Up Betimes...

I was smitten with the exquisite freshness of how things smell here in Paradise (I'd forgot) in that briefest of whiles between the crack of dawn and sunrise.  Without my morning coffee, running in fact down to the Star Market to get cream for it, the delicious tang stole upon my ravished senses like a tune from Twelfth Night.  What might I not accomplish on a day begun so fair?

Then...corruption, distaste, disillusion: I read the world and national news on-line.  I listen to a perfectly fine version of the Beethoven 4th symphony (Kleiber, the Bavarian State Orchestra)...God knows it's fast enough, faster even than the musicians can well play; but it's not played on original instruments...it lacks articulation, string/wind balance..it is not perfect.

The "news" is half Neo-Con partisan horseshit (e.g., "Russia started (!) the current hostilities with Georgia, should withdraw and hand back to Georgia the 'rebellious, break-away provinces' of South Ossetia and Abkhazan."), and half Orwellian froth, too stupid and too fugitive even to be called news ("Although the two Austrian composers [Mozart and Mahler] were born nearly 100 years apart, they shared a knack for composing transcendent music under extreme emotional pressure."--my choice for the Dumbest Remark of the Month).