I notice on the pukeazoid (sp?) Opera Smell the horrors are wiping poor Eleanor Steber with their stupidity, or using her as an excuse for their ludicrous feuds. It's not like there are heroes there to root for. Opera as music is foreign to all but a few. Aesthetic positions are parodies of what morons might dream when they, unconscious, see phantasms of insight in their tiny brains. But even as a list that mostly and for long periods of time celebrates singers, dead ones, it is preposterous, idiotic and insulting. I knew Steber when she was older and struggling, and saw her often, luckily for me, in her better years, though I wish I had been older to really savor those. She is far from the only person who taught me that artists are thrown away in America. But the memory at that list censored as it is by the idiot Kosovsky is of a late, isolated bad performance she gave, after her operatic career was essentially over. She did it to help the Met (and perhaps to try and remind Bing and the others that she still had plenty to offer) but it was a last minute substitution in a killer role she really wasn't prepared for. She gambled and lost. But she was a great, valiant artist.