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An excerpt from last night’s Daily Show:

Stephen Colbert: Yesterday Reagan’s casket was flown here, ironically not to his namesake Washington Reagan National Airport, but rather nearby Andrews Air Force Base, which today was renamed Andrews Reagan Air Force Base. The casket was then driven into the city up Gipper-chusetts Avenue, and now lies in state under the Capitol Reag-tunda.

Jon Stewart: Stephen, they’ve already renamed everything? I mean, Reagan already has an airport named after him, and I believe, isn’t the Ronald Reagan Federal Office Building…

Stephen: Actually, they’re renaming that, Jon. It’s now going to be called the Ronald Reagan Ronald Reagan Federal Office Building.

Jon: I see. Well, obviously tomorrow is going to be the funeral. It’s been a tough week. I guess that brings all of this process to a close.

Stephen: Far from it, Jon. Saturday and Sunday there will be round-the-clock coverage of the ceremonial police-barricade removal ceremony, followed on Monday by the post-memorial rebuffing of the Capitol floor. From what I am told, that will involve a backwards waxer pulled by a riderless horse. Of course all that is a mere prelude to the launch of C-SPAN Reagan. And finally, three weeks from now I will bring you my special report of all the retrospectives thus far, Reagan: Farewell to Coverage–A Look Back Remembered. I’m sure my memories of the future coverage will have been poignant.

Jon: Thank you, Stephen Colbert, for that moving report.

Streaming video is available on the Daily Show website, under “Reagan Remembered.”

Interesting. In a deal that was wrapped up just days before the Tonys, Avenue Q plans to forgo a national tour in favor of a resident production in Las Vegas. It’s scheduled to open around Labor Day 2005 at the Wynn Las Vegas resort (under construction) in a theater built especially for the show. I suppose it makes business sense (and also, it seems most touring productions get booked into big theaters that seat at least a couple of thousand people, which wouldn’t be right for Avenue Q‘s intimate scale), but still, I feel like potential theater-goers will be missing out. Oh well, another reason to go to Vegas!

Despite whatever feelings I have or don’t have for Ronald Reagan, I have a strange fascination with all the funeral proceedings. You know me, I love anything to do with protocol and event planning. (And I am now acquainted with the vocabulary of death. Caissons, caparisoned horses, and catafalques, oh my! Cue the partridge in the pear tree.) On TV I watched the casket being brought into the Capitol rotunda; I switched channels before the speeches got going. Earlier I had briefly thought about going to the Capitol myself, just in a “ooh, my first presidential funeral” kind of way, but that was when I naively thought I could just saunter in whenever I pleased. Nope, there are thousands of people in line out there. Not worth it. Later that night I tuned in to C-SPAN, which just had a completely silent, steady shot of the casket. After a few seconds, it’s like watching the Yule log on TV at Christmas. I clicked TiVo for the program title: “President Ronald Reagan Lying in State.” Yes, indeed it was. Later still, I checked back on C-SPAN, and disproving my assumption that they would just run a constant casket-cam for the next thirty-some-odd hours, they were instead running tape of the procession from earlier in the day.

So all this makes me think of what I’d like my funeral to be like. Is that morbid, or just practical? I’m thinking, some kind of eternal flame in the backyard surrounded by velvet ropes? Kidding aside, but still somewhat over the top, maybe I’d have the funeral service at Memorial Church at Stanford–it doesn’t really have to be at a church, but of the ones I have any association with, I am most fond of this one, more than the parishes I grew up in–then perhaps a ceremonial motorcade up scenic 280… one last time (and dab at the eyes… now), to be laid to rest in Colma, where my paternal grandmother is buried.

Oh, and I will be commissioning a requiem. (Okay, it just got all over-the-top again.)

In the tradition of such productions as The Exorcist and The Shining, Angry Alien presents Titanic in the now familiar format: in 30 seconds, re-enacted by bunnies (Flash required). Sure beats the 194-minute, enacted-by-humans version.

Tonight Reno 911! returns for a second season (Comedy Central at 10:30 p.m.). Yay! And the first-season DVDs will be available June 22.

