📚 Finished reading The Harvest Gypsies by John Steinbeck, a collection of articles he wrote before working on The Grapes of Wrath. Such clearly-written, simple, powerful and moving articles about refugees in California in the 1930s.

The migrants are needed, and they are hated.

I love finding a random piece of paper-cum-makeshift bookmark in an old book. I tried looking up Robin Hood Court but it doesn’t seem to exist.

I really love the F1 Beyond The Grid podcast, but the episode with Alex Zanardi is exceptionally good. What an incredible human being. I’m so sorry to hear that he’s once again in hospital, after an accident on his handbike, and hope he makes a full and speedy recovery.

Virtual Album Club tonight, #113. Back into shoegaze mode with Chapterhouse’s first album, Whirlpool. I may be wrong, but Pearl seems to sample Sophie B Hawkins and Siouxsie and the Banshees. I like!

Venturing into the dark world of trying to remove malware from a MacBook. This isn’t fun.

We finished the final two parts of I May Destroy You last night. Such a powerful, thoughtful drama of emotional highs and lows over its twelve episodes, which made me feel very old. None of the characters are likeable all the time, but they all come across as human and authentic.

Updating the maps on my Garmin cycle sat-nav is an excruciating affair. Download speeds via the Express (!) app that make it feel like I am draining a bath with a syringe. Been going for nearly 12 hours and not done yet. Still, I did get to see and screen grab this gem.

So lovely to receive some random vinyl in the post from a friend. There was no note, so I had to track them down. Random gifts out of the blue are so great, no matter whether you’re sending or receiving.

Does anyone have any good gift ideas for an 11 year old boy? We don’t have long to go until your youngest’s birthday and are stuck for ideas; web searches generally just yield tat which will be fun for five minutes.

Every case is so tragic. If you want to start going out and socialising, that’s fine, but please forgive me if I don’t join you.

I like Farnam Street’s Job Interviews Don’t Work, and its assertion that the best thing is to get candidates to demonstrate their effectiveness by actually doing the work. But how realistic is this, beyond competency tests? Does anyone do this routinely for all of their hiring?

Clever. 👏 Deliberately add text to an email so that it gets caught in a recipient’s spam filter. For those occasions where you want the answer to “didn’t you get my email?” to be negative. (via waxy.org)

So good to have the F1 back again. Incredible job by everyone involved in order to stage a race. Action throughout, with three different teams on the podium. I’m looking forward to next weekend already.

Curve being back up and running again already is seriously impressive.

Hope this is as good as I remember.

Stayed up too late on Friday night, working my way through every Prince video ever made.

1. How have I never spotted Doctor Fink before?
2. I had no idea the symbol/love sign appeared as early as When Doves Cry.
3. He had a great sense of humour and could really laugh at himself.

Tried to save myself some cash by replacing the rechargeable battery in my Garmin Edge Touring. Battery replacement went well, but now the touch screen always thinks I’m pressing the bottom left of the device. Now have a new screwdriver set, battery and a busted Garmin.

And so it begins. Hope the people at Curve manage to get things up and running again shortly.

🤦🏼‍♂️ Glad I have moved my myriad of Internet subscriptions over to Curve.