Yesterday I drove all the way down to Chicago to see Dmitri Hvorostovsky in recital at the Lyric Opera. He just about never comes to the Midwest, let alone the Great Lakes region; so when I read that he was doing a recital in Chicago, I got the tickets. There were a lot of Russians in the audience; two were right behind me.
The lineup was a series of romances by Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, and Strauss. A romance in this case is a short song, typically the sort of piece one would sing in the parlor or drawing room. I recognized one piece on the list, and that was Tchaikovsky's "I bless you, forests".
At first it seemed to take Dima a while to get his energy going, but once he got moving he was unstoppable. Hearing him live was a different experience from hearing him Live in HD or over the radio. His voice is very rich and seductive, and he showed it at full force last night. One piece that absolutely stood out to me was Rimsky-Korsakov's "The lark sings louder", which sounded for all the world like a secular version of the hymn "Wonderful Grace of Jesus". He received such an ovation at the end that he did three encores. One of them was the classic Neapolitan song "Core N'grato" (this was the first time I heard it sung by a baritone). I cannot place what the second encore was, but the third one was the famous Russian folk song "Farewell my joy", traditionally sung acapella.
This was a major undertaking for Dima given that his health has not been all that great (see my review of Il Trovatore for more information). So for him to pull off a long recital at this stage of the game is quite an accomplishment. Now the question is when is he going to perform for Madison or Milwaukee.
I Don't Know, But... has a few thoughts regarding distractions during church services.
Dr. Boli is continuing a farcical novel about a good-for-nothing ne'er-do-well.
The Anchoress has some thoughts on the Coptic martyrs.
And S. Weasel has a very nice image of a Triceratops.
I've seen it all over various Star Wars fan pages on Facebook and on YouTube; videos, comic strips, and fan art all about a Storm-trooper's point of view of the destruction of the first Death Star from A New Hope. While it is interesting to see events from another point of view, many fans treat it as though they were speaking of the 9/11 attacks from 2001. This is not a very good comparison given the situation we're talking about.
The problem is that these fans are comparing the destruction of a battle station meant for terror purposes to an unprovoked attack on helpless civilians. Yes millions of people got killed in the Death Star explosion, but the Rebels had no other choice. This Death Star had proven just how dangerous it was when it destroyed an entire planet full of billions more innocent civilians. And Darth Sidious could have used it to destroy hundreds more planets and billions more people unless someone put a stop to it.
The attack on the Twin Towers in New York City was an unexpected surprise attack meant to terrify a whole country. It was done by fanatics who wanted to kill people for an evil cause. The ones who hijacked the planes believed that dying for their religion and sending as many infidels to Hell as they could meant that they would live forever in Paradise. This not at all like the Rebels from Star Wars who are trying to overthrow a tyrannical regime that has enslaved and butchered so many people. This is a culture of death that values mass murder as means of furthering their cause.
To be quite frank, I think that the destruction of Alderaan would been a better comparison in this case. It was an unprovoked attack on an entire population with the means of demonstrating what would happen to anyone who didn't like the Empire. I do want to see stories written from an average storm-trooper's point of view, but not in a "Where were you on September 11th?" kind of way. Actually, it's a very inappropriate comparison as it's trying to compare a necessary attack on a battle station that obviously represented the strong arm of the law in its most extreme form, and a vicious and horrendous attack on a civilian population.
Also for the record, the Storm-troopers would have known full well that the Death Star was a military space station, and the Rebels would probably try to take it out. No one ever anticipated that someone would try to take out a civilian skyscraper like the Twin Towers.
Jar Jar Binks is not a Sith Lord. I say this because for one thing, he is not Force-sensitive. If he were, Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi would have sensed it right away. Now Palpatine has the power to cloud minds and hide his true purposes from the Jedi, but he can't entirely hide that fact, which is why the Jedi are able to sense that the Dark Side is clouding the future.
Also Jar Jar is naturally clumsy and stupid. I seriously doubt that someone like Palpatine would even bother training someone like him. To Palpatine, Jar Jar is just a naive fool who can be easily manipulated.
And finally, even if Jar Jar were Force-sensitive, Palpatine cannot possibly take on two apprentices at once. Aside from the Rule of Two, it isn't feasible to train to apprentices because of the time and effort it would take. Even a Sith Lord wouldn't be able to pull that off.
Besides, there is nothing in the canon to even suggest that he's a Sith Lord. Sidious was trained by Plagueis, and Sidious trained Maul. Looking at the novels, Palpatine met Plagueis in 65 BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin), and Jar Jar Binks was born in 55 BBY. So Jar Jar was no where near Palpatine or Maul at the time.
