In the afternoon some friends and I went to the circus, Circus Chimera, a little one tent & one ring circus passing through town. It was mostly acrobats, and one clown. It was quite entertaining in an old fashioned sort of way - one could imagine much the same acts and crowds a hundred years ago someone said to me. It would have come into town by way of the railroad, not semi-truck, but the there would still have been "SEE THE WORLD'S SMALLEST HORSE" and "SEE THE AMAZING GIANT KILLER SNAKES" and small children running about furiously and randomly in the dust.

They chose the weekend of the Antelope Valley's California Poppy Festival to visit - a good choice, they might get some of the overflow crowd.

Do you know, there are almost no public phones left? Not at department stores, not at Del Taco's, not at Applebee's, and so I had to walk a half mile over to the mall where there was one, where once there were banks of a dozen. Drug dealers and cell phones have caused them to fade away - where once where there were banks being used by teeny-boppers there was one. Yes, I have a cell, but it was home when all this happened. Naturally.

The truck is an old beater, used only for hauling bricks, trash, and such. My father gave to my brother who gave it to me. So the price was right then (free), but maybe I need to upgrade.  For small pickups the Chevy S-10's ride better than Ford Rangers, but seem to have lot's of little problems that the Rangers don't.

A few weeks back it was discovered that a popular file sharing program was spying on it's users, and using their computers for purposes of the program vendor. People, who mostly used the program to steal music were outraged. So now the program has been hacked and the spy/abuse-ware modules removed, and the company that provided it originally is outraged. Sauce for the goose is apparently not sauce for the gander...

I talked to an old friend, who is going to lend me a new biography of Einstein. He says it paints him as an unpleasant critical dog. Of course all men have feet of clay, and any new biographer has to have a hook on which to sell his book. We'll see. The current crop of biographers is more willing to enlarge upon the flaws and problems of their subjects it seems.

I'm a little short of links this week, so here is one to a Mt. Whitney climbing expedition. Lots of neat pictures.

Photo notes: A few months ago some friends and I went down to the Hollywood walk of fame. We did the usual, took pictures of ourselves next to the inlaid stars, visited Graumann's Chinese Theater and so on. I'll spare you those. On an old building however, I saw this gargoyle, kind of neat. We don't put things like this on our new buildings, more's the pity.