A cold morning

By the mild standards of our current home it is actually rather cold this morning: 23°F. I let the car warm up for a while but probably ought to have tried deicing the side mirrors; I wonder how fancy a car one need buy before it comes with small mirror heaters built in. The prediction is for the day to warm up so my drive home should see rather more usual weather, though also for my drive south tomorrow to include rain. It is nice to see the frost and the fog: I find much winter weather agreeably pretty.

Access to local public services

Various services such as library membership and registration with one's doctor in Britain tend to somehow be predicated on one's home address. However, my work address (in a different council area and a different city) is often rather more relevant for me given that I am more likely to be at work during these services' opening hours. Otherwise I end up trying to get everything done on a Saturday morning before places close.

For example, it would be very nice if the fact that my doctor's medical practice is but a ten-minute drive from work would make registration with them easy; I usually give them plenty of freedom in scheduling appointments and so far they have always been during my working hours. I don't need out-of-hours coverage, I just need them to consider me a local if I am in their area for most of the time that they are open.

My home address is almost an irrelevance for many such purposes as being the place where I am when the relevant service is probably not available anyway.

Unfortunately I do not now recall how the inter-city and inter-school-district dual-taxation agreements would tend to work in Ohio for years when I was living in one city and district but working in another, but at least there was some understanding that both locations somehow matter.

Different tastes in television

Britain has some dramas that are more like soap operas such as the contemporary Casualty (1986) and period dramas like Poldark (2015). They are not of the kind of drama that I like to watch. There are other kinds where my opinion is less clear-cut.

Even within genres I am intrigued by diversity of opinion. For example, some sitcoms are positively polarizing. I rather enjoyed Arrested Development (2003), enough to rewatch it, but it is the kind of show that people either love or would rather miss. If somebody didn't like it, how much credence should I give their recommendation of Son of Zorn (2016)? It is hard for me to tell. Are there multiple axes within a genre that we can somehow discover through clustering ratings and determine usefully predictive principal components? It is a thorny problem.

If we narrow very specifically to dramas in which time travelers from an apocalyptic future attempt to change that outcome by meddling with the present day, I much enjoyed Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008) but, of present series, I find Travelers (2016) worth watching but hardly unmissable. Yet some people love Travelers but found Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles so boring that they didn't make it through to the end even once. What is it that causes me to like one but them to like the other?

Even I do not understand my own preferences. For example, though I found it slow at times, I rather liked Prisoners of War (2009) but found Fauda (2015) reasonable but less good. I don't know why I didn't like Fauda more: it wasn't slow, has distinct characters, progression of arc, made some sense, tied things up well, gave me a window into another world, etc. Perhaps I can do no better than to keep reading reviews and trying shows out.