Family Entertainment Blog

ReviewAs Graeme Murphy’s  Swan Lake digs its way deeper into the Australian Ballet’s repertoire, its sturdiness as a production reveals its strengths. Now six years and a good many principal casts away from its premiere, it has a life of its own that offers the dancers good opportunities and audiences the promise of an entertaining night at the ballet.

Not all the casts will have the chemistry that sets performances alight, and they are likely to be varied in their interpretive nuances. Yet they should be consistently strong and interesting - as was the opening night of the company’s 2008 Sydney season on April 4.

Madeleine Eastoe has developed technically and dramatically in the central role of Odette, using the gift of Murphy’s choreography to evoke character and emotion as well as storytelling.

Robert Curran’s Prince has also gained character, which took a while to emerge, but by the party scene was powering his customary good dancing. He is helped by having two forceful performances to bounce off: not only from Eastoe, but also from Jane Casson as the scheming Baroness von Rothbart, one of several dancers who have found their theatrical abilities sharpened by this unpleasant role.

The scenario of this Swan Lake has echoes of a marriage of convenience in a real-life royal family, complete with familiar characters. But it is set in the Edwardian era - with all those beautiful ice-cream toned costumes by Kristian Fredrikson, who also did the handsome decor - and the bride ends up in a psychiatric institution, dreaming of flying with the swans she sees through the window.

There may be a temptation to linger on the characters’ identity, which is reflected in the free cast sheet. It is good to know the enchanting Duchess-to-be is played so vividly by Gina Brescianini; the Earl and his close Equerry by Marc Cassidy and Matthew Donnelly in a crisply paired performance; the Marquis with the camera by the ubiquitous octogenarian Harry Haythorne; and the disapproving queen by Shane Carroll.

But where were the names of performers distinguished simply by their good dancing? On opening night Lana Jones and Danielle Rowe sliced through a perfectly competent corps de ballet with a brilliantly precise, graceful portrayal of power as the leading swans. It was a showstopper. And, along with several others, the chief Hungarian couple, Laura Tong and Remi Wortmeyer, also deserved to be known.

The Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra, conducted by Nicolette Fraillon - led by Aubrey Murphy, who is also featured as a soloist in this amalgam of music by Tchaikovsky - made a notable contribution.
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LUCKNOW, India - Conservationists and scientists scrambled Tuesday to determine what has killed at least 50 critically endangered crocodile-like reptiles in recent weeks in a river sanctuary in central India.
Everything from parasites to pollution has been blamed for the deaths of the gharials — massive reptiles that look like their crocodile relatives, but with long slender snouts. The bodies, measuring between five and 10 feet long, have been found washed up on the banks of the Chambal River since early December, according to conservationists and officials.

The precise number of gharials that have died remains unclear, with the Gharial Conservation Alliance saying 81 bodies have been found since early December, butt Chief Wildlife Warden D.N.S Suman putting the number of dead animals at 50. Conservationists believe there are only some 1,500 gharials left in the wild, many of them in a sanctuary based along the Chambal,
 

one of the few unpolluted Indian rivers. The Chambal contains the largest of three breeding populations in the world.

In early December, officials found the bodies of at least 21 gharials over three days. The bodies have continued washing ashore in the weeks since.

The latest possible clue to what’s killing the rare reptiles is an unknown parasite that scientists found in the dead gharials’ liver and kidneys, according to Dr. A.K. Sharma of the Indian Veterinary Research Institute.

“We can say that liver and kidney of these gharials were badly damaged,” said Sharma. “They were swollen and bigger than their usual size.”

Other believe the gharials may have gotten sick and died after eating contaminated fish from the polluted Yamuna river, which joins the Chambal in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Pathological tests confirmed lead and cadmium in the bodies of the dead gharials, said Suman, the wildlife official.

“The Chambal river has clear water free from heavy metals. The only possibility seems that these gharials might have migrated from heavily polluted Yamuna river where they might have eaten fish,” said Suman.

The gharial, also known as the Indian crocodile, was on the verge of extinction in the 1970s, but a government breeding program that has released several hundred into the wild has raised their numbers.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An estimated 5.2 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, and it could steal the minds of one out of eight baby boomers, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Alzheimer’s Association.
The report found there were 411,000 new cases of Alzheimer’s in 2000, a number expected to grow to 454,000 new cases a year by 2010.
By 2050, 959,000 people will be diagnosed with the disease every year, the report predicts.The report, available on the Internet at says that 14 percent of all people age 71 and over have dementia.That includes 16 percent of women and 11 percent of men in that age group.Alzheimer’s disease is the
 
most common type of dementia, accounting for 60 to 80 percent of cases.

It starts out with mild memory loss and confusion but escalates into complete memory loss and an inability to care for oneself. There is no cure and the handful of drugs that can treat Alzheimer’s only slow its progression for a short time.

The second most common cause of dementia is vascular dementia, often caused by strokes.

The causes of Alzheimer’s disease are not yet clear. The brains of patients are clogged with protein plaques and tangles of nerve fibers. Corporate and academic scientists are working on tests for disease risk, better drugs to treat the symptoms and vaccines that might prevent the brain damage.

