Week 123: plonk(er)

Monday 26 July 2021

• Now the maxinated can enter France without proof of a negative test result. It’s topsy-turvily much harder to re-enter the (yet more disease-ridden) UK, so there’s a risk of catching the virus and being stranded abroad, but I guess I can privilegedly cope with that if it happens.

  I have ordered the tests needed for returning and having returned, and man the enterprising startups’ hastily developed webistes are shonky. (I’ve used a couple, as if to spread the risk of one being dodgy.) Makes you think.

• It’s been humid, and has anyone noticed it’s tricky to tell if you have a fever or it’s just really humid? Well, I think it’s just really humid.

• Some work. Among other things (well, of course among other things) going through and using the nicer pathlib where previously I’d used os.path, which is a bit pointless but I can think of more pointless ways to pass the time. It turns out that some parts of the Python ecosystem break if you use a Path in place of a str, so it’s not that simple a change.

• In weeknoteses past, I’d admitted to enjoying the radio broadcasts of an newspaper columnist (who has really disgraced himself in the last fortnight). Later (still more than a year ago) I’d concluded, partly from the plummy voiced company the guy keeps, that he’s actually a berk and I resolved to read and listen to better people. And I was delighted to stop my subscription to the newspaper of record earlier this year, without even having to speak on a telephone (because it’s not like the customer retentions department is responsible for the editorial hatefulness). So hooray for me, is that growth?

  Which reminds me I enjoyed Jeremy Clarkshole’s farming series, notwithstanding a bit where he blames a poor crop of oilseed rape on not being allowed to sicken bees, and some things that went unsaid about the negative externalities of sheep farming. Which is not a shock to me – I’m entertained by lots of his and his colleagues’ work – we can contain multitudes. I think the wrinkled motormouth is a textbook case of “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

• “Hey guys I was today years old when I learned that…” No, sorry, but yesterday I read something about the transport of grapepickers in the 70s, which made me wonder where the “plonk” word (for cheap wine) comes from, and I learnt it’s probably an alteration of “[vin] blanc” (but who knows?).