I got impatient and posted the July minutiae around 3 p.m. on the 31st rather than waiting until nighttime as is my usu­al practice.  An hour later, the local ice cream truck smashed its previous record for how early in the year it switched to Christmas music, playing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” as it puttered down my street.

My computer is getting up there in years and is starting to falter a bit.  The boot time is getting quite annoying: from the time I hit the power putting to the time my web browser starts loading pages, as long as ten full minutes might pass.  So a few weeks ago, when I went to bed, I put the computer into sleep mode instead of turning it off so that I could get right back to work as soon as I woke up.  The following mor­ning, I left-clicked to get the computer out of sleep mode… and the screen flashed blue (not a Blue Screen of Death, but just a bright blue flash) and the computer spontaneously re­booted.  It started spitting out messages about disk errors⁠—but Windows did load, so I was relieved.  For a moment.  But Windows was fucked up.  It started popping up windows with random letters missing!  This isn’t a screenshot, but it looked like this:

Eventually a window popped up saying that I needed to restart to begin disk repairs, which would take over an hour.  These were apparently successful.  Still, it was scary enough to get me to finally spend a day backing up everything.

I was looking at some population pyramids and was struck by this one, for Japan:

Obviously this one isn’t very pyramidal, as Japan’s birth rate has been plummeting for some time.  But that’s not what jumped out at me.  We have reached the point at which World War II veterans are in their upper nineties at the youngest, so war casualties are no longer as clearly visible as in decades past: yes, there are far more women than men at the top of the pyramid, but that’s true of virtually every country due to biological factors, irrespective of whether a significant percentage of its men were killed in the war.  We do still see a postwar baby boom (a bit later than ours; we see a bite near the top of the graph indicating a dearth of 77-year-olds at the beginning of 2023, suggesting that rela­tively few Japanese were in the mood to conceive babies in the latter half of 1945.)  But what I didn’t get was this: why so few 56-year-olds at the beginning of 2023⁠—indicating an anomalous drop in births in 1966?  And just for that single year!  What on earth happened in 1965 that made Japanese people stop knocking each other up and then get right back to it a year later?  I looked into it, and the answer turns out to be not a historical event at all, but simply superstition.  In Japan, every sixty years comes “the year of the fire horse”, when having a daughter is considered unlucky.  1966 was the last such year, and since in 1966 you couldn’t really control or even know in advance whether you’d have a daughter or a son, many decided just not to have children at all that year.

Overheard at the Mexican grocery:

Little girl: “Baba, when I was six, [childish yammering I could not understand]”

Her father: “When you were six? You mean like you’ve been for the past six months?”

Something reminded me of popular 1980s comedian Yakov Smirnoff⁠—you know, the “In Soviet Union, TV watches you” guy⁠—and I looked him up to see whether he was still alive.  Turns out that not only is he alive, but he’s been through a couple of graduate programs, including one at Penn, and picked up a Ph.D. in psychology at the age of 68.

I was working on a chapter set in a Midwestern city in the 1970s and needed to know what TV stations were broad­casting in that city back then.  So I did some research.  What came up looked familiar from my brief residence in the Midwest in the mid-1990s:

What blew my mind was what I found when these pages indicated the modern lineup for this city:

TV stations have decimal points now??  How long has this been a thing?

The good side of bureaucracy: I got a letter from California’s Franchise Tax Board saying that according to its analysis, I had missed out on a tax credit and could send in a copy of form 3514 to claim it and get some money refunded to me.

The bad side of bureaucracy: after submitting the form, I got a call from a representative of the board.  She said that while my claim had been approved, my check could not be issued until I returned the remaining pages of form 3514, as it was four pages long and I had only sent in two.  This was true: the last two pages didn’t apply to me and I hadn’t wanted to spend money on additional postage to mail in two blank pages.  And the Franchise Tax Board didn’t want me to mail in two blank pages, she said⁠—the only method by which it would accept the remaining pages was fax.  I haven’t owned a fax machine since 1996.  And so I signed up for an online faxing service in order to claim my additional refund by faxing the Franchise Tax Board two blank pages.