Sylvie Guillem is an incredible dancer. I’ve seen her dance a few times and each time was amazing. Push, with Russell Maliphant, is showing at the London Coliseum in April, go see. I saw it some time ago as Saddlers Wells with Ita. After the show we were hanging out front with some others chatting when the great lady emerged from the stage door. Ita, no stranger to working with the great and the good, went nuts and ended up hanging through the window of the limo.
Yes Syvie’s great, and she knows it:
‘A lot of people tell me I have changed the way people dance. Then I go and see ballet and I think: I hope I have not changed it to that. If they are copying me they should be doing it better,’ she grins at her sudden prima-donna honesty. ‘Still I guess you don’t have 24 Picassos, you just have one.’
In that same article you see just how much this type of dance screws with the body.
The morning after the night before the world’s greatest ballerina, Sylvie Guillem, is moving like the Tin Man as she collects a plateful of breakfast pastries in a Berlin hotel. She’s 42 now, but she says her stiffness isn’t much to do with age. Nearly every morning of her adult life has been like this. ‘It would be nice to wake up and be able to walk to the bathroom,’ she says. ‘But even when I was 20 and at the Paris Opera I had to crawl down the stairs; it is only when I start to work and stretch that my body begins to recover again.’
If a common heritage conferred peace, then perhaps the long history of conflict in the Middle East would have been resolved years ago. For, according to a new scientific study, Jews are the genetic brothers of Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese, and they all share a common genetic lineage that stretches back thousands of years.
well not much surprise here. and, of course, closely related genetic groups do not have a history of peace and harmony. If anything it’s the opposite. witness the Tutsi and Hutu of Rwanda and Burundi.
I’ve been meaning to write something about this for a while, but haven’t because I wanted to do a long post about all its evils. I just don’t have the time, so here is something less.
Your typical corporation is run by a small board (maybe 5-8 individuals) and a slightly larger management team (perhaps 10-15 people). The number of these that know anything about IT is generally 0-1.
A large corp might have 50 to 100 IT staff. They will train these by putting them through courses designed and managed by Cisco, Microsoft, IBM etc. Every now and then these large vendors will pay a visit to talk about their new wares. The conversation might go something like this:
Vendor: we have this new thingamajig, it’s much better than the old thingamajig and it stops all this stuff and enables you to do all that stuff. And it has blue LEDs.
CorpITboy: Nice. Do we need it?
Vendor: Of course. You don’t want this bad thing to happen do you?
CoprITboy: No, that would be terrible. How much?
Vendor: £500,000, but we could get it to you for £450,000
CorpITboy: thanks. Are you sure we need it?
Vendor: yeah, I’m sure.
CorpITboy goes to CIO or similar and the conversation is identical but with CorpITboy taking the vendor role. Wow, says the CIO, I’d better put this to the board.
CIO goes to the Board and the conversation is identical but with the CIO taking the vendor role.
At no point does anyone have any idea what they are talking about.
At the board meeting they’ve just been discussing something with a much smaller financial impact and they’ve hammered the issue to death. X or Y may have got their way but they’ve had to sweat. But now the thingamajig has been passed at the cost of £500k, after just five minutes, simply because no one has a clue what they are actually discussing.
It may sound like madness, and it is, but it happens.
