Mario, my Eratosphere inbox is almost full but some correspondence is too precious to delete. I have kept for many years the exchange we had about a couple of poems - in Angle and Soundzine - where our lives touched for a moment. During it you gave me four adjectives and I have treasured them; now I give them back to you...

Haunting, memorable, musical, powerful.

Well done and well shared, fellow tree-toucher.

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Mario, I will savor this until it is completely absorbed. Then savor it some more. Thank you.
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Thank you so much, Cally, Ann, and Jim!! your comments mean a lot to me and have lit up my day! I can't find a way to enter hearts in the reply window, so please see these as three hearts: :) :) :)

For a limited time only, people will be able to access an audio rebroadcast of the San Diego Master Chorale's 2016 performance of B9 (Beethoven's Ninth Symphony) with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra and conductor Edo de Waart. We were supposed to perform it last weekend with the SDSO and conductor Rafael Payare, but of course that couldn't happen. This is the best available substitute.

Click on the "Audio Broadcast" link here, and look for "KPBS Broadcast May 25."

(And hey, if anyone wants to give us money while we've got no performance income, we'll be glad to use it to pay our amazingly talented staff.)

I'm watching my niece's virtual graduation from Harvard Law School right now via a family Zoom session.

Tremble, ye pharmaceutical tycoons, tremble! Miriam is armed with an anti-trust specialty and is coming for you and your price-fixing! Woohoo!

[Edited to say: Wow, that was inspiring. Great speakers. Great honorees for the student awards. And such hope!]

Julie, this really is thrilling news! Hearty congratulations to Miriam and the family at large. Go forth, Miriam, and bring them and their prices down!

These graduation ceremonies can be inspiring. And hope -- what a feeling.

Cally

ps I intend to listen to your choir performance over the weekend.

Actually, editing in to say the talk of performance made me realise I should mention a thrilling thing happening now involving our beloved David Mason. Yesterday, we had the ZOOM launch of the cd for The Parting, music by Tom Cippulo, libretto by David Mason, released on Naxos. The opera is about Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti, and it has three characters -- Radnoti, his wife Fanni, and Death -- an extraordinary love triangle. It's about life, and love, and art. And it is powerful, and it has some of my favourite lines Dave has ever written.

To celebrate the launch of the cd, Music of Remembrance is streaming the one-act opera until Sunday. I think it's the Seattle performance. Put some good headphones on and watch it, listen to it. And buy the CD! HERE:

https://www.musicofremembrance.org/w...listen/parting

Thanks!

Cally

That's so exciting, Cally! Can't wait to check it out!

Julie, I tried to make a small donation, but the site wants too much information. All it needs is a PayPal link, not my autobiography.

Ann, you can archive PM threads or copy them to text files or word files. Although a PM keeper I’ve had to do that.

I joined in the Zoom meeting today (well, it was this evening for me, in the UK) organised by our wonderful Melissa, in which light verse was performed while we all watched and listened. It was SO much fun, seeing lots of familiar faces and some previously unknown faces!

The poems were all brilliant, and I'd like to thank the readers for providing such excellent entertainment. Well done, everyone! (It smacks of favouritism, sorry, but I have to give special thanks to Susan McLean.)

I feel happier than I've felt in about.. (how many weeks have we been in lockdown?)... nine weeks or so.

Jayne

Jayne, it was wonderful to see you there--and of course I'm very much looking forward to your reading on June 14!

Sounds like great fun, Light-hearted ones!! I wish I'd known it was on. How do we find out?

Going back a few posts, I wrote about the Zoom launch of the cd for the opera 'The Parting', libretto David Mason, music Tom Cippulo. And now, I've just found out this morning that the entire thing is now on YouTube! Here it is:

CD release party for The Parting

The whole thing is worth listening to. The insights of the creative artists involved are really inspiring. Near the beginning, at the 7 minute mark, Davey speaks about his process, followed by Tom -- and these two are a great team, and what they say will move you.

Cally

The performance that inspired this reeeeeeally long blank verse poem by someone whose name rings a bell is being re-broadcast at 8pm PDT next Sunday night, July 5.

The chorale only comes on for the Bernstein piece, which starts about 10pm. Very inconvenient for Americans in other time zones, I know, and my San Diego Symphony insider says it's very unlikely that there will be on-demand streaming of this afterward. Sorry. Anyway, I thought some of the Brits might enjoy it on Monday morning.

https://www.sandiegosymphony.org/san...on-kpbs-895fm/

Jahja Ling, conductor
Jean-Yves, Thibaudet, piano
Henry Nelson, boy soprano
San Diego Master Chorale
BARBER: Overture to The School for Scandal
GERSHWIN: Piano Concerto in F
COPLAND: Appalachian Spring Suite
BERNSTEIN: Chichester Psalms

I have successfully moved to Seattle. I wrote a poem again for the first time in two months.

Be happy in Seattle, Aaron. Cherish the poem.

I will certainly attempt to do both of these things

Welcome to the Pacific Time Zone, Aaron! And don't forget to register to vote.

