Helene

I'm going to attend a performance at the Opera Bastille in a couple of weeks, and I have a few questions about the house: Will there be enough signage in the house to be able to find my section easily? Is coat check required? (I'll be wearing a very light, short coat.) Is there a cost, or do the coat check people get tipped? Is there any specific vocabulary that would help? I'm in the cultural anxiety pre-planning phase of my trip and would appreciate any help.

I love the women in Smiles of a Summer Night and care about all of them. It's the only Bergman movie I ever "got."

The original strategy used by AOL, Yahoo, MSN, etc. was to control the "portal" by pre-packaging the world-view, with ample advertising. While it is still possible to default to each provider's default portal, there are many ways to customize the information that appears. The next step is to leverage RSS to make everything customizable. The current general vision of the Internet is to use it to choose exactly what one wants to see, on demand, and customizing the web experience to filter out the "clutter." (We see this with VCR's/TiVo, as we fast-forward through the commercials, commentary, etc. I've just heard from a friend that one sports network packages the "fast" version of football into about a half hour, getting rid of the huddles, time outs, etc., so that only the action is shown.) However, while the entire Internet is available, how to pre-package the options and tie it into revenue-producing "services" is the key toward "winning" the customizable blank slate. Whether people will customize with pasteurized, pre-packaged tripe or expand their world view using full resources is to be seen. Search and a little patience are the most powerful tools we have to go beyond conventional news sources. The Internet still remains the cheapest way to publish. There's no need for distributors, shelf space, incentives to carry, etc.. Wherever there is connectivity there is information. To bring this back to ballet, frankly, I have more confidence in the reviews of the posters on this board than I do in almost any newspaper critic in the country, including The New York Times. And for more contemporary work, I'd rather read On the Boards' "Blog the Boards" than a conventional arts critic on the same work.

Welcome to Ballet Talk, Blue Bird. We don't allow tape trading on Ballet Talk, but if there are any commercially available videos of Sarabia, we'll let you know on this thread.

I stopped doing the NY Times Sunday crossword because I didn't want to buy the entire paper and throw 3/4 of it away every week. I now happily peruse the online version and subscribe to their premium crossword service. I even more happily peruse washingtonpost.com. I love that there aren't space constraints on the web and that I can read new articles as they come out.

Unfortunately, it only passed in the Senate. The appropriations bill to which it is attached has to be negotiated with the House before it can be passed and signed. It's not quite a done deal. One of the reasons that Zavozin hasn't been named is that it is Belbin's lawyers who've been working on the legislation and have been cited in the press, and Zavozin's lawyers haven't released any statements. "Rumors" and "stories' in figure skating are essentially speculation by fans in an attempt to "follow the money" when the unexpected happens, which seems to occur most often when a skater or team is no longer considered a threat or suddenly becomes one. The rise of Belbin/Agosto is advantageous to different people for different reasons, even if none of them acted to make it happen. Since posting rumors are against Ballet Talk policy, we leave them to the skating boards The nationalities of the judges for the Olympics have been published by the ISU, and it's going to be an interesting few months leading up to the competition. The only question is going to be which judges the computer will choose to count. It's been hard to take judging seriously when the godparents and relatives of skaters are selected to judge family members or when officials who are active coaches are involved in determining the values for their own teams' rivals. In ballet, there's nothing unusual for there to be direct and indirect family connections within companies; gene pools run in the family. In sports, which are supposed to be "objective," nepotism and favoritism are considered unsportsmanlike.