Even in confessing to preening, Edwards was preening. His diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic, or was it self-narcissistic? Given his diagnosis, I’m sure his H.M.O. would pay.
The creepiest part of his creepy confession was when he stressed to Woodruff that he cheated on Elizabeth in 2006 when her cancer was in remission. His infidelity was oncologically correct.
Taking pride of place in the garden is Pig Toilet, an experimental dry sanitation project devised by the Dutch artists Atelier Van Lieshout. It combines a pigpen with a human toilet, the contents of which are eaten by the pigs, rather than being flushed away and wasting water. "It sounds disgusting, but it works," said Crawford. "In the 19th century there was a vigorous debate between the advantages of dry and wet sanitation systems. The urgh! factor is the reason why wet systems won, but dry sanitation was a perfectly workable solution."Well, we're just lucky we don't have Peter Greenaway doing an installation on avoiding a world food crisis.
JERUSALEM (Kyodo) Nissan MotorCo. has ordered its Israeli business ally to immediately stop airing a television commercial
The major Israeli paper Haaretz, in its online edition, showed video footage of a news program on Saudi Arabia's MBC TV that quoted a Saudi representative as saying that Persian Gulf states
"Have you been downtown?" asked City Councilman Richard Pletcher. "It's like little Hiroshima. It's HiroNeedles."Just what we need: the new micro-nation of Needles!
Resentment has been mounting for years, but the county's decision to reduce the Colorado River Medical Center, the town's once proud hospital, to a small urgent-care facility has sparked open rebellion. Needles is now considering leaving California to join Nevada or Arizona or to create its own independent county.
"This is not a publicity stunt. We are serious about secession,"
Greyhound has scrapped a billboard ad campaign that extols the relaxing upside of bus travel in the wake of a bus attack in Canada where a man beheaded and cannibalized another passenger.
The ad's punchline was "There's a reason you've never heard of 'bus rage.'"
I like this part the best:A FORMER spy claimed he was the new messiah in a “Sermon on the Mount” on top of Roseberry Topping.
Middlesbrough-born David Shayler, who was jailed in 2002 for leaking secrets including allegations the secret services plotted to assassinate Libyan Leader Colonel Gaddafi, preached to a handful of climbers during the sermon last night.
The story has photos of the new Messiah in action too.Reiterating his claims to be the new Messiah, Mr Shayler admitted people “might find it strange” for this to happen in Middlesbrough.
He said: “When people think of Middlesbrough, they tend to think of unemployment, child abuse and a failing football team. But I want to set the record straight.
“Why not promote Shayler as the Messiah and get people here on pilgrimages?”
The problem is all the more compelling for the Democrats because Senator Barack Obama, their likely nominee, lost the Catholic vote badly to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton - like Obama a supporter of abortion rights - during the primaries in states like New Hampshire, Missouri and Ohio. In Pennsylvania, Catholic voters preferred Clinton to Obama by a 40-point margin.The report puts it down to Obama being seen as being very liberal on abortion rights, but I wonder if there is more to it than that.
It's the salutes that really appeal to me.MUMBAI: Here in the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, the doyen of this city's hotels, what you think of the new India may depend on whether you are the person having soap squeezed onto your hands or the person squeezing the soap.
In every men's washroom at the Taj is a helper. As you approach the sink, he salutes you. Before you can turn on the tap, he does it for you. Before you can apply soap, he presses the dispenser. Before you can get a towel, he dangles one. As you leave, he salutes you again and mutters: "Right, sir. O.K., sir. Thank you, sir."
At 1 a.m. back in the boss's apartment building, the hallways are often covered with bodies. They belong to servants and sweepers who work inside by day but sleep outside by night, who clean the toilets but would not dare use them. They learn to sleep on cold tile, with tenants stepping over them when returning from Champagne-soaked evenings out.As you can see, the article is about how those who are getting richer in India still treat the poor very badly, and there is a new film on the the subject. I like this comment by a viewer from the middle class:
The film was good but "one-sided," he said: "Maybe there are 70 percent of the people who treat them bad, but there are 30 percent who treat them good."
