JUAN NON-VOLOKH says that charges of plagiarism levelled at Norah Vincent by lefty bloggers are bogus. Wait — didn’t Bill & Ted use that word?

UPDATE: The MinuteMan says Jason Rylander is “hyperventilating” on this one.

MARK STEYN REPORTS from Johannesburg on Robert Mugabe’s hilarious speech. Mugabe was just slaying them. . . .

DailySummit.Net has the end-of-summit wrapup.

UPDATE: Here’s more on Mugabe and his supporters at the summit.

RICH GALEN HAS NUMEROUS AMUSING OBSERVATIONS AND FACTS regarding the Johannesburg summit.

GARY FARBER has all your Hugo Award links in one convenient place. I’d gotten out of the habit of visiting his blog when he quit posting for a while. He’s back, and it’s nice to see.

THIS BOOK is a must-read in light of what’s going on right now.

IS IT LIVE, OR IS IT MEMOREX? Statistically, it’s probably Memorex. Er, and so are you, actually.

ORIGINS OF THE TERM “IDIOTARIAN” — Charles Johnson reveals the secret.

BLOGOPHOBIA: These worries worry me, but I’m not sure what I can do about the problem:

And I think there’s a trend growing in the Blogosphere, as the truly talented bloggers build brand recognition and market share, they start getting too much mail to respond to it all and picking to which mail they’ll reply or post about, much more carefully than in the humble beginnings. They’ve started turning inward, to each other.

They will become the Establishment, The Big Wheels as the Fat Guy called them, instead of the Young Turks, the Outside Looking In. They will slowly cut themselves off from the flow of esoteric/unusual incoming content that gave them their starts as bloggers. Content that they don’t read is content they don’t post, which is content that We Wonder What They Did With when we hear about it from another source, instead of from them.

Well, I sure get a lot of email. I do read it all, usually — unless a bunch backs up when I’m offline for a while. And I try to get to new corners of the Blogosphere when I can. (Like blogs about foot-washings.) I make a point of trying to link to new or different blogs, in fact.

But, yeah, the Blogosphere’s too big for anybody to really know, and now that InstaPundit’s over a year old it’s not bright and shiny and new anymore, and I get a lot of email. That’s life. If I get in a rut, and it’s no fun anymore, I’ll quit. (It’s not like I’ll miss the income, after all.) But it’s still fun for me so far.

BREAKING RANKS: Kuwait supports invasion, saying that it considers the war with Iraq to have never ended. Have you noticed the steady trickle of new diplomatic support over the past week? The ducks are forming a row.

DAVE TROWBRIDGE has a long post on Just War theory and Iraq.

DAN HANSON EXPLAINS why Big Entertainment hates the web. Hint: it’s not about piracy, but about control:

This new distribution and marketing model is a huge threat to the record companies. After all, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot only cost $85,000 to produce, and distribution was free. With low-cost production and a new distribution network that connects artists directly with their fans, there is little room for a giant plodding record label to insinuate itself into the picture and skim off the money. This is the real reason why the RIAA is spending millions of dollars to buy politicians and use the heavy hand of government to try to shut these networks down.

Indeed.

ROBERT MUGABE was the first head of state to get applause from journalists in Johannesburg, reports DailySummit.net, but not Big Media — I guess the applauding journalists were too embarrassed, or too unwilling to admit their biases, to include that in their reports. Good thing there’s a blogger there to keep them honest. Or, anyway, to expose them when they’re not.

OVER THE WEEKEND, I finished Richard Marius’s An Affair of Honor, which I found quite gripping, though also somewhat disturbing, if probably in a different way than he intended. Unlike Marius — and whole generations of southern authors — I never grew up on a farm, and though I spent part of my youth in the small town of Maryville, Tennessee, it’s a college town just outside Knoxville and doesn’t count. As a result, I don’t have the love/hate relationship — born in no small part of tortured religious introspection, which the other part of my childhood spent hanging around Harvard Divinity School and observing its denizens immunized me against — necessary to identify with some of the characters’ angst.

Still, a great posthumous book, by a very thoughtful and talented man who was very generous with his time — and even more so, retrospectively, since he turned out to have so little.

AZIZ POONAWALLA IS ENCOURAGING Blogger users to upgrade to Blogger Pro. I’m technically still a Blogger Pro subscriber, but I don’t use it anymore. But Pyra deserves support for kicking off the blogosphere explosion over the past year, and if you’re so inclined I encourage you to upgrade to Pro as a way of supporting Pyra — which, by the way, has provided an outlet for a lot of Iranian bloggers who are managing to bypass the mullahs’ censorship.

BACK FROM THE LAKE. MORE BLOGGING LATER. In the meantime, read this.