Word: kern
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...easy to say what's wrong with Show Boat, the seminal 1927 musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II that steamed onto Broadway this week in an $8.5 million blaze of spectacular stagecraft. Based on Edna Ferber's novel about a floating theater on the Mississippi River, the show has always been too long and thematically sprawling. The most engaging characters, the light- skinned black Julie and her white husband Steve, virtually disappear before the intermission, while the coincidence-plagued second act rambles episodically from 1889 to 1927. Over the years, some critics have found the treatment of blacks...
...heyday of Harrigan and Hart and Cohan, it was the music and the production numbers that drove the action. Who today remembers the plot of a single Gershwin show? True, it was Hammerstein who condensed Ferber and gave her characters sharp, affecting lyrics to sing. But it was Kern, in a majestic score that moves fluidly and freely among such disparate idioms as vaudeville (Life Upon the Wicked Stage), the Viennese waltz (You Are Love) and the flat-out operatic (Make Believe), who gave them life. It is the music, not the plot, that will keep Show Boat floating endlessly...
What can be done? Predictably, the two sides in the debate mostly talk past each other, with environmentalists stressing the dangers and water providers focusing on costs and the inflexibility of the laws. For example, the EPA requires testing for dioxin, a possible human carcinogen, but, argues Wayne Kern of the North Dakota department of health, "the industries that are common sources of dioxin just do not exist in North Dakota...
...worst-afflicted area is the San Joaquin's Kern County, which has reported nearly 2,000 cases since October. Valley fever is also on the rise in the Tucson and Phoenix areas, where reported cases jumped from 287 in 1991 to 438 last year. But statistics tell just part of the story: only about 10% of those infected ever come to a doctor's attention. The rest have either no noticeable symptoms or mild cases that they mistake for a cold or flu. Though . valley fever, which has been known for a hundred years, has received scant attention outside...
...victims, the disease spreads beyond the lungs through the bloodstream -- typically to the skin, bones and the membranes surrounding the brain, causing meningitis. "There was a time when I saw three new cases of cocci meningitis a year," says Dr. Royce Johnson, chief of infectious diseases at Bakersfield's Kern Medical Center. "Not long ago, I saw three new cases in one day." Johnson is now treating 51 cases of cocci meningitis and an additional 300 patients with severe valley fever...