You already know I’m partial to flash mobs, so I’ll neither explain nor apologize for today’s post. 🙂 Maybe it’s the turn in the weather here in Minnesota – from warm and sunny to cold (as in 30 degrees colder overnight) and overcast — or maybe it’s being midway through the semester and feeling like I’m falling way behind, or maybe it’s looking at three trips (each one of which I really look forward to) in the next two weeks, but needed a pick-me-upper this morning. And when I stumbled across this video of the Copenhagen Philharmonic playing Grieg’s Peer Gynt in the subway to the surprise and delight of the...

I’ll admit it: I’m a sucker for cultural flashmob events. I know they’re contrived – how else do you get the great footage? – but I still love the way they startle a random group of people and bring them together as a group, a body, joined partly, I’m sure, by curiosity but also, I think, be the sheer beauty of the event. In this case that event is a 100 member orchestra playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” It was sponsored by Banco Sabadell, Spain’s fifth largest bank, this past May to sponsor the 130th anniversary of its founding. Another favorite flashmob was the dance of “Do...