Jim Tobin wrote:

>At the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, there are two valuable old objects,
>one a Stradivarius violin, the other a stone associated with king Alfred.
>One is genuine, the other a copy (substituted during WW II, for security
>reasons.) Guess which? Not the one I would have chosen.  I asked if that
>one were ever used in concert, as the Smithsonian instruments are and the
>answer was, no, the donor/owner did not wish that...

There was a TV series called, I think, *Northern Exposure*, or something
like that, which I watched only sporadically, about a Jewish medical school
graduate who, I believe, had to pay off his scholarship money by practicing
in a remote Alaskan outpost, one of the episodes of which, if I recall
correctly, involved a precious violin the owner of which deemed it too
precious to be played.

(How's that for a vague memory dimly recorded?)

Walter Meyer