http://www.2blowhards.com/ en-us 2010-02-08T16:05:42-05:00 http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/02/pants_pockets_d.html Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- How's your line? Is it trim and sleek? Or are you like me. I got to thinking about this the other day when I was swapping out the contents of the pockets of my blue jeans to a clean pair of trousers. I was inspecting the reverse side of the pocket where I dump coins and recalled the horror from olden days when I might notice that the cloth was wearing thin or even developing a hole due to the weight and shifting of those coins. After all, once that pocket went, those pants were finished as well. Of course this would be a non-issue if I were of the set that never puts anything into pants pockets. Alas, I've always believed that pockets were made for stuffin'. For example, my right-rear pocket is for my wallet. (I used to put a card-carrier in the left-rear one, but with great effort abandoned that practice and thinned down my plastic so that they fit in the wallet.) The left front pocket is for car keys and ChapStick, the right front for coins, and both might hold a Kleenex or two. This post isn't about shirts, but I might as well add that my shirt pocket holds a dazzling array comprised of a calendar, Starbucks cards, scraps of notepaper and a few Tums for emergency aid for my poor, battered esophagus. Plus a ballpoint pen. And yes, it was a sad day indeed when shirtmakers economized by dropping the right-hand pocket. I can get away with this because men tend to be sloppy, practical sorts and I can blend in with the crowd -- or hope I do, anyway. On the other hand, my wife's trousers have pockets that are almost never used. This is surely because objects of any size would do strange things to her feminine figure. Conclusion: pockets on womens' pants are primarily decorative elements. Then there are men who walk around with empty pants pockets. I can understand this where the guy's appearance is an important career maintenance factor: think executives, movie stars and such. But otherwise...? Let us know your take on pockets in Comments. I'm especially curious where guys put their wallets, car keys, change and so forth if they avoid putting those items in pants pockets. Later, Donald... Women, Men, Eroticism and Sex Donald 2010-02-08T16:05:42-05:00 http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/02/facing_windows.html Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Rather than loading up on beer and snacks for the Super Bowl football game this past weekend and watching all those pre-game shows filled with video clips and conjecture, Your Faithful Blogger was occupied with the project of acquiring and setting up a new computer. My wife had an ancient (10 years-old? 12?) Sony Vaio computer whose key software had long since been abandoned by Microsoft's support staff. It was more than time to upgrade, and so she finally decided it was time to do so. Therefore, Saturday was Best Buy day. I was pumping for a entry-level box. This was because all she does is check email, surf the Web a tiny bit and write up minutes for her college sorority alumni group. To no avail. She spied a Gateway all-in-one machine with a fancy touch-screen she probably (wisely) won't track up with sticky/oily/greasy or whatever fingers. More expensive than that basic box, yet about half the price of a comparable Mac. So she bought it. Sunday afternoon it fell to me to disconnect the old computer and set up the new one (and the new printer). Three or four hours later, I finished the deed. Now I'm puzzling over some Windows 7 (the newest Microsoft operating system / user interface) features, but haven't yet read more than a snippet of documentation. Reader help will be greatly appreciated. I missed out on Windows Vista, so my point of reference is Windows XP, which I find easy to deal with. One feature of 7 that I immediately noticed is that I can't seem to find those clearly laid-out presentations of directories (or "folders" as Microsoft so rudely renamed them) that used to appear when I got into Windows Explorer. Now all I find under the C disk drive is two or three folder icons. What happened to all the rest? Must I go to My Documents or some other sissy location and start populating these on my own? I dearly miss Program Files, Windows and all those other really handy directories. Windows 7 seems not to have an email program; the folks at Best Buy told us to download something from the Microsoft site that would do the job. So I did, but the software doesn't seem to have an address book. Question: Is there a decent (and easy to use -- for Nancy's sake) email program with all the expected features that I can download? Also, I'll probably download the Firefox browser unless someone can convince me that Internet Explorer has now risen to Cat's Meow status. Any other tips? Later, Donald... Computers and Games Donald 2010-02-08T00:54:44-05:00 http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/02/president_on_th.html Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- For many of us, Barack Obama remains an International