Go ahead and signal your attitude toward your subject with a wittle bitty simile at the end of your opening paragraph:

“One thing that’s always been true in New York,” says Dan Doctoroff, “is that if you build it, they will come.” He is referring to Hudson Yards, the $25bn, 28-acre, mega-project that he had a critical hand in originating while he was deputy mayor of the city under Michael Bloomberg in the early 2000s. He can now look down on his co-creation every day from his new office in one of the development’s towers and see hundreds of people climbing up and down Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel sculpture, like tiny maggots crawling all over a rotting doner kebab.

LOL.

… up in flames.

Nearly a thousand years of history going up in flames.

********************

… Like a prodigious skeleton of fire
Leaving an immense void — twisted iron, indented
 clock wheels, broken muted bells.

   Foolish imposter doors which did not open
Hang in high galleries. Perforated the great
 roses — intense blues, purples,

   Reds so warm and vigorous which burnished
The rays of the midday sun. The gargoyles drip
 heavy tears. I hear the bells falling.

   Wind is raging among the naves and corpses.

— Daisy Aldan, The Destruction of Cathedrals.

*********************

From the Notre Dame School of Polyphony (1160-1250).

Begum allegedly … stitched IS fighters into suicide bomb vests so that they could not remove them …

Those allegations are believed to come from the interrogation of other Western IS members by the CIA and Dutch Military Intelligence, but have not been verified.

*********************

Some Brits are unhappy about having to pay for her legal representation.

Tory MP Philip Davies [said] the decision was “absolutely disgusting“.

He said: “How she has been allowed to sponge off taxpayers’ money to get back into a country that she hates is absolutely ridiculous.”

*********************

Here’s the right way to look at it. England should be willing to spend large sums to keep this woman and others like her out. Think of it as part of the defense budget. And don’t forget:

Both [violent Islam and fascism] evidently suffer from a death wish. It is surely not an accident that both of them stress suicidal tactics and sacrificial ends, just as both of them would obviously rather see the destruction of their own societies than any compromise with infidels or any dilution of the joys of absolute doctrinal orthodoxy. Thus, while we have a duty to oppose and destroy these and any similar totalitarian movements, we can also be fairly sure that they will play an unconscious part in arranging for their own destruction, as well.

Woolly mammoth goes extinct.

*****************

UD thanks S. for the link.

Oh right. Georgia ain’t got no law infringing your right to leave a loaded gun in your car and then exit the car with your toddlers in it.

I know it’s not supposed to make you laugh, but it makes it sound as though you turn to it only when the utilities fail.

SHORT OF ELECTRICITY, FOOD, AND WATER, VENEZUELANS TURN TO RELIGION

************

Americans? Not so much.

Probably forever. And get a load of all the headlines, many of them featuring his Notre Dame connection. Which you can instantly confirm by clicking on his... Hero Page. UD remains baffled as to why football factories don’t employ someone (respectable universities do) to take down the pages of the disgraced.

After an evening rainfall, a misty Saturday morning in UD‘s woods.

The effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure.

Oliver Sacks

… (the wedding took place under somewhat strained circumstances), seems to have the inside track for Maryland House Speaker.

Les UDs have been selling, via Bonham’s, a number of just these Fangor paintings from the ‘sixties. The next sale of one of their Fangors is on May 16 in New York City.

An excellent article about al-Hol camp raises the right questions.

The reporter’s walk through the camp reveals, in all its fullness, the surreality, depravity, and indescribable stupidity of its inmates.

But it also gets something fundamental wrong: The children are of course innocents, and governments are slowly identifying their child nationals and, if they can, taking them out of the camp. But “their women and children”? The women were also the enemy, fully paid-up, active ISIS members; and if descriptions of some of them in the camp are accurate, they are still very much caliphate combatants.

The Auschwitz Memorial and Museum gets it said. Little shocks ol’ UD, but she must say she is shocked by this.

… monstruos.

The German Minister [of the interior] said it would be a “good move” to set up an international court that would try foreign jihadists rather than have Germany and other nations repatriate fighters and their families back to their home countries, especially since “terrorism is an international issue,” according to Die Zeit.

“That’s always better, for me, than bringing all ISIS fighters of German nationality [back] to Germany,” before trial, he noted.

“If several states have a prosecution claim, the trials should be conducted there. Trials should be conducted where ISIS fighters are now in detention, for example in Iraq,” the official said.

Be on the faculty of Brigham Young University.