Yesterday I found out that Sid Caesar, Arthur Rankin, and Maggie Estep had died. Earlier this week, Shirley Temple. Philip Seymour Hoffmann the week before that. Death, this is a busman's holiday. Go back to the office and do some paperwork or something. Just stay off the streets. Everyone else, have some wombats.

I dreamed of arriving as an unemployed magician in a city that was mostly like Boston, except where it had outcroppings of monumental sculpture surfacing through parking lots and incorporated into the sides of apartment blocks, slowly eroding under the brick-weight of progress, defaced with asphalt and concrete and yet oddly invigorated by the transformation, as if a forest were taking them over, or the sea. I worked mostly with silver, fragments of broken jewelry—I kept a ring when it crumbled in three pieces, saving only the gem which I couldn't use—and with bones, small or splintered enough that I could carry them in a drawstring bag in my backpack. Magic required a lot of talking, like patter with a crowd, except that I had to convince the objects as well as the onlookers. The same tense cold in the stomach, not knowing if the trick will work, before the little heap of dusty or shining things in front of me started to run into one another like tipped watercolors and fade. There was plot, but I can't remember it. I was at a hotel. At one point I was cooking. There were some coasters, but I just wanted to ride them. Even after I woke, that was still true.

"so yes this is LITERALLY the 600-years-old butt song from hell." What it says on the tin. It makes me genuinely happy for humanity that there are people who not only transcribe music off the buttocks of the fifteenth-century damned, but make the MIDI file available online for free.

[edit] and now the Guardian has noticed. Yay, the internet. "None of this could have been foreseen by Bosch."