User talk:Dr. Blofeld

September music

story · music · places

Today's story has 3 composers, I couldn't decide for the one on the Main page or the one who didn't make it on his bicentenary, so took both, and the pic has a third. Listen if you have a bit of time. The music, played by the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra in Germany in April 2022, impressed me. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:26, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

Recommended reading today: Frye Fire, by sadly missed Vami_IV. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:06, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Speaking of fires, did you see Rebecca Cheptegei? Horrific! ♦ Dr. Blofeld 09:54, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

No, so sad. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:29, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

Can you perhaps with Caterina Valente? - Today is Schoenberg's 150th birthday! On display, portrayed by Egon Schiele, with music from Moses und Aron, and with two DYK hooks, one from 2010 and another from 2014; the latter, about his 40th birthday, appeared on his 140th birthday, which made me happy then and now again. - See places for a stunning sunrise, on the day Bruckner's 200th birthday was celebrated (just a few days late). --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:45, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

User:Gerda Arendt/Stories#15 Sep: a "hero" of peaceful revolution and a master Bach cantata article (not by me). - My idea regarding Valente is to try to find sources for the recordings (although numbers should suffix) and then split them off and leave only the most important ones in the article. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:29, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

It needs a lot of work!! Suggested sources? ♦ Dr. Blofeld 09:07, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

I had no chance yet to even look much. I'll add this which looks good but I haven't read, and then take it from there. Anything in English/French/Spanish? Awards will need refs most urgently but we can comment out what we can't reference. Let's make short edits to avoid edit conflicts. Her death was known on 11 Sep, so we have another day comfortably, and one more with stress. She should be mentioned, internationally recognised as one of the great performers of her time. One obit says don't look at Wikipedia, - did you see that? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:22, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

I made some progress, please check. Can you word more lead perhaps? More detail about which son from which father is somewhere. I'm out now, - no conflicts. Will be back later today, because I'd like to nominate today. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:21, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Nominated. My story today is about a man who played jazz when it was banned by the Nazis, - you can listen to how they played it later. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:05, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

Good work! ♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:06, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. I was at the funerals of him and his wife, - good to have known them. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:15, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

I should try to insert some coverage of her albums and start some of her missing ones. Perhaps I'll listen to a few soon, which may encourage me to create a few. She always looked like she was having a fun time whenever I saw her with Sinatra or Dean Martin etc. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:14, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

Film lists

I've certainly gone on record in the past that I believe film lists should be organized alphabetically — for one thing, the film titles are the most centrally important piece of information in the list, and for another, organizing it by commercial release date leaves films unable to be listed at all if they've screened at film festivals but haven't opened in the multiplexes yet (frex, I created several articles about Cannes-premiering films back in the spring which I wasn't able to add to List of French films of 2024 and had to list on the talk page for future reference instead, which isn't at all the way that should have gone.) Plus it also makes the list unnecessarily complicated to edit, because of all the rowspans that have to be adjusted every time a new film is added.

I don't think maintaining two separate sets of lists would be necessary, however — I don't see a problem with having release dates be present in the list as a supplementary column, and obviously if the lists are sortable then a reader who wants to see the films organized by release date can simply sort on that column — but I absolutely agree that the base sort order should be alphabetical rather than chronological, because the titles, not the dates, are the most salient and important characteristic of the list. (Chronological order is the right choice in cases where the specific succession order is important information in its own right, such as a list of holders of a specific political office, but the question of whether Blazing Saddles technically came out before or after Thieves Like Us is trivia, not a centrally defining characteristic of either film.)

I don't recall whether there's ever been a discussion at WP:NFILM to establish a consensus one way or the other, however. Bearcat (talk) 15:07, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

Agreed, also it's important when viewing on small devices that the lists are condensed, the A-Z tables look so good. The problem is that the more recent lists people seem to develop them by release date. I think what we need is some kind of consensus at WP:Film and multiple people watching the lists to stop that ip restoring the bloated tables. I would argue that all the more recent lists should be converted to A-Z format and made easier to edit too, including that French list. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 15:14, 8 September 2024 (UTC)