Weeknotes #321

I filed my tax return. That wouldn’t be that noteworthy except that this was the first year we did it after purchasing the house. The Japanese Government provides a mortgage deduction for the first 13 years or so of a mortgage and for all but the first year, it’s automatically calculated and deducted. But this was the first year so I had to lodge an income tax return together with the paperwork they need. I was a little disappointed to discover that our house wasn’t built to be at the highest levels of energy efficiency and so isn’t eligible for a larger deduction.

Eri’s still recovering from a nasty case of the flu so I took Rowan to his preschool at the beginning of the week. I suspect my doctor would be a little concerned to hear that given the fracture in my little toe but hopefully the bicycle is relatively safe for fractured little toes. It doesn’t involve you repeatedly slamming your foot into the ground like walking or running do and surely that counts for something.

I continued to make progress on Listless, albeit slowly. This week I learnt the hard way that one of the perils of reimplementing a standard list of items is that you don’t get the behaviour of a standard list of items that you might otherwise expect. This was extremely apparent one day when I tried to select multiple to-do list items and found that holding Shift as I pressed the Up key did nothing. It now does what you would expect but it’s made me concerned that there are no doubt dozens of these little UI behaviours that Listless’s custom list is not going to have. Well, maybe not dozens but at least a dozen.

It’s been a while since I found the time to read one of Matt Lakeman’s travelogues. I read his recent one about Afghanistan and it was excellent.

Speaking of reading, I didn’t finish Journey to the Centre of the Earth before we had to take it back to the library but I worried that it might have been a bit too dense for John and Rowan’s bedtime so I replaced it on my last library visit with Michael Bond’s original A Bear Called Paddington. I’m a big fan of the CG animated series The Adventures of Paddington that began in 2019 and it’s interesting to see how that retelling differs from the original.

I finally watched the third Benoit Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man. I enjoyed it more than Glass Onion and I appreciate that Rian Johnson is not content to just remake Knives Out. If anything, my main problem with the movie was that I thought Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud was too good. I realise others might be familiar with O’Connor from things like the Crown but this is the first I’d seen him in anything and I thought he easily stole the film. No small feat when you’re sharing the screen with Daniel Craig, Josh Brolin, Glenn Close, Mila Kunis and more.

If you’ve seen the movie—and there are spoilers so don’t watch it if you haven’t—I would recommend Rian Johnson’s Notes on a Scene for Vanity Fair’s YouTube channel. It’s somewhat akin to a director’s commentary but rather than being the entire film just involves Johnson explaining a scene. Well worth the 23 minutes or so.

I mentioned last week that I was delighted when Apple Music informed me that Gnarls Barkley had a new album out (called Atlanta). I’m sorry to say that I haven’t developed much of a taste for it over the past week. I’ve instead spent a lot of time in my Heavy Rotation playlist. One of the songs in it is ‘She Said (Big Jet Plane)’ a cover by the French electronica producers known as Trinix of ‘Big Jet Plane’ by Angus & Julia Stone (Apple Music). I’m not sure why it has a tweaked title. They’re French, I guess?