I have some suggestions for you.

Much of George Crumb's work is very quiet, haunting and beautiful. I'd suggest "Ancient Voices of Children" or "Vox Balinae: The Voice of the Whale."

That last one is for three masked players -- in concert, they're supposed to wear cloth masks. The ending involves the same little phrase repeated by the musicians over and over playing softer and softer until their gestures no longer actual the instruments -- you simply can't tell when it ends.

"Ancient Voices of Children" is more like opera, it's all in Spanish and has a soprano, a boy soprano and a counter-tenor (a male singing in alto-soprano range). Very exciting and very beautiful.

Nearly all of hiphop is a 4/4 drum machine pattern in groups of 4, 8 and 16, over which is a spoken voice, usually male, rhyming with very short distance between the rhymes.

Where are the pure instrumentals in hiphop? Where are the songs with time changes? Where are songs with clever chord changes? Where's harmony? Where's counterpoint? Where are the great instrumental solos? Where's the song structure? Waltzes, ketchaks

Rock music has included everything from Queen to Mr. Bungle to the Butthole Surfers to The Beatles. People are doing crazy things with it today -- check out Lightning Bolt for a new band that's definitely unlike anything you've heard.

It's just out of fashion, that's all.

It's a classic hoax.

I remember it as predating the internet. I just about died laughing the first time I read it. If you read the full article, then you get gems like:

"As an example, Scherbius showed Associated Press reporters the score of Webern's Opus 30 "Variations for Orchestra" overlayed with a cardboard template. The notes formed a mathematical grid that deciphered into German a comparison between the neutron release cross-sections of uranium isotopes 235 and 238.

"Schonberg responded with a collection of songs for soprano and woodwinds that encrypted the chemical makeup of the polonium-beryllium initiator at the core of the Trinity explosion."

Truly magnificent.

Deep background here: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa070398.htm

Original here: http://xent.com/FoRK-archive/may98/0469.html

Worth every penny.

He's absolutely right.

These people who claim to have "paranormal powers" are lying and should be squashed. Watching a John Edward or Silvia Brown makes me feel sick to my very core. They are ghouls and con artists who make a living sell untruths to idiots.

"Mikes Pace" wrote:

My child, my 9-year-old daughter, has to live under diminished expectations, will live under the threat of terrorist attacks and a ruined environment because you are a bad parent".

You are horribly out of touch with reality.

Unfortunately, you are the one out of touch with reality.

I'm 45 years old, and I never remember a time I was more frightened for the safety of this country. Half the Bill of Rights has been suspended indefinitely. The President claims the rights to detail and torture even unto death people who have not been charged with any crime and in many proven cases are innocent. We've been promised a perpetual war, one that is so important that it trumps any other cause.

All of these are due to President George W. Bush's psychopathy. The lion's share of the blame for that must lie at the feet of his parents.

The previous posters pointed out how they exceeded even the ridiculous rule that was on the books.

And you could easily tweak the rule to make it human:

"Physical displays of affection that make other people uncomfortable should be avoided. [etc]"

The whole stuff about "It is in poor taste, reflects poor judgment, and brings discredit to the school and to the persons involved" really does smack of mental illness on someone's part, though. Search that person's computer for pictures and I'd bet you'd get shock.

General relativity predicts that gravitation should propagate as a wave at the speed of light -- in fact, any information transfer mechanism should be limited by the speed of light.

You'd have no warning at all for 8 minutes and then.... brutal!

What's wrong with text?

If you're going to do this, spend a little money and get a decent mic, already. I can hear the room noise even over the musical background!

(Oh, and for the record, I'm strongly in favour of electing women even to the highest of offices. The reason I'm against Clinton is because she's extremely right-wing, not because she's a woman.)

I posted that here a few weeks ago (though I didn't think of Soros).

I'd personally put in $10K. It's not the magnitude of the money -- it's the fact that a candidate will say, "It's not torture," but then be unwilling to undergo it himself.

Let's do it!!

I get about 300 pieces of Spam *a day*.

I literally missed a job offer earlier in my life because I didn't see it through the Spam.

Thank God for gmail's Spam filtering, but I still spend many dozens of hours wading through all the semi-crap email I get from people I actually know.

If you ask people to take you off their lists, they don't. If you write back and insist, they say, "Just delete the e-mails. What's so hard about that?"

I've heard this literally hundreds of times. As I explain, if it were just them and just one message it'd be one thing, but it's thousands of scumbags just like you who want to send me email messages every week.