In Brief: Back to School Edition

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

• Could anyone ever top Nora the piano-playing cat? Well, for your video pleasure (embedded at right), a cat's improvisation on the theremin. [LOLCats]


• Earlier this month the Quatuor Tournières traveled from Caen in France to the Jesuit missions of Bolivia. [Le Point]


• Grieving for the death of a spouse's parent, further complicated when a writer grieves for the loved one's unfinished book, which she promised to finish. [Maud Newton]


• Was Victor Hugo's famous hunchback based on an actual person? Adrian Glew, an archivist at Tate Britain in Londres, found a reference in the journal of minor sculptor Henry Sibson to a hunchback working on the renovations of Notre Dame Cathedral in 1820. Sibson refers to a stone mason named Trajan who worked with the ornery hunchback: in a draft of Les Misérables, Hugo named his hero Trajean, changing it later to Jean Valjean. [Le Figaro]


• Bull takes revenge by leaping arena wall and goring spectators at bullfight. [Boing Boing]


• A sculpture by Salvador Dalí, Lady with Drawers, was the object of a brazen art burglary in Bruges. On Wednesday afternoon, an exhibit visitor was able to remove the sculpture from its base, put it into a sack, and walk out of the gallery, all under the watchful eyes of security cameras. The piece was insured, but there was no specific alarm protecting it. The two employees on guard were also responsible for selling tickets, and police believe that an accomplice blocked their view during the theft. [Libération]


• There is apparently a Creation Museum in Lexington, Ky. Ugh. A sociology professor reports on the reactions of different kinds of students taken for a visit there. [Christian Science Monitor]


• The Venus de Milo, newly restored and cleaned to a milky sheen, has returned to its place of honor in the Louvre. [Le Monde]


• Summer vacation may be over, but console yourself with this video of giant bubbles floating over a beach full of kids. [Boing Boing]