Category: Language

ENO Traviata dress rehearsal

Yesterday GodDaughter2 arranged for me to accompany her and and a selection her singing student friends to a dress rehearsal of the ENO’s La Traviata. Like every show at the E(nglish) NO, It was sung in English. It was also somewhat strangely directed, as operas tend to be nowadays. So, the students were all grumbling afterwards. What were those peculiar gestures the soprano kept on doing? “Such torture” to have listen to it in English!

As for me, my problems were that we were the usual third of a mile up and away in the sky (but with no windows through which I might have taken photos of London’s Things), and I couldn’t properly see what was happening down there in the distance, beyond the woman in front of me’s head and those brass railings that she was able crouch down and look under. I wasn’t bothered by all the strange “acting” that the singers were apparently doing, because I could hardly see it. It was all I could do to decypher the English crib (and thank goodness for that) above the stage, of what they were singing (in English also (but as often as not you still can’t make out the damn words (because of how they sing them))). But the music, by Giuseppe Verdi, which I knew only as a random bunch of tunes that I had just about quarter-heard before, is so good that I was kept constantly entertained. Plus, I understood enough of what was going on to really enjoy it, and to really learn something.

It’s quite a story. A young woman (the Traviata of the title) is trying to juggle short-term pleasure with and against long-term romantic fulfilment, is fretting about whether her true love can truly be depended upon, but also doesn’t want to get her true love into social trouble because of her lurid past causing everyone to think he could have done better, which will dishonour his entire family and make his younger sister much less marriageable. Plus, she is not in the best of health and has to keep seeing a doctor.

I can remember, way back in the sixties, when it was believed that all that social pressure stuff was dead in the water. Plus of course, in the sixties, everyone was far too young to be having any health problems. Girls could shack up with guys and have consequence-free sex, and then live happily ever after with … whoever. I think I remember thinking, even at the time: well, we’ll see. And it turns out that young girls can now be “ruined” a lot like they were in olden times, that “society” has not gone away, that people still get ill, even sometimes ill because of sex, and that La Traviata is still bang up to date.

The Father of the Traviata’s True Love very much wants True Love to stop being Traviata’s True Love, and begs Traviata to give him up. For the ENO, yesterday, this Father was sung by Alan Opie. He was especially good. A bloke had come on at the beginning and said that, what with this being only a dress rehearsal, some of the singers might be holding back a bit, saving it for the real show. But you could definitely tell that Opie was the real deal.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Assorted Twitterings

I follow Tom Holland because I have liked several of his books (especially Persian Fire), and because I often agree with him, as when he says things like this:

The assumption in Europe that its brand of colonialism was uniquely awful is, in a perverse way, one of the last hold-outs of eurocentrism.

Very true.

Via Tom Holland, I came upon this, from Anthony McGowan:

I came across a place called Strood. I looked it up (having no idea where or what it was), I found this achingly poignant statement: “Strood was part of Frindsbury until 1193, but now Frindsbury is considered part of Strood.”

It’s the implication that “now”, in the Strood/Finsbury part of the world, began in 1193 that makes this so entertaining. I guess they have long memories out there in the not-London part of Britain.

Anthony McGowan is someone I don’t agree with a lot of the time (here is what I think about that). But, I also liked this:

An article about the history of the Chinese typewriter. One old machine had a strange pattern, as some characters had been polished by over-use. It belonged to a Chinese-American immigrant. “The keys that glitter with use are: emigrant, far away, urgent, longing, hardship, dream”.

McGowan doesn’t supply links to where he got these intriguing titbits, which I don’t like. But despite that and other similarly nitpicky nitpicks on my part, Twitter is working, for me. At present I have no plans to depend upon it to say things, although that may change, for I am too distrustful of its increasing political bias. But it is supplying me with much more stuff to be thinking about and writing about.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Quota wine bottle with silly name

Incoming email from Tony entitled “Couldn’t resist buying this”:

Here’s hoping he was/will be amused by its cheek.

Apparently the Arse is a river in southern France, beside which grapes are grown.

Up early tomorrow. So now, to bed.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Penis park

Here:

The best comment I can think of is another photo, one of the many that I took in the Churchill Dungeon, this one being an item for sale in the gift shop:

I love words. I sometimes I fail to think of the right ones, but they never fail me. It just that I am sometimes not worthy of them.

But I found some good ones this time, I think.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

BMdotcom mixed metaphor of the day

I just heard ITV News describe South African politician Jacob Zuma as being “mired in a whirlwind” of something or other. Controversy, or some such thing. Yes, this.

Next thing you know, he’ll be blown away by a swamp.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Made up abbreviated words

I’ve often wondered about words like these, but Susie Dent explains:

You can be gruntled (satisfied), kempt (combed), couth (polite), ruthful (full of compassion), whelmed (capsized), and gorm-like (have an intelligent look about you). And, for a while in the 1600s, you could be shevelled too.

A commenter adds the words “chalant” and “consolate”, which were apparently first used in a New Yorker piece.

Also in that piece: “wieldy”, “descript”, “gainly”, “cognito”, “make bones about it”, “beknownst”, “it would be skin off my nose”, “both hide and hair”, “toward and heard-of behaviour”, “maculate”, “peccable”, “new hat”, “terminable”, “promptu”, “petuous”, “nomer”, “choate, “defatigable”, “committal”, and quite a few that I surely missed.

Immaculate and impeccable are odd ones. Does im at the front mean not? It’s not clear. Pressive? Pact? Mitate? Agination? Immiserate sounds the same as miserate. This can get very intricate. Although, you may think it to be not very tricate. Also, I hope you are being ritated rather than the more common negative of that.

