Skip to main content

They Applauded the Plastic Dummy

Last night Ms. FitN and I went to the Ballet, the advantage of living in the Great White North is that these events are reasonably priced – compared to London and New York.  Anyway, we have season tickets for the Montreal Ballet season (among many other cultural events).  Generally, I like the ballet, having lived as a student in London (London is cheapish when you are a student), a saw great productions, and an appreciative audience.

That was not the case last night.  Ms. FitN and I saw “La Sylphide”, one of the world’s oldest romantic ballets and not only was the performance wooden and out of synch with the music – considering it was canned music (as opposed to a live orchestra) it’s rather remarkable..

Now Montreal audiences in general believe that any performance is deserving of a standing ovation, in fact, I suspect that this is our compass to a good show, you would never have an audience in Montreal booing (as they have done in recent year at La Scala or Carnegie Hall).  “It was so good, they got a standing ovation”, justifying the amount of money spent to see a cultural event.

Last night was a new low, as the lights we lowered the public began applauding (sometime spectators applaud the conductor as he arrives when the music is live – it was canned here), then at the end of the Overture (which lasted a few minutes) people again applauded – again canned music.  So far no performance had occurred, Ms. FitN joked that it was a bit like passengers applauding the performance of the autopilot on a flight (note:  Montrealers are the only people in the world who applauded when a flight lands – don’t know if they are surprised that the whole thing didn’t end in disaster, ok so the Pope kissed the ground…).  Anyway, the ballet started, we both noted that the whole show felt flat, manly because the dancing and the music seemed incidental, the dancers out of tempo never allowed the music to get in the way of their performance.  The surprising thing here is that the Guangzhou ballet company that performed here has a rather good technical reputation.

From time to time there would be a dance solo, at the end of which the dancer would approach the front of the stage and bow for applauses – I’ve never seen that before, thankfully Montrealers applauded on cue (although at one point even they had enough).  It is one of the first times ever I have almost fallen asleep during a performance; I felt absolutely no connection to the show.  Finally, I don’t know who “wired” the stage but the sound quality was dismal.

The absolute low point of the evening were the applauses for the dummy;  The story is a little boring but bottom line a Scottish guy falls in love with a Sylph (forest elves), at one point the Sylph flies across the stage, but instead of using a real dancer they used a dummy (it crosses quickly and there are no movement), you guessed it Montrealers applauded that,

Yep, Montrealers applauded the dummy.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu