I’ve taken a quick glance at a few things this weekend:

• Ann Althouse posts about the rising tide of Dutch emigration.
  The housing problem she writes about has been going on forever there. I recall that when I was there quite
  a few years ago nearly everyone complained of it. Land, in particular, is nearly impossible to come
  by. Any country that extends their land surface out into the ocean by building dikes has a pretty obvious
  problem. And the apartments I visited when I was there were uniformly dreary and cramped. Do you remember
  the squatters’ revolt there of 20 years ago? Here’s
  some background on the squatting problem in the Netherlands.
• Marc Schulman of American Future has a round-up of reactions to Mubarak’s announced reforms. One that Marc has missed but that’s very worth reading is Abu Aardvark’s. Reaction from Egyptian blogger Big Pharaoh.
• Kris of Anywhere But Here blogs about giving her daughter The TALK. They’re blogging about everything these days.
• There’s a lot of Oscar blogging going on today. Bioethics Discussion Blog has a post about the inaccurate portrayal of legal and ethical medical issues in Million Dollar Baby (spoilers).

You may find them interesting, too.

My wife and I attended the 2005 International Kennel Club Dog Show held at McCormick Place yesterday and, as usual, got there at 8:00 in the morning and spent half the day there. Quite a bit of the time we spent working on the specialty show conducted by our club, the Chicagoland Samoyed Club in conjunction with the IKC. I’ll update this post with pictures and the results of the specialty show later today. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, a “specialty show” is a conformation show conducted for dogs of a single breed—in this case our breed, Samoyeds.

The IKC show is one of the few remaining benched shows in the country. A benched show is a dog show in which the exhibitors and dogs are required to stay in the exhibition area in their assigned benching area after their portion of the show has completed until the show closes (usually around 3:00pm). It’s a great opportunity to see and meet lots of dogs of all breeds and their handlers, owners, and breeders and get a first hand notion of what lots of dog breeds are all about by seeing the very finest examples of those breeds from all over the country and to learn about those breeds from the people who know the most about them. In addition to the conformation events in which dogs are judged according to the written standards established by the breed clubs for their breeds the IKC has canine obedience events, a canine agility competition, vendors, rescue booths, and lots of other stuff. If you’ve never seen a canine agility competition first-hand, you owe it to yourself to go. It’s great fun (and mesmerizing).

The IKC show has a lot of happy memories for me. The first time my in-laws came to visit us after we’d moved into our house we all went to the IKC show. My father-in-law, Don, was skeptical until he realized that he could meet and (in some cases) touch the dogs. Then we had a hard time dragging him away.

Eleven (or twelve?) years ago it was at the IKC show that we met Mary and Joyce, the breeders from whom we’ve obtained all of our dogs. They’ve become our close friends. They had two of their great champions, Noah and Jesse (Ch. Kendara’s Starduster’s Legacy and Ch. Kendara’s Vagabond King), with them. Gosh, how I miss Noah and Jesse!

Five years ago it was at the IKC show that our girl Tally, Ch. Kendara’s Notorious, OA, AXJ, WSX, got her championship. And since then we’ve either been competitors or exhibitors or working on conducting a specialty show.

I’ve just finished watching Ebert and Roeper at the Movies. Before I go any farther I should reveal a prejudice of mine: I believe that doing what Ebert most certainly does and Roeper probably does—watching scores or hundreds of new movies per year on the big screen—almost completely disqualifies a person from saying anything meaningful about movies to someone who actually goes to the movies once or twice or a handful of times per year. They just don’t see the movies with the same eyes.

That having been said I’ve found Richard Roeper’s reviews completely unreliable predictors of whether I will or will not like a particular movie. He apparently doesn’t like some things I do like and does like some things that I don’t. So while his reviews may be interesting or entertaining, as consumer information they’re total failures. I used to find Roger Ebert’s reviews reliable predictors. I generally liked pictures he recommended. But I’ve found this less and less true over the years and I suspect that’s for the reasons I mentioned in the first paragraph: our eyes are too different.

Today I saw a new aspect of Ebert’s reviews. Is it possible for a movie reviewer to review both a movie and its prospective audience? “This is a good movie for people who would go to see a movie like this”? I found that just puzzling.

Puccini’s Tosca was the last great 19^th century opera. In 1900 when Tosca was first produced, Puccini already had La Boheme and Manon Lescaut under his belt and was being widely hailed as the heir to Verdi’s mantle.

