‘Unlistenable nightmares’ procured

Here’s some ‘amazing’ news which seems to have passed under the radar of major MSM outlets:

A British widow has given 4,000 vinyl records spanning every classical genre to her local Oxfam shop, the largest music donation in the charity’s history.

Apparently it’s all there, from A to Z — well er, at least, from B to S...

The collection, worth an estimated 25,000 pounds, ranges from Bach and Haydn to Stravinsky and Stockhausen and will keep the shop stocked for three years.

“It is amazing. I can’t think of a classical genre that is missing,” said Oxfam volunteer Terry Hyde. “It is all there, all your big figures from the 18th and 19th century, your 20th century unlistenable nightmares by Stockhausen, avant garde, opera, unaccompanied violin. Virtually every genre is covered.”

Shop manager Jacky Theobald said the collection was too big to go on sale at the same time. “We will do a Chopin week, a Mozart week, that sort of thing.”

Music connoisseurs will not want to miss Unlistenable Nightmares Week.

Amazing.

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case you missed it

• ‘If’ may be the middle-word in ‘Life’, but there’s laughter in manslaughter.
• Starting down that slippery slope — the ‘Honour Lie’ — “Italy’s highest appeal court has ruled that married women are entitled to lie about committing adultery, even in judicial investigations, to protect their honour.”
• An awarding-winning actress has achieved the Chinese government’s highest honour, being made an Un-Person. All works and commercials featuring Chinese actress, Tang Wei, are to be removed from Chinese print and electronic media.
• How will we live without the convenience of instant photography?
• Poor old Sir Paul McCartney just can’t seem to score a hit lately, but Instant Karma’s gonna get Peter Garrett.

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Brief newslets

Author and Nobel-laureate Doris Lessing has made a disturbing oraculation:

Obama, who is vying to become the first black president in US history, “would certainly not last long, a black man in the position of president. They would murder him,” Lessing, 88, told the Dagens Nyheter [Swedish] daily.

While Muftim Blair ferrets away at the origins of the Obama-assassination meme, we can only hope Ms Lessing’s prediction isn’t borne out in reality, should Obama win the Presidential contest. If, God forbid, this does come to pass, however, then perhaps Ms Lessing could be prevailed upon to further oraculate and identify the “they” who “would murder him”.

Meanwhile over at Bugs’n’Slugs, Jack Robertson has had enough of sour, nit-picking, tyre-kicking Apology ‘Sceptics’:

Agonising over wordings, watering down phrases, trying hard to keep you inside the Reconciliation tent even though all it will earn from you, in your bitter determination to stand outside that tent and piss in, is another contemptuous sneer. And every equivocation, every narcissistic whinge, every pissant little ‘ah, but’, every ‘i’ you demand we dot and ‘t’ you blub and grizzle and wail until we cross is another hot Whitey needle in the open wound of every aging black Australian who was stolen, formally, officially, legally, whatever the intentions and motivations. And it’s them that this Apology is about, not you, or me. Five, 50, 500, 5,000, five million... apologising to however many did suffer and however many will appreciate our acknowledgement of that true fact, however belated, is not about making you, or me, feel better. Apologies are about humility, and humilty is about handing your power voluntarily to the people you are apologising to, who have none, and will not until you do so.

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Lets brief news

This is a really neat idea!!

Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs.

There could also be a niche market in those wanting an eco-friendly, self-sufficient energy solution for their cave whilst developing WMD capability.

In other eco-friendly news,

The body heat from hundreds of thousands of people who pass through the Stockholm Central Station each day will be used to heat a new office building nearby. .. The body heat would warm up water that in turn would be pumped through pipes over to the new office building, which will also house a small hotel and a few shops and is expected to be completed by the beginning of 2010.

Meanwhile there has been yet another hunting mishap in Texas:

An overexcited dog accidentally shot and killed its owner on a goose hunting trip in Texas.

Two go out, but only one comes back...

UPDATE

Oh dear. According to the Wikipedia entry for the Toshiba Micro Nuclear Reactor:

The original story describing this device was broken in Next Energy News and rapidly picked up by technology journalists and the blogosphere. However, no web presence from Toshiba has yet been seen, and it is possible that this is a hoax.

We’re through the looking glass when Wiki exposes factoids.

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Brewed nieflets

Anyone who wasn’t aware that China was ranked 72nd in the world on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2007 would nevertheless probably take the following as indicative of certain problems facing China today:

A Chinese Government website encouraging citizens to report corruption has crashed on its first day under the weight of too many hits.

And the latest round in an argument that has raged for years, and will continue until the day we are either greeted as long-lost celestial brethren, or enslaved or zapped out of existence by the ETs:

Two senior scientists have resigned from an elite international study group in protest over a lack of public discussion about the possible consequences of attracting the attention of aliens by sending signals deep into space.

Almost forgot to mention that Tim Dunlop recently published an urgent News Flash over at his news.com.au gig, as apparently he’d detected some residual confusion over events that occurred almost a month ago.

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Brief newslets

Turkish warplanes targeting Kurdish rebels bombed villages deep in northern Iraq today, killing one woman and forcing hundreds of people to flee their homes.

But it’s okay, because it was done “with the implicit approval of US occupying forces in Iraq.”

Hang on — no it’s not okay, because the US didn’t approve it at all. But it would’ve been okay if they had...

And singer and songsmith Dan Fogelberg has died of prostate cancer, aged 56.

Meanwhile another singer and songsmith almost as well-known as Dan, Chris de Burgh, will become the first Western artist to play a gig in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Incidentally, something about the chorus of Chris’s song, ‘Don’t Pay the Ferryman’, has always bothered me...

Don’t pay the ferryman!
Don’t even fix a price!
Don’t pay the ferryman
Until he gets you to the other side

I mean, what halfway competent ferryman would even contemplate getting you to the other side before first fixing a price that reflects market realities? And would any rational agent even want to be ferried by a person so lacking in basic commonsense?

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Brief newslets

Arthur C. Clarke, marking his “90th orbit of the sun”, predicts...

“commercial space travel will one day be commonplace.”

Again?!! Clarke predicted back in the 1960s scheduled Pan Am flights plying the void between Earth and Moon by the year 2000. That turned out well...

And gee, this dad is strict!

After catching his 15-year-old smoking pot, a father sold the hard-to-get Guitar Hero III video game he bought his son for $US90 for Christmas at an online auction, fetching $US9,000. ...

The naughty son, however, will not go without a present on Christmas.

“I am still considering getting him a game for his Nintendo. Maybe something like Barbie as the Island Princess or Dancing with the Stars ... I know he will just love them,” the father said, tongue-in-cheek.

Finally, hope these wannabes aren’t sitting around waiting for their shoes to ring with a job offer.

The success of the James Bond movies has given the British secret intelligence service a recruitment headache — too many cranks want to join MI6.

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