Melody

I said something on Twitter a while back about Pierina Legnani being the first Assoluta, and Alastair Macauley turned up to dispute that - he said that while it might have been the first time in Russia, the term was already in use in Italy and Legnani wasn't the first to be given the title. I'm not seeing any details in a google search, but I assume he knows what he's talking about.

Then maybe he should have declined when first asked and saved a lot of fans this disappointment.

Thanks for the info, everyone. So it looks as though the Karamakov family in Dance Academy is unusual but not totally unheard of.

I've been binge-watching the Australian TV series Dance Academy on YouTube, and I was wondering how realistic the Karamakov family is. The younger child is a first-year student at the academy and is 15 when the series starts; she has her 16th birthday during the first few months of that year, if I remember right. The elder child is a third-year student, who I assume is 17 at the start of the series. Their mother is one of the principal dancers with the company and appears to be somewhere in her early 40s (the actress playing her was 39 in 2010 when the first series aired); during the first series she was dancing Odette-Odile, so she's still an active ballerina doing physically demanding roles. So we have a ballerina who was pregnant in her early to mid-20s and then again a couple of years later, but has managed to become a principal dancer even with all that time off early in her career. Does that actually happen in real life? I've heard of principal dancers having one or two children in their 30s when their careers are well established, but I wondered how often it happens that a dancer has children early on and goes on to have a top-level career.

Les Patineurs Symphonic Variations A Month in the Country Then again, I totally agree that adding Elite Syncopations or The Concert would be brilliant. If I was stuck on a desert island, I'd want something to make me smile. Pineapple Poll would do that too.

Well, that was an interesting few hours. Facebook and Twitter were full of stories that Prince Philip had died - or maybe the Queen had died (and we want William! not Charles! to succeed her because we don't understand how the monarchy works...) - because of some rumours about an emergency meeting of senior staff. Then the announcement comes that Prince Philip is retiring from royal duties in the autumn (aged only 96 after all), and I swear half the people on the "he's dead!" threads were disappointed. Social media has a lot to answer for. I do wonder what the Queen will do, though, since they do so many royal engagements together and have done for so long. Hopefully one of the men in the family will be on hand to escort her so she doesn't have to adjust to going out alone after all those decades of working together.

Apparently not...

Thanks for the explanation - so basically a more complicated and stressful way of getting to the same place as before. Sigh. Just one thing, though - if the government didn't get the two-thirds majority to hold the early election but did win the subsequent vote of no confidence, why would the election have to go ahead? I mean, if there wasn't the two-thirds majority, wouldn't that just mean the government would have to continue in office until the end of the term or until they could get a two-thirds majority for an early election? Because, honestly, if it's the case that an election has to be held regardless, then the whole thing is just a charade.

I suppose it's not that unexpected. I've been trying to explain to American friends how we happen to have a Prime Minister who wasn't elected by the people ("she was elected, she just wasn't elected PM in a countrywide election because we don't do things like Americans do..." *sigh sigh sigh*). But even though British people understand how things work, she's still a Remain backer leading a government that's negotiating Brexit, and she might be wanting to shore up her credentials as a viable leader for the times. Also, as MAB pointed out, when the opposition parties are so weak, she'd be foolish not to take advantage. But I thought these days we had fixed terms like they do over here. If you can just call an early election at a time advantageous to your party, how is that different from before?

Nouns and verbs being used interchangeably in writing when the only difference is the number of words involved. Lookout is a noun, look out is a verb. I'm not sure why it annoys me so much to see lookout (and equivalent one-word terms) used as a verb; must be something to do with old age.

I remember that when Helgi Tomasson arrived at San Franciso in the mid-eighties, he completely remade the company from the ground up, pretty much turning it into a neoclassical company from something that had been a lot more showy and based on story ballets under Michael Smuin. There was quite a bit of bad feeling about the change at the top, and several dancers left or were purged. Over the next decade or so, Tomasson brought in a lot of young dancers and based the repertoire on Balanchine and Forsythe, which was really different from how it had been previously. Maybe what we're seeing now is the retirement of a generation of dancers who arrived there as youngsters during the years of the changeover in the 1990s.