In the Airbus A320, failures of the primary wiring system carrying power to the cockpit have not always led to the backup system kicking in automatically, leaving pilots dangerously distracted as they struggle to restore normality. This happened on 37 flights up to May 2007, prompting Airbus to publish a modification to the A320's electrical system.
....teachers were baffled that Larry was allowed to draw so much attention to himself. "All the teachers were complaining, because it was disruptive," says one of them. "Dress code is a huge issue at our school. We fight [over] it every day." Some teachers thought Larry was clearly in violation of the code, which prevents students from wearing articles of clothing considered distracting. When Larry wore lipstick and eyeliner to school for the first time, a teacher told him to wash it off, and he did. But the next day, he was back wearing even more. Larry told the teacher he could wear makeup if he wanted to. He said that Ms. Epstein told him that was his right.Ms Epstein, an assistant principal, is gay herself, and is seen by some of the other teachers as having been far too encouraging of Larry. One teacher complained:
She [the teacher] was approached by several boys in her class who said that Larry had started taunting them in the halls—"I know you want me," he'd say—and their friends were calling them gay.Ms Epstein appears to have generally downplayed the prospect of any action.
One teacher was very protective of Larry, his English teacher, Mrs. Boldrin. To help Larry feel better about moving to Casa Pacifica, she brought Larry a present: a green evening dress that once belonged to her own daughter. Before school started, Larry ran to the bathroom to try it on. Then he showed it to some of his friends, telling them that he was going to wear it at graduation.There's plenty more in the article; it's a fascinating read.
As night was falling across the Americas on Sunday, August 28, 1859, the phantom shapes of the auroras could already be seen overhead. From Maine to the tip of Florida, vivid curtains of light took the skies. Startled Cubans saw the auroras directly overhead; ships’ logs near the equator described crimson lights reaching halfway to the zenith. Many people thought their cities had caught fire. Scientific instruments around the world, patiently recording minute changes in Earth’s magnetism, suddenly shot off scale, and spurious electric currents surged into the world’s telegraph systems.Well, at least it would save me the cost of a long trip from Brisbane to see an aurora. The downside: it's quite possible that it could knock out the electricity grid for weeks:
According to studies by John G. Kappenman of Metatech Corporation, the magnetic storm of May 15, 1921, would have caused a blackout affecting half of North America had it happened today. A much larger storm, like that of 1859, could bring down the entire grid. Other industrial countries are also vulnerable, but North America faces greater danger because of its proximity to the north magnetic pole. Because of the physical damage to transformers, full recovery and replacement of damaged components might take weeks or even months. Kappenman testified to Congress in 2003 that “the ability to provide meaningful emergency aid and response to an impacted population that may be in excess of 100 million people will be a difficult challenge.”This seems a good excuse to see what videos of aurora can be found on Youtube. I want to see real-time video too; usually you see time lapse stuff and it doesn't give you much idea of how quickly the aurora move and change.
The documentary "On a Wind and a Prayer" tells the long, complex tale of Japan's dedicated but futile attempts to harass North Americans by creating panic and tying up various kinds of service crews with unpredictable but widespread damage....Japan's spotty but persistent assaults on America came by submarine and hot-air balloon. The Gearhart Mountain fatalities resulted from a balloon that had been launched from Japan. Of about 9,200 balloons sent into the prevailing winds starting in November 1944, some 920 should have reached North America, by Japanese estimates. By 1946, 265 had been found. Another 40 have turned up over the decades.
"On a Wind and a Prayer" also touches on Japan's submarine assaults on the U.S. coast, including the February 1942 shelling of an oil refinery near Santa Barbara, Calif. On June 20 another sub bombarded Vancouver, B.C., and the next night another sub fired on Fort Stevens near Astoria. On Sept. 9, 1942, a float plane launched from a Japanese submarine started a small forest fire near Brookings.
