caroljane

George, thank you. Please keep trying. I gave up trying years ago, and that someone of your abilities would undertake the task is an honour I do not deserve. Apologies for the sloppy editing. I just noticed the extra m in the topic title and a missing word in the post. The m is one of the letters still missing from my keyboard and it disappears and reappears at will. I would never actually write a memoir,(except micromini like this one) though as I said on PM recently I think everybody should write one, and I think that's worth saying again on the the board. I don't say everyone should publish one. But everyone should write their own life story, it's good for us. The old saw that everyone should write a book, have a child, build a house , and (what's the other one? I'm sure there are four of them), to live a full life, I think like most cliches has a metaphorical truth that is adjustable for the time you live in. You should tell your own story. You should have a connection with the generation after you, through the body or through the spirit or the mind. As to the house, I don't know what you should do, though. Maybe just go camping once in a while. George, I haven't checked, but my impression is that you are writing a memoir or autobio. judging from some of your reminiscences here that I have come across, it should be jaw-droppingly interesting, to borrow an adjective from one of my favourite publications, the National Enquirer. In seriousness, I've been thinking about the process of writing the internal story from memory, and how complex it is. "In the beginning I was born" is about the only absolutely true, incontrovertible sentence one can ever write, it seems to me. And it's already been written. If you've had any stray thoughts along this line, please share.

Redundant,sorry.

Oh, what to do now. How can I hope for Boston or Tampa either one? I hate Boston for their dirty play that cost Montreal their game. I like the Bolts because of Lecavalier, and don't want them to lose to wretched Boston. Vancouver must beat either one of them, of course. Vancouver beating Boston, pounding, thumping, triumphing utterly, just must be. But that means Boston will have beaten Tampa, who are the better team in every way that matters, and ought not to lose. Hockey should not be played down there in the swamps of course, but Vincent and his colleagues have made such a gallant thing of it. It's so vexing! I wish I could be like my father, he was the only man in town (or in all Canada for all I know) who obsessively watched HNIC, but claimed he did not have a favourite team. He said, he just enjoyed watching a good game. I got to enjoy that with him; Original Six games were good by definition. he was so knowledgeable and witty a commentator. He never played himself, but he mentioned listening to games on radio during the war when he was overseas. What it meant to him following Rocket Richard on play-by=play, with his buddies in North Africa and Italy,age 17 to 23, having it be a constant when they could get the radio through. When his father died in 1943, he and his brother could of course not get home for the funeral.They couldn't always get their mail from home, but it mostly came through. They always got the hockey games though, unless they were in battle. Something to enjoy, and to be able to keep enjoying, when the war was over.

I think you mean "take a sad song" ? I thought he did mean, bad song, as a pun.Good one too.

ND, Goes to show that nobody can "take a bad song, and make it better"... (Apologies to 'Hey, Jude' - a good'un.) I don't know - always seemed a sort of down-the-pub, football-supporter of the team that always loses but you're doomed to suport it anyway, end-of-the bachelor-party sort of song to me. To ND - did the wonderful Cathy B who I am meeting for the first time thanks to you, ever team up with Tiny Tim? She should have. But I suppose Tiny would shrewdly have refused such a duet, knowing when he was outclassed.

I think you mean "take a sad song..." Cathy Berberian was a classical soprano, based in Italy, who used to do Beatles songs in her recitals alongside Purcell, Handel, and the like. The ones I posted are actually the most listenable (to my ears). Want to hear the really goofy ones? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHRb35H4kLc Words fail me. Florence Foster Jenkins was reincarnated, who knew? Ninth, I'm sorry, but you have to move up to Tenth, as in Wonder of the World, music resource division. If you ever get kidnapped, with the contents of your hard drive and brain as ransom, you'll know who is behind it.

