Today’s subject line brought to you by episode 5 of HBO’s ‘Rome’, my addiction to which is in no way waning.

How can you NOT like a show where one powerful patrician woman sends another powerful patrician woman (whose life she has recently utterly ruined by forcing her lover to leave for war) a “friendship” gift of a naked slave with an enormous man-shaft, delicately attired in nothing but a tiny gold ribbon tied around his knob in a bow, holding a bejeweled golden tortoise on a pillow? How?

In other news, I’ve seen running around my new offices in the grip of Moving Madness. She looks very busy, and I can’t get over how bizarre it is that we’re together again given the vastness of the OPS. I mean, sixty thousand people, 25 cabinet ministers, 30 portfolios… there are good odds that after my job change and the political shuffle, we weren’t even going to be in the same building, let alone the same ministry. It’s an odd coincidence.

Further weirdness: I have had a dream, two nights in a row, about working with the cast of Night Court. Seriously strange. I was a lawyer who was apprenticing with Markie Post, who played Christine Sullivan, the feminista lawyer with a serious Anglophile fetish. I was sort of a silent observer as she battled various cases against Asst. D.A. Dan Fielding and flirted shamefully and awkwardly with
Judge Harry T. Stone while Court Reporter Mac Robinson looked on and made wisecracks.

I guess this could be observed as my brain’s silent cry for me to go out and buy the season one DVD set, except since the people in the courtroom were Bull and Roz, not Selma, and Christine was there rather than Liz, so I was clearly in the later, post-1984 seasons. Hmm. Raise your hand if you knew that Bull Shannon’s real first name on the show was Nostradamus. Man, my memory is crammed full with some weird shit.

Lastly, I made a batch of 27 Chocolate-Orange Cookies on Sunday afternoon, and they turned out well. A little *too* well. The cookie tin is looking suspiciously empty, and my pants are feeling suspiciously tight.

(ps – , , and need not concern themselves with my lack of posting about The Sheep Project. My radio silence is a result of deep thought and penetrating research, NOT, as you might suspect, a sudden revelation that purchasing a sheep while living in an urban area with insufficient grass stock, forbidding by-laws and an utter lack of farming experience is a silly idea. No, no. Nothing of the sort could dissuade me. I just need to get a nice sheep icon before I make my findings public.)