The Meridian's Mid-week Miscellany/La miscelanea del miercoles del Meridiano

Today is, of course, Rose Bowl Wednesday and, of course, all right-minded people will be wearing burnt orange and/or thinking burnt-orange thoughts. I am whatever that sort of fan is who is not an alum of a school but, because of confluences of space and time (I was born in Austin and came into football consciousness during the Darrell Royal years), I have no choice but to pull for the University of Texas and (I admit it) loathe Oklahoma with all the irrationality I can muster.

Q: Why doesn't Texas slip into the Gulf of Mexico?
A: Because Oklahoma sucks.

As you can see from the above, I am incapable of intelligent discourse today, so filled am I with anticipation for tonight's game with USC. I do not think the Trojans will succeed in offering up the Longhorns as a hecatomb to whatever gods determine the winning of national championships (the 'Horns' defense will be the difference in this game of otherwise equally-matched teams), but I'm not so deluded a fan as to think it won't be close. So I will be watching the skies for bird-signs, and then the game as well.

So: I have little else on my mind today, but the same is not true of my blogging brethren. Thus, in the spirit of Nancy's "blog slums" at Sine qua non, I present below the fold the first in an occasional series called Mid-week Miscellany. I hope you'll enjoy some of these.

Over at Delights for the Ingenious, Fearful Syzygy has a short meditation on Baudelaire, Foucault, and blogging.

Mimi in New York meditates on the sexual politics implicit in the story of Scheherazade.

And speaking of story-telling, over at Teoria del caos, Rene offers (in Spanish) a fable reminiscent of Borges' "Borges and I," in which life imitates literature imitates life.

The writer of Sunshine State briefly chronicles her own New Year's Day melancholy.

Over at Sauce Box, D-Day declares that she'll be participating in a Livejournal community's challenge to read 50 books (20,000 pages) this year. A worthy ambition.

I've also spent some time today mucking about in the blogosphere's primordial soup that is The Truth Laid Bear's list of Insignificant Microbes. I found two blogs there that, for very different reasons, caught my attention and that I've linked to.

Because Mrs. Meridian is immersed these days in the stressful business of applying to law schools, we both have become interested readers of blogs about lawyering and/or the law (or "blawgs," as some call them). Those of you who have perused the right ditch of this page have noticed that I've linked to a few of them. The newest one is A Frolic of Her Own. It originally caught my eye because it alters for gender purposes the title of the William Gaddis novel. But it's ostensibly, though not exclusively, a law blog; hence, it appears in the Unblogrollable section. It features long, intelligent posts written in a style conducive to lingering. I look forward to lingering there more.

As for The Budgie Research Blog, I will be frank: I cannot tell whether it is a joke in the vein of the brilliantly-funny Why Cats Paint, or whether it is deadly serious. It is for good reason, therefore, that I've put a link to it in Curiosities and Obsessions. I link; you decide. And seeing as I have yet to decide, I'll be visiting there again.

Hook 'em.