It is an absolutely, screamingly gorgeous day outside, sunny in the 70s, the leaves are turning autumn colors, my bicycle is waiting patiently in my car, and my shorts and sneakers are in a bag right next to me.

And I forgot my helmet. It’s at home.

I have an overwhelming moral imperative not to ride.

Could I survive on the bike path without the helmet? Of course. I’d do fine. But riding with a helmet is a practice I’ve established with great seriousness and intend to continue faithfully: for myself, so as to always have the helmet when it really is essential; for the kids who see me when I’m riding, to set a good example; and for my boys, because even if they can’t see me riding, they’re with me, and I’m not going to do the wrong thing.

Exasperating for the moment, but there are some standards you have to maintain.

My favorite Prince song. Syncopation doesn’t get better than this. Awesome and far too short. I wish I had a clean track that didn’t crossfade into “Darling Nikki”—not that I dislike “Darling Nikki” at all, but sometimes “Computer Blue” is just exactly what I want.

Unretouched photo detail of a US Airways Boeing 757 passenger safety guide:

• If you see grey in the window, there is smoke outside. Do not open the door.
• If you see red in the window, there is fire outside. Do not open the door.
• If you see yellow in the window, the Lights of Zetar are outside. Do not open the door.
• If you see blue in the window, there is water outside. Do not open the door.

Addendum: Wait a minute…these illustrations are a sequence. This is a story. He’s an alchemist! You can tell by the arcane symbol on his wand and his triumphant fist-pump when summoning each of the four elements.

1. Air: The plane is in the clouds. This does not require alchemical magick, of course, and that’s probably why this guy booked a flight in the first place—as a starting point.
2. Fire: The plane is engulfed in flames. The sudden chaos erupting inside the cabin gives the alchemist a few unobserved moments to execute his next step, the real objective of this exercise:
3. Earth: The alchemist has conjured gold! Unfortunately, the door won’t open, because the plane is embedded in rock. But you know he’ll be bragging about this to his buddies.
4. Water: The plane is floating in the ocean. No telling what kind of shape the passengers and crew are in by now, but at least they’re equipped for this.

You’d think the TSA would just stop these people.

Okay, smidgely lapse of notification—I neglected to mention that Joyce and Jenny and I were going to Walt Disney World on September 26 and returning on October 4. Had a great trip, met up with Allen and Dee, enjoyed Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party, and celebrated Epcot’s 25th anniversary. The boys spent the week at home with their tag-teaming grandmothers.

I’ll post a gallery as soon as half my pictures return from their unplanned trip to Maine. (No, my luggage wasn’t lost: A few gigs of my photos are on Jenny’s iBook, and I forgot to offload them before she turned around and headed north again. Her trip was planned; the photos are accidental stowaways.)

Meanwhile, I do have a few snapshots to share. Here’s my favorite so far:

Spaceship Earth, 4 October 2007.

EPCOT Central is back in action, again serving up insight and commentary on my favorite place in the world.

• EPCOT Central: Almost Right and Getting Closer

And I am pleased.

MacRumors.com has rounded up about a dozen links to sites covering today’s Apple press conference.

• ‘The Beat Goes On’ Live Event Coverage

New iPods? iPhone nano? We shall see.

Update: Yup, new stuff. No Beatles in the iTunes Store yet. The iPhone and the new iPod touch will be able to buy songs directly from the iTunes Music Store (and from Starbucks, oddly) and sync those songs to iTunes on your computer.

As usual, Engadget has my favorite writeup:

• Steve Jobs live—Apple’s “The beat goes on” special event

Engadget also has hands-on photo galleries for the new iPod nano, iPod classic, iPod touch, and the iTunes WiFi Music Store.

Here’s a quick summary of the new iPod/iPhone lineup; see Apple’s iPod and iPhone pages for all the details.

Further update: Apple has posted a video stream of the keynote.

Addendum, 6 September: Got a couple of good comments so far.

• Rob Usdin: Surprised Apple did not go with a hard drive for the iPod Touch. 16 GB is just not enough for me. Will wait until it hits 32 GB (my 30 GB iPod is at 24 GB right now).

• Perry: An iPhone or iPod Touch with a hard drive would be quite cool. Equally cool would be an iPod Touch with a speaker + microphone and skype via wifi.

“Quite cool” is, how you say, an understatement. “Irresistible,” that is the word.

Yeah, a hard drive. Or at least 32 GB of flash.

And Skype, jeez, yes. Forget adding a speaker and mic to the iPod; I wouldn’t mind (in fact, I would prefer) plugging in a headset. Both the iPhone and the iPod touch have a dock connector, and hacking them is a burgeoning industry (have you seen iToner? It’s not even a friggin’ hack! Awesome!), so it’s got to be just a matter of time.

Even before someone Skypes the iPod touch, I want Mail on it. Word on the street is that the app binaries are the same as the iPhone’s, so that’s gotta be the first hack to hit it, if not to simply be added by Apple in a software update. (The Macworld Podcast panel muses that Apple could offer Mail as a paid iPod download from the iTunes Store, which sounds realistic to me—not preferable, but realistic.)

If you’re planning a trip to Walt Disney World (hi, Rob!) or you’ve been there before, you may get a kick—and some useful tips—from Steve Russo’s article at All Ears:

• When to Go? (Part 1 of 2)

Walt Disney World is a million square miles and is larger than most planets. In the summer, the temperature often exceeds that of the surface of the sun. During holiday weeks, three-fourths of the population of mainland USA is in attendance. If you don’t make a dining reservation six years in advance, you have no shot at eating anything during your entire trip.

Steve then says, “That’s all hyperbole but there’s a point to be made.” The point (at least in Part 1; Part 2 isn’t posted yet) is to make an informed choice of the time of year you visit—and that is, in my opinion, the single most important factor.

At long last fulfilling my wish (and prediction) from years ago, there’s a digital SLR with a flip-out LCD you can use for composing your shots: the $1200 Panasonic Lumix DMC-L10.

• Info and press release at the Digital Camera Resource Page
• Comprehensive specs and preview at Digital Photography Review

D-SLR, 10.1 megapixel, flip-out LCD with live preview, face detection, and the kit lens has optical image stabilization. And Panasonic has a good track record with their Lumix cameras.

This is now the camera I want.

I’m tired of being saddled with read as the past tense of read. (Yes, yes: the past tense of to read. I’m also tired of being saddled with the infinitive as the canonical form for introducing verbs in English, and I’m more than happy to buck that standard.) It makes writing just that little much more difficult. You can’t just write “When I read Harry Potter,” because it’s not clear whether you’re saying “At the time in the past when I did read Harry Potter” or “Every time I am reading Harry Potter.”

You see.

And this reminds me: Some people don’t know that led is the past tense of lead (to lead! Fine! Jeez!), so you see ungrammatical/unspellanonical phrases like “We were lead to the front of the line.” Lead? The metal? Interesting.

Yes, “unspellanonical.” I claim it as my own. How many minutes before someone registers the domain?

Yankees legend Phil Rizzuto has died, aged 89. There’s an excellent story at the Chicago Tribune.