I think Gödel's theorem is the most beautiful thing I know

1. If you live in the Boston area, CC@MIT's Breaking the Code is well worth your time. Their staging in the round could use a little work, as I saw much less of their Turing's face than I would have liked, but on the other hand I got a terrific view of the supporting cast, including Dafydd ap Rees as an excellent Dilly Knox—doubling as the sergeant responsible for Turing's arrest—and Danny Bryck in a brilliant piece of triple-casting, Christopher/Ron/Nikos, as if it were the same figure recurring across the turning points of Turing's life, the first love of his schooldays, half-rough in a leather jacket, speaking Greek; an Indian rope trick, like Deborah Kerr in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). I would have preferred the actress who played Pat Green to be a little less perky, but that's partly because I know that her real-life model, Joan Clarke, was incredibly awesome. And I will always regret not being of an age to appreciate Derek Jacobi in 1986, but I liked Allyn Burrows' Alan Turing, who can hold the stage with a discussion of cold porridge or mathematical incompleteness; he lets neither his occasional stammer get in the way of his eloquence nor his physical awkwardness his intensity of gesture (or his handiness with a radio) and he is right that what he does in bed shouldn't matter to anyone who isn't in bed with him, but he can't keep the laws of Britain c. 1952 from disagreeing. He reacts to the news that he's being charged with gross indecency as if it were a piece of bad mathematics: not only does it not compute, there's no way it's ever going to. 2+ 2 = 5. Let the sleeping death seep through . . . We took my father for his birthday observed; he liked it very much and was then depressed for the rest of the day, which is probably an appropriate reaction. The set was a three-dimensional diagram of the scrambling action of the rotors in an Enigma machine.

2. Score of the yesterday: Robin Muir's John Deakin: Photographs (1996). I'd barely heard of Deakin until February, when I felt too awful to attend SMSS and instead read Michael Peppiatt's Francis Bacon in the 1950s (2006), which reproduces several of his stark, scuffed, right-up-in-your-face portraits, mostly of Bacon and George Dyer, and it was clear I needed more stat. I didn't think anyone took photographs like him until the 1970's. Of course, neither of his collected retrospectives were to be found in the local used book stores and all of the good copies online started at expensive; then I walked into McIntyre & Moore's to look for a present for somebody else and there it was, entirely affordable. I pounced. Photographs like his are one of the reasons I wish I remembered to carry a camera more often, even if I know I'll never have the eye for them.

3. Turns out I like Waldorf salad, so long as it is (heretically) not made with mayonnaise. Now if I could just figure out how I feel about an Arrow collar.

4. For the day: PJ Harvey, "Yuri-G."