Blimey, what a great end-of-year gift I have received. Professor Von Explaino heard my sad cry for help and gave me almost exactly what I was hoping for in his post Chartist.js data from table.

A funny collision of things happened yesterday morning. I had just listened to a Broken Record podcast in which Rick Rubin chatted with Dave Cobb, and in the middle of the mutual love-fest, Rick said that the latest musician to have really excited him was James Blake. I’ve never heard of James Bla...

I started reading Adrian Bell’s Corduroy yesterday, the Country Book Club edition of 1951, a treat that had been in store for a couple of weeks. My best friend, who knows my taste for a countryside I never really knew, sent it, and although I am only two chapters in, so this is not a review, there...

It pains me to admit this, but I am going to give up on my attempts to learn enough javascript to tinker. I just cannot get my head around enough of it. The two things I find most difficult are flow control and flow control. In particular, I just cannot grasp how to obtain some information inside a function and then be able to use it outside the function. Lord knows I've tried, like being back in the bad old days of BASIC and changing one thing at a time until — miracle of miracles — it works. Except that no matter what I have tried, it doesn't work.

A couple of summers ago, we arrived on Ischia in that dead time, too late for lunch, too early for an aperitivo, and famished. The tavola calda just down the road didn’t have much left, but we took some of what there was and then I noticed on the counter a jar of large circular things, with almonds. Presuming them to be some kind of ciambelle, I confidently ordered two of them as a nod towards dessert.