A known fact

Bloodthirsty ghouls like Greg Abbot and Wayne Lapierre, Ron DeSantis, and Marjorie Taylor-Greene (if I'm misspelling her name, don't tell me; I'm not going to look it up and risk seeing a picture of her) love school shootings, the bigger the better. They blare "Celebration" by Kool & the Gang and pop champagne corks whenever a new one happens.  I can neither confirm nor deny that they're incapable of reaching orgasm without envisioning giant stacks of dead five-year-olds, but people are certainly saying as much.  Some people might say that's unfair, but those probably wouldn't be grieving parents.

William Beckford, Vathek, an Arabian Tale (1787)

I had really wanted to read this for a long time.  Seems like a fun bit of Orientalism, maybe.

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Mario Vargas Llosa, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973)

So the Peruvian army has a problem: their troops stationed in remote areas are sexually frustrated, with few women around, rape is commonplace, and generally the whole situation is bad for morale.  Captain Pantoja isn't really interested in this, but he is extremely dilligent and devoted to the army, so he is assigned to create a "Special Service" of prostitutes to try to ameliorate the situation.  This is made even more difficult for him by the fact that he's not allowed to reveal his ties to the army, and he's not allowed to tell his family what he's really doing.  Seems rough, but in fact, due to his conscientious nature, he succeeds beyond anyone's wildest dreams.  It's probably not much of a spoiler, though, to reveal that everything does not end up going wholly according to plan.

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A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies

 I'm glad that pro-Ukraine sentiment is as nigh-universal as it is.  Sure, there are some right-wing Putin-apologist shitheads, but the message doesn't really seemed to have spread to the vast majority of people.  There's a bank around here that now says "Pray for Ukraine" on its electronic sign.  If you think a dang bank would ever put up a sign that they feared was going to cause any controversy whatsoever...well, I disagree.

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Wendy Walker, The Secret Service (1995)

Wendy Walker is slightly hard to find online just because there's a thriller author of the same name who has a bigger internet footprint.  I don't resent her!  That's fine!  I hope her books are good, even though they're not likely to be anything I would want to read.  Still, the Wendy Walker in question here DID manage to score wendywalker.com, so...win.  In a sense.

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Ivan Franko, Fox Mykyta (1905)

Franko was a Ukrainian poet, the author of a poem about Moses that I recently saw an opera based on.  Well, there's also an opera based on THIS, and I found that there's an English translation/retelling of it, so I decided to check that out.  I haven't seen the opera yet, but I have read this, so I thought I would note it here.

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Solidarity

 I sometimes play a picross game called Pictopix that lets users create their own puzzles.  Here's one that came up recently:

And from OperaVision:

Go watch it!

Even if it sometimes might seem performative, I think it's important to make one's commitment to human rights loud and visible.  I mean, it's too early to really know anything for sure, but I feel like this is the most fucked-up thing (not counting atrocities like the Rwandan Genocide) that's ever happened in my lifetime, and the most likely to lead to dire geopolitical outcomes.  There would be something ironic about nuclear war having been avoided during the Cold War, allowing everyone to relax a little, only to all destroy ourselves a few years later in a completely different way.  Like a spy who carefully avoids a gauntlet of death traps only to trip on his shoelaces and fall and brain himself.