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Packing a terrific one-two punch, the Melbourne Opera Puccini Gala pairs a heavenly concert performance of one-act tragedy Suor Angelica with a set of splendid Puccini selections. Traditionally performed as the second act of Puccini triptych Il Trittico, Suor Angelica makes for an ideal concert offering, its all-female cast of 11 showcasing a glorious set of voices. Deeply repentant and immersed in convent life, Sister Angelica is left devastated after …

While some British actresses with Eastern European ancestry have ‘transcended’ their roots and are not thought of in terms of nationality, they were brought up in the UK and never had their ‘Britishness’ questioned. For anybody else of the same heritage wanting to make it in the West as a serious actress, they have to put up with many obstacles – the greatest being preconceptions and stereotypes… Written and performed …

7-week ‘project-within-a-project’ wrapped up this week. Brilliant feedback. Lots to crack on with. A good summer, closed nicely. Trip down south to family this weekend. Very chill. Seeing R around her Grandma and Grandad every few months is always such a way-marker. I see so many of the step-changes that have felt so gradual day-to-day. A treat. Shiatsu has been helping with the back/leg pain. But man alive is it …

https://scottboms.com/media/pages/documenting/fill-in-the-blanks/f01adc877c-1727041703/fill-in-the-blanks-poster.jpg It’s not every day that a songwriter you love writes a song about a topic that’s not about what it might seem on the surface — and one that has a personal familial connection. Case in point: the brilliant Joel Plaskett writing a song about McLuhan’s theory of Hot and Cool media. The origin of this song, which I first heard this summer, came about from Joel taking my …

I completed three runs this week. This was the second to last week of the 5km training plan that I had been following so theoretically I should be feeling really confident about achieving my goal of running 5km in 30 minutes or less. Except I chose to replace all runs this week with 35 minute slow paced runs so that I wasn't running sprints immediately after coming back from holiday …

August was a month of bustling cafés, striped parasols, sticky heat, loppis tucked away in courtyards, lines of cyclists, pots of heather, blazing…

Captain L. David Marquet is known for taking the worst ship in the U.S. Navy fleet to the most effective. One of the principles he credits for this change is moving authority to the information. In typical team structures, authority and information are proportionate inverses. People at the top usually have the most amount of authority but the least amount of information as they’re often a few levels removed from …

Geezers and friends spend a sunny day in Deal - 2024 coach trip

The Netherlands has returned numerous looted artifacts and art objects to Indonesia in a major repatriation. This move aims to make partial restitution for historical legacies of Dutch colonialism, imperialism, and slavery in Southeast Asia. The New York Times reports that “the Dutch government returned centuries-old stone Buddhist statues, a bejeweled serpentine armband and other looted artifacts to its former colony Indonesia on Friday, a rare example of cultural objects …

Tell me if this sounds familiar: you’re browsing through Kickstarter projects, skip over a whole bunch of projects that look just plain boring or like another fulfilment disaster waiting to happen, and suddenly you stop. You’ve found a game that looks amazing! The visuals speak to you, the production is lavish, and the few sentences the Kickstarter page actually spends on telling you how the game works sound like it …

Things I probably knew but had forgotten: velociraptors are small. It’s only Jurassic Park that made us think otherwise; there’d be much less drama if the most dangerous adversary was only the size of a dog. Even if it was a big dog. We went on a guided walk around the Crystal Palace dinosaurs with a palaeontologist last weekend (the photo is an Iguanodon). We finished at the Irish Elk, …

S.A.M. is back to review SiR’s new album, HEAVY. The post Bitiques: SiR – HEAVY appeared first on Sampleface.

The Sargent Vintage Hand Plane Tote Differences A quick note as to whether we should call it a handle or a tote, the term tote is relatively new in the metallic hand plane world. It’s possible it is a translation of toat, found in early literature. However the earliest example of tote meaning plane handle seems to date to the late 1600s in Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises. Moxon uses the …

A bunch of years ago, I threw together Sauntering verse. Based on an individual going on a walk, it uses what3words as a source for collecting words, related to the locations the person moves through, to construct poetry connected to the person’s journey. Then, the often clunky result can be cleaned up by using ChatGPT, constructing a poem that still might not make much sense, but is readable. Because of …