And now, bacchanalia: We pause from our World Series coverage to bring you nymphs.

Mixolydian Mode points the way to "an eccentric online art gallery," the Art Renewal Center:

You won’t find Kandinsky, Klee or even Cezanne there, but if your tastes run to Waterhouse, Bouguereau or the Pre-Raphaelites, you’re in luck.

The piece above by William Bouguereau is just the thing to hang behind the cyber-bar to give The Irish Elk the proper Locke-Ober's feel.

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Now Playing: "Wa Wa Wa" and "Sugar Foot Stomp" by King Oliver.

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Elsewhere:

The Brits re-enact the Charge of the Light Brigade.

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The NY Sun offers a review of a new biography of the pioneering black heavyweight champ Jack Johnson.

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Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post reconsiders the canonical standing of Holden Caulfield:

"The Catcher in the Rye" is now, you'll be told just about anywhere you ask, an "American classic," right up there with the book that was published the following year, Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." They are two of the most durable and beloved books in American literature and, by any reasonable critical standard, two of the worst. Rereading "The Catcher in the Rye" after all those years was almost literally a painful experience: The combination of Salinger's execrable prose and Caulfield's jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil.

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Armavirumque on campus conservatives in opposition:

[T]he only students being hurt by the liberal-dominated academy are, like it or not, the liberal ones. We conservatives always had to hit the books, blogs, and newspapers to argue against received opinion, while professors congratulated our "progressive" peers just for showing up and nodding. Pop quiz: who, then, got half an education?

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Otto Clemson Hiss on inscrutable spam: The Jade Monkey goes to anyone who can decipher this.

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Ecclesia Anglicana's Nashotah House football team, the Black Monks, traveled to Seabury Western Seminary for the annual Lavabo Bowl: An omen occurred when Seabury's thurible broke during their blessing of the field. God would not accept their strange fire.

Meantime, at San Francisco's fabled St. Gregory of Nyssa Parish, the celebrant has forgotten her shoes but donned the couch cover.

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Who does the Vatican favor in the US presidential election? Sandro Magister reports. The Espresso church columnist also offers a who's who of authority in the Roman curia.

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John Kerry may have taken to traveling with rosary beads and St. Christopher medal, but really isn't one to be lecturing on Christian charity, observes the Globe's Jeff Jacoby.

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From England, land of Hope and Glory, Fr. Faber and the Brompton Oratory:

The Tablet polled readers on their Favourite Hymn. The winner: "Here I Am, Lord," the St. Louis Jesuit chestnut by Dan Schutte, a clip of which may be heard here.

The winning song is aptly titled, in my opinion, for the Redd Foxx heart-clasping reaction it prompts, and a fitting follow-up addition to the Schutte songbook would be: "I'm coming to join you, Elizabeth!"