At the Pope's funeral:

Bush sat on the aisle in the second row, next to his wife, Laura. Beside them were French President Jacques Chirac and his wife, Bernadette. The two presidents shook hands.

When Bush's face appeared on giant screen TVs showing the ceremony, many in the crowds outside St. Peter's Square booed and whistled.

Did I mention that he's extraordinarily unpopular in the United States? Oh yes. I did.

Damn blogger. Down yesterday.

Yeah, so everyone's tellin' me I need one of these. Help.

1. Someone tell me (in comments) a good RSS reader for my WinTel ass to use. I guess I should get with the program. I experimented with a couple before but they all seemed so annoying.

2. Someone tell me HOW (in comments) to set this shit up. My little brain gets cold and clammy with tech stuff. I can barely deal with blogger.

We here at the hippie love-commune we call home at Haight and Ashbury missed the debut of the US version of the TV sitcom the Office, because:

We don't have cable, and we don't get NBC through our wack antenna.

It's pathetic that the crap NBC station in the area can't penetrate it's signal to the middle of the freakin' city. This means that I also miss Pumpkinhead's show when I (infrequently) really want to watch it.

The comic talent on the Office US actually looked promising to me, too, what with some Daily Show funnyman playing the boss (and he was v. good as "Brick" in Anchorman) and the genius Rainn Wilson (sp?) from Six Feet Under playing the Gareth character.

But I'm still glad, on balance, that we don't have cable. Fuck that.

Here.

A little reality-check for the media cheerleaders.

...more good stuff here.

I miss working. But I don't miss the dick that I worked for.

Sigh.

Pat Buchanan is frequently loathsome but almost always interesting. On Hardball, in an interview with Chris Matthews, he indicates his support for "voluntary unionism" and a living wage -- the moral aspects of his Catholicism that separate him from the libertarian wing of the Rethuglicans.

The video is here.