That's my name, too!

The Minnesota Opera is currently running a production of Lucia di Lammermoor, Donizetti's tale of feuding Scots with Italian names. They have been promoting it on Classical Minnesota Public Radio and elsewhere with the tagline "In all of opera, there's only one Lucia." I've found this to be fairly useless, as it tells nothing of what the story is about, and is also quite generic. You could just as well say that in all of opera there is only one Aida, one Figaro (one character in three operas), or one Nixon.

I was talking about this over the weekend with my opera-buff father, and he explained that besides being silly, the phrase is also false:

• there is a Lucia in Cavalleria Rusticana (the one-act opera featured in the climax of Godfather III that tried so hard to be the climax from Godfather I)
• Mimi, the female lead in La Boheme, explains "Mi chiamano Mimi, ma il mio name e Lucia" ("They call me Mimi, but my real name is Lucia")

So not only is there not only one Lucia in all of opera, but we only need to come up with two more to create an "Operatic Lucias" Jeopardy category.


I propose that for the rest of the week, the MN Opera and MPR revise the ad copy to "In all of opera, there are no fewer than three Lucias. This is one of them." No doubt the Ordway will be standing room only next weekend in gratitude for the accuracy.

We're gonna make it after all!

The Minnesota news media has a HUGE inferiority complex about the state. Now, I'm a lifelong Minnesotan and take a certain amount of pride in my home state, and get annoyed by those who consider MN "flyover country." That said, I found the contortions that the local media made to make major tragedies like September 11th, the Indian Ocean tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina about Minnesota embarrassing. Whenever there's a story like these, you can count on the Star Tribune to find the one person who lived in White Bear Lake for a summer and has a cousin who lost their dog in the tsunami or some such contrivance, and put it at the top of the front page of their website.

Those were extreme cases. Sometimes it's just funny, and reminds me of a proud parent clipping any mention of their kid from the paper. Like when they run their annual pieces concerning the tenuous Minnesotan roots of people nominated for Academy Awards. Along those lines, I give you Exhibit A.

Adorable! It's like they're the Grinnell Herald Register (there's no webpage) or something. Hey everybody, there was a governor on the front page of the NY Times today, and guess what! It was ours!

I bet they don't do stories like this in California.

Also: there's a grammatical error in the STrib article.

Alternate headline for the article: "Pawlenty's seeking of national spotlight makes national spotlight."

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Following up on last week's quiz bonus question, commenter "Scott" got the correct answer, identifying my error of referring to West Germany as Germany in the quiz. He also claims that Peking is the English name for Beijing. Wikipedia (grain of salt) claims that Peking is a name that has "also" been used in English, but not the sole one; also, I've always heard/seen "Beijing" used in the media, so I'm going to give just a half-additional shout-out to Scott for that one. For those keeping score, that brings his total to a shout-out and a half.