The first story is from the Business section, and it is the story of tablet PC technology from China. It is called How China is Making the Pen as Mighty as the Sword:
BEIJING — For more than a year, Wang Jian and his team at Microsoft Corp.’s research lab here fed a computer a diet of handwritten documents — scribbled lecture notes, back-of-the-envelope diagrams, shopping lists. The computer grew smarter, until it was finally able to perform a mundane yet crucial task: It could distinguish words from most everything else on the page, then turn the letters into neatly typed text.
The other story, titled Break a Leg, informs us that Baz Luhrmann (the man) is putting on a Broadway production of ‘La Boheme.’ Quoting Luhrmann:
“Look, there are easier ways and quicker ways to have a hit on Broadway than doing Italian opera in the original language,” he says. “You can’t say enough about that. You can’t really be clear enough that as well as it seems to have gone so far, it’s an extraordinarily risky venture.”
Another classic Luhrmann quote:
Updated versions of classics have become one of Luhrmann’s trademarks. His goal with the opera, he says, was “not to allow it to be caked in, a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of someone’s memory of an early-20th-century production probably seen in 1930 that has by the very legend of it become the watermark for how you should do Puccini.”
I’m sure his production will be far from that. It’s just a matter of time before I see it. The official website is bohemeonbroadway.com.