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I 'did' that for 'A' Level back in the early 70s. Didn't much care for it. Reread it a few years back and enjoyed it a bit more. Well, that's one that hasn't stood the test of time. It was on my 20th Century Literature reading list at Leeds University in 1962, along with giants like Lawrence, Eliot and Yeats. In a seminar with Geoffrey Hill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hill) when I said that while Lawrence described his characters' state of soul, Snow was concerned with whether or not they got promoted, Hill responded by describing Snow's novel as "Whitehall gibberish". I seem to recall Snow was obsessed with the division between the 'arts' and the 'sciences'. Apparently people worried about that sort of thing then. Yes, he made his name with "the two cultures". All seems a bit irrelevant now that government and business are prepared to junk academia generally. Well, in some ways the debates rage even greater than before. Most state universities in the US are under enormous pressure to promote STEM courses and other applied sciences and to junk the humanities. It isn't accurate to say that everything is under the knife equally. Anyway, from the perspective of cultural studies, Snow's novels and Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time are way more valuable than Lawrence's writings, since it is precisely the office politics of the day that are intriguing, rather than sort of a neo-Rousseauian take on the state of the soul. Of course, cultural studies departments may not survive the coming shake-out in academia...

As you know from elsewhere on the web, one of my favorite novels. Your review led me to reread the novel. I actually saw a staged version of this, in Atlanta of all places. It is definitely an interesting novel (I've read it twice) but it's one where I deeply dislike the main character but find the book quite compelling anyway. (I suspect this unlikeable quality of Ignatius is why it was so hard to find a publisher in the first place.) I may have mentioned that there is a very similar book by a Canadian author -- Guy Vanderhaeghe's My Present Age. It isn't as epic as Confederacy, but the main character is an overweight, failed academic who gets up to some strange misadventures. I assume both authors were drawing heavily on Shakespeare's Falstaff.

Having trouble getting into this. Crummey is trying so hard to replicate Garcia Marquez's sprawling generational epics (with more than a bit of magic realism) -- and the characters don't seem as much characters as chess pieces moved around by two of the main figures in the book. Towing Jehovah is far more to my taste. Also reading Grossman's Everything Flows, which is a shorter work written after his masterpiece, Life and Fate. It is pretty didactic but still interesting in places.

I really feel for you. It's obvious (to me) that the IRS went too far in allowing e-filing these instant returns without enough true security measures, and I've read some real horror stories. But try getting them to change -- or even acknowledge the scope of the problem.

I lived the Chicago postal experience. Most of the time it was fine. Sometimes mail was slow. We had one carrier who was great, replaced by one not so great. Again, most of the time it was fine. I did occasionally lose mail, and once I mailed a package that was severely damaged and someone on the board got some CDs they didn't order -- as if two boxes broke at the same time and they just shuffled what they could back into one. On the rare occasions I actually had to pick up a package, that was bad, because I had to go to this kind of remote post office where the customer service was truly abysmal. I did note that with the various cut-backs the counter service at the main post office downtown had gotten noticeably worse from 2005 to 2011.

Yes, it does -- on two tape cassettes. Sounds like the kind of thing that should be archived. Nudge nudge wink wink.

I put it on this evening, though I didn't realize it is over 2.5 hours, so we're watching it in phases. Made it through the gas station scene.

Mailed US taxes in a couple of days ago. Unbelievably complicated this year, but I am gettin $200 back. Starting Canadian taxes. Also complicated.

You seem to be getting all hung up over the tax implications of pre-funding pensions as if the USPS were a normal company, when it manifestly is not. It is also very clear that governments have routinely not contributed enough for their state employee pensions (and health care plans), and this is a huge problem. Regardless of what any law says, many states face a huge gap in pension funding. Illinois is one of the very worst. So in a sense, it is good that USPS is clearly making payments towards these future medical costs, but it isn't clear to me that the numbers that the GOP came up with and put into the law are appropriate. They may be far too high, esp. as the USPS is downsizing the number of postal employees, so the required pension and health care costs may be vastly inflated.

This is the text of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/hr6407/text Go down to Sec. 8909a. Postal Service Retiree Health Benefit Fund I guess it is arguable whether this is literally pre-funding the benefit fund for 75 years in an accounting sense, or it is just some crazy numbers that the GOP pulled out of the air (was about to say something different, but Jim wants us to keep it clean). But no question, this is a heavy, heavy burden on USPS, when Congress won't let them do all kinds of other things, like close rural post offices, that might help them close the gap. So really the USPS has kind of the worst of both worlds. Sadly, this is happening more and more frequently, particularly with state colleges where state funding is slashed to the bone but legislative meddling is as high or higher than ever.

