Born Beethoven

I was just listening to this wide-eyed, highbrowed chap last night, as I do most nights, entirely unaware that it was his birthday. Shame on me! Indeed I'd been at the mall that very day (unusual for me) and could easily have purchased one extra gift, a chocolate iPhone perhaps, retailing at $8.99. I'd decided against this gift for my boys, because there are two of them. But there is only one Beethoven. 

Google is celebrating Beethoven's birthday (245yrs) - also shared by Jane Austen (240yrs) - today, though it were yesterday, the 16th (by the Southern Hemisphere clock), with a Google doodle that allows you to play the first few bars of his famous 5th. I wonder what Beethoven would make of that, a Google doodle of his 5th symphony? I think he would be, as I am, thrilled and appalled in equal measure.

Indeed this sums up my feelings on the internet in general - one is thrilled and appalled in roughly equal measure by the miraculous readiness of information and endless inventiveness, on the one hand, and on the other by the relentless cheapening and dumbing down of life and art wherein anyone and everyone is selling themselves and manipulating others to make a buck. 

WOW, on the one hand, WOE on the other, which sounds like a balance of sorts but I fear is the kind of balance that will preclude the birth of Beethovens and Austens in the future, the kind of people who could not be bought off with an overpriced chocolate phone, indeed. My kind of people.