Melody

Thanks for all you do to keep this forum going; I know that running forums like this requires a lot of work behind the scenes. So much appreciated, though - it's a lifeline to home for me!

It isn't every day you get Swan Lake as well as The Nutcracker at Christmas. Unfortunately I couldn't find a video of a live performance (where the conductor was happily doing high kicks during the Ninth Day part), but it's fun anyway.

The more I read about Ross Stretton's decisions for the company, the more I wonder why he was allowed near it in the first place. He sounds more and more like a person who didn't have a clue what the RB was about. As a person seriously prone to motion sickness, I had a lot of trouble with the Bjornson designs and the weird perspectives. I'm not sure how useful it is for the current designs to be based so heavily on ones from more than half a century ago, but for me they're a major improvement over that previous version.

It looks really bare for a while until we get used to it. Some friends of our who hadn't seen the house except during our Christmas party, when it's full of people and decorations, were really surprised when they visited during the summer and saw it was quite a lot bigger than they'd remembered!

This year's is fairly similar to last year's - these days we mostly just move things around from year to year. Glad you like it, though!

Merry Christmas!

As long as the whole street doesn't look unkempt, it probably won't be much of an issue when you come to sell. If those neighbours aren't noisy, that's always something. My mother-in-law had a similar problem with the house next door, and it got bad enough that it was encouraging rats. At that point the council did half-heartedly try to do something but it never lasted very long. Things cleared up a bit when they had a baby, I assume because they finally figured out that rats weren't a good mix with a new baby, but the outside always looked like a tip.

Gosh, is that even legal?

Gosh, that sounds like a Monty Python sketch. Some of the makeup you see on people behind counters in shops sometimes looks quite a bit more like warpaint.

Oh, definitely. Such a stupid waste - all they ever seem to do is move leaves around, and as soon as there's any wind they scatter again.

Erm, yes, only a couple. The thing about nutcrackers is that I don't remember which ones we already have, I just knew that two of them weren't already in our display (they were standing on little boxes containing a chocolate truffle) so I got them. In the Washington Ballet Nutcracker, the nutcracker is a George Washington one, and I'd have loved to get one like that but they didn't have any. I assume the items for sale weren't all custom-made items and George Washington nutcrackers aren't that much of a thing in Christmas shops. Production being worked on as we speak...

Sounds as though they should be asking audience members what sorts of things they'd like to buy at the shop, if the stuff on offer is that different from what people want. When we went to the Nutcracker here a couple of years ago, there were all sorts of fun Christmas decorations and small nutcrackers on offer, and they were doing a very brisk job of selling things in the interval as well as before the performance. Our nutcracker display still has a couple of items from there, as well as a Clara on the nutcracker tree.

Ninette de Valois said much the same thing about how ballet companies shouldn't be competing with contemporary companies on their own turf. If a company like the Royal Ballet is resorting to contemporary dance rather than finding a way forward with ballet, that's pretty sad. Mind you, I think it's trying to do both; however, the contemporary stuff should be a once-in-a-while experiment, not a major part of the repertoire.

It was amazingly huge when I saw it low in the sky a couple of evenings ago. That was a day or two before the full moon, but still wonderfully impressive. I've loved some of the photos on Facebook showing the moon apparently balancing over basketball hoops or church spires.

Well, the media has behaved shockingly throughout this whole business, so nothing much would surprise me there at this point.

It's obviously not something we'll ever know definitively. But if people don't try and analyse what happened, there won't be any lessons to be learned. For those of us who live in the USA, this is going to be a lot more personal than for others. As a person in one of the vulnerable groups (noncitizen immigrant) with a memory that goes back to what some of these same people tried in 1994, I'm more than a little concerned. For the first time since moving here nearly 40 years ago, we're seriously discussing moving back to the UK at the moment.

As Bernie Sanders said, in a situation where you have two people who are personally not popular, the best thing to do is to try and ignore the personalities and look at the policy positions. Not that the media gave people much of a chance to do that, they were so busy dissecting all the scandals. I think if anything, when people look back at this election and try to figure out what happened, the media are going to end up shouldering a lot of the blame. At least I hope they are. They focused on Trump exhaustively right from the start, to the point where one time they ignored a live speech by Bernie Sanders to spend that half hour with their cameras on an empty podium in another city where Trump was going to speak a bit later. During the primaries, Trump turned the debates into such circuses that the media ratings were through the roof compared with debates in previous elections, and several media moguls were openly gloating about the money they were getting. The head of CBS actually said, about Trump's candidacy "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," and "Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun. I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” We heard practically nothing about policy positions on either side (maybe not all that relevant since a lot of Trump's campaign promises have gone the way of the Brexit promises the day after they won), but it was emails, emails, emails, p***y grabbing, emails, emails, Benghazi the whole time. Not a word in any of the three presidential debates about climate change, one of the most serious issues facing the next president and one where they had massive differences, just basically opportunities for them to stick to their talking points and attack each other's personal failings. I suppose the prospect of a Trump presidency is also going to be more profitable for the media than a Clinton presidency. But the media failed us badly during the campaign.

