It's Paul Harvey's 80th birthday - his voice has been a radio familiar all my life. At this time I don't hear him with any frequency at all; just as well since becoming a mouthpiece for the intolerant Republican "family values" crowd. He's always been a right-winger, but in decades past the ideology wasn't so irritating. But as one of radio's Grand Old Men he deserves praise for endurance.

While working today I heard Simon & Garfunkel's America in my mind's ear - the cigarette lyrics are very J.D. Salinger - discovering the first side of "Bookends" in high school was a revelation. <1> This is one of our musical canon - to this day L looks forward to sitting on a park bench with me, when we're elderly:

• "I must show you this picture."
• "Are you happy here, living with us?"
• "Your own room... in your own home."

At lunch my temporary crown seemed to come loose; I returned to the dentist where I learned it was no big deal. Seems a lot of the work they did yesterday was customizing an aluminum outer shell to the generic temporary crown, matching it to my original tooth's dimensions; that shell broke but it wasn't necessary - this dentist (not my regular one) simply discarded it and sent me on my way. Now the generic crown makes itself known a little more, but it's not uncomfortable.

In the evening I attended another singles' dinner - it was great, although (as has become typical) nobody made a lasting connection. I was most attracted to a toothsome Canadian girl, and although polite and enthusiastic it was clear I wasn't someone she cared to spend any more time with (thought balloon here: a Charlie Brown "sigh"). One of the guys was a Formula V automobile racer, who'd had a crash a few months back where he smashed up both of his feet, so he regaled us of the wheelchair life he'd endured for almost two months, and his new-found sympathy with the ADA. The restaurant was a very nice Indian place in Ghirardelli Square called "Gaylords", and I had great fun getting there, meandering through the whole of San Francisco as the wraithlike mists of the summer-sunset fog rolled in. A "fruit-salad" spectrum banner heralded my arrival at Castro Street, which I took north to Haight. I the drove west to the end of the hippies' boulevard to pause at "Amoeba", where I dashed in and got every compact disk on my list <2>. A loud "scratch" band called "Bruce" was playing an in-store concert; they generated rhythmic noise with a drummer, and a record player-player who also did some vocalization. Then back to the car to drive north to the Marina district and the restaurant.

From today's Feed:

...the mountain of evidence originally cited to support the [Sudan drug plant] attack turns out to be a handful of dust allegedly collected at the plant by a CIA agent a few months ago, the case for forcing Bill Clinton out of office gets stronger and stronger.

It's hard to imagine a more complete dereliction of the President's responsibilities. Did Clinton not have a chance, prior to ordering the attack, to find out how thin the evidence against the plant was?