Thanks, but I don't understand most of those expressions. Software programs, particularly freeware programs, pick up all these extra features (called bloat) and they get a bit larger and slower. Since you really only want the software to rip CDs, sometimes it is better to go for an older version when you go to download it. (Often for freeware software, they will have the last 10 or so working versions of the program.) MG

Well, I mostly rip to mp3 not flac (yeah, yeah, I know). I use freerip, which is fine for mp3s. There are a bunch of comparable programs floating out there. Usually the slightly older build versions are better, as they don't have as much bloat and feature creep.

I've been pretty unhappy with this (and I'll see if David's fix works for me). I basically only rip contemporary CDs using WMP when I won't be splitting sessions. If I know I'll be reordering and splitting the tracks (like Prestige 2-fers or something), I just use a different ripper, since I am so sick of WMP undoing my changes. This has been particularly a problem with classical CDs, where I usually want each composition in its own folder (ultimately sorted by conductor, which is a little perverse, but it does help with folder management).

I guess that didn't come up, but this stub thread talks about the Anniversary box:

I actually have listened to very little Nick Cave and just was streaming a bit of his newest album, Push the Sky Away. It has some good moments, but I really like "The Higgs Boson Blues" and listen to it a couple of times a day:

I just checked and, interestingly, Amazon UK haven't raised their delivery charges for either UK or foreign sellers. Yet. MG They definitely will though. I'm glad I just put in an order or two, and I might put in one more this week (for a few DVDs). I'm sorry the good times are ending, but I certainly did stockpile a huge amount of goods back when the shipping was cheap.

I think it is a good recording, even though I am not a huge fan of the piece. I don't think you'll be disappointed once you hear it.

I'm a little baffled though. I think you mean the 1958 (not 1960) recording. I guess I didn't realize it was that hard to get. It is the version that came in the Bernstein OJC collection, which despite being a limited edition from many years back is still kicking around on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Original-Jacket-Collection-Leonard-Bernstein/dp/B00005T7RB

So I just had to check this out, and it isn't a simple case of air-brushing. The poses are slightly different, esp. the lady's feet, so they must have taken two (or more) shots during the session, knowing that the bare-breasted one might be too much.

I saw the Borodin Quartet in town last night. They were going to do Shostakovich String Quartets 3 & 5 and Tchaikovsky's Quartet Movement in B flat. The first violin and maybe one other member were fairly ill, and having a bit of trouble keeping it together (even coughing between movements and once during a movement!). I salute them for doing as well as they did. They dropped the Tchaikovsky and did two encores instead. The Scherzo from Shostakovich's 1st Quartet and something else by Shostakovich. I think it was a bit of film music, but hard to track down so far. I thought they did a nice job and I'm glad I saw them. But Pacifica was definitely better when I saw them, particularly in that ultra-tricky ending of the 3rd Quartet. So they really will be my go-to ensemble for these pieces, though I'll still listen to the Fitzwilliam recordings as well.

That is a very good deal. Again, sometimes late adopters can get these amazing bargains. OTOH, my children and I have enjoyed the cartoons for years in the meantime, so it isn't a total loss.

To be honest, I am a little more interested in the Decca set that is coming out at the same time, covering an earlier part of Abbado career: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Claudio-Abbado-The-Decca-Years/dp/B00BN1QV1M Though even here, I might settle for this 2 CD set that focuses on Prokofiev, Hindemith & Janácek: http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/Australian%2BEloquence/4806611 (A little bit harder to find than I thought on Amazon.com -- it is here). I don't have nearly as much Abbado as other conductors, but I do have his Mendelssohn set on DG, which is still quite reasonable: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005ONMP/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I should probably take the Abbado a bit more seriously, but I am about done with replicating the standard repertoire (I did make an exception with the Steinberg EMI set but mostly because of the recordings with Nathan Milstein). So the boxes that I have ordered lately have mostly been of lesser known Russian composers or in a few cases famous string soloists doing their thing. As far as Bruno Walter, I recently purchased the slimline Walter conducts Mozart and from way back I had the Sony OJC set of his stereo Bruckner and Mahler recordings. So by passing on this set, I am basically passing on another Beethoven and Brahms cycle, and a handful of other recordings. I am sure the new set is a really nice one, but I think I'll be ok without it. Just trying to show some restraint here.

Ebert was a different week, but two big deaths in the same day always squeezes one out. If I am not mistaken, Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died the same day and MJ got all the headlines. I suspect it will be the same today with Thatcher dominating (naturally ).

Not aware of Hoberman. Absolutely not a fan of Rosenbaum. At one point, I was reading and disliking his work on a regular basis (so an anti-fan of sorts), since I felt compelled to read all the reviews in the Chicago Reader. The Reader has fallen on hard times (and Rosenbaum may have moved on) and I am not in the city anymore, so he has completely fallen off my radar screen.