On the second date of Christmas, my true love saw with me: "Green Book"
You’ll recall that my adorable wife gave me the greatest Christmas gift of all, and last night, we saw Green Book in #12DatesOfChristmas #1.
Before I get to my review (tl;dr: we both loved it, in particular, the musicianship was outstanding) let me complain for a moment or two.
irrelevant complaining
We took a Lyft to the theatre (so that I can safely look at my phone in the car). On the way there I used the Cineplex app to buy tickets. Normally I like what Cineplex calls the “AVX” experience where you get a reserved seat and need not worry about getting there at the last minute … but this was a normal you-take-your-chances-where-you-sit film, and the Cineplex app was only letting me enter “1” in the ticket quantity field. The stupid “+” button to increment the number of tickets was disabled. Obviously this means there is something broken with the UI in the app. We’ll fix it when we get to the theatre and buy a ticket by standing in line like cavemen.
Well guess what, when the app only lets you buy 1 ticket, it actually means “you are buying the very last ticket, the movie is almost sold out.” Live and learn. We couldn’t get a 2nd ticket, so we decided to have dinner in one of the many fine restaurants in what is actually called the “Oakville Entertainment Centrum” and come back for the 9:30 show.
Conveniently the fine restaurant we selected took their time with abysmally slow service which ate up most of the 3 hour wait for the next show.
movie review
Anyway. We loved the movie. Movie reviewers love it too, and our local reviewer strongly encouraged us to see it (thanks, Tyler, you were right.)
There are plenty of reasons to love Green Book, but one actually struck me: The actors genuinely seem to be playing their instruments! Mahershala Ali is VERY believable as a concert pianist, and the other actors playing cello and bass seem to be doing it properly too. Even the big band you see at the Copacabana in an early scene seems to be playing the notes correctly. (Am I the only person who studies trombone positions and trumpet fingerings on the screen to decide if they actually represent the correct note? I hope not.)
If you play any instrument, you cringe when you see actors trying to do it, usually badly. Their hand and arm movements are out of sync, the camera shoots from the other side of the piano so you can’t actually see the keyboard, the trombone slide is moving when the note is not changing, the trumpet fingering is all wrong. Actors-as-conductors are usually the worst, waving their arms as if they were shooing away a fly.
But in The Green Book, they really took the effort to make it all believable.
I came across this article on The Secret to Mahershala Ali’s Piano Playing. The film’s music director Kris Bowers is the one actually performing, but he worked with Ali to get the posture and gestures right, and the effect really shows. I wish more productions took the trouble to get this right. (One of the commenters on that article says that Ali’s head was superimposed on Bowers’s body in many shots. It’s seamless.)
It reminds me of one of my all time favourite films, Brassed Off, starring the late Pete Postlethwaite as the leader of the Grimley Colliery Brass Band in a coal mining town in the U.K. and the adversity they face when the mine shuts down. I totally bought that he was a band conductor. I didn’t for a moment think he was an actor faking it - and I felt the same way in The Green Book. Bravo.
More like this please. Find actors who can do it properly, or train the ones that can’t, or - here’s an idea - cast actual musicians once in a while.
postscript
I was intrigued by this story. If you’ve seen the movie, you might also like to read up on the real Don Shirley and Tony .Vallelonga
legal note
Counsel has raised an objection to calling this #12DatesOfChristmas #1 since we had earlier seen Mary Poppins Returns, and that this should more properly be at most Date 1(b). I will respond that the viewing of Mary Poppins Returns was #12DatesOfChristmas #0, actually a Pre-Tournament Exhibition Date, in the same way that Canada plays Finland before the World Junior Hockey Championship actually began. And also in Computer Science we often begin counting at zero anyway.
Clamdy Canes. Mmmmm.
Here’s a holiday treat. I ordered some of these unusual candy canes for Christmas.
https://mcphee.com/collections/candy-canes
Unfortunately, my first choice - Mac & Cheese Candy Canes - was (and still is) out of stock, so I had to settle for Clam, Bacon, Pickle and Rotisserie Chicken.
They are delightfully packaged, but you are probably more interested in what they taste like. Well, they taste like clam, bacon, pickle and rotisserie chicken. Some of my family appreciated the fidelity of these flavours, others immediately spit them out (but at least they tried them) and some flat-out refused.
