...John Pistole, the head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), said on Thursday that the bomb did not detonate because Abdulmutallab had been wearing the same underwear for more than two weeks.

"He had it with him for over two weeks," Mr Pistole said at the Aspen Security Forum.

Asked by his interviewer whether the bomb's fuse had become "damp" from two weeks of wear, Mr Pistole said: "Let's say it was degraded. We're getting kind of personal now."...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/10989843/Underwear-bomber-plot-failed-because-he-wore-same-pants-for-two-weeks.html

Is M. Pistole related to that dreaded other Frenchman, De Tour?

Best regards,

RA1

You remind me that the name Valéry Giscard d'Estaing always sounded to me like a good curse.

Oui. And, to switch languages, what about Gotterdammerung? This word ought to at least invoke thunder, lightening and all sorts of bad weather, not Twilight of the Gods.

Best regards,

RA1

Oui. And, to switch languages, what about Gotterdammerung? This word ought to at least invoke thunder, lightening and all sorts of bad weather

That is to say, the music of Wagner.

Si.

Best regards,

RA1

For me Wagner is impossible... he talks without ever stopping. One can't just talk all the time.
-- Robert Schumann, quoted in: H Gall, Johannes Brahms

Wagner's art recognises only superlatives, and a superlative has no future. It is an end, and not a beginning.
-- Edward Hanslick, in: Pleasants, ed., Hanslick's Music Criticism

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches -- he has made music sick. I postulate this viewpoint: Wagner's art is diseased.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner

Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-bloodied stuff that I ever saw on a human stage, that last night beat -- as far as the story and acting went -- all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, scrabble-pipiest-tongs, and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliest of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest -- as far as the sound went.
-- John Ruskin, letter, referring to a performance of Die Meistersinger

Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.
-- Gioacchino Rossini, in a letter to Emile Naumann

I have been told that Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
-- Mark Twain, Autobiography

Not until the turn of the century did the outlines of the new world discovered in Tristan begin to take shape. Music reacted to it as a human body to an injected serum, which it at first strives to exclude as a poison, and only afterwards learns to accept as necessary and even wholesome.
-- Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Compositions

It would kill a cat and turn rocks into scrambled eggs.
-- Richard Strauss, German composer, writing of Wagner's opera Siegfried in a letter to Ludwig Thuille

I love Wagner, but the music that I prefer is that of a cat hung by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.
-- Charles Baudelaire

That kind of opera that starts at six o'clock and after it has been going three hours you look at your watch and it says 6.20.
-- David Randolph on Wagner's opera Parzifal (Parsifal)

Wagner was a monster. He was anti-Semitic on Mondays and vegetarian on Tuesdays. On Wednesday he was in favour of annexing Newfoundland, Thursday he wanted to sink Venice, and Friday he wanted to blow up the pope.
-- Tony Palmer

One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend hearing it a second time.
-- Gioacchino Rossini

The prelude to Tristan und Isolde reminds us of one of the old Italian paintings of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on to a reel.
Eduard Hanslick, German Bohemian music critic, on Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde

I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says.
-- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Tsk, tsk. And, no one likes buxom ladies, either.

Best regards,

RA1

Ha! I was right about cleanliness is the best policy but fortunately his uncleanliness saved lives. That's an irony that I find in this incident... Hmm