Drug test nasty

Some nasty news of pharmaceutical testing badness in this morning's Guardian. I wonder what'll happen if it turns out that the dosage was correct and that the problem had gone undetected in animal trials. I guess it's almost bound to add yet more fuel to the debate over the justifiability of animal testing.

Musical accidents

One of the most supremely superb features of Live from the Met is the absurdly snobby presentation tone, whereby the announcers insist on calling every one Mister and Ms, and would rather die than title the conductor with anything less than Maestro. Fortunately, the Guardian suffers from no such reticence and today it muses at length on the Great Man's recent accident — he tripped and fell while ascending the conducting platform and has been forced to take the rest of the season off with a knee injury.

This lead to an examination of various unfortunate, music related, injuries concluding with the particularly unfortunate mode of death of the composer Charles-Valentin Alkan:

A pupil arrived at her piano lesson to find him dead, pinned to the floor by a bookshelf. Critics of this ostentatiously religious composer claimed he had been felled by a huge copy of the Talmud.

This is, obvious, the way I myself would wish to die, although I suspect that I'm more likely to be laid low by a copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell than the Talmud. Sadly, after quickly cross checking the facts with wikipedia, it looks like the story about Alkan isn't true. Pity.

Essay update

For the curious, my latest magnum opus is going reasonably well. I'm currently blithering about Patrick Devlin and his slightly odd attitudes to homosexuality. For the uninitiated, in his response to the Wolfenden Report, he equates private, consensual acts of homosexuality with treason on the grounds that it undermines the shared morality of society. Others have pointed out the bogosity of this position: who you choose to sleep with does not, in general, change your views on murder or arson or whatever does it?

Exactly.

Essay update: part 2

Well, it looks like I'm pretty much done, excepting a quick polish and proofread tomorrow. I'm not at all convinced by the strength of my own arguments, but at this point, I'm pretty much reconciled to its mediocrity.