While driving around today "Music From the Knee Plays" came out of my tape player - David Byrne said
"Number Five: Buying Things and Spending Money".

At the gym this morning, on the treadmill I discovered that Pink Floyd's "Waiting For The Worms" is a running song. Its fascist theme and marching jack-boot rhythms put me into that Fatherland mood - departure is just ten days away! That song completed my fourth treadmill tape - all of them full of tunes which exactly match my running speed, and a more diverse collection would be difficult to locate.

A bank of monitors in the "No Fear" section mesmerized me with a video of "Krupa" by Apollo Four-Forty - perfectly synchronized scenes of the New York City subway system, usually of passengers, always from the neck down. I was in Macy's for reason of a 10% Off Anything coupon plus a weekend sale, and the idea of a new jacket. From Scott's travel narrative (09.09.98) I thought a J. Crew "barn jacket" might work - his suggestion propelled me into that store for the first & perhaps last time, but their jackets didn't send me. None of those in Macy's did either, so I bought a blue solid cotton long-sleeved dress shirt for half-price, deciding to make do in Europe with my trusty old London Fog trenchcoat <1>. From the opulent class of the Stanford Shopping Center I drove over to University Avenue, the fun main drag of the town of Stanford. A guy passed me on the sidewalk with a motorized skateboard - that was a first. Attached to the rear was a small motor (something similar to a lawn mower's single-stroke) and up front was a slender waist-high column with hand-grips and probably some type of speed control.

At the Stanford Theater, today's film - Akira Kurosawa's dramatic masterpiece: "Ikiru" (translated as "To Live" or "Living"). A window into ragged post-war/post-Occupation 1952 Tokyo, an understated spectacle in black-and-white, and the story of the changes in a minor bureaucrat's life after he discovers that he has cancer, with just a few months left. One man can make a difference. An interesting detail was the name-plates on the office desks - little black elongated tetrahedrons (stubby trylons, really) with the identifying kanji running down each face vertically, in white. This page has the film's credits, including the color movie poster.

In today's paper, from the Associated Press:

Jacksonville, Fla - A youth minister, trying to drive home that sin was like Russian roulette, put a .357-caliber pistol to his head at the end of his sermon and, before 250 youngsters and parents, pulled the trigger.

The blank cartridge inside flew apart, shattering his skull. Thursday, he died from the wounds at University Medical Center. Melvyn Nurse was 35.

"We were absolutely stunned. Nobody moved. We thought it might be part of his sermon, and he would pop back up," said Micheal Cooper, a pastor at the Livingway Christian Fellowship Church International said Friday.

In the audience were Nurse's wife Debra and his four daughters, ages 8, 9, 14, and 15.

"It was a total wake-up call. They got the message," Cooper said.