Sorry, I can’t take your paper seriously if it uses LaTeX equation formatting for italics in text.

The good news is that The Mekons* sold out their London show tonight. The bad news is that they sold out before I remembered to get tickets…

(*Well, it’s only about 20% of the Mekons, but any fraction is good.)

Introduced my kids to Star Trek via “The Trouble With Tribbles”.

(Having turned out to be a professional astrophysicist, I can’t overstate how important the original series of Trek was to me growing up in the 70s.)

Devastated to hear of the death of Nick Kaiser: collaborator, friend, mentor. He helped bring me to CITA in 1994 and we worked on two of my favourite papers, minor works in his influential oeuvre. Simultaneously one of the smartest & nicest people I’ve had the privilege to work with. RIP.

Is anyone else seeing a blank iOS @NYTimes widget like this? (It’s been this way about a week.) Even a handful of responses that it is still working for you would be useful…

Update: I’ve had a response from “NY Times Customer Care”:

We have reported this issue to our developers. They are working on a fix for this and we hope to get a fix out soon. Please keep an eye out for an update.

Update 2: … and now seems to be fixed as of this evening’s update…

At London’s Bush Hall for the wonderful Lloyd/Bean show, I was honoured to be able to chat for a few minutes with one of my rock’n’roll heroes, Jon Langford, about Chicago’s New City News, the Mekons, and express my thanks for many years of life-changing music.

Thanks to Lloyd/Bean (Robert/Janet) for their beautiful/chaotic set @BushHallMusic tonight.

I made scones for a picnic yesterday, cut into triangles from the dough before baking. I was told by my (English, otherwise complimentary) friends that they obviously couldn’t be scones because they weren’t round.