It's interesting how I've been consistently able to use the immediacy of Web-publishing to chronicle my thoughts on subjects well after they've been beaten to death by the dead-horse factory of the print and television media.

Luckily for you, all I'm really doing here is providing a conduit to a couple of tangents to last week's funeral orgy. The first is Tom Carson's summation in the Village Voice, which makes the profound and correct point that "Nixon is comprehensible; Reagan is not" -- a point of view which goes a long way to explaining the mind-choking fog of mystique that blanketed the country (or at least the part of it that talks on TV) for the past week or so. (The fact that the vapors are still pretty heady in some places can be readily observed in the reader mail.)

The second is one of the scariest, saddest shapes that loomed out of the fogbank: the on-beyond-eulogy most recently penned by Peggy Noonan. Her distracted, repetitious, inadverdently moving "Highlights of a State Funeral" is a startling example how cultish the cult of personality can get...

Oh, and yes, today was the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday. If you never learned what all the fuss was about, here's the ultimate abridgement.