Carol, ...and the way you look tonight. I just looked it up on Google song lyrics to check (because those few lines have haunted me for years), and see Harry Connick Jr, Frank Sinatra, and now Michael Buble, have all done versions. Beautifully lilting tune. Tony Thanks, Tony.The song-stuck-in-the-head syndrome can be maddening, of course, especially when it's ad jingles (I won't give examples here, for fear of contagion), but generally I enjoy the internal concert. Hymns are especially satisfying. "Glorious things of thee are spoken...who can faint, when such a river ever flows our thirst to assuage?.." I don't get tired of that loop. And innocent, soaring pop from dimmest adolescence. Lately it's been "This Girl is a Woman Now" by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. Gary was an undeservedly neglected giant of the Neolithic pop music . That song is so tender... reflects a time when the young male might have resented, disliked, used or scorned the young female in real life, but when he sang about her, he loved her . The Beatles weren't at their best with love ballads imo. (Sorry, Kat!) "Michelle" was hardly worth recording.(Sorry,sorry...couldn't help it...it just slipped out). But I loved "Here, There and Everywhere". Heavenly to slow-dance to. A great thing about the Ipod era is that when the urge to sing along overwhelms you in public, you can vocalize and nobody thinks you're crazy. Come to that you can talk to yourself and people will just assume you're on your phone. Not that I go around doing that. Usually.

Oh! Just today, for no reason was going through my head so strongly.. Someday, when I'm awfully low, and the world is cold, I will feel a glow just thinking of you, just the way you are tonight... Misquoted probably, sorry (Cole Porter is it?)

I recall the day clearly. I was in a playpen in my parents' kitchen. I don't know my age then, except that it was under 5, but I do know that I was too old to be in a playpen. I didn't mind being in there. I think the demise of the playpen is a big loss to the peace of mind of parents, and the creativity of little kids, but I digress. Into the kitchen came our landlady, Ada Keene, widow of Elijah Keene. I don't know how long "'Lige" had been dead, but Ada did not seem to miss him much at that point, so I suppose it had been a while. On her considerable shoulders she bore the slaughtered carcass of a deer. Ada and Elijah had wed rather late in life, though a few said it was too soon. They had one daughter, Florence Keene,my future role model. There is little to be said about deermeat unless you are a chef and can call it venison. The only thing I know about it is that my parents did not enjoy eating it, and did not make me eat it, but that as it was a gracious gift of Ada on whose good side they naturally wished to keep, they ate it. They ate up the whole thing and did everything they could to make it more palatable. It took a long to eat it up, but they just persevered. Stuarts are not quitters. I do not mean of course that they cooked it all for one meal, it took all winter, and a lot of marital compromise. That evening I encountered Ada when I had been put to play in the yard. More correct to say, she encountered me. "Well, Carol Jane" were her words. "What are you doing out? Isn't it past your bedtime? What's that you're eating, an apple?" I admitted that it was. I knew it wasn't her apple, it came from Uncle Leonard's tree, so I had comparatively little fear. "Mind you don't swallow the seeds, now. If you swallow the seeds a whole apple tree will grow down from your stomach and up your throat and choke you. " How could I ever tell my mother that I had been so foolish, or so sinful, or so stupid, or whatever it was, as to swallow those seeds? That was my first thought. Had I really swallowed them? That was my second.If I had a third thought I don't remember it. I remember a long night of checking my stomach in dread and trying to feel for trunk-roots forcing up my throat. I remember just giving up. If I had swallowed those seeds I had swallowed them. I couldn't unswallow them. I could never explain to my mother, because if I had swallowed them I would be dead, and if I hadn't I would never have to tell her anything about it. I eventually went to sleep , and I don't remember anything about the next day, or many days from early childhood. I do remember Ada and her considerable hunting skills, which she always said surpassed her husband's (she was right , they did. I remember the apple seeds which of course I swallowed, who cannot? And the tree which grew up from my stomach and heart and still chokes me, how could it not? And the mother whose judgment I feared and who knew so entirely all that needed to be known,what could I ever have said to her, which I did not?

How dare you put down the exquisitely-named Don Cherry? If I but could. The man is impossible to put down. The whole country has been trying for years. One of the best Tylenol commercials we ever had here featured his lovely late wife, Rose. Her lines began, "When someone's been shouting in your ear, for forty years...." Grapes's co-anchor and straight man, Ron Maclean, is really good, Together they're the most popular Canadian duo since Wayne & Shuster in the Ed Sullivan era.

Thanks so much for this. From now on I will think not of Northumbrian or Highland or CapeBreton bagpipes, but of Indo-European pipes, period. They wailed the fall of Troy, they waded wailing onto Normandy, they accompany this gallant lady into battle. Of the dumb deliberate cruelties of the Taliban, to starve people of music was the dumbest, because of course it is impossible to take music from a person without killing the person outright. Still, they did keep a large number of Afghans from listening to their music, or singing or playing it except under awful secrecy. One of my youngest students, Waheeda, heard hardly any music her whole life, until she was 21 and orphaned and a refugee. The first song she ever sang aloud, in company with others, happened to be "O Canada", because we always sing it at the end of every class. It tends to wake them up.

