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Forgive me if I’ve reviewed this one previously. I checked the reviews over the past few years, and I don’t find it. I’ve been cutting back on the potato chips. But I’ve been cutting back on the reviews more extensively than I have been cutting back on the new flavors.

I don’t have any more flights planned in 2024, so I pulled up my R script from last year to generate a map of the flights I made this year. Then I wondered what the flights would look like for the past decade, from 2015 through 2024.

I can still remember a profound disappointment with an ice cream flavor I chose once, and only once, as a child. We had gone to the grocery store, and I’d seen a new flavor of ice cream—a granola flavor.

For such a dangerous fruit, durian sure is a big business. An article in the NY Times leads with this: “lust for durian is creating fortunes in Southeast Asia”. The value of durian exported from SE Asia into China was $6.

I was up early this morning to write a newsletter. I heard the intermittent sound of firecrackers out the window while I was writing. After I finished writing, I decided to go for a run before the midday heat.

These are the books I finished reading, for the first time, in 2023. I’ve included a few notes. Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami. I quite enjoyed this one. It was my favorite this year.

By my recent standards, I’ve been playing a lot of golf. I started off my golf in 2023 with that round in July on a business trip. Two birdies. Then in November, I played my second round, at New South Wales Golf Club.

When you are out for a run, and when you encounter this sign, and when the only part of it you can read is クマ and the exclamation mark, it’s a bit scary.

I’ve been making a lot of business trips. About fifteen years ago, my business trips sometimes included golf. Recent business trips have included a lot of meetings, hotel changes, train rides, early mornings, seminars, data collection, and writing.

Occasional readers of this blog might be surprised to see me writing about something other than potato chips. Or seaweed. Regular readers of this blog,1 friends, family, and traveling companions may be expecting to see some pad kee mao.