A Few Little Things to Talk About...

Nice weather here in the Midwest. Only a few weeks until watermelon season starts to kick into high gear!

• Here's a guy from Scotland who is doing a survey of bloggers as part of his college research project.
• This is a very interesting Language Log post about hyperlinking practices in the New York Times and elsewhere. Excerpt: It's pretty clear what's going on. There's an index of Times Topics, which "correspond to the most frequently assigned subject, geographic, organization and personal name headings". Stories are indexed (automatically?) relative to that (finite and fairly small) list of topics. Thus Berger's story on suburban home prices is linked to Harvard, even though the only connection is a quote in the 14th paragraph from someone who works there; and to Martha Stewart, even though she is only mentioned in the 25th paragraph as an example of one of the wealthy residents of the town of Bedford.
• Now, I think Camille Paglia is one tough cookie. Or so I thought... So WTF is the deal with this situation regarding her and Ann Althouse?? Excerpt: ...A couple days later, I received a phone call inviting me to the pre-speech dinner with Paglia. I accepted the invitation. But what's this? Suddenly, I'm uninvited! Camille Paglia has actually read "Try to survive a tornado with a post-structuralist," and -- I'm told -- she's angry and hurt by what I said about her. The very material that was used to promote the book has become a reason to demand that my invitation to the dinner be withdrawn. Okaaaaayyyy.... For 15 years, I've thought of Camille Paglia as an unusually tough and feisty woman. Wasn't she the one who sneered at women who acted like fragile victims?