.)

But while he was digging up the number, the owners of the house (that the pup was trying to re-enter) came out and claimed the dog.

I'd only spent between 1/2 hour and an hour with the dog, and I sincerely had a hard time giving him up. Maybe my idea of volunteering at a shelter isn't such a great idea.

Lastly - a quick video. (Sorry for the vertical video - in my defense, I was playing with a derrrrrrrrg.)

ETA: in the video I say “Owasso Texas”  which is something I kept doing over and over again, and I have no idea why. I was actually in Owasso Oklahoma. 

Have you ever had this thing like, when you've just taken a nice handful of something snacky, like potato chips, and tossed them in your face and started chowing down, that your body decides that NOW, right NOW would be the perfect time to have a gigantic coughing fit?

And you're standing there with a mouth full of food and you know exaaaaactl what your diaphragm is going to do in a very short period of time with no conscious control and think, "I don't want to die." 

And you have to judge, can I swallow all of this VERY quickly, or is there somewhere I can spit it out VERY quickly, before there begins this massive wheezing intake that would likely be extremely counterproductive to clearing your lungs, followed by a 100km/h explosive burst of air coming out with god knows what in it?

You ever had that?

Because, you know, that's one of those times when you realize you, your being, your self, is merely riding along in that meat space-ship in an purely *advisory* role. 

Hi, I'm your friend Sean, and sometimes I turn a sink full of partially chewed food into existential commentary.

[ ding ] please drive through.