June 13-21, 2015

Ugh, another long gap. Part of that time was spent migrating from tumblr to WordPress, but that’s not really a reasonable excuse.

Let’s see: Last Saturday . . . was kinda just a chore day. The only entertainment of note was going to Gocciolina for their 1-year anniversary party/cookout thing. Which was fun, but not as much fun as actually having dinner at Gocciolina. One of these days we’ll learn how to plan dinner more than 30 minutes in advance, and then we’ll be able to eat there again.

We finally dug into Inside Amy Schumer — jumped right in with Season Three, under the assumption that the magazine articles & whatnot are correct & that the latest season is the best. (And, having finished 3 & moved backwards into 2, I think that was a reasonable assumption.)

It’s uneven — any show of its kind probably would be — but the sheer brilliance of 12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer should earn it some kind of permanent spot in the TV Comedy Hall of Fame. It’s utter genius. If you’re reading this & haven’t seen it, you can rent the episode for a couple of bucks on Amazon. Do it.

Or maybe watch 12 Angry Men and *then* do it.

I’m still working on reading Cadillac Desert. I paused it this week to take another stab at The Martian, which I had put down earlier because, honestly, it’s not that well-written. But last week I read this XKCD:

I have never seen a work of fiction so perfectly capture the out-of-nowhere shock of discovering that you've just bricked something important because you didn't pay enough attention to a loose wire.

Which is awesome, so I decided to give it another chance.

It’s close to exactly what that comic describes. The character development is so-so, some of the writing is kinda meh, but boy there’s a lot of carefully written narrative about engineering oneself out of an endless series of jams.

Anyway, life-wise, the week has been quiet — reading, surfing the web, etc. Being appalled at the news. The usual stuff. During the summer I’m in front of my computer less during the workday, which means I fall way behind on Twitter, far enough behind that I don’t even scroll back to try to catch up. It feels kinda weird.

Last night we drove down to Jordan Lake to look at stars through some moderately large telescopes, under the aegis of UNC’s Morehead Planetarium. It was cloudy earlier in the day, so much so that I was kind of gently agitating not to go, but M persisted and by the time we got down there, there were big patches of open sky.

So we stood in line for 15-20 minutes to look at Saturn through an ~8 inch telescope. It looked more or less just like this:

I try not to be a jaded 21st-century dude, and yeah, the awareness that the light hitting my eye had bounced off Saturn was cool. But still, come on. I have been totally spoiled by The Internet. Sigh.

 

June 13-21, 2015

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