Well, what do you know? the best-selling book over the last decade was E.L. James’s 50 Shades of Grey, which which sold 15.2 million copies from 2010 through 2019. It was originally self-published as a Kindle ebook and print-on-demand publication in June 2011; the publishing rights were acquired by Vintage Books in March 2012. Smart move. I wonder what they paid for them.

Source: New York Times

Boeing’s 737MAX remains grounded (rightly) as the company struggles to overcome the design flaw that caused two crashes that killed everyone on board. In the meantime, Boeing has been surveying airline passengers across the world to assess their thoughts about flying in the MAX once it gets certification. The news is not good, according to this report in the New York Times: people are nervous about flying in the plane. In order to get ahead of the problem, Boeing has been preparing draft briefing materials for airline staff giving guidance on how to soothe and reassure nervous passengers. Above is a draft of the crib-sheet that’s been obtained by the Times.

As you’d expect, it’s an exercise in consumer manipulation.

This has a personal dimension for me. The place to which I most often fly is Ireland. And the only way to get there from Stansted, my local airport, is via RyanAir. But RyanAir plans to replace its existing fleet of Boeing aircraft with 737MAXs. So will I trust the Federal Aviation Administration enough to continue flying RyanAir? Or will I have to plump for much less convenient alternatives?

Hmmm…

It’s not Christmas in our house until this guy has been taken out of his box and suspended in flight mode.

This is his signature on the screwball letter he wrote to Speaker Pelosi.

Sits on top of my big iMac and never interferes with my copy. What more could one ask for?

In late 1941, a mysterious Mr Gavin wrote to the Daily Telegraph offering £100 to be donated to charity if anyone could solve this crossword in less than 12 minutes. The competition was to be held at the Telegraph’s office in Fleet Street, London.

A few weeks later those who managed it received letters asking them to report to Military Intelligence (that well-known oxymoron), which then sent them on to Bletchley Park.

This recruitment method would never get past HR nowadays. But then, there was a war on.

(As you can see, someone in our house has been having a go at it!)

It’s different from the cryptic puzzles one finds nowadays in the posher newspapers — it’s a mixture of cryptic and quick clues.

Dave Winer has bought a house in Woodstock, where it’s been snowing. He arranged to have some boxes of stuff that was in storage in California shipped to him via FedEx. Here’s what happened —- from his blog:

As you know I’ve had trouble with UPS, so I figured when Fedex was set to do a big delivery to my house just after a 1.5 foot snow in the area, that they would never get one of their big delivery trucks down the road to my house, and I’d end up driving somewhere to pick up the packages. But yesterday afternoon there was a knock on the door, and there was the Fedex guy with my packages. Smiling. I couldn’t believe it. #

The truck said Hertz, not Fedex. It was a small AWD vehicle. He said when they came to deliver the stuff a day before they realized their big truck wouldn’t make it down the orad, so they rented a smaller truck and drove that to my house with my package. He said we like to go the extra mile. Yes, they surely do! Compared to UPS, which has basically the same policy, trust the driver, but the ethos of this driver compared to whoever made the call at UPS (basically the customer can fuck off) was night and day. #

Hat’s off to Fedex. You win this contest, hands down. #

Last night we went to a performance of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus at the school where my wife teaches. It was an impressive adaptation, especially so given that all the parts were played by teenagers. The production also mixed some recordings of Mozart’s music, with live performances by a quartet on the stage. It adhered as much as possible — given the limitations of a school theatre and the casting — to Shaffer’s storyline, but on the way home I fell to thinking how unfair and misleading that line was. Its dramatic engine is the idea that Salieri, the Court Composer in the Austrian Imperial Court, was so jealous of Mozart’s transcendent talent that sabotaged his career in Vienna, leaving him destitute — and then, many years later, was so overcome with remorse that he tried to slit his throat and was thereafter confined to a lunatic asylum where a priest persuaded him to confess.

This makes for great theatre, of course, but historically speaking, it skates on rather thin ice. In the Oscar-winning film, Amadeus that Milos Forman made in 1984 (with screenplay by Shaffer), F. Murray Abraham (who won the Oscar for Best Actor that year) portrays Salieri as “a Machiavellian, Iago-esque character, who uses his connections to keep Mozart as the underdog and slowly destroy Mozart’s career”.

The play does not portray Salieri as a murderer but rather has him hastening Mozart’s demise through a series of plots, leaving him destitute. Salieri is characterized as both in awe of and insanely envious of Mozart, going so far as to renounce God for blessing his adversary; “Amadeus” means love of God, or God’s love, and the play can be said to be about God-given talent, or the lack thereof: Salieri is hospitalized in a mental institution, where he announces himself as “the patron saint of mediocrity”.

The hugely-informative Wikipedia page on Salieri suggests that while there was definite rivalry between Salieri and Mozart (as there would have been in the poisonous back-biting milieu of any Imperial court of the time), broadly speaking they got on fairly well. “Even with Mozart and Salieri’s rivalry for certain jobs”, it says,

there is virtually no evidence that the relationship between the two composers was at all acrimonious beyond this, especially after around 1785, when Mozart had become established in Vienna. Rather, they appeared to usually see each other as friends and colleagues, and supported each other’s work. For example, when Salieri was appointed Kapellmeister in 1788, he chose to revive Figaro instead of introducing a new opera of his own, and when he attended the coronation festivities for Leopold II in 1790, Salieri had no fewer than three Mozart masses in his luggage. Salieri and Mozart even jointly composed a cantata for voice and piano, called Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia, which celebrated the return to stage of the singer Nancy Storace. […] Mozart’s Davide penitente (1785), his Piano Concerto KV 482 (1785), the Clarinet Quintet (1789) and the 40th Symphony (1788) had been premiered on the suggestion of Salieri, who supposedly conducted a performance of it in 1791. In his last surviving letter from 14 October 1791, Mozart tells his wife that he picked up Salieri and Caterina Cavalieri in his carriage and drove them both to the opera; about Salieri’s attendance at his opera The Magic Flute, speaking enthusiastically: “He heard and saw with all his attention, and from the overture to the last choir there was not a piece that didn’t elicit a ‘Bravo!’ or ‘Bello!’ out of him […].”

Also interesting is the fact that Salieri, along with Mozart’s protégé Hummel, educated Mozart’s younger son Franz Xaver Mozart, who was born about four months before his father’s death.

So the historical truth about the relationship between the two composers could probably be summarised as “the usual professional rivalry accompanied by a degree of mutual respect” but where’s the dramatic interest in that?

Ironically, Salieri’s music was neglected for centuries, and it was only the world-wide popularity of Forman’s film in 1984 (and the travesty of its portrayal of him) that reawakened interest in it.