The most important thing to note is that I was away from my desk literally for three weeks, on a wonderfully relaxing holiday. Of course, there were still work-like things to be done, and they got done, but mostly I wasn’t thinking or doing much “work”. Ever hopeful, I entered a podcast for the James Beard Awards, although the expanded duration allowed, one hour now as opposed to 30 minutes before, is a worry. I also set up some direct payment options so that people can support the podcast. Take that, Patreon.

Over the past few days I have again picked up the torch of fully implementing webmentions in Grav. It's a maddening pursuit, mostly because I don't really know what I'm doing (although I am getting fantastic help from the folks in the IndieWeb community). The details are pretty arcane, and although I am trying to keep a decent record of all the steps and missteps, a full write-up will have to wait. In the meantime, I'm up against all sorts of weird things that I don't fully understand. My main aim is to try and get a more consistent, more essential, set of data back about webmentions to this site. To do that, I need to persuade the plugin to use XRay, rather than the standard PHP microformat parser, which I started doing back in late May.

Legalized marijuana is going the way of all agricultural commodities in the United States, and that shouldn't be a surprise. A really interesting analysis by 538 reveals that the price of pot has dropped for grower and dope fiend alike, and with big money at stake -- $6.7 billion this past year and $20 billion the dream for 2021 -- big money is very interested. The market, according to 538:

increasingly favors big businesses with deep pockets. As legal weed keeps expanding, pot prices are likely to continue to decline, making the odds of running a profitable small pot farm even longer.

Botany One reviews Food: Delicious Science, a newish TV series from James Wong and Michael Mosley, originally produced on BBC2 as The Secrets of Your Food. Among the "entertaining stories" that Ian Street singles out for special praise:

Watching James Wong and Michael Mosley participate in a...

Taking advantage of the downtime to continue migrating old blog posts, I'm mostly conscious that nobody except me cares whether most of these pieces endure. Some I'm rejecting out of hand, as too ephemeral or unimportant to bother with. The bulk I just process. A few are worth drawing attention to once again.