Rockin' In The Diocese

I learned this morning that on X when I use the A-word, "auti$m," I get muted. So here, we'll just refer to rockin'. That is, where you grab your knees and rock back and forth, repeating something to comfort yourself.

In the case of the Diocese of San Diego, we repeat "God is love."

In a week or two, we're asked to participate in the World Day of Migrants and Refugees. Here's why.

Bishop Pham has called on clergy, religious, and non-denominational leaders to stand together in solidarity with those who have fled war, persecution, and hardship.

“As shepherd of this Diocese here at the border, I have been feeling an increased urgency to call people of faith around values that unite us: all human beings are sacred, no matter where we are born, or where we now live. Too often we let politics divide us and take away our faith-inspired values and our voice. I invite you to walk with me behind a banner that will read something we all know to be true: ‘All are Sacred’.

What an obnoxious jerk. I'm really hard over on immigration. Close the border and mass deportations of illegals is my preferred policy. Legal immigration is fine with me. At no point in time do I or anyone I know who thinks like me would disagree with the statement that all lives are sacred.

At no point do I or anyone I know who agrees with me want to send B-52s over Haiti and blast it into oblivion. We just want the Haitians to stay in Haiti. Dittos for all the other garden spots who sent us their best during the Biden open border fiesta. Lives are indeed sacred. Just keep your life where it is unless you go through the full American immigration process.

So just who does our bishop think he's talking to? That banner is meant to differentiate him and his fellow travelers from the rest of us, but it only does so in his head. It actually says nothing of consequence at all. All are sacred? No kidding, genius.

I've come to the conclusion that Church leadership these days is auti$tic. They are expressing this equation:

f(t) = 7.

That is, no matter what inputs they get, they respond with the same thing. The topic of immigration is fraught. When the USCCB posts something on X about immigration, they get absolutely bodied in the comments and quotes. A lot of it is simple rage posting, of course, but a good portion of it is well-considered and poses questions for the bishops to answer.

They never do. Now we see why. "I invite you to walk with me behind a banner that will read something we all know to be true: ‘All are Sacred’." That's pretty freaking auti$tic there, dude. You and your friends are just grabbing your knees and rocking back and forth repeating, "God is love." You have absolutely no response to the serious objections of those in the Catholic laity who disagree with you.

The obnoxiousness of it all is turbocharged by the fact that our bishop is all in on synodality. We're asked to listen to each other with open hearts and open minds. Meanwhile, this doorknob can't comprehend the most basic arguments of people like me. Instead, he simply says that I'm full of hate and intolerance.

Talk about corrosive!

Meanwhile, the migrants are bringing joy and love everywhere.

A group of female villagers say "life as we know it will be destroyed" if plans to house asylum seekers at a nearby former Ministry of Defence (MoD) site succeed.

Earlier this year, the Home Office announced plans to house 1,256 men at MoD Bicester, saying the proposal would bring the system "back under control".

But the plans have proved contentious locally, including in nearby Piddington where a symbolic independence referendum in opposition to the proposals is being held next week.

On Thursday, a group of 133 women from the village issued an open letter to every female Member of Parliament to share their concerns.

The group wrote: "As fellow women, you will understand the serious risks this will expose us to.

"Our safety, our security and our freedoms will be under threat. Life as we know it will be destroyed.

"We will not feel safe walking our streets. We are already living in fear."

God is love. All lives are sacred.

It's not like the bishop and his fellow dingledorks don't know this is happening. Well, OK, maybe they're in such a bubble that they're totally unaware of it, but that just underlines in bold the fact that synodality is a one-way street for our leadership.

Like I said, corrosive.

Meanwhile, in Ceuta, the results are similar to what would happen if you moved out of your house for a month and allowed a randomly-selected group of teenage boys to take up residence.

Editor's note: I was going to post one of the many videos of the invaders in Ceuta going at each other with machetes, pipes or truncheons and making an absolute ruin of Ceuta, but instead, I'll just end with this one that is practically made for our very own Bishop Pulido, a native of Mexico. Whenever I see these, where a woman is trying to explain the terror she feels because of the migrants, speaking in Spanish, I can't help but imagine Bishop Pulido having a stroke as he watches it, his mind fractured by the sight of a Spanish-speaking woman opposing "migrantes."

