Melody

I assume if the Queen was going to abdicate it'd have happened by now. I think if anything, they'll set up a regency rather than actually have her abdicate. Prince Charles is gradually taking on more of the responsibilities and things seem to be surviving pretty well. Capybara, I totally agree that she seems to have relaxed a lot since the Queen Mother died. It's amazing to see the way she and Prince Philip just soldier on as though the years mean nothing to them. So now on royalty forums they're more or less laying bets about whether it'll be Carl Gustaf or Harald who abdicates next. Never thought I'd live to see the day when monarchy was a job you just standardly retired from.

Today (the 61st anniversary of the Queen's coronation) comes the news that King Juan Carlos of Spain will be following Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands and King Albert of Belgium into retirement. Not surprising after some of the sleazy stories that have come to light over the last year or two. There are also some pretty strong calls in Sweden for King Carl Gustaf to step down after various sex scandals, and there are rumours that Harald of Norway isn't well. Even in Denmark it seems as though people would like to see Queen Margrethe step down in favour of Crown Prince Frederik (and his photogenic family) even though she's popular. At this rate Prince Charles will still be heir to the throne when he's older than every other monarch in Europe.

Such womanly figures aren't particularly welcome these days either. I mean, they have fairly obvious bosoms. Oh, the horror...

That would be fine unless you use the eBay message boards, which require a password change if you want to carry on using them. The annoying thing is that the leak was plugged some weeks before that, and I happened to have changed my eBay password just a couple of days before all these "change your password" demands came out, but they still made me change it again. Since they keep a record of when passwords are changed, they could have done things so that people who'd changed passwords within the last couple of weeks wouldn't have to do it again. But eBay doesn't seem to have grasped the concept of making life easier for its members when it can make it more difficult.

Regarding the cars, I think it's a bit of both. The emission controls do make a difference, but US cars were getting laughable gas mileage decades ago before emission controls became mandatory. In those days, it really was (as Fonty said) because they were much bigger and heavier than the European and British alternatives. I think also it has to do with the way the engines are tuned - being set for optimal performance can result in less efficiency (so I'm told anyway - engineering is a closed book to me). I didn't think that would make a lot of difference until we stopped taking our cars to the dealer for servicing and found that the mileage dropped by 3 to 5 mpg after the first service by the independent guy. My husband took his to another garage for servicing next time, in case the first one had just been incompetent, and the same thing happened. They told him that only the dealers are given the specifications to set the system for maximum efficiency and everyone else has to use guesswork. Since this has now happened with two independent garages and our local Honda dealer (which apparently has the specifications for Honda cars but not Acura ones), I'm inclined to believe it. Another problem with some of these environmental requirements, as you suspected, Fonty, is that manufacturers get to the lawmakers and have all sorts of things written into the laws that benefit them at the expense of the consumer. I remember when we had to change our central-heating thermostat in California, and the new one was pre-set with all sorts of "energy-saving" settings that were a real devil to override, and the guy who installed it said, "yes everyone is complaining, but this is what the manufacturer wanted..." But that sort of thing is at least partly a function of a system where the election process is so expensive that lawmakers can easily be held hostage by large donors. Which is getting into the realms of politics so probably not a topic for discussion here. Regarding things being different in different states, it's even more weird than you'd think. Not only are things different when they appear to be different, but they're sometimes different even when they don't. When we moved here and tried to change the address on our bank account and get our homeowner and auto insurance from the same insurance companies, we were told, oh you can't do that, I know it's the same name but it's actually different companies, you'll need to start over with a brand-new bank account, and the insurance companies might have the same name on the east coast as the west coast but none of the good-customer discounts from California apply because it's a different company out east. I swear the US states are more different than some of the EU member nations.

We're not allowed to hang washing out to dry here (homeowners association rules). Then again, in winter it'd freeze solid and in summer with the humidity I'm not sure it'd ever really get dry. We didn't have air conditioning in California and rarely used the heat, but it's really hard to do without it here. Well, coming from Pennsylvania, you know what the east coast is like in summer.

