The automobile laconically runs down pedestrians. It gnaws into the side of a barn or else, grinning, it flies down a slope. It can't be blamed for anything. Its conscience is... clear... It only fulfillls its destiny. It is destined to wipe out the world. from Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg's , The Life of the Automobile , published in 1929. Worldwide three quarters of a million people are killed every year on the roads. More people between five and 44 die in car crashes in the Third World than are killed by any single disease. 3,508 people were killed in road accidents in 2003 in the UK, and 33,707 were seriously injured. 171 of those killed were children. Since 1899 motor vehicles have killed over 2.5 million Americans, and permanently injured 43 million. The Humane Society estimates that more than one million animals are killed every day on US roads. It has been estimated that motor vehicles kill more animals than the fur trade and animal experimentation industry combined, ...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQnd5ilKx2Y
Here we have an example of the failure to show visually whence came our music and how the whole of it came to be. A small matter, of course, for young people now go out into the world almost nescient about how the world as we know it came to be and how they themselves might find a place in it, for they were never properly taught such in the years of their 'schooling'. I'm an ex-pat retired historian who sometimes dreams of the A-Levels of yore (my yore). I kid you not that one september three decades ago, I started the first tutorial of a first-year European history course
by asking someone, anyone, to tell me what they knew about Hitler and Nazism. Nothing - not one could tell me anything at all.
I hope no one is asking what the hell that photo has got to do with history, for it has everything to do with it, including the fact that there are now people thinking Nielsen looked like an avuncular, bearded Scot with a shirt and photographer way ahead of their time.
The description "Radio 2.5" has achieved widespread currency in connection with this and other changes. When I read that description while travelling last week I had a feeling that it originated On An Overgrown Path some years ago. My feeling has been confirmed by a poster on the independent BBC Radio 3 forum -
http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?3294-Brian-Sewell-joins-the-throng!/page2
Here is my 2006 post, which was somewhat ahead of its time -
http://www.overgrownpath.com/2006/12/bbc-is-performing-badly.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2039794/BBC-Radio-3-Breakfast-Radio-2-5-say-listeners.html
http://www.overgrownpath.com/2008/01/great-music-making-doesnt-need.html