I think a better strategy would be to order a variety, unpackage them and set them out in a bowl and see what happens if people just randomly take one.
My niece took a few to a party and planned on telling people that the clam/bacon/pickle/chicken ones were actually Vanilla, Strawberry, Lime and Root Beer flavours. I need to find out how that worked out.
Note: Archie McPhee sells all sorts of fascinatingly odd products but they won’t ship to Canada! Booooo. I had to have them shipped to a hotel I was staying at in the US. It was a little awkward bringing them back through Canada Customs - I declared that I had some candy, and the border agent said, “Well, did you bring enough for all of us?” I’m glad I didn’t share with them. I need to be able to cross the border in the future.
Quest for Hayman's Gin
I suppose if my last name was Beefeater, Bombay or Tanqueray I’d drink something else, but ever since some random Google ego-search turned up Hayman’s Gin, I knew what we’d be drinking from now on. Gin and Tonic is the most favoured drink at our summer cottage going back generations, so we’ve been acquiring a nice collection of Hayman’s products, and, occasionally, even drinking some.
Recently I learned of a new entry: Hayman’s Family Reserve Gin. How can I resist? Everybody in the Hayman family supports everybody else in the Hayman family; we buy our coffee from Hayman Coffee, we save up for a once-in-a-lifetime vacation on Hayman Island, we get our buildings built by Hayman Construction, and if you ever need some rope, I’m sure Steve Hayman of Island Ropes in Malvern can fix you up.
So, I had to find some Hayman’s Family Reserve Gin.
Step one. Visit the local LCBO. (Note for those outside Ontario: In our enlightened society, you must buy your alcohol at the government alcohol store, because reasons.) No dice. Even though they occasionally had other Hayman’s brands, they didn’t have this one.
Step two: A search on LCBO.com revealed that it was out of stock online, but might be available in certain stores. Back before Christmas, they showed a couple of bottles in Toronto, a couple in Ottawa, a couple in Mississauga, and that was it. I went to visit our local LCBO outlet and Sabina, the very kind manager, even though it was December 23 and she was probably swamped with important pre-holiday work, got on the phone and located two of the last bottles of Hayman’s Family Reserve Gin at a downtown Toronto store and somehow, by asking nicely, arranged to have it shipped to the Oakville store. I didn’t know they’d do that! But she did, and even though it couldn’t possibly arrive before Christmas I was very happy about this.
Step 3: A few days later we got the word - it’s here! Since my son works near the LCBO in question, I had him pick it up, and he came home, having thanked the manager profusely at my instruction, with two bottles.
Of Hayman’s Gently Rested Gin.
What? What the heck is that? That’s not the family reserve that my family had reserved!
I couldn’t bring myself to go back to the manager and say “Um, thank you for the HUGE favour, but that wasn’t what I thought you were ordering, so I need to bug you again.”
So, step 3: Back to a search on LCBO.com, which revealed that there is now exactly ONE bottle of Hayman’s Family Reserve Gin left in the entire province of Ontario - at a store in Mississauga.
I must have this. It’s off to Mississauga.
The gin section includes all sorts of gins, including something called “Ungava”, distilled in Canada from native northern botanicals, that was a completely (un)appetizing yellow colour. Well I better buy one of those. But where’s the Hayman’s Family Reserve Gin bottle? The one bottle left in all of Ontario? Where? Where? Please help me, Mississauga store employee!
Well, she did help me. “Oh, it might be in the back. Sometimes when there’s only one left, it’s in the back; let me go check.”
Fingers crossed.
Imagine my disappointment when, moments later, she returned with the news that
- Yes they have one bottle of Hayman's Family Reserve Gin, just like the web site says
- No you can't have it
- Because the bottle is broken
- No you can't have it anyway.
Defeat. Maybe this was some limited edition thing and the world really is out.
There’s only one thing left to do - tweet about it.
I finally tracked down the last bottle of @HaymansGin Family Reserve Gin in the entire province of Ontario.
— 𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑯𝒂𝒚𝒎𝒂𝒏 (@shayman) December 31, 2018
It’s here in Mississauga.
It’s in the back.