Oh, my mother would so agree, Fonty. When her siblings had young children, we lived near a seaside resort, so every summer we were hosting one or the other family for a week or two for a cheap holiday by the sea. Then later my parents moved to a town near Gatwick, very convenient for those same kids who were now young adults and had gone from holidays by the sea to cheap flights (usually at the crack of dawn) to overseas resorts in the sun, and who didn't especially want to pay for an airport hotel the night before.

I used to post at the BBC discussion forum section years and years ago, but they gradually dismantled it over the years. The science forum turned into a place to discuss a couple of the BBC science programmes and I think the religious forum disappeared altogether.

I'm looking for a British equivalent to this forum: http://politicalhotwire.com/forum.php

A poster at an American discussion forum where I participate is asking if there are any equivalent British forums that concentrate on political topics. Does anyone know of a forum I could recommend to her?

Raccoons in the attic. And insane birds that spend days trying to chase their reflections away. We've spent the last three days listening to "bang, bang, bang" as this stupid American robin has been valiantly trying to make his territory safe from his reflected self in the bathroom window.

Sounds as though the perpetrator is one of the fatalities. I hope the police can figure out the motive anyway. Seeing some horrifying photos of the aftermath. So far it's being reported that there are four people dead. I hope that number doesn't increase.

I post under a different ID in political and religious discussions. This ID and avatar are just for this forum (to remind me not to get carried away into discussing politics and whatnot).

Reading some histories of Ballets Russes, I gather there was a funding problem early on, caused in no small part by Mathilde Kschessinska having a hissy fit. I might be misunderstanding, but apparently Mikhail Fokine was wanting the Ballets Russes to go in a different direction from the Mariinsky tradition of ballets showcasing ballerinas, who appeared in all their finery including their jewels that were gifts from rich and influential admirers, and Her Highness wasn't happy. Seems as though Fokine wasn't a great admirer of Kschessinska and wasn't intending for the Ballets Russes to basically be a backdrop for her, and when she found out she pulled strings to try and get the company's funding cancelled. (I remember reading her justification of this as "but really I had no choice..." which is what she always seemed to say when she was poking someone in the eye.) Diaghilev managed to get funding from an alternative source and the first season went ahead. But it did get me wondering how ballet in Western Europe might have developed if she'd been successful and had managed to get the first season cancelled and had also managed to discredit Diaghilev and Fokine with the Powers That Be that made decisions about the ballet, such that the Ballets Russes never did appear and Fokine wasn't such a major influence. Obviously there'd still have been the influx of dancers and teachers into Western Europe once the Russian revolution got under way, but that was nearly a decade later and might not have included the sorts of ballets that were already familiar in Europe as a result of the Ballets Russes. There was already a tradition of ballet in the UK, largely due to Adeline Genee and her followers, but Ballets Russes had a massive impact when they appeared in London. So I've been wondering what British ballet in particular and Western European in general would have looked like over the 20th century if it had developed without the influence of Ballets Russes.

Why was his ability to do his job relevant when he was behind the wheel under the influence and killed someone? That ought to be enough to put him in jail, where he couldn't do his job anyway. I thought we were years past the time when professionals could use the "I need a car to do my job" excuse to get off a drunk driving charge.

This business of people being allowed to go in and out of the auditorium during the performance sounds like yet another way (the most obvious being food and drink allowed in the auditorium) where the theatre is trying to be more like the cinema. The trouble is that rows of seats at cinemas are usually further apart, so it's not quite such a production to get in and out. But still, it can be annoying enough in the cinema - in the theatre where there are live performers, it's really not on unless there's some sort of emergency. It's sad that people can't sit still for an hour or go without eating and drinking for a while, but that does seem to be the way of it these days.

Oh dear - this looks like another victim of the growing aggressiveness and trolling on discussion forums. Does Amazon still have its forums? I seem to remember that there are movie and TV areas there.

For all I know, there's actually a point to this - but apparently researchers have been teaching bumblebees to play golf. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2122383-bees-learn-to-play-golf-and-show-off-how-clever-they-really-are/

Good grief, the weather has gone insane. While this was happening over there, it's been in the mid- to high 70s (22-23 Celsius) for the last few days, at a time when it should be in the mid-40s (less than 10 Celsius). The nighttime temperature is higher than the normal daytime highs. We're supposed to get a cold front today so are expecting a thunderstorm, which is pretty rare in February.

That must be a relief, Lisa. I hope this move, if it's real, happened because they just wanted to move, not because he was bothering someone else. Especially the kids at the school.