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Japan has a new prime minister, Fumio Kishida (Reuters). I don’t really expect much and I don’t think many people do either but from what little I’ve seen so far, he seems like someone who’s saying the right things.
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Temperatures reached 30 during the week which seems absolutely crazy (it’s October!) but I guess is probably what we have to get used to as the climate continues to warm up. I mean on our current trajectory, it’s only going to get worse, right? I found myself thinking about when we can expect countries to deploy technology to scrub the air (perhaps if/when we have abundant cheap energy?).
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Emma had her sports carnival on Saturday. I took her rather than Eri and it was great in the way that something that involves your kid is great for you but absolute boredom for anyone else. And it gave me a chance to try out the iPhone 13’s new camera system, particularly the 3x ‘telephoto’ lens. I didn’t use the iPhone 12 much last year (for obvious reasons) so unfortunately don’t have videos I can directly compare it against but I thought what it captured turned out pretty well.
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Speaking of the iPhone 13, one of the ways that I justified purchasing it this year despite getting the iPhone 12 in 2020 was the fact that I could trade in the iPhone 12 for about half the price of the iPhone 13. Well, a man came around on Saturday to pick it up and while the hand-off went smoothly I realised very, very shortly after I closed the door that I had not wiped the phone. iPhones can be wiped remotely but they need to be on the Internet for that to work and the iPhone wasn’t. Hopefully, this doesn’t result in me forfeiting the trade-in (there’s a deadline the phone has to be provided).
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I made steady progress on Watchful. I also spent far too long working on a little program to calculate the number of repositories on GitHub that use the Janet programming language. I had hoped to be able to run it entirely Heroku but didn’t realise until I’d written it all that my plan to periodically run the calculation script wouldn’t work because of the way that Heroku isolates scheduled workers from web workers.
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This was the week that a confluence of events led to me discovering the English comedian James Acaster. Acaster broke out years ago but I’m 39 and so live in an almost permanent state of pop culture jet lag. I devoured his stand-up series Repertoire (Netflix) and think it’s one of the best routines I’ve ever seen. It spoils some of the jokes so I’d recommend watching the Netflix series first but I also enjoyed My Little Thought Tree’s ‘James Acaster | The Art of Absurdity’ and Comedy Without Errors’ ‘James Acaster: A Strange Form of Stand Up’.
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I meant to write about this last week but ‘Scoundrels’ (season 5, episode 9) might be the perfect Law & Order episode. It has it all: investigative hurdles, legal conundrums, a terrific villain, the classic cast and a morally grey conclusion that leaves it to the viewer to decide whether they think the prosecution did the right thing. I looked around for a link to toss in here but it doesn’t look like anyone else is equally besotted. In the (admittedly) unlikely event that you’re reading this and have the series lying around on DVD or something, take it from me that this is well worth a rewatch.
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Apple Music was recommending Australian 90s bands to me and I started listening to Regurgitator’s 1999 release …art (Apple Music). I’m sure there’s a lot of nostalgia at work here but it’s a far more solid album than I remember.
