Out There in Blogville

You know, I used to do a post of links to other people's blogs quite regularly, and then I stopped. This is not because of a lack of good reading in Blogville, certainly, and must have something to do with our craze for content lately.

Thanks to the Blowhards (are there really only 2 of them now?) for their kind mention of little old us in a (typically) thorough and wide-ranging post on the culture of the arts:

The culture-chat ground has been leveled. If you find that what the Sunday Times peddles is displeasing, it takes almost no effort to surf over and check in with the classy cast at IonArts.

As I was finishing up my last traversal of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, Waggish started in on Waggish Reads Proust. It was a real attempt to blog the reading of Proust, and I enjoyed reading it, but it appears to have stalled out in the middle of Volume 4. However, Waggish's eclectic and profound, if infrequent, posts have continued on his regular blog, much to my enjoyment. Some of the good ones lately include an appraisal of a difficult but rewarding book, Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau and a series of reflections on the genre of blogging.

The Standing Room recounts a hilarious tragic story that befell a parking control officer in San Francisco. (Three-wheeled scooter, hill, brake failure, crash with carpet cleaning truck.) We returned from our trip to Santa Fe to discover a ticket on our car, which was parked in a completely legal spot. Fortunately, the hearing examiner agreed with me, on the basis of photographs I took with me to dispute the ticket. Do I stop there? No, I am trying to get the Department of Motor Vehicles to put an official complaint of frivolous citation in the officer's file. Sadly, we don't have many dangerous hills in Washington.

How long should recorded sounds be legally copyrighted? At The Rambler, Tim Rutherford-Johnson discusses the British plan to double it (or so) from the current length of 50 years. We have to be able to get around the copyright issue somehow, to move the information revolution ahead. What will happen to our grip on information if Google Library really is only allowed to scan books printed before 1923? Will our view of literary history be permanently skewed?

Not really bloggish but still funny are some of the great articles in this week's issue of The Onion:

• Rumsfeld Makes Surprise Visit to Wife's Vagina
  
• U.S. Intelligence: Nukehavistan May Have Nuclear Weapons
  
• Evangelical Scientists Refute Grave with New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

I was planning to write something in reaction to this article (The New, Exciting and Soon Forgotten, August 15) by Allan Kozinn for the New York Times, about orchestral programming of new compositions. However, I can be lazy and direct you instead to two professional players' responses to it, from Patricia Mitchell at oboeinsight and Brian Sacawa at Sounds Like Now.