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So this update was meant to begin with the sentence ‘We arrived in Australia.’ As you might expect from that opening sentence, that did not in fact happen. Unfortunately, John’s fever didn’t settle down as last week ended but instead jumped up to 40 degrees on Friday. Eri and I decided to reschedule our Saturday flight and I took John to the doctor to see what date he thought would be best. He suggested Tuesday and fortunately ANA had space on that day. I’m a little worried that something going badly wrong on the way to Australia is a Christmas tradition for us now.
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I felt particularly fortunate we were able to reschedule after I was told by the second person I spoke with at ANA that that shouldn’t have been possible (at least with the tickets that I’d purchased). It seems the first person I called very, very early on Saturday morning (before visiting the doctor) had told us the wrong thing. When I called again (after visiting the doctor), the second person informed me we should have only been able to fully cancel the tickets but that because I’d been told something different, they’d make an exception this time. ANA tickets aren’t cheap but repeated instances of this kind of service are why I keep paying.
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Over the past few days, Eri and I have taken turns staying up to give John medicine to bring down his fever. While I waited, I continued shaving ever further afield yaks and in addition to the Lemongrass library I talked about last week now have two more projects written in Janet: (1) Fossiliser, (2) Medea. Fossiliser is the tool for archiving statuses from a Mastodon user that I mentioned last week. Medea is a JSON encoder and decoder in pure Janet (Janet has an encoder/decoder in its Spork library but it’s written in C).
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Nate Silver wrote a great essay on the new tripolar configuration in Western democracies of (1) Social Justice Leftism, (2) Conservatism and (3) Liberalism. This feels correct to me and helped clarify my thinking. I can see now why I find some of the ideas of the modern ‘left’ objectionable (largely those in opposition to liberalism). I didn’t really feel like I was ‘conservative’, though, and so recognising myself as a ‘liberal’ has helped better slot some things into place.
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Not sure if I’m an ‘open sharer’ or a ‘question asker’.
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I enjoyed watching Nick Canovas’ Deep Discography Dive on Coldplay as Mic the Snare. The conceit of this series is that Canovas listens to an artist’s full discography and explains it for a new listener. In my experience, though, he moves so quickly through the releases (and YouTube’s copyright detection algorithm make it prohibitive to include samples of any decent length) that it functions far better if you’re familiar with the music already. As someone who’s been listening to Coldplay since Parachutes, I fell squarely into that category for this band and ate up the 60-minute mix of trivia and musical analysis.
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This isn’t breaking news for anyone but I watched Olivia Rodrigo’s Tiny Desk Concert and wish to confirm for the record that, in addition to being a talent musician, she is very pretty. The song she starts out that set with is I think my favourite on the Guts album, ‘Love is Embarrassing’ (Apple Music).
