Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
Merry Company on a Terrace, by Jan Steen, c. 1670. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1958.
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Miscellany
In 2009 a twenty-four-year-old policewoman in Long Branch, New Jersey, responded to complaints about an “eccentric-looking old man” peering into a house. She asked the man his name. “I’m Bob Dylan,” he said. “I’m on tour.” Taking him for a liar, she put him in the back of her car and drove him to his hotel, where others confirmed he really was the musician. “I think he named a couple of songs,” she later recalled. “But I wouldn’t have known any of the songs.”
Music today is nothing more than the art of performing difficult pieces.
—Voltaire, 1759Lapham’sDaily
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