Olympian2004

A sad news flash was shown during the BBC World live coverage of the Olympic Flame handover in Athens: Donna Summer died at the age of 63. Apparently she died from lung cancer -- an illness she believed to have contracted by inhaling toxic particles after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

http://www.dailymail...cer-battle.html

After the King of Pop in 2009 and the Queen of Pop this year also the Queen of Disco has died. What a tragic sequence.

Boris Johnson graced the Beijing closing ceremony with his presence, and he will also grace the ceremonies in London with his presence -- especially the closing ceremony where he'll wave the Olympic Flag for a final time. Any comments?

http://www.bbc.co.uk...litics-17946742

I'm surprised how narrow his victory was. Johnson will have to deal with a Labour-controlled assembly however, so it's really only a bittersweet victory for him.

Sorry, correction: Labour has no majority in the London Assembly now, but is only one seat short of it and is the strongest party. It could gain a majority with the help of the Greens.

I've made the experience that music can relieve a lot of stress one carried around throughout the day. Do you experience the same -- and if so, which songs lift you up when you had a bad day?

For me, it depends on which stress I had (or have in that moment). There were times when this classic helped me:

Nat King Cole with George Shearing - Pick Yourself Up

Sometimes this song is also a "positive mood guarantee" for me: The Doobie Brothers - What a Fool Believes

But hardly any song reaches what this one gives to me:


I got to know this video (although I already knew the song casually) in this forum, by the way -- two years ago, shortly before or after Rio de Janeiro was chosen as 2016 host city and when someone started a thread about Brazilian music. And this song has never lost me ever since. It's such a beautiful hymn to life and to new beginnings, especially in the "northern hemisphere" version Tom Jobim wrote in English, referring to the start of spring there (while the Portuguese version refers to the start of autumn in Brazil in March):



Now it's your turn.

I know that "Irene" has been scaled down to just a category 1 hurricane (for the non-Americans: that's the weakest kind of hurricane) -- but frankly, I'm shi*ting my pants right now in these very early hours here in Germany. Why? My sister, my brother-in-law and my baby nephew are vacationing in the northeastern US right now and already had to cancel their planned trip to New York City due to "Irene". Right now they are in Lake George, NY -- about 200 miles north of NYC -- and waiting for the storm to hit also their place. They'll spend the whole Sunday in their hotel room, because they have been advised to stay inside. Even upstate New York is expecting winds of still up to 70 miles per hour and torrential rain.

And reading the news from North Carolina and Virginia and also from NYC where it seems to get worse every minute makes me pretty anxious. "Irene" is all over the news here in Germany (mostly, it's the top story in the news or on the websites). This is a rare case in terms of US hurricanes, which usually don't get that amount of coverage here. And that worries me even more.

Is anyone here experienced in hurricanes and can say whether it can get really that bad? Is it any different to a big storm here in Europe (in case you experienced both things already)? Or has anyone here even been already hit or is about to be hit by "Irene"?