Well, they can't, and a lot of them are really hard to replace (the saving grace being that they tend to last longer than incandescents). But our kitchen also has a bunch of spotlights and we have this idiotic chandelier thingy in the hallway that I haven't even tried to count the number of lights it has, and when we moved here the whole lot were incandescents. We've replaced most of the lights in the house with LEDs now, but that chandelier is still sitting there with all its incandescents. We just don't turn it on very often. It's made a difference to our electricity usage although pretty minor compared with the air conditioning, which is the major drain on electricity for somewhat more than half the year. Of course with all the competing different opinions coming from the press, it's always an easy option to just say "sod it" and carry on with business as usual. We were just asking our HVAC guy the other day about turning off the pilot lights to our gas fires in summer when we don't need them (and if that would cause problems with turning them back on again in winter), and he was a bit surprised about why we'd even be thinking of such a thing. Muttered something about how it would wear out the system and it wasn't all that much gas anyway so what was the problem. But then I think it's easier to look at the downside of changing how you do things than to look at the downside of carrying on in the same way. I'm hearing a lot in the press and especially in the blogosphere about the downsides of solar energy and wind farms, but there seems to be a lot less concern about the problems with transporting oil all around the country (leaking pipelines, exploding tanker cars on trains), I assume because we've got used to it and it's just part of the familiar landscape (better the devil you know....!). On the other hand, there do seem to be quite a few solar panels on houses and especially businesses these days which is nice to see (and no destroyed roofs that I've noticed!). Since we live in an area prone to hurricanes, although fortunately usually not that gigantic hail that I assume would damage solar panels just like it damages everything else, I was wondering if solar panels would be safe, but the ones around here seem to have survived Irene, Sandy, and the derecho pretty well, so hopefully it should be OK if we do get round to doing it. In the meantime, regarding energy conservation, one thing that's always bugged me over here is the fuel efficiency (or lack of it) in cars. I know they have to run air conditioning in summer which British cars often don't, but still, I remember years ago our first car over here got something like 12-15 miles per gallon when my car I'd left behind in the UK got easily twice that (allowing for the fact that UK and US gallons are different). Every time there was a push to get auto manufacturers to increase efficiency there were always loads of good reasons why it was totally impossible. And this from companies like Ford which were selling cars in the UK that had far greater fuel efficiency. A couple of years ago we were thinking of finally replacing our 10-year-old car, so we went back to the dealer to see what the model looked like now, and found that the fuel efficiency had actually decreased. Apparently there are so many more bells and whistles on cars these days that it takes a lot more to keep them going, or something of the sort, and the salesman looked us straight in the eye and told us that the efficiency of European cars was no better. In the meantime, in the UK it seems as though 40 mpg is quite possible and in Japan it's something like twice that. So we still have our 12-year-old car.

The problem is, as long as humans need energy, we're going to impact the environment. I've just started reading The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, and it really is worrying, what humans are doing to the planet. But if we don't try to bring sustainable energy on board, we'll be doing the environment every bit as much damage. I hope the projections of population growth are correct when they say the human population will peak sometime in the next 100 years and then start to fall naturally, or we're going to be in trouble. My doctor was telling me last year to eat more fish (the problem being that my husband doesn't like fish so it's always a challenge to get more of it in our diet), so I was asking about the issue of mercury contamination and overfishing. He said, "Look, in the long term, we as a species are doomed. In the meantime, eat fish." Cheerful guy...

Don't worry about the hazmat thingy, that's just a misunderstanding. Just make sure the area is well ventilated and wear disposable gloves and mask if you want to be really safe. http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cfl.asp Mind you, we've had a CFL bulb explode and that was interesting. LED bulbs are quite a lot less trouble and IMO they look better too (regular-looking bulbs, not those silly corkscrews), and now there's the warm-white option the effect is the same as regular bulbs only they don't have to be changed every few minutes. Would love to be able to put solar panels on the house but the homeowners association is creating difficulties. It's so hot in summer here that it'd be nice to think all that heat was actually useful instead of just downright unpleasant. I don't miss much about California, but the weather in summer was a lot more bearable than this humidity.

In some of the YouTube videos about costumes at the ballet companies, they do sometimes refer to having to clean or launder the costumes, so apparently it does happen. I'm not sure if it happens to the tutus, but I assume that if these things are supposed to last 20 years or more, they have to be cleaned once in a while.

