How the Internet Began

I found this on a site for British expats in France so thought I would share it:

How the Internet Began
By hgibson in Ubuntu on 2012-08-14
In ancient Israel , it came to pass that a trader by the name of Abraham Com did take unto himself a young wife by the name of Dot.

Dot Com was a comely woman, broad of shoulder and long of leg. Indeed, she was often called Amazon Dot Com.

And she said unto Abraham, her husband, “Why dos’t thou travel so far from town to town with thy goods when thou cans’t trade without ever leaving thy tent?”

And Abraham did look at her as though she were several saddle bags short of a camel load, but simply said, “How, dear?”

And Dot replied, “I will place drums in all the towns and drums in between to send messages saying what you have for sale, and they will reply telling you who hath the best price. And the sale can be made on the drums and delivery made by Uriah’s Pony Stable (UPS).”

Abraham thought long and decided he would let Dot have her way with the drums. And the drums rang out and were an immediate success.

Abraham sold all the goods he had at the top price, without ever having to move from his tent.

To prevent neighboring countries from overhearing what the drums were saying, Dot devised a system that only she and the drummers knew. It was known as Must Send Drum Over Sound (MSDOS), and she also developed a language to transmit ideas and pictures – Hebrew To The People (HTTP).

And the young men did take to Dot Com’s trading as doth the greedy horsefly take to camel dung. They were called Nomadic Ecclesiastical Rich Dominican Sybarites, or  NERDS.

And lo, the land was so feverish with joy at the new riches and the deafening sound of drums that no one noticed that the real riches were going to that enterprising drum dealer, Brother William of Gates, who bought off every drum maker in the land.

And indeed did insist on drums to be made that would work only with Brother Gates’ drumheads and drumsticks.

And Dot did say, “Oh, Abraham, what we have started is being taken over by others.”

And Abraham looked out over the Bay of Ezekiel , or eBay as it came to be known. He said, “We need a name that reflects what we are.”

And Dot replied, “Young Ambitious Hebrew Owner Operators.” “YAHOO,” said Abraham. And because it was Dot’s idea, they named it YAHOO Dot Com.

Abraham’s cousin, Joshua, being the young Gregarious Energetic Educated Kid (GEEK) that he was, soon started using Dot’s drums to locate things around the countryside. It soon became known as God’s Own Official Guide to Locating Everything (GOOGLE).

And that’s how the Internet began.

 

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The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

 

I finished ploughing through this tome and had to immediately go back and read the first few pages, as the book starts by plunging the reader into a strange, surrealistic almost nightmarish scenario of a person (man? woman?) constrained by unknown circumstances to remain in a hotel room in Amsterdam. The physical situation (a pretty standard hotel room) is described in great detail and then we are taken back in time to the situation of a young boy approaching what he expects to be a painful interview with the school principal, accompanied by his mother. The narrative voice is that of an adult, so that the device of presenting the narrator as a young boy does not come across as convincing at all.

From there the narrative takes off, whirling the reader through the mind of the anxious child, the chance entry into the museum (in New York), and the explosion (what the analysts call the ‘inciting incident’) which kills the boy’s mother, brings him into contact with a dying elderly man who tells the boy to take a small painting, the goldfinch of the title. In the museum the narrator has seen a young girl, whose image haunts him.

The ‘inciting incident,’ i.e., the explosion, is described at inordinate length, as is the long and tortuous route the boy takes to get out of the museum. This turns out to be a feature of the book as a whole, setting sudden acts of violence or twists and turns of the narrative against long and tedious descriptions or accounts of events. The various situations in which the main protagonist finds himself are all given at great and excessive length and in wearisome detail. And so, we experience the boy’s feelings as he waits in vain in their apartment for his mother’s return, is taken in by his best friend’s wealthy family, is then transported to Las Vegas to live with his less-than-successful father and the father’s girlfriend, strikes up a friendship with Boris, another half-abandoned boy, with whom he experiments extensively with drugs, and his eventual escape back to New York in the company of a small white dog, eventually reaching the antique shop once owned by the elderly man in the museum and now run by a large, kind man called Hobie. This is the situation in which the boy remains for the rest of his story, and the antique shop and the antiques trade form the focus of the rest of the action.

