But the constant conjecture, no matter how idle or fanciful, touches on one of the stranger realities of John Paul's astonishingly durable reign.
Rows of Chinese and foreign architects were working in an almost sepulchral silence, surrounded by models of their fanciful projects: on one end of the second floor, there was a twisting, layered skyscraper designed for Chongqing, on the other a swirly cross section of an opera house and a performing-arts center whose construction Gillen was also overseeing in Harbin.
Louis Comfort Tiffany already lived in a grand house on the northwest corner of Madison and 72nd, and Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo was just beginning work on her fanciful chateau on the southeast corner.
Serious themes are encountered on this fanciful journey, ones that will resonate with adults more than with the young.
There is a terra-cotta pot like the one's that adorned Cosimo de' Medici's Renaissance garden in Florence, and one with a fanciful face on the side that was developed during the era of the great tulip craze in the Netherlands.
There is Mary Zimmerman's fanciful gloss on Ovid, "Metamorphoses," newly on Broadway.
With the latest Planet of the Apes flick getting almost unanimous praise, and Game of Thrones continuing to captivate the world, gritty realist takes on fanciful sci-fi and fantasy tropes seems to be in right now.
Robert Gellman, a Washington-based privacy and information policy consultant, offered some "fanciful predictions" on surveillance and tracking in 2020 on the Web site DMNews: Every car will be required to have a transponder, and automated highway readers will record all trips...
But it stands in stark contrast to many less fanciful reflections on sexist violence to be heard tonight on "Until the Violence Stops," a rousing film documenting the consequences of Ms. Ensler's infectious brand of activism.
(Catherine Rampell Brendanat athehe Chelsea' (closes on Sunday) Adrian Dunbar gives a riveting performance in this fanciful take on the life of the Irish playwright, memoirist and hard-drinking hell-raiser Brendan Behan, set in the Chelsea Hotel during his stay there in the early 1960s.
