Update Bullets

(1) My father agreed with me that it was, for us at least, unusual to attend a funeral where part of the ceremony involved watching a video of the deceased oiled up and posing onstage in a skimpy swimsuit. I suppose it's the sort of thing that might happen when the deceased happened to be a successful local figure competitor prior to her first bout with cancer, but it was still strange for me. That aside, it was the first non-Catholic (or nominally Catholic) funeral I've attended, and it was simultaneously nice but well outside my realm of experience and, sometimes, comfort.

(2) Ongoing and interlocking frustrations at work of the sort that I imagine must be insufferably dull to talk about, even by the standards of what I put up on this so-infrequent blog. I will note that working for five months in a government agency has pretty much solidified and etched in stone my nascent convictions that we live in a society where systems seem to operate independently of the individuals who compose them, and work against them. A surprising proportion of my frustration and anger is impotent and directionless because there's no one identifiable at whom to aim it; everyone would appear to agree, whether explicitly or tacitly, that most of the stuff I think is crazy shit is in fact crazy shit. I'm utterly confident that if I had a sit down with the organization's CEO, he'd agree with me. Things calcify and seem to be the way they *are* and the system grinds on. Everyone watching out for their own wheelhouse unknowingly conspires to create the machine they decry.

(3) There was a movie starring Fred Ward (and Kate Mulgrew and Wilford Brimley and Joel Grey in what I'm going to call "yellow-face", somewhere between David Carradine in Kung Fu and Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's on the offensive scale, though I suspect that might've been the point), based on a long-running series of men's pulp novels. The movie was entitled, optimistically, Remo Williams: The Adventure Beings. There were clearly supposed to be multiple sequels. There clearly were none. I don't post here as often as I'd like, but note to a fellow blogger: when your post titles indicate a multi-part series, it's only polite to provide the second installment within a month's time of the first. Just saying. :-P

(4) I just put an emoticon on my blog.

(5) I don't write about direct politics in the horse-race sense, because for the sake of my mental health I like to maintain a heavily mediated distance from the immediacy of all that, but I'd like to be the umpteenth voice noting the absurdity that Katie Fucking Couric was too tough an interview for Sarah Palin. That literally dozens of bloggers on the left can come up with answers that would be 1000% preferable for her own interests than what she can come up with is astonishing. "What newspapers do I read? The Anchorage [Whatever] and/or the Juneau [Whatever-Picayune], and I make sure to read through at least a couple of sections of the Wall Street Journal, plus, of course, whatever press clippings my staff feels it necessary to bring to my attention." Christ, namecheck USA Today. How fucking hard is this? I wouldn't want to vote for someone who claimed their worldview was influenced by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but I'm not a fucking Republican, am I? - that'd be a perfectly respectable answer for someone coming from her perspective. The early buzz amongst frightened liberals was that Palin was an astonishingly good liar because she didn't flinch while telling you her piss was actually rain, but at least piss is a fucking liquid. Some of her responses are the kind of idiot panic / smug conceit you get from Homer Simpson. Where have you been all day, Governor Palin? Think of something clever, think of something clever! I was at the bar getting drunk at two in the afternoon! Brilliant! What newspapers do you read? All of them! What are your personal accomplishments? I invented the Cobb Salad!

(6) In the month of September I lost twenty pounds (thanks, Dr. Agatstin!). Unfortunately, between May and August I gained twenty pounds, so I'm still c.30 pounds overweight, same as I have been since applying for grad school back in 2006. Sometimes for giggles I measure my weight against basketball players, though, and it's nice that I no longer weigh as much as some NBA power forwards (i.e., muscular guys who are nine inches taller than me).