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I agree on the Hilary thing. The female Pharaoh is old news. Bill did preside over the Seven Fat Years we had recently.

It heralds the election of Hilary Clinton as Pharoahdent…um, President.

That thought came to mind for me as well…

23 Skidoo!

http://news.africast.com/africastv/article.php?newsID=62289

I wonder what this might herald…

In the future, the entire world will be stitched together into one giant sprawling airport.

This is sort of what Coruscant in Revenge of the Sith looks like. I took an aviation class a long time ago and I recognized the look of the maps when I saw the movie.

Lots of lava on Mustafar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafar

I’ve also realized lately that I lived as much of the musical as I’d written before I went down there and it went basically the same as how I’d left it in the open-ended version, with all the same problems and subplots and unresolved components. I knew what I was doing though all along: that the only way I could find how that story needed to go was to actually live through it. Otherwise it wouldn’t have worked™.

Catharsis only works when you’re swung back and forth violently from extremes

I mean, take a great song from a great musical; Favorite Things from The Sound of Music. Now imagine it being sung by Barney the Dinosaur or Teletubbies in the midst of the 90s to children with rich parents at home: It would be completely trite crap, now wouldn’t it? But now take the original, sung by a wayward nun in the midst of Nazi germany, a woman without a place in a world where 11 million PeopleWithoutPlacesâ„¢ were being killed in concentration camps. She is using what little power she has to cheer up children God has given her to care for in the midst of the “storm” unfolding outside. In this context, surrounded by shadows and horrors, its one of the most beautiful moments in any musical. Think about it.

The point is that within the context of The Musical, badness is the necessary backdrop to highlight the goodness in simple things, like the song sung to children in the midst of the storm.

(Of course the opposite also applies. If you want to highlight horror, you need to take a bunch of young couples, put them in a house with many resources, and give them the dionysian pleasures of sex and booze. Within the context of these pleasures, with their whole lives ahead of them, the guy in the hockey mask truly looks scary; precisely because they have *everything to lose*. But try pitting Freddy Kreuger against Cool Hand Luke, and you don’t really have much of a movie, now do you?)

Do a search on google images for ‘drama’. What do you see? Two masks, intimately connected, one smiling and one frowning. These two elements are nailed to each other, crucified to each other back to back in drama: Every story has these elements, every writer must use both; the horrible as the backdrop of the beautiful, the beautiful as the backdrop of the horrible, and every other combination of dualities you can imagine. Please though, don’t seek any existential meaning from this fact, because there is there is NONE. We are not the disciples of Janus.The whole thing is merely a device, something that is used. And however its used, the goal is always the same: Illumination. The illumination may allow you to see the sacrifice of Christ in a nanny singing to children during a storm, or the Devil in a piece of sports equipment. But its always illumination, and this goal is singular, not dual.

So cheer up and eat your plate of Bloodsexdeathâ„¢. Its good for you.