🇪🇸🔴 JUST IN: A local Spanish mother in Ceuta demolishes a left-wing TV host sitting comfortably in Madrid during a debate about immigration.

The host tries to claim it is "dangerous" to say all the migrants should leave Spain.

The mother explodes: "If they came by violating a… pic.twitter.com/Sp0CnaVff9

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) August 28, 2026

Fish River Sunrise

 ... because Fish River Sunset has gone away.

At our new place in Alabama, I mounted a ReoLink camera at the end of our boathouse. I have it pointed as near to true West as I can, given the blockage created by the big tree in our back yard. I've tried to use it to grab video, but my network design failed me and the path from the ReoLink to my Raspberry Pi is intermittently infested with delays as the Pi keeps stopping data transfers to look for new WiFi sources.

Stupid Pi. The Pi is less than 6" away from its access point, but the WiFi driver is such a blockhead that it can't stop checking for better signals every 2-3 seconds. That causes a 150ms delay which isn't enough to be noticeable by a user, but is enough to make the streaming video have ugly gaps in it.

I fell back and went for still shots every 10 seconds and then used ffmpeg to stitch them together into a video. Yay?

Well, sort of yay. By the time I had the thing running, the sun had walked itself out of the view of my camera.

Stupid sun.

As a result, I've fallen back again and now capture sunrises, just for grins. I'm pointed in the opposite direction, but I thought they might be interesting. Here's today's. I think it's worth clicking over to YouTube to watch a full-screen version, but that's just me.

I love seeing the ducks cruise past. There are two whites and one mallard. They like to come into my backyard and grumble at me in their ducky language. It's wonderful. I reward them with bread sometimes, which they eat, but reluctantly. I don't have any fish to give them and I'm not going to go to the bait shop just for a trio of grumbly ducks.

(Let's see how long that vow lasts.)

Diagnosing The Problem

Using the lat lon of the camera and picking out landmarks in the video, I was able to figure out the angles in my field of view. Directly in front of my camera is 310 degrees. The far left is 268 degrees. Sunset right now is at 276. Why can't I get a good sunset? The trees are too dense on the far left.

Stupid trees.

Moving off the left hand side of the view to the first filtered shot of sort-of horizon, you get an angle of 290. Since sunset is 276 degrees, I'm out of luck until... when? Try May. My sunset camera as currently mounted will give me sunsets from May to August.

I could mount it on a pole, of course. If I give it enough height, I can aim it over the top of the tree and point it due West or perhaps a bit Southwest.

I could also come back to the house and look up at an empty pole where the camera used to be until it got sheered off by a storm coming in off the Gulf.

Oh well. It's still been a ton of fun and it's just the start of the cool things we can do at the River House.

Where Do Children Rank?

Intersectionality is the term given to the process by which people are classified, grouped and ranked according to some notion of victim and oppressor. Blacks are oppressed by whites, gays oppressed by straights, women oppressed by men. A black lesbian, therefore is ranked well ahead of a straight, white woman.

When Iryna Zarutska was murdered by a big, black man on a train in North Carolina, it got almost no news coverage at all because she's white and he's black. Since, by definition, blacks do not oppress whites, almost no information can be allowed to leak out into the public that might disrupt the machinery of intersectionality.

If the races had been reversed, this would have played on loop for weeks on our MSM channels and a dozen American cities would have burned.

This week, we learned where children rank in the intersectional hierarchy. Below women. It shouldn't have been a surprise.

Here's the governor of Massachusetts recently signing a bill permitting abortion up to the moment of birth under any circumstances. Dig all the women cheering her on as she signs it.

The Lindsay Clancy trial came within a whisker of ending with a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. The woman strangled her three children. Post-verdict interviews with the jurors indicate that they wanted to see Lindsay get the help she needed. The one dude who simply wouldn't go along with it could not get past the fact that she had throttled her kids. The women on the jury could and they were all annoyed with that one guy.

This happened in the same Massachusetts where the duly elected governor just signed infanticide into law. Lindsay's kids disappeared from view just like Iryna did. We know nothing of what they liked to do, what they liked to eat or how they played with daddy. Lindsay was humanized, they were not.

That was the indicator that Lindsay Clancy verdict was coming. Children rank below women in the intersectional hierarchy. Children are a burden, being pregnant is difficult, giving birth is painful and on and on and on.