The narrator continues to describe his life up to the point where he is holed up in the hotel in Amsterdam, along the way introducing a host of interesting characters, some friendly, others ominous, but most of whom are depicted in a convincing way. There is also a renewed encounter with Boris, his friend from Las Vegas, now grown up and involved in some kind of shady deals, though nothing is spelled out very clearly. Boris is originally from Russia, and his way of speaking and accent are depicted with devastating and entertaining accuracy. The narrator gets involved willy-nilly in a violent and eventually fatal attack in an attempt to retrieve the painting he himself once stole from the museum, and this explains his situation at the beginning of the book.

In between the longeurs of the descriptive passages and accounts of situations that could and should have been cut in the editorial process are brilliantly evocative accounts of feelings, events, individuals, and developments that almost take the reader’s breath away. Interspersed with all these are passages where, instead of describing scenes or events the author simply lists a series of adverbs or adjectives, seeming to think that by doing so she is creating atmosphere. To me this simply reflects laziness, or weariness with the need to build a sentence rather than just giving a list of words. There are sections that display great knowledge of such diverse subjects as art, drugs, and antiques, and I found these both interesting and illuminating, though I’m not sure if that was the purpose of the book.

To sum up, this book has descriptive passages of luminous brilliance and insight and a narrative thread that pulls the reader onwards, alongside parts that are simply too long and almost unbearably tedious. Where was the editor in all this?

 

 

Jerusalem — Again

 

So now the Palestinians are saying that the concept of any historical connection between the Jews and Jerusalem, and the Temple Mount in particular, is pure myth, and they are trying to get UNESCO to adopt a resolution to that effect.

I wonder what would happen if they tried to claim that there’s no connection between Christianity and Jerusalem. Their ability to totally deny proven historical facts and create a fictional reality simply beggars belief. Admittedly, Christianity’s association with Jerusalem is not entirely lacking in violence, murder and mayhem, yet it cannot be denied that it existed and continues to exist. Understandably enough, the inhabitants of Rome don’t seem to be anxious to proclaim their connection with Jerusalem, though I believe that the Pope is not averse to asserting Catholicism’s association with the city. But when all is said and done, the Vatican is an independent political entity and cannot be linked to the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem in 70 C.E.

Jews should not need to be reminded that most of what Jesus preached was based on Jewish ethics and teachings. His presence in Jerusalem prior to his death served as the culmination of a life lived as a Jew in the Holy Land, where pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Temple for one of the three ‘foot-festivals’ formed just one aspect of Jewish observance, and he obviously participated in this custom (although that particular pilgrimage ended badly).

The Crusaders who conquered Jerusalem in the eleventh century and remained there for several centuries until they were defeated by Saladdin and his army, left their physical mark in the form of churches, fortresses and other mementos. Jerusalem is mentioned in numerous Christian texts and prayers, as it is of course in Jewish ones. To give just one example, anyone who attends a performance of Fauré’s touching Requiem cannot fail to be moved by the final chorus about Paradise, which ends with the tender repetition of the word Jerusalem by the choir.

Of course, the Christian references are primarily to celestial Jerusalem, perceived as a metaphor for heaven, a place of love and peace. That seems to be the vision perceived by the nineteenth-century English poet, William Blake, whose poem, ‘Jerusalem,’ set to music by Hubert Parry, is tantamount to a second national anthem for England.

On a personal note, Handel’s oratorio, Messiah, contains several references to Jerusalem, all taken from the Torah. The beautiful aria, ‘O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get thee up into the high mountain, O thou that tellest good tidings to Jerusalem…’ refers quite clearly to physical Jerusalem, as do innumerable verses in the Bible. For me, hearing that particular passage is always a special delight, because the far more concise Hebrew text reads Mevasseret Ziyyon and Mevasseret Yerushalayim, which are the names of the place just outside Jerusalem where I live. To be sitting in the church of the neighbouring Arab village of Abu Ghosh and hear this performed is an incomparable experience.

