David Crosby (1941-2023), RIP

Probably like most of my peers, my first exposure to David Crosby was the eponymous 'Crosby, Stills and Nash' album from 1969 (he's the one with the mustache on the right - the order of names is in reverse to their pictures). I'm not sure when I first listened to it properly: certainly not upon its release. I remember at the infamous Weeley festival (August 1971) reading a copy of the International Times* that featured an article based upon CS&Y's 'Wooden ships' - the article was called 'songs ... the apocalypse' (I don't remember now whether it was 'songs of', 'songs for', 'songs about' or even something else). Then again, there was the soundtrack of the film of the Woodstock festival that featured two good songs from the trio.

However it was, I reconnected with this album during my gap year (73-4), especially liking the divine song 'Guinnevere', written by DC. Unfortunately, in my humble opinion, he was never able to reach the same dizzy heights of this song or 'Wooden ships'. I've no doubt written this before, but I think the album would have been improved by removing the final song ('49 bye byes') and replacing it with David's 'On the lee shore'. There exists an almost finished version of this song on the unofficial album 'Studio Archives 1969': the lead guitar is a bit rough here and there and presumably would have been replaced had the song made the album. '49 bye byes' on the other hand is a waste of space. 

Thinking about it now, during the gap year I was also introduced to another Crosby song, the very contentious 'Triad', as performed by Jefferson Airplane. I have this version as well as Crosby's version (also on 'Studio Archives').

Then the Crosby trail ran dry, at least for me. Graham Nash's autobiography naturally contains a great deal of material about Crosby; one comes away thinking that Crosby peaked too early, and spent the last 50 years of his life in a crack cocaine haze. 

A few years ago I found the CSN  album that opened with a very strong Crosby song, 'Shadow captain', co-written with pianist Craig Doerge. His other songs on the album are not so good.

Other activities of note are 'discovering' Joni Mitchell and producing her first album. He also sang harmony vocals on several songs by Jackson Browne.

So farewell David, a voice from youth. Considering his life style, one might be surprised that he lasted so long.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
799	20/01/2015	Position paper submitted	DBA
1105	20/01/2018	Noise cancelling headphones	Personal, Headphones
1284	20/01/2020	Grand-daughter #2 standing	Grandfather
1465	20/01/2022	Accountant's gloves	Personal
1574	20/01/2023	David Crosby (1941-2023), RIP	Obituary, CSN

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* I found the article in the International Times archive; it was written by Jody Breslaw and is actually called "A hard rain's gonna fall", but it's subtitled 'visions of the apocalypse', which is what I remembered. The article covers two pages; the second page is very legible, but the first (that of course refers to 'Wooden ships') is not. In desperation, I 'printed' the page to PDF then in a PDF viewer increased the magnification to 400%: this is definitely legible.

Breslaw would appear to be a writer for the music press, as there are a few references to him (her?) in various rock publications. After writing about the apocalyptic vision of the early Dylan, Breslaw goes on to write The Buffalo Springfield-Byrds-Airplane-CSN&Y family pick up where Dylan left off.... From the first CS&N album, "Wooden Ships" is one of the classic apocalyptic songs. It arises from the humanistic, fabulistic science fiction tradition of, say, Vonnegut, but is more suffused with anguish and loss. Here it is again, an explicit depiction of the collapse of Western civilisation, etc., presumably through atomic holocaust. "Horror grips us as we watch you die", but there's still hope for us - "we are leaving" to make a new and better world. The music and lyrics have a pleading quality, a yearning theme of return to innocence which was later to culminate in Woodstock.

Reading this 50 years after the event, I am struck by how erudite is the above. One might imagine that IT was written by people who weren't too concerned with the niceties of language, but the punctuation of the above paragraph is 100% - 'etc' is written with a full stop before the comma as behoves an expression that has been shortened (et cetera). Similarly, the multiple commas around Vonnegut are correct. The only word that is wrong is the 'which' in the final sentence that really should be a 'that'.

Inside and outside the lemon tree

As I've probably written before, we have a lemon tree in our garden. In the past, it's given us a fair amount of lemons, but for some reason, the last year has been somewhat barren. I'm pleased to see that now we have plenty of lemons growing. 

The picture on the left was taken from inside the tree; there's a nice clump of lemons in the top left hand corner. The picture on the right was taken from above the tree (from our balcony): there are some good sized lemons in the middle of the picture, but I'm going to need a ladder to get to them (if at all).

But even the small lemons are very juicy, so the size doesn't matter too much. Some rain would help....

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
443	14/01/2012	More City Boy	City Boy
534	14/01/2013	Election day duty driver	Kibbutz, Probability
669	14/01/2014	Commuting	Personal
915	14/01/2016	MP3 Headphones	Richard Thompson, mp3
916	14/01/2016	Alan Rickman, RIP	Films, Obituary
1574	14/01/2023	Inside and outside the lemon tree	Personal

Israeli democracy nightmares

Yesterday evening at about 7:45 in the evening, we turned on our television, by chance to see a live speech from the president of the Israeli Supreme Court, Esther Hayut. Following are parts of what she said.

"This is an unrestrained attack on the legal system, as though it were an enemy to be stormed and subdued. Cynically enough, those who thought up this plan call it a plan ‘to fix’ the legal system. And I say, this is a plan to dismember the legal system. It is intended to land a mortal blow on the independence and impartiality of the judicial branch of government and to turn it into a silent branch....

