I grew up hating rugby. I spent eleven years at a rugger-bugger school in Dublin. I couldn’t stand the game. I was a small, unathletic child with no interest in sports. Rugby, even the modified rugby that they teach seven-year-olds, was violent and unpleasant and involved running around cold, wet fields. I had a big operation on my feet when I was 10 and I parlayed that into an excuse never to play rugby again.

I can’t remember when I last watched a rugby match, but it was surely back in the ‘80s, as I doubt I’ve seen one over the 20 years that I’ve been in the States.

So imagine the im­prob­a­bil­i­ty …continue.

Ten LAPD patrolmen congregate regularly in MacArthur Park for “choir practice”: late-night bitchfests, marathon boozing, and group sex with a couple of cocktail waitresses.

LA’s finest are not exactly fine specimens of humanity, but then neither are the people they serve, whom they consider little better than the ones they arrest. The choirboys include an idealist, a psychopath, a prankster, and a world-class mooch. They fight and they drink and they argue: everything but discuss the things that really bother them. Wambaugh lampoons the choirboys, but he reserves his full contempt for their su­per­vi­sors, martinets …continue.

Python has list com­pre­hen­sions, syntactic sugar for building lists from an expression.

>>> [2 * i for i in (2, 3, 5, 7, 11)]
[4, 6, 10, 14, 22]

This doesn’t work so well when the com­pre­hen­sion expression is itself a list: you end up with a list of lists.

>>> def gen():
...     for l in [['a', 'b'], ['c'], ['d', 'e', 'f']]:
...         yield l
...
>>> [l for l in gen()]
[['a', 'b'], ['c'], ['d', 'e', 'f']]

This is ugly. Here’s one way to build a flattened list, but it’s less elegant than the com­pre­hen­sion.

>>> x = []
>>> for l in gen():
... 

I am co-directing this year’s reading of Ulysses with Helen. We have decided to do the first half of the chapter with some light cuts. The Circe character, Bella Cohen, will not be seen until next year, as we’ll be stopping shortly before she makes her entrance.

We had a readthrough-cum-planning meeting ten days ago at Helen’s and a rehearsal tonight at my house. We’ll need several more rehearsals, but it’s starting to come together.

We’ll be reading at the University Bookstore on Saturday, June 13th.

DI John Rebus in­ves­ti­gates the murder of an illegal immigrant, who had ties to asylum seekers in Edinburgh. DS Siobhan Clarke looks into the dis­ap­pear­ance of a teenaged girl; soon, the rapist of the girl’s sister is murdered.

Rebus and Siobhan struggle with the uglier side of life in Edinburgh, notably, racism, latter-day slavery, and the increasing numbers of asylum seekers. As usual, their personal lives are in a mess: Rebus drinks too much; Siobhan falls asleep with a tub of ice cream.

As in other Rebus books, the two in­ves­ti­ga­tions end up being …continue.

It takes a special … talent? … chutzpah? … to fuck up the global economic system to the point where you need four enormous bailouts totaling $170 billion and then to give your senior people $165 million in bonuses.

It’s like they’re taunting the lynch mob.

We discovered Bistrot Bistro in Kitsilano on a previous visit to Vancouver. It’s an agreeable little French restaurant just south of downtown. Emma suggested that we eat there again for my birthday, and it was a fine choice.

We ate from the prix fixe menu for $26 apiece. She had the carrot soup, roast chicken, and raspberry sorbet; I had the pate de campagne, a peppercorn steak, and a chocolate mousse. The prix fixe included a sizeable quantity of pommes frites. We added Brussel sprouts, a baguette with olive tapenade, and a half-litre of Pinot Gris, and walked away two hours later, pleasantly sated.

The last time we were there, it was full. This …continue.

We drove up to Vancouver today. We’ll be here until Tuesday. It’s my birthday tomorrow and I have two days of vacation that I have to use by the end of March or lose them, so why not.

I always like Vancouver. It’s un­equiv­o­cal­ly a major city. Vancouver feels more urban than Seattle, where people have only been moving into high-density downtown condos and apartments for a few years.

We’re staying at the Sunset Inn and Suites in the West End. We stayed here before. It’s relatively cheap, clean, and centrally located. No particular charm either.

Tomorrow, we see my great-uncle Dick and his wife Margaret. They’re both 92 and about to move into a retirement center. We’ll have …continue.

Ow! Ow! Ow! It’s Friday the 13th and I ransomed my car this evening from the shop for over two grand—more than half of it labor. I think I’m in the wrong line of business. Maybe I should be a grease­mon­key instead.

The clutch was worn out and the flywheel needed replacing, which required taking out the trans­mis­sion.

We’ve only had one other comparable bill with this car and it has over 90,000 miles. We’re not doing too badly overall, except that the other bill was late last year.

Feh.

Via Tor.com, Lex Luthor asking the president for a bailout.