a socially distanced Andrea Bocelli performs O Holy Night in St Paul’s Cathedral

O Holy Night was created in 1847 by French opera composer Adolphe Adam, who also wrote the ballet Giselle

While initially popular in France, the carol quickly fell out of favour after its premiere, when Adam’s Judaism and poet Placide Cappeau’s socialism worried the Church so much that they banned performances.  

However, eight years later, John Dwight, an American Unitarian minister and classical musical critic, translated the carol into English, bringing its text and melody to a new audience.

archived source*

see also: an archived article* on backstories to the top ten carols for 2020 from a BBC poll


20201225T1536−08*
*a link; see a note on notes and links; see also a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the post archive*



Posted

ISO 8601 style for date and time: quick notes posted 2020-12-18T01:54Z

image credit: Fabrizio Verrecchia*

quick notes on ISO 8601 style for date and time:
date and time values are ordered left to right, from largest unit of time to smallest, / ISO 8601 (!w2, !?)
and the sequence may end with any unit: year, month, day, hour, minute, …

basic format separates date from time with a capital T

extended format uses hyphens and colons to separate units within these fields

use extended format, not basic, in running text

midnight – 00:00 in extended format – marks the start of a day

time with no date: T00, T0000, T00:00, and 00:00 / examples for midnight

local time is implied if no offset is appended

to relate local time to UTC, append an offset* (negative for west of the IRM*)

a compliant offset for PST is −08, for PDST, −07  / Unicode minus sign, U+2212 (!?)

compliant offsets for UTC, aka Zulu time, include +00 and Z


20201217T1754−08
*a link; see a note on notes and links; see also a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the post archive*


2023-09-13 … screenshot of teaser for 2023-01 piece on Substack


Posted

Michael Palin does Biggles … and Algy … and Ginger

Michael Palin* – a Biggles (!i) fan as a 12-year-old – reads a story he wrote in the style of W.E. Johns

The video, with Danish subtitles, is of an (almost) solo performance in The Secret Policeman’s Ball (1979).*

See also a 2013 piece on W.E. Johns by Patrick Cockburn in The Independent: Biggles flies uncensored.*


20201215T2155−08
*a link; see a note on notes and links; see also a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the post archive*

Posted

Matthieu Ricard … 2004, 2020

2004 TED Talk, Monterey, CA / transcript*

see also: results of search for images, no year specified*

at 05:29 – a copy-paste from the transcript:
Now, what, then, will be happiness? And happiness, of course, is such a vague word, so let's say well-being. And so, I think the best definition, according to the Buddhist view, is that well-being is not just a mere pleasurable sensation. It is a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment. A state that actually pervades and underlies all emotional states, and all the joys and sorrows that can come one's way. For you, that might be surprising. Can we have this kind of well-being while being sad? In a way, why not? Because we are speaking of a different level.

2020-06-05 … from an FT interview, done while Ricard is in France, visiting his 97-year-old mother:
The notion that we can control external conditions is mistaken, he explains, … “We have this very arrogant idea that we have extracted ourselves from nature. We are masters of the universe, we can send people to the moon, we can manipulate genes. It seems that we are invincible.”

He is horrified, too, by the idea of transhumanism, and its adherents’ quest to prolong dramatically the human lifespan. “Imagine Donald Trump being elected for the 50th time or Lionel Messi scoring his 50,000th goal. How boring!” I laugh in agreement. He goes on: “I mean, I love my hermitage, but a thousand years? As my mother likes to say, eternity is awfully long, especially near the end.”

source archived*


*a link; see a note on notes and links; see also a disclaimer


Posted

the boy in the yellow t-shirt

the boy in the yellow t-shirt*

2020-12-07 … Snopes on the boy and Ugur Sahin, CEO of BioNtech:
Although the family shown in the photograph is not Sahin’s, and the boy in the yellow shirt is not him, the milieu it depicted may well have been similar to the one in which Sahin grew up. According to multiple reports, Sahin’s father — like the father of the “boy in the yellow t-shirt” — immigrated to Germany as a gastarbeiter (“guest worker”) in a Ford factory in Cologne. Both men originally arrived by themselves, before their respective families later joined them.

The purpose of the guest-worker programs was to bring an influx of skilled labor into Germany in order to revive the German economy in the 1960s and 1970s. Workers were originally intended to stay for only two years, before returning to their countries of origin, but the rules were later changed and allowed for family reunification in Germany.

So in the case of Sahin and the boy in the yellow shirt, their families’ journey in German society began under the same legal mechanisms, and in similarly modest circumstances.*


*a link; see a note on notes and links; see also a disclaimer

Posted

Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life (John Gray)


from the Tim Adams book interview:
In the last sentence of Straw Dogs, Gray asked a question, almost plaintively: “Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?” Has writing the current book helped him to understand what such a life of experience might look like?

“Cats live for the sensation of life, not for something they might achieve or not achieve,” he says. “If we attach ourselves too heavily to some overarching purpose we’re losing the joy of life. Leave all those ideologies and religions to one side and what’s left? What’s left is a sensation of life – which is a wonderful thing.”*

!w2 John Gray (philosopher)


*a link; see a note on notes and links; see also a disclaimer
Posted