Took in a performance of Master Class at the Odyssey Theatre with Nico and Anna last night.
Saw McNally's play with Anar a few years ago; Patti LuPone played the Callas role. The last professionally-staged opera I saw was with Nico: Die Zaüberflöte, a story I love, in San Francisco.
I often hear the question: "Why only a front brake?" when I'm riding a fixed-gear. Font of wisdom Sheldon Brown, of course, has the answer:
You really should have a front brake. A front brake, all by itself, will stop a bicycle as fast as it is possible to stop. This is true because when you are applying the front brake to the maximum, there is no weight on the rear wheel, so it has no traction.One of the wonderful things about fixed-gear riding is that the direct feel you get for rear-wheel traction teaches you exactly how hard you can apply the front brake without quite lifting the wheel off of the ground.
This is a very valuable lesson for any cyclist who likes to go fast; it could save your life.
There is really no need for a rear brake on a fixed-gear bicycle. By applying back-pressure on the pedals, you can supply all the braking that the rear wheel really needs. In fact, it is fairly easy to lock up the rear wheel and make it skid, unless you are running a rather high gear.
Some fixed-gear fans make a point of not using their brake except in an emergency. I am not sure that this is a good idea. Heavy duty resisting is widely reputed to be bad for your legs, and to be counterproductive for building up muscles and coordination for forward pedaling.
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2 Are Hurt in Bizarre Motorcycle Collision
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A Costa Mesa officer and another rider are knocked onto other bikes, police say.
By David Haldane
Times Staff Writer
June 2 2004
In an accident reminiscent of an action-movie sequence, a Costa Mesa police officer and another man were injured Monday when their motorcycles collided, causing a game of "musical cycle seats" on the San Diego Freeway, authorities said.
The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cycle2jun02,1,7833246.story
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cycle2jun02,1,7833246.story
ORANGE COUNTY
2 Are Hurt in Bizarre Motorcycle Collision
A Costa Mesa officer and another rider are knocked onto other bikes, police say.
By David Haldane
Times Staff Writer
June 2, 2004
In an accident reminiscent of an action-movie sequence, a Costa Mesa police officer and another man were injured Monday when their motorcycles collided, causing a game of "musical cycle seats" on the San Diego Freeway, authorities said.
"This is definitely one of the most unique accidents I've ever seen," Lt. John FitzPatrick, a spokesman for the Costa Mesa Police Department, said of the 10 p.m. collision that knocked Officer Dennis Dickens, 39, off his seat and Javier Gasga, 33, onto it for a quarter of a mile.
"It was like a Hollywood stunt," FitzPatrick said.
Both men were taken to Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo and were reported in serious condition.
According to FitzPatrick, the accident occurred in the southbound carpool lane just north of Jamboree Road, where Dickens and fellow motorcycle officer Tony Yannizzi were traveling about 65 mph as they rode home from work side by side. A third cycle driven by Gasga and traveling more than 100 mph, FitzPatrick said, roared up behind the officers and struck Dickens' bike in the rear.
The impact, FitzPatrick said, threw Dickens off his motorcycle and onto Yannizzi's, where he was able to hang on for about five seconds before losing his grip and somersaulting along the asphalt for more than 40 yards. At the same time, FitzPatrick said, Gasga — who police believe had been drinking — was thrown from his bike onto Dickens', which continued for about a quarter-mile before crashing onto the pavement.
"He was just kind of spread-eagled on top of it," FitzPatrick said.
Eventually Yannizzi, who was not injured, was able to stop and pull the two men out of the path of oncoming traffic. Dickens suffered a cracked pelvis and multiple abrasions requiring surgery, while Gasga sustained a collapsed lung.
Gasga was arrested by the California Highway Patrol on suspicion of felony driving under the influence, FitzPatrick said.
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Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
After months of hearing about Danger Mouse's Grey Album, I finally got copy onto my iPod. Bumpin', perhaps unfair use (of Jay-Z's Black Album and of the Beatles' White Album), but bumpin'. And what's the bottom line?
