R3OK

Spotted on my travels today:



One can understand the sentiments without quite grasping the logic of the consequences ...

I was going to raise the question of blue-rinsed ladies but then I remembered that my source for the notion that music in the US was a highly commercial and ruthlessly marketed activity was The Rest is Noise ..... 

Quote from: MabelJane on May 05, 2013, 11:56:30 pm

We're Going on a Gove Hunt - brilliant!

http://mattpearson.org/2012/03/06/were-going-on-a-gove-hunt-2/

[If you don't already know it, Michael Rosen's book is We're Going on a Bear Hunt.]

 

Michael Rosen is curating this year's Brighton Festival.  His video of the Brighton bear hunt certainly made me smile.

http://brightonfestival.org/extras/video_a_brighton_bear_hunt/

And on which subject, Michael Rosen's evisceration of Gove's recent remarks about teaching "correct" grammar - citing examples from We're Going on a Bear Hunt - made me smile quite a lot too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/10/michael-gove-grammar

Not exactly my latest purchase (I've had it a few weeks now) but one that I've been savouring during that time:



A bit of a nostalgia trip, because I had the LP box back in the 1980s and it was one of my first forays into Sibelius.  Years later, and knowing this music far better, it stands up incredibly well. The original box included Kullervo, which sadly isn't here, and the decision to include only two movements of the Karelia Suite seems strange.   Berglund's Sibelius evokes all sorts of cliches about being "granite-hewn" but what is certainly true is that the performances, generally in slowish tempi, have a feel of absolute integrity about them - and there's no lack of expressive power or intensity.  Berglund works the climax of Tapiola into something utterly terrifying and overpowering - an extraordinary performance.  The sound is terrific (it always was) and the Bournemouth SO play their socks off - there's nothing remotely "provincial" about this orchestra.  And the set is almost absurdly cheap.

It's not funny.  It really isn't.  There's nothing remotely funny at all about it. It was terribly embarrassing.  Really. Stop sniggering at the back.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-22381593

In my DfT days, "signage" was a collective term used for the deployment of signs, e.g. around a new traffic scheme or road, or in relation to the regulations governing road sign (which are complex, detailed and have more in common with the Schleswig-Holstein question than many traffic planners would care to admit)  But, yes, "signage" for a single sign is pretty horrible.

I saw part of the piece on TV and my problem was with the notion of people being driven to spend a quid a day on food and how it gives an excuse for certain people to say that cuts in welfare aren't as big a deal. 'Look at them...'

Quite.  It's one thing to do it for a week; another to know that that is your lot indefinitely.  Nothing has really changed though - here's George Orwell from The Road to Wigan Pier:

The miner’s family spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables and tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and nine on sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on tea. The half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the materials for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four or five tins of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes–an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.

Quote from: oliver sudden on April 25, 2013, 08:30:46 am

I wonder what percentage of Daily Mail clicks aren't actually people 'reading' the stuff but are from those of us clicking-through from links along the lines of 'look what they've done NOW!'...

I don't suppose the Daily  Mail is too fussed either way... 

Quite. It's the mentality of the playground bully abusing his peers, getting off on both the power kick and the notoriety.  Repulsive.