ZEITGEIST

If you’ve been as busy as I have over the last couple of days, you too will not have seen the video for Brokencyde’s "Freaxxx." Ariana just made me watch it. I will think of a suitable punishment for that later.

As she says, it really kicks off into lunacy around the 1.50 mark. But I would like you to watch the whole thing. Because it really is one of those "fall of Western culture" moments. It’s a near-perfect snapshot of everything that’s shit about this point in the culture.

It is, however, going to be one of those great Litmus tests. If you meet someone who likes this? Even if they profess to like it in an "ironic," knowing, media-aware kind of way? Then they’re a turd with a haircut.

There's an official CORALINE trailer out....



It's out in English, but this version of it is it in Italian. Because everything sounds better in Italian.

A few of you have written in asking if I'd done an Alan Moore and taken my name off the film, or if I'd had a falling out with the studio, as my name isn't mentioned in this trailer, just Henry Selick's -- and no, not at all. Nobody's name except Henry's is mentioned in the trailer, and that has more to do with Focus wanting to make sure that if they invoked The Nightmare Before Xmas, people wouldn't then assume this was a Tim Burton film, and go and see it -- or stay away -- based on that. (On the international poster -- above -- you won't find my name or Henry's.) I suppose it's a marketing decision.

I chatted to Henry today, and am really looking forward to seeing a finished film -- the last twenty minutes of the thing weren't done the last time I was sent anything. And it has music...

Incidentally, the Coraline Movie edition is now out, with an essay by me in the back, and another by Henry Selick...



I've now assembled the same list of passwords for the CORALINE website -- www.coraline.com -- that everyone else with access to a search engine has:

stopmotion : the Biggest Smallest movie ever made.

buttoneyes : Meet the cast...

moustachio : Bo Henry, art director of Coraline, shows off his remarkable moustache tricks.

armpithair : Every hair in the film was placed there by hand...

puppetlove : Director Henry Selick explains what it must be like for the puppets in the film.

sweaterxxs : Micro-knitting. That's right: micro-knitting.

...

A small collection of MAD fold-ins are up at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/03/28/arts/20080330_FOLD_IN_FEATURE.html. I cannot imagine a better time-waster than if someone were to put every Mad Fold-in up on line. I could click my way through them forever...

...

I've started playing with the T-mobile G1. First reactions -- I like it, mostly. It feels good in your hand. It's reasonably intuitive. (Bizarrely, when it isn't intuitive and I've had to head into manual land, the phone's software and the PDF of the manual do not always agree with each other.) I've had fun making ring tones, creating galleries. The way that your contacts list is also your Gmail contacts is mostly terrific (although it won't let me create entries that have the same email address as someone already on the list).

The things I don't like about it so far seem huge and obvious: no Blogger app (when there's a LiveJournal app and several others) seems a huge omission, seeing it's from Google; it can't read or open PDF files yet; you can send it pictures and watch them as a slideshow, but you can't save them; the built in Gmail app can't do anywhere near the things that the gmail program on my N73 can do; the camera is about the same standard as the iPhone's, which is to say, a bit meh. I like having a real keyboard but wish it was a tiny bit bigger -- I find myself typing with fingernails. Battery life is fine unless you've got Wifi on.

More reactions after it's been on the road with me and been used for a bit.

...

Hi Neil,

I just had a quick question on the Who Killed Amanda Palmer book. I have the album already (and have listened to it countless times. It's beautiful).

I was going to go and order the book, but when I went to the site, I found that the book seems to only be in packages. I was wondering if there are any plans to sell the book alone, or whether I should buy one of the packages. The extra CD could make a nice gift.

Thanks,
Nate

Let's see... the book is being desgned right now, then it goes off to the printers. The people who bought the package version will get theirs first. Depending on where in the world it's printed, this could be a couple of months before anyone else. Then, when copies come in from the printer, they'll go on sale -- probably in the early Spring. I think.

Neil!

I'm re-reading American Gods, and I'm at the point where Shadow first meets Sam. At the diner, Shadow reads a newspaper story saying "local farmers wanted to hang dead crows around the town to frighten the others away; ornithologists said it wouldn't work, that the living crows would simply eat the dead ones. The locals were implacable. 'When they see the corpses of their friends,' said a spokesman, 'they'll know we don't want them here.'"

Neil, I don't have Time Enough for Love here at school, but wasn't there something very similar to that in that story? Was your dead crow story a little Heinlein homage?

And OMG - just realized that Sam's last name is Black Crow, and that story was about crows. Wow. Sneaky of you.

Chris



When I'm driving through small-town America I make a point of buying local papers in towns where I stop, and reading them, preferably in local coffee shops. I read that in a small town as I went, and thought "It belongs in my book". So I put it there.

Dear Mr Gaiman,
I recently finished reading M is For Magic, and I have a question about the story Chivalry. Sir Galahad was considered the holiest of Arthur's knights; so, how coul he have obtained an apple from the garden of the Hespiredes? The Hespiredes were a part of greek mythology which was actually a religeon based on monotheism. So, how could he get something that his religeon said didn't exist? I am sorry to bother you with this question, but it has sparked my interest.

- a young and curious reader

He had to travel a long way.

I don't think it would have been a problem for early Christians, of whom Galaad would have been one: in The Golden Legend, which was the most popular book of stories about saints, collected in the thriteenth century, Saint Nicholas (the one who became Santa Claus) went up against the Goddess Diana. Then again, Narnia, a most monotheistic world, had more than its share of nymphs (just like the Hesperides) not to mention such gods as Bacchus and Silenus (and Santa Claus again) wandering around. So I would not worry about it, were I you.