"Whoever tells you ‘no more striking down laws’ actually means: no more prohibiting the arrest of soldiers for days without bringing them before a court, as the court ruled in the Tzemah case; no more protection of the right of a car owner to receive income supplement, as the court ruled in the Hassan case; no more realization of the right of single-sex couples to parenthood and a full family life, as the court ruled in the Arad-Pinkas case.

"And anyone who tells you ‘no more disqualification of decisions marred by extreme unreasonableness’ actually means: no more prohibiting cutting off electricity to citizens in financial or medical difficulty, as the court ruled in the Moisa case; no more reinforcement of all educational institutions near the Gaza border, as the court ruled in the Wasser case; no more cancellation of severe restrictions on freedom of political expression in the press and in demonstrations, as the court ruled in the Schnitzer case, and in many other cases; no more obliging a local authority to build a mikveh (ritual bath) for religiously observant women in a settlement with a secular majority, as the court ruled in the case of Kfar Vradim; no more protection of the right of children with special needs to receive free special education, even when they are integrated into the regular education system, as the court ruled in the Yated case. No more, and these are just a few examples.

"In other words, if government decisions are the end of the matter, and the court is deprived of the tools for fulfilling its function, it will not be possible to ensure protection of rights in cases in which government agencies infringe them in an uncalled for way through legislation or administrative decisions."

A few minutes later, the new Minister of Justice, Yariv Levin, said (in a speech that almost certainly was written earlier in the day, i.e. without knowing exactly what Hayut was going to say):

"Something happened this evening. It turns out that there is another political party in Israel. A party that did not compete in the election that took place only two months ago. A party that has put itself above the Knesset, above the decision of the people. This evening, we heard rhetoric familiar from black flag demonstrations. It’s the same political agenda, the same call to set the streets on fire".

That's not what we heard, but never mind.

As usual, I awoke in the middle of the night (at about 2:20 am) for a toilet visit; unusually I didn't fall asleep straight away once back in bed. Instead, I had nightmares of Yariv Levin running the country.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
325	13/01/2011	Mirror mirror on the wall	Personal
442	13/01/2012	Caught in a musical timeweb	10cc, City Boy
533	13/01/2013	Embedding pictures in HTML emails	Programming, Delphi, Email
798	13/01/2015	Split questionnaire design	DBA
914	13/01/2016	Reviving the research	DBA
1461	13/01/2022	Desiccated apple slices	Cooking, Ninja grill

Passports

Our Israeli passports will run out at the beginning of June 2023. I remember this date well as we had to renew our passports in a hurry ten years ago in order to travel to Spain and Britain. Five months in advance should be plenty of time, no? So I search for 'renew passport' on the Internet (in Hebrew, of course) and receive details of what I should do. The first step is to make an appointment for the local office that deals with passports, identity cards, etc. Since Covid-19, they have set up an appointments application easily accessible via the Internet.

The first available date for Bet Shemesh is ... 4 July! That can't be right! But, yes, it is: I have to make an appointment six months in advance! As one cannot use passports in the three months prior to their running out, and a new one could take as long as six weeks to arrive, this means that we cannot leave the country between the beginning of March and the middle of August. 

What does this mean if I am honoured to attend the degree ceremony in Edinburgh in June, should I be awarded my doctorate?

The website shows various locations and dates - I could make an appointment for Karmiel on 2 May, thus saving two months! As I and my wife travel half price on trains, this wouldn't cost very much. Unfortunately the website won't allow me to make multiple appointments. OK, I cancel Bet Shemesh and make an appointment for Karmiel.

Now we're set for 2 May... in Karmiel, with a 3 hour journey ahead of us (and 3 hours back). Even so, I'll check the website every day for cancellations in Bet Shemesh.

As for paying, if I do so before the end of February and via the website, the renewal will cost only 160 NIS. I understand that after February, it will cost 320 NIS, and paying in person is even more expensive. I believe that I can pay in advance, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
530	07/01/2013	Recurring actors in long running TV shows	TV series
910	07/01/2016	Vinyl log 25 - 3 January	Vinyl log, Jackson Browne
1000	07/01/2017	1000 blog entries	Meta-blogging
1369	07/01/2021	I haven't disappeared	DBA, Health
1456	07/01/2022	Fourth time around	Covid-19

Randy Newman's 20 greatest songs

It all began with an article (if that's the correct word these days) on the Guardian's website from yesterday evening listing Randy's 20 greatest songs, at least as according to author Elle Hunt. First, let's look at the list before making comments:

 
 
20. Short people
19. Have you seen my baby? 
18. Lonely at the top
17. You can leave your hat on
16. When she loved me
15. Love story (you and me)
14. Mama told me not to come
13. Birmingham
12. Political science
11. Louisiana 1927
10. I think it's going to rain today
9. I love LA 
8. Simon Smith and the amazing dancing bear
7. Rednecks
6. Marie
5. In Germany before the war 
4. My life is good
3. Living without you
2. Sail away
1. God's song

Really? It's as if Randy has done nothing good since 'Trouble in Paradise' (1980). 'Living without you' in position 3? As much as I like the old songs, most of them don't belong on this list. 'You can leave your hat on' may have earned more money than the other songs, but it's not much of a song as a song.

If I were going to list his 20 best songs, they might be (in chronological order)

  1. I think it's going to rain today
  2. Simon Smith and the amazing dancing bear
  3. Davy the fat boy
  4. Sail away
  5. Lonely at the top
  6. Rednecks
  7. Louisiana 1927
  8. In Germany before the war
  9. It's money that I love
  10. Same girl
  11. My life is good
  12. Christmas in Capetown
  13. Dixie flyer
  14. New Orleans wins the war
  15. Bad news from home
  16. The world isn't fair
  17. A piece of the pie
  18. Shame
  19. Lost without you
  20. She chose me
  

One thing that I have noticed about Randy's songs is that they have become less amenable to covers. How could anyone else record 'The world isn't fair', a song that in my point of view is amongst his best?

