Random Thoughts

[verena]

Well that doesn't happen to me. Actually, better not realise you're eating Oreos. They suck & make you sick. Too much sugar/ junk ingredients in those.

There are better cookies you know, real goodies!

[miss buenos aires]

Three guys on an expense account are travelling together, all representing the same company. The company has a very strict per diem of $25/day for each to spend on lodging (okay, so they work for my company, which isn't doing to well...). They can pocket whatever they don't spend on lodging and meals.

The most thrifty of the three has identified a hotel that charges only $30/night. They decide to room together, so each contributes $10 dollars to meet the total bill of $30.

Once they have left the lobby to relax in the room and gloat over their shred move, the desk clerk realizes that he has mistakenly put them into a $25/night room. He gives the bellman five $1.00 dollar bills and tells him to bring the cash to the three travellers. The bellman, en route, reasons that they cannot easily divide the $5 among three, so he slips $2 in his pocket, knocks on the door, and thrills the three guys by giving each a crisp $1.00 dollar bill rebate. Thus, the actual cash outlay for the room (from the lodgers perspective) is $9/each for a total of $27 dollars. The bellman, as you recall, placed $2 dollars in his pocket.

$27 dollars + $2 dollars = $29 dollars.

Where did the other dollar go?

You don't add those two numbers for the price of the room! You subtract:

$27 (what they paid) - $2 (what the bellhop skimmed) = $25 (new price of room)

(This is after a morning of emailing several friends and getting them to work on it.)

[selfmademug]

Actually, better not realise you're eating Oreos. They suck & make you sick. Too much sugar/ junk ingredients in those.

There are better cookies you know, real goodies!

Yeah, if there's anything I hate, it's a cookie made with sugar. Second only to the horrible fate of realizing I'm eating it; much better we should shove stuff unconsciously down our throats.

[mood swung]

a cookie without sugar is like a cracker. or is it a day without sunshine?

[Extreme Honey]

a cookie without sugar is like a cracker. or is it a day without sunshine?

Nope, it's more of an american nightmare.

[selfmademug]

Yes, it's true, we ignorant Yanks like our cookies sweet. Just figures, doesn't it. We also like our pickles briny and our lemons sour, our chili peppers spicy, etc. God, we're awful.

[stormwarning]

Now we're all warmed up (including Miss BA's friends), try this one.

"U2" have a concert that starts in 17 minutes and the group members must all cross a bridge to get there. All four men begin on the same side of the bridge. You must help them across to the other side. It is night. There is one flashlight. A maximum of two people can cross at one time. Any party who crosses, either one or two people, must have the flashlight to see. The flashlight must be walked back and forth, it cannot be thrown, etc. Each band member walks at a different speed. A pair must walk together at the rate of the slower man's pace, based on this information:


* Bono: - 1 minute to cross

* Edge: - 2 minutes to cross

* Adam: - 5 minutes to cross

* Larry: - 10 minutes to cross

For example: if Bono and Larry walk across first, 10 minutes have elapsed when they get to the other side of the bridge. If Larry then returns with the flashlight, a total of 20 minutes will have passed and you will have failed.

Note: There is no "trick" behind this. It is the simple movement of resources in the appropriate order. There are two known answers to this problem.

[Who Shot Sam?]

Now we're all warmed up (including Miss BA's friends), try this one.

"U2" have a concert that starts in 17 minutes and the group members must all cross a bridge to get there. All four men begin on the same side of the bridge. You must help them across to the other side. It is night. There is one flashlight. A maximum of two people can cross at one time. Any party who crosses, either one or two people, must have the flashlight to see. The flashlight must be walked back and forth, it cannot be thrown, etc. Each band member walks at a different speed. A pair must walk together at the rate of the slower man's pace, based on this information:


* Bono: - 1 minute to cross

* Edge: - 2 minutes to cross

* Adam: - 5 minutes to cross

* Larry: - 10 minutes to cross

For example: if Bono and Larry walk across first, 10 minutes have elapsed when they get to the other side of the bridge. If Larry then returns with the flashlight, a total of 20 minutes will have passed and you will have failed.

Note: There is no "trick" behind this. It is the simple movement of resources in the appropriate order. There are two known answers to this problem.

Why does Larry take so long? Is he carrying his drum kit?

[stormwarning]

No, he's looking for the lost dollar that the bellboy dropped.

[so lacklustre]

Now we're all warmed up (including Miss BA's friends), try this one.

"U2" have a concert that starts in 17 minutes and the group members must all cross a bridge to get there. All four men begin on the same side of the bridge. You must help them across to the other side. It is night. There is one flashlight. A maximum of two people can cross at one time. Any party who crosses, either one or two people, must have the flashlight to see. The flashlight must be walked back and forth, it cannot be thrown, etc. Each band member walks at a different speed. A pair must walk together at the rate of the slower man's pace, based on this information:


* Bono: - 1 minute to cross

* Edge: - 2 minutes to cross

* Adam: - 5 minutes to cross

* Larry: - 10 minutes to cross

For example: if Bono and Larry walk across first, 10 minutes have elapsed when they get to the other side of the bridge. If Larry then returns with the flashlight, a total of 20 minutes will have passed and you will have failed.

