Week 198: glass spider

Some work. At last, integrated Transport for London’s disruption messages/status updates/whatever they’re called. I have some complaints about the TfL API, but it speaks to the power of APIs that even an imperfect one is good enough to have inspired dozens of apps etc. I wonder about the line breaks in the Bus Stop Closed messages, like they’re some kind of poem:

Bus Stop Closed
Please use the next stop
or the previous stop
to catch your bus

whereas the other, longer messages are unbroken streams-of-consciousness about how a bus route has been diverted.

Finally made some mince pies. Making the pastry, I used a food processor (really a Braun MultiQuick blender with a food processor attachment) and by jingo, it took a matter of seconds to combine the butter and flour – it’s true what they say, food processors are great. I enjoy the delicate rubbing in by hand, reckon I’m good at it, but just think of everything I’ll be able to achieve in the time saved by using a machine instead. In the end, the pastry was disappointing, but that could just as well have been because the flour was a bit old and I hadn’t an egg yolk to hand.

Best bit of this peaceful video showing the restoration of a dilapidated stand mixer is the use of the relative pronoun “who” for a centrifugal governor. It’s a matter of style, but I feel strongly that “that” is always less elegant somehow, and I’d love to meet someone who feels that as strongly as I do.

I had conflated a glass onion with a glass spider in my mind. Intellectually, I can tell the difference between a spider and an onion, but you know how it is.

And so we say goodbye to 2022. A few of the things I did in 2022 without mentioning on here: harboured a crush, tried jellied eels, grew mushrooms. I had a better time than many, but still a bit less misery would have been appreciated thanks.

Looky, slightly different type on this website. I was attached to the old particular cut of Futura, with its quirks and bad kerning, until I learnt Jost has a stylistic alternate with a single-storey a and I was sold. I think 2023 is the year I get into stylistic alternates.