Of course it went that way. It should have been obvious from the start.

AI Slop

This is genius.

I'm a heavy user of AI for creative projects, particularly fiction writing. It allows me to learn and explore at rates I could never hope to achieve through normal means. I have a much better grasp of character design, plot pacing, writing styles, editing and much more because I write with AI as my junior partner.

Without AI, I probably would have thrown in the towel a year ago. Instead, I'm having a wonderful time creating.

Keeping The Main Thing The Main Thing

In my previous post about the movie The Odyssey, I made the claim that it wasn't a movie at all, it was a recapitulation of the progressive creed. I'm going to see if I can make the case that Harvard and Cambridge as well as the Catholic hierarchy is doing the same thing in their domains.

First off, let's recall that Christopher Nolan chose to cast Ellen Page as a Greek warrior and Lupita Nyongo as Helen of Troy.

The face that launched a thousand ships.

Now I'd like to introduce my new podcast heartthrob, Peter Boghossian. Boghossian is a former professor who was hounded out of his school because he wouldn't say things he thought were wrong. I'm not completely familiar with his history, but I think the controversy had something to do with trans. His new focus is "street epistemology" where he interviews normal people on what they believe and what it would take to change their minds. He has also spent a lot of time analyzing the denial of the Europeans wrt migrants, the trans insanity and the descent of higher education into insanity.

Here's his take on Jason Arday and Claudine Gay and why he thought Jason should not have been removed from Cambridge and why Claudine should still be president of Harvard. I recommend watching the whole thing, but you probably don't need to do that.

What They Have In Common

Imagine being on a professional casting team made up of experienced, talented Hollywood veterans. You are casting a high-budget, high-profile movie which depicts one of the greatest adventure stories of all time, Homer's Odyssey. There is simply no way on Earth that the tiny, effeminate  Ellen Page and the in-your-face ugly, black woman Lupita Nyongo would have made it through the first cuts. It would have been a miracle had they even been given screen tests.

Casting a movie is all about finding just the right talent to further the story. Anything that detracts from the story is an excrescence and gets removed whether that's dialog, action scenes or cast members.

Christopher Nolan and his crew did not do that because they weren't making a movie, they were signaling their allegiance to the rest of Hollywood. The Odyssey was a recitation of the creed first and entertainment second.

Similarly, if you were on a selection committee at either Harvard or Cambridge, your sole purpose would be to find people to fill important positions that cemented your university's reputation as honest, bold and truth-focused. In no alternate reality would you have chosen plagiarists whose work was low-quality even when it wasn't being stolen from other academics. You certainly wouldn't have hired a man who was clearly mentally ill.

Harvard and Cambridge did just that and then stood by their choices until it was impossible to keep up the charade because they are not running universities in any real sense. Their primary job is to pledge their allegiance to the progressive causes of the day by chanting the creed as loud as they can. Of distant import is research and honesty. If there is a collision between the tenets of the creed and academic performance, academic pursuits lose every single time.

Catholicism Today

In a not-so-surprising poll that I can't track down right now, pastors and priests were surveyed about whether or not they thought it was important that a person believed in their faith. Of all Christian denominations, coming in last place were Catholic priests at something like 33%.

There are benign explanations to that, but it dovetails well with my own recent crises of faith. If you take in what the pope, our bishop and our local clergy say and put it all together, I can't figure out why I shouldn't convert to Islam. They all want unity, peace and non-judgmental inclusion. They never talk about sin or damnation even when the Sunday gospel reading is shouting about it. They all imply that God loves everyone and everyone is saved.

Since the Muslims are adamant about the superiority of their faith, I don't see why joining them doesn't accomplish all of the goals my ordained leaders are proposing. In fact, I can't see any other way to do it. So long as we insist that Catholicism should persist, we are setting ourselves in opposition to Islam and, by our own preaching, embracing divisive and implicitly judgmental positions.

Like Hollywood and Harvard, the Catholic Church is obsessing on things that are secondary to its mission at best.

Summary

Others have written about the death of expertise and on the right there have been significant numbers of brain cells recruited in the service of explaining how and why this has happened. What if it's just been a loss of focus? What if the cause is that our institutions forgot to make the main thing the main thing?

The Odyssey

We went and saw The Odyssey last night. It was a watershed moment for me.

