Drugged-Up Sausages

Today's sausage links sponsored by codeine and a slip on the ice checking an empty mailbox.

• A warning for the government guardians of French linguistic purity: The history of English linguistic purity.
• Some lament the end of Kirkus; some don't.
• In a long-overdue change in business structures dictated by fundamental economic realities that were apparent by 1998, Nielsen Business Publications has sold three and is closing two entertainment-industry trade publications. The sale includes Adweek, Mediaweek, Brandweek, Film Journal International, Backstage, The Hollywood Reporter, and Billboard; the two terminations are Kirkus Reviews and Editor & Publisher. The irony that the first three of the surviving publications are explicitly focussed on repurposing the same damned material, and the remaining four are only slightly differing perspectives on a different set of the same damned material (and an increasingly interdependent set of those perspectives), should be more than adequate warning for book publishers struggling to maintain the casebound package as the default product.
• Random House has decided that it isn't bound by settlements it doesn't like anymore (or, for that matter, by U.S. Supreme Court opinions). It will be interesting to see exactly how long it takes someone to find one of the two procedural means of making it pay...
• Mark Ingram was awarded the Heisman Trophy as the best college football player... without one mention of the substance of the "college" part. No note of whether he met Alabama's ordinary (rather low) admissions standards; no note of his progress toward graduation, his GPA, or his major; no mention of the extra tutoring available to "scholarship" athletes employees of the athletic department.
• Multicategory novelist Laura Resnick ponders vanity press scams. She does not go nearly far enough... but that's probably because she's never actually met any vanity-press owners. ("She'll never agree to marry the Prince." "Why not?" "She's met him.")
• I've often thought our banking policies were on drugs, but Charlie Stross is somewhat more literal about it.