Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! Could any day of the week be more bon? I seriously doubt it. And here, for your Sunday morning cerebral pleasuring, is yet another collection of mots immissiblés. So push aside your limited-edition, Franklin Mint, Obama ‘08 coffee mug, and prepare to blissfully click your way through some of the best writings the internets have on offer this week. Bon appétit!

Mark Simpson : Little Britain: too camp for Uncle Sam?

“What other culture could have produced someone like Ernest Hemingway,” waspish, bisexual American exile Gore Vidal once asked of America’s favourite so-butch-he’s-camp writer, “and not seen the joke?” The answer, of course, was that only a culture that couldn’t see the joke could produce a Hemingway.

Simson L. Garfinkel : Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth

With little notice from the outside world, the community-written encyclopedia Wikipedia has redefined the commonly accepted use of the word “truth.”

Why should we care? Because Wikipedia’s articles are the first- or second-ranked results for most Internet searches. Type “iron” into Google, and Wikipedia’s article on the element is the top-ranked result; likewise, its article on the Iron Cross is first when the search words are “iron cross.” Google’s search algorithms rank a story in part by how many times it has been linked to; people are linking to Wikipedia articles a lot.

Ed Potton : The dramatic world of Marc Almond

Wilton’s Music Hall in East London is full of ghosts. The world’s oldest surviving “grand music hall”, its 150-year-old floorboards and peeling walls played host to Victorian music stars, the anti-fascist warriors of Cable Street and, it’s said, Britain’s first cancan. Now, materialising out of a side door, is another phantom: pale, delicate face, pierced nose, jet-black hair, long flowing coat. Wilton’s is a special place for Marc Almond; it is where, last year, he chose to perform his first solo concert after the motorcycle accident that left him in a two-week coma in 2004.

Scott Tucker : A Less Perfect Union: Gay Marriage and the Subversion of the Republic

Again, consider: Why not begin a widespread boycott of marriage among those who are presently the overwhelming majority of members within that club—namely, heterosexuals? To ask such questions is to answer them—because the overwhelming majority is not brave. Neither among heterosexuals nor among homosexuals. If civic courage and dissent were already the daily norm, then indeed we might be on the verge of a social revolution. Or at least a general strike. Instead, we choose our battles, but not often on the social terrain we would like to choose.

What is the moral and political difference between marriage as a human right and marriage as just another capitalist country club? Marriage has a social history and indeed human possibilities that long predate the modern state. There are secular libertarians who are willing to reinvent marriage as one more corporate contract, and some of them do indeed serve as judges in the public courts. This does not mean we, the people, must accept the bad bargain of capitalist social relations without friction or struggle.

Will Self : Inching Along the Edge of the World

Ever since I was last in Shetland – the northernmost archipelago of that greater archipelago, the British Isles – I’ve had an Ordnance Survey map of the remotest of these islands pinned to the wall of the room where I write. Foula – which is pronounced “Foola” – to me, the very name sounds romantic; but then I love an island, and the smaller and remoter the better, within reason. For eleven years I’ve been promising I’ll make it to this three-and-a-half by two-and-a-half mile niblet of a landmass that sits, like some Avalon, 15 miles off the west coast of Shetland, out in the tempestuous Atlantic.

Stuart Whatley : The Group Behind Prop 8

In her October column on ballot initiatives, Dana Goldstein points out conservatives’ tendency to employ language in their initiatives that is antithetical to their intended goal. Ward Connerly’s “civil-rights initiatives,” for example, seek to quash affirmative-action programs. But perhaps no group has demonstrated greater dissonance between rhetoric and reality as the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF). The ADF is a primary player in the push to pass the California Protection of Marriage Act (Proposition 8), which calls for the explicit revocation, not protection, of the gay community’s new-found right to marry.

John Lichfield : Je t’aime (again): The French love affair with Serge Gainsbourg

Serge Gainsbourg has also been rediscovered by young people in his home country as one of the few truly original musicians that France produced in the classic years of pop and rock. He is now seen as a precursor of Queen or David Bowie, as someone who successfully spliced rock and classical music and a writer who produced poetic rather than crass pop lyrics (although he also wrote plenty of those).

Gainsbourg, whose first album appeared a half-century ago, is the subject of an ambitious, hi-tech exhibition which began this week at the Musée de Musique in Paris. There is also a series of tribute concerts at the Cité de Musique, to which the museum belongs, including one next Tuesday by Jane Birkin, now a fresh, 61-year-old English rose and the most popular Briton living in France.