Man of Mystery even though he has been President for more than a year. Blame for our ignorance can largely be dumped on the news media Establishment (The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc.) who sent platoons of reporters chasing after every detail of Sarah Palin's existence while accepting Obama's autobiographies and press releases as gospel. This Cone of Spin has been in place since before the start of 2008 presidential campaigning. As a result, the average citizen probably knows less about Obama and how he ticks than any president in recent times. Another result is that political writers -- mostly on the Right -- have been on a What's Obama Really Like kick for some time. This is nice for the writers because it's a topic that shows no sign of going away. But it might not be in Obama's best interest because, if pundits are uncertain, then so must be broad swaths of the voting public. At any rate, as the title to this post hints, a number of commentators have been putting Obama on the proverbial psychiatrist's couch and using his words and deeds in an attempt to discern what might lie deeper. To illustrate my point, here are some recent items in that vein from the Internet. I make no claim for their accuracy or profundity; I chose them simply because they were recent and easy to spot. Harvey Mansfield, for example, delves into political philosophy. Matthew Continetti looks at the "man behind the 'postpartisan' curtain." Peter Wehner doubts Obama's claim that he (Obama) is non-ideological. Finally, two Washington Post reporters point out that Obama has been to church only four times in the past year, yet go on the claim he is actually privately a religious or spiritual man. I think Obama and his public relations crew consider it politically wise to keep an invisibility cloak wrapped around the inner Obama. As to why, well that ought to be grist for yet another analytical column by one of those pundits. Later, Donald... Politics, Economics, Education Donald 2010-02-04T13:18:13-05:00 http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/02/politicized_sci.html Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Politics seems to be everywhere. And maybe it always was, though I don't recall such pervasiveness before, say, the mid-1960s. Admittedly, I grew up in the shadow of the New Deal and World War 2, an era when disagreements regarding the state of the nation and its place in the world were comparatively small in scale and tended to emerge at election season, leaving the rest of the time fairly quiet. One place that seemed politics-free in those happy years was the field of science-fiction. Noticeable (to me) politics emerged sometime around 1970 when Harlan Ellison's writing struck me as being a bit Left. Well, whatever his slant, it wasn't the space opera libertarianism common up until then (think, among others, Robert Heinlein). In contrast, at about the same time, Poul Anderson's stories began to include explicit anti-Left elements. It's worth noting that early sci-fi -- space opera, mostly -- featured conflict between humans and varieties of bug-eyed monsters wherein a Mensa-class scientist might almost instantly invent and build a weapon that would save the humans' day. Science fiction eventually evolved to the point where authors were inventing societies and conflict could be between humans. This opens the field to politics: are the bad guys businessmen, the military, big government -- or what? Even so, classical science-fiction writers with a strong personal political bent could still keep the political dimension of their stories disguised well enough that it didn't interfere with the main action. I've mentioned a number of times that I seldom read fiction, and that includes science-fiction. So I'm out of touch. Can readers bring us up to date regarding the intrusion of politics into sci-fi? And which currently active writers fall into various political camps based on the content of their work? Later, Donald... Books, Writing and Publishing Donald 2010-02-03T15:38:58-05:00 http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/02/highway_numerol.html Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Back home at last after six weeks in the not always sunny-in-winter southern Pacific Coast. While traveling, I made use of road maps. And this brought to mind the national systems of highway numbering. The basic scheme is clear, but the details are sometimes anomalous. An account of the origin of the U.S. highway or route system is here. Unlike the Interstate system begun in the 1950s, the U.S. numbering system emerged in the mid-1920s from lower-level initiatives. The general scheme is that north-south routes are odd-numbered and east-west routes are even. The lowest numbers are in the northeast, the highest in the southwest. From my Rand McNally road atlas collection I dug out atlases from 1941 and 1952, my oldest, and did some checking. Even numbers ranged from 2 in the north to 94 crossing lower Florida in the south. The odds were from 1 in the east to 101 along the west coast. The linked article goes into detail regarding split highways (for instance, U.S. 99E and 99W -- east and west versions of highway 99) and three-digit numbers indicating variants (195 and 395 running parallel to 95 in Oregon and Washington). The Federally-implemented Interstate highway system retained the odd-even scheme but flipped the numbering order: the lowest in the southwest corner of the country, the highest numbers in the northeast. What I find interesting are the oddities. For example, a little number-adjusting back in the late 60s (if I remember right) resulted in Interstate 76, which just happened to pass through Philadelphia. (Nudge: Philadelphia. Declaration of Independence. 