Content-Type: text/shitpost

Python code I wrote today:

    # This is not the most elegant line of code I have ever written
    return [ item for item in data if item["item"]["id"] == item_id ]

Larry Wall says that a successful program is one that does its job before your boss fires you. Somehow I don't imagine Guido being as lenient.

• Brian Ritchie, bassist for the Violent Femmes, is also proficient at playing the Shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) and has released two albums of Shakuhahi music.

• In 1996 the Femmes and the Red Hot Chili Peppers played a promotional concert at the magnetic north pole.

Suppose you have available an evil necromantic spell that turns humans into mindless zombies. (Whether the humans are required to be dead or alive is not important for this inquiry.)

What happens if you cast this spell on starfish instead, turning them into mindless zombie starfish?

Today I had a cream cheese and cashew nut sandwich. It was pretty good.

It was inspired by the “nutted cheese” sandwich found at Chock full o'Nuts lunch counters long ago. (Theirs had walnuts, not cashews, and was served on dark raisin bread. When I have the ingredients handy I sometimes make the walnut and raisin bread version, which I recommend.)

These days Chock full o'Nuts exists primarily as a supermarket coffee brand. I'm so old I can remember actually eating a chicken salad sandwich at one of the lunch counters.

Thinking on this a little more, I think you have to make Ringo d'Artagnan, and play up his country-bumpkin-ness.

Then George is Aramis (obviously) and Paul is Athos, so that makes John Porthos.

According to Wikipedia:

[The Three Musketeers] was originally proposed in the 1960s as a vehicle for The Beatles, whom Lester had directed in two other films.

I am having a lot of trouble picturing this. Which Beatle is which Musketeer? There is no Porthos in the Beatles. There is no Ringo in the Musketeers.

The script was written by George MacDonald Fraser, creator of Harry Flashman.

I would watch a Flashman movie. The likelihood of there being a Flashman movie for me to watch, in the next twenty or thirty years, seems close to zero.

Aha, but there is already a Flashman movie, directed by the same Richard Lester who directed The Three Musketeers. Malcolm McDowell plays Flashy. And Oliver Reed, who played Porthos, returns in Royal Flash as Otto von Bismarck. How about that?