Compare and Contrast

Nessun Dorma this time ..

First Jussi Bjorling



Then, of course, Pavarotti



and finally ... the one you have all been waiting for Paul Potts. I think that he is very talented but I also think that you can see the difference between a wonderfully talented amateur and someone that really has spend a lifetime perfecting their craft.

Some A capella with The Nylons

This is one of my favorite songs to sing in the shower



Actually, this one is too



And not of my faves .. but it has the original lineup. Even when they suck they are better than 99.44% of the crap on the radio now.

A little Paul Robeson

I am a tenor and so I can listen to Paul Robeson without envy but merely with awe.

First, Old Man River


THen, Gloomy Sunday



And finally, fittingly I think .. Let My People Go



Paul Robeson has always been a personal hero of mine. Not merely because he was possessed of an amazing voice but because he risked everything for his political views. One does not have to agree with him to see him as a great man.

Summertime - Compare and Contrast

First Kiri Te Kanawa, by far my favorite female opera singer that is alive.


and then Ken Anderson (who I had not heard of tonight but you will see more of on here)



and finally ... Billie Holiday

Christina Aguilera does a little Gershwin

Just because I love just about anything Gershwin, here is Christina Aguilera at the 2008 Grammy Awards.

Josh Marshall on the stupidity that is west back settlement policy

Ackerman's Nonsense | TPM

But the essence is this. What we're talking about is the right to have your kids build their house and start their family down the street from you when they get married -- a 'right' few people in the world have.

There's some important context to understand here. A good number of the settlements are deep into the West Bank. But in modern transportation terms, most function as bedroom communities that are a reasonable commute from cities in Israel proper, where many of the settlers actually work. So, you live in settlement X, maybe when your daughter gets married and wants to start her own family there's no more room in the settlement and she and her husband have to buy a home fifteen miles away in Israel proper. To say such a freeze amounts to throwing away grandparents or telling people not to have children is really malicious nonsense.

I couldn't have said it better myself (obviously)

Bank Profits .. or lack thereof

Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » Pixie Dust Has Many, Many Uses

The revival may be short-lived. Analysts who have examined the quarterly profits and government tests say that accounting rule changes and rosy assumptions are making the institutions look healthier than they are.

The government probably wants to win time for the banks, keeping them alive as they struggle to earn their way out of the mess, says economist Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University in New York. The danger is that weak banks will remain reluctant to lend, hobbling President Barack Obama’s efforts to pull the economy out of recession.

Citigroup’s $1.6 billion in first-quarter profit would vanish if accounting were more stringent, says Martin Weiss of Weiss Research Inc. in Jupiter, Florida. “The big banks’ profits were totally bogus,” says Weiss, whose 38-year-old firm rates financial companies. “The new accounting rules, the stress tests: They’re all part of a major effort to put lipstick on a pig.”

Quote is actually from Bloomberg but I saw it at balloon juice so they get the linky love too. (Yeah, like they would notice the HUGE increase in traffic via this blog)

In the interests of full disclosure I will say that I hope that Citigroup stays in business because their intercountry banking is how I pay my child support but I don't particularly like shovelling more taxpayer's money into the sinkhole that the money center banks have become. I can always use western union!