Major sports teams tend to be clothing companies with a nice line in football(/baseball/basketball/etc).

And you did no worthwhile research either. Yes, recombination is a thing. However, it only happens between sufficiently similar DNA sequences. Ebola and rhinoviruses share very little common DNA and the chances of any sharing happening and producing something that did anything biologically interesting are, to put it mildly, low.

As for your/my attitude, grow up. Speculating wildly with no clue what you're talking about it is liable to get people taking the piss out of you. In this case you literally had to type a question into Google and click on the first link to come up. Instead you had to waste mine and everyone else's time with your nonsense.

Lord knows. I can't imagine a stupider or more pointless question. Is stupid fucking lawyering *really* the most important thing about this whole issue? Who the hell gives a shit? And we wonder why women have a problem with /.

Yes, the reason being you're a fucking idiot with no idea what you're saying.

Getting to the Met involves a lot of things, only one of which is vocal skill. A random adult would not have a lifelong network of contacts, experience, acting skills, and a depth of knowledge of the repertoire that someone who grew up doing it would. And there are certainly arguments that brain plasticity and physiology plays a part in developing talented child musicians in a way that may not be replicable in adults.

But that aside, yes, an adult can be trained to a high standard of opera singing, sufficiently so to take on significant roles in commercial productions. Bearing in mind, of course, that we are talking here about 5-10 years worth of daily training - but it is possible. Just rare.

"fast"=/="good", but even leaving that aside, I'm sceptical. Fast solos on guitar don't involve that much lefthand speed in absolute terms. I suspect it is something about the way you practice or think about your own performance. Musicians are their own worst enemy when it comes to improving their skills and a large part of my job as a teacher is breaking down roadblocks so that you can actually improve. A lot of teachers don't recognise this (and I suspect it's worse for instruments like electric guitar where teacher training may be, well, variable).

Considering you have a range bigger than that used by most male opera singers, yeah, I'd say that's respectable. Also, G6...why, just why?

Sure, everyone has physiological issues to deal with - this is why the best sprinters are the best - but I don't think it negates my point all that much. Also I bet a good vocal tutor could get you two and half octaves if you wanted to :)

Hello flamebait mod, care to justify your moderation?

No, your wife recognises the people that fit her teaching style and can't adapt to deal with the rest. I also teach people who arrive and on day one are fingers and thumbs. They have different challenges and need different support, but at least one of my pupils who arrived in this state is now a recording artist.

Yes. There's a book - something like "The Child As Musician" that goes into some detail about childhood musical skill acquisition. The lesson I took from that for my teaching is that different kids arrive for their first music lesson with wildly varying levels of musical skill, despite never having had a formal lesson in their lives.

As a music teacher, I have never - ever - found that I could not teach someone who practiced regularly and intelligently to be as good as they wanted to be. Your teacher was too damned lazy to teach you properly and as a consequence has denied you the ability to be the musician you could perfectly well have been. I can't comment on whether you ended up in a better place or not, but I can say, with absolute certainty, that your teacher was dead wrong.

PR departments use off the shelf search providers to keep them up to date on their areas of interest. They don't read slashdot, but they did read this story.

Get your party elected to the Court of Common Council.

This is one - just one - of the many reasons you're not an undercover agent.