Happy Fourth, all

I'll be leaving town this afternoon to spend a few wonderful days with Mrs. Meridian and conducting some research up in Lawrence; I'll return "here" Monday at the latest.

I'd like to post some links to some places and posts you might enjoy, though:

Via Crooked Timber comes something called Sea Dragon and Photosynth, which sound sorta like rejected Super Friends names . . . and then you see this, and you won't be laughing anymore. O brave new world, indeed.

Fearful Syzygy has up a nice review of a concert--or, more properly, the circumstances under which he found himself attending a concert--for the Hold Steady. With links to videos and music and stuff.

Flesh and Bone is a new-to-me-blog. dd (which stands for Delta Diva) is a working artist somewhere in the South (New Orleans-ish?) who appears to have found my blog via my recent posts on Eudora Welty's photography and has been kind enough to visit since. Her current post is a musing on summer in the South.

R. Sherman of Musings from the Hinterland has a recent post up that proves, as if any of us needed further proof, that great suffering produces great art.

The Random Things meme pops up just about everywhere I visit these days, and Winston of Nobody Asked . . . plays as well, but with a twists: here is his list, two items of which are deliberately false and which he challenges his readers to find. And here he taunts his readers for not guessing one of them.

Raminagrobis discusses several different translations of a poem by Baudelaire.

Over at Tales from the Microbial Lab, Pam's bumper crop of tomatoes inspires her to write a poem about them.

I've really gotten behind in my reading of Heaven Tree, Gawain's extraordinary art blog. Here's a promise to get caught up when I return from Topeka. In this post, he describes the experience of seeing and walking on the mosaic tiles at St Mark's in Venice. And speaking of Gawain, in this post Conrad of Varieties of Unreligious Experience describes his blog-meet with Gawain as they wander about London together. Conviviality indeed not only lives, it flourishes: you can't help but want to know these men better after reading this post.

I have a couple of new posts up over at Admirers of Baroque Art, one of which is barely worth mentioning. The first one is yet another post on Velázquez's Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, this one in response to an article in which two writers claim to have "solved" it. The other is a short commentary on a Velázquez portrait of a famed Spanish sculptor.

That's all from here for now. Be well and safe this holiday.