Out There in Blogville

Here are a few items noted with pleasure at other blogs:

• James Wagner's admiration for a picture of Bavarian herdsmen may have had other motivations, but it led to the following observation: "When heard in the mountains, the cattle often out of sight, the sound of even one of those bells is absolutely sublime." This made me remember being in the Alps in Switzerland several years ago. We had stopped on the side of a small mountain pass road to have a picnic. While we were eating, a herd of cows came up into the nearby pasture, and the sound of several hundred massive cowbells was overwhelmingly beautiful. I can still imagine that glorious tintinnabulation in my mind's ear. On a different trip, to hike up to Lac Blanc from Chamonix, we met a goatherd who sold fresh goat's cheese right there on the mountain. The taste of that cheese was the gustatory equivalent of the sound that James admires.
  
• Todd Gibson has had a great idea at From the Floor:

  Dan Flavin must have known that he had made his breakthrough with the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi) because he decided that one copy wasn’t enough. He specified that the piece be executed with nine different fluorescent tubes (yellow, daylight, cool white, warm white, soft white, blue, green, pink, and red), each one in an edition of three. [...] The catalogue says that two pieces from this series of 27 have never been executed and are (theoretically) still available for purchase from the estate. Interested in buying one of these historically important Flavin works? There is one available in warm white and another in soft white. Of course you could always just buy an eight-foot fixture and the correct bulb from The Home Depot and install it yourself at a 45 degree angle from the floor.

  
  
• Greg Allen, who has been trying to make up for the deficiencies of The New Yorker's Web site at greg.org, related the good news that Google News is indexing the magazine's online articles. Wahoo!
  
• Music theory nerds, unite! At Musical Perceptions, Scott Spiegelberg posted a long joke to make music theorists laugh:

  A 'C,' an E-flat, and a 'G' go into a bar. The bartender says: "Sorry, but we don't serve minors." So the E-flat leaves, and the C and the G have an open fifth between them. After a few drinks, the fifth is diminished and the G is out flat. An F comes in and tries to augment the situation, but is not sharp enough.

  If this does not strike you as funny, you need to advance your music education. If you do find it funny, that's only the first paragraph!
  
• Do we already hear so much of Mozart's music in live performance that the upcoming major anniversary events are unnecessary? At Adaptistration, Drew McManus let us know about his article in The Partial Observer about what too much Mozart can do. There he reports the felicitous news that "in case you do live in an area which has contracted Mozart fever you can always escape to Graz, Austria which has declared their town a 'Mozart Free Zone' for 2006 and banned all public performances of Mozart's music."