cloudsoup

Rattlesnakes, South Dakota

Helen's returned from Oxford with a bench from her old college's refectory. Seems they're refurbishing and some bright spark saw a way to make money from their alumni. And she fell for it.

It remains a puzzle why the intelligent left have never succeeded in producing or nurturing a thoughtful and balanced newspaper to rival those on the right. Perhaps it is an delusion, like expecting a cyclist will win the Epsom Derby.

The Guardian envisaging a digital-only existence

Cars, Southgate Street

Erster Verlust / Ian Bostridge

When still at school, Ian Bostridge corresponded with Sir Roger Penrose, then the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, about a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism. Growing tired of theoretical physics, Ian studied history at Oxford and Cambridge, getting a First, an MPhil and a DPhil for ground-breaking research into witchcraft in the 17th-18th Centuries. For a while he was a post-doctoral Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Then he became a professional singer, and an extraordinary one at that. I've already posted his stunning version of Der Leiermann from Schubert's Winterreise

https://plus.google.com/113934106958219608468/posts/Z9jDxxLhVbt

and here below is some more Schubert, Erster Verlust. Words by Goethe, music by the finest songwriter ever

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Schubert/Goethe – Erster Verlust D.226 (Bostridge/Drake).

Ach, wer bringt die schönen Tage,
Jene Tage der ersten Liebe,
Ach, wer bringt nur eine Stunde
Jener

I sometimes – often – despair of the Beeb. Here's a little news teaser about a US sniper who killed 255 'insurgents' – or terrorists, as the rest of the world prefers to call them.

Devil or hero? asks the Beeb.

Well, hero, BBC. What else? In what world could an allied sniper who shot dead 255 enemies be thought anything other than a hero?
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Monument Valley

Oregon Coast

Just got added to the mailing list for the Copenhagen Centre for Neoplatonic Virtue Ethics. Now to see if I can understand what on earth real academic ethicists and philosophers say to each other.