Here's a less silly screenshot reflecting the progress of SBCL's upcoming Unicode support. A limited number of external formats have been implemented: enough to act as proof of concept, as demonstrated there. The TODO file is beginning to read more like notes of the process we went through rather than the mountain that has yet to be climbed, which is definitely cheering.
In other news, I went to Amsterdam last weekend for a local lispmeet (well, it was flagged as benelux, but when you're getting people from the UK and Sweden, it's looking more than just that.) There was much of interest, from Peter van Eynde's stealth introduction of Lisp resulting in him being “forced” to do Unix systems engineering in his favourite language, through Edi Weitz' rdnzl .net/Lisp bridge, to the ever-present question of evolution of Lisp: this time Nick Levine represented the clrfi-editors (those who know Scheme will spot the similarities with the SRFIs) with a plea for a high-quality submission to see if their process could be unblocked.
On this last, my view is that the Lisp community, whatever that is, certainly needs a process to evolve the language (preferably backwards-compatibly, but some things might need to be removed root-and-branch), it also needs people to do the work to produce high-quality standardization material: and it's more the lack of that that's lacking, and no amount of process will generate it. I'd love to be proved wrong.