Below are simple links to other interesting stuff I've come across on the web in the last day or two; they may or may not concern literature or photography, or indeed the arts at all. You can click here to learn more about how I compile this list and what software I use, if you're interested.

Fans petition Disneyworld to turn Sawyer Island into "Lost" attraction
Funny -- fans of the weirdo television show "Lost" (starting its final season in just a few weeks) have started an online petition, to try to get Disneyworld to re-purpose their old Tom Sawyer Island (now serving apparently as a home to several cheap distractions involving Pirates of the Caribbean) into a permanent attraction featuring the JJ Abrams show. I'd go to that!

Fascinating photo essay of semi-abandoned Biosphere 2
If you click through to just one overlong but fascinating online photo essay this year, make sure it's this one, a look at the post-apocalyptic wasteland that the much-hyped Reagan-Era scientific complex "Biosphere 2" has become, in the wake of the post-9/11 realization that the entire project was essentially a pointless folly. (It was an attempt to create a livable air-based environment while completely cut off from natural resources, supposedly in preparation for colonizing space; "Biosphere 1" is Earth, get it?) Once management fell apart, in light of the news of the founders actually being New Age frauds who had made up their scientific credentials, the entire complex became decrepit quite quickly, leading to the untamed mess you see in these images, taken a few months before much of the complex is slated to be bulldozed to make way for new housing developments.

1 in 20 retirees still smoke pot, twice as many abuse pills
Ah, the Baby Boomers.

Germans have very, very intellectual debate over future of welfare state
Back when I visited Germany in the early 2000s, what many agreed was going to be a major issue there soon was the subject of their "welfare state" -- the unusually generous programs for the retired, jobless and homeless, that is, paid for by the taxes of the working, a system that has become lopsided by now because of the huge amount of retired now there. And sure enough, one of the country's leading liberal intellectuals has spurred a national debate there on the subject, by essentially calling the entire system broken and ironically a means to keep an entire class of people as permanent semi-citizens. Click through for all the nerdy details at GlobalPost.com.

Porn industry financially imploding at rapidly dramatic rate
Did you know that the revenue generated by the adult-entertainment industry may have dropped in the last few years by perhaps as much as half? Here, an interesting article from the Daily Beast on why that is -- not just because of online piracy like you'd think, but also the profound rise in amateur porn, the lack of desire among customers for full-length movies, the growing amount of porn stars who moonlight as actual prostitutes because of such social media as Facebook and Twitter, and interestingly the high competition being offered by such MMOs as World Of Warcraft and Second Life, which one insider claims here nearly 100 percent of his industry plays, both the creatives and the fans.

NBC disaster! Leno in prime-time out! Conan might be quitting! Affiliate revolt! HA HA HA HA HA HA!
See, I f-cking TOLD you, didn't I? NBC's experiment at a nightly Jay Leno variety show during prime time has officially become a giant trainwreck disaster -- the affiliates are apparently so unhappy that they've been quietly threatening to sink this coming merger with Comcast, so under pressure NBC has decided to scale the show back to a half-hour and put it back at its usual after-late-news slot, which would of course bump Conan O'Brien's "Tonight Show" back a half-hour, and make him the "main" star of late-night in name only. And this apparently has Conan so pissed that he's actually seriously thinking about quitting, which because of his contract ironically will net him a $45 million bonus. Meanwhile, NBC has five new hours of prime-time programming to fill, and just announced that they've gone as safe a route as humanly possible, including splashy new big-budget shows by JJ Abrams and Jerry Bruckheimer and a remake of the freaking "Rockford Files;" so in other words, an exact repeat of the kind of behavior that put the network in trouble to begin with, and that the "Leno" move was supposed to be a radical action against, meaning that hundreds of millions of dollars was wasted in the last year without a single person learning a single lesson. Gee, and you wonder why the corporate broadcast paradigm is dying?

Republican Party is almost broke; will they finally kick out Steele?
Well, okay, so "Republican Party" is a pretty big umbrella with a lot of unrelated budgets; but the budget specifically of the Republican National Committee has dropped from $22 million and no debt at the time of chairman Michael Steele's election to now $9 million and with nearly $5 million in debt, and with midterm elections this year that are looking more and more like a potential disaster for the GOP. The problem? To fire their very first black chairman in the middle of the Obama presidency would be an unrecoverable disaster, or so think most Republicans -- which of course is the risk of trying to solve a problem with a surface-level gesture, is that you then have to stick with that gesture no matter what an ill-conceived disaster it turns out to be -- which is why they're now in this unstoppable downward spiral of fundraising debacles and endless public gaffes. Many are saying that this latest financial news is finally enough to kick Steele out of office without seeming like out-and-out racists; it'll be interesting to see if he still has his job by a month from now.