Sorry I missed reminding you about 4/20 events. I think I was just drifting through preparations, man.

April 23 is the recognized birth of Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, the bane of most high schoolers' existence, and no help to Bill and Ted. If your thing is recognizing the date of death, well, her died on April 23, also.

If you haven't gotten the cake yet, he prefers a nice chocolate. Spice cake is OK, too.

Just a head's up that Saturday is HHhttps://youtu.be/-BNwiqDGz5g?si=8btkq79kbJ2XMk_0Perfect Date Day. Be sure to have a light jacket ready!

So envious.

It's rare when a comic strip can push the punchline forward into the second panel, but B.C. pulled off the feat.

Not only that, I'm jealous of the main character, who declares 'I just realized I haven't had a thought in four hours.' Four hours? I'm lucky if I can go four seconds without a thought. It's one of the conundrumicals. As soon as I try to power down, I immediately start mantra-ing, 'Don't think! Don't think! Don't think!' and then berate myself for still thinking.

One of those thoughts.

What if Toto in The Wizard of Oz had been a cat instead if a dog?

Thought gumbo.

(or, a stream of consciousness not quite equal to the best of James Joyce and the other early 20th century S.O.C. guys, but with some punctuation.)

so there i was, lying in bed at 3:34 after a visit to the necessary and as is my wont, I thought 'you know, we're already more than halfway through this decade, and I'm just now noticing (that we're halfway through this decade).'

How could I have let 1/15, or nearly 7.5% of my life slip by without being aware of anything that happened? That's when a stray earworm crept into the conversation, in this case,

time keeps on slippin', slippin' slippin', into the future.

Which, of course, the musically literate will recognize as the opening 'real' lyric of Fly Like an Eagle by The Steve Miller Band.

Well, now that I am aware, what am I going to draw from this 6.5 decades of experience to inform the last however many years of living, let's say even if only rounding out the last half of this decade?

One thing I do know is it's all about questions. Three that spring to mind:

• What do I want to be when I grow up?
• Where do I store all the terabytes if not petabytes of data and information I acquired in that 75+ years of hanging out, and will I be able to retrieve it quickly when needed so people don't think I'm getting senile?
• The cat is poking at me. Is it time to get up already?

Those of you who remember the hard-learned lessons of high school and college English will recognize that we are rapidly approaching that mystical number 500, beyond which sane people (and English teachers) lose interest and stop reading.

Back to thinking deep thoughts, or at least slapping down pop-ups from the past like Quemoy and Matsu, or the big hit of the British Invasion band that made the most appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show.

About those prayers.

Variety reports on some of the fallout from Kid Rock's recent conversion to Christianity: 'I WILL pray for them, but I know that sooner or later God will cut 'em down,' Rock said, referring to members of the media who reported on his ticket prices.

We have a whole bunch of conundrums (conundrii?) and revelations wrapped up in that statement. The Kid doesn't say what his prayers are, but he may be praying for the happy yet sudden and painful death of his enemies, and that is the prayer that God hears. But then he throws that 'but' in there, implying that God is not listening to The Kid's prayers, which calls into question the whole faith thing. Like munitions makers praying for peace. Prayers of the heart, not prayers uttered in public.

Mark Twain had a pretty good take on secret prayers.

Pressing questions.

The BBC asks How do you modernise mango farming?

Although I can't answer that question, at least I now have an answer to the question, 'where do mangos cone from?'

What happens if?

Mental telepathy (or more specifically, telepathic communication) has long been a dream of many people, or at least the geekerati among us. Just think of it, they say, being able to communicate without speaking, making noise, or needing a device of some sort! How efficient! How wonderful!

Well, it is or must be a significant scientific problem, because even in the brave new world of Star Trek in the mid 1960s, the creators could envision a universe where whole beings could be decomposed, moved, and recomposed someplace else, even keeping items (like bodies, clothing, and devices) intact and separate after the move. Even though they could do that, they couldn't envision a world without communication devices.

I can see why. I've been thinking about mechanics–filters and limiters (blocks), how to tell who's speaking (even when you can't see a speaker, like on a telephone, yet you can still identify the speaker's voice). So will we someday be able to communicate without devices? Maybe, but I wonder if we'll still have anything left to say.

Not keeping up, WSJ!

That's my response to its headline The lived-in look is back.

At least, that's the response in these heah parts, where the lived-in look never went away! And we're talking the real deal, the total ensemble, right from the hip-pocket-creased gimmie cap to the pillow-matted hair through the laugh lines around the eyes, the mostly tucked-in shirt, the jeans bagging slightly at the knees, down to the shoes with scuffed toes and rundown heels. You can't buy this look!

In these heah parts we don't need no seam rippers, cheese graters, chemical aging or strategically placed mechanical fraying to achieve just the right amount of lived-in. No, lived in happens here where God intended it to be, that is to say, exactly where it is.