Pictures, letters, empty coffee cups, and CD’s surround my desk and keep watch over a hundred little slips of insurgent papers. Those slips of paper which up till today were my calendaring system are now vanquished after a painstaking morning of manually importing them into apple’s new ical program. Maybe now I can start showing up on time to things again. I’ve even imported (subscribed to) all the american holidays and the entire fall television season premier schedule. Now I can make sure I keep my calendar clean for next Thursdays season premier of Survivor Thailand. And Kelly don’t make any plans for the evening of September 29th, cause that’s the season premier of Alias. Isn’t technology wonderful? I wish I could subscribe to some app that would allow me to set some preferences on the type of music I enjoy and am interested in seeing, and the app would then automatically comb the Ticketmaster database and others and give me concert dates in my calendar for bands and music specific to my tastes. I can never remember concert dates, and if I see someone good coming in the City Pages, while reading it over lunch, the information disappears almost as soon as the foods gone.

Tying to avoid all the patriotism on television last night, I stumbled onto a 1997 NOVA special about the building of the Super Bridge. The Super bridge is actually the new Clark Bridge, built in Alton, Illinois. It was basically a construction and engineering documentary on cable-stay designs for bridge systems with tons of great footage of the actual high-wire act construction crew and the problems they ran into along the way (which included a 500 years flood of the Mississippi River). The demolition of the old bridge was pretty good too. Excellent television.

Mandela calls Dick Cheney a dinasour.