In Brief: Real Christmas Edition

Here is your regular Sunday dosage of interesting items, from Blogville and beyond:

• La Cieca documents the Metropolitan Opera's foray into broadcasting, in 1926. [parterre box]
  
• Also, La Cieca discusses blogging on the Norman Lebrecht show, on the future topic of "Is there cultural value in blogging?". Lebrecht and La Cieca in contact: oh, to have been a fly on the wall. [parterre box]
  
• Bob Shingleton has a great post about the miracle of Taizé, an interfaith Christian community in rural France. [On an Overgrown Path]
  
• Tyler Green asks the question: is charging for admission to your museum worth it? [Modern Art Notes]
  
• If you are allowed to dig up the ground near the Acropolis in Athens, you will find things, lots of them. What did the Greeks find while building the new museum for the Parthenon marbles? [The Guardian]
  
• Soprano Alison Trainer stayed in a hotel in Phoenix that had a bedbug infestation. Not good. [AP]
  
• Joan Acocella gets caught up on her reading about Lorenzo da Ponte. [The New Yorker]
  
• The Institut français d'architecture, in the Palais de Chaillot, is showing the results of a contest to design another new building in the Tolbiac neighborhood of Paris, the Tribunal de grande instance de la capitale, or Palais de justice. [Le Monde]
  
• First, it was the complete Mozart set, 150 CDs from Brilliant Classics. Now you can buy Mozart 22, the Salzburg Festival's summer of all the Mozart operas, on 33 DVDs. [Le Monde]
  
• Scott Spiegelberg tags no one in particular for the meme du jour, so he must mean me: "Find the nearest book. Turn to page 123. Go to the fifth sentence on the page. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog. Name the book and the author, and tag three more folks." [Musical Perceptions]

  His fits were becoming more frequent, and on the days he was ill Marfa cooked, which did not suit Fyodor Pavlovitch at all. "Why are your fits getting worse?" asked Fyodor Pavlovitch, looking askance at his new cook. "Would you like to get married? Shall I find you a wife?"

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett
  
• We wish Alex Ross and our other Orthodox friends a blessed Christmas this weekend ("Real Christmas" as Alex once put it). In the epic battle to save classical music from oblivion, Alex is ready to declare victory. [The Rest Is Noise]