Scrawled in Wax

Hey Nature! You can fuck off now! As I write this, there is another foot of snow slowly building up outside. In fact, in the time it takes you to read this sentence, fourteen children will go temporarily missing under mounds of snow. So, to bide your time until spring – and to console those momentarily-panicked parents – here are some warm scrawl links to keep you going.

While he’s unknown here in North America, standup comic Papa CJ is apparently tearing up a storm in the UK and India, and this YouTube clip – in which the Indian immigrant excoriates the English and ‘Great’ Britain – proves why (The last line is absolute gold). As one review said, “to take on and berate your audience while making them cry with laughter shows a supreme confidence and he had it in spades”. Suddenly, my dissertation on immigrant identity seems hopelessly impotent.

Hardly earth-shattering or even new, but here’s a great little pictorial list of movie references in The Simpsons. What’s great about this is that many – including me – get these references backward: on the The Simpsons first and then from the original films later on. So, despite his contoversial comments on 9/11, Baudrillard and his crazy theories are sounding more right all the time. [via]

This entirely fictional diary of Heath Ledger‘s last days – in Esquire no less – makes all kindsa’ sense. What are the lives of celebrities but fictions? What is the image of a celebrity but a fiction? What do we love more than something that blurs the line between fake and real? Okay, I’ll stop with the annoying rhetorical questions now. [via]

So, imagine you’re having a cigarette after sex and the person you’ve just slept with – maybe even made love to – says, “oh yeah, did I, umm, mention I’m an assassin for an ultra right-wing paramilitary organisation?”. That actually happened to this fellow as he trained as a photojournalist in Colombia. In. Sane. [via]

Clive Thompson’s blog is pretty solid – exactly the sort of smart, diverse stuff that blogging does well. Examples? A post on how the brain shuts down during improvisation; one on how Japanese scientists have finally replicated how minute events can trigger huge traffic jams; or another on the relationship gamers have to AI characters. All of which is to say, Clive Thompson is like a much better, more successful version of me.

While the buzz is that private file exchange service drop.io is going to be this year’s SXSW darling, the real deal seems to be organisation tool Twine, which promises to link your information horizontally, rather than in the traditional vertical silos of yesterday. It’s in private beta but it’s still exciting to think that this semantic web thing might actually be fo’ real.

There’s something a little fascinating about this NY Times interview with Mary-Louise Parker. For example, it suggests this about Parker’s ideas about fame: “To reveal much about her private life, she said, would be ‘inelegant.’ That’s the word she repeatedly uses to describe the prying impulse, as if paparazzism were more of an aesthetic failing than a moral one. “