As if you needed to be reminded, the Six Feet Under fourth-season premiere is this Sunday night (HBO at 9 p.m.).

Team bios for the new, fifth season of The Amazing Race are now up on the show’s website. The 90-minute premiere airs July 6 at 9:30 p.m on CBS. Where are the token gay contestants? And less importantly, how is it that I just now realized that “amazing race” is kind of a pun, intended or not, on “amazing grace”?

In further news, we won’t have to deal with the post-season blues for too long. The Amazing Race has already been picked up for a sixth season, which CBS decided to move up into this fall’s lineup, Saturdays at 8 p.m.

This morning the windows of our office building are being cleaned, inside and out. Just now outside, two very coordinated window washers came rappelling down adjacent sides of my corner office on the seventh floor, swinging to and fro, wielding their squeegees. It was a little unnerving. Very Mission: Impossible. Well, if they had been secret agents, and not window washers.

[Update (17:02): Speaking of office windows, having worked from this specific office for a little more than a year, I find it kind of interesting how the position of the sun varies at given times throughout the year. My windows face north and west, and right now, at about 5 p.m., the sun is still rather high in the sky, at a definitely different position (on both the x and y axes, if you will) relative to the other buildings in view, than at this time of day a few months ago, say, when it would be much lower and sunlight would already be streaming in at eye level. Ooh, maybe I could draw a grid on my window, and keep track of its position. Or I could plot a given shadow cast inside, and end up with a big arc across my floor and walls. Or I could stop looking out the window, and actually do the work I am paid to do. Too late: time to go home.]

Last weekend Rajani and I were talking about David Sedaris, and she seemed almost positive that a while back a photo of me and Sandro (another of my college barkada), standing in line at a book signing, had appeared in the newspaper. I was prepared to call her crazy. But it took me a second, and then I remembered that yes, in the summer of 2000, Sandro and I had indeed gone to see David–listen to me, throwing around his first name with such insouciance–at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco, and on a morning shortly thereafter, an article about independent bookstores appeared in the Chronicle, accompanied by a photo of people in line waiting for David to sign a copy of his book. It was there that he signed my copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day, on the opening page of the story “Jesus Shaves.” (I asked him to sign there, ’cause it’s my favorite story in the book, and he obliged.)

However, Rajani was only half right. I dug through the archives and found the photo. While Sandro appears about one-third of the photo over from the left (seemingly mid-speech, in a black shirt), I, standing to his left, am completely obscured. Oh, well. Take a look. (The bookstore was so packed during the actual reading that there wasn’t enough space in the open area to accomodate everyone. We, along with many others, stood or sat in nearby aisles among the bookshelves, out of view.)

Related: article on David, now on tour with Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, in Sunday’s Times (“Turning Sour Grapes into a Silk Purse“).

Mr. Sedaris’s success has presented him with a familiar artistic problem: maintaining his credibility as the charming surrogate loser who turns the tables on his oppressors with caustic and sometimes brutal wit. A writer who made his name with tales of skimping by as a housecleaner in Manhattan, he now earns up to $25,000 to appear in large halls (bookstore appearances are free); he has apartments in Paris, New York and the trendy Holland Park section of London; and he owns a house in Normandy.

“I have to make it sound like it’s so hard,” Mr. Sedaris said over breakfast at his hotel in Midtown on Wednesday. “Sometimes you reach for that sweater, and you left it at the Paris apartment. You know, it’s so difficult.”

Sigh.

Last week I continued to read Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which notes that the next transit of Venus, a rare occurrence in which the planet crosses in front of the Sun as seen from Earth, would be June 8, 2004. I was like, whoa, that’s soon! Tomorrow, in fact. It lasts a few hours, and takes place in pairs spanning eight years (the next transit will be in 2012), but each pair is separated by more than a century (the next after that will be in 2117). Regarding visibility in North America, part of the egress–yes, I’ve been reading up–will be visible in the east, but not towards the west. NASA predicts visibility beginning at 7:06 a.m. for Washington, D.C. Kind of cool. But needless to say, I will be asleep, rare celestial occurrence or no.

[Update (8 June): images via NASA spacecraft.]