In “It Happened in Juneau”, near the end of the third season of Northern Exposure (one of very few TV series of which I’ve seen every episode twice), Maggie flies Joel to Juneau for a conference; they both get lonely, and drunkenly seduce each other. But Maggie falls asleep and cannot be roused, so Joel puts her to bed alone.

In the morning they return to Cicely. Maggie believes that they did copulate, and partly regrets it. Some time goes by before Joel succeeds in telling Maggie what really happened. She is insulted: “Why didn’t you? I had consented!”

Maggie later invites Joel to her house to try again. She asks him to say his desire for her is so strong that he’ll let nothing get in its way. She then finds (or reveals) that that expression of desire, rather than the execution, was what she really wanted from Joel, and dismisses him.

This affair bugs me on two points. First: I can accept that Maggie is insulted by Joel’s inaction, but wouldn’t the insult be outweighed by relief? (Well, the people of Cicely are quirky, and Maggie more so than some.)

Second: what Maggie asks of Joel in the end, taken literally, includes a commitment to rape her. Am I sick for noticing that? On reflection, I guess it’s in character – and suitable for prime time – that Joel is too startled (and perhaps deflated!) by the dismissal to respond with more than a bewildered verbal protest; but I’m still disappointed that the script didn’t explore that point at all.

I woke up (within a dream), looked out my window and saw that my new upstairs neighbor (there is no upstairs unit here) stored his cello by hanging it from a kite. I went up to the roof and found a copy of the neighbor’s self-published, glossy, lavishly illustrated but poorly bound book.

The book’s introduction assured me that he had never lost an instrument stored in this way, other than that one flute; but then the book went on and on about rivers (natural or diverted) and bridges, whose bearing on the subject was not obvious. My reading was interrupted by knocks on some door.

Thursday I saw that my favorite bookshop is hiring. I got a bit of a buzz from the fantasy of working there. Friday I went to the shop and had a polite chat with one of the owners. When I got home, I was depressed, perhaps because the fantasy wore off. After dinner I went straight to bed “for a nap”; slept three hours, woke up feeling rested but still depressed.

My computer ran for eight solid days to extend this table from six rows — (2 3 7), (2 4 5), (3 3 4), (2 3 ∞), (2 ∞ ∞), (∞ ∞ ∞), each of which is (in some sense) minimal — to 106, by request. I don’t know why anyone would want all those others; I see no qualitative difference between any of them and one or more of the six.

Now that the run is done, I look again at my code and see where it could be made more efficient, by changing from complex to real arithmetic; I’ve already done that in my other hyperbolic programs, the ones that generate the ribbon patterns.