The one and only cactus I've grown from seed had seven, eight, and nine ribs before settling on ten (which was how many ribs its parents had).

It stopped growing a while back and I put it in a larger pot. It's showing new growth now but seems confused about how many ribs it should have. I suspect the cactus has no idea of the sense of suspense it evokes.

My favorite marimba mallets aren't made anymore. No other mallet I've tried so far has the same tone. I asked in an online forum for suggestions and someone recommended a small mallet manufacturer*, a one‑man operation, whose products include custom mallets. There are many possible variations in the type of rubber core inside the mallet head, type and thickness of yarn wrapping, stick material, and so on. I had a conversation with the one man this morning and yeah he was up for making me mallets that would perform like the ones I prefer. He wasn't familiar with the particular model I use but he will be working from two samples I'm sending him: one new mallet and one worn‑out one that he can take apart and analyze. He said he'd burn the yarn to help identify what it was made of. His level of dedication to serving the needs of musicians impressed the hell out of me. He spoke with me for 37 minutes. It remains to be seen whether I'll like his finished product but I'm optimistic. The music business has its share of people in it for the money but also some individuals with a passion for music.

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From a 1982 interview with Seymour Cray:

interviewer:	What have been some of the limitations you've encountered in your niche of the industry?
Cray:	I suppose the limitations are just the visions of the designer; there aren't any physical limitations. [...] It's only the ability to conceive of the next step. It's always easy to do the next step and it's impossible to do two steps at a time. I think it's appropriate to say that each step is rather evolutionary, so of course you use what you learn from the previous step.

From an interview with Béla Bartók:

Speaking roughly, the period from 1910 was not revolutionary at all. In art that is not possible. In art there are only slow or fast progressions. It is essentially evolution, not revolution.

Back in November, the NY Times published an essay by a high school student about how her classmates felt the day after the election. It ran under the title I'm 16. On Nov. 5 the Girls Cried, and the Boys Played Minecraft. An excerpt:

We girls woke up to a country that would rather elect a man found liable for sexual abuse than a woman. Where the kind of man my mother instructs me to cross the street to avoid will be addressed as Mr. President. Where the body I haven't fully grown into may no longer be under my control. The boys, it seemed to me, just woke up on a Wednesday.

From a 1994 interview with Frank Zappa:

interviewer:	In your touring days with rock bands, did you see guys out there playing air guitar?
Frank Zappa:	Sure.
interviewer:	What is that, and how come girls don't do it?
Frank Zappa:	I think it's probably because girls are too smart to play air guitar.

California is not just earthquake country; it's also fire country. Knowing that is one thing but seeing the photos from Los Angeles this month is another.

Around 20 years ago, I was in town running errands and saw a big plume of smoke coming from my neighborhood. I quit what I was doing and went home. The fire was about a mile away from my house. It burned one vacant lot; things could've been much worse if the wind had been a little different.

I was reminded a couple months ago how easily the brush in this area burns.

The closest fire came to anywhere I've lived was when a bakery across the street from me in San Francisco burned down in 1995. I was riding my bicycle home, saw the fire when I started up the hill to where I lived, and thought this doesn't look good.

From a video Mark Zuckerberg posted this morning:

We're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.

In particular—as of today, Meta's hateful conduct policies page lists this exception to their general prohibition on insults about mental characteristics:

We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non‑serious usage of words like “weird.”

Gosh, I feel special to be part of a minority singled out as acceptable to insult.

I had an Acura NSX from 2003-2024 (sold as the Honda NSX outside of North America). The NSX was a significant piece of automobile history with several features never used in a production car before: aluminum body/suspension and titanium connecting rods, to name two. I put 97,000 miles on it and sold it for more than I'd paid in 2003.

In 2005, a guy working at Honda posted to an Internet forum that he had a few prototype NSX connecting rods on hand and would send one to any NSX owner who contacted him. He sent me one and it hung on the wall in my living room for 19 years.

Wood paneling fades from daylight coming in through windows. There's a faint shadow of a connecting rod on the wall under the peg it used to hang from. The photo underneath is from Colorado in the 1980s and is a smaller print of the one that I gave to the guy with the spiky hair years later when, by a twist of fate I wrote about a while back, he was working across the street from me in San Francisco.

I had some urgent paperwork to send to the east coast late last month. I went to a FedEx office and asked for their cheapest overnight service; they wanted $68.30.

I felt so old. I remember when FedEx would send an envelope overnight for about $12.

I chose the two‑day service this time, which was $9.75. It got there the next day anyway. This is consistent with my experience over the years: you pay for FedEx's two‑day service around Christmas and it goes overnight. I imagine that during periods of high volume, it's to FedEx's advantage to move stuff out of their system as soon as they can. But if they did that all year 'round, people would get wise to it and stop paying for next‑day service.

Happy new year, everyone.