Week 204: bumbling fool

Some work.

Wondered about going to Skegness, and noticed that my presentation of the outbound 57 (Skegness - Boston - Spalding) timetable leaves a lot to be desired. For familiar Kafkaesque reasons, it’s “split” at Boston, and the problem for me is it arrives at bay 4 and departs from bay 7. (Going in the other direction, it both arrives at and departs from bay 4, which the computer understands beautifully.) Perhaps the promise of a rewarding trip to Skeg is the conceit I need as motivation to work on handling that sort of situation better. (Not a very exciting reward, but it’s not a gruelling problem to fix either.)

Google Maps’s journey planner is much worse, by the way, insists on a longer two-legged journey, thinks the 57 is a different bus that could leave before the 57 has arrived. Traveline’s one manages it perfectly, I’d have liked another thing to complain about but no, well done to Traveline.

Started using the computer to spice up the experience of playing Wordle for a change:

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cat /usr/share/dict/web2 | grep -x '^[^cramp]\{5\}$'
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cat /usr/share/dict/web2 | grep -x '^[^crampjoist]\{5\}$'
etc.

Not really learning anything I didn’t already know about regular expressions, but learning something. I’d barely used grep’s -x option before, and it wasn’t immediately obvious to me that I needed to escape the { and } like that.

Then one day the Wordle word was a word that isn’t in /usr/share/dict/web2. It was debug, and de and bug are in there but not debug, so ~

Some bicycling instead of walking for a change. It’s not too cold out, just cold enough that I don’t get too sweaty, and it’s dry so the beds of leaves aren’t all slippery but just make the ride nice and smooth. I return home with all salt from off the road on my trousers, which I prefer to mud.

A nice surprise that there’s a whole (first half of a) new series of You available to watch now. Was briefly aghast that the horrible slimy main character hadn’t murdered anyone yet, pathetic, until I realised it had only been fifteen minutes. __ is particularly brilliant in it, I won’t name them because I think the dawning of oh that’s __ is part of the fun. I don’t mind the delightful and silly geography of the pretend version of London, but I have a complaint about the sound design – the guy’s moka pot overheating made an unrealistic noise, a sort of fizzing (the subtitles say “food sizzling”) whereas in real life it’s more like a gurgle, I think?

Have stopped subscribing to Amazon Prime these days, but I found a way to inhale Jeremy Clarkson’s Farm programme. The offensive newspaper columnist is portrayed as less of a low-status, out-of-his-depth bumbling fool than he was in the first series, which is a slight shame – it would have been better if some of the flying excrement from a muck spreader could have gone on him – but it’s still compelling. So what if Clarkson and his friends would kill me with hammers for my preferred modes of transport or if they mistook me for a badger.

The producers of Cacklebean eggs appear in a few episodes, and what a shame it is incidentally that Marks & Spencer don’t stock them any more.