Teatro Zinzanni is a long-running circus dinner theater in Seattle. Six of us went tonight and enjoyed a blend of cabaret, circus arts, fine dining, and vaudeville.

The current show, Hotel L’Amour, is ostensibly set in a fine hotel, where the oc­to­ge­nar­i­an Madame reminisces about her career, while Caesar the lounge lizard hams it up, Maestro Voronin brings a puppet girl to life, one aerialist cavorts around an enormous martini glass, a juggler dazzles with his ver­sa­til­i­ty, another aerialist works the straps, and the soprano trills. All this while the audience eats a fairly decent meal spread out over three hours.

‘Twas enjoyable to be sure and the acts were good but it was hard …continue.

Andy Osnard (Pierce Brosnan) is a disgraced MI6 officer, packed off to Panama, where he recruits Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), the eponymous tailor. Osnard is an un­scrupu­lous dirtbag; Pendel is a fabulist in need of money; they’re made for each other. Panama is “Casablan­ca without the heroes” and Pendel spins tall tales that make their way back to London. Eventually, he outdoes himself, claiming that the Canal is to be sold to the Chinese. Osnard manages to procure $15 million to fund a revolution, which he plans to abscond with.

Brosnan plays against type …continue.

I had to rename several hundred thousand files today. Thanks to a botched invocation of Im­ageMag­ick, they all looked like unique_pre­fix.png.jpg, whereas we simply wanted unique_pre­fix.jpg.

I found a suitable answer at the Unix Stack­Ex­change. As one of the many variants of parameter sub­sti­tu­tion, Bash supports ${var/Pattern/Re­place­men­t}: “first match of Pattern within var replaced with Re­place­ment.”

for f in *.png.jpg;
do
    mv $f "${f/.png}"
done

The target expression could also have been written as "${f/.png.jpg/.jpg}"

Flashman’s Lady takes place between the two parts of Royal Flash, making it the third book chrono­log­i­cal­ly of the Flashman Papers and the sixth book published.

Flashman and his wife, Elspeth, become friendly with Don Solomon Haslam, a rich merchant from the East Indies. Losing a wager to Haslam, who is smitten with Elspeth, Flashy has to let Haslam take Elspeth and her father on a trip to Singapore. As things have become hot for him in England, he sails east with them. Haslam’s feelings for …continue.

I have an ambivalent relation to the notion of patriotism because all too often those who most loudly proclaim themselves to be patriots are the worst sort of jingoistic, know-nothing, blowhard­s—be they Trump supporters, Brexiters, or Irish na­tion­al­ists.

And yet, for all the flaws and failures of the American Experiment, there are still things to celebrate. America’s optimism and can-do spirit, although much abraded in recent years, is still exemplary. Millions continue to flock here, drawn to the land of op­por­tu­ni­ty. The Founding Fathers created a great and lasting democracy, albeit with a franchise and a set of rights that had to be widened several times. The world can’t get enough …continue.

My mid-2012 15" MacBook Pro has been getting ever slower. My last two work laptops came with SSDs, but this older machine has a 768GB hard disk drive. It was time to get a solid-state drive, which are far more affordable now than four years ago. Rather than replace the HDD, I bought a Data Doubler kit and a 480GB SSD. I removed the optical drive and installed the Data Doubler with SSD in that space. I rarely used the DVD drive, so I won’t miss it.

The Data Doubler kit came with a set of screw­drivers and a detailed manual that covered multiple MacBook models. The manual had …continue.

To­mor­row­land is a story of dashed dreams and recovered optimism.

In 1964, eleven-year-old Frank Walker meets a girl called Athena who takes him from the World’s Fair into a futuristic city called To­mor­row­land. In the present day, where doom and gloom reign, a teenager called Casey hasn’t given up hope of a better future. She is recruited by Athena—­some­how no older—to save the world. Casey finds Frank, who is embittered at having been cast out of paradise decades ago. They find their way back into the now-desolate To­mor­row­land and destroy the machine that’s casting a pall of …continue.

Jimmy’s Hall tells how Jimmy Gralton became the only Irishman ever deported from Ireland. Gralton returns to rural Ireland from the US in 1932, after being run out ten years’ earlier during the Irish Civil War for Communist activity. He revives the dance hall he had built previously, as it is a much-needed outlet for the young to dance, study, and talk, and im­me­di­ate­ly runs afoul of the local powers, par­tic­u­lar­ly the parish priest. Tensions escalate, cul­mi­nat­ing in his de­por­ta­tion.

Ken Loach is never subtle about his own socialist beliefs. Jimmy’s Hall is a polemic about the struggle between …continue.

While re­search­ing yesterday’s post about nested markup in Re­Struc­tured­Text, I finally learned how to use anonymous hyperlinks.

Hitherto, I used one of these three forms for hyperlinks:

1. The central conceit of the fictional `Flashman Papers`_ is that Flashy
2. besieging Breda_ in 1625.
3. my club, `Freely Speaking Toastmasters <http://freelyspeaking.org/>`_.

.. _Flashman Papers:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flashman_Papers
.. _Breda: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Breda

The first, `Flashman Papers`_, is a named hyperlink reference, which refers to an external hyperlink target, .. _Flashman Papers: URI. Note that the reference name starts with a backquote, `, and ends with backquote-underscore, `_.

The second, Breda_, is a simple reference name—the backquotes are optional, but the trailing _ is crucial.

`Freely Speaking Toast­mas­ters …continue.

I use re­Struc­tured­Text for both this blog and the MetaBrite DevBlog. This blog is built with Acrylamid, while the MetaBrite blog is built with Nikola.

Yesterday I used a link (~/.pgpass) that styled the link as an inline literal; i.e., in the code font. Re­Struc­tured­Text doesn’t support nested markup, but you can pull it together with a two-step sub­sti­tu­tion reference:

Here you have |optparse.OptionParser|_.

.. |optparse.OptionParser| replace:: ``optparse.OptionParser`` documentation
.. _optparse.OptionParser: http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.html

This is tedious as you have to create a pair of directives for every such link that you wish to style.

Nested inline markup has been on the todo list for 15 years—it ain’t happening.