Oh, oh, oh. Just revelling in the banal, witless, robotic statements of the victors and commentators. Loving every meaningless remark. What is there to say? "I've fallen off my chair, Brian". I've fallen, and I don't want to get up.

How I hate to agree with national inescapable blowhard Don Cherry but sometimes he is right. Defence do you think you are all goalies ? Your job is just to get from position to position by inclining your great stupid bodies? Skate, for chrissakes.

O dear lord - they are all too beatable - I am scared to jinx them. I deliberately missed the national anthems, just in case, though that is my favourite part. Tremulously, Carol

Yes - Iowa is one of the first and as the current occupant of the White House's campaign operatives showed, a "victory" can be easily stolen by packing the caucus's [cauci??] and employing goon tactics as they did in 2008. Adam Packing cauci? Goon tactics? We're in! Cousin Eugene has great contacts! Well, there's no doubt now, the tantric powers of the hockey stick cannot be denied. Notice that Sister Claudine and Brother Joel are now Members of Parliament, and they sure did not do anything to deserve it, and that is not without the influence of a hypothetical panarctic Brotherhood which does not exist, Brother Adam.

Just need to let cousin Eugen know, he is a leading activist for Political Rights of the Incarcerated and applying to move wherever he can get out the soonest, on grounds of being near family, so they will be near him wherever it is. Freedom transcends geographyafter all. And the tantra o the hockey stick has powers we know not of.

Iowa is the right state, isn't it?

Do they use ethanol in the Zambonis? I did not check out the scandal but really, you know in your heart that to know hockey is to know highest values, true morality and rational passion. Some of my cousins are grumbling that they are not Republicans or even American citizens, and they don't want to move to Iowa, but most of them will do the right thing. Blood is thicker than water.

Muchas, muchas gracias! I am committing this to memory right away. I remember so fondly the great sense of humour of Spanish men as one of their most personable qualities and am delighted to see it rise so wryly and exuberantly in this context. You can't think how you've cheered me up. I have been trying to figure out why in hell the auxilary verb "can" has no future tense in English, just a past and present.Or "will" either come to think of it - but that states futurity itself, so I kind of get that one. "Can" has a future tense in French and Spanish, and I've forgotten the Latin but likely it has there as well. But when you get Teutonic it just doesn't exist. Is it some kind of semantic commentary on the Anglo-Saxon sense of life in the Dark Ages. I was on the point of actually doing the tedious work of looking it up, but now the hell with that, I am going to root out my old Photo album from Ca'an Pastilla. Danke Angela

Incidentally, isn't it too bad that O'politics prevented D. Harriman from having a go at the screenplay? I hear he did a good job of rewriting Rand's personal journals. And having achieved such eminence as a scientist and philosopher, he'd be ready for the next big career move.

Judge for yourself. http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/arts/movies/6168-amadeus%3A-a-pinnacle-of-cultural-corruption.html Don't miss my replies in the comment section. An interesting point is that I've been moderated for pointing out that my posts (and Jonathan's) have been deleted. So not only do they censor, they censor discussion of the practice. Keeping up appearances? Who do they think they're fooling? Well, that was interesting all right. I can't even answer my own question though, about Cline's writing - he doesn't really write, he just rails. Whatever subject matter he's railing about, it just overwhelms his structure and I found it desperately annoying and really had to force myself to keep reading. He likes to load everything onto a simile, like the handcart, and push it down the tracks-- we get it, Ed, we know where the stuff in a handcart ends up. About the "interesting image" he thought of as good movie poster -- there, my reaction to seeing the thing was so similar to Jonathan's that maybe I do have some art instinct after all! I thought, Ayn Rand's face? Gazing away from some tracks, like a fed-up railway supervisor who knows the navvies are going to cock up the job. Her familiar compelling stare suggests, "Look what I have to put up with." Well, maybe that is Cline's point, given what an outrage upon her he thinks the movie is. I've just remembered that Cline is the man that one of the BOW winners thought should have written the screenplay. This person was very indignant that Cline was not approached, due too the fact that Aglialoro is a "Kelleyite moron." Maybe Cline, like every other AS fan in the world, knows that it is indeed he who should have been entrusted with the sacred task, and would have done it right, and it's plain old sour grapes. Anyway, this is the guy on whose behalf Oonline is censoring you and Jonathan - a writer scorned, himself censored and silenced by the evillest silencer of all: being ignored! Those poor moderators. I can't believe they think they're fooling anybody - they're just trying to to follow, or maybe figure out, whatever the Rules of Appearance are over there. It's incomprehensible, it's ridiculous, it's..it's just postmodern, is what it is.