And the bottle is broken, I can’t have it :-( pic.twitter.com/coBwTcFqEd
Now, my friends on Twitter are awesome; they immediately reported sightings of Hayman’s Gin (not necessarily this kind), or places in other countries that were able to ship me a bottle and perhaps I could have one shipped on an upcoming trip … but here was the best response.
Hello - drop me a DM I’ll see if I can help! Happy New Year.
— James Hayman (@HaymanJames) December 31, 2018
What? Can it be? Yes! James is the actual proprietor of Hayman’s Gin, a family business since 1863 in London, UK, and after an exchange of messages, I learned that
- The reason it's not available is because it's been renamed "Hayman's Gently Rested Gin."
- And therefore the LCBO actually HAD sent me the right product. Same gin, new label! (Same SKU, apparently)
- It was renamed because too many people thought that "Hayman's Family Reserve" meant that it was the best Hayman's gin, and nobody was buying the other varieties
- We should come and visit the Home of English Gin in Balham, South West London, which we totally will, they have tours!
- He'll send me one of the remaining bottles from his personal stock.
Well that is fantastic. Thank you James. And we definitely will come and visit. I mean, come on, their stills are named after their mothers and they have some fascinating recipies. We are definitely trying the Hayman’s Winter Warmers, including Mulled Sloe Gin, because, what do you know, I happen to have some Hayman’s Sloe Gin on hand already.
Will update this story when the Family Reserve arrives and when the London (Ontario) Hayman Family visits the London (UK) Hayman Family distillery.
On the first date of Christmas, my true love saw with me ...
I like going to the movies. My wife doesn’t like going to the movies.
So we have always compromised: we don’t go to the movies.
But she gave me an amazing Christmas gift -
This certifies that Steve Hayman is entitled to one movie date per month with his wife (movie subject to review) with no whining from his wife.
Wow. I am a lucky man indeed!
We decided to attend Mary Poppins Returns on December 30, 2018. Does this count as the first date, or is it more like an exhibition date, in the same way that Canada plays Finland before the World Junior Hockey Championship actually starts?
I sought advice from counsel; I happen to be related to a brilliant lawyer, who commented
Very liberal interpretation of contract, construed in favour of the beneficiary. If only she’d consulted a lawyer, she could have inserted “commencing January 1st 2019.” Looks like you are getting a bakers’ dozen.
Followup, if it please the court. The clause that says “movie subject to review” can be reasonably interpreted to mean “reviewed AFTER we see any arbitrary movie of my choice”, can it not?
The clause is ambiguous. In my view, the drafter (your wife) clearly intended to have some say in the movie choice. I would therefore read that word into the contract, as in “movie choice subject to review by wife”. This is a contextual, feminist analysis and should be preferred to the standard approach of “contra proferentem”.
I accept this contextual, feminist analysis, and I’m sure know you know what *contra proferentem" means, but just in case you don’t -
Contra proferentem (Latin: "against [the] offeror"), also known as "interpretation against the draftsman", is a doctrine of contractual interpretation providing that, where a promise, agreement or term is ambiguous, the preferred meaning should be the one that works against the interests of the party who provided the wording.
So anyway. We both deeply enjoyed Mary Poppins Returned. Date Night #0! I cheered when Dick Van Dyke appeared. Of course I saw the original when I was a kid, and the fact that Dick Van Dyke is still in it must surely mean that I am not actually getting older myself.
Even though they didn’t use any of the original music in the film, there were plenty of musical quotes of the original themes. Fun to listen to that too. And if you go - not only is Dick Van Dyke back from the original, but watch for the scene where a woman asks Jack and Jane for directions to #19 Cherry Tree Lane. That actress is Karen Dotrice (age 63), who played Jane Banks (age 9) in the original movie.
Many thanks to Cathy for this awesome, selfless present, and I will do my best to suggest movies that we might both enjoy equally. (I’m guessing that any upcoming Transformers or Fast and Furious sequel won’t be on the list.) (although really, we probably WOULD enjoy those ones equally.)
New shirts for the Moon Shot 1969 50th Anniversary
fifty years ago
July 16, 1969. Mom and Dad took my brother and me to Florida to see the Apollo XI launch. I will be grateful to them forever for taking us to see the greatest scientific thing ever.
I took this picture with my Kodak Instamatic 100. It’s still my favourite picture I’ve ever taken. See that white dot above the two puffs of smoke? That’s Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins heading to the moon.
