Melody

Speaking of weather - just been helpfully told that the forecast high temperature for today is 87 degrees and that the current temperature is 89. Whole new definition of the word "high." In the meantime, my husband just got home and said that the outside-temperature thermometer in the car was registering 98 at one point. Fortunately we live near a golf course, which cools things down a couple of degrees.

Well, we're working on it. Bought some grass plug thingies and planted them at the weekend. Hopefully they won't attract birds the way grass seed does.

16 June 1961 - Rudolf Nureyev defected to the West at Le Bourget Airport in Paris.

Oh, sorry, I meant the cast list for Coppelia that was posted in another thread here. Copying the list Wednesday Evening 23.7.14 Shoiri Kase Yonah Acosta Thursday Matinee 24.7.14 Erina Takahashi Fernando Bufalá Thursday Evening 24.7.14 Tamara Rojo Alban Lendorf Friday Evening 25.7.14 Fernanda Oliveira Dmitri Gruzdyev Saturday Matinee 26.7.14 Erina Takahashi Fernando Bufalá Saturday Evening 26.7.14 Tamara Rojo Alban Lendorf Sunday Matinee 27.7.14 Shiori Kase Yonah Acosta Now, seriously, ENGLISH National Ballet? I mean, if someone who isn't a ballet enthusiast (but is maybe a civil servant in the Treasury) looks at that, he could be forgiven for asking - why are we using so many thousands of taxpayer pounds training all these British kids? What are we training them for, exactly? Is it a good use of taxpayer money to train kids who go off to join companies in Croatia and Outer Mongolia (or the Bolshoi) but seem to be invisible in companies in Britain? And then, if said civil servant wants to make a case for not spending all this money training British kids to become ballet dancers and someone says, oh but there's three British principals at the Royal - well, it's not hard to find articles by respected critics suggesting that those promotions had an element of "gotta promote some natives, I suppose." Not that everyone agrees with that by any means, but I'm just saying that Mr Treasury Bean Counter could make quite a case. I suppose this is going back to the topic in the thread about British ballet training and where it leads. It's really heartbreaking when you read the threads about families going through so much stress to put their DC through these schools because of funding problems, only to realise that far more kids are still being trained than there are jobs for - AND that the top jobs tend to go to foreigners, even if they were trained for a couple of years on a scholarship at a British school, meaning that the British-trained kids are often having to find work abroad so the government funding isn't really helping the British ballet scene.

Yes, I was reading about that. The sad thing is that years and years ago they were praising the German system of apprenticeships, but apparently decided to go a different route themselves.

I totally agree with this - there seems to have been something approaching a scam over the last couple of decades. In my day (says the old lady), students getting a place at university would be guaranteed a grant from their local education authority (means-tested depending on parental income), but only 10 to 15% of kids went to uni. Then along come politicians and their everlasting consultants, deciding that everyone should be able to go to uni. So the technical colleges and teacher training colleges suddenly became universities, everyone and their pet rabbit was expected to get a university degree, and that had a couple of really serious consequences. First, it isn't practical to give grants to every kid to do everything, so the grants were replaced by loans and the UK (of course) went down the US route of kids coming out of college with massive debt. Second, courses that used to take a year or so and lead to a diploma turned into three- or four-year university courses, and subjects were tailored to appeal to all the less academic kids finding their way to universities, so now you have all these media studies graduates and whatnot, with their debt and their expectations, while the less popular but expensive science and engineering courses are still struggling to get enough students. I know the old system had problems - I remember Kenneth Branagh being (understandably) bitter about kids who could pick up a grant with no questions asked to go to Cambridge to study Egyptology (and get their drama education with Footlights once they were there) whereas there was no equivalently funded route for the most talented drama students to go to RADA - but I don't see much improvement with the current system of encouraging kids to go into debt in order to study subjects that won't really get them anywhere. I think the same thing seems to be happening with dance, from what people are saying. As well as courses that do train kids for a performing-arts career, there seem to be a worrying number of courses that really don't, but that claim to. This might be nice for a short time for the kids who haven't got into somewhere with more rigorous training, and obviously it's nice for the institutions getting the students and the money, but if they're just churning out graduates who are basically unemployable in their chosen field, they aren't doing any favours. I have a certain suspicion of the argument that, well, these courses do at least give good life skills to their graduates even if they don't lead to a job in the theatre. You could say that about just about any course of study, and the ironic thing is that people do tend to say it about just about any course of study except maths, engineering, and science, and that's where graduates are most deficient, going out into this technology-base society. And as for training our own first - I'm not sure what to think here. I know ballet companies want the best dancers, but, looking at that ENB cast list yesterday, with not a single name that looked remotely British (to say nothing of the roster of Royal Ballet principals), it does make you stop and wonder. The taxpayer is funding a lot of these places at the top ballet schools, and apparently basically what they're doing is subsidising the training of the corps de ballet, while the top dancers come from Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe. Some of them get into the upper schools after winning international competitions that the British schools aren't even sending their pupils to, and some of them just get hired as professionals after training in other countries. I know a lot of countries have exceptions in their immigration laws so that people talented in arts and sports can leapfrog the queues, but I think it's still something that needs to be looked at. To say that there are no natives with the required skills is just ridiculous, given how many really good kids are competing to get into the ballet schools. Nowadays, with public money being so tight and governments being much more focussed on the needs of business than the needs of the arts and sciences, sooner or later someone in power is going to come up with the question of whether this public expenditure is worth it, when there's scarcely a British name in the international roster of the world's greatest ballet dancers or even in the roster of the top levels of the British companies, and there hasn't been for some time.