Today really is Sandy Denny's birthday. In the summer of 1973, she played some concerts as support to Randy Newman, but I've never been able to find anything out about these concerts.

200 best singers of all time

No small fuss was made in Israel when Rolling Stone published their list of 200 best singers of all time, including Ofra Haza in position 186. Nice that they've heard of her. I admit that I haven't heard of many of the singers placed in these positions.

Anyway, I idly wondered whether the late great Sandy Denny would appear in the list. And appear she does: position 164! 

Denny’s buttery, mystical croon is so timeless that it sounds centuries older than the Sixties folk revival, making her the perfect choice to appear on a song about Middle-earth (and take home the award for Led Zeppelin’s only guest vocalist, on “The Battle of Evermore”). In both Fairport Convention and her solo work, she commanded a sense of longing with her phrasing and feathery register that gave her an ethereal quality on par with other tragic folk icons like Nick Drake and Judee Sill. She died in 1978 at just 31, making her obscurity all the more alluring to those who stumble upon her catalog. “What you heard was a kind of awe at the contingency of human life and the beauty of the world,” Greil Marcus wrote in her Rolling Stone obituary. “A certain reverence for the past, and a steady determination to take her place in the long story she was telling.” —A.M. 

Good news for her birthday that by chance is today. And also by chance, the t-shirt at the top of the pile that I took today to wear underneath my buttoned shirt was the one with the David Bailey picture of Sandy.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
666	05/01/2014	End of year blues	ERP
1104	05/01/2018	Business rules in Priority which do not apply to specific users/2	Priority tips
1455	05/01/2022	Sandy Denny would have been 75 years old today	Sandy Denny

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Correction: Wikipedia has Sandy's birthday as tomorrow, meaning that the coincidences that I wrote about are not coincidences. Today is, however, Maartin Allcock's birthday.

Gaslit, Watergate ... and more ranting about Israel's new government

I have been watching the Gaslit tv series for the past few weeks and have been finding it very interesting. Even though it is primarily about the private lives of Martha Mitchell (played by Julia Roberts) and John Dean (Dan Stevens), it also shows the Watergate scandal as it happens and from different angles than from its usual projection. I had quite a surprise in the fifth episode when the music that accompanied John and Mo Dean to their 'honeymoon' at Camp David was 'I want to see the bright lights tonight', by none other than Richard and Linda Thompson. Slightly anachronistic, I thought, as the song would only be recorded a few months after the event that it accompanied. The song was played again during the long credits sequence, although it itself was not credited.

I suppose that I knew about Watergate, but I was more involved with other matters at the time, and like the Vietnam war, it passed me by. Watching this series sparked my interest, so I had to find more authoritive material that would explain Watergate in depth. First off was 'Fear and loathing on the campaign trail 72' by Hunter S. Thompson; whilst this was written contemporaneously with Watergate, it was more about the George McGovern campaign for the Democratic nomination. I actually read this book about 40 years ago (when even then it was 10 years old), but it didn't leave too much of an impression then. 

This led me to a much more informative book, "King Richard: Nixon and Watergate, an American tragedy", by Michael Dobbs. Whilst this book limits itself to the hundred days following Nixon's inauguration in January 1973, and similarly limits its point of view to Nixon, it also gives a great deal of background to Watergate and explains how the entire house of cards fell down. The book contains many pictures of the main characters in the Watergate saga, and it is quite amusing to see how closely the actors in 'Gaslit' resemble their real life counterparts. Julia Roberts really looks like Martha Mitchell; Dan Stevens resembles John Dean quite well, and the actress playing his wife does look like Dean's wife. Sean Penn was unrecognisable as John Mitchell, but has been made up to resemble him very closely. Similarly Gordon Liddy. Going back to 'Gaslit', I wish that they could have toned the language down a bit. Did public figures really swear so freely then, or is it the 2020s informing the 1970s?

Of course, reading about Nixon and how far his henchmen/cronies/supporters were willing to go brings up painful memories of Donald Trump and his belief in an alternate history. Lost an election? Declare election fraud and claim that you won. There was yet another example of this a few weeks ago: a Republican candidate for a governership lost, but she took her case to the supreme court of the state, citing election fraud. The judge stated that the evidence presented showed no signs whatsoever of tampering or fraud, and that the suit was baseless. I forget now who the plaintiff was and in which state this happened: after all, I'm not a student of American election fraud.

This, unfortunately, brings us (once again) to the newly sworn in government of Israel. Of course, there was no election fraud, but claims that "the people spoke" are somewhat contentious when the actual margin was so thin. But that's as may be; what worries us 'bleeding heart liberals' is that the victors believe that they can do whatever they like (as per Nixon et al.), such as dismantling the entire judicial system. Something doesn't suit them? Pass a law allowing it. Where else do you have a minister responsible for the police and the border police who himself has been convicted for various crimes? 

As a commentator said on television last night, "They [the government] say that it will be like in America, where politicians nominate the judges for the supreme court. What they are forgetting is that in America there are three separate branches of government: executive, legislative and judicial. In Israel, there is no separation between the executive and legislative branches, and if this joint branch nominates the judicial branch, then there is no separation whatsover. So no, Israel is not like America".