Note: There is no "trick" behind this. It is the simple movement of resources in the appropriate order. There are two known answers to this problem.

Bono & Edge go over = 2 minutes
Edge goes back with torch = 2 minutes
Adam & Larry go over = 10 minutes
Bono goes back with torch = 1 minute
Bono & Edge go over = 2 minutes
2+2+10+1+2=17

What do I win?

[mood swung]

but that's only one answer.




(and no, I couldn't come up with ANY answers)

[bobster]

The level of the devastation of Katrina is really mind-boggling. Obviously, this is the worst thing to happen to the country since 9/11.

In a related story, Fox News reports have surfaced that, in 2000, Katrina met with a member of the Iraqui secret service in a Prague hotel room. Pass it on.

[verbal gymnastics]

Going back to the U2 question, where's the venue?

[so lacklustre]

but that's only one answer.




(and no, I couldn't come up with ANY answers)

Obviously you swap Bono & Edge around in going back dumb ass.

[mood swung]

HEY!!!

just because I am, you don't have to ANNOUNCE it!

[verbal gymnastics]

Mood Swung's mood swung!

[selfmademug]

My Mood Swings too when someone calls me a dumbass.

[RedShoes]

I'm stuck at this desk for another three hours and I'm downright hyper. That's not a good mix.

[Otis Westinghouse]

I'm too tired to do the things I have to do before bedtime. I'm normally wide awake and full on energy at this time, but tonight I'm just shafted.

[oily slick]

both somewhat difficult to watch, but wonderful to hear, i miss mel torme and betty carter.

[ice nine]

The 21st century has gotten off to a deadly start.

[Who Shot Sam?]

Otis, I know you're a big fan of Rufus Wainwright, as is Bad Ambassador and a few others on here. Thought I'd share this interesting interview he did with Tony Tommasini, a good friend of mine who writes on classical music for the NY Times. The interview focuses mainly on Rufus' passion for opera, something that I wasn't aware of:

September 7, 2005

Born Into Popular Music, Weaned on Opera

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

The pop singer and songwriter Rufus Wainwright knows that many of his fans are surprised to learn that he is an avowed opera buff. Yet the term "buff" does not tell the half of it.

Mr. Wainwright is not your stereotypical opera fanatic with a weakness for big-voiced, big-boned divas and a head full of trivia. He is a musically discerning opera lover who can trace the seamless structure of the banquet scene from Verdi's "Macbeth" and discuss the subtleties of Gluck's lesser-known "Armide," his most recent passion, which he first heard at La Scala in Milan.

Opera has influenced his singing style: Mr. Wainwright's baritone may be folk-rockish in character, but he bends phrases with a plaintive operatic legato. Opera has also infused his songwriting, sometimes explicitly. In a recent interview, he slyly admitted to lifting the melody of "Greek Song," on his hit 2001 album, "Poses," right out of Weber's "Freischütz."

Tomorrow evening, Mr. Wainwright will participate in "Opera-For-All," a gala event at the New York State Theater to celebrate the opening of the New York City Opera's season. A roster of singers will perform arias and scenes from operas to be presented this season, and Mr. Wainwright will sing a few of his songs with the City Opera Orchestra. After the concert, there will be a party for all in the theater's spacious promenade. (Mr. Wainwright will also be in the audience tonight, when the City Opera season officially opens with a new production of Strauss's "Capriccio.")

For the interview, which took place in a studio equipped with a fancy CD system at the New York offices of his recording company, Dreamworks/Geffen, Mr. Wainwright, 32, took along several of his favorite recordings. He arrived looking unshaven, scruffy and hip - in a T-shirt, brown vest, short shorts and sandals - even though his next stop was to be a meeting at the Metropolitan Opera with Peter Gelb, its future general manager. Mr. Gelb has said that he would like to entice composers from film, musical theater and pop into the opera house. Could a Rufus Wainwright project be a possibility at the Met someday?

For Mr. Wainwright, opera has been not just a passion but also a solace, he said. "I like to think that opera chose me," he added. "I didn't choose opera."

Either way, no one was more surprised at the choice than his parents, the folk-music luminaries Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, who divorced when their son was 3. (After the split, he lived with Ms. McGarrigle, a Canadian, in Montreal.)

Though his father "didn't get opera at all," Mr. Wainwright said, his mother had beloved recordings by the Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli, the successor to Caruso, and by the Swedish tenor Jussi Bjoerling. One day she took home the acclaimed 1960 recording of Verdi's Requiem, conducted by Fritz Reiner, with Bjoerling and the young Leontyne Price among the soloists. Listening to it, the adolescent Mr. Wainwright had an epiphany.

"It came at a junction in my life where I was completely hit at simultaneously by different things," he said. "One was that I was gay, two being that AIDS was on the scene." This thrilling and consoling music, he added, "immediately hooked into all the emotions I was feeling."

