I never heard an accordion played like this

[uwe]

Never had issues with accordion (more with Ayn Rand!), to me it's kind of a keyboard that went through a faulty transformation process as Jeff Goldblum did in The Fly!



And of course that accordion kid is great.

[Highlander]

Not had the chance in the UK to see the visualisation of Atlas Shrugged and only available as region 1 afaik; an interesting title, albeit extreme...

Who is Uwe Hornung...?

(the guy with the packet of cig's with the € symbol...?)

[uwe]

Ayn Rand looks like she has gone mad in that picture.  

I believe that neither she nor her disciples would have had an issue admitting that she was never less than obsessive and driven. But I find her fascinating in a car accident way: After having read "Anthem" decades ago, I only recently got round to reading "The Fountainhead" (a worn copy was lying around in a house we had rented in Cape Town) and am now bracing myself for "Atlas Shrugged". The Rand Foundation is making money off me! But don't expect me to turn into an objectivist anytime soon, despicable "second-hander" and collectivist slave I am!  

I read an interesting angle on her work in a Randist chat room recently where someone wrote - I paraphrase - "I wonder whether she was barren given her lifelong obsession with and adoration for man as a creator in any shape or form". And it's true, her reverence for - regularly male - "creators" is quasi-religious in outlook, not bad for a card-carrying atheist as she professed to be. Objectivism is more a religion than either a philosophy or ideology. Maybe that explains its popularity ("popularity" is perhaps a bit strong a word, Rand's raging atheism and pro-choice-agenda would today grate with some quarters otherwise in favor of her laissez-faire and "each-man-for-himself"-views)  in the US vis-à-vis the rest of the world. You Mayflower descendants have a penchant for sects and cults!  

[Highlander]

Atlas Shrugged I first read as a teenager, pre Rush knowledge I add here, but I did read Anthem post, and I found that quite a tough read... all to do with the loss of the word "I" so written in a most peculiar way...

Fountain head - if you found that enjoyable then you will enjoy AS - the one caveat is the Party Political Broadcast chapter (you'll know it straight off - read once, skip on re-read unless this is your thing, which I severely doubt...

Atlas Shrugged... easily up there with the finest works of literature, imho... read it several times and gifted it a few too... it is one of those books that should be passed on to someone who has not read it before... that's how I got my first copy... deservedly in many best-of lists...

re my psych profile - I have never read Catcher In The Rye, nor have I ever owned a copy...

[Dave W]

How the hell did this get turned into an Ayn Rand thread?

[uwe]

Easy! Ukraine was part of Russia (or, according to Comrade Putin, still is!). Ayn, a native of St. Petersburg, would have sure as hell also approved of the accordion player's non-conventional and gifted approach, especially that, on his way to becoming what he is, he defied "how to play accordion"-rules and conventions plus, in the anointed quest for the purity of his art expressing his self, disregarded what instruments you may play Vivaldi with. He's the Howard Roark of accordion! Self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated and unsubmissive. Ayn would have had a ball or two with him.



You've got to admit: We've had subjects within one thread with much less of a fig leaf of a connection!

Within the eternal circle of life, everything is connected, Simba!



Can we now move on to Elton John? Nikita was Russian and so are both his children ...

[westen44]

How the hell did this get turned into an Ayn Rand thread?

If I could post videos of my friend playing accordion or one of the Golden Earring song with an accordion in it, I'd like to.  But that isn't possible at the moment.  Strangely enough, over the summer I did ask her about Vivaldi.  She said she liked him, but there were other Baroque composers who were outstanding but have never received the recognition that they should have.  That seemed to bother her a lot. 

[westen44]

I believe that neither she nor her disciples would have had an issue admitting that she was never less than obsessive and driven. But I find her fascinating in a car accident way: After having read "Anthem" decades ago, I only recently got round to reading "The Fountainhead" (a worn copy was lying around in a house we had rented in Cape Town) and am now bracing myself for "Atlas Shrugged". The Rand Foundation is making money off me! But don't expect me to turn into an objectivist anytime soon, despicable "second-hander" and collectivist slave I am!  

