There are extreme weather events... and then there's:

a Beethoven

SFORZNADO!!

Today's quiz (some people may find this one a bit tricky):

Is it The Bible Or Is It Tarantino?

A. Blessed are the peacemakers.
B. Any of you fucking pricks move, and I'll execute every motherfucking last one of you.

The door-to-door hat salesman really earned his commission that morning.

Black cat, seated, with dilated pupils, green/blue eyes, and Opinions.

Bea listened to some of Sibelius 4 with me. She's not convinced it's wise to stare so hard into the abyss.

"Herefore I art!"

"And doun from thennes faste he gan avyse
This litel spot of erthe, that with the see
Embraced is..."

Is one and a half trillion dollars quite a lot of dollars? It seems like quite a lot of dollars. It's hard to be sure – nothing quite feels real any more. But it does seem a lot.

Photo of the opening paragraph of a book review: White trash Suicide of a nation Matt Goodwin (Northstar, £12.99) Matt Goodwin bills Suicide of a Nation as “the book they don't want you to read". Well, it's certainly a book I didn't want me to read. Goodwin, a former centrist academic turned Reform's in-house intellectual (who recently lost the Gordon and Denton by-election), has cultivated a social media presence somewhere between Kevin the Teenager and Roderick Spode. It felt unlikely he'd be more bearable at greater length.

Unimprovable opening to Private Eye’s review of Matt Goodwin’s ‘book’

V relieved I spent the day in hiding.

If you need something extra to sweeten the deal, maybe a tie-in album and tour with the Sextet? "My Favourite Things (Sponsored by Huel)". Playlist ideas, anyone? Huel the Things You Are, maybe.

Will someone need to go through the genetic profiles and weed out all the Welsh people who are (at least partly) of Iberian descent, or is that not a thing any more?

I remember hearing Miklós Spányi playing a tangent piano when I dipped into a volume or two of his C. P. E. Bach keyboard works series. Your characterization of it is lovely!

I have a Vivaldi joke, but it's pretty much the same as the ones you've already heard.

Scrappy, low(er)-budget, heartfelt, intellectually sharp Doctor Who? It might just work!

(Unfortunately the BBC needs a flagship, flashy, splashy, readily-exported cash cow, because things really are that desperate. I fear the show can't survive either way, but would like to be proved wrong.)

And comfortable? Peering at your profile photo, I think you're a glasses wearer like me.

(At home, wired: HD800; doing jobs about the house: B&W Px7 S2; out and about: Pi8, better than I realised wireless earbuds could be. I'm tempted by the new HDB630s, partly for the dongle.)

I mostly manage not to rant on here, and when I do it's rarely about suprasegmental phonology. But goodness me, Stagecoach bus stop announcements on their Oxford services have an *unerring* ability to put the stress on the wrong syllable.

I suppose Hildedriver was always at risk of being forgotten when Bingen went down the single-operator mysticism route.

I find myself needing to add my voice to the chorus:
"Where's the cue ball going? WHERE'S THE CUE BALL GOING?"

Goodnight and thank you JV.

We're making chilli con carne tonight. The current job is trying to explain to Bea, the greediest little black cat in all of creation, that "free range" beef mince doesn't mean "cats are allowed all over it". Pictured here with her marginally less naughty sister Nina.

Reading Alfred Brendel's collected essays, "Music, Sense and Nonsense." Every now and then he'll just allow himself a little parenthesis:

"(Haydn springs surprises, while Schubert, I think, allows himself to be surprised.)"

I could probably do a Quote of the Day from this book for a fair while.

I subscribed to Qobuz, then added Presto streaming, before knowing any of that, so I'm happy with my luck. There's some belt-tightening to be done this year, though, and I'm not sure I can maintain both, even with the savings on what I used to buy on CD or download.

What a good idea! I'll join you. Have picked out Christopher Hogwood's St Paul's Chamber Orch. recording.

I'd be interested to know what you think; 4 and 6 are pretty different approaches to symphonic form. Pleased to see that Munch's 1956 recording is available on streaming in the stereo pressing nowadays – a few years ago I had to import the CD from Japan. It's probably still unsurpassed.

Is it cheating to give a plug for Bohuslav Martinů's Symphony no. 6 (Fantaisies symphoniques). Czech-born and Czech at heart but long in exile, he started writing the Sixth in NYC, and it was commissioned and premiered (1955) by Charles Munch in Boston. Also, it's rather extraordinary.

Just quit X regardless? You could regard it as playing the long game. You could play it as a game of rebuilding civilization in microcosm.

(Maybe you can't risk that.)

((I'm also on Threads.))

I gather they're recasting Paul – it's going to be a de-aged Arnold Schwarzenegger. They're calling it Dunior.

Black cat standing in a box on the kitchem floor, looking wide-eyed.

Any box is a good box. But a box that recently held a 12lb goose is a very good box.

And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die,
Wished he could fly
Way up in the sky
And he could.

Der Tod Oscars seems a bit hyperbolic, surely? They're only moving to YouTube.

(I am very sorry.)

Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem – and yit thei spake hem so,
And ferde as wel in love as men now do.
Ek for to winnen love in sondry ages,
In sondry londes, sondry ben usages.