"The lady has foolishly attempted to join the conversation with a wild and dangerous opinion of her own! What half-baked drivel! See how the men look at her with utter contempt!"

I'm letting myself slightly off the hook do to Wikipedia's account that "almost nothing is known about his early years." Please ignore the next line that claims he "enjoyed a close relationship with Emperor Leopold I, was ennobled by him, and rose to the rank of Kapellmeister in 1679." Or the subsequent claim that he "was one of the most important violinists of the period, and an important influence on later German and Austrian composers for violin." Or that he "was the foremost Austrian composer of instrumental music of his day."

OK, so that's not quite the same thing as being doomed by your greatness, I suppose. But it does seem fair to say that Stanton's film was at least somewhat doomed by the greatness -- or by the great influence --  of its source material. Isn't that ironic? Your work is dismissed as predictable and derivative, yet it's really everyone else's work that's borrowing from you (or from your source), not the other way 'round.

 I discovered that it's not terribly easy to find versions from many classic German performers. Not because there are no available recordings, but because they're frequently not evenin Italian; they're in German. And the German sounds incredibly weird, especially after listening to so many Italian versions in such quick succession.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a YouTube video called "14 World Famous Tenors Sing Nessun Dorma!" that was nothing but a series of excerpted clips featuring numerous tenors performing the same section of Puccini's famous aria from "Turandot." And I really loved it.

It's Iowa Caucus Day, which means it's the perfect time for "E," the award-winning Political Commentary Disguised as Fairy Tale where "animated paper cut-outs enact a drama in which a dictator imposes his delusions on his unfortunate subjects." Strikes a bit close to home at times like this, and is pretty much the perfect example of one of my dad's favorite sarcastic sayings, "Never allow reality to interfere with one's opinions."