And of course, the funniest thing of all is that the Quran doesn’t have a single reference to Jerusalem. The Muslims say that a verse mentioning ‘the far place’ is in fact about Jerusalem, but that contention is flimsy in the extreme. Granted, Muslims or Ottomans did rule Jerusalem for several hundred years, as they did most of the area of the Middle East, and Suleiman the Magnificent built an impressive wall around Jerusalem in the fifteenth century, but Jerusalem is considered only the third most sacred site for Muslims. The original version of the Al-Aksa mosque was built on the Temple Mount in the eighth century C.E. (and rebuilt and extended several times after being destroyed by earthquakes and used as a palace by the Crusaders).

Perhaps most telling of all is the fact that Jews traditionally turn towards Jerusalem when praying whereas Muslims turn towards Mecca, which means in essence that they turn their backs and behinds to Jerusalem (just visualize their position while praying). Nevertheless, as Goebbels remarked, the more outrageous the lie, the greater the chances that it will be believed. Fortunately, Goebbels is no longer with us, but it seems that those who lie as well as those who give credence to untruths remain.

(This article firstappeared in the September issue of the AJR)

 

 

Glyndebourne

 

I’d often heard about Glyndebourne, the country estate where operas are presented at a very high artistic standard, but never dreamed I would actually be able to attend a performance myself. It wasn’t even quite clear to me where it was, somewhere out in the country outside London. It sounded like another realm of existence, one where one paid a lot of money for a ticket, and where ladies and gentlemen dressed in formal wear picnicked on manicured lawns (often getting rained on in the process, this is England, after all), and altogether belonged to another world. I come from a refugee background that, while cultured musically, was what you might call impoverished and far removed from the comings and goings of the world of opera, formal wear and upper-class mores.

And so, when the opportunity arose to join a group being organized to attend one of my favourite operas, Mozart’s ‘Marriage of Figaro,’ at Glyndebourne and to attend a ceremony to mark the dedication of a plaque being installed there to honour the late Sir Rudolf Bing, himself a former refugee from Vienna and one of the founders of Glyndebourne, I jumped at the chance. For me it was as if a fairy had waved a magic wand and given me the chance to fulfill a wish that I had always thought was nowhere within my reach.

From its very beginnings in 1943 it was the custom at Glyndebourne (as it is at Covent Garden, too, I believe) for the audience to wear formal evening dress (‘black tie’ for men means a dark suit and bow tie), which is not the style of clothes that is found in everyone’s wardrobe, and certainly not in mine or my husband’s. The latter, in fact, was not at all happy at being required to ‘dress up’ in that kind of outfit, but calmed down once he saw that all the other men there were similarly attired. To be quite honest, I’d say that the outfit suited him down to the ground and he looked every bit the aristocrat in his dark suit and (borrowed) bow tie.

To be at Glyndebourne and feeling that one is blending in with the rest of the audience, all of us dressed in our most elegant finery, felt a bit like taking part in a period film, or even participating in an episode of ‘Downton Abbey.’ The well-modulated tones in which everyone around us was speaking only added to the dream-like quality of the experience. To tell the truth, the audiences at concerts and performances of operas I’ve attended all over the world, and that extends to the Tel-Aviv Opera, Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, Teatro Massimo in Palermo and even La Scala in Milan, amongst others, are generally well-behaved and well-dressed (though not at the Proms, I might add), but there’s a certain something about Glyndebourne that sets it apart from all the others. Maybe it’s the typical Englishness of the event (though almost all the performers were from Italy, Russia, Romania and elsewhere) but somehow the ambience was particularly warm, cultured and welcoming.

To add to the general perfection of the event, the weather that evening, generally so unpredictable and inconsiderate, was as balmy and kind as anyone could have hoped for. Admittedly, since the construction of a new auditorium a few years ago the audience no longer sits in the open, but all the same the cooperation of the weather helped to make the occasion as memorable and enjoyable as anyone could wish for. And it goes without saying that the standard of the singing, acting and staging was of the highest order, though one or two dance sequences, in which Mozart’s sublime music was accompanied by dance moves and settings more typical of 1960s night clubs struck a slightly incongruous note. But nothing could spoil my enjoyment of the occasion and everything that it exemplified and embodied.