73 today. Abundant thanks to all who have wished me well on social networks or email. Carol and I are healthy, and Dash still gets occasional zoomies, even at sixteen and change.<\/p>\n
Some time back I mentioned a classical music composer I discovered on KBAQ: Doreen Carwithen 1922-2003<\/a>. Probably her best-known work is Suffolk Suite<\/em> (1964), of which the third movement has become a big favorite of mine. I mention her because she was born the year my father was (1922) and I always thought \u201cDoreen\u201d was a 50s name. Why, I\u2019m not entirely sure. I\u2019ve never met a Doreen and only saw one<\/a> on The Mickey Mouse Club. Of course, there\u2019s more than one name popularity graph online. I checked the Shoestring Baby site\u2019s name visualizer<\/a>, and sure enough, Doreen Carwithen was an outlier for 1922. The name peaked about 1956, which is toward the end of my age cohort. Odd that I\u2019ve never met one.<\/p>\n This morning at Mass at St. Patrick\u2019s, the weekly announcements (projected on huge screens around the largish U-shaped nave) included one for a session entitled \u201cTheology and AI,\u201d to be held July 15 in the parish hall. I spoke briefly with the man who will be giving the lecture, and it sounds fascinating. The focus will be on the ethics of using AI. I\u2019ve written SF stories about AI for over 50 years, and ethical issues have come up more than once, especially in \u201cSilicon Psalm,\u201d which was published in Asimov\u2019s<\/em> in 1981. The lecture\u2019s still two weeks off, but I\u2019ll report here after I participate.<\/p>\n For my birthday dinner tonight we\u2019re having tenderloin steaks, polenta, and one of our biggish rainbow salads. I\u2019m going to open the last bottle I have of Gnarly Head\u2019s Authentic Black dark red blend, which has been out of production for a year or two now. I bought up the last six bottles I could find, and opened them on holidays or special occasions. Tonight\u2019s is the last. I\u2019ve tried a lot of dark red blends since then, and finally found one in the ballpark: Red Drop Dark<\/a>, from Red Drop Wines. Weirdly, Sprouts seems to have an exclusive distribution agreement with Red Drop for the Phoenix metro, and none of the other wine shops I\u2019ve checked have it. California, ~$10. Like Authentic Black, it\u2019s a little off-dry and very fruit-forward. If you like dark reds, try it.<\/p>\n