If I have any regular readers...

You've got too much material, I told myself.  That's why you pile it up and produce fewer and fewer actual blog posts.  So I told myself to be disciplined, do a single subject, use these two complementary pieces that happened to turn up on the same day.

And it comes out at 2850 words.

So, if I have any regular readers, sorry.  And sorry too to those who've sent comments which have disappeared into the void.  I thought I wasn't getting many to moderate, and it was disappointing to the ego but pleasing as well - not too much work to do.  I hadn't checked the ones Google thought were spam, so I'll have to go through them.