1776. Get it?) Then there is Interstate 84 (Portland, Oregon - near Salt Lake City). For many years it was 80-N -- mainline 80 connecting San Francisco and New York City's George Washington Bridge. Eventually 80-N was renamed Interstate 84. A while later, a stretch of Interstate connecting I-90 and I-84 via Yakima, Washington became I-82. Huh? Why not an intermediate number such as 86 or 88? (I-88 is fragmented already, one segment is between Binghamton and Schenectady, New York and another between the Chicago area and Moline, Illinois.) The old U.S. highway system had a few cases where a route would seriously wander from its proper sequential place. A famous example is Route 66 which went between Chicago and Santa Monica, California. Then there was U.S. 6 which, in the 1940s ran between Long Beach, California and Provincetown on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. By all rights, U.S. 6 should have been placed north of U.S. 10, which stretched from Seattle to Detroit. One problem with highway numbers is that, while there are plenty of reasonable-size cities in the east that can serve as anchors, the west only has a few potential termini: Puget Sound, Portland, Oregon, the San Francisco Bay area, the Los Angeles region and San Diego. Regardless, I find studying the supposedly orderly but actually slightly messy number systems an interesting way to occupy my mind when it has nothing better to... Miscellaneous Donald 2010-02-02T11:16:36-05:00 http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/01/folks_who_know.html Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Whether it's a general male trait or simply my normal sloth, it seems that most of the guys I meet and socialize with nowadays are husbands of friends of my wife. And of those husbands of my wife's friends, the ones I tend to get along with best and for the longest visits are guys who Know Stuff. Now, everybody of sound mind knows a lot of things by the time teen years are nicely underway. So my Know Stuff criterion is really something to the effect of knowing stuff about subjects I too am familiar with. That is, a guy deep into bricklaying, hot-rodding and pre-1970 baseball statistics clearly knows a lot of stuff, but I would have trouble carrying on a long conversation with him about those subjects because my knowledge about them is pretty scanty. On the other hand there are a few people who know things, but at a superficial level across nearly all the board. And there are those who know things, but aren't able to organize or present them in an interesting way. Do you get the idea that the subject of this post is highly subjective? Even so, I think there are people whose knowledge and ability to communicate it are above average. Further, I suggest that these traits make for blogging success as well as conversational compatibility. A prime example is Dave Burge who blogs as Iowahawk. Burge is widely recognized in the righty side of the blogosphere as an especially keen satirist. I believe that the strength of his satires is largely due to knowing a lot of stuff -- the way people of different backgrounds phrase things, details of society now and even 70 or 80 years ago, details about other countries, and so on. If the details are wrong, the satire fails. Burge's blog persona is that of a Iowa hayseed hot rod freak who (for a while on the blog) purportedly lived in a trailer park. Yet not long ago Burge dropped his mask and wrote this post in which he created a downloadable spreadsheet model that mimicked the well-known global warming "hockey stick" graph. (It seems Burge works with statistical modeling on his day job). The punch line of the piece is that that hockey stick appears only if data are manipulated just so. So, while the criteria for the honor of Knowing Stuff are subjective, in certain circumstances there can be a payoff for one who Knows Stuff. Later, Donald... Miscellaneous Donald 2010-01-30T18:11:58-05:00 http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/01/what_salinger_r.html Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- As many readers know by now, author J.D. Salinger died yesterday. And many readers have read Salinger. Even not-so-lit me read "The Catcher in the Rye" when I was too young to really understand all the East Coast stuff it inhabited. Speaking of reading preferences, what were Salinger's? Roger L. Simon comes to the rescue with this anecdote. Key passage: My encounters with Salinger happened when I was a Dartmouth student (1964). The already reclusive