We watched this from what is now Parrish Park in Titusville, on the SR 402 causeway heading to the Kennedy Space Center. Dad rented a camper van and we patiently waited it out, along with a million other people…
and we checked out the same spot in 2015 (this time with a slightly better camera).
Oh, and we got souvenir shirts. Here we are, having just returned from Florida in this spacious camper van - me, Mom (who, sadly, didn’t get a shirt), Dad and my brother. 
Check out the cool shirts with a beautiful late 1960s aesthetic. “MOON SHOT 1969 - I was there.” They weren’t quite bold enough to put the actual launch date on the shirt. Just in case.
My sister was a baby at the time and didn’t come along, and I’m sure she has been very tired of hearing for almost 50 years of what an amazing thing this was. And she didn’t get a shirt either.
I don’t know where my original shirt is. Of course it most likely wouldn’t fit, seeing as how it was probably a boy’s medium, and I’m now an adult extra-medium. Dad still has his - and my brother even wore it to the final Space Shuttle launch.
christmas 2018
But with the 50th Anniversary coming up, I thought of a fun Christmas present. How about getting those shirts re-made in the correct sizes? Michael sent me a snapshot of his carefully preserved shirt, and I touched it up (in Pixelmator) and submitted it to Entripy, a great local producer of T-shirts who seem willing to do really small orders when they’re not cranking out 25,000 at once for the Raptors or Leafs.
I ordered 4 reproductions for me, my parents, and my brother. And then thinking of everyone else we’d see at Christmas, who have all kindly listened to our stories of the Apollo XI launch without complaining, I ordered a few more of a slightly different design. See if you can spot the difference.
Many thanks to Entripy for doing a great job on these. I hope everyone in my family wears the right one next July 16.
the designs
Moon Shot 1969 - I Was There
Moon Shot 1969 - I Wasn’t There, But I Know Somebody Who Was
the end result
(I’m holding a reproduction of the July 21, 1969 New York Times, headline “MEN WALK ON MOON.” Thanks for that, Michael!)
a Twitter CFL experiment
So this is kind of interesting, isn’t it?
Wow, isn’t that wild. A twitter account called @CFLPredictor that posted exactly one tweet, on June 13, before the season started, correctly calling the outcome of the 106th Grey Cup, played in November! What are the chances of that?
Well … I gotta come clean; as it happens, I have a pretty good idea what the chances of that are, because I …
- created the CFLPredictor account on June 10, as a private account not visible to anybody.
<li>wrote a script (using a nifty <a href="https://github.com/sferik/t">command line twitter tool</a>) that posted hundreds of variations of the above tweet - essentially, every possible combination of <em>Team A</em> over <em>Team B</em>
- in a close one
- in overtime
- by a touchdown
- by more than a touchdown
- in a blowout
Essentially it did this ..
#!/bin/sh
for t1 in BC Edmonton Calgary Saskatchewan Winnipeg Toronto Hamilton Ottawa Montreal; do
for t2 in BC Edmonton Calgary Saskatchewan Winnipeg Toronto Hamilton Ottawa Montreal; do
if [[ $t1 != $t2 ]]; then
tweet "My Grey Cup 2018 Prediction: $t1 over $t2 in overtime."
tweet "My Grey Cup 2018 Prediction: $t1 over $t2 in a close one."
tweet "My Grey Cup 2018 Prediction: $t1 over $t2 by a touchdown"
tweet "My Grey Cup 2018 Prediction: $t1 over $t2 by more than a touchdown."
tweet "My Grey Cup 2018 Prediction: $t1 over $t2 in a blowout."
fi
done
done
To be safe, my script had to include various extremely unlikely options like “Toronto over Hamilton”, because with the CFL’s crossover playoff format, any team can potentially beat any other team.
(It didn’t post “Toronto over Toronto”. I have my integrity here.)
I’m not sure what my plan was going to be if anybody else actually picked up on this but naturally I was hoping it’d get mentioned in the media somewhere.
To my slight disappointment but ultimate relief, everybody on the Internet must be smarter than me because nobody fell for this fake news ruse.
So anyway, next time you see an amazing Internet prediction, consider the possible source.
My name's on your iPhone
Really. Go find it. I’ll wait.
