The mulberry bush returns

The low temperature around here this morning was 10°F (-12°C), most un-Georgia-like of Mother Nature.

Moving right along....

I enjoy blogging, the act of mining the vast near-emptiness that is my brain and composing posts to be published on this very 'web log' out of what few nuggets of gold I manage to dredge up (oops, mixed metaphor). It is therapeutic to rid my brain of the thoughts that spring up continually along with the inevitable detritus, flotsam, and jetsam of daily existence that help make an otherwise dull life interesting.

To be more accurate, I should say that I currently enjoy blogging because sometimes it seems more like hard work, and I also have a firm enough grasp of reality to know that it may not be enjoyable at some point in the future.

So it is abundantly clear that in spite of the words Giuseppe Verdi put into the mouth of the Duke of Mantua at the beginning of Act 3 of the opera Rigoletto, it is not just La donna (woman) who è mobile (is fickle).

I don't know very much about opera when it comes right down to it. I have just a superficial, passing acquaintance with it. I know that Georges Bizet wrote Carmen in French although it takes place in Spain, and that Giacomo Puccini wrote Madama Butterfly in Italian although it takes place in Japan. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote The Magic Flute and The Marriage Of Figaro. Puccini also wrote La bohème on which the Broadway musical Rent was loosely based, not to mention that "Don't You Know?", the song that helped launch Della Reese's career several decades ago, used the music from "Musetta's Waltz" from the same opera.

I know what let's do, let's toss a few opera singers' names around like Luciano Pavarotti and Maria Callas and Enrico Caruso and Amelia Galli-Curci and Roberta Peters and Lawrence Tibbett and Kirsten Flagstad and Joan Surherland and Placido Domingo and Birgit Nilsson and Renata Tebaldi and Kathleen Battle and Robert Merrill and Beverly Sills and Loritz Melchior and Renée Fleming and Marilyn Horne and Kiri Te Kanawa and Jessye Norman and Leontyne Price, the last of whom was from Laurel, Mississippi, the place where Ben and Erin Napier renovate all those houses on Home Town, their program on the Home & Garden Television network (HGTV), not to change horses in mid-stream or anything.

Finally, last night on Jeopardy! three people did not know that the way an egg must be cooked to produce a solid interior is called hard-boiled. A middle-aged man said, "What is soft-boiled?" and two middle-aged women never buzzed in at all. I found it incomprehensible.

Until next time, I remain,
yr obdt svt