Good morning, West Coast. Good afternoon, East Coast. Good riddance, Eastern Bloc!

OMG, y'all. I'm only kiddeen. Hilli Heihmenn here, subbing for Mme. Grisi Pasta, who's taking her daily constipational. Wait… or was it constitutional? I dunno. Something. All I know is she's walking around some park in Seattle. I know..Seattle?puke… but at least she doesn't have to contend with those silly Christo curtainrods.

Besides, I want to take a moment to recognize a few new sites that I'm adding to the "blogroll." I really hate that term, as it conjures up images of auntie's favorite holiday concoction, except instead of being covered with various nuts and sauces, it's littered with comma splices and gigantic digital photos that screw up the HTML formatting and sizing. With the recent explosion of classical music and opera blogs, I can almost understand how Mme. Grisi Pasta and/or our editor might've missed these, but I suspect it's more due to the fact that they both wear adult diapers and are actually illiterate.

These weblogs have definitely earned a place of infamy on our sidebar:

• Finocchio: a blog mixing lit, crit, and polit, authored by a Philadelphia lawyer and a former academic. Pray, tell, Finocchio. Are you also an honorary "sister of the Church"? Hail, Mary!
• Never Been Home: "musical dispatches from the city of lights." Oh, sod off, then. You get to be in Paris? I'm herding goats and doing a stint as a sherpa. I can only dream of the Bois de Boulogne.
• SilverBlog: another professional singer! And one who adds Trrill to his blogroll with the tagline "because opera isn't just for straight men." But, Aaron, we wish it were just for straight men. If I hear one more faggot call some overhyped soprano "fabulous"… I'm gonna go home… and I'm gonna bite my pillow, is what I'm gonna do.
• An Unamplified Voice: "One operagoer's notes." Well, we only wish our Post-Its were so articulate and carefully-considered. Instead, ours look like we stuck the pen between our ass-cheeks, scooted around on the paper, and accidentally spelled "c doG runn."