In today’s Connection Problem, Peter included some helpful “best practices for group video calls,” a topic that’s been on my mind a lot (I’ve spent 90 minutes in video calls today so far).

I need to be better at listening, guidance that Pomplamouse has helpfully put into a catchy song. My measuring stick for this of late has been “if I think I’ve been talking a little too much, I’ve likely been talking a lot too much.” My demographic needs to heed this advice 10x more than everyone else.

Another piece of advice, picked up from a client this week during a video call: if you’re working remote, reach out to one colleague (or customer, or vendor, or client) every day to touch base. Just say hi. Ask a question. Pay a compliment. Help to paint in the life-affirming bits of work that sequestering has robbed us of. I tried it today for the first time, and it felt good (and the reply, in the same spirit, only amplified that feeling).

I’ve been listening to Lost Words Blessing every morning for months now, but until today I didn’t know the genesis of the project that begat the song:

Why were these words taken out of the Oxford Junior Dictionary?

They were taken out because they were not being used enough. That’s the simple answer. It’s not the dictionary’s fault. This is a dictionary for children aged roughly six to eight. It doesn’t have many words in it. So they have to take hard choices about what language is relevant to that age group.

But the words that went in were very telling: in went broadband, attachment, voicemail, you get the picture. This was a moment in lexicographic analysis which spoke of a much bigger moment in culture, where childhood is becoming virtualized, interiorized — and nature is slipping from childhood, as it is slipping from all our lives.

So the book was kind of a protest not against the dictionary, but against the loss.

The clock in the apex of the Coles Building—you may remember it from previous adventures—has gone missing.

A quick call to the Department of Transportation, Infrastructure, and Energy (whose receptionist has the hardest mouthful since Stewart McKelvey Stirling and Scales changed its name) revealed that it’s simply due roof repair, and not a permanent removal.

Which is good, because, at least historically, it’s the clock from which all bearings flow.

Brigid Delaney writes about the new friendship for The Guardian:

You haven’t seriously thought about the concept of picking a best friend since primary school, but now Bryony has asked you to be her best friend. “Will you be in my bubble?” she asks. You’re flattered but surprised. You don’t know Bryony that well. A former colleague, you’ve only hung out a handful of times outside the office. You haven’t even put her number in your phone. You’d only ask her to be in your bubble if everyone you knew died. The asymmetrical nature of the friendship unnerves you. You get to thinking: “What if the person I asked to be in my bubble was freaked out at my request?” You start to question every friendship you’ve ever had. Are you someone’s Bryony?

There was a time last year when I was in active communication with three people named Matthew, all of whom went by Matt casually, and who had overlapping domains. More than once I caught myself emailing Matt № 1 when I meant to email Matt № 2 or 3. And, indeed, once I did that. And because of the overlapping domains, the email kind of made sense. 

This year I’ve swapped out Matts for Joshes. I’m juggling four Joshes this year. Their domains don’t overlap as much as the Matts, but I suspect that, nonetheless, I will end up emailing Josh № 4 sometime soon when I mean to email Josh № 2. Thank goodness I’m not dating any of them.

(I’ve met a new Mitch this summer, which pushes my Mitch-count to three, so it’s possible that there will be similar Mitch-problems in parallel).

All of which got me curious about first name frequency, so I exported the 1,092 contacts in my address book, extracted their first names, and then sorted and calculated frequency (if you’re a command line-user and have never explored uniq -c, you haven’t lived!).

There are 32 first names that show up 5 or more times in my contacts; in order of frequency, they are:

  18 John
  12 Peter
  11 Paul
  10 David
  10 Dave
   9 Steve
   9 Chris
   8 Mark
   7 Stephen
   7 Mike
   7 Kelly
   7 Bill
   6 Robert
   6 Patrick
   6 Karen
   6 Ian
   6 Heather
   6 Gary
   6 Alan
   5 Tom
   5 Tim
   5 Susan
   5 Scott
   5 Ron
   5 Nancy
   5 Kevin
   5 Jeff
   5 George
   5 Doug
   5 Don
   5 Bob
   5 Ben

It’s worth noting, per aforementioned first name confusion, that in that top-32 are the names of all of my brothers (John, Stephen, Mike).

