Now I've told you all the particulars of how I pass my day away

1. I cannot imagine that I will be without internet at schreibergasse and Grace's unless something improbable and apotropaically unnamed occurs, but that's where I'll be tomorrow; I still mind not being able to make my ungodson's birthday two weekends ago, but at least I'm not letting another year go by without actually visiting. I am now trying to decide whether I will be conscious enough to bake in the morning. Mostly I should not forget Peter's present.

2. I am currently reading Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935) and Michael Peppiatt's Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait (2008), both newly scored. If I'm lucky, they'll do something to my brain.

3. I had not planned on seeing Red Riding (2009), but David Denby may have convinced me otherwise:

You don't see any of the murders, but there are shadows of death everywhere: pale corpses, brutality and cynicism, and hints of perversion and obsession—a sense of violation fouling the terrain. One writer, Tony Grisoni, did the adaptation, but each film has a different director and a different look. A few scenes in each episode—the repeated use of swans' wings as a portent, some fancy camerawork—border on the pretentious, but the dark power and the flowing organization of the material pull you into the narrative, which moves forward and backward in a single skein of visionary filmmaking. Forgoing digital effects, or any presence of the supernatural, "The Red Riding Trilogy" nevertheless achieves a terrific sense of the uncanny, an atmosphere so spooked and suggestive that it becomes oddly attractive, like an enchanted forest in a children's story. Flowers of evil are growing in the stony Yorkshire soil.

I can take or leave police procedurals, but I am always at home to the unheimlich.

4. The men's Olympic figure skating was quite good this year.