Wax Scrawls is a recurring feature on Scrawled in Wax in which usually I link to ‘non-techy’ things I hope you’ll find interesting or, in the case of today, a post in which, feeling fuzzy-headed from beer, I link to shit and then ramble about it. Um… enjoy?

If I could get Toronto-centric for a moment… There was a delegation from San Francisco that came to do a sort of comparative study of Toronto and their thoughts are presented in this issue of SPUR Urbanist (via the always great Spacing magazine). It’s interesting for a number of reasons and, if you live here, it’ll make you feel both fortunate and pessimistic. Speaking of Spacing, they also link to what they’re calling ‘Thunderdusk‘ – i.e. yesterday’s weird combination of a thunderstorm and a brilliant sunset which some have gone so far as to call ‘”the sunset of the century”. I dunno’ about that, but the pics are pretty great.

The video for “Lights Out” by Santogold, one of my favourite tracks from the album. [Thanks, Rex.]

The Guardian has a piece on whether Raymond Carver is the ‘king of the dirty realists’. From someone who reads as little as I do it may not mean much, but Carver is probably my favourite writer and his spare, aching stories can break me in two like nothing else. As I twittered recently, my aim in life is to meld him and Owen Ashworth of CFTPA into a bloggy, tumbly collection of short stories. If it were published, I expect shortly thereafter I’d fill my pockets with stones and walk into a river. Oh also, if for some reason you’re interested, my favourite writer right now is Zulfikar Ghose.

This is the website for neuticles. What are neuticles, you ask? They’re plastic balls to replace the ones you remove from your dog. Yeah. Beer and blogging: it’s a great combination. (And since we’re on the topic, it seems that ‘beer goggles’ are actually based in science).

I don’t know what the story of blog I Wrote This For You is, but it’s sorta’ heartbreaking.

That ‘answering machine’ muxtape I was working on is now up to a massive six songs. Thanks to Vanessa and Matthew for suggestions and if you have any more songs with answering machine messages in them, please send them in. In the meantime, the Jenny Owen Youngs and Throw Me the Statue tracks especially are worth listening to.

And to end, since I am finally getting my ass out of the suburbs again, it seems appropriate to link to this Freakonomics piece discussing the future of the our extra-urban wastelands spaces. It’s grim but fascinating.