Slightly Stale Internet Pickings

A couple of brief articles that caught my eye over the past week: The New York Times writes up the return of Holst's The Planets to astronomical completeness, while noting the now superfluous status of a "Pluto" add-on commissioned from British composer Colin Matthews a few years back... Reuters passes along the Met's announcement that it will broadcast six live Sunday matinees in movie theaters next year. If people barely go to movie theaters to see movies these days I'm not sure how many new fans operas will draw that way, but I'm intrigued -- I'm a big fan of visuals in opera recordings, even though filmed stage productions almost always end up static and boring to look at, what the Onion once mocked as "One Camera in the Balcony of La Traviata"... In the world of non-classical-music-related culture, Slate details the pleasures of deconstructing your friends' cultural habits and personalities via Netflix, through their ratings of movies they've watched but more so through their queues. Just from my own ever-larger Netflix queue -- I don't creepily overanalyze the lists of my own couple of Netflix buddies -- I'm familiar with the emergent narrative of movies one is watching, movies one plans to watch, movies one thinks one should watch, movies one perpetually puts off watching...