Glimpse
The radio mentions a dragon boat gathering. The announcer describes the boats and the crowds. It makes my mind wonder for a moment. I think of a movie I saw years ago that started with a person rowing in flat water through a city. That leads my mind to a scene I encountered on a Boyscout retreat when I was fifteen. A man in a small boat on a lake at dawn pulling in floats as the sun shown sideways in the waist deep fog rising off the warm water in a cool sharp air morning. The shadows of the trees around the lake only allowed rays of light and dark through it seems one at a time. The trees chose the rays well. From the shore it seemed your feet should be wet. The ground felt like it was under the water level. The sounds from the man in the boat were echoed around the lake giving every tree and rock a voice. The smell was of camp - wet, cold, dirt, fire, and bug spray.
Then I come back. I'm thirty eight years old. That memory is of a moment that lasted a few heartbeats from many years ago.

Flawed Design
There are two fundamental flaws in the design of calendars.
1) You must enter data into it before it is useful.
2) You must read the data back out of it before that information is useful.
I suppose these two design flaws apply to more than calendars. Databases of most any kind have this problem. If the data goes in easy, most likely, it comes out hard or hard to understand. If the data comes out easy and usable, generally, something had to be done to make it so. The oldest saying in computers "garbage in, garbage out".
This is why some people have personal assistants. it takes a human to understand what a human wants. This is why phone robots are so damn annoying. It isn't the buttons. I've noticed you have to speak to the damn things lately. I miss hitting the buttons. They don't seem to understand "Oh, for fuck sake!" either.
I'm sure there are folks out there working feverishly on detecting inflection in people's voices over the phone. There is an industrial need for it. I read somewhere that there is no technical reason there are not video phones in every home and in every one's pocket. People don't want them. I don't either. There are some things best left to yesterday's specs.
I used to wonder what I was going to do about all the little bits of stuff. I used old plastic 35mm film cases to store things. Well, I use plastic bags or pill bottles now. Sometimes things just evolve. I dread video phones. I'm playing the old-codger card on that one.

Prince (whatever he is calling himself this week)
I remember my father going fishing with some friends of his. One of them had a boat with a stereo in it. All my life I've been told to be quite while fishing because the fish don't like loud noises. Well, then comes the story of my dad and the music that makes the fish jump.
My Dad's buddy liked country and what we would now call classic rock. However, through much experimentation, he noticed the fish liked a heavy beat. He would put prince in the tape deck and crank it up. it was the only urban music he could tolerate. My father reported to me that it worked great. Sure enough the fish would show up with a little bump in the boat.
I first heard "Pussy Control" at a club called Midnight Rodeo. Yes, it is a country place. I've noticed most people who listen to country like other kinds of music too. I've heard that hip-hop aka. (gangster) rap, aka. be-box, aka. urban aka. crap is on the decline. When interviewed people said it had a bad influence on people who listened to it. You think?!? Some of it is. Some of it is not. I've heard some Christian hip-hop that was pretty good. Prince doesn't seem anything like hip-hop to me. I don't particularly like Prince. I can listen to his work. There are some real stinkers in there.
I read somewhere that Prince played every instrument on his first album. He was from the mid-west somewhere. That's nice. I'm not sure I care.