Natural selection my ass!

I would think it takes very little mental RAM space to figure out that sidewalks in Manhattan get copious daily deposits of urine, feces, vomit, spit, garbage, soot, grime, and God knows what other unpleasant stuff from millions of people (residents, commuters, tourists), dogs, birds, rats and other members of the local fauna.  So when it rains hard enough to create bubbling streams of water running along the curb toward the nearest storm drain, even borderline retards among us should know that this is not the kind of water you want to make contact with your skin, let alone your face and/or genitalia.
      Any adult who does not know this is a living proof that something may be wrong with the concept of evolution by natural selection.  The genotype of the two happy twenty-somethings in the photo below - taken in Times Square shortly after the hurricane Irene passed through Manhattan - should have been "de-selected" long time ago because it produces such staggering stupidity at the phenotype level.

Where to sit in the concert hall for a piano recital

1.  With pianists whose playing is extroverted, powerful, and strongly projected, I would sit toward the back of the hall:

2.  With pianists whose playing is introverted and highly nuanced, I would sit next to the stage:

3.  And then there is one pianist who recently proved that the best place in the hall may actually be under the piano itself:

Whaddayawant!?!?

Four times (on three different days) I tried to listen to my favorite piece by the German modernist composer Helmut Lachenmann.   And each time Lachenmann's otherworldly orchestral textures were shattered by incessant ear-piercing shrieks of a bluejay sitting on a tree next to my house.  Naturally I hated the bird for its anti-modernist heckling, but also for bringing back memories of an even more annoying creature I once encountered on a half-empty mid-afternoon train I was riding back into the city some years ago.

Schoenberg, Boulez, and the Schrödinger's cat

Arnold Schoenberg's grave

By now the story is old and tired: Soon after Schoenberg-the-man was buried Pierre Boulez proceeded to bury Schoenberg-the-composer in the infamously cold-blooded pseudo-obituary entitled Schoenberg is dead.  Temperamentally Boulez's unceremonious postmortem of Schoenberg's creative legacy was the work of a pathologically ambitious scoundrel, if not a borderline sociopath.  Intellectually it was an exercise in musicological triviality and ideologically motivated nonsense.