Gilbert O’Sullivan’s 1991 lawsuit against Biz Markie for the uncleared use of 20 seconds from O’Sullivan’s "Alone Again (Naturally)" was a major turning point in the evolution of hip-hop. Markie lost the case; the judge told him, verbatim, "Thou shalt not steal." With that, the era of carefree sampling was over. Sample-heavy albums in the vein of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back or the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique became impossibly expensive and difficult to release. Many artists continued to sample but retreated into using more and more obscure source material.
separate faeces from urine; produce energy and reduce wastewater usage
http://www.holon.se/folke/kurs/Distans/Ekofys/Recirk/Eng/mifsla_en.shtml
http://www.wost-man-ecology.se/clearvac_duo.
While I've been belly-aching about the new CalTrain rolling stock for some time, the West Coast is trumped by the East: The Long Island Rail Road's new cars are "a total failure":
Now, though, railroad officials are admitting that one minor miscalculation has snagged their dream of design perfection on the railroad cars of the future.The flaw? An armrest measuring four-tenths of an inch too long.
Four-tenths of an inch might seem like a picayune matter in an 85-foot train car. Or, to a hand that would otherwise dangle from a longer-than-average forearm, it might seem like a godsend. But to the owners of countless pants, pockets and raincoats that have been torn on the armrests, four-tenths of an inch is a measure of frustration.
Engineers of Dreams
Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation
Vintage Book of Amnesia
The Secret Life of Lobsters
Locust
ah, Latin: here I was, thinking that it's only good for reading a Greek lexicon, while a humble Carmelite toils in obscurity to preserve the lingua franca of ancient courtesans and cheats:
Father Foster prizes simplicity. His office is as spare as his work clothes, which he buys while visiting relatives in the United States. It contains a table, a few books and a bonsai tree. A bottle of vermouth, which he occasionally sips while working. Across the hall is his manual typewriter. He dislikes computers, though he did provide Latin text for the screen of a Vatican Bank teller machine"
full text
VATICAN CITY — Let us now enter the inner sanctum of the Vatican. Walk past the Swiss Guards, up the marble stairways of the Apostolic Palace, through corridors adorned with wondrous Renaissance frescoes rarely glimpsed by outsiders, to a hushed spot near the residence of the pope himself.
There, in a small office, toils a plumber's son from Milwaukee with a shaved head, rascally sense of humor and fondness for janitor outfits that look as if they came from a J. C. Penney. (Which they did).
He is a Carmelite priest, but do not address him as father. The name's Reggie, as he is known to admirers around the world. Or perhaps Reginaldus.
Part ecclesiastical oddball, part inspirational educator, the Rev. Reginald Foster is a master classicist who has devoted his life to saving Latin from extinction. Not just quill-on-parchment Latin. The conversational Latin language of Cicero, wellspring of Western civilization and, at one time, mother tongue of the Roman Catholic Church.
It still is, technically, but in his 35 years as one of the Vatican's premier Latin translators, Father Foster has watched its role in the church wither. Church documents continue to be issued in Latin, but fewer and fewer priests know the language well, if at all.
Father Foster believes that Pope John Paul II and the church establishment no longer value Latin, and as a result are spurning two millenniums of tradition. Without Latin, how can anyone truly grasp St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas and Erasmus, not to mention Descartes and Newton and countless others who worked in the language? To those who carp about the language's difficulty, he retorts, "Every prostitute and bum in Rome knew Latin."
"The fact that you don't have Latin, you are just sitting out there in left field," he said in an interview in his office. "You have no sense of history, no sense of continuity."
"If you do Latin, all this other stuff is just peanuts," he said. "It's nonsense. If you do Latin well, Spanish and French, you can do that over the weekend. All these languages and all this culture came out of Latin, whether you like it or not."
Father Foster, 64, has immersed himself in Latin since he was a teenager at a Carmelite seminary in New Hampshire. He says he dreams in Latin, and considers it his first language.
