Category: people

“A French court on Wednesday dismissed a much-mocked attempt by President Nicolas Sarkozy to have a comedy voodoo doll bearing his image banned from sale. […]
It was the president’s sixth lawsuit since he was elected last year and caused widespread mirth in France, generating acres of free publicity for the doll and cheering his political opponents.”

Scottish composer and current Master of the Queen’s Music Peter Maxwell Davies “was left temporarily unable to compose and had to borrow from friends after money was allegedly found to be missing from his accounts. Scotland Yard said yesterday that Michael and Judith Arnold, his former managers, had been charged with the theft of £447,000.”

“Magomaev, who launched his career with an internship in Milan’s famed La Scala opera theater in 1963 and enjoyed great success in Paris’s Olympia theater, abandoned opera in favor of a more pop repertoire, becoming a legend of the Soviet Union’s 1960s generation.”

“It’s understandable that people might, at first blush, think of [writer, comedian and U.S. Senate candidate Al] Franken as the equivalent of Sen. Carrot Top–or the next Jesse Ventura, a fellow Minnesotan to whom Franken is incessantly compared. … Actually, while Franken has done lots of straight comedy, he began his career as a political satirist–a very different thing. Satire is a form of political commentary.”

Novelist Ian McEwan has ventured into opera with the libretto of “For You,” composed by Michael Berkeley. McEwan isn’t a frequent operagoer, but only because he doesn’t usually like it. “Because of the terrible plots,” he explains. “The biggest problem with opera, for me, is the disjunction between the sublime quality of the music and the silliness, often, of the drama. “

“The restoration of Dylan Thomas’s birthplace has been completed on what would have been the poet’s 94th birthday. … A [Swansea] businessman and his wife have spent three years restoring the former student bedsits to how the house would have looked when Thomas lived there.”

Hillerman lived through two heart attacks and surgeries for prostate and bladder cancer. He kept tapping at his keyboard even as his eyes began to dim, as his hearing faded, as rheumatoid arthritis turned his hands into claws.

“A leading actor in a West End play insisted on finishing his opening night performance before being taken to hospital. Concealing his discomfort from critics at the Gielgud Theatre sufficiently for them to later deliver glowing reviews, Ian McDiarmid carried on with his role” even as he suffered what reports have called a heart attack.

“Playwright Alan Bennett has taken a sideswipe at the government and Oxford university over tuition fees as he bequeaths his literary archive to the Bodleian library in Oxford. The sort of free state education that he had enjoyed was something today’s students could only dream of, he told the Guardian, criticising his old university for demanding higher fees, and telling it off for accepting money from Rupert Murdoch.”