The raids caused little damage and no injuries. Nor was there damage or injury to the Japanese subs and crews; decades later, we must admit they were intrepid. They also exemplified the sorry state of coastal security in 1942.
"Wind" also mentions the "Battle of Los Angeles," a profoundly confused panic in which U.S. military units fired some 1,400 artillery and anti-aircraft shells based on rumors. The melee inspired Steven Spielberg's 1979 epic farce "1941." The farrago actually occurred in late February 1942, Spielberg's title notwithstanding. Spielberg did not mention the three people killed by artillery fallout or the three people known to have died of heart attacks caused by the frenzy.
Sounds like a good documentary to watch out for.
..Havenhand said. ‘I really hope I’m wrong about the broader implications of our work. However, the available evidence points to the conclusion that at present acidification is the biggest threat to the long-term viability of our ocean ecosystems and especially to key invertebrate species that maintain many of the marine ecosystems on which we rely for food, protection, and recreation.’I didn't see much of the Four Corners story last night on melting Arctic ice, but I could imagine Andrew Bolt's blood pressure rising as he watched it. I did have a look at one of the extended interviews on the Four Corner's website (the one with Ted Scambos), and he looked very calm, cool and reasonable while expressing the reasons for his great concern. (But, I can hear a skeptic cry, he thought the 2008 melt would be worse than it is. It seems to me that the 2008 ice cover is no where near a recovery of such an extent to dismiss the overal trend to melting.)
In an interview in the latest issue of Healthy and Organic Living magazine, the TV cook suggested that the weed, called henbane, would make a tasty addition to salads.
Speaking from Spain, where he is on holiday, Worrall Thompson said he had confused it with the fat hen weed, which has edible leaves that can be used in salads or cooked like spinach....
Experts said anyone who had followed his advice and created a salad with henbane should seek medical help and may have their stomach pumped.
The fizzy, yellow-colored drink contains extracts from the head and bones of eel and five vitamins — A, B1, B2, D and E — contained in the fish.But, does it taste like eel? Apparently:
The eel involved in recent scandals was prepared in a popular "kaba-yaki" style, in which it is broiled and covered with a sweet sauce. The ¥140 drink costs about one-tenth as much as broiled eel but has a similar flavor.I feel queasy just thinking about tasting it.
For more drama, you can always go for the Lost Chambers suites: the bedrooms look out through huge underwater picture windows into the resort’s 11m-litre lagoon, stocked with sharks, rays,angel-fish, trevallies and more, in dense, multicoloured shoals.Fine for romantics, as long as you don’t mind a fishy audience – though the sight of the rays gliding past is so mesmerising, you might not get round to anything energetic.
But the silly part is the imaginary theme:
It takes a certain damn-the-torpedoes guts to spend £750m on a premise this self-evidently daft: the “discovery” of a 10,000-year-old civilisation that never existed, on an island that’s still being finished...The funny thing is, I quite like fake environments. I love Disney World, for example. But Dubai 's attempt to create man-made excitement out of a bit of desert by the sea leaves me cold. It just seems to be trying too hard, somehow, and too much of it is designed for decadent tastes.The keynote attraction...is the Lost Chambers. In a dimly lit stone labyrinth full of startled fish are great bits of fallen masonry covered with mysterious runes (though, presumably, they’re not that mysterious to the guy who made them up). You wouldn’t think you’re supposed to take all this stuff seriously, but they do, they really do.
From the top down, Atlantis’s staff treat their newly constructed ruins with po-faced reverence. Their eyes take on a spooky, glazed look when they talk about it, like freshly indoctrinated members of a Californian UFO cult.
“This is the Abyss,” my guide says. “It was here the Atlanteans mined their minerals – they lowered their miners down this well. Fascinating, isn’t it?”
“But... it’s not real, is it?” I mumble. My words simply don’t register. “We expect a lot of school parties,” he says. “Education is a big part of our work.”