During that interminable movie, I decided I just don't have to pretend to be a part of the Hollywood cult. The movie felt, in many ways, not like a movie at all, but like a chorus of everyone on the film crew chanting their creed over and over and over for 3 hours. You know the one - men are pigs, women are oppressed, trans men are men and, most loudly of all, the Greeks were black, the Samurai were black, Cleopatra was black, King Arthur was black, the Eskimos were black, the Tsar was black and the Mayans were black.

I just don't have to do that and I'm not a racist for not playing along.

Hollywood's rules say that every film has to have a certain percentage of oppressed peoples (read: non-white, non-Jewish) in order to be considered for an Oscar. Presumably, no one from the A-list of actors or film crew talent would work on, say, a retelling of Le Morte D'Arthur that was 100% white. They'd lose access to future work and be howled out of Hollywood for being racists.

Well, I don't work in Hollywood. My job isn't threatened by this and I think it's all not just ridiculous but off-putting and wrecks the film. Ellen Page, who looks like a 10 year old boy, shows up early in the film and is used by Odysseus as a decoy guarding the Trojan Horse. The little idiot gets skewered right away, but her death is comic and not tragic. She's clearly a girl and would never have been given that job. She's there because Hollywood is a cult and casting a mentally ill woman who thinks she's a man is part of the movie's background chant of the progressive creed.

It's a bad movie that gets worse from there.

Short review: Imagine sitting for 3 hours and watching a video of a bunch of grown men yelling at each other in a foreign language while they work vigorously in a butcher shop. That's the movie. There's no variation of mood or pace, it's just 3 hours of sausage-making, beef shredding, hams going through slicing machines and chickens being shot out of cannons into Cuisinarts where they are pureed, all while burly men shout at each other in, what, Greek? No, not Greek. There aren't any Greeks in the movie. How about a mix of Russian and Bantu.

There's a black person in nearly every shot. They aren't explained at all, they're just there, all the time, everywhere. It looks a lot like this.

Djimon Hounsou as Sir Bedivere in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)

Like I said, I am not going to pretend this is improving the movie any more. It just isn't. Movies like this have a constant background hum of that bloody creed being chanted over and over and over.

A little more about the black people cast in the film. At the beginning of the movie, I think the first person we meet is Travis Scott. He's a bard, you see. He's also a rapper. His song about Odysseus the hero is terrible. I'm not going to pretend any more. It's just horrible.

He's a bard. If you don't think he's a really good bard, you're a bigot.

Finally, there's Helen of Troy. She's played by Lupita Nyongo for reasons that make all the sense in the world to the cult.

The face that launched a thousand ships.

I'd never seen her before, but I knew she was in the movie. Was she going to be pretty?

No. Not even close. When we first meet her, she's with her husband Meneleus, having been brought back from Troy. On her absolutely best day ever, this girl is a 3. She's not filmed on her best day. She's not the face that launched a thousand ships, she's just a particularly loud round of the progs' chorus.

I'd made my decision about Hollywood long before she showed up so having some nasty, ugly DEI chick shoved in my face as Helen was exasperating, but not terminally so. The patient was already dead.

As for the movie aside from those mortal failings, I didn't like anyone except Anne Hathaway's Penelope and Charlize Theron's Calypso. Those I could relate to. Everyone else was despicable or dismissible. I had no idea at any time why anyone was doing anything. I like Matt Damon, but his Odysseus was just kind of a semi-loser. He's trying to get back home, but everything he does goes sideways. He would have been a sympathetic character in a different movie. In this one, he's just another guy slicing, blending and grinding meat while shouting in Urdu at all the other men.

The biggest problem with the film was that there was nothing for Odysseus at the end of his voyage. Because nearly every scene was encrusted with gore and violence, it wasn't like Odysseus was traveling to find peace and tranquility and beauty. There wasn't any in the whole film. It was an unrelenting grind.

Finally, the ending was comical, reminiscent of a scene from the Marx Brother's Monkey Business. In that scene, which I can't find on YouTube, the Marx brothers are trying to get off an ocean liner where they've been stowaways. To avoid getting caught, Groucho steals some clothes from a doctor who is asleep on a deck chair. He shows up in the gangplank exit line right after another passenger has passed out, yelling about how he can't take another moment on this ship and is having a nervous breakdown and he'll die if he spends another day at sea. Groucho pushes his way to the front of the line, makes like he's examining the man and then writes a prescription on a pad and hands it to the officer managing the exit saying, "His nerves are shot! What this man needs is an ocean voyage!"