With Tosca Puccini was on fire. Tosca has everything a really great pot-boiler should: sex, politics, and religion. A jealous diva. An artist willing to die to oppose tyranny. A depraved baron hiding a lust for dominance behind a mask of piety. Love, jealousy, subterfuges, spies, sadism, attempted rape, murder, and betrayal. Add to that several of Puccini’s greatest arias and the luscious orchestration and it’s easy to see why Tosca has been one of the most frequently staged works in the operatic repertoire.

I’ve seen at least ten performances of Tosca over the years (I’ve frequently complained that Lyric Opera was the Tosca, La Traviata, La Boheme Repertory Company). If all of the performances had been as good as this one, as far as I’m concerned Lyric could do nothing but Tosca, La Traviata, and La Boheme and I’d be happy.

The production we saw last night wasn’t the production we’ve been seeing for the last several years—it’s the 1964 Zeffirelli production. It’s a beautiful set and good costumes but the only problems I saw with last night’s performances were directly related to difficulties in navigating some rather labyrinthine set pieces—scaffolding in Act I and a staircase in Act III. Other than that the performance was simply tremendous.

We’d been looking forward to Sam Ramey’s performance as Baron Scarpia all season and we weren’t disappointed. He doesn’t have quite the physicality he had twenty years ago (who of us does?) but his stagecraft has matured. He’s simply the finest actor-singer on the operatic stage today. His Va, Tosca that climaxes Act I had the women sitting around me nearly swooning. When was the last time you saw that at an opera?¹

I’ve never been a big fan of Neil Shicoff’s rather tinny tenor. And I was apprehensive when he soft-balled the first act Recondita armonia (one of my all-time favorite arias) and failed to top Tosca in their first act duet (even though the music clearly calls for it). I understood later: he was saving it up for the third act. To continue the baseball metaphors he knocked E lucevan le stelle out of the park and received an appropriate ovation from the audience. Lyric Opera audiences are pretty stingy with their ovations. He continued at the same level of excellence and matched Tosca in their heart-rending (if you know what’s going to happen—as the audience does) third act duet. Well done.

Doina Dimitriu simply owned the role of Tosca last night. Her acting was perfect; her singing was fabulous. I’d point to highlights but every aria and every duet was a highlight. I’ve heard few sopranos who were able to make use of the pianissimo and contrast it with the fortissimo that well. That takes real control. I’ve never seen a better Tosca.

Lyric Opera saved the best for last. This is the best performance of Tosca I’ve ever seen.

With the season concluded here’s how I rank the operas in the 2004-2005 Lyric Opera season: (best to worst): Tosca, Das Rheingold, The Cunning Little Vixen—Fidelio (tied), Aida, Don Giovanni, A Wedding. Knock-out performances of Tosca and Das Rheingold. A performance of Fidelio I could actually tolerate. And a nice little performance of a nice little opera in The Cunning Little Vixen. The season came out better than I’d expected and I’m looking forward to next season. We’ve already re-subscribed.

¹Almost makes me wish I were a bass-baritone rather than a tenor.

…due to pressing commitments.

I’ll attempt to post some pictures and reflections later.

The pilot’s joke is that a good landing is one you can walk away from; a great landing is one that you can use the plane again after. America West flight 6583 from San Diego to Las Vegas had a good landing today.

A few seconds after touchdown, there was a loud bang, a large bump, and the aircraft got really, really loud. It turns out that all four of the main gear tires blew – I’m not certain of the cause. The pilots got the aircraft off the active runway by forcing the aircraft to move with a lot of thrust, and we got to take a bus ride to the terminal. (While we were waiting, the crew came over the intercom to ask if anyone had a AAA card on them. 🙂

No one was injured, and I didn’t even miss my connection or lose my baggage. A big thanks to the America West crew for getting me home safe, as they do every week.

Wow! I really got an eye-ful this morning. Here’s what’s caught my eye today:

• A Daily Briefing on Iran
  is reporting that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is complaining that they wouldn’t be able to contain
  an uprising in Tehran lasting more than a few hours. This sounds to me as though they want to use greater
  force and expand their operations.
• I don’t understand this modern cult of apology. But David McDuff of A Step at a Time
  reports that Putin is being asked (by a Lithuanian historian) to apologize for the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.
• Abu Aardvark points out what I believe is the
  most significant effect of Arabic language TV e.g. Al Jazeera:

  The magazine notes, again correctly I think, that religious programming on satellite television has had a homogenizing effect, as more and more Arab Muslims look for guidance on religious issues not from local mosques or from state religious officials, but from TV stars like Amr Khaled (and, though not named by the Economist, Yusuf al Qaradawi).

