In Brief: How Is It October Edition

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

• You mean "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was not about LSD? [The Independent]


• The Musée du quai Branly has an exhibit on the civilization and art of Teotihuacan, containing an extraordinary range of some 450 objects, through January 24, 2010. Pictures! [Le Figaro]


• The banquet hall of Nero's Domus Aurea had a platform that rotated at the earth's speed, as described by Suetonius. Archeologists believe they have discovered the ruins of the hall and the rotation mechanism. [BBC News]


• My editor at DCist, Heather Goss, has a regular column now about astronomical happenings in the area, called Look Up, and we are totally addicted to it. [DCist]


• The Louvre has this program where they invite a prominent person, generally in an artistic or cultural field, to create six weeks of cultural programming in the museum -- Toni Morrison, Anselm Kiefer, and Pierre Boulez have all done it. This fall it will be Umberto Eco, who spoke with Éric Biétry-Rivierre about his plans. He advises that a visit to a museum should last no longer than a half-hour, in order to avoid over-saturation. Eco's wife, who works at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, has fought to get a bar installed in the museum, primarily as a place for Eco to have a glass of whiskey. "A museum with a bar," says Eco, "signifies that one can take a break there and thus not see more than one or two works per visit." [Le Figaro]