Nope, no dog, but lots of subterranean ant activity. Plus it's north facing so doesn't get much sun. We did manage to seed one area successfully but some of these other patches seem to be impervious. Anjuli_Bai, I have a feeling the grass would have contingency plans even if we did try to fake it out like that. But I must admit it's tempting.

I don't know if this belongs here or in Room 101, but we've spent the last few years battling a lawn full of bare patches while the flower beds are happily growing grass like there's no tomorrow. Seems unfair somehow.

Looking at that cast list, I don't know why they don't just rename the company English International Ballet.

Aileen, are these the articles? http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2014/jun/13/are-we-training-too-many-actors http://www.thestage.co.uk/columns/education-training/2014/06/train-fewer-actors-tell-truth/ also this http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/just-one-actor-in-50-makes-more-than-20000-per-year-survey-shows-9448922.html (Independent articles have limited access, at least in the USA)

A tomato watch - now that would be interesting! Sort of like a vegetarian version of Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. Unfortunately around here tomatoes are a bit rare because deer are very common. We used to grow all sorts of fruit and vegetables in California but having an edible garden here is a waste of time without building all sorts of high barricades. Agriculturally this isn't a major centre for growing tomatoes, the main crop tends to be maize and I've also seen fields of what looks like wheat, and soybean seems to be taking hold. Pretty boring really compared with all the lovely vineyards and citrus groves back in California. Tornadoes are also mercifully rare but they do happen, so when a tornado watch turns into a tornado warning, we obediently troop down to the basement and hope for the best. This is mostly hurricane country, not tornado country, not that that's much consolation. Back in California we lived in earthquake country (the San Andreas fault is very close to the urban centres in the San Francisco Bay Area, plus there's the Hayward fault in the East Bay, which apparently every major hospital in the East Bay is built on top of). Not sure which I dislike the most, having lived through both earthquakes and hurricanes. But - on the plus side - just severe thunderstorms forecast for this afternoon, no tornadoes today. DH is getting very grouchy on account of not being able to play golf.

Well, now we're under a tornado watch. It always amuses me when Americans go on about the awful weather in Britain. It may be dampish, but it usually isn't lethal.

That's what this forum is for - to stop people going to pieces when their DC are going through the audition process. It's sort of like a stiff drink but without the hangover.

I bought the DVD of Northern Ballet's Christmas Carol last year and thoroughly enjoyed it. I wish more companies would have a go at it, as an alternative to the everlasting Nutcrackers. I know there isn't a really compelling love story as an anchor for conventional pas de deux, but that didn't seem to be a problem for Northern Ballet.