Although the launch of the A380 initially prompted wild speculation that the aircraft would feature shopping malls and cinemas, Emirates has come up with a genuine wheeze – showers.
You have to have deep pockets of course – the shower spa room is only for the lucky 14 passengers who will occupy the First Class suites, but the favoured few will be allowed to spend 25 minutes in the spa itself – beauty treatments available – and five minutes in the shower which is regulated by a five-minute timer that glows green, amber and red as the allowance runs down.
And you thought getting out of the toilet to get back to your seat in a hurry during sudden turbulence was a worry.
“Emirates will have the lowest fuel economy of any aircraft in the world,” said chairman and chief executive Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saeed Al-Maktoum in Hamburg. “We will use just three litres of fuel per passenger per 100km (60miles) – the A380 unites sensible business with social responsibility.”If only one of them would fit in my garage.
Comedian Jerry Lewis was detained by police in Las Vegas late last week when airport screeners found an unloaded gun in his baggage, authorities said on Tuesday. Lewis, 82, had a small .22-caliber handgun when he arrived at the security screening area on Friday at Las Vegas McCarran International AirportBut get this, he was on his way to do a one man show! He's still working? I hope he's arranged for some sight gag at his funeral.
Just when she thought life would be really good and she could sit back and enjoy life after selling Gloria Jean's, her husband asked for a divorce by fax and a couple years later she finds breast cancer.
Here in Yakumo, four clients came to see Hirai on a recent day: an older woman worried about leaving an inheritance to an adopted son; a middle-aged salaryman who had hit a female employee; two clients involved in land disputes, one dating from the 1930s.
Like many Japanese who consult lawyers, the four seemed embarrassed about doing so.
"Japanese by nature don't want to publicize their problems," Hirai explained. "And coming to see a lawyer is to admit that there are problems inside your home or workplace."
It was precisely to dispel the shame of consulting a lawyer that Hirai chose to open his office in the town's most prominent square.
Katharina Fabricius, a Principal Research Scientist from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), who, along with fellow Magnetic Islanders, Dr Glenn De'ath and spatial analyst Stuart Kininmonth, is involved in a soon-to-be released web-based atlas of the reef, told Magnetic Times, "Sheriden had three hours to brief the Prime Minister who then gave a twenty minute speech in the Council Chamber that showed he really got the message. It went really well.” ....Well, why on earth in the evening TV news grabs don't we hear the PM, Penny Wong and others talking specifically about ocean acidification as a vital issue if Australia wants to preserve its extensive coral reefs? They clearly know about it, yet for some reason it still gets little media attention.
Dr Fabricius described the serious effects of climate change on the reef which has prompted the making of the Atlas. “Climate change is already evident on the reef in two forms. One is water temperature which, from records which go back to the 1870s, shows that the ocean's water temperature has increased by 0.7 degrees C in the last hundred years. Corals have a low tolerance to only minor increases in water temperature, and hot water has led to the mass bleachings that have begun to happen in the last twenty years.”
“Of even greater concern is ocean acidification. The world's oceans absorb about half of the atmosphere's CO2. With increased CO2 in the sea water it becomes more acidic. Models predict that the pH (the measure of acidity and alkalinity) has already declined by 0.1 units which means that shellfish, crustaceans, corals and other marine creatures which utilise the carbonate in the water are less able to calcify.”
Charles is a complicated character, who causes a lot of trouble in the Flyte-Marchmain family even as he pretends to be a detached observer of its internal drama. The role calls for a mix of diffidence and magnetism — Charles is a shy, stoical seducer — but Mr. Goode shows all the charisma of a stalk of boiled asparagus molded into the likeness of Jeremy Irons. The film can’t explain why Julia or Sebastian would conceive a risky, tempestuous passion for Charles other than that Waugh seemed to think they might.* Anthony Lane reviews Mamma Mia! and has a good line or two:
The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years, and I take “Mamma Mia!” to be a useful contribution to that debate.
