Deliberately old fashioned lead in. Did it ever strike anyone else as odd that it takes a corps of bloggers that is growing at a rate of at least 8,000 to 9,000 blogs a day to keep track of everything that’s interesting on the Internet as it comes on line? What does that say about the overall rate of growth of the Internet? If we’re the surface of the sphere, what does the inside look like?

• Kind of like this, apparently.
• Tony Pierce’s second self-published book of his blog, Blook II, is on pre-sale now. The best writing in the blogosphere, in book form, including Tony’s trip to Hell with Kurt Cobain. Get it now.
• Linux hackers get a hold of Big Mouth Billy Bass. The result? Videoconferencing through Billy Bass, coming soon.
• The quick review of Sting’s “Sacred Love” in the New York Times stops short of calling him a geezer, but it’s increasingly obvious that he’s no longer the man who wrote a song treatment of Lolita, or even name-checked General Pinochet.
• Page and Brin’s Blog: What if Google’s founders wrote a blog? Please try to ignore the fact that it’s run on a search engine optimization site, and take the endless cracks about “selling PageRank” in stride accordingly.
• Why are we nervous about expanded surveillance powers for the FBI? Um, sometimes history speaks for itself.
• Soon, we hope, there will be a survey of Virginia accents, following on the heels of the National Geographic survey of Texas accents. Maybe it will show why those who grew up in Tidewater (like me) have no particular Southern accent, while those who grow up in Richmond sound a little like Foghorn Leghorn.
• Charles Lindbergh: First dog to cross the Atlantic solo?

It has been a lazy holiday day—well, lazy if you don’t count housecleaning and some desultory day-after-Thanksgiving shopping (at Lowes, so I’m not sure it really counts).

Tonight I repeated the sautéed duck breast recipe from last night (when I bought the breasts from Larry’s, I didn’t realize the package had four breasts, not two. It made me feel slightly better about paying more that $25 for duck breasts). I made one change: instead of doing the apricot sauce, I did a pan sauce with drippings from the cooked duck, onion, fresh herbs (sage, rosemary, and thyme) from our garden, salt, pepper, veal stock, white wine, and a little butter. It was much better.

We had the duck with some steamed green beans dressed with olive oil, lemon, and sea salt, and the rest of the bottle of the 1993 CastelGiocondo Brunello di Montalcino (link goes to the 1994 vintage) that we opened yesterday to taste with the duck teaser. Omiofriggin’dio. So fabulous.