My daughter just got back from China, and all you get is this newsletter. Count your blessings — at least you're not jet-lagged.

As noted at the outset, my daughter has returned from the China trip I prepped her for by getting her phone ready for international travel. It was, by all measures, a successful trip — she made friends many of her traveling companions, she saw parts of the world many people her age have not and she returned without causing any sort of international incident or at least, nothing that made the papers.

The trip organizers certainly packed the itinerary with culturally appropriate stops — visits to tea houses and panda preserves and various other sites around Beijing and Chengdu. But clearly, the highlight of the trip for my daughter was spending time at the Great Wall of China, to which I think we would all say, "Well, fair enough."

She liked climbing up and down the steps of the wall, which she noted were clearly not designed with 21st-century-sized feet in mind. She took special pride in pushing herself up to heights that her traveling companions did not dare to mount. And she gushed about all of it in texts to her mom and me sent courtesy of that eSIM I equipped her phone with prior to departure.

The Great Wall, my daughter informed us, "has been on my bucket list since I was, like, six."

Two thoughts immediately gripped me upon reading that text. 1) Six-year-olds are drawing up bucket lists? And 2) What's still left on my travel bucket list?

I'm fortunate to been able to see a lot of the places I've wanted to see. I live in a place where it's easy enough to nip over to Hawaii when time and finances allow, and that's bucket list travel enough for most people. The quirks of employment have also allowed me to see places like Barcelona, Berlin and Shanghai on someone else's dime. And while I'd like to add to the 25 U.S. states I've been to, that's simply a matter of scheduling and logistics. As much as I hope to see Milwaukee or assorted National Parks, that's hardly the once-in-a-lifetime kind of opportunities you'd associate with a bucket list.

Instead, I think bucket-list travel involves destinations where the voyage takes some effort and intention. So in no particular order, I'm going to go with:

Much of my writing career is built around what happens when something annoys me, and I decided to do something about it. Usually, that something is limited to writing an article in which I complain about the topic ceaselessly, but occasionally, it involves coming up with an actual solution that will help people.

So it is with my latest contribution to Six Colors, in which I got annoyed that the Disney Plus app started auto-playing previews of TV shows and movies when I was scrolling through the app looking for something to stream. Rather than rage impotently at Disney's capriciousness, I looked up how to disable that setting — it's buried within the app's controls. And then I did the same for other popular streaming services, each of which has its own approach to controlling autoplay. You're welcome.

Would you like me to rage impotently for your publication or children's party? You can view my qualifications and get in touch. I've already told a team of Girl Scouts how to text through China, I can tell your readers whatever it is they need.

I handle most of the cooking in the household, a job I am happy to take on. As someone who regards emotions the way the Amish regard electrical circuits, preparing meals is how I show people I appreciate them. Plus, after a decade of remote work, stopping to get dinner ready for everyone served as a great way to put a punctuation mark on my working day and enjoy my out-of-office hours.

That said, having a teenager among the regular diners adds a degree of difficulty to my task. My daughter is an adventurous eater, but she has developed a few more preferences in recent years that I'm not used to accommodating. Pork is a no-go, for example, and every time I cook fish, I have to remind her that, yes, you actually do enjoy pan-fried rockfish, I have you on video saying as much the last time I served this. In fact, I had to take the video after a previous conversation.

(Yes, I've taken to shooting videos with my phone of my daughter conceding I've served her food she enjoys. My ability to win arguments demands it.)

Anyhow, 10 days of my daughter in China meant one less hungry mouth to feed — and one less hungry mouth that also voices some pretty strong opinions about the food. And so the missus and I took advantage of that when it came to menu planning. 

There are two entrees from my daughter-free dining that I'd like to highlight because I think they'd be handy weeknight additions to your own meal rotation. This chicken Caesar salad recipe developed by Brian Lagerstrom is a great meal if you're looking for a lighter supper. It's also very easy to make, even if you are whipping up your own salad dressing as part of the project.

