Slow week:

• I watched I'm Not There today. It's pretty good, an arty film exploring the life of Bob Dylan by splitting him up into six characters. It doesn't usually make sense, but I think that's not the point.
• We bought a bottle of wine to go with the Indian food, got back to the apartment, and I remembered that I didn't own a corkscrew; and in fact, when I had bought a bottle of wine last year, I went for a decent-quality screw-cap bottle, specifically so I wouldn't have to bother buying a corkscrew. Kat said, "Do you have a Swiss army knife?", and I got to explain that yes, I've been owning them for almost 20 years, and I specifically get the model without a corkscrew because a screwdriver is more useful. I made do with a screwdriver and a bit of a mess, and tonight I bought a corkscrew for future use.
• Work is entertaining. The code is still bad. I've been a bit less diplomatic than usual in some of my pronouncements, but that will even itself out. I recruited my friend Stefan from Danger, who contracted throughout July and starts as an employee toward the end of this month.
• I was supposed to give a dharma talk tomorrow night about my time at Zen Center, but sitting got canceled by the facility's maintenance. So I get some time to work on it, which I haven't been doing.
• I'm finally reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, and it's even better than I'd figured it would be. The interesting thing with hearing about books on the radio, as I do, is that I often get the meat of the books from the author's interviews, especially with multiple interviews from the same author. This makes sense, the author has developed a bit of spiel and ideas and phrases for talking about the material. So I end up reading books where I already know the broad outlines and frequently the conclusions, but I am gifted with an expanded scope and lots of important details. For example, in all his interviews, Michael Pollan didn't talk about his experiment with vegetarianism, or his experiment with hunting. (He found someone to take him after wild boar, which is a feralized pig/boar hybrid pretty common here in Northern California, and actually a bit of a pest most of the time.)
• The book is encouraging my idea to eat only carefully-sourced meat, only every few days. I don't object to eating meat on principle, but holy crap, what a miserable and unsafe system to be participating in. I mean, really, when something is both creating incredible amounts of human and animal suffering, and producing unsafe food, there's not really a reason to continue with it.