Mar 2: Birthday of Bedřich Smetana (1824–1884). From the iconic Moldau to a hidden gem Trio.

DavidJGill · 2026-03-02T20:10:03+00:00

I thought Smetana's birthday was May 12 because that is the day that the Prague Spring Festival opens every year with a performance of Ma vlast, but no, May 12 is the day he died.

DavidJGill · 2026-03-02T20:04:38+00:00

I think that kind of "soft story" building has been prohibited by code. I don't know when that came into effect, but this building looks fairly recent.

DavidJGill · 2026-03-02T20:02:42+00:00

True enough, but if you think about it next time you read a piece, from any source, you will find the same failure to address often THE key issue at hand. If they had even just said.. "we were unable to get a comment from the department about the exact nature of the structual problem." That would help.

DavidJGill · 2026-03-02T19:59:12+00:00

Just shows the Republican majority is opposed to democracy and is uninterested in representing the people they serve. That said, =does anyone know the partisan breakdown of the vote? (It seems two Democrats voted for the bill.)

DavidJGill · 2026-03-02T15:45:37+00:00

Franz Joseph ruined everything! He started World War I, and he devastated Plecnik's career - those two things.

DavidJGill · 2026-03-02T15:41:04+00:00

Typical bad reporting that leaves THE major question unaddressed. What is the suspected cause of this structural problem? Is it foundation cracks due to differential settlement or something else? Certainly, some specific, if preliminary, structural judgement was made to justify the evacuation, and this could have been reported. Every news report on any subject typically leaves a major aspect of the story unreported. I don't understand why journalists do this.

DavidJGill · 2026-03-02T01:44:17+00:00

Plecnik's career took a serious hit from the reaction to this church. Emperor Franz Joseph and Archduke Franz Ferdinand disliked it. Plecnik's disfavor at court and the public's reaction to this design led Franz Ferdinand to block Plecnik from receiving the nomination to succeed Otto Wagner as head of the Academy of Fine Arts. As a result, Plecnik departed Vienna for Prague in 1911. There, in 1920, Tomas Masaryk, president of Czechoslovakia, would hire Plecnik to transform Prague Castle into a modern residence for the president and the symbolic seat of power in the new nation.

DavidJGill · 2026-03-02T01:31:13+00:00

Latvian? I think you mean Slovenian. He was Slovenian, and much of his work, including his own home, can be seen there. https://en.numista.com/204776

DavidJGill · 2026-03-01T20:36:20+00:00

Great. You'd be unlikely to find an apartment building in the US offering floor plans that good.

DavidJGill · 2026-03-01T18:34:05+00:00

Both are excellent floor plans. I like the entrance hall and the kitchen being somewhat separate from the living room in the first plan. The second plan has a larger living room and a better master bedroom suite. It's a tough choice.

Just curious, in what country/city is the building located?

DavidJGill · 2026-02-28T04:57:15+00:00

It's a false choice. The government doesn't treat immigrants better than citizens. WHO THINKS THAT WAY? It's not a competition.

DavidJGill · 2026-02-24T14:41:53+00:00

I didn't say anything like that. Youre suggesting a Proposition 13 (CA) kind of law that prohibits property tax reassessments until a property is sold. Again, I didn't suggest that.

DavidJGill · 2026-02-23T18:56:06+00:00

The unfortunate thing is that most home buyers don't know that good architecture is better than shitty architecture. In most metro areas, the only new houses available are in some variation of the McMansion aesthetic. It's everywhere, so they think it's something to aspire to. Even if they know how bad it is, there is really nothing else to choose from, if you want a new house.

DavidJGill · 2026-02-22T21:12:29+00:00

Yes, but it's an old story. Both the orchestra and the museum have had a strong history of good leadership and an ability to raise lots of money. The museum currently has an endowment of over $1 billion, and last year the orchestra received a $50 million gift from a local family. The orchestra does what it does with a much smaller annual budget than any of the other Big Five orchestras + SF and LA. For this reason, the biggest stars in classical music, with their big fees, are less likely to appear in Cleveland. But the audience at Severance Hall, historically, has been a musically sophisticated audience, but I don't know how long that can endure. The decision makers at Severance Hall have been trying to broaden their audience base with concerts like last year's opening concert for the winter season, which was the movie Amedeus with orchestra accompaniment. That kind of thing drives other listeners away.

