Nobody told me there was going to be a parade in downtown Mountain View. Apparently the promoters were a bit slack because nobody else seemed to know about it either. It was the annual Portugese parade - like I've seen in other venues. Anyway I'm at the store working on book orders (remember those?) and all of a sudden there's a parade outside. Talk about free precision-targetted advertising. My shoppe is in the dead zone between the two performing regions. And there's hardly anybody on the sidewalks. So I've literally got waves of marching bands strolling by looking at shop windows. And they're all looking and pointing - check out that music store...

Then a half hour later they come back - going the other direction... Double exposure.

Bush's declaration that the new US policy is basically shoot first and ask questions later is a bit unsettling. First that he does it and second that he can do it at all. Yup he can. Can wage war pretty much whatever way he wants. The only thing he has to worry about is getting congress to pay for the troops. They're only too glad to oblige right now.

About 4:17PM. The house started crackling. I didn't experience any motion - just the timbers crackling briefly. My guess is a moderately large earthquake far away. Not a peep from the snare drum this time - but I was in another room so I might have missed it.

Ah - a bad vibe day. Had trouble tuning the guitar. Time to perform my experiment. Tried to tune the bajo sexto. Couldn't get it right for the life of me. Picked up a violin that I already knew was in tune and drove G-D-A-E (mate) into my brain. Didn't work. When I got home later the guitar sounded terrible. I'll have to wait for the harmonic zen to return again before I can conduct the rest of the experiment.