...cavitation damage to the high pressure fuel pumps of both engines, indicative of abnormally low pressure at the pump inlets. After ruling out fuel freezing or contamination, the investigation now focuses on what caused the low pressure at the pump inlets. "Restrictions in the fuel system between the aircraft fuel tanks and each of the engine HP pumps, resulting in reduced fuel flows, is suspected."This seems a very peculiar scenario, given that it affected both engines at the same time. I am very curious to see the final explanation.
We went to the theatre the other night, a desperate evening enlivened only by imagining just how much more fun we could have had with the hundred quid it cost us. The play was The Year of Magical Thinking, a monologue about death performed by Vanessa Redgrave (I know: what did we expect? Custard pies?).
Damn. My plans for introducing them to Australia may have its opponents.'I have seen the impact of all sorts of animals introduced to new habitats, but I have never seen anything like the damage inflicted by these beavers,' said Josh Donlan, of the ACS. 'They move along rivers and lay waste to their banks. It looks as if bulldozers have been let loose. Millions of acres have been wrecked.'
Fifty North American beavers, Castor canadensis, were introduced to Tierra del Fuego, in southern South America, in the 1940s in order to establish a fur trade. It was a catastrophic mistake. Numbers multiplied dramatically and beavers spread across the archipelago, crossed the Magellan Strait and are now spreading through the mainland.
At current exchange rates, that's about $600 a month for your own little, tiny room with internet access. There are worse ways to live.Cyber@Cafe in Warabi, Saitama Prefecture, is home to around 25 people who "live" there. The cafe, located outside JR Warabi Station, occupies three floors of an office building and has a shower room, a washing machine and high-tech toilets for the convenience of its guests. Blankets can be borrowed for free. Guests paying ¥200 can spend 30 minutes in the cafe's comfortable 130 cm × 190 cm cubicles, which each have soft pads on the floor, a pair of black and red cushions, and a personal computer with a high-speed Internet connection.
The biggest attraction, however, is that guests who pay for a month's stay (¥57,600) in advance can register the cafe as their home and have mail sent there for an additional ¥3,000. At least four people have registered the cafe as their home with the local city government, according to Cyber@Cafe owner Akihiro Sato.
I wonder when any global warming sceptic is going to come up with convincing reasons why ocean acidification is not something to worry about. In fact, when are they going to give it any attention at all.Over the history of the planet, there have been many sudden peaks in CO2 related to volcanic eruptions, releases from hydrothermal vents, and other natural events. When the pH of the ocean dips as a result of absorbing this excess gas, bottom sediments rich in calcium carbonate begin to dissolve, countering the increase in acidity. This buffering process occurs over 20,000 years, roughly the time it takes for water to circulate along the bottom from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back up to the surface several times. Currently, however, we are pouring man-made CO2 into the atmosphere at 50 times the natural rate. “That overwhelms the natural buffering system for maintaining balance in ocean chemistry,” the Carnegie Institution’s Caldeira says. “To find any parallel in the earth’s history you would have to look to a sudden violent shock to the system far in the geologic past.”
One such event occurred 55 million years ago at the so-called Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when 4.5 million tons of greenhouse gases were released into the atmosphere. Just what triggered this enormous emission is not known, but scientists suspect volcanic activity may have begun the process. That may in turn have caused the planet to heat up enough to melt deposits of methane frozen in sediments on the ocean floor (something, incidentally, that could happen again), discharging even more potent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and further heating the planet in an escalating feedback loop.
Whatever the exact cause of the CO2 release at the PETM, the earth warmed faster than at almost any other time in its history. The average temperature soared 9 degrees Fahrenheit, entire ecosystems shifted to higher latitudes, and massive extinctions occurred on land and, most telling, at sea. The abrupt rise of CO2 acidified the oceans. James Zachos, a paleo-oceanographer from the University of California at Santa Cruz, analyzed sediment cores obtained from deep drilling in the ocean and discovered that bottom-dwelling creatures with shells disappeared from the fossil record for a period of more than 40,000 years corresponding to the PETM. And once the oceans turned more acidic, Zachos says, they did not recover quickly: It took another 60,000 years before sediments again began to show a thick white streak indicative of fossilized shells.
