dinner, stuff, and bleach

Professor U. R. of operating systems fame (also the professor in whose lab I assisted W. with his research last semester) was in town yesterday, and he invited various of his past and current students who were in the Seattle area to dinner. Naturally, I went, since I'd been called. I can count on one hand the number of dinners I've been invited to by important people: one. It was at a Thai restaurant right on the border of the respectable part of town. W. and Speedy were both there, illuminating the dinner table with their halos. Everyone else was a past student of the professor's. Food was all right, conversation was good, and the evening came to an end before anyone got restless - just as it should be. That's about all I had to say on the topic. It wasn't especially blog-worthy, though I felt I had to record it for posterity.

I'm currently reading Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman. I read his Julius Caesar a few years ago. Julius Caesar was fascinating, and Alexander the Great is no less fascinating. Freeman writes in a conversational tone that's easy to follow. There's a vividness to his writing that's entirely too desirable in history books and a welcome respite from the torpidity of Livy's History of Rome, which I've tried to read at various points in my life when no other reading material was available. Freeman's history is not devoid of value judgements, but that's all right when the values in question are modern values. Too often one gets the urge to chuck Livy's History of Rome at David Hume's head when one hears him chuckling sententiously from the eighteenth century. Not so with Freeman, who's a delight. I tend to read A. t. G. on the bus ride to work every morning. Seems a sensible thing to do with my time. On the bus ride back I watch an episode of Slam Dunk on my phone. Idyllic. It's amazing how we use phones these days for actually making phone calls about 6% of the time, and use them for everything else (everything else, to be sure) the other 94% of the time. Alexander the Great's eyes would pop if he saw what we did with phones these days - more so because he wouldn't know what a telephone was.

*Spoiler Alert* Bleach 682 came out a day early. Yhwach made the inspired decision to release Aizen from the chair in which he'd been imprisoned, and Aizen promptly proceeded to release a volcanic burst of reiatsu. Aizen has no master, so he's de facto Yhwach's enemy, notwithstanding his antipathies toward Soul Society. Classic Aizen. I never much cared for him during the Aizen arc, but now he's a total badass, which is more than I can say for Ichigo, who's being dragged around by Renji like a rag doll, broken in body as well as in spirit.