Monday: the Queen’s Speech. Lots of the media suddenly using the word “flummery”, as if that’s a normal word people use. There’s some evidence that that usage isn’t completely new, including a 1998 letter about Her Maj’s Gracious Address, so fair enough I suppose. Wikipedia is mostly concerned with various kinds of stodgy pudding called flummery, but also asserts boldly: “The word has also been used […] as a minced oath in certain online social groups.” Which social groups?
The shower head had become clogged, such that the jets of water jetted out of it in all different directions. Taking it apart and just rinsing it in water got rid of a surprising amount of deposits, and now, after a soak in distilled malt vinegar, the spurts all go in one direction – brilliant – but they also seem a bit wimpy and flaccid. Is this because the holes are bigger? Is that how water pressure works? Hmm.
Some work. I deployed all of the big and grand new stuff I’ve written so far. Last week, I finished my stuff that converts timetable data from ATCO-CIF and TransXChange formats (for Northern Ireland and Great Britain respectively) into a nice consistent GTFS-ish structure in the database. Now, I have some timetables, all lists of departures, and other things using that database – previously, they used all different weird shit. I was slightly concerned that the new departure lists were much slower, but that was solved by fiddling until the Django database-abstraction API produced some SQL more closely resembling what I’d write if I were writing the SQL myself. Cool story.
Richard Osman’s House of Games is an entertaining television programme. Perhaps having seen or heard some contestant or other mention being tired after recording a week of programmes, I imagined some gruelling physical challenges, but the titular games are in fact all cerebral. Lots of the back catalogue has been uploaded to YouTube (in a high quality fashion) by a pirate, which is nice.
I also caught up with Osman’s The Birthday Game podcast, another gentle parlour game where three mostly comedians guess the ages of names from the week’s “today’s birthdays” lists. I’m slightly concerned that a contestant could cheat (in the way that revising for anything is cheating) by consulting something like Wikipedia’s days of the year category beforehand, but perhaps the producers prevent this by recording weeks in advance and not telling contestants which week their episode will be released (i.e. which week of celebrity birthdays to memorise).