Drastic as the PETM was, the event is tame compared with acidification today. “Back then,” Zachos says, “4.5 million tons of CO2 were released over a period of 1,000 to 10,000 years. Industrial activities will release the same amount in a mere 300 years—so quickly that the ocean’s buffering system doesn’t even come into play.”
A scene in which the groom’s shirtless beach blanket buddies, who are throwing him a bachelor party, peel him away from his bride in order to force him to join their merry band as they goose-step along the dock, while wearing flippers, with maximal flapping of arms, suggests a re-enactment of the invasion of the Sudetenland conducted by the Village People during a weekend on Fire Island.On to The Dark Knight. Ever since Heath Ledger died, and there were stories of how playing this role messed with his mind, I have wondered whether this would put audiences off, as it may seem too much like watching someone self destruct on screen. (OK, so the death may well have been an accident, but still he wasn't the happiest chap at the time.)
....as you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering—in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism—how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way.This article notes that it was pretty daring of the studio to continue promoting the film by concentrating the attention on Hedger's ghoulish Joker appearance; I actually agree more with the line that it was in rather poor taste to do so and semi-exploitive.
"When the cost of a white LED lamp comes down to about $5, LEDs will be in widespread use for general illumination," Sands said. "LEDs are still improving in efficiency, so they will surpass fluorescents. Everything looks favorable for LEDs, except for that initial cost, a problem that is likely to be solved soon."
He expects affordable LED lights to be on the market within two years.
Bush already has approved several significant tropical forest conservation projects in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama and elsewhere. With this deal, Bush could legitimately claim that he'd done far more, far sooner, for far less money to stop global warming than either the Kyoto Protocol or the failed congressional climate bill would have.
The goal of climate mitigation is to avoid dangerous human-caused impacts, which science suggests would mean limiting total warming to 2 °C above preindustrial temperatures. In turn, this would require keeping atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide below 450 parts per million (p.p.m.). According to the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report in 2007, model studies based on our current understanding of climate–carbon-cycle feedbacks suggest that to stabilize carbon dioxide levels at 450 p.p.m. could require that cumulative emissions over the twenty-first century reach only about 490 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC), which equates to less than 5 GtC per year1.
Similarly, stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at 1,000 p.p.m. would require cumulative emissions this century of only about 1,100 GtC. In other words, if annual emissions average 11 GtC this century, we risk the real, terrifying prospect of seeing 1,000 p.p.m. carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a 'best estimate' warming of a staggering 5.5 °C by the end of the century.
Carbon emissions from the global consumption of fossil fuels are currently above 8 GtC per year and rising faster than the most pessimistic economic model considered by the IPCC2. Yet even if the high price of energy from fossil fuels and power plants combines with regional climate initiatives to slow the current rate of growth somewhat, we will probably hit 11 gigatonnes of carbon emissions per year by 2020.
The limits of a strategy built around carbon pricing can be seen in the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme, the world's largest system for pricing carbon and trading permits. A full decade after signing the Kyoto Protocol, European nations finally have in place a cap-and-trade system with a significant price for allowances, namely US$40 per metric ton of carbon dioxide. Yet utilities in Italy, Great Britain, the Czech Republic and Germany are reported to still be pursuing new coal-fired plants4, so we must clearly go beyond pricing carbon.The whole scenario set out in the article about how difficult it will be to achieve stabilisation at 550 ppm is pretty depressing, really. But the author argues that:
...such is the urgent need to reverse emissions trends by deploying a multitude of low-carbon technologies that we must rely on technologies that either are already commercial or will very shortly be so. Fortunately, venture capitalists and public companies have begun to inject many billions of dollars into the development and short-term commercialization of most plausible low-carbon technologies. Governments should now focus their R&D spending on a longer-term effort aimed at a new generation of technologies for the emissions reduction effort after 2040, but the notion that we need a Manhattan Project or Apollo programme for technology development is mistaken. Instead, what is urgently needed is an effort of that scale focused on the deployment of technology.It's all interesting, and well worth reading.
