Yesterday, the radio opera was “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Mason Bates. It’s (pretty obviously) based on the book, and there’s also a movie, a play, and a miniseries. So there’s virtually no end of resources to know what it’s about. I’ll just say that it’s aggressively anti-fascist. It was recorded last September when it opened the Met season. It’s not Nates’s first opera – that was based on the life of Steve Jobs and was included in the summer series several years ago. Not to disparage the first one, but this one is even more listenable – and also more tragic – which is to be expected from an oera which touches on the Holocaust. Also, just to clarify, the cartoon today is for Epiphany, which is January 6, which is not a Sunday. Today is the closest.
I’ve previously shared news about Mackenzie Scott’s philanthropy. But at the end of a very tough year, The Root found it appropriate to publish a reminder of how she keeps stepping up, and I agree. And the quotation from her at the end of the article – needs to be a meme.
This from the AP (referred by Daily Dose of Democracy) is absolutely flabbergasting. I have never heard before of an ectopic pregnancy coming to term. My mother almost died from one 8 years before I was born – hers was (like most) in a Fallopian tube, which burst, and she almost bled to death. This would have been around 1937, and blood transfusion was barely out of the dark ages, but her OBG found a way to transfuse the blood she was losing back into her and saved her life (and that too amazes me. Technically, I probably shouldn’t be here.) This snippet of my family history is a big part of the reasons I have so little patience with abortion opponents.
Referred by Daily Dose of Democracy, archived from The Guardian, this story reminds me that you cannot judge anyone by any factor as superficial as the country they are from. Individual people are individual people, and make individual choices, and good people from anywhere need to be valued.
Betty Bowers
