Fate and Curses

Last night's tweets;

The virgin pillow bride wore a white gown.
Easter candy fills an hour abscess.
Wal-Mat's chocolate bunny sickens a town.
Jehovah locked up His magic princess.

Obviously that first tweet is a reference to the South Korean man who married his pillow recently;



Tim showed me some pictures yesterday of the ceremony where the guy had put a white dress on the pillow. Though I'm afraid the pillow probably isn't a virgin. At least, I hope not. If you can't get any action out of a pillow bride, that's really sad. But I guess this story's plenty sad already.

The character on the pillow is Fate Testarossa, a name that immediately caught my imagination when I heard it yesterday. I started imagining a film noir where this guy's pillow gets stolen and no-one takes him seriously, however much he pleads, except one female police detective. The two work hard trying to track down the pillow and she starts to fall in love with him . . . But, although he starts to naturally reciprocate the feelings, his conscience won't allow him to betray Fate. Damn, it writes itself.

Last night I watched a 1980 production of Das Rheingold. It was very nice to see the opera performed and with English subtitles, though I wish I could've gotten my hands on a copy where the players wore period appropriate costumes. In this case, everyone's wearing what looks like clothes of the period in which the opera premiered (1869), which wasn't so bad. At least Wotan actually carried a spear and I loved the stilts and long, false arms Fasolt and Fafner wore.



It was strange reading of the bombing in Moscow a couple days ago while I happen to be at the place in War and Peace dealing with the 1812 Fire of Moscow during Napoleon's occupation of the city. The Wikipedia article mentions War and Peace;

Tolstoy, in War and Peace, suggests that the fire was not deliberately set, either by the Russians or the French, but was the natural result of placing a deserted and mostly wooden city in the hands of invading troops in summertime, when fires start nearly every day even with the owners present and a fully functioning police department, and that the soldiers will start fires–from smoking their pipes, cooking their food twice a day, and burning enemy's possessions in the streets. Some of those fires will inevitably get out of control. Without an efficient Fire Department, these house fires will spread to become neighborhood fires, and ultimately a city-wide conflagration.

Which is in line with much of Tolstoy's main argument in the book--that big, historical events are usually totally beyond the deliberate control of any leader, that the individual motives of various people at all levels of society are too diverse and chaotic to predict. Which seems an appropriate observation for the terrible bombings from a couple days ago--and for really all terrorist attacks in the modern age. They're almost completely impossible to predict or prevent, and they never seem to accomplish anything constructive for the perpetrators. It makes me think of Tolstoy's perspective on war being absurd and grotesque--a disconnected thing with delusional leaders at one end and senseless loss of life at the other.

From an earlier segment on The Battle of Borodino;

Neither Napoleon nor any of his generals had ever before seen such a ghastly spectacle, or so many slain in such a small area. The roar of guns, which had not ceased for ten hours, wearied the ear and gave a special significance to the scene (like music accompanying tableaux vivante). Napoleon rode up to the hilltop at Semyonovsk, and through the smoke saw ranks of soldiers in uniforms of unfamiliar colours. They were the Russians.

The Russians were drawn up in serried ranks behind the knoll and village of Semyonovsk, their guns booming incessantly and filling the air with smoke all along the line. It was no longer a battle: it was a protracted slaughter, futile for both the French and the Russians.

Napoleon pulled up his horse and again sank into the brown study from which Berthier had roused him. He could not stop what was going on before and around him, an enterprise ostensibly led by him and dependant on him, and for the first time, because of its lack of success, it struck him as unnecessary and appalling.