One outrageous statement was made by one of the extremist ministers (Orit Strook) at the beginning of the week: doctors will be empowered to refuse treatment to patients if the patient's qualities (sex, sexual orientation, ethnic origin) are against the doctor's beliefs. Fortunately this has been condemned by everyone, including Strook's coalition partners, so it looks like this piece of megalomania will not get very far.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court will decide (whilst it still has the power) whether one of the senior ministers is fit to serve, considering that he was imprisoned over seven years ago for fraud (the 'cooling off period' for that sentence has passed) and that he was convicted once again last year for tax evasion. In a plea bargain, he received a suspended sentence and promised to leave politics. Whilst he did resign from the Knesset at the time, he contends that the condition referred only to the then-current Knesset, not to future elections. Others would beg to differ. Some say that he should be held in contempt of court and should not only resign again from the Knesset but should also serve the prison time that was previously suspended. As no doubt he would say (quoting Humpty Dumpty from 'Alice through the looking glass'), 'words mean what I want them to mean' - not necessarily what is written in a dictionary. 

There is no doubt that the Supreme Court's decision (whatever it will be) will be decisive for the months and years to come.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
999	31/12/2016	Farewell 2016 - a summary of the year from my idiosyncratic viewpoint	DBA, Health, Personal, Obituary, Song writing, Theanine
1102	31/12/2017	End of an era	TV series
1192	31/12/2018	Love is all you need (film)	Films, Sorrento, Italy

I have been thinking over the past few days about writing a summary for 2022, but feel that now is not an appropriate end point. 

Belated discovery about menu short cuts (Things I never knew about delphi, part 2)

In my blogs database program, I added at the beginning of the month some functionality to the 'show entries' form, to remove (i.e. stop displaying) an entry and to show the tags connected to an entry; these were implemented by means of a popup menu, something that I've done many times before.

Over the past few weeks, whilst entering old blogs from 2012/3, I realised that using this functionality requires two clicks (one right click to bring up the menu, one left click to choose the option). I wondered whether I could achieve the same result with one key press. In the 'manager' program, there's some arcane code using accelerator tables, used probably because I wanted this code to be in an ancestor form, from which other forms inherit these definitions. I tried to copy what I did then but couldn't get the code to work.

Then I googled 'delphi accelerator' and discovered that there was a simple solution under my fingertips. All I had to do was set the 'short cut' property of the menu item (i.e. mnRemove, mnShowtags) to a key such as F8 or F9. Once I did this, not only did this key name attach itself to the menu caption, but pressing it activated the menu option.

I might have known this once but if so, I must have forgotten years ago. Another belated discovery.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
222	27/12/2009	Dollhouse 2	TV series, Olivia Williams, Dollhouse
663	27/12/2013	Song festival - the producer speaks	MIDI, Kibbutz, Song writing
789	27/12/2014	Sebaceous cyst and other health issues	Health
996	27/12/2016	Puzzle	Puzzles

Doctoral thesis extension granted

Following the exchange of emails with my doctoral supervisor a few days ago, I received a formal note from the manager of the doctoral programme, saying that the [external] examiners have agreed to grant me an extension for a few months in order to collect additional data that should bolster my research findings. I now have to submit no later than early April, although I imagine that I won't wait until the final day. I also have to fork out for half a year's tuition fee, although I suppose that it's only fair.

Early this morning whilst walking the dog, I had the idea of updating the 'time line of events' table for the new case study with specific references to my proposed model. For example, the first entry was 'Letter explaining the general idea' - this has now been extended to 'Letter explaining the general idea, setting forth the mission statement', where 'phrasing the mission statement' is the first step in the model. It occurs to me as I write these words that this is yet another forward reference (as it is called in the formal definition of the Pascal programming language), as the time line appears in section 7.4 whereas the model appears in the following chapter, section 8.4.

I also expanded what I had written a few days ago in describing the new enhancement by referring to the Kanban model and even including a few academic references. There are many papers that I could have chosen from; I suppose that I should read more than a few lines of one of these papers in order to find the canonical reference.

On Wednesday I wrote most of the 'work order reporter' program that will take a 'kanban number' and optional quantity and report the production. I had a problem trying to figure out what the current quantity should be if there is only a partial report (i.e. not the entire quantity of the work orders). Fortunately my test work orders had an example where the quantity of the work order was not the same as the quantity of the work order for the kanban part, so I could test my program fully. I only solved the problem when I printed out the program and worked on it away from the computer.

I still have one program to write; this will be part of the general work order generator (not the kanban generator), where a kanban part will be substituted for a parallel part that the configurator has built. This probably won't mean much to anyone outside of my company, and I'm not sure that anyone inside will understand either. It's a hairy problem, but definitely feasible. I wrote something similar in our previous ERP program 20 years ago. I hope that I will have suitable data tomorrow so that I can work on this prior to the development committee's next meeting on Monday.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
21	17/12/2005	The Brief and The Book	TV series, Van der Graaf Generator
786	17/12/2014	Seasonal greetings	Jewish holidays
1567	17/12/2022	Doctoral thesis extension granted	DBA

Another case study for the DBA - that can validate my model

About ten days ago, I received a letter at work, than when translated into colloquial English, said something along the lines of The CEO mentioned in a meeting, in a way that some might have taken to be an off-the-cuff remark that he envisages a factory, or at least a department with the existing factory, "Legs Inc", that manufactures four parts only (plain metal legs). These would be used by OffFurnCo for colour plating or even sold to outside manufacturers.

My immediate reaction was One might imagine that this is not difficult to do, but unfortunately manufacture for inventory is not the standard method of operation for OffFurnCo! There are two major challenges created by the current standard method of operation: (1) creation and management of work orders that are not connected to customer orders; (2) the configurator is liable to create duplicate parts to the plain metal legs – these will have to be managed somehow.

