Word: kingdoms
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...most places, pop music may be an anthem of anarchy. But Cantopop is an island of musical serenity in the Kingdom of Nice. Here's how Edison Chen, one of the young rebels challenging the autocracy of amiability, describes it: "No sex. No drugs. Maybe a little rock 'n' roll." The ballads rise with a decorous lilt; even most of Cantopop's uptempo numbers could be sung (with English lyrics) in a Presbyterian church in Iowa. Most of the singers have good manners too. Perky, dreamy, neatly dressed, well behaved, they are the rock stars any mom would want...
...music. I'd never been outside the country before I joined a rock band. Scotland has no music industry per se. Everything in terms of the industry goes through London, which causes it to be quite difficult for Scottish musicians to really garner any national attention in the United Kingdom. Certainly when I was 15, it was only once you made a big splash locally that the record labels ever took note. I think Scottish musicians work in isolation a lot of the time. Consequently, that allows a certain lack of self-consciousness...
Before departing the United Kingdom, I took in the long-running West End production of Yasmina Reza’s Art. The play was as enjoyable as when I first viewed it on Broadway in 1997, and two-thirds of the cast sparkled. The one dull spot? The lone American, George Segal, sadly best known these days for his role on the insipid Just Shoot Me, was flat throughout. Still, I left London having enjoyed three of the four productions and fired up for some good ol’ American theater...
...whether this storied queen actually existed--or even what her name might have been. The Arabs call her Bilqis (thought to be a religious honorific), the Greeks Black Minerva and the Ethiopians Makeda, or "Greatness," but these are only titles. "Sheba" is simply an alternate spelling of Saba, the kingdom in modern-day Yemen where she is said to have reigned for a score of years beginning about 950 B.C. And while Cleopatra, the other storied beauty of Middle Eastern royalty, is mentioned in contemporary secular texts, the Queen of Sheba appears only in religious works--not the most authoritative...
...images of unmitigated hatred threaten to provoke inter-communal clashes at other flashpoints. And it's a crisis that will ultimately hurt the Loyalist cause. Indeed, there are signs of increasing impatience, or even distaste in Britain over the Loyalist's desire to keep Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. A Guardian newspaper poll last month found that 41 percent of Britons favor the Republican goal of uniting Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic, while only 26 percent want it to remain part of the U.K. Analysts attributed the sharp drop in British public support for the Loyalist cause...