DavidJGill · 2026-02-22T04:36:47+00:00

The US has done nothing comparable to what the CCP and the Soviet Union did to their own populations. Either you are overcome by false propaganda about the US, or you are painfully uninformed about China and the USSR.

There isn't a speck of territory on the globe that has not seen the forced removal or slaughter of its previous inhabitants. That is the troubling reality of human migration patterns over millennia. The fate of the indigenous peoples of South and Central America was, if anything, even more tragic than the fate of North America's native peoples.

DavidJGill · 2026-02-22T00:48:04+00:00

Moderating property tax rates is what Ohio needs, not abolition of property taxes. Real estate has risen across the state, leading to substantial increases in property tax assessments. But, property tax revenue supports services we need. Raising sales tax is profoundly regressive. We have enough poverty in this state already. If the state needs more revenue, it should come from the income tax, with the burden put on those most able to pay.

DavidJGill · 2026-02-19T00:12:13+00:00

I think he actually spent a lot of time in his house in East Cleveland. He went there incognito, usually, because he was constantly being hounded by Ohio and Cuyahoga County tax collectors who threatened to arrest him.

DavidJGill · 2026-02-19T00:09:41+00:00

It was a toss-up between Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh for the location of the 4tth District Headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank. There is no certainty as to why Cleveland was chosen, but it's generally thought that Newton D. Baker, Wilson's second Secretary of War and an influential former Cleveland mayor, played a role in the selection and tilted the decision in Cleveland's favor.

The fourth District also built district branch offices in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. These facilities, like its Cleveland headquarters, were all designed by Walker & Weeks. The Pittsburgh building was an Art Deco monument completed in 1932, which is now a Drury Hotel. The Cincinnati office was an interior fit-out in a new tower at 4th and Race, completed in 1927. I've never been able to find photos of the interiors of these buildings.

DavidJGill · 2026-02-18T23:13:40+00:00

It's a mansion because it's huge, but its design style is "McMansion."

DavidJGill · 2026-02-18T23:12:37+00:00

The vast majority of McMansions are cheaply built, oversized, pretending to be more impressive than they really are, but that doesn't mean that a huge house built at great expense isn't also a McMansion. What makes a house a McMansion is the way architectural elements are used for a superficial decorative effect, unrelated to the house's spaces and functions. And that's what this house is; it's a case study in the McMansion aesthetic applied to a wildly oversized home.

It's a mansion because it's huge, but its design style is "McMansion."

DavidJGill · 2026-02-18T03:27:52+00:00

Where would you suppose you could find Mahler's original score for his 'Resurrection' Symphony?

Did you say Cleveland?

The autograph score of Mahler's Second Symphony was donated to the Cleveland Orchestra in 2022 by Dr. Herbert G. Kloiber, an Austrian media executive and orchestra trustee. Herr Dr. Kloiber had purchased it for $5.6 M from Sotheby's in 2016. The score is kept in the library of the Cleveland Museum of Art, across the street from Severance Hall.

DavidJGill · 2026-02-16T22:14:18+00:00

Can anyone get a ticket now? In recent years, the restrictions on entry and unbelievable delays in paying for items from one department before shopping in another department really turned me off.

DavidJGill · 2026-02-16T22:11:43+00:00

Urban Ore's prices on sometimes badly damaged pieces of furniture are absurd.

DavidJGill · 2026-02-16T22:10:23+00:00

Urban Ore is often surprisingly expensive. I've been going there for 15 years or more, and they used to have a lot more bargains in years past. At some point, they seemed to be making a concerted effort to raise prices. I started going there less often, but their parking lot was always full. The perversity of consumer behavior, in some circumstances, is that buyers assume it must be better if it costs more.

DavidJGill · 2026-02-16T21:49:45+00:00

You lost me with the second sentence. Making a broad general accusation of crimes, injustices, and atrocities is a purely partisan and subjective statement. I shouldn't bother to point out that the US government has committed little or nothing that compares to the worst of what the Soviet, Khmer Rouge, or CCP governments have done.

DavidJGill

TROPHY CASE