My daughter does not care for the anchovies in said dressing, so when I serve this with her around, she tends to get a bowl of undressed lettuce with grilled chicken and some parm. If you share her disdain for the distinctive taste of anchovies, I'd suggest trimming the number of anchovy filets you include; the recipe also suggests swapping Worcestershire sauce plus some extra parm if you really are adamant in your anchovy opposition.

I also whipped up a favorite of my wife's this past week — Alton Brown's baked macaroni and cheese. Over the years, I've made a few modifications to the base recipe, working in some pancetta that I've fried up separately into the cheese and macaroni mixture. This time around, instead of dicing onions required for the sauce, I used a box grater to render them as tiny shreds. That way, you still get the flavor the onions bring to the party while the onions themselves disappear into the sauce. That may solve my daughter's primary objection to the dish, as she meticulously picks out the onion pieces when eating the mac-n-cheese. YOU CAN'T EAT AROUND WHAT YOU CAN NO LONGER SEE, MY DEAR. NOW DON'T PAY ANY MIND TO THIS CAMERA RECORDING YOU ENJOYING THIS MEAL.

No daughter around left me with plenty of time to read things this week. Here's a sampling of the most interesting stuff.

/I picked up my daughter post-China trip from one of those extended stay hotels outside of the San Francisco Airport, and in the lounge area, one of the TVs was on a Harry Potter movie, I'm not sure which one. I've only seen a handful of the pictures, owing to my lifelong aversion to the fantasy genre and the fact that the books started appearing well into my adulthood. My point being that when I see Daniel Radcliffe, I don't think of him as Harry Potter; instead, to me, he's the guy who's done other more interesting work since graduating from that franchise.

I touched on this back when I wrote about Radcliffe appearing in the Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along, but he's had a really eclectic career, post-Harry Potter. He's adept at comedy, can pull off drama, and he even convincingly pulled off playing a corpse in Swiss Army Man. I've really enjoyed his TV work — we named the cat after his character in the second season of Miracle Workers, and you can currently catch him in The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins on Peacock. But now I've seen Daniel Radcliffe in the role I think he'll be remembered for: playing Weird Al Yankovic in the singer/songwriter's biopic.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story came out a couple of years ago, and since it was on the Roku Channel and not theatrically released, there's a good chance you may have missed it. If so, rectify that right now. We ended up buying the film on iTunes, as the purchase price had been cut to the price of a rental. (At last, ol' Philsy's becoming a crafty consumer!) 

Weird is a hilarious picture, and Radcliffe's turn as Weird Al is a big reason why.

It's probably fitting that a biopic about a guy who writes parody songs would itself be a send-up of the biopic genre, along the lines of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Here, though, Weird takes the essential facts of the case — there is a man named Al Yankovic and he has made a name for himself changing the words of existing songs — and phonies up everything else about his life story. In real life, Al Yankovic's parents were supportive of his interest in music; in Weird, they forbid him from playing an accordion in the house. Yankovich doesn't smoke, drink or swear in real life; he does quite a bit of that in Weird. He also has a passionate love affair with Madonna in the movie, runs afoul of Pablo Escobar and writes "Eat It" as an original song, only to have Michael Jackson copy him. It's a funhouse mirror version of This Is Your Life, and it's a real hoot.

Besides Radcliffe, Toby Huss continues his lifelong habit of improving every project he's involved in, and Evan Rachel Wood holds her own against Radcliffe as Madonna. Throw in some cameos by Conan O'Brien, Patton Oswalt, Jack Black and Quinta Brunson, and you've got an enjoyable romp on your hands.

If I have a complaint about Weird, it's this: a little more than a decade ago, the last time I found myself between regular employment, I landed a freelance gig interviewing Weird Al Yankovic for a profile. He couldn't have been nicer, and I think the article turned out well. So I can't help but wonder why I was left out of this biopic. I'm going to assume it was because Jon Hamm wasn't available to play my part, which seems like a better reason than "Al Yankovic has no memory of ever interacting with Philip Michaels."

And that's the Phil for this week — thanks for reading. We'll be back again in another week's time as soon as I find another family member's adventures to mine for content.