With a torch up on the rocks, you are a miracle

Tonight derspatchel and I had dessert at Finale. (We'd continued our tradition of dinner at Christopher's, but left in search of chocolate-ier things; also, I couldn't stand any more reproachful staring from the cocktail I'd had to abandon. It was made with Moxie, some anise-flavored bitters, muddled lemon, and ginger liqueur and somehow managed to be terrible. On looking up Fernet Branca, actually, the mystery is solved.) When our drinks came, he asked if it was Harpo Marx who had the story about being told the proper way to drink brandy—pace yourself with an ice cube in one hand, wait for it to melt before taking the next sip, repeat; "it'll keep you glowing all night." (I couldn't remember off the top of my head, but the answer is yes.) We weren't, of course, convinced that this was the ideal approach to brandy, unless you wanted to spend the evening with one hand freezing wet and the other full of liquor you couldn't drink. "It'd make a great comedy routine, though," I said.

And he was on the instant an anxious man with a handful of too slowly melting ice, looking longingly at his brandy and helplessly at his watch and hopelessly at the ice cubes—melting none the faster for being shuffled around like worry beads or surreptitiously huffed on like dice—in all ways a man thwarted by fancy-sounding advice and fate and nothing in his hands (on his wrist, on the tabletop) but air.

Yeah.

Then I heard a mermaid singing

1. This weekend:

rushthatspeaks baked a carrot cake. It was not a debacle, because the results were an entirely edible cake of the correct species, but I was only involved in the very last stages and the cake still tried to inflict on me as much damage as it could. (Arriving in Davis Square with the kindly loaned cake tray and its contents, I sent a text: "You are my best cousin. I am covered in melted cream cheese frosting. Your cake is a malevolent sod.") I brought it back to my family and it was eaten with delicious vindictiveness.

For my father's birthday cake, we made him a concentric arrangement of sixty cupcakes in three different flavors (almond, hazelnut, Grand Marnier chocolate) and two frostings (whipped cream with almond, chocolate buttercream) and all of them with candles, some of which turned out to be the sparkling kind and some of which turned out to be trick-relighting. Getting them lit in the first place was nearly as epic as blowing them out afterward; I have some very good shots of my brother with the crème brûlée torch looking like the textbook illustration of pyromania. There was smoke in fog-banks everywhere. Most of the candles had to be eventually, forcibly disposed of in water. We have so many cupcakes. A terrific time was had by all.

We were not in such a sugar coma that we could not make Emmanuel Music's La Clemenza di Tito, which is an opera with a flawed book and luminous music. This version was performed with a narrator, as in some productions of Bernstein's Candide; I would love to know whether it might be possible to rewrite it with spoken dialogue (even if it's an opera seria) and stage it fully, because the characterizations are fascinating. It's a fantasia of the Roman Empire, but it twists and twists inexorably toward tragedy and then it twists out into eucatastrophe at the last minute. I was reminded of certain less traditional film noir.

There was luck at the MIT Swapfest: my father and my brother now co-own a WWII-era Hewlett-Packard signal generator which we carried back to the car with the vague sense that we should have been laying charges as we retreated. The only photographs I have of it are seatbelted in to the front seat, because the car of which I am speaking is no longer the ancient rattling van in which sizeable quantities of furniture and/or lumber could be fit even without needing to remove the back seats, but a rather smaller sports model with no back seats to speak of. My father kept worrying it would shift position suddenly at a stop and deploy the airbag. This did not happen, I suspect because Rush-That-Speaks' carrot cake had used up all the you must be kidding me vibes for the weekend. I found the front and back covers to a November issue of Hugo Gernsback's Radio-Craft—I wish it had been the entire magazine, but the interior pages had apparently all oxidized out. There was no year listed, but derspatchel and I were able to deduce from the articles (Phantom Raiders, the radio on the SS America) that it was November 1940. The headline photograph showed a locomotive and a turntable: The Iron Horse Goes on Record.

There was neither Blues Jam nor Brattle Theatre, but at the point where I realized I had not eaten for over twenty-four hours, there was dinner. See previous. Don't order the Moxie Mule.

2. This morning:

I have seen Sofia Samatar's post on A Mayse-Bikhl.

It is July outside again, I have not slept and I am behind on my work, but I'm good.

[edit] Neal is flyby-visiting for lunch. Must not talk to him only about Alan Turing. Even if someone has now unearthed and digitized his Sherborne school reports.