Our Muse this week is Greta Garbo, and why not: the DG vants to be left alone with his buddies at Boing Boing and has been far too busy being slashdotted and counting his web traffic to send us any lollies.

Mark likes this on the diaries of a not very nice person; a campaign to devise a new swear word for the 21st Century, launched via Facebook; finds Christopher Hitchens is in top form “pissing into your grandmother’s fish tank”; and the “recreational genetics” that are making America squirm about its past.

From li’l ole me, Scott Murray at the Guardian reckons our very own “fourth most popular digi-folk parodists” Flight of the Conchords is a “bona fide classic” and is set to become the new Curb Your Enthusiasm.

There are 14 days left to vote on Helen DeWitt’s blog poll widget about whether Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker is a work of genius. No prizes from me for guessing the correct answer.

Steve Johnson reviews Andrew Keen’s new book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture in the Chicago Tribune. Keen doesn’t like YouTube, hates the blogosphere and distrusts Wikipedia. Today’s web, he says, is “an endless digital forest of mediocrity”. Speak for yourself, mate. If you haven’t figured out that the internet is the disruptive technology to end them all, don’t hold us responsible for your poverty of comprehension.

And talking about disruption, this piece at SFGate.com about Owsley Stanley, via Boing Boing, is essential reading, as is Owsley’s own site; in particular his essays. But then I’m an old hippie. This man was probably the first private individual to manufacture LSD and has thus been deservedly canonised in song by Steely Dan, the Grateful Dead and others.

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Lydia Davis on KCRW’s Bookworm in conversation with the inimitable Michael Silverblatt; especially some of her very short pieces from the collection, Varieties of Disturbance; including a few one-liners that are self-contained grammar primers, such as Example of the Continuing Past Tense in a Hotel Room (reproduced here in full):

“Your housekeeper has been Shelly.”

Stephen likes this alternative take on Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion; and he says he naturally agrees with number six on this list (via Marginal Revolution); he thinks some articles in the latest (UK) Literary Review look promising — philosopher Alan Ryan exploring the ramifications of John Gray’s theory about our search for Utopia and Alexander Masters on a history of Algebra; and SS closes with a French lolly about drivers trading licence points on the internet, no doubt with a petulant shrug.

Finally, if you’d like to experience the Great Garbo in something light and entertaining, rent out Ninotchka from your local DVD store. Marvel at her ridiculous hat and the sexiest eyebrows the world has ever seen.

до свидания!