Prerecorded music at inauguration causes flap - Yahoo! News

"I think this is a whole lot of nothin'," she said on Friday. "These are world-class performers who are playing in 19 degree weather and the technical requirements of their instruments made it impossible for them to have their music amplified and know that it would be in tune. So they made, what I think, was probably a difficult decision to play to tape."

A representative for Perlman echoed her comments Friday with the following statement: "Mr. Perlman was deeply honored to be a part of the inauguration ceremony. The brutal cold created the distinct possibility of broken or out of tune instruments and, in order to avoid a weather related issue detracting from the majesty of the day, a decision was reached to play along to the recording that the quartet had made earlier in the week."

Cellist Ma, violinist Perlman, pianist Gabriela Montero and Metropolitan Opera clarinet player Anthony McGill performed "Air and Simple Gifts," a piece arranged by Oscar-winning composer John Williams. Montero was wearing gloves, but the rest of the quartet played their instruments barehanded in the frigid 28-degree weather.
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Kent Webb, manager of technical services and support for the famous Steinway & Sons piano maker, said its instruments are extremely sensitive to changes in temperature and the extreme cold would not only have made the instrument out of tune, but would have made the keys susceptible to sticking.

Rudd's economic disaster | The Daily Telegraph

While US President Barack Obama applauded risk-takers, "the doers, makers of things'' in his inaugural address, Rudd has demonstrated that the "makers of things'' come second to the trade unions and to his own vainglorious attempts to achieve global stature through the implementation of his ill-considered and disastrously timed emissions trading scheme.
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It gives me no joy to have been proven correct, but I am bewildered by the failure of the Rudd Government and its economic gurus to have predicted what was so obvious then, I am stunned by the mediocrity of Labor's ideology-driven response to the economic meltdown.
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The Government is a disaster. Its determination to press ahead with the ETS in the face of growing disquiet in the scientific community about the political agenda of those who initially claimed global warming was due to human intervention, and now talk of climate change, is nonsensical.

Even if there is a skerrick of validity to an anthropogenic factor in climate change, the absurd structure of the ETS, the guaranteed cost to employment, and its sheer meaninglessness in terms of climate difference, renders it a disastrous policy.

BBC's Cut and Paste Journalism — Climate Resistance

So Obama can fix the recession and save the world from global warming… But why stop there? Maybe we could ask him to find a cure for cancer and the common cold too, by next week? Oh, and then there’s that eternal question he could answer - ‘why are we here?’ Obama’s to-do list grows as the people reporting on his progress empty their heads of reason. Watts’ analysis is, as we said at the beginning of this post, not journalism, but projection. Her story says nothing about Obama and his policies, nor does it accurately reflect the role of science and its relationship with public policy, nor does it even give a plausible account of the last decade’s political developments. It doesn’t even tell you anything useful about climate change. It is all about Watts, her hopes and her prejudices, informed only by ignorance, hidden behind a veneer of scientific authority.