Discussing differences between the religions, Dr Williams acknowledges that Christian belief in the Trinity is "difficult, sometimes offensive, to Muslims".More to the point is why it should be considered "offensive," by anyone.
AUSSIES who find themselves under threat are more likely to shoot at Muslims, especially if they're in a good mood, a study claims.Just how many people find themselves both under threat from Muslims and in a good mood, I wonder.
In Australia, CCS would lead, at best, to a 9% emissions reduction in 2030 and a cumulative emissions reduction from 2005 to 2030 of only 2.4%.[88] This is partly due to the lack of suitable storage locations. For example, in the Newcastle-Sydney-Wollongong area of New South Wales and at Port Augusta in South Australia, which together produce about 39% of Australia’s current net CO2 emissions from electricity generation, there are no identified storage sites within 500 km of the coal-fired power stations.[89] In comparison, a modest improvement in energy efficiency could – at zero or even negative cost – decrease emissions in 2030 by about the same amount, and cumulative emissions by twice as much.[90]Well, they might just have a point.
When I was 18, I bought a record called The New Music. It featured Kontra-Punkte by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima by Krzysztof Penderecki. I was incredibly proud of myself for giving this music a try, even though the Stockhausen sounded like a cat running up and down the piano, and the Penderecki was that reliable old post-Schoenberg standby: belligerent bees buzzing in the basement. I did not really like these pieces, but I would put them on the turntable every few months to see if the bizarre might one day morph into the familiar. I've been doing that for 40 years now, and both compositions continue to sound harsh, unpleasant, gloomy, post-nuclear. It is not the composers' fault that they wrote uncompromising music that was a direct response to the violence and stupidity of the 20th century; but it is not my fault that I would rather listen to Bach. That's my way of responding to the violence and stupidity of the 20th century, and the 21st century as well.Queenan writes that this year when he did see an audience respond reasonably well to a new composition, the explanation is that:
...nothing thrills a classical music crowd more than a new piece of music that doesn't make them physically ill.Quite the wit, is Joe.
...Rita Gangwani, image enhancer and personality architect...So now we know where Kevin Rudd got his makeover advice from.
For most of 1943, Waugh was sunk in gloom. He was fed up with army life. After serving in Crete with the Special Services Brigade, he had spent a year waiting to be given a company to command. None was forthcoming. It was agreed among the senior officers that the author-turned-soldier was spectacularly ill-equipped to command ordinary soldiers, because of his "total incapacity for establishing any sort of human relations with his men". He was, all agreed, a 24-carat, card-carrying shit. His rudeness, his dislike of the working classes, his fondness for bullying and horror of social contact with strangers made him, in the words of his commanding officer, Lord Lovat, "a total misfit".For a year, he'd hung out in a London office,drinking gallons of wine with friends. In July, his father Arthur died. Evelyn's wife and children remained in Combe Florey, Somerset and rarely contacted him. "I should like to feel," he wrote to his wife Laura, "that, once or twice a week, you felt enough interest in me to write and say so... If by any chance the children should die, do come to London. I miss you."
Then he received the final kiss-off. He was advised to resign from the Commandos "for the Brigade's good". It wasn't just rejection and bereavement that brought him low; it was the condition of England at this point of the war, and the predictions of its aftermath. "Everyone I meet is despondent about the future," he confided to his diary. Wherever he looked, life was grotty, grey, sloppy, utterly lacking in style, grace and chic. By the year's end his nerve had broken. He asked the army for leave, and travelled to Chagford in Devon. In that frame of mind , at the beginning of February 1944, he began to write Brideshead.