It's in the Telegraph and HuffPo too (not seeing it in the Guardian yet). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/10857133/Michael-Gove-Kill-a-Mockingbird-Id-never-dream-of-it.html http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/05/27/michael-gove-to-kill-a-mockingbird-gcse_n_5395409.html

That's why I said "discourage" rather than "ban," because I assume these accusations of banning were based on something even if they were exaggerated. Having a bit of trouble finding out what he actually did say (as opposed to what other people said he said, or what he said he said), but I gather he (or someone) was concerned that too many kids were studying the same few books year after year and that there wasn't enough breadth in the curriculum. I did see one article saying that teachers liked teaching Of Mice And Men because it was short. I really wasn't quite sure what to make of that.

Do you mean this latest thing about Michael Gove wanting to discourage kids studying American authors for GCSE or is there something else going on?

I think the new LED lights may be part of the problem because they really are bright and at least until recently the only white was a sort of blue-white. The saving grace is that they're a lot less heavy on drawing power and they last a lot longer than incandescent bulbs. But now the warm white colour is available (at least it is available in Christmas lights so I assume it's available for car lights), there really ought to be a move to strongly discourage that blinding blue-white. Even if it helps the driver of that car see marginally better than a regular-colour white, that doesn't help much if it's blinding the drivers of oncoming traffic.

This sounds a bit like the arguments about whether or not ballet, music, and drama companies should keep the classics in their repertoire or simply concentrate on modern works by current choreographers, composers, and dramatists on account of they're supposedly more relevant to modern life than works that have been around for hundreds of years. Every time I hear this stuff about "why do we need children to study Shakespeare?" or even "the professional companies should stop performing Shakespeare, at least so often," I do wonder why these people think the modern stuff will still make sense if we aren't familiar with its foundations. I didn't enjoy studying Latin but it did help to put some of my history and geography lessons in context.

*head explodes* Just wondering when all this got so complicated or whether it was there all along and I just didn't notice. But it did answer one question, which is that I gather BTEC was set up in 1984 which means that it did happen after I moved to the USA. Guess that's why it all sounds so unfamiliar. But still, there seem to be an inordinate number of layers and levels and whatnot. I mean, Level 3? Just trawled through Wiki and found there are now 8 NQF levels of which the top 5 are broadly equivalent to something called FHEQ levels. This is the sort of thing that you can look at and understand each individual word and the information still doesn't make sense. The more I look at this, the more I wonder if there aren't just too many bureaucrats dreaming stuff up. And Foundation degrees? Just in case things weren't complicated enough already with regular degrees? Need tea...

How long have BTec qualifications been around? I remember in the 1970s there were City & Guilds qualifications for vocational subjects but BTec isn't something I recognise from the time I used to live in the UK.

I discuss all sorts of things without it becoming about global warming. But as long as we're talking about science, and especially science education, global warming is relevant. It's the latest bone of contention in science education, the previous one being evolution, and it all adds up to science and scientists being distrusted by society. Then people wonder why Americans don't want to do science courses at school and become scientists. I'm finally starting to hear some of my husband's colleagues say that they wouldn't encourage young people to go into science these days because there's very little to recommend it any more, and these are people who 5 or 10 years ago were still feeling positive about the prospects of life as a scientist. Not any more, though.

I'd changed my eBay password recently (as a result of a hack of another site I used the same password for), but still yesterday when I tried to sign into one of the eBay forums, I was made to change it again. So I used a combination of capital and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols, and the site told me the password was only medium strength. I mean, the bloody nerve of these people. I had a password before that was considered strong, and it made no difference because these days hackers can undo encryptions. Strikes me that the weakness is in eBay (or even in the whole password system), not the members. Sooner or later all these sites, especially the ones where you have to give credit card information, will have to do something to replace the current system of passwords, because it obviously isn't secure now that encryptions can be hacked.

If there was another short piece with Giselle, I'd rather see it performed before than after, as a sort of curtain-raiser. As Amelia said, Act 2 of Giselle is so atmospheric that you wouldn't want that to be broken by another piece. I think you'd find a lot of people leaving the theatre after Giselle, and a follow-on performance playing to a half-empty theatre.