Being woken up by major weather. We just had something like 5 inches of rain here this morning and it sounded like being stuck under a waterfall. Apparently just north of here people were having to abandon cars and run for high ground when the flash floods started. Heavy thundershowers forecast for this afternoon. Lovely.

And they also need to realize that even if they do get to perform professionally, they'll need something else to do after they retire. Reading books by dancers, one of the recurrent themes seems to be that life as a professional dancer is too busy and demanding for them to give much thought, never mind actual preparation, for the next stage of their lives.

Or the even more embarrassing query about how to get a rubber for your pencil...(one of our British friends has never lived that one down).

Dunno about worldwide - Winter's Tale wasn't shown in the USA, and so far Fathom Events is silent about future Royal Ballet broadcasts.

In the Natalia Osipova thread around the time of her (and Margot Fonteyn's) birthday last month, someone suggested starting a topic for birthdays and other important anniversaries in the ballet world and there seemed to be some interest. So because today is significant for British ballet, I thought I'd start a thread. Today is Ninette de Valois's birthday; she was born in County Wicklow, Ireland, on 6 June 1898. The world of British ballet would have been so different without her.

A few years ago in our local bookstore in California - a parrot on someone's shoulder freaking out at the Halloween display in the shop and flying round the store attacking all the fake spiders.

I'm not sure how that would work in an exam context. In an ideal world the kids would go away and read all or most of the books on the reading list, but when it comes to studying for the exam there'd only be a small number of books on the exam paper, and then you have the temptation for the teacher (and pupils) to only concentrate on them during the year's coursework.

That depends on what you're wanting to teach the children in your schools. If the message is, "we only want to teach great authors so here's a list of foreign authors because our authors don't measure up," fair enough. Personally I don't think that's a good message to be sending, if it isn't actually true, which IMO it isn't.

However, Britain is becoming more and more Americanised (my husband is by no means a Little Englander like me, but he gets really upset when we visit after a year or so of being away and find Britain getting to be more like here every time we come over), and there seems to be a positive stampede sometimes to drop British things in favour of American ones. It's been a year since we were there, and he still waxes eloquent that the golf course where he learned as a child is now proudly labelling itself "Home of American Golf!". I have a really hard time believing that there are no 20th century British authors worth studying, to the point where the vast majority of kids of successive generations are studying To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice And Men instead. I don't have a problem at all with books by non-British authors being in the list of books to study, but I don't see why we should be ignoring our own authors in the process. I mean, I know these days that expressing a preference for British things is likely to get a person labelled as a narrow-minded reactionary (especially after seeing some of the Facebook groups purporting to celebrate British things that are really just for anti-immigrant rants), but I think it's very sad that "we need to move with the times" seems to have turned into "we need to replace this old-fashioned British stuff with lovely modern American stuff." Surely modern British authors aren't that irrelevant.

The problem with something like keepass is that apparently hackers are breaking password encryptions now. I had a long password, mixture of all sorts of letters and numbers and symbols, at AOL, yet hackers got into my account along with several million others back in April because they got into the AOL password database and broke the encryptions. Then a few weeks later eBay sheepishly owned up that its database of encrypted passwords had also been compromised. So these days it seems as though it doesn't matter how complicated your password it - you're the only person who can't remember it, the hackers can get hold of it perfectly easily. So you might just as well just use your cat's name or your date of birth or the word "password" because to the hackers it's no less complicated than zj9Y&k#)*2Mz5$Q&3L^! and it's a lot more convenient for you. Plus I assume that somewhere the hackers have a database, being shared and sold and bought among themselves, of information including passwords and security questions and answers, for everyone whose account at one of these large online sites has been hacked, which these days is practically everyone. Which means that you can never re-use a password, and it also means that security questions and answers are basically useless because they're the same few questions at most sites. If the hackers get my dog's name and my mother's maiden name from one site and stick it in their database, it's no longer a security question at other sites, it's just the illusion of security. If this carries on, large online sites, especially ones that sell stuff and need credit card information, are going to have to replace the password system with something more secure. The security of "strong" passwords, that apparently can't be decrypted in 50,000 years of trying, is a thing of the past.

Really, people have no staying power these days...