In Brief: Labor Day Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond. Happy Labor Day to our American readers!

• A squirrel spotted running up and down the right field foul pole during a game in Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night "resembled those of Ratatosk, or 'gnawing tooth', a squirrel in Norse mythology that climbed up and down a tree that represented the world. Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic scholar and poet, recorded the story in his 13th-century Prose Edda." If the squirrel was Ratatosk, it would be a very bad omen for the Yankees (please, God, let it be true). [Boing Boing]


• Robert Rubin has managed to purchase the Maison de Verre, a legendary modernist private home designed by Pierre Chareau and tucked away off the Rue Saint-Guillaume in Paris. If you missed the article by Nicolai Ouroussoff, you can read it without registering at the Times site by following this link to iht.com. The French government apparently had the chance to buy the house and turned it down. Soon people, in limited numbers, will be able to visit it. [New York Times]


• The exhibit on the complicated relationship of Venice and Islam has reached its final stop, in the Doge's Palace of La Serenissima, which has been reviewed by Roderick Conway Morris. The title in Italian ("Venezia e l'Islam") has been translated on the museum's English-language page as Venice and the Islam. [International Herald Tribune]


• First Anna Netrebko told us, in her own words, that her voice "started suddenly to be bigger, because I was using the microphone between my tits!" Now we learn that she doesn't even like I Puritani: "it's crap." Ugh. She will be singing some other crap at the Last Night of the Proms on September 8, a concert that will be broadcast online. [The Guardian]


• Alex Ross informs us that the concerts of the Banff String Quartet Competition are available for Internet broadcast. One of the competing quartets, the Ariel Quartet, will be playing here in Washington this fall, at the Corcoran on October 12. [Banff Broadcasts from CBC Radio]