"What a gorgeous day. What effulgent sunshine. It was a day of this sort the McGillicuddy brothers murdered their mother with an ax. Sweet old lady, I can see her now carrying the laundry home on her head." - W. C. Fields

I got another magnificent early birthday present today as well, a boxed CD set of all nine Beethoven symphonies by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra [1] in celebration of his 100th birthday.

The recordings are not new, I have them on Deutsche Grammophon cassettes dated 1963.

It is said that Sony and Philips engineers developed the CD with the goal of an uninterrupted performance of the Ninth. Now a fifty-dollar iPod the size of a wrist watch will hold all of them with room to spare.

And just as Miss Scarlet had trouble with the Tarleton twins, I'll be awake all night trying to decide just which one is the handsomest.