Brain Spasms

It's been a few weeks since I've seen the film "The Lovely Bones," but some of the gorgeous images are still stuck in my brain, along with the astounding performance by Stanley Tucci, whom I didn't even recognize until very near the end. Was also impressed that the teenaged Saoirse Ronan was able to hold her own amongst the heavyweight thespians she was working with.

Meanwhile, the economy still seems stuck in the doldrums. Wrapped up a six week stint last Friday at TD Bank as an AML Investigator. Basically had to review account holders who made cash deposits or withdrawals in the general neighborhood of $10,000 to determine the source of these funds and attempt to ascertain if they were from legal or illegal or questionable sources.

Didn't find any myself, but a colleague across the row was delighted at the cash flow of a client employed by the Scores organization in Manhattan. Another colleague vicariously enjoyed a person living high on the hog in Boca Raton who was apparently quite fond of walking about Florida with major wads of Benjamins stuffed in his pockets.

Try though I do to avoid Olympics overload some shenanigans inevitably infiltrate my personal filter. The ice skater who appears to enjoy dresses, the much criticized Russian skaters who dressed up as aboriginals (which was not a lot better or worse than several of the other truly dumb, pathetic and embarrassing costumes on display) and the Korean guys who seem to think that Apolo Ohno did them wrong during their competitive outing. Anyway, this will all go away soon, Jay Leno will be back on NBC at 11:35 p.m. EST Monday through Friday, and our planet will continue to spin.

Have been plodding in recent days through the latest doorstop by Steven King, "Under the Dome," which might actually weigh more than his earlier doorstop, "The Stand."

My understanding is that he generally has been working without an editor for a number of years and this is not always a good thing. Even Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway (to name but a few) knew that a pair of objective eyeballs on a manuscript could work wonders on overextended prose.