“Indefatigable” could be shortened twice. Defatigable. Fatigable. Which means something very similar to indefatigable.

Timidate. Timate. Genious. Sipid. Cest. Ert and Ept, I’ve heard before. Nuendo. Finitesimal. Juriours,

For “over”, you could just put “der”.

I hope this posting has interested you. My apologies if, instead, you have been terested.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Photoers on Primrose Hill and how my camera turns everything yellow

After that trip to Primrose Hill with GodDaughter2, when my camera stopped cooperating, and I later got it working again, I went back there, on my own. I couldn’t be content until I had taken as many photos there as I would like to have taken on the previous visit.

One of the better photos I took on that second trip, of photoers photoing, was this:

Is that guy photoing his photoer lady-friend, as she photos the view? Judging by the red blob on his screen, which has got to be her bright red rucksack, I would say: yes he is. What a peculiar man, wanting to take a photo like that.

Joking aside, there is something else about my camera that troubles me, besides having spent a day thinking it was completely bust. Do you remember that day earlier this year when the sky turned yellow, because of some North African dust storm, or some such thing. Well, when my camera is set on automatic – and when I use it it is always set on automatic – it does this all the time. Everything comes out yellower than it should. Blues are diminished into white. The merest suggesting of actual yellow is intensified. Not good.

The above photo, effective though I think it is, illustrates this only too clearly. Notice how even my photo of the guy’s screen has his sky bluer than my version of the sky. Which means that his screen must have been very blue.

I tried reading the camera manual, but unfortunately this is written in a Serbo-Croation dialect of Sanskrit. Not one word of it makes any sense to me at all. And I tried fiddling around with the camera itself, without any success. I couldn’t even find anywhere on the www where I might be able to ask my question, and more to the point, maybe get some worthwhile answers. Help. I realise that Boxing day is not a good day to be saying such a thing, but I say it anyway. By the time anyone gets around to reading this, the problem is unlikely to have gone away.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Googling for new planets

Incoming from Rob Fisher: link to a piece in the Independent, about machine learning applied to old telescope data is finding new planets.

Quote:

A computer was trained to look through the data from the Kepler space telescope, and look for signals that might belong to planets. And it found new planets within existing systems, by spotting signals that seemed to indicate something of interest but were too weak to have been spotted by humans.

That suggests that there might be whole worlds and solar systems hiding within the data we’ve already collected, but which we had not noticed because there are simply so many signals to pick through. Kepler has collected four-years of data from looking at the sky and 150,000 stars – far more than humans could ever look through.

So, exactly what were these weak signals?

The new planets – just like all of the thousands found by Kepler – were spotted by watching the sky for light coming from the stars. When planets pass in front of their stars, scientists can register the dimming as they go, and use the speed and characteristics of that dimming to work out what the solar system might actually look like.

Much of that work relies on pattern recognition, which until now has been done by scientists looking through the data. But the new findings are the result of work between Nasa and Google, which trained machine learning algorithms to learn to spot those patterns itself and so pick through the data much more quickly.

This is good. Keep Skynet busy with harmless hobbies.

Maybe not. Getting Skynet to compile a huge and exhaustive list of all the places in the universe where biology-based life might be, after biology-based life on this planet has been taken care of.

This is maybe how the robot holocaust will happen. We will have been telling them to “take care of” us and our fellow creatures. But they’ll have been watching too many gangster movies, and …

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Queen and Bean

Today I was in central London. It wasn’t good photoing weather. Grim and grey and wet. But I did take this photo:

At the time, I thought I was photoing an army of Santas. For some reason I find the photoing of large numbers of similar or identical objects, in a big clump or clutch, to be rather satisfying.

But it turned out I was photoing two British Personal Brands With Huge Global Reach, namely The Queen, as performed by Elizabeth Windsor, and Mr Bean, as performed by Rowan Atkinson.

A lot of their appeal is that these are both characters who do a lot of physical stuff, rather than characters who talk a lot. Neither Elizabeth Windsor nor Rowan Atkinson are stupid or inarticulate people. On the contrary both are notable wordsmiths, blessed with famously subtle senses of humour. Nevertheless, the Queen’s daily repertoire of stuff is adopting Royal poses and walking or being driven about Royally and making Royal gestures and doing Royal things like shaking hands with a line of lesser celebrities. And Mr Bean mostly makes faces and does pratfalls. These are things that anyone on earth can see – see – the point of with great ease. You don’t have to know a word of English to get what The Queen or Mr Bean are all about. And if only a tiny percentage of the world’s populace like what they see of these two characters, that is still a lot of people.

You see Queen and Bean together, in effigy, in tourist crap shops, a lot. That I photoed the two of them accidentally is no, as it were, accident.

Despite googling it, I still don’t understand what this is about.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A clean dirty joke

Earlier today I was at a party, and sitting in on the party was Alexa, the cylindrical robot from Amazon. So, one of us asked Alexa to tell us a Dirty Joke. Alexa replied: “Why do you call a chicken covered in dirt crossing the road?” Answer, although I didn’t hear if Alexa actually said this or merely assumed that we’d get it: a dirty joke.

Not bad. And funny because, although a joke involving dirt, it is not a dirty joke in the sense of there being any sexual innuendo involved.

But, was Alexa trying to tell a joke? Or merely trying to do as she was told, without in any way understanding what the thing she was being told to do actually meant? I know, Alexa never “understands” anything. She’s a machine, with no consciousness. But, you surely know what I mean.

Another rather perfunctory posting. But, I spent quite a lot of my day going to a party, partying, and getting back from the party. I may, although I promise nothing, do better tomorrow.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog