In Brief: Quadragesima Edition

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

• Congratulations to my alma mater: as first reported two years ago, Michigan State University will break ground next month for the building of its new art museum, designed by Zaha Hadid, at the corner of Grand River Avenue and Farm Lane at the Collingwood Campus entrance. The project has been paid for by a major donation from Eli and Edythe Broad (Eli Broad is also an alumnus of Michigan State, Class of 1954), for whom it will be named. [Cityscapes]


• More wild-eyed pseudo-academic speculation: René Descartes did not die of pneumonia but was actually murdered by a priest who gave him an arsenic-laced communion wafer. Paging Dan Brown -- your next paycheck is here. [The Guardian]


• Big Brother really is watching you. A school in the Philadelphia suburbs gave its students laptops to take home, not telling them that the computers had software that could turn on the laptop webcam and take pictures. A law suit alleges that a school administrator took a photo of a student with one of these laptop webcams while the student was at home and used it to charge the student with improper behavior in his home. [Boing Boing]


• Jessica Duchen posted about the embezzlement fiasco at the London Philharmonic, where her husband plays in the violin section, and then took down the post at her husband's request. She now sets the record straight about the whole situation, why she took the post down, and so on. [Standpoint]


• Grey Wyshynski gives voice to what all hockey fans are feeling about NBC's coverage (or lack thereof) of the Olympic hockey tournament. All I can say is that tonight's U.S.A.-Canada match had better be on the air, broadcast in full, and with competent announcers (at least, in the case of a deficit in the last category, I can turn the sound off). [Puck Daddy]


• Nationals Jacked about Getting Wang after Long Pursuit. What else is there to write about Washington's baseball team other than penis puns? [DCist]


• Wait: Stephen Hough is in Grand Rapids? Double wait: the hotel where Britten and Pears first, you know, did the whole gay thing is in Grand Rapids? The things I did not know about my Great State of Michigan. Surprisingly (or not?), the hotel does not have the Britten-Pears room commemorated as a special place to stay? [The Telegraph]


• Who were the most important, most enduring composers of the first decade of the 21st century? Norman Lebrecht has been collecting data on which pieces premiered in that decade have received the most performances to try to find out. It's a flawed methodology -- pieces that are the most popular may in fact be crap -- but the top twenty pieces is still a list worth thinking about. [Slipped Disc]