  It’s the same phenomenon as the adoption of the educated Chicago dialect as the standard for radio and
  TV announces in the States and BBC English in the UK—regional dialects have tended to be exstinguished.

• Caveman in Beirut
  comments on Syria’s four-corners offense.
• Dr. Demarche of The Daily Demarche asks the following question:
  

  What if the newly elected regimes are friendly to states and groups that Washington considers enemies? What if the spread of democracy through the region empowers elements that don’t share American values and goals?

  I already answered that question in my post, “Plan B”. If terrorism is not stemmed
  by Wilsonian idealism, we won’t return to Hamiltonian realism (our original Plan A). We’ll try either
  Jeffersonian isolationism or a full Jacksonian response. With either of those the world will become a very, very harsh place.

• Victor (an actuary) of The Dead Parrot Society has an excellent observation on the actuarial role
  in the Social Security reform discussion:

  We should be evaluating proposals on basic principles of fairness and efficiency. Further, we should make our proposals robust, in order to increase their likelihood that they will be successful if implemented.
  […]
  The number crunching should augment the debate, not be a substitute for it.

• Dennis the Peasant
  has more news from Westerville, the Red State Lake Wobegone.
• Different River
  analyzes event-based health insurance.
• Finestkind Clinic and Fish Market has a couple of good posts on tracheostomy in re: John Paul II
  here and here.
  I also agree that Cardinal Arinze would be a prudent selection as the next pope.
  He has roughly the same relationship to Islam as Karel Wojtyla had to communism when he was elected pope in 1978. More on the pope’s condition from Medpundit.
• Scooby Doo meets Hunter S. Thompson in the latest insanity from Iowahawk.
• There hasn’t been as much reporting of the Anglican Communion’s putting the Episcopal church on probation as I thought
  there might be. Robert of The Llama Butchers comments.
• Dan Herzog of Left2Right posts on originalism
  in constitutional law.
• Time Goes By with what are, I think,
  some sensible observations on raising the Social Security retirement age. Funny how the older you get the more obvious some of this stuff is.

That’s the lot.

The 28^th Carnival of the Recipes is available! This week it’s hosted by Rocket Jones and, I must say, every week the bar’s being raised a little higher for the formatting of the Carnival. This week we’ve got lots of chicken dishes from guys named Dave, many delicious main dishes, desserts, and sides, and vegemite.

Many years ago I was in my favorite used bookstore and the proprietor, Connie—may she rest in peace, was engaged in a vigorous discussion with an elderly woman. The elderly woman was slender, well under five feet tall, and had skin the color and texture of a nutmeg. She spoke with a strong Caribbean accent. She was attempting to give Connie a recipe for jerk chicken and was enthusiastically describing a type of pepper (which she had apparently forgotten the name of). I listened for a few moments and then ventured “Scotch Bonnet?” She flashed me an enormous smile and then proceeded to rattle off the instructions as though she were taking a fellow-conspirator into her confidence.

This isn’t the recipe she gave me. This is my recipe for jerk chicken. And now it can be yours as well.

Please, please be careful in handling and using Scotch Bonnet chiles. They are very, very hot and must be treated with respect. Wear gloves. Don’t touch your face when working with them. Wash your hands thoroughly afterwards.

Jerk Chicken

4 servings

1 medium onion, quartered
1 garlic clove, halved
1 Scotch Bonnet chile or 2 Serrano chiles, seeded, veined, and quartered
1/3 cup low sodium soy sauce
¼ cup red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons light brown sugar
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 teaspoon ground allspice
½ teaspoon thyme
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
4 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves (about 1½ pounds)

1. Light a grill or preheat the broiler. Combine the onion, garlic and chile
   in a food processor and pulse until coarsely chopped. Add the soy sauce, vinegar, brown
   sugar, oil, allspice, thyme, pepper, cloves, and cinnamon and process
   to a coarse paste.
2. Arrange the chicken breasts in a 10-inch microwaveable baking dish with the thinner ends slightly overlapping
   in the center. Pour the marinade evenly over the chicken, cover and let stand at room temperature
   for 10 minutes.
3. Cover the dish with wax paper and cook in the microwave on High, or full, power for 1½ minutes;
   do not let the marinade boil. Transfer the chicken to a plate and pour the marinade into a
   microwaveable 2-cup measure.
4. Grill or broil the chicken for 3 to 4 minutes per side, brushing occasionally
   with the marinade, until lightly charred and just cooked through.
5. To serve, cook the remaining marinade uncovered on High just until boiling,
   about 1 minute. Slice the chicken breasts across the grain and arrange on 4 plates.
   Serve the warm marinade alongside.