In Brief: September's End Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• "Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M." -- " 'From the prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings to the stirring symphonies of Mozart to today's hot-dog eating competitions and action films with comical gerbils, culture has descended into a festering pool of mass ignorance', said Yale sociologist Paul Riordan, who has spent his career analyzing western civilization's fall into the depths of depravity." [The Onion]


• Folks who work in downtown Washington have another option for a musical lunchtime, a new free concert series on the first Wednesday of the month (starting in October), at the gorgeous church by the White House. We congratulate our own Michael Lodico, who is the parish's new organist and associate choirmaster. [St. John's, Lafayette Square]


• Here are some images of the stunning find of a treasure burial in Staffordshire, dated to the 7th century, the era of Beowulf, and three times the size of the famous Sutton Hoo ship burial. [The Guardian]


• The Washington Nationals joined a club of dubious renown this week by being one of the limited number of baseball teams to have lost 100 games in a season. "I'm pretty sure that such examples of the suckiest bunches of sucks that ever sucked don't get a letter from the President, at least not the one who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Yes, instead of being celebrated, these squads inherit one of two difficult to swallow legacies: either they are written off as hardball experiments gone wrong and forgotten or remembered as terrible abominations, a stain on the fabric of the American pasttime." [DCist]


• One of my favorite sopranos, Sandrine Piau, runs the 20 Questions gauntlet. [Playbill Arts]


• One of the things I love to do while traveling is to visit locations described in beloved books and the homes and tombs of favorite authors, artists, or composers. Michael Kimmelman is on the trail of Chopin in Poland. [New York Times]


• Jessica Duchen interviews mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato. [The Independent]