…genetically modified onions that won’t make you cry (see Blame it on the enzyme: Researchers pinpoint culprit of onion tear factor). Whatever will they think of next?
All posts by Kevin
Different views of news
I always find it interesting when different media report the same story in different ways, or as in this case, when a story makes headlines in one location, but doesn’t see the light of day in another.
For several days now, the top Canadian story about the Queen’s current tour of Canada is that the Deputy Prime Minister, John Manley, has stated that the monarchy should be abolished. On Sunday Radio Canada International reported:
A political controversy is brewing over untimely remarks by Canada’s deputy prime minister. Hours after Queen Elizabeth arrived Friday for a 12-day tour of Canada to mark her Golden Jubilee, John Manley called for the abolition of the monarchy. Now a former prime minister says Mr. Manley has shown rudeness and poor political judgement. Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark is calling for Prime Minister Jean Chretien to reconsider Mr. Manley’s duties as host to the Queen during her visit to Ottawa this week.
Meanwhile, here in Britain this story hasn’t made the news at all. On Monday the coverage was all about that spectacular puck drop, and today it’s about running adrift in Winterpeg’s Red River during a cold spell (see Queen ‘ashen-faced’ after rescue from freezing river).
I can only assume that British journalists think their audiences at home just don’t care whether or not the Queen remains the Canadian head of state. And who can blame them? It would make even less difference here, than it would in Canada.
US Radio Wants a Digital Revolution
Here’s an interesting article from the Associated Press (via Wired) about the advent of digital radio in the US: Radio Wants a Digital Revolution. As I read it I wondered if the author would mention the experiences other countries have had implementing digital radio, but no such luck. Only at the very end do we learn that…
Canada and parts of Europe and Asia have had digital radio for years, but those broadcasts are carried on a frequency reserved in the United States for the military.
Queen drops puck
What an earth-shattering headline greeted us yesterday morning. According to the CBC…
For the first time in her 50-year reign, Canada’s head of state dropped the ceremonial puck at the start of a hockey game.
How could she have been Queen for so long and only now started dropping pucks? Boy, has she got a lot of catching up to do! For more see CBC News: Queen drops puck, raises cheer in arena.
The Accrington Apples
BBC1 is in the middle of a new TV series on the weather (Wild Weather). Last night’s programme featured the story of the “Accrington apples”. On the night of November 8, 1984 the house of Derek and Adrienne Haythornwhite in Accrington, Lancashire, was bombarded by at least 300 apples. More apples were discovered in nearby gardens as well. The couple were woken up at night by thunderous noises on the roof, and by the time it was over they were ankle deep in apples!
It seems the weather was responsible for picking these apples up and dumping them on the Haythornwhites, and apparently lots of things fall from the sky in a similar way (see LOOK OUT BELOW! Reports of various creatures and strange objects falling to earth). Truth is once again stranger than fiction.
The BBC rages against the machine
During the last couple of weeks, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme has featured reports by Dominic Arkwright on the success and failure of computers during the last 40 years:
Forty years ago, computers were about to revolutionise our lives. They would steal our jobs, said the pessimists. They would give us more leisure time, said the optimists. But what has actually happened?
These interesting programmes are currently on the BBC’s web site, and can be found via the following links (NB: you will need Real Audio’s RealPlayer software):
Time for another genius?
Earlier this month Martin Kettle questioned the current state of the piano recital in the pages of The Guardian (Why are today’s concert pianists so boring?), and Susan Tomes responded in kind by suggesting that the modern music business is the cause of the pianists’ demise (The visonary thing).
It seems however, that this complaint is not new. Arts & Letters Daily has compiled a number of links to celebrate the work of Glenn Gould, who would have turned 70 today had he lived. Among them is an essay written in 1983 by Denis Dutton (The Ecstasy of Glenn Gould):
Though the world of music and art has always been thought to thrive on novelty, history teaches us that it often rejects the imaginatively new simply because it is too new. Examples are limitless, but I have in mind something that interested me back in the late 1950s. It was then common to complain that virtually all of the younger generation of pianists (and not only pianists) were musically indistinguishable from one another. All very fine technically, so the story went, but what of spirit? They all played "like machines," devoid of temperament, of individual personality.
It looks like we could do with another Glenn Gould.
A Date For Your Diary
On September 30th visit here. MIT is putting its courses online for free, which is an amazing reversal of the fee-for-use mania now rampaging across the Internet. I wonder what specific courses will be offerred next week?
Caveat Emptor
Dorothea Salo struck a nerve a few days ago with this post to her weblog (it’s been quoted several times) Caveat Lector: Speaking the Self:
I am touched by the Cluetrainers' belief that real people always speak in real voices. It isn't so, though I wish it were and I envy the Cluetrainers their belief. Some people speak about themselves and their families in clichés and polite fictions for many of the same reasons corporations speak in empty, sonorous PR, not least among them desperate fear of the truth. Some people, submerged in the family fictions, lose their real voices in part or wholly. (I never lost quite all of mine, but I have been searching for some departed pieces a long time. I may never find them.)
Blogging threatens such families for the same reasons it threatens PR-dependent corporations. It threatens the fiction, the public façade of perfection, the private walls around anger and pain and disagreement and error.
Although DS was responding to the risks associated with personal expression, her comments about businesses and the truth are relevant to a new essay I have written and fortuitously entitled Caveat Emptor, Art Collector. Her sentiments serve as an eloquent introduction.
The Home of Asian Cuisine
I wonder how many first-time visitors to Britain are confused by the factory sign they can see from the Heathrow Express on their way to Paddington station? It says simply:
“LRS – Asia’s Finest Foods”.