Everyone assumed that the young Mr. Wainwright, a born performer, would go into the family business. But "after I got into opera," he said, "it was obvious that I had caught this sort of fever and was obsessed with this music." He and his mother had "bang-out battles," he added, in which she would play recordings of "poor people's music" (folk music, blues, 60's rock), and he would counter with Verdi and company.

"She would be furious that I was involved in this escapist, rather dark medium," he said. But once he truly embraced it, his mother supported him and became an opera buff, too, though not with her son's intensity.

"Opera saved my life twice," Mr. Wainwright said. The first time was when he was 14 and felt isolated and reckless. He picked up an older man in London. "I got in over my head," he said, describing the resulting encounter as "essentially rape." In the months and years that followed, opera helped him recover from this trauma.

Alone in his dormitory room at the Millbrook School in upstate New York, he would dance naked to the voluptuous strains of the "Dance of the Seven Veils" from Strauss's "Salome" and blast Verdi and Wagner into the quad, where his uncomprehending classmates played lacrosse. During this period, he was secretly convinced that the sexual incident had left him H.I.V. positive. (It had not.) "With opera I could relax and relate to that kind of despair and fear," he said, yet "regain some innocence."

After high school, he entered McGill University in Montreal as a composition major but found classical music training stultifying. When he should have been practicing the piano, he composed songs. Reconnecting to the "brilliance of pop music," as he put it, he left college and found his own musical voice. His first album, "Rufus Wainwright," was released to acclaim in 1998. He was living in New York and seemingly thriving. "Everything seemed fresh," he said, "whether pop music or pop drugs." Yet he was still fighting demons.

He went to a production of Strauss's "Elektra" at the Met, completely drugged, Mr. Wainwright said, and the performance was "amazing." Finally admitting that he was abusing drugs and alcohol, he entered Hazelden, the addiction treatment center in Minnesota.

After completing a month of therapy, he returned to the Met to see the same production of "Elektra." To his delight, the performance was just as amazing. "It proved to me that when music is potent, it doesn't matter what state you are in, it will uplift you," he said. For a second time, opera had steadied his life.

As Mr. Wainwright played the recordings he had taken to the interview, he came across not as an expert showing off his erudition but as a devotee aching to share his enthusiasms. The first excerpt was from Berlioz's "Damnation de Faust," which is technically a dramatic concert work. Mr. Wainwright considers it every bit an opera, and he is not alone.

He cued up an episode that "gets me every time," he said. The disconsolate Faust is about to commit suicide when an angelic choir sings the Easter Hymn, and he is ravished by its mystical aura. As the luminous music wafted from a recording by Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Wainwright hummed along, pointing in advance to every surprising harmonic shift.

For the banquet scene in "Macbeth," Mr. Wainwright's recording of choice was the classic 1959 version with Leonard Warren in the title role and Leonie Rysanek as Lady Macbeth. During a celebratory dinner, Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo and is stricken with horrific guilt. The complex ensemble is "one of those unbelievably suspended moments in opera," Mr. Wainwright said, "where everyone is like, 'What's going on?' " With its undulant accompaniment, the ensemble is "actually very simple orchestration-wise," he added, "like something coming over a jukebox."

"Verdi's sense of timing," he said, "is without equal."

Specific references to opera run though his lyrics and music. "Damned Ladies" tells of the fates of tormented operatic heroines, including Desdemona, Violetta, Gilda, even Katya Kabanova. His album "Want Two" opens with "Agnus Dei," a nod to the Verdi Requiem. When told that the habanera-like accompaniment in "Vibrate" on his album "Want One" seems a homage to Bizet's "Carmen," Mr. Wainwright countered that he was actually thinking of those Spanish-tinged accompaniments that run through certain arias and ensembles in Donizetti, a more subtle source of inspiration. Several times he emphasized that long-spun melody meant everything to him, in both opera and his own songs.

Mr. Wainwright kept pulling intriguing selections from his stack of CD's, like the confrontation scene between Elisabetta and Eboli in Verdi's "Don Carlos" from a recording he reveres, the 1971 EMI Classics release with Montserrat Caballé and Shirley Verrett at their peaks. And of course, there was an excerpt from Gluck's "Armide," the scene in the enchanted garden in which the title character, a sorceress, having fallen in love with a knight who resists her, summons hate to well up from the earth. Mr. Wainwright described the music as achieving a miraculous balance of penetrating emotion and classical symmetry.

"I'm amazed at, on the one hand, how composed it was," he said, "and on the other, how off the cuff."

Mr. Wainwright is discouraged by what he sees as a lack of sympathy for opera among members of his own generation, including gay people, who, for whatever reasons, have traditionally included a solid contingent of opera buffs.

"Every child should have to go to the opera, and gay people should almost be tricked into loving it," he said. In the middle of the night at a rave, when all the revelers are peaking on Ecstasy, he said, "they should turn the music off and put on 'Samson et Dalila,' just to scare them sort of, and show the other side of bliss."

[bambooneedle]

Two wrongs don't make a right.

[spooky girlfriend]

I need to go work in the yard.

I hope today is my last day of washing dishes by hand. The new dishwasher is finally here. Doc and I will be installing it tonight.

I guess that's all, folks.

[BlueChair]

Film festival starts today. I hope I see famous people.