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![]() Just Above Sunset
September 18, 2005 - Making a list and checking it twice...
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As noted in the August
7 issue of Just Above Sunset - Jára Cimrman Finally Gets His Due? - in these pages we have covered the BBC and French polls and found the greatest Brit of all time was Winston Churchill,
followed closely by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, then by Diana, Princess of Wales. The greatest Frenchman? Charles De Gaulle was
first, of course, followed by Louis Pasteur, then Abbé Pierre, then Marie Curie. Canada chose Tommy Douglas, the former Saskatchewan
premier, the man credited with being the founding father of Canada's health-care system, as the greatest Canadian of all time.
In this summer's AOL poll, done along with a series of shows on the Discovery Channel, we voted Ronald Reagan the greatest
American of all time. The idea failed in South Africa, where apartheid-era leaders cracked the top one hundred of the polling
and the show was cancelled. In the Netherlands the contest got everyone grumbling about the citizenship of Anne Frank, who
spoke and wrote in Dutch, but who officially was German. That got everyone all messed up. The August subject was the Czech
poll, and how those folks just don't take anything seriously. Jára Cimrman wasn't even a real person. William Blake, George
Stubbs, John Everett Millais and Stanley Spencer were among targeted artists. Timothy Clifford, director general of the National
Galleries of Scotland, named Adolphe-Joseph Monticelli's "Garden Fête," adding that he refuses to hang nine donated examples
of Monticelli's "screamingly awful art." See them all here at The Guardian site, and click on number four for Adolphe-Joseph Monticelli's "Garden Fête." It's rather awful.
A decade ago, Rudyard
Kipling's inspirational poem "If" was named Britain's favorite poem in a BBC poll - and it would probably win again. But the
BBC was not finished. In 2003, it set out to find a contemporary "Poem for Britain." From some 5,000 entries, the winner was
"Harvest Time: A Needlework Map Commemorating the Millennium," an appropriately nostalgic poem about village life by Con Connell,
a computer expert. Oh yes - Britain's favorite
movies, by box office ("Gone With the Wind") and by poll ("Brief Encounter") - the ten most downloaded creators of music,
classical (Beethoven) and pop (Paul McCartney). And so on and so forth. |
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This issue updated and published on...
Paris readers add nine hours....
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