Salinger would appear on the campus occasionally, usually to make a stop at the Dartmouth Bookstore to stock up on books. (He lived some twenty miles off in the town of Cornish, N. H.) When he was around, word would go out to the artier types at the college and we would slip over to the bookstore and, well, stalk the famous writer, I guess you could say. By then he had published Franny and Zooey, among other works, which we greatly admired. But many of us were puzzled that the majority of his purchases were mere mystery paperbacks – Dorothy Sayers was one of his favorites. Undergraduate snobs, we had expected Dostoevsky or Camus. This deserves further comment, but I'm not equipped to deliver. Are you there, Michael Blowhard? Anyone? Later, Donald... Books, Writing and Publishing Donald 2010-01-28T21:00:19-05:00 http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/01/a_disappearing.html Books, Writing and Publishing Donald 2010-01-28T12:22:35-05:00 http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/01/recession_snows.html Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Our get-out-of-Seattle-in-winter effort is into its final phases. That is, we're in the Lake Tahoe area for Nancy's annual ski week. I never skiied much and quit before I bailed out of Albany, NY to return to the Seattle area. So she skis and I try to keep busy doing other things. Today those "other things" involved driving down to South Lake Tahoe/Stateline to buy a few needed groceries. While there, I checked out the commercial scene. Two or three years ago, the place was doing well, if appearance was any guide. Now, that same casual yardstick suggests that times are hard. In the "village" by the big Marriott on the main drag, something like half the retail spaces are vacant. Nearby, things don't look so bad, but vacancies seem greater than last year which was worse than pre-recession. I then drove over to Harrah's and did a walk-through of the four big casinos on the Nevada side of the state line. Two of them -- the Montbleu and the Horizon -- didn't look healthy. Some restaurants were closed "for the season" or otherwise simply shuttered. The slot machine zone of one casino struck me as sparsely populated -- by machines as well as gamblers. Harrah's and its sister (brother?) casino Harvey's seemed in better shape. Perhaps that might be due to the comparatively deep pockets of the Harrah organization. Even so, a small Harrah casino for non-smokers called Bill's was closed (it never struck me as very busy in past years). Skiing is an expensive hobby, so it stands to reason that it would be affected by the current recession which is lengthy as well as deep. Had the recession been shorter, perhaps more tourist-related businesses would have survived. For what it's worth, what I've been seeing here is the strongest evidence of the recession that I've experienced thus far. On the other hand, I haven't visited Detroit and similar places since before the 2008 crash. Later, Donald... Politics, Economics, Education Donald 2010-01-26T19:21:58-05:00 http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/01/forever_young.html Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Now that Michael Blowhard has willed me the Top Banana role here at 2B, I whine from time to time that posting reinforcements are more than welcome. Last week, longtime reader Rick Darby passed along the following thoughts. * * * * * Forever Young May your heart always be joyful, May your song always be sung, May you stay forever young, Forever young, forever young, May you stay forever young. — Bob Dylan The pace is picking up. “My” generation is dying off. I put quotes around “my” because it doesn’t necessarily mean exact chronological cohorts. Rather, people whose work affected me when I was young, or at least a lot younger than I am now, and left a lasting impression. It’s hard to imagine them aging, impossible to comprehend them dying. They and I will always be in the 1960s or 1970s when I think of them. (That’s not so long ago in my mind, although for young adults it’s the Pleistocene Age.) Just this week, two people I never met personally but with whom I connected with emotionally passed out of this life. The first was Kate McGarrigle, one-half of Kate and Anna McGarrigle. Their first album floored me when I heard it in the early ’70s; some 35 years later, it still does. Practically every track on the album sparkles. They were bilingual “English” girls from French Canada, blessed with splendid voices, individually and in harmony. I’m not sure which songs were written by which sister (the sublime “Heart Like a Wheel” is credited to Anna), but they were synergy in action. Kate and Anna released other albums over the decades. While they were of uneven quality, and none in my estimation surpassed that original effort, the craftsmanship was always there. They continued to offer consolation to those of us who were immiserated as popular music sank to ever-more artificial, and often cretinous, levels. The other loss this week that affected me was the detective novel writer Robert B. Parker. I believe I discovered him by way of his first book, The