Couldn’t find it? Settings > General > About > Legal > Legal Notices. Scroll waaaaaaaay down. Eventually you’ll hit this -
update - in 2022 it’s in Settings > General > Legal and Regulatory > Legal Notices
That’s right, Steve Hayman of the Indiana University Computer Science Department.
What’s all that about?
In 1989 or so I was working at Indiana University as a network manager in the computer science department. We had a fleet of Apollo and Sun workstations, and one or two of these weird NeXT cube things, which I wound up getting to know pretty well but that’s another story.
University of California, Berkeley had a popular variant of the UNIX system, which we used at IU on our Suns, including the Sun 3/60 on my desk, that happened to be based extensively on AT&T’s System V.
Berkeley wanted to get rid of the AT&T parts so that they could make it truly open-source and unencumbered by the AT&T license restrictions, so they put out a call for volunteers to rewrite certain AT&T programs from scratch. (The rules were: you were allowed to study and run the original, and look at the man page, but you couldn’t look at the original AT&T source code.)
Along with many other people who were much better programmers than me, I volunteered, and they asked me to take a stab at rewriting /usr/games/bcd, which was a silly little program that took text and drew a fake punch card around it.
BCD stands for Binary Coded Decimal, which was the text encoding standard that evolved into EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code), as used on punch cards, which I actually used in my first year Waterloo computing course on Fortran, and you would perhaps have liked the conference talk I gave at MacSysAdmin on the history of text encodings from Morse Code to Emoji - but more importantly - this bcd program qualified as high concept computer geek humor back in the day.
Also it was in /usr/games! What exciting computer games we had in those days!
AT&T Unix came with this utility, and I volunteered to rewrite it, and submitted the code to Berkeley.
They seemed happy with it and asked me to do another so I also rewrote /usr/bin/join, which is a sort of command line version of the database join function.
(That one was way more useful but way less fun to demo.)
Weirdly, the AT&T version only created 48-column cards instead of the standard 80-column card, but I was intent on copying the AT&T version, so if you ever look at the source you should change this line
int columns = 48;
So anyway I kind of forgot about it, but here we are, decades later.
Berkeley UNIX has continued to evolve, and a lot of the Berkeley code found its way into Linux, and MacOS, and even iOS.
Needless to say, iOS doesn’t actually include either the bcd or join programs, but it does include a lot of other Berkeley Unix code.
Apple lists the license agreement and credits for a ton of open source code in its Legal Notices section, and Berkeley, god bless them, has chosen to include the names of all these contributors from long ago. The Berkeley section says This code is derived from software contributed to Berkeley by …. and lists dozens of people, virtually all of whom did something way more important than I did.
But there it is. I’m sure hardly anybody reads the Legal Notices but it’s the first thing I check when there’s a new iOS release. Just making sure things are still there.
postscript
Berkeley unix mutated into OpenBSD and FreeBSD and NetBSD and Linux and MacOS and iOS and watchOS and tvOS and I can’t keep track of it all - but you can see the OpenBSD version of the BCD source here.
I am really amused that in my efforts to copy the AT&T version exactly, I inadvertently copied a bug from the original! Four years later, Dyane Bruce noticed (and fixed) that Q and R were being punched the same way! ooops.
old experiments
The other day my son informed me that the basement family room light turned on at the exact moment someone rang the doorbell. Now, we have some HomeKit automation in our house - light switches, thermostat, etc - but I know our doorbell is not a homekit-enabled doorbell, so that couldn’t possibly be it.
It must have been just one of those weird coincidences.
Maybe an electrical glitch.
Maybe he’s imagining things….
Today I got thinking about another kind of automation. Is there something I can do so that I can post something once and then it gets automatically submitted to Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook and this blog? Hmm. I know a lot of people like IFTTT, a web based tool where you can make actions happen when something else happens ….I remember looking at that once … I should log in there and see if there’s something.
So I log in to ifttt for the first time in a long time. And discover this, which has been quietly running away for the past two years:
Um.
Oh.
Oh THAT. I remember now.
That explains it. That long forgotten experiment has been turning our basement lights on whenever the doorbell rings for almost three years, completely unnoticed by everybody.
Well, unnoticed by me.
Thanks for the tip, Nick.
(I’ve deleted it. Thank you for your service, my little forgotten ifttt workflow.)