World of Windows: pandemic-proof P2P to (re)build resilience, from Kirsten Dirksen and an international group of collaborators, is the best view into pandemic that I’ve come across.

I am convinced that the zeitgeist, which is shape-shifting at a dizzying pace, is going to make a dramatic turn this week; some of us are going to go to ground, some of us are going to flower.

My friend Henriette is going to flower:

It’s so weird that during this Corona Virus Isolation, it seems like everything is fucked up outside of the garden and in here everything is sunshine, grounding as well as birds chirping away. Occasionally the cat comes to visit on the little porch I have in the front.

I do very much still want to hear what Henriette has to say.

Six years ago this morning I was in the letterpress shop printing coffee bags for the late, reborn-as-Receiver, Row 142.

Oliver took this photo of me, about to blow out the candle on my birthday cake.

I turned 54 years old today.

The day started with calls from loved ones, followed by our usual Sunday waffles (I added some cocoa, because, well, it’s my birthday). After lunch I helped Oliver make me a birthday cake (lemon cake from the kitchen of Betty Crocker, with improv chocolate frosting using icing sugar helpfully provided by Catherine).

As the cake was chilling we had round one of gift opening, a nap, a little work, and then dug in to fulfill Oliver’s dream of cooking a “medieval vegetarian supper,” which ended up being navy beans and shallots stewed in broth, mushroom soup, and English muffins topped with cheese. Those medievals and their brown food!

We organized an impromptu birthday cake reveal Zoom at the very last minute, and had drop-ins from California, Ontario, PEI and Sweden (thank you all!). A second round of gifts were opened.

I’m now just coming down off the sugar shock and might tuck into a rousing game of “Set: The Family Game of Visual Perception,” which rode in on round one.

If you’re going to have a birthday during a fucking pandemic, this was a pretty good birthday to have.

Here’s Oliver’s take on the day.

Photo of Trubarjeva cesta 54 in Ljubljana by duncan c
Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Because, fuck the pandemic, I’m ordering six pain au chocolat.

I’ve been chewing on an idea I’ve called First and Last for a many years now; my 54th birthday, on Sunday, amidst a pandemic, seems as good a time as any to try it out.

The original idea was to rent a theatre once a month and to screen the pilot and series finale episodes of a television show, separated by a thematic intermission (“Newhart Martinis”), and followed by some sort of group discussion.

Given that we’re all storm-stayed until whenever, with Oliver’s help I’ve reimagined First and Last for the digital realm.

Want to join in?

The first show I’ve selected is The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which ran from 1970 to 1977—between the ages of 4 and 11 for me. In its original run, and then, later, in reruns, the show was frequently watched in our household.

• The pilot episode (alternate link), Love is All Around, aired September 19, 1970.
• The series finale (alternate link), The Last Show, aired March 19, 1977.

Watch both (it will only take you 48 minutes), then discuss in the comments here. Did you watch the show when it ran? Did it play a role in your life? Does it stand up? What happened over those seven seasons? Is this a good idea?

I inherited Catherine’s iPad, and find myself using it more and more: I watch TV, edit photos, browse the web, FaceTime my mother. And I write blog posts, like this one, via email.

I haven’t used an iOS device regularly for a long time, so I’ve become rusty on iPad text editing niceties; this helpful guide from Apple taught me a bunch of things I didn’t know, especially about the different ways to move the cursor (“insertion point” in Applespeak).

It’s time we all upped our video chat aesthetics game; designer and filmmaker Tom Ford has some simple advice:

Put the computer up on a stack of books so the camera is slightly higher than your head. Say, about the top of your head. And then point it down into your eyes. Then take a tall lamp and set it next to the computer on the side of your face you feel is best. The lamp should be in line with and slightly behind the computer so the light falls nicely on your face. Then put a piece of white paper or a white tablecloth on the table you are sitting at but make sure it can’t be seen in the frame. It will give you a bit of fill and bounce. And lots of powder, et voilà!

Longtime readers may recall my 2013 remix of a Vinyl Café episode, wherein I took advantage of the pause-filled speaking style of the late Stuart McLean to take apart and reassemble the audio into something completely new. The result sounds like it should make sense, but it most certainly doesn’t.

I get the same sense watching the “deleted scenes” videos from The Office, like this one. Unlike the Vinyl Café, these are the bits that ended up on the cutting room floor, the bits we never got to see. Stitched together they end up as “episodes” that seem like they should make sense, but don’t. As if The Office writers were incapable of writing plot.