I’m pleased to read that neither ABC nor NBC will be conducting a post-jail interview with professional trainwreck Paris Hilton. I had been dismayed initially upon hearing that NBC had supposedly offered a million damn dollars to talk to that wretched whore. Now I see in the New York Times that that is no longer the case:
After a flurry of accounts this week about financial offers to land the first postprison interview with Paris Hilton, both ABC and NBC said yesterday that they no longer had any interest in securing the interview.
NBC said that it had contacted representatives of the Hilton family yesterday afternoon and told them the network would no longer pursue the interview with Ms. Hilton, who has been in jail in Los Angeles since June 3 on charges related to traffic violations. She was sentenced to serve 45 days.
‘We have informed their representatives that we are not interested in this interview,’ said Allison Gollust, the spokeswoman for NBC News.
It’s clear that Barbara Walters had been approached to do the interview for ABC, but the network declined, to their credit. I am certain, however, that Walters would have done the interview had she been allowed. The only thing that could convince me that whatever journalistic integrity Walters ever had had not long since vanished would have been if the first question she asked Hilton was, “Why are you such a terrible human being?”
Filed under: Axis of Evil on June 23rd, 2007 | No Comments »
With an hour to fill before the opera broadcast today (Così fan tutte), I could have been creative. I had pulled out some English language canons and secular cantatas by Haydn. But in the end I lazied-out, and put on Mozart’s C Minor Mass, K. 427 (the Fricsay recording), with a running time of 57:03.
On the plus side, it was a superior choice on musical and performance grounds. Maria Stader was truly outstanding, and its sad to think that her style of singing no longer exists. That is the case, unfortunately, with many fine singers of the golden age. Voice students are so protective now of their instruments, and their teachers direct them into such a lightweight style of performance. Every young singer does Mozart these days, but who is doing Leoncavallo, Verdi, Giordano?
Filed under: Music, Work on June 23rd, 2007 | No Comments »
In today’s New York Times is A.O. Scott’s review of the new film Sicko. In the review he comments on one of the chief ironies of today’s political climate in America. Describing Michael Moore, Scott writes:
“His regular-guy, happy-warrior personality plays a large part in the movies and in their publicity campaigns, and he has no use for neutrality, balance or objectivity. More than that, his polemical, left-populist manner seems calculated to drive guardians of conventional wisdom bananas. That is because conventional wisdom seems to hold, against much available evidence, that liberalism is an elite ideology, and that the authentic vox populi always comes from the right. Mr. Moore, therefore, must be an oxymoron or a hypocrite of some kind.”
The second to last sentence is the key here. Why is it that liberals are branded elitist? I think it is because there is a distrust in conservative America of anything that appears intellectual. You see it in a variety of settings, from the ridiculous (and yes, I literally mean worthy of ridicule) denial of central tenets of science, to President Bush’s demonstrable lack of intellectual curiosity.
Moreover, I firmly believe that the “vox populi” as put forth by the political right is not, in fact, genuine. Consider the irony that the little support that remains for the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” comes largely from Bible-belt, red state America, the least likely target of international terrorism. And, as pointed out by another writer recently, environmental activism is largely the domain of urban “liberal elite” types, and not conservative, rural America.
Ironic.
Filed under: Politics on June 22nd, 2007 | 1 Comment »
For now it looks like the rains have stopped, and looking around the house I am surveying the damage. Nothing severe. The nice fern, sitting in a pot beneath the eaves, was pelted such that it is looking droopy, but it will spring back. The impatiens appear happy, and so do the St. Augustine plugs I have planted. I’ve been waiting two years to see one of the rotten limbs on the live oak come crashing down, and when it finally did the day before yesterday, it did so not with a fearsome, obliterating force upon the Japanese magnolias, but with a relatively gentile swinging motion. Pulling it the rest of the way down will be challenging, since other delicate plants are at risk.
The rain has been very welcome. At our house we have gone without rain for what seems like months. April and May are usually dry months, but they had been so dry that we were several inches below normal precipitation levels region-wide, and at this particular location, even lower, since rains that fell on other parts of the county missed us altogether. But we got a couple inches this week, and that’s good news. Now we just need another two inches this month to be “average”, though I have pondered for a decade or more why they continue to say year in and year out how annual rainfall has been “below average”. If “below average” rainfall is the norm, why hasn’t the “average” changed?
Filed under: Garden, Meteorology, Musings on June 22nd, 2007 | No Comments »
So I am wrapping up the finer details of the new web page, and I guess I’m satisfied. Sure, I would love it if it was the best looking site in the world, and if it had all manner of pretty things to look at, but what’re you going to do? I’m just one man.
I am about to put a message up on the old site that will forward visitors to the new one. I haven’t decided if I’ll migrate all the old archives over to the new site. It might take a lot of work, and still wouldn’t look as I’d like. I’d need some help, probably, to even create the appropriate page structure to have it work. So, for the time being, if it’s the past you’re interested in–and I’m with you there–then seek ye the old Archives.
Filed under: Website on June 22nd, 2007 | 1 Comment »