Sausages for Breaking Fast

No sausages yesterday. At least not during daylight hours (as if I were observant — or had even been raised in that tradition — anyway, or even, as an atheist, cared).

• Doonesberry's focus a while back on soldiers' playlists on iPods now has some academic respectability (or at least enough for a Monday morning).
• There's now a proposal for rating arbitrators floating about. Yeah, like that's going to do the victims other side — largely consumers — any good. It's not that arbitration is an inherently bad concept; it's that the system we have is self-interested and corrupted.
• Gee, what a concept: sites for individual cases as marketing tools. Something I've been doing for, oh, close to a decade.
• Two pieces of "news" in the publishing industry demonstrate that publishing executives aren't even smart enough to understand a hypothetical Publishing for Dummies. First, PW cites a survey proclaiming that 72% of publishers are trying to develop new business models; one wonders what the other 28% are doing (compare to this item from the Frankfurt Book Fair). Then, immediately to the right of that item on today's PW front page, there's an announcement that Sony has signed up a vanity press for its e-book reader. Anyone for a little cognitive dissonance?
• It appears that my approach to learning — learn everything, all the time — remains rather unpopular... which isn't too surprising in the face of allegations that Joanne Rowling was denied a medal by a notoriously even-more-hostile-to-intellectuals-than-usual White House¹ because the Harry Potter books allegedly encourage witchcraft (announced during Banned Books Week). Of course, a true polymath rejects the very premise of this article lauding Dickens as timeless: Not only are Dickens's characters closely bound to their times and circumstances, but they're not even the best examples from Victorian literature.
• Too much love for IP — or not enough?

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1. I still think that Republicans should be forced to refer to it as the "Half-Black House" due to both its current resident... and the fact that it was built with slave labor.