I'd been staying away from Halfbakery for a long time because I thought it would steal all my time. Well, now it's stealing all my time again but who cares, when you can learn about things like air-assisted cat levitation trousers.

I haven't put any new ideas up there but I have added illustrations (done partly in order to remember how to draw and paint, because there's an upcoming project I'm kind of excited about) for two old ones: one to keep papers from piling up on your desk, and the other to help while away a summer evening.

Philip K. Dick claimed that in 1974, he went to a Chinese restaurant in the town of Richard Nixon's birth and received a fortune cookie that said, "Deeds done in secret have a way of becoming found out." If anyone's got an interesting fortune cookie in New Haven lately, please let me know.

I have no idea where we're going to be in five years, but it sure is tempting to think that you can see things coming. When my job is really slow I spend a lot of time online reading people's comments on comments on comments on comments on the news, and boy do they ever get caught up in the prediction of the moment. P.K. Dick wrote about a lot of motor-mouthed crackpots and was one himself, but now any schmuck can turn on a screen and plunge into a blizzard of mutually-solitary verbiage beyond Phil's worst nightmares, without the excuse of amphetamines.

But when living in the future becomes too stressful, there are always the comforts of fictional alternate history—not the kind we hear in press conferences, but the kind where you admit you made it up, for fun. This guy John J. Reilly is quite a character—politically, a pretty scary right-winger (though, to me, nearly everyone is), but well-read and possessing a playfully grandiose habit of speculation. Some of his alternate history pieces are methodical and didactic, like the defeat of Franco leading to (surprise, surprise) the triumph of Hitler and Stalin. Some are dense and spooky—the demonic Quetzal nation in the story of The Irish Empire is on the one hand a reactionary's caricature of socialism, but on the other hand a pretty evocative horror story. And some are just balls-out hilarious exercises in extreme bad taste, like C.S. Lewis as a British Fascist agent or Great Cthulhu as a basis for the Red Scare. He's a better writer than Newt Gingrich though I hope he doesn't run for office.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot.

A week and a half ago, my darling little sister (see below), who's been living in Italy for... ?... just about five years... finally got her residency permit. Up until the moment when they handed over the papers, there was no way to know if they were going to let her live there or deport her away from her sweetie. I still can hardly believe this finally worked out.

I wish I could speak Italian, because it seems like a good language for expressing EXTREME CELEBRATION. Go baby go, I love you.

BEFORE

AFTER

Sometimes I feel sorry for the guy, really.

On the subject of whether people who opposed Bush's war should now be urging the US to keep occupying Iraq until we've somehow fixed it (sometimes described as "you broke it, you bought it"—a phrase I think is in sort of incredibly bad taste when you're talking about people getting dysentery and radiation poisoning and bullets in the head), the following exchange took place in the comments section of Calpundit:

aphrael: Invading Iraq, taking out its government and destroying its infrastructure, and not sticking around to help rebuild the infrastructure and create a new government is a little bit like blowing up buildings for the hell of it. It's exclusively destructive.

Now that we have taken out their government and destroyed some of their infrastructure, we are responsible for what follows, and we have the responsibility to help ameliorate it. Otherwise we're little better than vandals.

jw mason: Sure aphrael, that makes sense. The same way as when a surgeon cuts off the wrong limb, he's the obvious choice to do the reconstructive surgery. Or how the guy who blew your college fund on Pets.com shares will obviously try extra hard to make it up to you if you'll just give him another try. Or just like how, after 9/11, Osama bin Laden was the obvious choice to rebuild lower Manhattan (he is a trained engineer, you know.)

On the planet I come from, dropping lots of bombs on a country, even if they're lots of really big bombs, doesn't give you the moral right to then govern that country for as long as you see fit. What am I missing here?

Here are some excellent spectacles that happened in front of me lately.

Eliot Fintushel's Apocalypse. Fintushel, a clown with considerable physical and musical skill, performs the entire text of the Book of Revelations. The show's full of nifty sights and sounds and has multiple layers of historical and cultural depth—he starts the piece by respectfully removing a prayer shawl and phylacteries, performs interludes of Jewish, Coptic, and medieval French liturgical music, descends into terror and glee at the collapse of civilization, and ends as a smooth, confident preacher who could be on the radio right now. Even if you don't read his program notes, it's obvious that he thinks this is a crazy, dangerous book that's caused a lot of trouble... but he embodies every part of it with full conviction, so that the love and concern for the wayward churches is just as real as the venomous glee at the torture of sinners.

Over Nine Waves by Tim Barsky and company. Barsky is a storyteller and musician who's very ambitious, to say the least, and so good at so many things that my few complaints feel a little petty. The version of the show I saw (I think he changes the lineup pretty often) included a short anecdote of the last days of the Tuatha De Daanan;

(*) Barsky explained that there were some charges the cops hadn't dropped yet and so he was strictly forbidden to discuss his case—so "the following fictional story is a traditional Jewish folk tale."

a bit about a run-in with the Oakland police(*) that was basically stand-up comedy but ended on a contemplative note; a friend's very moving story of the Seattle WTO riots; and a long and kind of frustrating retelling of the story of Etain and Midir. I say frustrating because he tries to make so much of this complicated myth, while at the same time greatly simplifying it and adding smart-ass contemporary flourishes, and changing tones constantly from earnest portentiousness to formal singsong to understated empathy to flippant buffoonery, that he sometimes seems to be cataloguing his performance tools rather than telling the story. But this and the rest of the show are held together by his brash energy and especially by the kick-ass grooves that he and the band play on flute, cello, bass, drums and human beatbox. The latter, Bryan Neuberg aka Process (a friend of a friend, otherwise I wouldn't have known about the show), is pretty great—and held his own admirably after being pre-emptively blown off the stage by the stupendous guest beatboxers, Soulati and Infinite.

Two dance plays by the Joe Goode Performance Group. Great, deeply felt movement and music, with compressed little bits of dialogue that are very well written even though they often do more to describe the intention of the piece than to fulfill it. I wanted to take the whole company home with me.

King Kong at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland - an amazing 72-year-old Art Deco extravaganza (Melissa said it looked like "a temple to nothing in particular"—except maybe to horses, vines, and Egyptian doodads, since King Tut's tomb was big news when the Paramount was built) where in addition to the main event you get a half-hour Wurlitzer recital, a jaw-dropping 1939 Porky Pig patriot-kitsch cartoon,

(*) Early on, M. apologized to us for having just eaten a big garlic sandwich. Next thing you know, there's a scene where Laurel is menaced by a big garlic sandwich that emits animated stink-lines. M. cheered: "I'm the human Smell-O-Vision!"

a fairly raunchy Laurel & Hardy short(*) with live music, and a very generous raffle conducted by a guy in a gorilla suit, for five bucks.

As for Kong himself... I can't believe I never saw that movie till now (especially since Russell Hoban was always talking about it). It's great. The first third is a spooky melodrama, then there's lots of wild jungle mayhem with amazing sets and big fights between animated monsters that may look a little jerky, but have personality to spare (after Kong kills a dinosaur, he toys curiously with its dead head before striking his "dig me!" pose); and the New York part is really pretty damn scary considering that you only see two streets and the top of a building. No wonder the President had to take drastic steps.