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I had my first examination after being discharged. So far, it all seems to be going well. The doctor was happy enough with my progress to remove the stitches so those are gone. It’s a little nerve-wracking that the next appointment is in two weeks but I’m telling myself that the fact the doctor is comfortable waiting that long is a good sign.
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Rowan’s speech development has been a bit delayed in comparison to Emma and John but it did improve during the month I was in the hospital. One thing he desperately loves at the moment is knock-knock jokes. Siri will tell a knock-knock joke if you ask (or at least she should) and so he’s constantly asking me to trigger the interaction by repeating ‘na-na jo’ until I crumble. Siri responds correctly about 85% of the time which, you know, is Siri for you.
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I created a new Google Account for the kids after discovering you can’t block a YouTube channel on YouTube with an ordinary account (this seems bizarre). You can block a channel for a child account from that child’s parent account but, for reasons I can no longer remember, when I set up our kids’ account, I set the birthday to be halfway between Eri and me (i.e. Google thinks the account is for a 40-year-old). There might have been a way to change this but the simpler thing to do was to create another account from scratch. I feel bad taking up another Gmail address from the precious reserve of those that are left but I didn’t make the rule that creating a Google Account also creates a Gmail account.
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In a recent episode of the Talk Show podcast, John Gruber mentioned the well-known anecdote from the early days of cinema where a scene of a steam train pulling into the station caused the audience to run out of the theatre. I’ve heard this story many times before but for whatever reason this time I found myself questioning its veracity. I mean, when you stop and think about it, it sounds ridiculous, right? Even if you’d never seen a movie before, these people had seen photos. More pertinently, they were presumably aware before they went into the theatre that they were going in to watch a moving picture. A moving picture in black and white no less. And with an atrocious frame rate. Oh, and no sound. I was hoping for an article on Snopes but the best I could find was this piece on Atlas Obscura. There’s of course additional information on Wikipedia including the scene itself.
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The Japanese study has petered out into almost nothing. The only thing that makes me feel better about this is that I’ve also fallen behind in episodes of Only Murders in the Building.
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I’ve decided that with my limited musical background, the best YouTube videos about music are those breaking down something simple. The guitar riff in Blur’s ‘Song 2’ would seem to fit the bill perfectly and indeed, Paul Davids’ reconstruction of the riff is a masterful example. If you have a modicum of interest in the song (or guitars), it is so enjoyable to watch him build it from the ground up.
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Can I link to anything else as the musical selection for this week? I could I suppose but that would just be cruel (Apple Music). Woo-hoo!