I read an interesting angle on her work in a Randist chat room recently where someone wrote - I paraphrase - "I wonder whether she was barren given her lifelong obsession with and adoration for man as a creator in any shape or form". And it's true, her reverence for - regularly male - "creators" is quasi-religious in outlook, not bad for a card-carrying atheist as she professed to be. Objectivism is more a religion than either a philosophy or ideology. Maybe that explains its popularity ("popularity" is perhaps a bit strong a word, Rand's raging atheism and pro-choice-agenda would today grate with some quarters otherwise in favor of her laissez-faire and "each-man-for-himself"-views)  in the US vis-à-vis the rest of the world. You Mayflower descendants have a penchant for sects and cults!  

On the other hand, America is so diverse that there are also many of us who don't have a penchant for sects and cults.  IRL, I once had a colleague at my job who was quite into the Ayn Rand way of thinking.  He had a Ph.D. in math and was brilliant.  But when we got to talking about topics such as politics, he started making leaps of logic which I found very impractical.  

Edit:

Not trying to inject anything political.  I'm pretty close to being nonpolitical and definitely have no agenda or ideology to promote. 

[westen44]

Not had the chance in the UK to see the visualisation of Atlas Shrugged and only available as region 1 afaik; an interesting title, albeit extreme...

Who is Uwe Hornung...?

(the guy with the packet of cig's with the € symbol...?)

You might consider getting one of those players which will play DVDs from all regions.  I'm thinking of doing that, too. 

[Highlander]

We shouldn't ought'a Russian ta' things, but it is an idea...

(too much hassle when I've been angling for a blueray for some time with no luck - when I get a round tuit I intend to dedicate a "flight" PC which will probably have a region 1 DVD player within...)

[westen44]

We shouldn't ought'a Russian ta' things, but it is an idea...

(too much hassle when I've been angling for a blueray for some time with no luck - when I get a round tuit I intend to dedicate a "flight" PC which will probably have a region 1 DVD player within...)

It would be in my best interest to get one one day that would play region 2, but I don't quite know how I'm going to do that.  It is a hassle, definitely. 

[uwe]

I think the whole Blu-Ray thing is a hype. Over a high quality state-of-the-art TV with top notch resolution and a good 5.1 sound system I can neither see, much less hear a relevant difference between DVD and Blu-Ray when I feed our double-compatible Blu-Ray player with either one. (To be fair: The salesman guy said as much to us when we got the TV and the Blu-Ray player. He even said that for obsessive audio buffs DVD is the better choice, most Blu-Ray players not being geared to audiophiles, but videophiles.)

All I  notice is - and it drives me nuts - that ever since we have this high resolution TV every goddam interior scene even in the most expensive movies looks disturbingly like a studio-filmed scene in your cheapest daily soap. Of course, it might have all been studio scenes before, but I never noticed! Too much detail can take away the illusion.  

[Highlander]

The primary reasoning behind it being blocked is the "but you'll want to replace those you've already got...!" and my reply is "... only with a select few: Blade Runner, Matrix, 2001, Avatar, Star Wars, Alien, Prometheus, LOTR ... "

Give me a few hours and I'll update the list properly...

Seriously though Uwe, certain movies will "cheapen", certain sounds are "poor" - anyone here buy LZ-IV when it first came out on CD - utterly awful transfer... certain modern films are designed for the modern technology and will view accordingly... DVD audio is almost flawless... but virtually unavailable...
I am certain on this though - 3d screens and players are an utter con-job: they could manage it on a standard HD screen: it is just an image and the market is dying in front of them because of greed...
... and this... the curved screen is just a product looking for a market and a fool to buy into it... and the manufacturers know it...

Now if LG (etc) bought into the idea of their super-slim screens as "wallpaper" ...

Michael... this Dell laptop has a DVD player that is not region-set and will allow me to set any region and changed a further 4 times - the Toshiba 32 we have has a VGA in and can support standard DVD's - my daughter's HP is WIN 8 and has a HDMI output as standard - you probably already have a R2 player and you are looking right at it now...

[Pilgrim]

Ayn Rand looks like she has gone mad in that picture. 

And she's ugly enough to star in her own Halloween movie.  That face would make a good mask.

[Highlander]

There is/was a band over here called Half Man Half Biscuit that were popular on the college circuit oop north of 'ere and there was a line in a song of theirs that went "she had a face that launched a thousand dredgers..."

Subtlety was not their thing...