A collection of James Ellroy’s articles on crime and his own past.

I’ve enjoyed Ellroy in the past but I found this unreadable. I tried it twice but abandoned it halfway through. Ellroy’s writing is self-indulgent, irritating, grandiose, and full of tiresome stylistic tics.

Aside from a few hours spent at two parties, we’ve worked from when we got up until midnight getting the bar room back in shape. I spent a couple of hours just washing all the greasy crystal glasses this morning (not to be confused with last night’s cleaning the booze bottles). We sorted through all the cookbooks and set aside about a third of them. The room is now ready to use again. Alas, we’ve moved a pile of stuff tem­porar­i­ly into the spare room, which will have to be dealt with soon.

As I mentioned last week, we started painting our "bar room" blue. The picture above shows the new color—and why we call this room the bar room.

The kitchen stove is just on the other side of the doorway, but the extractor fan is about six feet left of the stove, over the sink. The kitchen was remodeled and expanded in the 1960s; I believe the original stove was under the extractor fan. One con­se­quence of this is that, over time, bottles and glassware in the bar room become greasy.

I cleaned all the bottles tonight. Some of them needed it quite badly.

We have a sizeable collection of liquor and liqueurs, but we drink very …continue.

I can’t decide whether I should be amused or ex­as­per­at­ed by all the cries of NO SPOILERS! NO SPOILERS! for Star Wars: The Force Turns Over in Bed and Goes Back To Sleep.

At this month’s PuPPy (Puget Sound Pro­gram­ming Python) Meetup, I heard a brief mention of Python f-strings as a new feature coming in Python 3.6.

In essence, they offer a simpler, more versatile method of string formatting and in­ter­po­la­tion over existing methods. F-strings can include not only symbol names but Python ex­pres­sions within strings. With str.format, you can write 'Hello, {name}'.format(name=some_name). You can control various aspects of how name is formatted, such as being centered within a field—see PyFormat and Python String Format Cookbook for ex­am­ples—but no more complex expression is allowed between the braces.

Herewith some examples of f-string ex­pres­sions drawn from PEP 0498:

>>> date = datetime.date(1991, 10, 12)
>>> f'{date} was on a {date:%A}'
'1991-10-12 was 

For the CookBrite holiday party this evening, we selected recipes from the CookBrite app and cooked them for each other.

We had a lot of good food. I par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoyed making and drinking these milkshakes.

It seems old-fashioned to do so, but I still like to send and to receive Christmas cards. We wrote 30 cards last weekend. Almost all were Wondermark Multi-Purpose Greeting Cards, from a Kick­starter that Emma con­tributed to a few months ago.

Speaking of Kick­starters, No Holds Bard showed up in my Facebook feed today. I was so tickled by the concept that I anted up $10. I’ve read several novels where Will Shake­speare was a character, such as Ink and Steel and Revenger, but never a comic book where he was a superhero.

Yesterday, we started receiving cards from other people. A couple of dozen more will follow.

Two weeks ago, we painted the kitchen blue. A deeper blue than I had intended. It had more than a little bit of the Greek taverna about it.

Today, we started work on the "bar room", the room between the kitchen and the back yard, where we keep the booze. No painting yet. We’ve taken everything out of that room and cleaned. Fifteen years of cobwebs have been removed from behind the book cases.

Soon, a lighter blue.

Tom Hardy has had a very good year, starring in Mad Max: Fury Road and playing both Reggie and Ronnie Kray in Legend.

Legend loving recreates London in the Swinging Sixties when the Kray twins were not only notorious gangsters but also celebri­ties, mingling with the rich and famous in their nightclubs. Reggie is portrayed as the smarter, charming, and stable brother; Ronnie as erratic and psy­cho­pathic; both are capable of great violence. The film is narrated from beyond the grave by Reggie’s wife, Frances, and con­cen­trates mostly on Reggie. Hardy is excellent as Reggie, but hard to understand as Ronnie, while Emily Browning does a fine job as the young wife who’s …continue.