Don't get me started on the miserable state of science education in the USA and the UK. The narrowness of the topics studied at A-level (although I think this is changing, finally) has meant that people can get through an advanced education in the UK without having studied any science at all since their mid-teens, and the attitude towards science in the USA has been politicised to an incredible degree. Not only do more than half of Republicans reject evolution, but the percentage has actually increased in recent years, and the same trend is true for global warming. This sort of attitude is bound to be reflected in the schools. There's no point going to university to study an expensive subject that leaves you saddled with student loan debt, doesn't lead to a well-paid or secure job in the way a law or economics degree would, and not only isn't respected but these days is regarded with deep suspicion.

I don't know if it's still true in this day and age of "everyone must go to university" but in my day students had to have at least 2 A levels plus some O levels and a certain range of subjects before they could be accepted at a university. Also, this may not be true nowadays but back in my day the British university undergraduate course took three years, not four like in the USA, because kids going to university tended to specialise a lot more in their last two years at school. The general rule of thumb is that in the core subject studied, a British bachelor's degree was more equivalent to a US master's degree, but the student tended to be a lot less schooled in subjects outside the one in which they took their degree. And again in my day (but possibly not nowadays when so many colleges have been turned into universities), when a British kid referred to going to college, they usually meant a higher-education institution that wasn't a university, whereas in the USA the word "college" seems to be used for any higher-education institution from an Ivy League university to a local college that trains nurses and electricians. Also, in Britain the term "school" is reserved places teaching kids up to the age of 18 (with the exception of sixth-form colleges, if they still exist, which only take kids doing A levels or the International Baccalaureate diploma) whereas in the USA it tends to also be used to refer to colleges and universities. I was always a bit dubious about the 11-plus exam because it was presented as a pass-fail type of exam, meaning that the more academic kids were classed as successful and the others were already, at a very young age, labeled as failures. Which then meant that secondary modern schools had the reputation of being the places where the failures were warehoused. Also, if you happened to be a late developer academically (as my husband was on account of a poor primary school), you were sometimes stuck on a track that didn't suit and was hard to get away from. It would be nice to have a system where potential craftsmen were given the same amount of respect as potential university professors. I'm not sure if comprehensive schools really did deal with that deficiency or were mostly a way of making everything mediocre, but when I hear people calling to bring back academic selection, it worries me a bit. Anjuli_Bai, I don't know if this is helpful but it's a list of the American educational levels and their British equivalents. http://fanbloomingtastic.typepad.com/blog/usa-and-uk-school-systems-ages-grades-years-schools.html

I must admit to liking Emeralds better than Rubies, although I think all three movements have a wonderful synthesis between the dance and the music.

Oooh, a new Carmen... I'm surprised he's still on this kick about young people these days going into ballet for money and fame. I thought it was a notoriously poorly paid profession and that these days most ballet dancers are pretty well unknown outside the narrow world of ballet itself. If you want money and fame in the performing arts, ballet would be quite a long way down the list of things to get into. I hope, rather than getting someone to choreograph him sitting down, he'll continue in the ballet world in some capacity. As long as he has the interest and talent to stage new ballets, I do hope this upcoming Carmen won't be his last new venture.

We had to do Latin at O level but only a few did Greek. I remember being completely at sea over Latin despite being good at French. Somehow this business of "if you learn Latin, it'll help you with the other languages" didn't work in my case - it was only my ability with modern languages that got me through Latin. As for Greek, which we did for a few weeks after the O-levels were over, that was a total nonstarter because of the different alphabet. One of the reasons I didn't like travelling abroad was that I couldn't read anything - I think a week in somewhere like Japan or Russia, where even the alphabet was different, would have driven me demented. I don't think the OP is especially political since it takes a swipe at both major parties for doing away with the grammar schools (although according to Wiki it was Anthony Crosland, not Shirley Williams, we have to thank for it). It struck me as more historical than anything, and I'm always a sucker for British history! although I don't think I agree that the rise of the UKIP has a lot to do with dropping Latin from the school curriculum but that really is a discussion for another forum. Also, as Lin said, since this is the non-dance forum, I thought that talking about things other than dance was OK here. Maybe it'll all make more sense when I've had my cup of tea.