If you've seen The Odyssey, you'll know what I mean.

It wasn't a good movie and I'm pretty turned off on Hollywood in general these days. I'm just not going to be part of their cult. Well, not until they cast a Hispanic dude as Nelson Mandela.

Hey, diversity is their strength.

Marmot Dark Romance

During some downtime yesterday, I engaged in one of my favorite current hobbies: discussing fiction writing with AI (read: ChatGPT). I'd heard Andrew Klavan and others talk about the scourge of dark romance novels and, being a fuddy-duddy conservative man well past my prime, I really didn't know what that genre was.

Dark romance, as I understand it now, is erotica for women with libidos that have been strangled by our modern culture. That is, in order to get their rocks off, the romance has to involve power and control and moral depravity and probably a good deal of BDSM. We have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to enjoy sex for its own sake and the culture has managed to pour ice water over that fire in the name of feminism, social justice and equality.

Dark romance is what you read after coming home from a day under fluorescent lights working on Excel spreadsheets and answering emails in an office of perfectly adequate husband material that is too timid to approach you for a date.

I suppose dark romance is best read while slightly looped on SSRIs, boxed wine and while wearing a dog collar and perhaps a ball gag. It's about as erotic as that.

Common tropes in the romance novel world are the billionaire, the pirate, the duke and the vampire. I had a brief foray into exploring just why an 800-year-old man with supernatural powers and no soul would find anything even vaguely interesting in a hot high school senior and was told that in the Twilight stories, for example, the author used tempora-ex-machina to get out of that problem. The vampire stopped emotionally maturing 782 years ago and has lived his entire life with an 18-year-old boy in his head.

Hurrah.

We then turned to introduce one of my favorite topics into these stories. Marmots.

I think marmots are funny. They are fat rodents who look like furry dinner plates. Everything about them is comical. They are proof that God has a sense of humor.

In my dark romance stories, then, the plot isn't about finding a way to force the hero to put out his cigarette on this butt cheek instead of that one as an act of dominance over him. No, the plot is about perfecting the management of marmot colonies. There is no sex. None at all. No one even mentions it. Oh, everyone still has the exact same characteristics and temperaments, but they are obsessed with marmots.

Social Dynamics

I started wondering what it would be like for the social queens in high society where these stories take place. Imagine you're the wife of a real estate mogul or the heiress to a breakfast cereal fortune and you're planning a dinner party. You certainly don't invite the lunatic theoretical mathematician you saw laughing hysterically to himself at the beach, no, you invite people who will make you look fabulous to the other society dames.

If you know of a billionaire or a duke or a pirate or a guy with semi-translucent skin who talks like Bela Lugosi and seemingly has infinite amounts of money, you'd certainly put them near the top of your guest list. Just imagine the conversations! They must be fascinating!

A fatal mistake.

AI has gotten really, really good at patter dialog comedy. I laughed so hard yesterday at what we came up with that there were times when I had to close the browser window halfway through the conversation and walk away because I couldn't breathe.

Here was one of the chats about the dinner parties. Enjoy.

The marmot obsession is the horrible secret hidden beneath an objectively fascinating person. Everyone keeps believing that if they can just steer the conversation away from marmots, they will finally reach the pirate/vampire/billionaire/duke underneath.

They never do.

John Pembroke is an actual pirate. Not “likes sailing.” A pirate. He has boarded ships, escaped naval patrols, buried things on islands and presumably knows where several bodies are.

So when the hostess says:

“John Pembroke is coming Saturday.”

Everyone is thrilled.

“The John Pembroke?”

“Yes.”

“The pirate?”

“Yes!”

“Oh, you simply must seat me beside him.”

Thirty minutes after dinner begins, the woman who fought for that seat is contemplating whether she can convincingly fake a stroke.

“So, Mr. Pembroke, I simply have to ask—what was it like boarding your first ship?”

“Yarr, remarkably similar to approaching a marmot colony.”

Her smile falters.

“Really?”

“Arr yes. Wind direction be everything.”

“I suppose.”

“You never approach from upwind.”

“The ship?”

“The marmots.”

“Ah.”