We had a meeting on the topic last Wednesday; in the middle of the meeting, I realised that this would be an excellent opportunity for my doctoral research. This is a new enhancement that can be managed on the basis of the model that my research proposes, and in fact will serve as a validation study, something that has been lacking.

As beholds an enhancement managed according to the model, I wrote a specification on Thursday, as full as I could make it for the time, and noting where there were areas that I was not sure what should be (primarily the two challenges that I note in the second paragraph above). On Sunday, I was sent the number of a part that would be suitable for manufacture by this new system; on the basis of my specification, I built a new son part for the part that I was sent, and defined it accordingly. I wrote a simple work order generator for this new system and fully debugged it.

I also wrote a note to my doctoral supervisor telling him about developments, and whether the thesis should be submitted now (I am supposed to submit by the end of the year) with a note to say that another test case in under way, or request an extension that would allow the enhancement to be completed and for me to research it.

We had another meeting on Monday, where the engineering department, working in parallel to me, had defined their own test part. Unfortunately for them, this part is not one that is intended to be manufactured by the new system, but we did learn from this example that there were definitions that need to be added to the part that I had defined. During the next few days, they will add the engineering definitions to my simple test part and then we can make a test run that will examine how the configurator works in this new situation.

In the mean-time, I received no word from my supervisor, and whilst showering yesterday evening, I considered my options. Fortunately this morning I received a note from him (I would like to say that my thinking about him in the shower caused him to write, but I can see from the time stamp that he wrote to me yesterday morning. As he writes, We shouldn't be submitting the thesis when suggesting the research is still not complete. If this enhancement is relevant and important to the research then I would suggest you wait until it concludes and then include it into the Thesis. To be honest you cannot really say there is additional research data pending... it's either in or it's out.

So with that clarified, I am going to be working on the enhancement at work, whilst at home I will be revising whatever needs to be rewritten in the thesis, and adding what needs to be added. I expect that everything will be over by the end of January.

Mint chocolate ice cream

At the beginning of the year, I was very happy to discover that a new ice cream emporium was selling mint chocolate ice cream. Unfortunately, after that first visit (and maybe a second), that flavour has yet to reappear. Obviously fewer people like it than I thought.

A few months ago it seemed as if there were an ice cream shortage in Israel. When I mentioned this to a friend, he told me about a shop that sells ice cream at very low prices. As this shop is around the corner from the health food shop where I buy rice milk regularly, I popped in there on my next visit. Apart from regular ice cream, they also had one freezer of Ben and Jerry's, and amongst the various flavours I found a container of mint chocolate cookie ice cream that I immediately bought. They have forgone the traditional green colour of this type of ice cream, and I could have done without the cookies, but otherwise I very much enjoyed eating this ice cream.

Since then I've been in that shop a few times but each time there was no mint chocolate flavoured ice cream to be found (in fact, the freezer was almost empty). I went to the health food shop on Friday, and as usual I went to the ice cream shop to discover that this time the B&J freezer was now full of different flavoured ice cream. I went through the various cartons until I found what I was looking for. I asked the salesman why this flavour hadn't been stocked for some time, and he said that every now and then a B&J representative comes and fills the freezer. I asked that they always bring some cartons of this specific flavour.

The price? If one buys only one carton then it costs 20 NIS; two cost 17.5 NIS each (ie 35 together), and three cost 17 NIS each. I don't need three at the moment, and as the price difference is minimal between 2 and 3 cartons, I bought two. Each carton weighs 500g, so I bought 1 kg ice cream for 35 NIS. Golda charge 102-106 NIS for a kilo (I don't remember the exact price). Why pay inflated prices when one can get a similar product at a fraction of the price?

I very much doubt that I will finish even one carton before my next visit to the health shop. As the days are quite short and cool, this isn't optimal ice cream eating weather, so I'm only eating a small portion now and then.

Caffeine

My current non-fiction reading is 'This is your mind on plants' by Michael Pollan, in which the author writes about three alkaloids - opium, caffeine and mescaline - that are produced by plants and affect our body. This is the third book that I have read by Pollan (it's a shame his name isn't Pollen, for this would make an excellent pun), all of which basically are about the influence of plants on humans and how they have used us to ensure the survival of their species.

At the moment, I'm in the middle of the chapter about caffeine, and who should enter the discourse but Matthew Walker, whose book about sleep I finished last week. Here Pollan reiterates what Walker wrote about 'sleep pressure' and caffein, as follows.... 

Within the body there is a molecule called adenosine that is very familiar to me as in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) in which the body stores energy derived from the tricyclic acid cycle, otherwise known as how the body derives energy from the metabolism of glucose. Adenosine builds up during the day and binds to receptors, causing us to feel sleepy. As one web site explains it, Because adenosine is continuously metabolized by the enzyme adenosine desaminase, the decline in adenosine production during sleep quickly causes a general decline in adenosine concentrations in the brain, eventually producing conditions more favourable to awakening.

Caffeine is an antagonist of adenosine, meaning that it binds more strongly to those receptors than does adenosine. In consequence, caffeine prevents us from feeling sleepy, or in other words, 'gives us more energy'. But the concentration of free adenosine within the body is still increasing during the day: when the caffeine is released from the receptors, the sudden influx of adenosine causes one to feel very tired ... so another cup of coffee is called for. This is how addiction and tolerance are built up. 

As Pollan writes, Here’s what’s uniquely insidious about caffeine: the drug is not only a leading cause of our sleep deprivation; it is also the principal tool we rely on to remedy the problem. Most of the caffeine consumed today is being used to compensate for the lousy sleep that caffeine causes. Which means that caffeine is helping to hide from our awareness the very problem that caffeine creates.