As one of a handful of Vatican Latinists, he writes and translates a daily regimen of documents weighty and banal, from encyclicals to a recent congratulatory letter issued by the pope - Summus Pontifex Ioannes Paulus II - to the bishop of Rochester, Matthew Clark, on the 25th anniversary of his appointment. Most of his translations are into Latin from Italian, the Vatican's real lingua franca.
Father Foster prizes simplicity. His office is as spare as his work clothes, which he buys while visiting relatives in the United States. It contains a table, a few books and a bonsai tree. A bottle of vermouth, which he occasionally sips while working. Across the hall is his manual typewriter. He dislikes computers, though he did provide Latin text for the screen of a Vatican Bank teller machine.
His antics and candor have long exasperated his bosses, but he is apparently too valuable to be cast out. At least on the issue dear to him, he does not shy from criticizing the pope, who, he says, "uses Latin less than anyone in history.''
"The use of Latin in this pontificate has gone right down the drain," he laments.
It is Father Foster's outside work - teaching classes in Rome to clergy and laity - that has garnered him much of his acclaim. Alternately abrasive and endearing, he brings the language to life by drawing on works of titans like Ovid and Virgil, not grammar primers. Classics professors around the world send him students.
"You people have to learn these things, and pass on this flame of Latin," he exhorts his students at the Pontifical Gregorian University. While Latin is enduring or even thriving in academia, he worries that inside the church, he might not have successors. It matters little that a prominent cardinal recently ordered a commission to issue a report on how to improve Latin education in the church. It has all been done before, and amounted to little.
"We do not need any more documents or letters!" thundered Father Foster, whose oratories, whether in Latin or English, require a storehouse of exclamation points. (His many guffaws, grimaces and verbal raspberries are not so easily transcribable.)
There was a knock on the door from a fellow Latinist, this one wearing the more customary garb of a monk's brown habit. The two engaged in a rapid-fire exchange in Latin, causing the visitor to plumb his brain for any remnants of his high-school Latin. It seemed to be something about a routine papal letter. Or maybe plans for lunch.
Father Foster is not one of those ritual-clinging Roman Catholics who rail against the Second Vatican Council of the 1960's, which largely did away with the Latin Mass. He has nothing against the vernacular, and in some respects is theologically liberal.
He merely believes that the church should compel priests to study Latin extensively at seminary, and encourage the laity to learn Latin as part of religious schooling.
Father Foster dismisses as a sideshow recent Vatican attempts to invigorate interest in Latin by issuing dictionaries with newly coined words for modern concepts and things, like "escariorum lavator" for "dishwasher." Instead, he uses all of Italy as a teaching tool. On the Ides of March, he takes students to significant places in Julius Caesar's life, including the spot he was assassinated. "Oh, it's a glorious day!" Father Foster said.
"Latin is not going to die," he said. "There is so much interest - all outside the church!"
The classes are uplifting, some former students said. Gone is the old-style approach of relentlessly drilling pupils in declensions ("hic, haec, hoc") and their ilk.
"For me, the big revelation was this idea that Latin could become part of your living life, and you could have friends to whom you could speak only Latin," said Leah Whittington, 24, a Latin teacher at the Nightingale-Bamford private school in Manhattan.
Her boyfriend, John Kuhner, 28, who is writing a Latin textbook based on Father Foster's methods, said the priest was driven by fear of the language's demise.
Back at his office, Father Foster was asked how the Vatican could rescue Latin. He pecked an answer on his typewriter: "Exemplo non documento est linguae Latinae inculcandus usus," which means, he said, "The Latin language should be encouraged by example, not by a document."
He yanked the paper out. The pope, he said, "should stand up at the United Nations and speak Latin. And say, "If you don't understand this, it's too bad, jack!' "
Then he sighed. He was not optimistic.
Even at the Vatican, he said, when the pope leads senior church figures in the Lord's Prayer in Latin, after "Pater Noster," their voices often descend into mumbles.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