Godwulf Manuscript, about the same time as the sisters McGarrigle swum into my ken. He created the tough, wisecracking detective Spenser who was to Boston what Hammett’s Sam Spade was to San Francisco and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe was to Los Angeles. Parker has his detractors, and I agree with some of their reasons. After the first few novels, the Spenser series started to roll off an assembly line -- still entertaining enough to be good company on an airplane ride or for light reading, but successive titles did not grow in depth over the years like Ross Macdonald’s, for instance. But it was thrilling enough to my young self to learn that the Raymond Chandler tradition was alive and well, and the snappy dialogue probably influenced my own style, as it undoubtedly influenced many others. (I’m not, of course, saying I imitate Parker or comparing myself to him... Miscellaneous Donald 2010-01-25T20:12:50-05:00 http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/01/opening_soon_ps.html Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- The title of this post is approximately what I read on what appeared to be a professionally painted canvas sign on the back, freeway-facing wall of a new strip mall someplace between Vacaville and Sacramento California. Maybe this is nothing new to you. For me, most of the psychics I notice seem to be in residences in transitional (residential-to-commercial) neighborhoods. Perhaps you've seen them: a house with a sign in a front window featuring a drawing of a hand and a short slogan with the word "Psychic" prominently displayed. The closest I ever got to psychic stuff was many, many years ago when my grandmother read tea leaves for a cousin of mine who was really anxious about finding herself a man (I don't remember what the leaves said, but ten or so years later she did get married). This means that I'm clueless regarding (1) what comprises the clientele for psychics and (2) what psychics actually tell those people. But that forthcoming psychic shop in the new strip mall intrigues me. Is that a sign the psychics are getting enough business to go mainstream? Please advise. Later, Donald... Miscellaneous Donald 2010-01-24T23:20:51-05:00 http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/01/byebye_la.html Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Los Angeles' 2010 week of rainy winter weather is almost over and so is our stay in nearby Malibu. Once I download photos to one of my computers, I'll conjure up some pix-posts. In any event, it's evaluation time. In the past, I've made it clear that I haven't been a Los Angeles fan. The reason probably has to do with the short-term nature of previous visits -- having a hotel as the base of operations, putting in a lot of freeway time and frustration getting from attraction to attraction or sales call to sales call, and the rest of that kind of drill. House-sitting isn't quite like being an actual resident, but it does provide a different slant than the hotel-centric visit. So does being here 3 1/2 weeks rather than three or four days. One distortion from full residential mode is that we went out and visited places every day, something regular folks wouldn't be doing. Another variation from the norm is that our roost was in a nice part of town -- a part so nice we couldn't afford to live there. Shaking and stirring the above, I have to say that we enjoyed LA a lot more than anticipated. There is plenty of culture here, interesting places to visit and nice scenery. Finally, this week aside, wintering here is nicer than wintering in Seattle (which, in turn, is nicer than wintering in large chunks of the USA). Later, Donald... Miscellaneous Donald 2010-01-23T01:53:04-05:00 http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/01/mighty_kingdom.html Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Not long ago I bought a book by Philip Matyszak with the charming title "Ancient Rome on Five Dinarii a Day" (Amazon link here.) It' a pretty painless introduction to life at the heart of the Roman Empire circa 200 AD in the guise of a travel guide. It even includes some Latin phrases that might be of use, for example: Scorpio sum -- quod signum tibi es? (I'm a Scorpio -- what sign are you?). One passage that particularly intrigued me was this one on page 67: The Romans do know of China. Chinese records speak of a visit of merchants from the emperor An'tun (probably Antonius or Marcus Aurelius), but trade between the two empires is done through intermediaries. Can you truly wrap your mind around the idea of a distant kingdom or empire about which you know almost nothing, yet that rivals yours in scale? My problem is that no such thing is possible in today's world and hasn't been for hundreds of years. It's simply not part of our life-experience. When I was a kid, there might have been a few undetected tribes someplace in the Amazon basin or New Guinea, but even that smidgen of geographical and cultural ignorance has been eliminated. One might raise the matter of civilizations on planets of distant stars, but these are presently hypothetical and not real as China was in Roman