Up with this I will not put.

As a former brass player — the trumpet, specifically — I find this news story, linked by Lynn Sislo, offensive in the extreme.

(All kidding aside, the oboe is my favorite of the woodwind instruments. So many of Berlioz’s most achingly-beautiful moments involve the oboe, and the third movement of the Symphonie Fantastique, with its duet for English Horn and offstage oboe, is sublime. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade is also laden with wonderful stuff for the oboe.)