Bobby!

T.A.

I finally got around to reading Titus Andronicus, and finished it last night. Not that I was saying to myself these years, "You know, you really need to read Titus Andronicus".

Because whenever I would read about the play, the consensus was always 1. it's Shakespeare's least good play - flat as a board, and 2. it's so very violent and did we mention the violence?

The second point would only help to redound the first point. And then I would say to the consensus, "Surely it's not that violent, and because you are looking at it in light of Shakespeare's other plays, perhaps you people are rather exaggerating what is quantitatively only a few more corpses?"

Having now read the play, I take that back.

And certainly it is flat, but yet there are inspired passages that crackle out here and there with that cap gun smell you knew as a kid after you shot off the entire round in two seconds.

Hurray!

Julie and Nigel have some new apple tasting videos!

Here's episode 4:




LOL @ 15:38


Go to Growing with Julie to watch more.

Excellent translation

If you want literal:





It's actually a very well written exchange between the two, precisely because it is comprised entirely of classic Latin sayings. The inferences run deep and sharp.

In fact, the colloquial translation, while generally excellent, doesn't really communicate the fast-paced piling on that is occurring - especially when Doc Holliday says "Requiescat in pace".

Ringo opens an idea of an insult, while Holliday closes each of Ringo's insults on themselves.

Very good writing.

Cox's Orange Pippin

Beautiful russeting on left middle one.

They are praised for being a very well-balanced apple in flavour. They are so well-balanced that one can easily overlook them and say what's the big deal. But the flavour is there.

You might think that someone saying they have mango notes is waxing a little too poetical, but it's true when you pay attention, and don't just eat them like a pig. There are indeed mango notes, among others. And to eat one that has been warming on the branch in the sun is apple heaven.

I find they are also well-balanced in texture. Hard to describe, as with flavour. Certainly crisp, but with more than just the same old same old crisp that one gets tired of; something slightly giving, but not soft...something bread-like, but not chewy; not mealy at all. Dense but sprightly; real good apple meat, but not a work-out for your jaw bone. Juicy and ever so slightly starchy.

Probably the greatest opera of the Twentieth Century

Being around five hours long there are many following acts along with the between the act knee plays to be found on youtube. Also, because of its length, the composer Philip Glass encouraged people in the audience to walk about if they wanted - say, to go to the bathroom or whatever. This aspect makes the opera have something of the spirit of ambient music: something that's there like a surrounding to which one is not supposed to give too intense a listening attention. Which is actually a different kind of attention - not inattentiveness.

This seems to me the future of music. I remember reading about the Era of Peace in which a kind of ambient music will permeate the very atmosphere, without speakers and electronics. And people will be able to compose it somehow and it will be sort of ongoing in the rhythm with people's day to day lives, but not at all in an enslaving way as though one wouldn't be able to "turn it off". Like a breaking free from the rigid constraints of written bars and so forth, it will be in union with the music of the spheres. Not papered away in a book until it gets performed. What's interesting is how this ambient-leaning way which encourages spontaneity, like jazz, brings music closer to what liturgical music does, whereas the classical notion of traditional forms gets stuffy and musty and falls into meaningless decadence.

Ox guts

But! But! The gold standard! The gold standard!

We need to go back to the Gold Standard!

LOL.

"Unto itself"

High time to get rid of this stupid combo. High time too for either one of them alone. Chuck them along with "but yet" and "that which" et alia, and you might be on the narrow road that leads to life. Have fun and good luck.