We’ve posted before here about the “horridness of Christmas Music”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/12/06/most-annoying-christmas-record. Ian McDonald has the “antidote”:http://ianmcdonald.livejournal.com/52744.html.

captainlucy makes the blinding discovery that Christmas muzak can be made bearable by inserting the word ‘Sex’ for ‘Christmas’.

‘I wish it could be sex everyday…’ etc etc.

It can also be made deeply disturbing, vide the first line from ‘Do they know it’s Christmas…

I’ve been away without ordered leave from the blogosphere for the last couple of weeks – the joys of end-of-semester committee crunch and grading. But two things that I’ve wanted to link to:

“Greg Bloom”:http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/12/3/231739/424 has another series of posts on the ways in which the Fund for Public Interest Research has resisted unionization efforts. The way in which many purportedly lefty organizations refuse to let their workers bargain for decent conditions is pretty shameful.

Alexander Mueller, fresh from porting over Susanna Clarke has translated the China Mieville seminar “into German too”:http://molochronik.antville.org/stories/1528809/. Great stuff.

Finally, I’ve been meaning for a while to link to this “Nir Rosen piece”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR31.6/rosen.html, which is the best and most detailed on the ground discussion that I’ve seen of Iraq’s descent into civil war. I see via “TPM Muckraker”:http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002155.php that Rosen is venturing into the blogosphere.

Last night I mentioned to my wife — a reference librarian at the Library of Congress whose areas of concentration include e-commerce and information technology — that the BBC website had just run a story headlined “Blogging ‘set to peak next year.”” Here it is.

Her response to this was a sound (one I cannot quite transcribe) conveying a subtle blend of disbelief, disgust, and world-weariness. It was not at all a matter of pro-blog parti pris; rather, it reflected a deeply informed disdain for the methods and presumptions usually involved in making such predictions. As usual, I payed close attention to her opinion in the matter. (Reference librarians have amazing powers.)
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Next time you want to link to a New York Times article on your blog or want to bookmark it for future reference, you no longer have to rely on a bookmarklet to generate a permanent link. On each article page, there is now a Share link that reveals links to some sites plus the possibility of obtaining a permanent link to the piece.

The automatic link options are to Digg, Facebook and Newswine. What curious choices. I would love to know what went into those decisions, possible deals or whatnot. Digg users seem mostly interested in tech news so while it may make sense to have a quick link to that service on science and technology pieces, it doesn’t make sense on other sections of the NYTimes site. The idea suggested on The Mu Life about different links depending on the part of the site makes sense. And where are quick links to Reddit, Netscape, Yahoo My Web and del.icio.us, just to name a few. Has the Facebook user demographic changed significantly in recent months away from college students? If not (and I haven’t heard of any such significant changes) then why assume that users of that system would be most likely to want to bookmark and share NYTimes articles?

In any case, the good news is that they had the sense to create a permalink option that you can use to add the page to the social bookmarking site of your choice, which would be del.icio.us in my case thanks to its automated post-to-blog feature.