I’m now on “preview mode”, in other words moderation, that sure didn’t take long. Here’s the offending thread, though you won’t see the offending posts, they’ve been deleted. I pointed out that at least a couple posts by me and Jonathan had been deleted, that clearly pointed criticism of Ed Cline’s writing was not allowed on the site, ending with “So don the kid gloves and try to rely more on subtext, folks.” I got an email from “softwareNerd” informing me of my status, though without any explanation beyond quoting the above sentence. Who's Ed Cline? Is his writing good, or anyway if you don't think so why wouldn't you be allowed to say so? This seems weird - it's not like you were criticizing Rand or even Peikoff.

I think you mean Ewa Podleś. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewa_Podleś Was this a performance in Canada? You're where, Toronto? I went to the Chicago performance of Julius Caesar because I was in town for a conference (work stuff) and have gone to the Chicago Lyric 4-5 times so whatever they were doing, I was going. I saw Isabel Bayrakdarian there, I think she was Zerlina (in Don Giovanni), that was more than 5, less than 10 years ago. Bryn Terfel was the Don, and the rest of the cast was just off the charts. One of the best performances of anything I've ever been to anywhere. BTW, the Chicago production was set in colonial India, it was some really goofy stuff. Oh, you lucky! I envy you, would love to have seen that-Don G is my only, could not live without opera. No production could harm it, and every one just brings out something else. I've mentioned elsewhere how I loved the Sellars one. Yes, it was the Canadian Opera Company, 2001 that I saw Ewa, I have seen Isabel B. three or four times there, and Daniels once )I think - I could have him confused with another countertenor with similar name. You could deduce from the above that my primary interest is more the music than the singers, --when I first fell hopelessly in love with the classical genre, it was all orchestral, symphonies mainly, and concerti heavy on the instrumentation. It seems weird, but to me then, it was like the voice was some kind of interference between me and the music, or a bossy commentator - unnecessary. Of course I outgrew that and became a more or less normal music consumer, value-swooning when appropriate. I can't think of Handel as "Baroque opera" though, anymore than I can think of Shakespeare as "Elizabethan drama", ==he's Handel. When he wrote Messiah he said he felt he had seen the face of Heaven, and the Great God himself. And as he showed it to the rest of us, I for one believe him. Certainly for us godless Anglicans, he solved the is-ought problem, once and for all. Thanks, GF. To counterbalance the curses of all those sopranos who had to work with you, you have the blessings of we who get to listen to you, and praise you in the gates.

Sorry, I was watching House. I'm betting the opera in question is Julius Caesar by Handel, and so I would guess the singer is David Daniels. But you're asking for a she. Trick question? I saw David Daniels do the role in Chicago opposite Danielle DeNiese oh, maybe 5 years ago. Anyway, I don't know. I'm not really into Baroque opera, not very much. You are so good. Right opera, and Daniels would have been great, but really he is not much like Rand to look at. The other contestant , me,answers correctly Ewa Podlusch or however the hell you spell her. She marched out on the stage in an ill-fitting costume, hit her mark, looked around at the orchestra (not in a complimentary way), opened her mouth, and owned us. Me especially, and even partially my poor friend who hates opera but took me there because it was a sad time for me and she wanted to do something for me, and oh she did. I will always remember that performance so dearly. The stalwart sturdy brilliance of that singer, just doing her job, the entire delight of the music, the beauty and awfulness and inevitability of life.

Further to tattooing, I don't have any feelings about it except practical ones - trendy gets old fast,and old girlfriends get inconvenient, and lasering is expensive. My Andy's tattoo was for his father. It is a maple leaf and St Andrews cross flags entwined, with Eddie's dates of birth and death. It's on his left shoulder, closest to his heart.