"help bot" wrote in message
oups.com...

Chess One wrote:

Got to run. There's a Gilbert & Sullivan play I don't
want to miss.

I just bought some skirts and other prettly lil things I don't know the
name
of [pinafores?] to dress up my chess pieces. All they need now is a
couple
of navy bonnets. As for Spanish, I'll ask Raquel at the chess club
tonight.

Cordially, HMS Innes


I watched an episode (or was it a movie?) of Star
Trek, the next generation, in which Captain Jean
Luke Picard outsmarted/confounded Data

What? These must be the baby-trekkies. I am old enough to think of Kirk,
'Big-Ears' and Scottie. "I canna fianchetto faster, Captain!"

by getting
him to sing along to a Gilbert & Sullivan tune to
distract him for a a few seconds. The tune wasn't
particulalrly good, so I expect the real point of this
was to demonstrate that Captain Picard was well
educated, as in he went to the proper schools. I
noted an aire of smugness in the tone taken by
Mr. Parr when he declared that G & S plays are
still performed at better schools (i.e. like the ones
he attended).

And me too! 6 bloody years of it! And its all very well, but really just
Victoriana fantasy about what real lives people had, done in drag.

I don't even think Victoria would have liked it much, and certainly Mr.
Brown wouldn't. She was alternately a bit typsy in the park, and he too dour
for such prancing 'roond'.

Fortunately at college we encountered some properly depressing modern
stuff, with Brecht and Pinter, along with black stages and dialogue.

Personally, I am not familiar with
these plays, nor with operas, nor any of the other
halmarks of the rich and famous. But I am
familiar with a story about an Emperor and his new
clothes, which I think puts things into sharper
perspective here. :D

Swami Kennedy can't help himself from speculating on others - always
negatively of course. One of these days he's going to discover what his
balls are for, and they ain't for suggesting in new groups coy little
deprecating fantasies about other people's lives who get out more.

One good thing about Pirates of Penzance is that I lived in the same place
and could engage in some real smuggling or 'free-trading' as we called it -
since there were never any pirates in a customs port! ROFL

Just up the coast was Falmouth where there still exists a massive chimney
used for burning contraband tobacco, on which the whole town got high. These
real places and the lives of their people did not intersect with the London
light-opera circuit of romatic vistas.

PI

-- help bot