Traffic is a little more complicated over here, you see.

I try to leave the truly geeky tech stuff to the fine folks at BoingBoing and Engadget — you may have noticed them on the blogroll to your right — but this is something I haven’t yet seen on either of them.

Got a laptop and one of them new-fangled WiFi-enabled cell phones? Sick of wandering around looking for an open wireless connection? Well, dig this: A new program called Walking Hot Spot turns your phone into a WiFi router, letting your laptop access its 3G data capability. You can control the level of security, and allow as many as four other users to access the connection.

Pretty clever, huh? (Particularly if said phone has an unlimited data package.) I imagine it’ll suck your battery dry fairly quickly, but presumably you’d just plug your phone into your laptop to charge.

The downside: It’s currently only available for phones running Windows Mobile 6.0 and up, or Symbian 60, whatever that is. I’m sure the iPhone store has a similar app somewhere on its vast virtual shelves … and if not, it’s just a matter of time.

Bea Arthur has died. A fixture of the stage and screen, yes. A formidable talk-show presence, certainly. Also, kind of a low-talker.

But as Adam Mathew (see comments below) pointed out last night, her true value may lie in her ability to inspire art — or, more specifically, the art of Brandon Bird.

Click the image above. It’s how I’ll always remember her.

There’s no way this can be real — and nope, it isn’t — but it’s a fine way to start the week.

(Found on Andrew Sullivan’s blog.)

From CNN:

“Beneath an Antarctic glacier in a cold, airless pool that never sees the sun seems like an unusual place to search for life.”

You know why? Because it is. This is how the best horror movies start, with the glacier explorations and the teeny microbes that take over the hapless scientists and make with the homicidal madness or the genetic mutations or the chronic thingism.

Remember the crazy old guy warning everyone about the perils of messing with ancient natural deposits? He’s not always wrong. In fact, sometimes he’s the only one who really knows what’s going on.

And I don’t even want to mention the latest warning sign of the inevitable zombie apocalypse. But then, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t.

What can I tell you? My DVD column hasn’t gone up yet, and I have to post something before heading out for a day of Hot Docs screenings.

So let’s consider the pop-culture landscape, which has been busier than usual in the last 24 hours. Marilyn Chambers, the star of David Cronenberg’s “Rabid”, was found dead in her home, aged 57; elsewhere in Los Angeles, Phil Spector — whose visage graces this page, and is probably already giving you the willies — was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of actress Lana Clarkson.

Oh, and in other news, Ronald Reagan turns out to have been a rat for the FBI during the McCarthy era. Remind me again why he was so great for America?

So we caught up to the “Battlestar Galactica” finale over the weekend, and you can put me firmly in the “contented” camp. I think it was a fine sendoff for the show and the characters — and entirely in keeping with the overarching themes of the series, as much as some may wish that were otherwise.

There’s plenty of excellent analysis and debate available at The House Next Door, The Onion AV Club and Salon; don’t forget to check out the comment threads for some relatively polite bickering.

And don’t worry about your Fridays going empty. Remember when the promotional push for “Dollhouse” started to ramp up, and Joss Whedon took all that time to tell people that the show wouldn’t really be awesome until Episode Six? When it would start to pull everything together and take the series in a darker and more complex direction — some might call it “Whedonesque” — after the initial run of stand-alone shows?

Well, Episode Six aired on Friday, and you know what? It totally got awesome. I’m starting to think he may have something great there after all.

And also, it was really weird to see Helo and Romo Lampkin turn up in modern-day Los Angeles just after we’d left them on … whoops, sorry. Never mind, move along, nothing to see here.

… and by “you”, I mean me.

Slate’s Emily Yoffe has just written a piece on the prevalence of narcissistic personality disorders in popular culture, and while she does mention certain prominently positioned characters on the current media landscape, she takes the topic much more seriously than others might.

Yoffe doesn’t come up any new revelations — basically, people who believe they’re entitled to the world’s attention will find a way to get it, whether it’s by becoming a famous Broadway star or by mounting a reality show — but it’s a good read, all the same.

Some comics are known for being confrontational. Some comics are known for being vulgar. Some comics are known for using outrageousness and vulgarity to comment on social mores. I’m sure you can think of a few examples — Don Rickles, Sam Kinison, George Carlin, Sarah Silverman.

And then there’s that delightful Jackie Mason, who’s just clawed his way back into the news cycle by lobbing a racial slur at Barack Obama:

At a show in New York City last week, Mason called Obama a “shvartze,” the gossip Web site TMZ reports. The term generally refers to a black person, but some people believe it has a negative connotation, akin to the n-word in English.

And some people — oh, let’s say those of us who grew up with elderly Jewish grandparents who never quite adjusted to the melting-pot nature of North America — know that there’s no other connotation to the word besides the negative.

Seriously, check out the story. Mason tries to parse his way out of trouble by playing the victim card, and somehow ends up dragging Oprah into it. What a mensch.