In Brief: Back to School Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond, although there is not much at the end of August.

• Please tell me that someone has YouTubed a video of Bill Murray driving a golf car through Stockholm. Maybe it was actually part of a new Sofia Coppola movie (the writer of this article actually went there -- "Police wondered whether something was lost in translation"). [Associated Press]


• News flash! Apparently, Peter Sellars is an unconventional director. Or something. [International Herald Tribune]


• Matthew Guerrieri has reviewed the best answers to his delightfully fun quiz last March, in preparation for a new one (goodie!). My answers got a gold star a couple times, but if you want to revisit the whole glorious thing, here is my complete response. [Soho the Dog]


• It's true that living in Europe gave me the taste for the occasional cigarette, and I have suggested before a new way to spend all that tobacco lawsuit money. Artist David Hockney has already pulled out all of the polemic stops in writing against the growing craze of more and more stringent smoking bans. I have no problem with imposing some limits on smoking in airplanes and airports, government and office buildings, even some restaurants, but can we at least leave a few places where it is allowed? A few skanky dives? I mean, can we at least agree that the Rolling Fucking Stones should be allowed to smoke on stage? [BBC News]


• Kriston Capps answers the question of "whether Chinese art sweatshops resemble Renaissance art apprenticeships." I'm with Kriston: very little about how art was made in the Middle Ages and Renaissance has much to do with how art is made and consumed now. [Grammar.police]