Health and mental hygiene

News nuggets:

New York’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene detects mice in the food-service area of the Metropolitan Opera. . . . Cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, composer Michael Wolters and students of the Birmingham Conservatoire will improvise musical accompaniment to the BBC’s evening newscast, The Independent reports. . . . La Scala has commissioned Giorgio Battistelli to compose an opera on Al Gore’s "An Inconvenient Truth." . . . A favorite tune at British funerals, according to The Guardian, is Monty Python’s "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." . . . David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame, will transform the Great Hall of New York’s Battery Museum Building into "a gargantuan cast-iron orchestra," The New York Times reports.

A paragraph that meanders from "health and mental hygiene" to "gargantuan cast-iron orchestra" strikes me as a not too subtle hint that it’s time for a break. I’m taking off a couple of months to pursue other interests and psychically reboot. Back in August.