2015 — 5 September: Saturday
A bracing start1 provided both by the music that was played just before 08:00 and the temperature hereabouts.
I nearly downloaded...
... the music but, having first skimmed my (sadly outdated and — shock, horror — quite possibly incomplete) "database" of classical music and then moved across the living room to physically inspect the revolving tower in which I like to kid myself I store all the 'classical' CDs that will fit, I found I may well already have (at least two) versions of Borodin's rousing smörgåsbord that is the "Polovtsian Dances", and at least one version of "In the steppes of Central Asia".
The tentative nature of these assertions stems from the fact that quite a few of my classical CDs are now stashed among the CaseLogic folders that hold all (well, nearly all) the non-classical material. And quite a few are now piled on a "coffee" table cunningly placed to stop me tripping over the network printer.
I need a better system.2 I need another cuppa, too, and I know which of those is likely to come higher in the priority sequence.
This interview...
... of Christopher Hitchens by Richard Dawkins from Xmas 2011 is well worth reading — Hitchens died as it was published. Source and snippet:
RD: And Mother Teresa was one of the worst offenders?
CH: She preached that poverty was a gift from God. And she believed that women should not be given control over the reproductive cycle. Mother Teresa spent her whole life making sure that the one
cure for poverty we know is sound was not implemented. So Tony Blair knows this but he doesn't have an answer. If I say, "Your Church preaches against the one cure for poverty," he doesn't deny it, but he
doesn't affirm it either. But remember, I did start with a text and I asked him to comment on it first, but he never did. Cardinal Newman said he would rather the whole world and everyone in it be painfully destroyed
and condemned for ever to eternal torture than one sinner go unrebuked for the stealing of a sixpence. It's right there in the centre of the Apologia. The man whose canonisation Tony had been campaigning for. You put
these discrepancies in front of him and he's like all the others. He keeps two sets of books. And this is also, even in an honest person, shady.
The only 'canonisation' I would endorse has an extra letter "n" in it. And gunpowder.
The other track...
... on this just-delivered Kate Bush CD single...
... is an idiosyncratic version of Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" that (if I can trust Wikipedia) is unavailable anywhere else. I heard it for the first time last Tuesday — to be more precise, I actually heard it on one of Anne Hilde Neset's superbly-curated "Late Junction" programmes that I'd finally worked my way around to.
[Pause]
I have skimmed and browsed through quite enough of Cardinal Newman's rambling, self-satisfied Apologia for an entire lifetime. I dread to think what possible "miracles" can be ascribed to him for his onward and "upward" progress. Religion is a funny business.
I'm not sure that devoting the entire Prom to Bach's work for solo cello was entirely sensible.