In the brilliant, mind-bending dark comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once, Michelle Yeoh plays (to absolute perfection) the laundromat owner Evelyn Quan Wang, who finds that the universe has been shattered into hundreds of parallel time streams, and her job is to get all of reality back on the rails.
Along the way, Evelyn discovers that in these different timelines, she had many other possible fates, including a martial arts master, an award-winning dancer, and an acclaimed movie star. At one point she asks why she (the laundromat-owner version) is being asked to save the universe, and receives the hilarious answer that of all the possible Evelyns, she is the one who is the biggest failure.
So basically, whatever she decides to do, there's no way she can fuck things up any worse.
Oh, and the wonderful Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu also have fantastic roles, and Jamie Lee Curtis just about steals the show as an absolutely fed-up IRS agent named (I shit you not) Deirdre Beaubeirdre.
If you haven't seen it, put it on your list immediately. It's that good.
The reason it comes up is that I have to wonder if we're all actually trapped in the stupidest of all possible timelines. Just in the last couple of days, Donald Trump threw a major temper tantrum because people are telling him he can't have Greenland to play with. Trump's response to everything is always one of three things: belligerent social media posts, lawsuits, and tariffs. He selected the last-mentioned, threatening tariffs against any nation that sides with Denmark and Greenland, because there's nothing like raising the price of imported goods paid by your own citizens to make a point with the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, that point seems to be summed up in psychologist Abraham Maslow's pithy line, "When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail."
If you needed another example of how ridiculous things have gotten, look no further than my home state of Louisiana, which recently enacted a law establishing an agency (a branch of the Department of Environmental Quality) to handle reports about "weather modification." How ordinary, untrained laypeople would recognize weather modification if they saw it is an open question, but that hasn't stopped them from making hundreds of reports, because apparently a founding principle of the United States is (to swipe Isaac Asimov's phrase) "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge."
So I had a look at a few of them. And...
... yikes.
One from my hometown of Lafayette describes "multiple chemtrails crisscrossing the sky." Another, from New Iberia, says (and I quote), "There was a large fog that covered New Iberia within the past few weeks; materials (nanochip/bacteria) were dropped into the fog causing parasitic infections (per a medical source). Who is authorized to poison citizens?" Then there was the one from Covington, which I reproduce here verbatim, because you can only write [sic] so many times:
I haven't noticed especially this past Sunday and Monday on a clear sky clear blue sky. Small Plains will appear. This is not the first time there's several up to three and they will make a Chris cross pattern in the sky, admitting white substance and it clouds the sky when they're done the sky is cloudy before it was a clear sky. I don't know what they're admitting. I don't know who's doing it. I don't know who's paying for it. I don't know why it's being done, but I want answers to all of my questions because of this should not be happening in Saint Tammany Parish and it happens all the time.
Then, from Thibodaux we have:
Obvious they are not naturally occurring clouds but remnants of the last spray. They take hours to dissipate where regular jet trails disappear immediately. Also the rippling effect caused clearly by frequency emission should be looked into. Hmmmm wonder what towers emit those.
Last, we have the guy from Lake Charles who said that there were chemtrails all over the place, and he would be happy to show anyone who was willing to come to his house, but first, visitors must prove that they are"not robots."
Okay, let me just make a few clarifications for any yo-yos who think all this makes sense.
The combustion of jet fuel produces two main waste products: carbon dioxide and water vapor. When water vapor is released into the (cold) upper air layers, it condenses into a line of tiny water droplets called a contrail. How long it takes a contrail to dissipate and/or evaporate depends on a variety of factors, including temperature, windspeed, turbulence, and humidity.
In particular: the higher the humidity, the slower the evaporation. And the air down in Louisiana is really fucking humid.
I grew up there, remember?
Also, allow me to point out that if there was some sort of nefarious program to poison U.S. citizens, adding toxins (or nanochips and bacteria) to jet fuel so that the remnants in the exhaust would settle, and then hoping the right people would be outside to breathe in the Bad Stuff and die, has to be the all-time stupidest idea I've ever heard. Despite this, these wingnuts filing all the reports seem to picture a bunch of Boris-and-Natasha-style villains mwah-hah-hahing and gleefully rubbing their hands together over what a brilliant and devious plot this is.
Although now that I come to think of it, this is actually not a bad comparison. Chemtrails are about as plausible a superweapon as Goof Gas, which was Boris's invention that (if inhaled) makes the victim suddenly much stupider. (It didn't work on Bullwinkle, you might recall, because he was already so stupid there was nowhere else to go. A little like the people filing all these reports.)
What galls me the most about the chemtrails agency, though, is that every single one of these claims has to be investigated by agents who are getting paid by taxpayer money that could be used for something more worthwhile, which is, oh, just about anything. Say, the education system, so the next generation grows up smart enough to know that "frequency emissions" don't create clouds.
Me, I'm torn between laughing and flipping my desk. I don't know how Evelyn Quan Wang managed to keep her sanity, but I'm getting worn out from living in the stupidest of all possible timelines. I mean, I guess you have to try and find some humor in it, like the guy who posted the pic of Donald Trump as a crying, messy-faced toddler in a high chair, and his mother is saying to him, "No, Donald, you can't have any Greenland until you've finished your Venezuela."
But at the moment, I'm just shaking my head over the whole thing. Maybe I can appeal to Michelle Yeoh to help out. If she's not up to the task, I'll settle for Rocky and Bullwinkle.
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