Today marks two years on the wagon for me.

(it's also Mary Meriam's birthday. So happy birthday Mary, I'm raising a glass of apple juice!)

Congratulations, Mark! And happy birthday, Mary!

Ditto to Julie's post above, Mark and Mary. Cheers my dears!

My Good News is that, having missed out on a big party for a significant birthday in July that had been planned, I spent the money that would have gone on that and bought some really lovely new garden furniture.

It's that rattan material in light grey - a kind of interwoven plastic that's weather-proof (and quite expensive, ...but hey, I'm worth it ;)); our old stuff of the same type is still good after many years of exposure to the elements, but it's faded and I wanted to jazz up the garden anyway!

We've been lucky with the weather, mostly, since lockdown and since we were allowed to have a few people in the garden I took full advantage of it. I don't recall ever having spent so much time out there, or having so many al fresco meals. Autumn is upon us but we might still get an ''Indian Summer''. I live in hope.

Jayne

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Jayne: We've been lucky with the weather, mostly, since lockdown and since we were allowed to have a few people in the garden I took full advantage of it. I don't recall ever having spent so much time out there, or having so many al fresco meals. Autumn is upon us but we might still get an ''Indian Summer''. I live in hope.

Many thanks for the affirmation. This is the way the world wants to be. Marry it, I say!
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Hi Jayne and Jim,
In Minnesota we love to talk about the weather. It's getting cool now, but this has been the most beautiful summer ever, few hot days, regular rainfall, temperate in every way -- in counterpoint to the increase in tent encampments in the parks and waste spaces and the sporadic destruction of the demonstrations. Best wishes, Bill

My new book, "An Answer from the Past", has just been published by Kelsay Books. More info. on the "Accomplished Members" (ahem!) thread.

Just quickly...

I don't think I even need to SAY what the good news is, do I???

The whole world knows :D

Jayne

Say it, Jayne. Say it. It feels like a burden lifting. It is a burden lifting.

Oh, all right then, Simon...

I asked my husband how I should say it... and he referred to the much-desired departure of the Cambridge University Netball Team...

There, I said it - sort of. I'm sure you get my drift ;)

Jayne

Ha. I knew what you meant before, but it took me a long minute to figure out what you meant this time...

Not surprising, Simon - your team is Harvard.

Something to look forward to, for a change. The family is getting bigger...

My 3rd great-grandchild is due in April, and my 8th grandchild is due in May. Next year promises to be a whole lot better than this one!!!

Jayne

“Hey, Jayne, here’s my good news! I won the election! But that lyin' creep Joe Biden refuses to admit defeat, so my guys are havin’ to do a lotta court cases to get the true results accepted. In the meantime, more good news: the Cambridge University Netball Team has made me their president for life! And the Presidential Re-election and Inauguration Committee of Kentucky has done the same, thanks to that great patriot Mitch McConnell! Believe me, I ain’t goin’ anywhere soon … although I’m keepin’ my passport in a safe place just in case.” @realDotardTrump

Haha! Very good, Brian! :D

Chiefly for classical nerds and mug lovers
 

https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/pictu...&pictureid=145

December 05 2020

My good news is that I located a very tricky text that was smaller than small in finer than fine print.

What I’m writing about here is not the so-called holy grail (as in Monty Python and THC – sorry, THG), but something else that only a Latin or Greek semi-classicist like me could love. By using two stacked bifocals on my head combined with a binocular jeweler’s loupe, and holding the magnifier for my compact Oxford English Dictionary, that in combination all together amounted to about ninety diameters enlargement, I located something and marked it with a green “sharpie” pen on a coffee mug which I recently purchased for $19.99 from “RomaOptima.com” that bears a truly nano-scopic reproduction of the Latin text (with damaged letters too) of the Res Divi Augusti (or Accomplishments of the [Divine] Emperor Augustus). So, what’s that to me, or you in AD/CE 2020? Well, for years many people have said that the census account in what is called the New Testament is incorrect because no census was recorded for or near 1 BC or 1 AD. (There is no year “zero” in the world-wide calendar.)

And the real question is, Is this important now?

The matter that interested me was the relatively recent acceptance by the previous Pope in 2012 in his book “Jesus of Nazareth” of what nerds more informed than myself had been saying for years. That is, that our secular calendar that is based on calculations by the sixth century monk known as Dionysius Exiguus (or in English, Dennis the Small) is wrong by up to eight years. Dionysius added up a lot of poorly recorded intervals and made a mistake because the available records were rather sketchy. Furthermore, multiplication and division are almost impossible to do with Roman numerals. Romans used an abacus which is quite fast for adding and subtracting and wrote down what they got. (Multiplication is like shorthand addition.) So what Dionysius thought was the year 525 was most likely 532 or 531. This redating fits with eclipse records, coins, and the widespread stone census records of the second (2nd) of Augustus’s three (3) pedestrian speed “censuses of all the world” that began in “8 BCE” (“Before Common/Christian Era”). I said “pedestrian speed” because communication from the eastern Mediterranean to Rome took a long time on land or by boats that hugged the coasts and sailed only in good seasons. The names of the Roman consuls for the second census of Augustus are given on this mug and in books. Of the books I have, the best is Res Gestae Divi Augusti; Text, Translation, and Commentary, by Alison E. Cooley, published by the University of Cambridge, 2009, see pp 66-67, which has the texts with the damaged letters identified so that reading the mug was much easier. A less useful version is Res Gestae Divi Augusti; The Achievements of the Divine [to the Romans] Augustus, edited by P.A. Brunt and J.M. Moore, Oxford University Press, 1967 [and continually], pp 22-23.