And, in the number two slot, is my name. Given that nobody has been named Peter since the 1950s, this tells you something about the age of my contacts.

This blog post actually started off being a blog post not about Joshes, but about Peters. About Peter Bihr, in fact. He’s the youngest Peter in my contacts, an exception to the aged rule.

And what I wanted to mention about Peter is that he’s started to post his weekly email newsletter to his blog, which means that I can consume his weekly newsletter in my RSS reader. For which I am truly thankful.

I should really send him a thank you note. There’s a good chance that one of the Peters Bevan-Baker, Foley, Hooley, Johnston, Livingstone, Lux, Mutch, Noonan, Porteous, Richards or Whittle will get the thank you instead, but that’s a risk I’ll have to take.

After the hurricane-that-didn’t-amount-to-much, the weather is brilliant this morning. A cup of tea at Receiver before heading to work.

Fruit flies in the kitchen have been the bane of my existence for as long as I can remember (I wrote about this bane in 2004 and 2008, and received much helpful advice in reply).

This year I decided that it was a losing proposition to try to control fruit flies once they’d taken over: I needed to get ahead of them, and remove the conditions in which they thrived.

And so that’s what I did.

I never left food or dishes out on the counter.

I washed everything to be recycled, immediately.

I washed out the kitchen sink drains with vinegar and baking soda every few days.

I wiped down the kitchen counters constantly.

Despite all advice from purists, I stored all fruits and vegetables in the fridge, tomatoes included.

And it worked.

The kitchen wasn’t 100% fruit fly-free, but over the summer I saw only perhaps a dozen, and I took their emergence as a sign that I needed to double-down on my prophylactic control measures.

In saying all this, I suppose it’s equally possible that this year happened to be an off year for fruit flies for other reasons: perhaps the combination of sun and rain and temperature conspired to be inhospitable to them, and nothing I did had much influence.

I will chose to believe, however, that I conquered them through my vigilance.

Here’s a Spotify playlist of 25 songs that prompted me to hit “like” this spring and summer.

Here are the songs on the playlist:

• Goodbye Rain - Hush Kids - Hush Kids
• Yo Mae Leh - Invisible Minds - Make up Your Own Stories
• Trying - The Staves - Trying
• Nothing’s Gonna Happen (Demo) - The Staves
• By Your Side - Ane Brun - Leave Me Breathless
• What You Want - May Erlewine - Mother Lion
• Moon Song - Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher
• Julianna Calm Down - The Chicks - Gaslighter
• A Feeling Felt or a Feeling Made - Siv Jakobsen - A Feeling Felt or a Feeling Made
• Is There Something in the Movies? - Samia - The Baby
• Rest - Leif Vollebekk - Twin Solitude
• Darcy’s Song - Sierra Eagleson - Darcy’s Song
• Sad Girl Summer - Maisie Peters - Sad Girl Summer
• Slow Burn - Kacey Musgraves - Golden Hour
• Soft Line - Lucy Wainwright Roche - Little Beast
• Elergy for the Present - Philip Glass, Dennis Russell Davies
• Options Open - Kathleen Edwards - Total Freedom
• Spiracles - COMA - Voyage Voyage
• Warped Window - Anna Mieke - Idle Mind
• Tourism (feat. Fenne Lily) - Henry Jamison, Fenne Lily
• Wild - May Erlewine - Mother Lion
• I Burn but I Am Not Consumed - Karine Polwart - Laws of Motion
• Zona Rosa - Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, Thomas Bartlett
• Salters Road - Karine Polwart - Traces
• Killer + The Sound - Phoebe Bridgers, Noah Gundersen, Abby Gundersen

Twenty years ago today on the radio I talked to Matt Rainnie about the cats of Marion Island. It was, I think, the high point of my erstwhile side hustle as a broadcaster.

With Hurricane Teddy on the way, it seemed like a good afternoon to pick the apples. And as I was picking the apples, I realized the plum tree was filled with the most wonderful ripe plums. So I picked some plums too. And then made apple plum sauce.

A joke from my childhood:

What’s the difference between elephants and plums?

They’re different colours.

What did the man say when he saw the elephants coming over the hill?

Here come the plums!

(He was colour blind).