Yep, it was.

I don't think so - there aren't alternative votes. On the ballot people vote for one or other of the candidates, and the elections are run by the states so that they're counted state by state. But the actual selection is made by the electoral college, and the way the electoral college is chosen is that all the electoral college votes in a state will go to the candidate who wins that state, they aren't apportioned proportionally with respect to what percentage each candidate gets. So if a candidate wins California with 51% of the vote, s/he gets all 55 electoral college votes for California. If s/he wins California with 81% of the vote, s/he gets the same 55 electoral college votes. So a big win isn't an advantage. This is how one party can win the popular vote and lose the election - winning by large margins in states with densely populated areas (especially California, New York, and Illinois) and losing by small margins in a large number of smaller states in the Midwest and south. And that's what happened in this election; Clinton got 62% of the vote in California to Trump's 33%, 59% in New York to Trump's 37%, and 55% in Illinois to Trump's 39%, which is where the bulk of her popular vote win came from. But in the swing states, he won Florida and Pennsylvania 49% to 48%, Michigan and Wisconsin 48% to 47%, and North Carolina 51% to 47%; he won Iowa and Ohio by larger margins but nothing like her wins in California and New York. However, just as she got all the California electoral college votes for her 29-point victory, he got all the Florida electoral college votes for his 1-point victory. A small number of states apportion the electoral college votes proportionally, but it's just a bare handful of small states, and even then it's done by electoral district rather than pure percentage of voters, meaning there's another way to manipulate the result because electoral districts are drawn by whichever party is in power in the state after each census, and that leads to serious gerrymandering. After every election there are calls to abandon the electoral college because it skews the results so weirdly, especially in favour of the party which appeals more to rural voters, but it's in the Constitution so it's going to be very hard to do anything about it.

Yes, in 2000. The electoral college tends to favour the less populated states. A candidate can win California or New York by a wide margin but end up losing as a result of close losses in states like Ohio and Wisconsin, which is what happened this time around. This is what happens when all the electoral college votes in a state go to the winner, regardless of how close the vote was. In a few states it's done by district (which opens the system up to the same sort of gerrymandering that's bedeviling the House of Representatives at the moment) but mostly it's a statewide thing.

I've seen it, and I've been a bit worried about the parallels with real life over the last few days.

It's even worse than that. California is the largest state in the country in terms of number of voters, yet it has a very late primary. So by the time the people of California got to vote in the primaries in June, Trump was the only Republican still in the race on that side even though some of the candidates who'd already withdrawn were still on the ballot. So the people of California had no say in choosing the Republican candidate. Then in the election last Tuesday, the media were calling states for Trump or Clinton as soon as their models told them who was the projected winner, and that was happening as soon as the polls closed on the east coast. So the polls were still open in California when it started to be discussed that there was no way Clinton was realistically going to win. Which makes it more likely that Democrats wouldn't bother to go to the polls, which affects all the other races in the state as well as the presidential one. I remember one year, a TV anchor actually told Californians not to bother to go and vote because their vote didn't matter any more. Not that that's helpful when there were all sorts of state and local issues on the ballot too, but the media generally doesn't care about that. But it's bloody sad in a democracy for the people in the most populous state in the country to be told their votes don't matter.

Still got that headache. Sigh...

Well, that's my impression as an expat Brit; I think the Brexit vote and the US presidential election are symptoms of the same problem (along with the rise of far-right politicians throughout western Europe). Reposting a comment I made on another site earlier: This is scarily like the 1930s and for many of the same reasons. First you get a financial bubble in the USA because bankers are playing high-stakes games with a deregulated financial system, then you get a crash whose effects are felt around the world. Then you get governments protecting themselves and their friends in finance and industry at the expense of ordinary people, who end up in a hopeless position and are blamed for it by the very people who put them there, with precious little attempt to help them out of the depression economy. Then you get right-wing demagogues coming to power everywhere, pretending to be the champions of the little guys while actually perpetuating the system but fanning the flames of everyone's discontent and blaming immigrants and brown people. Let's hope we don't go one step further and end up with a world war. Although when you throw the effects of climate change, and the resulting inevitable resource wars, into the mix, things really aren't looking good. Apologies if this is getting too political but I was trying to explain my previous post and keep things historical.

It's the Brexit vote all over again, and for many of the same reasons. This is going to be interesting. Alison, there's a line of succession to the presidency if a president is declared incapable of serving - the Vice President would take over, and if the President and the VP were both unable to serve the Speaker of the House is next in line. Not sure what would be involved in declaring a president incapable, but it'd have to be a genuinely incapacitating medical condition. Being a person who, in the words of the First Lady, has a thin skin and a tendency to lash out wouldn't come close to being grounds for removal.