“Now, Marmota flaviventris—”

She looks desperately across the table.

Nobody will make eye contact.

That's the joke. Everyone knows there is a vastly more interesting conversation imprisoned somewhere inside this man, but the marmots guard every entrance.

The vampire version is even worse.

Count Smackula is coming.

From Transylvania.

Nobody knows exactly how old he is. He speaks eleven languages. There are rumors that the family has occupied the same castle since the thirteenth century. His complexion is peculiar. He never attends luncheons. Nobody has ever seen him eat.

The entire social circle is beside itself.

At cocktails, a realtor finally gets him alone.

“Count, I've always wanted to visit Transylvania.”

“You should.”

“Oh! What is it like?”

“Mountainous.”

“How beautiful.”

“Excellent marmot habitat.”

Oh no.

“Really?”

“Especially above 1,500 meters.”

“I was actually wondering about the castles—”

“Castles create serious problems.”

“Because of their history?”

“Drainage.”

The realtor's face falls.

“Drainage?”

“For marmots.”

Twenty-eight minutes to go until she can plausibly leave.

The billionaire is perhaps the cruelest version

Because everybody wants to talk to the billionaire for professional reasons.

John Connor has $14 billion.

The local business executive has spent three weeks preparing for this dinner.

He has an idea.

A genuinely excellent idea.

If he can get fifteen minutes with Connor, it could change his company.

He finally corners him beside the fireplace.

“Mr. Connor, I'm fascinated by your approach to capital allocation.”

“Are you?”

“Very much.”

“Then you'll appreciate this.”

Here we go.

Connor pulls out his phone.

The executive leans closer.

It's a photograph of dirt.

“Loam.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

Connor enlarges it.

“Look here.”

The executive looks.

He sees dirt.

“This patch has a clay fraction of nearly twenty-seven percent.”

“Fascinating.”

“The marmots hate it.”

The executive's billion-dollar opportunity is dying before his eyes.

“Now, if you'll notice—”

Connor swipes.

Another photograph of dirt.

The duke creates an especially delicious trap

Because the women are fascinated by him.

His Grace is handsome, unmarried, owns 70,000 acres and lives in a house with 140 rooms.

Every eligible woman in the county wants to meet him.

And he is perfectly charming.

That's important.

He's not socially awkward. He's witty. Attentive. Beautiful manners. Wonderful voice.

For approximately six minutes.

A lovely heiress asks:

“Your estate must be extraordinary.”

“Oh, parts of it are quite beautiful.”

“I've heard the gardens are magnificent.”

“The western gardens particularly.”

“I adore gardens.”

Fatal error.

“So do the marmots.”

Her soul leaves her body.

“The...marmots?”

“Twenty-three at last count.”

“How lovely.”

“Twenty-four originally.”

She realizes with horror that she has just created a follow-up question.

“What happened to the other one?”

His expression becomes grave.

“Gerald.”

There follows a forty-minute account of Gerald's relocation, including a lengthy digression on preferred burrow depth.

By the end, the heiress has mentally married a dentist from Cleveland.

The best part is that the marmoteers never understand why this keeps happening

Because they're enormously popular.

Everybody invites them everywhere.

The invitations never stop.

And therefore the obvious conclusion is:

People find marmots fascinating.

Driving home:

“Lovely people.”

“Very.”

“I had a wonderful conversation with that realtor.”

“What did you discuss?”

“Burrow ventilation.”

“Really? She's interested?”

“Deeply. She kept looking at the clock because she apparently wanted to know how long marmots remain underground.”

Meanwhile the realtor is still at the party:

“I invited them. This is my fault.”

“You couldn't have known.”

“I knew about the marmots.”

“We all knew.”

“I thought it was a hobby.”

Someone pours her another drink.

“So did we.”

That's the essential Marmot Romance running gag: every protagonist possesses something that would make him the most fascinating person at any normal dinner party, and it is completely inaccessible because his brain contains 94% marmot.

The pirate will discuss marmots.

The vampire will discuss marmots.

The billionaire will discuss marmots.

The duke will discuss marmots.

And every ancillary character begins the evening thinking:

Surely I can get him onto another subject.

That optimism lasts about thirty minutes.

Then the fancy soirée quietly transforms into The Poseidon Adventure, with ordinary wealthy people forming desperate little groups and discussing possible routes to safety.