Titans, "Enormitous" and The Rostov Two-Step

I have no idea what just happened

Riveting, bleakly hopeful and significantly alarming: Prigozhin’s weird will-I, won’t-I rebellion.

The Financial Times has an interesting quote this morning saying, essentially, that Prigozhin just had no idea what to do once he’d started. He was just pissed off and wanted to make a point: he wasn’t going to answer to Shoigu and lose out on the cashflow and caché that came with answering direct to Putin. Wow, did that escalate quickly. Half way through yesterday he was literally threatening to raid a storage warehouse for tactical nuclear weapons. Pretty much the worst water-cooler row in history.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky - inevitably not neutral, but equally inevitably well-informed - says it’s far from over in terms of instability in Putin’s Russia. And that seems to be a common view. Well, you’d think so - the spectacle of Wagner driving towards Moscow didn’t scream calm control.

For me, among other weird things, it had the feel of a sandpit row played out huge, with money and tanks and death. The ordinary business of disagreement and bad blood, but rendered enormous (and - probably not a word - enormitous). Basically, in my context, a Titan argument.

I’m trying to put something non-fictional together on the madness of kings - or Titans - right now, and the world is just absolutely firehosing options onto the ground in front of me. My favourite: apparently “Donald Trump Is A Titan”.

I honestly could not ask for a better jumping off point. This is the world made strange in one image. There is SO MUCH going on there.

Obviously, on the “billionaire madness” issue there is the upcoming Musk-Zuckerberg Cage Match. Seriously, they both need some quiet time.

And there was also the submersible. That was horrible, and it does not feel appropriate to hold it up as an example of absurd things that people do when they are rich, even though the more you dig into the submersible and its history the more alarming the story becomes. To my untutored eye, at least, it just doesn’t look as if the thing was built for that kind of dive. But don’t ask me, ask James Cameron. And what was the sub called?

Oh, good God. It was called ‘Titan’.

I tell you, sometimes you really do feel that the universe is screwing with you.

The story of the sub made everyone remember the Iuventa crew, busted for saving refugees from drowning - well, I say everyone, I mean “lots of people on my social media feed whom I like”. The comparison is stark: huge air/sea search for the Titan vs prosecution for sea rescue for the Iuventa. Since that weirdness kicked off in 2019 and has been quite slow ever since, they mostly seemed to be quoting four year old articles. More up-to-date information is here, and hell, you could even donate.

And on a separate note: the climate crisis has arrived and our governments need to stop screwing around. I know you know this, but we - and more importantly anyone in government, management or similar - need to hear it AND ACT ON IT.

Incidentally, I think “enormitous” actually isn’t a word, which is slightly perplexing because it means there is no word for the quality of possessing “enormity” which is not the same as possessing “enormousness”. Well, in that case I’m going to make it up and add it.