a perverse incentive in customer service

Awhile ago I worked out that, if you want to watch a different disc every evening using Netflix, your quota (the number of discs you have out at a time) needs to be at least five: three for the mail cycle plus two because Netflix does no processing on Saturday or Sunday. (This assumes no glitches and no holidays. It also assumes you do not get the disc back into the mail on the same day you received it.)

Now I see that Netflix has begun working on Saturdays, reducing the addict’s minimum quota to four. That means they’ll get $6/month less from each subscriber who applies my reasoning. Hm.

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where’s my fix?

For two or three years I was never without a supply of navel oranges, because the Australian (or before that Chilean) crop came in just as the California crop was ending; but the antipodean goodies have not (yet) shown up this year. Is a weak dollar to blame?

Sunday: scurvy is averted: Chile came through.

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Nero Wolfe and the Drones Club

P. G. Wodehouse and Rex Stout were contemporaries and friends, I recently learned.

The opening pages of Stout’s Champagne For One read like a Bertie Wooster story: an acquaintance known as Dinky, feigning laryngitis, rings to beg that the narrator take his place at an aunt’s annual dinner party.

Maybe it only seems more wodehousy than usual because I happen to have a Penguin edition, printed in a typeface that’s not used much on this side of the water (Plantin, a favorite of mine).

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I watch stuff

I’ve been relatively quiet here since I stopped listing my Netflix rentals. I could do that some more.
Continue reading

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an international art

In the opening scene of Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation, a Hungarian Jew plays a Japanese impersonating a German, speaking English in Arabia.

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rejecting the cult

Sheldon Richman (with help from Paddy Chayevsky) nails Memorial Day.

Posted in militaria | 4 Comments

polytopes

Dr. Richard Klitzing lost his webhost, so I took custody of his polytope pages.

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