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It's raining like crazy here, I just helped dry off the dog who enjoyed the towel enormously. Thought it was a toy! In the meantime, if it's rainy where you are too, here are some ideas for continuing education.

Steve Alcorn's online course on theme park engineering has got to be one of the best entertainment values around. Instead of going to a theme park, you design one yourself.

If you're a child, you would surely enjoy taking part in one of Alla Kazovsky's ongoing series of Children's Architecture Workshops. Now if you're a parent, her company, buildin' box, has some products you might be interested in: an architectural toy you wish you could play with yourself, and easels.

Bugs on micromachined devices. Literally! Try to guess what the machines are actually used for -- hint: they're not really theme park rides. Hint number two: mirrors are involved.

After we went to see 'Spirited Away', anime genius Hayao Miyazaki's painted masterpiece , a friend recommended that we take a look at Princess Mononoke, which we rented last night from NetFlix.

In Japan, this movie was a huge boxoffice success, eclipsed only by The Titanic, and it is easy to see why. It's a wonderful movie, full of action, suspense, drama, civility and heart. The DVD doesn't pile in a lot of extras, just a theatrical trailer and short interviews with the actors who did the voiceover in the English-language release. Nonetheless, the DVD has the movie itself, and on this basis alone it's worth owning. I highly recommend Princess Mononoke [buy at amazon] . by Hayao Miyazaki.

One of the things that flew in over the transom this week was a link to the weblog of photojournalist Pauline Lubens. What really comes out from this posting is that a photojournalist is, above all else, a journalist.

I also got back in touch with my friend Phil Wasson, who in the interim has sharpened up his MySQL and PHP skills and put together a fun news site called NewsHeadLinks.com. Phil has a great sense of humor, and along with news articles of the day, he always mixes in something hysterically funny, like "Study shows majority of people kiss right". Hey Phil, did you hear about the murder at the Nigerian embassy last week? Thanks to Jim Collins at www.JamesCollins.net, who brought it to our attention. It's the first murder I've heard about that may actually be related to this hoary Internet spam scam.

Did I say weight loss cream? Of course I meant ice cream. I have heard it asserted (quite recently) that if you don't eat for three hours before you go to bed, you will lose weight.

A horrible thought.

After dinner last night, we took the dog on a three-mile walk to the local ice cream store. When we got there, an executive brand new meeting of twenty (20) young women was taking place. All the little tables had been put together to make a big long executive conference table.

At the head of the table, a brand new mother and her brand new baby had called the meeting to order. They were celebrating a brand new life with cake and ice cream. They all looked quite thin. Ice cream must be a brand new weight loss cream.

It has been just over a year since Levar Harper, a young black man, and father, was shot to death in a futon store just a half block away from where I'm writing this in my safe night kitchen. For the most part we don't think of the retail experience as dangerous, which may be quite correct. Since there were no witnesses besides the futon store owner, no one really knows whether Levar was trying to buy a futon or deface the store.

Not that either one should be particularly dangerous.

Looking back over the past year, it is easy to see how many people were harmed by this single shooting. Every night for months Levar Harper's friends and family brought candles and flowers to the scene of his death. A cross was set up, and a black vinyl record was wrapped in plastic and hand-labelled "BLANK: The music he did not get a chance to make."

A cardboard sign showed his dates 7/17/77 to 2/13/02, a photo of him holding his son, his nickname "AKA EMCEYE 1 LOVE", and phone numbers for people to call who, as eyewitnesses, may have seen something.

One Saturday night I saw a lot of people, including a gray haired couple who must have been his parents or older relatives. They looked as stark and severe and stricken as anyone you might imagine.

The police department posted notices in the neighborhood, typed memos on 8 1/2 by 11 sheets of paper, in both Spanish and English, asking for eyewitness volunteers to call. Eventually the memos came down and were replaced every other week with handwritten notices advertising yard sales from 9 to 2 p.m. on Saturday or Sunday.

Later I heard that the man who owned the futon store had left town.

Tonight when I walked by the makeshift shrine there were a dozen candles, a rude wooden cross, and a bouquet of flowers wrapped in plastic.

I've shopped several places for CDs online, but my wife got an email today that made me think of changing to CDBaby.com The email included the usual shipping information, but then described the actual process of shipping the CD in some detail.

Here is what it said:

	Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
	sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
	

	A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
	it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
	

	Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
	the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
	can buy.
	

	We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
	marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
	Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in
	our private CD Baby jet on this day, Saturday, February 15th.
	

	I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby.  We sure did.
	Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'.  We're all
	exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Now that's what I call a good attitude!

I parked the car and turned off the engine, but left the ignition on to hear the rest of a radio story. Across the street a mime walked along the sidewalk. Why not? Sure, it could be a mime. After all, it's Los Angeles and odd things can happen anywhere, even in parts of the city nowhere near Hollywood and its daily Halloween ambience.

As I was watching the mime propel himself up the sidewalk on the other side of the street, he was suddenly overcome with a paroxysm of mime-ness. He had come to a wide driveway, and about to walk across, he quickly threw twirled and threw an imaginary rope over to the other side. It must have 'caught' because then he immediately pulled himself, hand over hand on the imaginary rope, across the wide mouth of the driveway.

It was a very effective imaginary exercise and it reminded me of nothing more than the Republican administration of George W. Bush, engaged in so many imaginary artifices and deceptions that perhaps soon, like the mime, they will actually need to use them to accomplish the plainest and most straightforward of natural actions, even when no one is actually watching.

If you missed it: The Imbalanced Budget [NY Times editorial] .