ThinkBlog

http://www.biblegateway.org/cgi-bin/bible?passage=...glish

Apparently people don’t have common sense. First there was the grilled cheese sandwich that sold on eBay for $28,000. Now there’s a grain of cereal that looks (supposedly) like ET from the movie of early 1980s Spielbergian fame.

Now, the first can be explained by a growing sociological obsession with the comforting mother-figure of Mary the virgin bearer of Jesus Christ which will soon (less than a hundred years) develop into full-blown Mary-worship and a frenzy of feminist doctrines. That part’s easy.

But this grain of cereal thing? That really gets me. Why would anyone pay $800 (that’s not a typo) for a GRAIN of CEREAL? I mean, I really like Blade Runner but if I found a honey bun with Rutger Hauer’s likeness in the icing I’d still eat it. Good grief. Any thoughts on what motivated this?

On a whim, today, I picked up the latest issue of Wired magazine and a publication I’d never seen before, BBC’s Music. It came with a CD attached, and I love classical music, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

This really looks to be a solid publication, but there was on tagline that really caught my eye: “Can’t Cope with Copland: Why are the chattering classes so afraid of classical music?” (Emphasis mine.) Featuring Richard Morrison on “why we must strive to demystify classical music,” he says, “The galling fact is that serious music plays virtually no part in defining the cultural Zeitgeist of 21st-century Britain”.

Now, the article is fairly cogent, and anyone that really uses `Zeitgeist’ correctly gets an automatic bonus as far as I’m concerned. But I wonder if that question doesn’t answer itself unwittingly by calling people who don’t really appreciate classical music the “chattering classes.” I’m no Brit, granted, but I know condescension when I see it.
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