Featured takoyaki. Karyna, my companion, spends every summer in Japan, and was thrilled. La Kid joined us, at the end of her workday.

… the sharia way.

Mr UD and Emilia, on the deck, early spring.

… and everyone sort of maneuvers a life around being corrupt… So that if you, say, get arrested for corruption, and even if you go to jail for a year or eight for corruption, okay. Occupational hazard, and maybe you’ve even anticipated and mentally adjusted to the possibility. You have a terrific attorney; you’ve acquainted yourself with the nicest lockups in your country, etc. You’re a man, after all, and men man up and face the music if they have to. UD has always, along these lines, been very fond of Enron’s Andrew Fastow, who, you know, did his time, and came out sardonic and stoical about it. He gives amusing lectures to business ethics classes.

But every now and then you encounter a figure of pathos, like Alan Garcia.Clearly not willing to play the game.

… Alan Dershowitz’s work is never done. Having finished advising for the defense team of a notorious alleged clit-slasher, he now moves on to his own defense in a defamation/sex trafficking case.

A song about cathedrals and Paris.

You know her voice from We’ll Meet Again at the end of Strangelove.

And listen: The life-force in that powerful voice ain’t chopped liver — she’s still alive, at 102.

… for today’s trip to the Enchanted Forest (see post below this one for details), but it was certainly a hoot sober. The feeble faded fragments of Mother Goose and Grimm tales UD remembers from her trips to the EF 58 years ago remain fully un-intact, their aura of the random malsain surreal even more powerful than before. It was all there – the chipping paint, the dusty magic potions, the sordid three-bear beds. Criminal neglect and magical mystery mingled to create a sense of desperate shabby enduring escapism… and ain’t dat life? Ain’t it da truth?

…our parents often took us to nearby Enchanted Forest, basically a bunch of cheap, chipped structures placed in a small suburban wood, representing fairy tales (here’s a vintage picture of the Hansel and Gretel house). UD doesn’t remember much of her madly happy childhood, but, for all its kitsch, Enchanted Forest made a big impression on her. She vaguely recalls having been thrillingly frightened by some of the darker-themed sculptures…

Anyway, UD and her sister are going there today – she will of course blog the experience.

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.