Another effect of caffeine is that it causes reinforcement. Pollan quotes Roland Griffiths, a Johns Hopkins drug researcher, who says "It’s like saying ‘I like the taste of Scotch.’ No! This is an acquired, conditioned taste preference. When you pair a taste with a reinforcer like alcohol or caffeine, you will confer a specific preference for that taste". So, combined with the addiction and tolerance, one can see how insidious are the effects of caffeine on the body.

I admit that books of this ilk are about the topics that I find most intriguing: basically, how our body works and how its function can be improved or impaired.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
219	12/12/2009	Displaying tabs on the right of a TTabControl	Delphi, right-to-left
1364	12/12/2020	How could I have known? (new song)	Song writing, Home recording
1447	12/12/2021	Darwin and Covid-19	Covid-19

Could it be that it's over? A rant about current Israeli politics.

About 50 years ago, Yehonatan Geffen wrote a song with the above title (except that it was in Hebrew, of course). In the song, he says that life was 'beautiful' before he was born: he is writing about the period before the state of Israel was declared, primarily the years 1910-35 (approximately). In those days, there was so much to do: virgin land to be cultivated, marshes to be dried and a state to build. Geffen bemoans the fact that 'now' there seems to be nothing big left to do. 50 years later, whilst there may not have been so many 'big things' done in that period, the state has definitely grown and prospered. 

There's a line in the song that doesn't translate well into English that was one of the rallying cries of the 'original' immigrants in 1910-20: we came to build and to be built. Even though I emigrated at a much later stage when such cries were embarrassing, I appreciate the sentiment: I too came to build and to be built (i.e. develop my personality). 

<Hereon a rant>

And I (and I am not alone in this) feel now that everything that has happened to Israel and to me personally is about to be taken away by the extremist government that is in the process of being formed as I write these words. The juidicial system, the education system, the police ... everything that screams 'democracy' is now considered to be 'undemocratic' and has to be replaced. "We have a clear majority", the extremists claim, and whilst they have a clear parliamentary majority, these parties received only 30,000 more votes; in other words, allocating parliamentary seats by a straight allocation of the popular vote (instead of the complicated system in use) would have resulted in a much smaller majority. 

The irony is that the non-democratic factors are suddenly the bastions of democracy and redefining what it means. I am reminded of Orwell's 1984 and the claim that 'we have always been at war with Eurasia' is replaced with 'we have always been at war with Eastasia'. What will happen to the "people's army" in which will serve only the sons and daughters of the new "anti-democrats", whilst the new "democrats" sit at home and get rich on the taxes paid by the "anti-democrats"? 

Maybe Robert Heinlein had it right in 'Starship troopers', where only those who performed some kind of national service became franchised to vote. I never liked this approach - not socialist or equal enough for my tastes - but maybe that's what we need now.

As much as I have never liked Bibi Netanyahu, unfortunately Israel's longest serving prime minister, I have always recognised his intelligence. But in the agreements made with the extremist parties in order to form a coalition (and quite possibly to save his skin from being sentenced to jail because of bribery and misconduct, etc), he seems to have signed away his - and my - birthright. Finally members of his own party are waking up to discover that the ministerial posts that are being offered to them have been gutted of content: the education ministry appears to be have been divided into four, as has the defence ministry. Who wants to be minister of education when one is barely responsible for anything? 

My only hope is that the Likud back-benchers (or equivalent) will stage a mini-revolution, Netanyahu won't be able to present a government, there will be new elections, and in these, enough people will change their votes such that the resulting government will be far more moderate.

I have barely been able to watch the evening news for the past month because it so angers me. Yes, I think that it's over, and that we are going to enter four or five black years that will set Israel back at least 50 years because of the damage that these "democrats" will wreak.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
434	11/12/2011	50 words for snow - Kate Bush	Kate Bush
991	11/12/2016	Repairing the Kindle	Kindle
1098	11/12/2017	More on Delphi 7/Hebrew/Win 10	Programming, Delphi, Unicode
1446	11/12/2021	Mike Nesmith, RIP	Obituary

Yitzchak Klepter, 1950-2022

Not only British musicians, but also Israeli musicians are mortal and unfortunately the time has come to say goodbye to one who was (at one stage) one of Israel's top guitarists: Yitzchak Klepter, aged 72. 

I first became aware of Klepter in 1973-4, when he was lead guitarists in Kaveret, along with Danny Sanderson. He wrote the music for several of their songs, especially on their third and last album, as well as taking lead vocals on one (let's say that his singing was less impressive than his guitar playing).

Throughout the 70s, his playing and songwriting were part of the Israeli music scene and I was well aware of his contributions. In the early 80s, like Yoni Rechter before him, Arik Einstein recorded two albums with Klepter; his songs were always interesting and often had unexpected twists in the chord sequences.

After about 1985, he disappeared off my radar, and it was only in the (financially profitable) reunions of Kaveret that I ever saw him. He suffered from COPD and in this guise he made an unexpected appearance in a television show that showed the lives of five doctors ; he was one of the patients.

Last night, he was the leading item in the news; this shows how well he was regarded as there are so many things to report these days, such as political news (that I cannot bear to hear), tales of road rage and price increases across the board.