Another study released this week supports the potential broad reach of the epidemic.

COMMON MEMORY LOSS

It found that more than a third of Americans over the age of 70 have some form of memory loss.

The team at Duke University Medical Center, the University of Michigan, the University of Iowa, the University of Southern California and the Rand Corporation found that about 12 percent of patients with cognitive impairment progress to full dementia every year.

Writing in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the researchers said they studied 856 people. They took a neuropsychological examination and family members were asked to evaluate their memory, ability to complete daily activities and medical history.

They were then followed from July 2001 through March 2005.

“These findings illustrate that nearly every family will be faced with the challenges of caring for a family member with some form of memory impairment,” said Brenda Plassman of Duke, who led the study.

“Given how common cognitive impairment without dementia is, physicians should be alert to this problem as they evaluate and treat the patient for other medical problems,” said Dr. Robert Wallace of the University of Iowa.

“This may have significant ramifications because it means that patients may not be able to accurately portray their symptoms and may not retain important information about their treatment.”

“As the population ages and works longer, understanding the extent of cognitive impairment in the older population is critically important,” said Richard Suzman of the National Institute on Aging, one of the National Institutes of Health.

“Research is now beginning to suggest that interventions such as controlling hypertension and diabetes or perhaps cognitive training might help maintain or improve mental abilities with age.”

People who send large numbers of text messages and emails may have a mental disorder, a doctor writing in a leading psychiatric journal said.

Jerald Block, writing in the latest issue of the American Journal Of Psychiatry, said “internet addiction” was a “common disorder” that deserved inclusion in a manual of mental disorders used by health professionals.

Those with the condition suffered withdrawal symptoms of anger and tension when a computer was inaccessible, and often lost their sense of time through excessive use, Dr Block said.

Other symptoms included feeling “the need for better computer equipment, more software, or more hours of use”, and having arguments, lying, social isolation and fatigue, he said.

Excessive gaming, sexual preoccupations and excessive text messages and emails were all evidence of having the disorder, he said.

It was difficult to know how widespread the illness was, Dr Block said.

“Attempts to measure the phenomenon are clouded by shame, denial, and minimisation,” he wrote.

“Unfortunately, internet addiction is resistant to treatment [and] entails significant risks
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Is it possible to regain trust and intimacy after a relationship has been marred by infidelity? This question has become increasingly important as recent statistics have shown that young people are cheating on their significant others in record rates. Indeed, a recent survey performed in Australia has found that one-third of people aged 18 to 25 have cheated on their romantic partners.
How do you make a relationship work after this type of heartbreak? Well, it depends on who you ask. Cheryl Cole, singer of British pop group, Girls Aloud, has reportedly taken back her cheating husband on one condition: No sex for six months! 

While this program might work for Cheryl and her husband, Ashley, I have found that similar “no-sex” plans only serve to create further distance and hurt feelings between the already wounded partners. Taking sex off the table might help to clear the air and place focus on the true issues within the relationship, but banning intercourse as a form of punishment will only sever intimacy, right at the time that it is needed the most.  

What are some better techniques for repairing after the affair?

The truth must come out. Whether it is a cyber affair or a relationship with a co-worker, straying partners need to come clean about the entirety of their extramarital relationships. In the case of Cheryl and Ashley, he allegedly cheated on her with three different women. If this hits close to home, take the safe road and fess up to your affairs completely. Whether or not your partner will forgive you is up in the air — but at least the truth will finally be out.

Avoid gory details. While it is crucial to be honest with your partner, try to avoid being too graphic or explicit with the details. Yes, your partner needs to know that you cheated on him with the next-door neighbor, but he doesn’t need to know minute details about the sack sessions. Your partner will already be replaying the possible scenes in his head — the last thing he needs is extra details to fill in the blanks of his worst nightmare. 

Limit the amount of outbursts. When couples encounter infidelity in their relationships, the betrayed partner often has a free-for-all in which their anger and pain is unleashed upon the guilty partner daily. While the guilty partner certainly deserves some of this feedback, couples should be careful to avoid a situation in which the infidelity becomes bigger than the relationship itself. The betrayed partner should limit their grievances and lashing out to 10 minutes, and then agree to let the matter lie for the rest of the day. Thus, the guilty partner will not feel constantly attacked and the betrayed partner will not wallow in pain every minute of the day.

Discover why the cheating occurred. Infidelity can occur for many reasons, but perhaps the most common reason is a need to feel special, loved, and attractive. Don’t get me wrong, there is no excuse for cheating. But if someone is cheating, it often suggests deeper problems within the relationship. Discovering these reasons, either with or without a couples’ therapist, is a necessary first step on the road to healing a broken relationship. 

As long as both members of the couple are committed to improving the relationship and weathering the storm, repairing after an affair is possible. As the Bard once said, “the course of true love never did run smooth,” so perhaps this scary bout with infidelity will only serve as a road bump on you and your partner’s path to happily ever after