Varia and miscella

From the Life Long Learning department:
Just now, à propos of an opera poster, I realised that the "Nabucco" from the Verdi opera of the same name (the one with the famous chorus) is meant to be Nebuchadnezzar!!! Argh!!

From the department for the Observation of Human Oddities:
There was a fellow in the train this morning who actually looked a bit like madame_mercredi 's husband, Paul, and he was reading "Order of the Phoenix" (German edition). Only he was obsessively wrapping it up in the plastic bag he had taken it out from so the nobody should see the title. He was behaving as if he were reading pron. I felt a bit like asking him what he was doing that for, and did he realise if anyone said "Poor Remus!" out loud among a random group of perfectly normal people, almost everybody would know who and what was meant, and most people would actually agree with the sentiment? But I was mulling over developments and non-developments between Teppic and Chidder on discworld_rpg, so the Paul-oid remained unmolested.

From the department for Political Opinions and Conspiracy Theories:
Telepolis has a great article about why war doesn't work against terrorism, and one rather unsetling one about right-wing politicians calling for tightening security already. (The links are in German, and posted here especially for woelfle, with whom I was discussing this last night.)

From the Personal Department:
I'm much relieved as I had a mail from my former colleague Angela that our former colleague Graciela (who lives in Madrid) is all right.  She says Graciela said there's total chaos in the city and she was far too sad to write much.-