The relevant sentence is: tum [iter]um consulari cum imperio lustrum [s]olus feci C(aio) Censorino [et C(aio) Asinio] co(n)s(ulibus), quo lustro censa sunt civium Romanorum [capit]a quadragiens centum millia at ducenta trigenta tria m[illia]. Parentheses indicate Roman abbreviations; brackets show damaged stone letters. A Greek translation with different damaged points exists in modern Turkey. The Cambridge translation reads: “Then for a second time I conducted a census on my own with consular power in the consulship of Gaius Censorinus and Gaius Asinius [8 BC]; in this census registered 4,233,000 individual Roman citizens.” Of course, Roman “citizens” were a smallish percentage of the entire population.

What’s particularly nice is that the relevant spot on the mug is shown in the picture just above in lines six through ten in the column just below the words “AVGUSTI” and “ROMANUM”.

I should warn you that the website https://romaoptima.com/collections/all seems to be currently experiencing difficulties which doesn’t make purchasing your own mug easy. I found a link by chance for the mug and used it in September 2020. However, at the top there’s an online picture of what I got.

Allen, could you say what you just said in plain language? I have no idea what you're talking about or what your point is.

I'm thankful for your post, Bob, as I've just helped to sink a sufficient amount of alcohol (two bottles of Bollinger in celebration of my son's birthday) to render me into the 'WTF' bracket.

Jayne

My point is that I succeeded in reading a microscopic text in a very hard copy that I've known about and understood for many years. Eventually, the Roman Catholic Church caught up with me and others. It has to do with the entire dating system most people use. The ordering of almost all events is unaffected of course. Not to worry, unless you want to "reduce" your age by a few years because you weren't born in, let's say, 1992, but in 1998 or 2000. It's just that reading that text on the mug was such a pleasure.

Allen, I feel your joy. I can't read the text or fully grasp the significance of it, but I recognise the pleasure of the discovery.

I speak as one who spent far too much time on trying to prove that the battle of Mons Graupius really did take place, and that it was on Dunsinane Hill, the Roman army in full battle gear moving like a great forest up towards the picts, whose folk memory led to the "prophecy" in the time of Macobey. I recently looked up that proposal to see if anyone else had come up with it and my heart stopped when I Googled it and found that someone had, then re-started when I clicked on the link and found it was - me. Here.
https://ablemuse.org/erato/showthrea...t=29324&page=2

It's the happiness of discovering that Luther and Dürer were contemporaries after I'd quoted them both in a silly little squib about rabbits that ended with a bit of Keats that one day historians will unravel - and understand.

It's the joy of researching the truth of De Nerval and his lobster and finding so much more than I was looking for - ending up devastated by the poet's death and certain that a kindly-meant remark by Théophile Gautier during the day of it might have pushed him to that awful gesture.

It's a special and personal "Wahey!", A sudden and lovely "Hurrah!" that only comes sometimes, making one tip one's chair back on its hind legs and clap one's hands like a Japanese businessman at a brainstorming.

And in moments of tranquility, it's a perfect conviction that one is what one's head is full of, and, having lived completely alone since March, it's a piece of good news worth posting that, here on Eratosphere, I can find other people who occasionally feel the same.

Copy you on that link! Very nice. Thanks. Considering that navigational tools and skills then weren’t what have available, Spain as “west” makes a smidge of sense. They thought the world was much smaller then. Spain certainly isn’t “east”! Thanks.

BTW, the lettering on the mug isn’t only very very small, but it’s gray, and reading it somewhat easily (as if) needed a lot of enlargement. Check out the Cambridge. On this dating question, there’s a whole thing involving the dates of death of a king, eclipses, word of mouth transmission of religious recollection, etc, etc. Nothing is changed about the sequencing of most events, except possibly within a limited span of a decade or so. But since the available chronologies for Roman events are very few, one wonders about other hiccups.

First known math error: beer
 

This is a bit long, but it’s about old beer and record keeping. As such, it gives Little Dennis mentioned above someone to commiserate with, “Kushim”.

Oops! Where’s the eraser?

We haven't had any Good News posts this year yet...
Here's my latest: my 8th grandchild was born this morning, a boy weighing 9lb 10oz. I now have four of each! :D

Jayne

Grandchildren! Been there, done that. Just kidding!! You’re far and away ahead of me number-wise. Congratulations! USA Mother’s Day is Sunday next. I hope all yours are as cool as you are.