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