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As it happens, I was in Tel Aviv yesterday, and my path took me past a musical instruments shop run by another lead guitarist active in Israel between 1976-1990, Shmulik Budagov. I used to see him every week as part of a quartet called Brosh (poplar) on a television show that supposedly was for children (Zehu zeh), but I suspect that more adults than children used to watch. He was one of the six members of a group called Sheshet (that can be translated either as 'sextet' or 'Man Friday'; four of the group achieved various levels of success afterwards, from moderately famous (Budagov) to extremely famous (Yehudit Ravitz). I don't know whether this group ever played live or how even they came about, but I enjoy their eponymous record that I first bought in 1978/9.

After retiring from active playing, he opened a guitar shop in Petach Tikva, and I read an article about him somewhere a few years ago about how he was developing his own brand of guitars. There were a few in his shop window: a telecaster copy, an acoustic and another electric guitar, but no prices (not that I intend to buy yet another guitar!). A sign in the window said that opening hours were from 10am; I was there at 10:05 and the doors were firmly locked. At some stage I have to return to that area, so I'll try to time it after 11am.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
113	09/12/2007	Uncle	Uncle
218	09/12/2009	After the accounting exam	MBA
659	09/12/2013	Gymnopedie Number 3?	Woody Allen, Satie
907	09/12/2015	Margin call and redundancy	Films, Business novel
989	09/12/2016	Greg Lake, RIP	Obituary, King Crimson
1097	09/12/2017	Delphi 7/Hebrew programs running on Windows 10	Programming, Delphi, Unicode

Upgrading the 'blogs' program

I wrote a month ago about redesigning my 'blogs database' program. Since then, I've been religiously entering old blogs, a month at a time (I'm now at the end of October 2011), as well as entering the new blogs as they are written.

I've also been working on the functionality of the program. Mostly this has just been fixing bits and pieces here and there, but yesterday I devoted several hours to improving the functionality. First off was the ability to retrieve blogs connected to multiple tags (called an 'or' query in logic despite that in everyday language it's an 'and' query); I had included the possibility of retrieving blogs that are connected to either one tag or a second tag, along with the possibility of negating this (i.e. connected to one tag and not to a specific second tag). This is what lead me to the possibility of including Venn diagrams; I found an example of how to draw a circle but not how to draw two intersecting circles, so this has been quietly forgotten. I'm not a graphical programmer but rather a database programmer, so this type of programming is not easy for me.

But I wanted to allow the possibility of retrieving blogs that were connected to several blogs (i.e. connected to tag A or tag B or tag C or tag D). I had laid some groundwork for this in the past and I thought that I had implemented this multiple retrieval, but either it didn't work properly or I had simply left it for when I would have more time. So yesterday I continued the work; this required some short-circuiting of the usual 'blog retrieval' query but the resulting query was simpler than the query for two tags.

Then I worked on the 'singleton tag' query, namely tags that were connected to one blog only. I had written a complicated query for this some time ago, but realised at some stage that it would be much easier to adapt the 'number of entries per tag' query to show only those with one entry. So this was quite simple.

Another idea that came to me whilst improving the program was simplifying the code generation of the 'this day in history' table. Originally this simply output the necessary HTML code into a file; whenever I needed this, I would have to open the file with Notepad, copy the contents and paste them into the HTML interface of Blogger. It would be simpler to create a new window with the HTML text waiting to be copied and pasted, so this I did. I also discovered that the code was missing one angle bracket that explained why Blogger told me every time that there was a problem with my HTML code.

An additional idea was reusing the 'choose tags' dialog in order to show which tags were connected to a specific entry in a 'read only' manner. 

Finally, I picked up an idea that I had written about previously: Another idea for a report was taking one popular tag (e.g. programming) and seeing how many times different tags have been paired with this tag. Then I could retrieve the entries that have the chosen combination of tags and show them in the the 'show entries' form. I had no idea of how complicated this would be! There were three and a half stages to this: the first half was choosing a 'base' tag - I already had a dialog box for this. Then I had to find all the tags that had joint entries with this one tag and store their identity numbers in the temporary 'linked' table. This required quite a hairy sql statement. Then the 'show tags' dialog (pre-existing) had to be extended in order to show this list of tags and calculate the number of joint entries with the base tag. I couldn't do this in the previous stage because there I only wanted the tag ids because that's all the temporary table has - an id and an instance number. It occurs to me now that I could extend this easily by adding another field to the table, 'payload', that would contain whatever needed to be passed. It would certainly make the second stage easier! 

This is another example of rubber duck debugging: explaining the problem to the duck brings up ideas to simplify the solution.

The final stage was to allow double clicking on one of the joint tabs in order to see what the joint entries were. For example, let's say that the base tag was 1970; there are seven tags that are joined to an entry that is also connected to '1970'. One of these is 'Nice enough to eat' - three common entries; doubling clicking on this line should open a new 'show entries' window with the three specific entries. The window would open but it was empty. I checked the query time and time again; I ran it in my 'db management' program where it worked perfectly. I checked the parameters time after time and they were correct. So why was I getting no results?

Normally when this happens in Priority, I check the primary keys of what I am trying to insert - are these values duplicate? No. After banging my head against a wall for at least an hour, I decided to sleep on the problem. I won't say that I awoke with the solution at my fingertips, but I did decide on a new approach to the problem. I created a new temporary table and tried inserting to this table - no difference. Then I tried adding the parameters directly into the sql query, by what is known as 'sql injection' - this is considered a bad technique. Still no luck. Then I looked at the sql query being passed to the database engine - the value of the base tag was 0 instead of 98, explaining why there was no data being transferred. It took a few minutes to realise how this could be; I had checked several times that the value of the 'tag' parameter was 98.

