You know, I have never been to an opera either, not because of anti-elitism (hell, I'd go in spite just for that reason), but because the opportunity and time have not emerged. Then again, I've not been to many concerts or performances at all. I saw Chorus Line on Broadway in the late 80's (fell asleep in the warm theater), caught Phish (guy played a vacuum cleaner during a song, and virtually all the fans looked like Jesus) and Great Big Sea (in DC about 7 years ago, not bad) while in college (ungrad and grad), and, um, that's about it. A few plays here and there. Quite disgraceful, no?

Perhaps Bunnie should not read this lovely bit by Theodore Dalrymple over at the Social Affairs Unit. Baroque is superior to Rock! Imagine!

Speaking of disgraceful, there were plans to auction off the jawbone of an unknown Civil War soldier in New Hampshire, until it was pulled under public pressure. Everything has a price apparently.

A lovely commentary here by Roger Sandall. Just a taste for you,

But I don’t care if the Maya civilization did collapse. I don’t think we should shed a single retrospective tear. It might be interesting to know how or why it fell—whether from war or drought or disease or soil exhaustion—but I don’t much care about that either. Because quite frankly, as civilizations go, the Mayan civilization in Mexico didn’t amount to much.

Now I know this is a shocking thing to say. Gallery owners in New York and elsewhere will cry out indignantly about the glories of Maya art. They will show you terra cotta figurines and fine reliefs and paintings and tell splendid tales of “kings” and “nobles” and such. In deference to this view we shall gladly concede that Maya art is not uninteresting. But it is sheer romantic fantasy to mourn the passing, around 900 AD, of an aristocracy of hypersensitive native aesthetes—though anthropologists and art critics have written reams of such stuff.

Glamorous talk of “kings” and “lords” and “nobles” always sounds better than a realistic description of murderous and predatory chieftains with little but power, conquest, self-glorification, enslavement, and killing and torture on their minds. Yes: they wore spectacular feather head-dresses. Yes: they built sky-high piles of masonry. But their hands dripped blood—incessantly.

Yet another disgrace: the Beatles have been voted an icon of the 20th century over Louis Armstrong. This is right up there with those who have been memorializing that Baby Boomer bard John Lennon, whose "gifts" I simply do not understand or appreciate ... or see evidence of. I just don't get it.

Nice commentary on John Buchan right here, the greatest of the espionage writers.