times. Later, Donald... Miscellaneous Donald 2010-01-22T01:54:43-05:00 http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/01/the_harder_they.html Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Consider: Barack Obama, Teddy Kennedy, Tiger Woods and, oh yes, Ingrid Bergman. And think about what was known long ago in the days of Greek theatrical tragedies and surely long, long before that. Namely, success reinforced by adulation can make the almost inevitable fall harder than it might have been otherwise. These thoughts are with me as I draft this post on the first anniversary of the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States. A year ago, Obama was treated in a number of media outlets as a kind of reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln and/or Franklin Roosevelt. I recall a few digitally modified images morphing him partway into one or the other of the two iconic presidents. The outburst of enthusiasm and high expectations for Obama was reaching the point where some opponents wondered if such Obama-worship might be a form of religion. Today Obama and his program are in serious trouble. He is "under water" (pundit-speak for below 50 percent approval) in most opinion polls. His party has now lost three important elections: the governorships of Virginia (a Republican, but recently leaning to Democrat state) and New Jersey (a strongly Democrat state) and yesterday a senate seat in Massachusetts, practically a Democrat fiefdom. A number of reasons are being advanced for this fall from grace, most having plenty of merit. But I wonder how much the adulation and lack of contsructive criticism by that "watchdog" media of a year ago contributed. It wasn't the most important factor, but still.... Media coddling helped make golf star Tiger Woods' recent windshield splat an 80 miles-per-hour affair rather than a 10 MPH matter. I haven't paid much attention to Woods, but from snippets I've read, he was a far rougher character than his media image suggested. Moreover, this was known in the professional golf fraternity for a long while. Woods' name is Mud for the short run. His golf skills probably will not harm his career on the links, but his "clean" image is destroyed and income from endorsements will probably be diminished for years. Perhaps Woods would be better off today if his public image had been more in synch with reality. Nowadays, transgressions of movie stars are proclaimed every week by gossip magazines and tabloid papers in racks near sup ... * * * * UH OH!! Rich Rostrom pointed out in an email that the comments link wasn't activated. I checked, and by golly it really wasn't -- for some reason unknown to me. So I fixed that, and then the last part of this post got zapped. (So that's how it feels to get bitten by a snake.) Herewith is a rough reconstruction of the last part: * * * * From the 1920s well into the 50s movie studios had stars and other performers under contract. Part of the deal was that the studios handled public relations to protect the stars' images, unlike now where stars are basically... Miscellaneous Donald 2010-01-21T01:46:19-05:00 http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/01/maazel_tov.html Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Okay, so the title to this post can't possibly be original. And I'm writing about music, about which I know almost nothing. But the nature of blogging is that bloggers tend to write about what they encounter on the Web or in daily life. Yesterday, we ventured to downtown Los Angeles and the Walt Disney Concert Hall (designed by Frank Gehry -- I'll have photos and an article about it one of these days) to witness the Los Angeles Philharmonic and guest conductor Lorin Maazel. The program began with a suite from Der Rosenkavalier followed by The Dance of the Seven Veils from Salome (the latter including singing by Nancy Gustafson) by Richard Strauss. After the intermission was the Second Symphony by Jean Sibelius. We went because my wife wanted to see the Disney and soak up some culture. "Arts buff" me was thinking that, for the price of my ticket, I could buy three classical CDs of my choosing to pop into the trusty little Bose in our living room while avoiding the stress and hassle of navigating a downtown LA I hadn't visited in more than 20 years. The main attraction for me was seeing Maazel conduct. The gent is pushing 80 really hard (his birthday is in March), yet was energetic enough for the 90 or so minutes he was on the podium. Actually, Gustafson proved a surprise attraction. She's in her early 50s and, as Salome, was wearing a slinky, semi-see-through gown: Bravo! quoth me. Oh yes. The music. I'm not a huge Strauss fan. We saw his opera Elektra a while ago, and I didn't care for it much. The two pieces Maazel conducted were okay, but I wouldn't buy a CD of them. The Sibelius was a waste of my time. Plenty of different sounds, but save for the last few minutes, no sustained melodic thrust. I never cared for Sibelius' work. But as I mentioned, I'm pretty ignorant of music, so do pile on in Comments if you wish. Later, Donald... Music, Dance, etc. Donald 2010-01-18T21:40:48-05:00