Then it hit me: the code is as follows:

with qInsert do
 begin
  sql.text:= ....... 
  params[0].asinteger:= tag;
  execsql
 end

The query was using the 'tag' property of qInsert, whose value is 0 by default, instead of the variable defined in the unit, 'tag'. Bitten by the 'with' bug!! A simple name change was required; once this was done, finally I could see the three entries that had both the '1970' and 'Nice enough to eat' tags! 

That's it. My bag of ideas to be implemented is now empty (although I'll consider that idea of adding a payload to the temporary table and how it can help me).

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
149	04/12/2008	Learning to walk	Health, Robert Silverberg
654	04/12/2013	The least we can do is wave to each other	Van der Graaf Generator
782	04/12/2014	My army service - part four	Health, Israel, Personal

Why we sleep (book)

I am currently reading this fascinating book, that is described as follows: Neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker provides a revolutionary exploration of sleep, examining how it affects every aspect of our physical and mental well-being. Charting the most cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, and marshalling his decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood and energy levels, regulate hormones, prevent cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes, slow the effects of aging, and increase longevity. He also provides actionable steps towards getting a better night's sleep every night.

I am seriously considering preparing a talk based on this book for the English speakers OAP group on the kibbutz (for whom I delivered a talk about British folk songs). In fact, every time that I meet the group's organiser, she asks when I am going to give another talk. I was considering doing something along the lines of music synthesis, but talking about the value of sleep is much better. I can also add my experience of sleep disorders.

Today I came across this sentence, that extols the value of REM sleep: We can awake the next morning with new solutions to previously intractable problems or even be infused with radically new and original ideas. Yes! This almost exactly describes what I wrote a few days ago, about waking up with 'revelations'.

If I do decide to give a talk on this subject, then I'll have to read it closely and make notes, which is not my normal style of reading. On the other hand, I could use the informative Wiki page about the book, that also notes criticisms of the ideas, and especially data, that are presented in the book. Well, I'm not going to be giving a scientific talk but something much more general. 

I'm in the middle of chapter 4, so I haven't come across much contentious material yet, although Walker does hypothesize about how REM sleep started - he suggests that the tree-to-ground reengineering of sleep was a key trigger that rocketed Homo sapiens to the top of evolution’s lofty pyramid. This is only an idea, a hypothesis that can't really be tested. A salient fact about REM sleep that is completely accepted is that muscles loose their tone when people are in REM sleep; other sources say that 'bodies are paralysed'. It is hypothesised that this is so that people are unable to act out what they are dreaming. The point about hominids moving from sleeping in trees to sleeping on the ground is that they were very likely to fall out of the trees where they were sleeping when they entered REM sleep!

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
216	03/12/2009	Swedish Fly Girls	Sandy Denny
781	03/12/2014	My army service - part three	Israel, Personal
1363	03/12/2020	Train journey	Personal, Trains, Covid-19

MTB shoes

Every few months someone organises an exhibition of shoes on the kibbutz. For the seller, it's a good chance to sell some stock and possibly get rid of some old stock, whereas for the kibbutz members (especially the older ones), it's a chance to try on some new shoes. As it happens, the nearby mall has several shoe shops, but never mind.

The advance notice said that there would be shoes of the Lumberjack brand, amongst others; the very comfortable shoes that I bought in Bari were of this make, so I was hoping that I could find a similar shoe. I had looked at the Lumberjack website but couldn't see my shoe, which was somewhat disappointing.

Not surprisingly, the seller didn't have what I was looking for specifically, but he did have some other interesting shoes. The one on the left is made by MTB, a Swiss firm. Apparently these shoes are "physiological professional sports shoes from MBT Switzerland. The shoe has a unique structure originating from the Maasai tribe from East Africa that transfers the load center to the front of the foot and actually simulates the way runners run". I'm not going to be running in these shoes, but I do note that they have a gel filled sole that is extremely comfortable. They are also the correct size! My wife was there and she approved the purchase. A mere snip at 400 NIS (that's quite expensive).

Back home, I looked online for these shoes, primarily to see if I had paid an extortionate price. To my surprise, I found an Israeli site selling exactly the same shoe (I have the box with the catalogue number and size stuck on it - very helpful). They're selling the shoe for 349 NIS, including free delivery, paid in five installments, so I ordered another pair. Maybe I pay slightly over the odds for the shoes here, but I also had the benefit of trying them on. I need shoes sized 42; as can be seen from the label below, '42' is not mentioned!

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
314	02/12/2010	Chanuka through the years	Jewish holidays
780	02/12/2014	My army service - part two	Israel, Personal
1559	02/12/2022	MTB shoes	Shoes

Christine McVie, RIP

Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie died aged 79, "after a short illness". I don't think that I have a single record on which Christine appears, but there are a few songs of hers that I will remember.

She first crossed my horizon whilst in Chicken Shack, singing "I'd rather go blind" at the end of the 60s, although this wasn't very much my taste in music. A year later, she moved on to Fleetwood Mac, bolstering their sound after Peter Green left. Several years later I became enamoured of her song "You make loving fun" from "Rumours".

I liked the post-1975 version of Fleetwood Mac less than earlier versions, so basically almost 50 years of Christine's career have passed me by. Even so, I would like to remember her as a name from my musical past.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
111	01/12/2007	Sleep	Apnea, Anaemia
653	01/12/2013	Critical week	DBA
779	01/12/2014	My army service - part one	Israel, Personal
1361	01/12/2020	E-hour minus 4	DBA
1362	01/12/2020	Viva result	DBA
1444	01/12/2021	My body is like a barometer	Weather
1558	01/12/2022	Christine McVie, RIP	Obituary, Fleetwood Mac