I loved the link to the Sandman Death 20th Anniversary Bookends you put up.
When should they be coming out and how much of a dent will they put on my wallet, please?

According to a quick Google, http://www.toymania.com/news/messages/9960.shtml says they came out in September, and they will cost a wallet-twinging $295. (Ouch.) There are only a thousand of them.

This one has almost nothing to do with you Neil, but since his website is still in the makings I thought you could perhaps forward this to him.
I was very sad (like a child whose told there won't be a Christmas this year) to learn that Dave McKean's appearance this weekend in Buenos Aires was canceled.
In the event's blog they posted Dave's email in which he mentioned he couldn't make it because a date was changed (which sounds reasonable). But it remained unclear if it was the date of ANIMATE (the Buenos Aires event) which was changed, or if it was one of Dave's previous engagements.

Dave McKean said...

Hi Neil,

Please post this, as I certainly do feel very bad letting people down:

I agreed to go to Animate in the summer and had to organize a military
operation of friends and family to take care of our son Liam during
the proposed week, as he is appearing as Gavroche in Les Miserables in
London and has to be accompanied to and from the theatre each day he's
on, and also be available on 12 hours notice every day in case another
actor drops out.
We managed this, so both Clare and I could make the trip to Buenos
Aires, a city we've always wanted to visit.
Unfortunately, the date was changed by the organizers, and so we had
to re-arrange.
More importantly, it became obvious that the festival was now
colliding with a variety of previous commitments falling in the latter
half of November, so I decided with great sadness to withdraw this
year.
I hate letting people down, and I was really looking forward to the
trip (though not the 24 hours travelling each way, I admit!).

Hopefully there will be another event, an animation or film festival,
that will allow me to visit the city in the future. Or maybe we'll
just go for a holiday, and do a signing in a bookstore.

Thanks,
Dave

(I think it's worth pointing out that ten-year old Liam McKean -- owner of the original Pig Puppet -- is in Les Miserables in London. If you happen to go and see it, check if he's in your performance. Get his autograph. Mention pigs. Make his day.) And that reminds me...

Hi Neil,

I thought you might like to let people know that Dave McKean is on the BBC4 programme "Picture Book" talking about his illustations for David Almond's 'The Savage' and how he was inspired by Comic Book's art. The programme is airing (again) at 19.10 on Saturday and 3.30 on Sunday, and is also currently available on the BBC i-player. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fhnb6/comingup

Thank you again for all the stories,

Marjorie

You're welcome.

Hi,

Just read that you completed "the Dying Earth story." Huh? Is there a new collection of Dying Earth stories coming out? Is it an homage to Jack Vance's work, or what?

Did a search for "dying earth" on your website and saw no other mention of it.

Thanks,
Chris

It's for this.

...

And finally, Larry Marder talks about why the drawing we did together is so special at http://larrymarder.blogspot.com/2008/11/neil-gaimanlarry-marder-drawing-up-for.html.

My most sincere condolences to the White side of the family.

I didn't know my uncle, but we shared an alma mater. A few of the journalism professors there held him in what seemed to me then and now a mix of admiration and affection well worth achieving in one's public life.

<a href="http://www.bdangouleme.com/38-selection-2009-youth-selection" title="Selection Jeunesse (Youth Selection) 2009">Selection Jeunesse (Youth Selection) 2009

* Anna et Froga: Qu'est-ce qu'on fait maintenant?, Vol. 2, Anouk Ricard (Sarbacane)
* Le Chateau de l'aurore, Osamu Tezuka (Cornelius)
* Chronokids, Vol. 2, Zep, Stan & Vince (Glenat)
* Doraemon, Le Chat venu du future, Vol. 8, Fujiko.F.Fujio (Kana)
* Les Enfants d'ailleurs: Le Maitre des ombres, Vol. 3, Bannister & Nykko (Dupuis)
* Ernest & Rebecca: Mon copain est un microbe , Vol. 1, Bianco and Dalena (Le Lombard)
* L'Envolee sauvage, Vol. 2, Galandon and Monin (Bamboo)
* La Fille du savant fou: L'Equation inconnue , Vol. 3, Mathieu Sapin (Delcourt)
* Gully: Les Vengeurs d'injures, Vol. 1, Dodier and Makyo (Dupuis)
* Jacques le petit lezard geant, Libon (Dupuis)
* Ludo: Qu'as-tu, Kim ?, Vol. 7, Bailly, Mathy and Lapiere (Dupuis)
* Nana, Vol. 18, Ai Yazawa (Delcourt)
* Le Petit Prince, Joann Sfar (Gallimard)
* La Rose ecarlate: J'irai voir Venise, Vol. 4, Patricia Lyfoung (Delcourt)
* Sardine de l'espace: Pizza Tomik, Vol. 7, Emmanuel Guibert (Dargaud)
* Seuls: Le Clan du requin, Vol. 3, Vehlmann and Gazzotti (Dupuis)
* Sillage: Monde Flottant, Vol. 11, Morvan and Buchet (Delcourt)
* Titeuf: Le sens de la vie , Vol. 12, Zep, (Glenat)
* Trolls de Troy: Trollympiades, Vol. 11, Arleston & Mourier (Soleil)
* Zblucops: Le Pays des courgettes volantes, Vol. 5, Bill and Gobi (Glenat)

*****



<a href="http://www.bdangouleme.com/39-selection-2009-heritage-award" title="Selection Patrimoine (Heritage Prize) 2009">Selection Patrimoine (Heritage Prize) 2009

* Au bord de l'eau, Mitsuteru Yokoyama (Delcourt)
* Breakdowns, Art Spiegelman (Casterman)
* L'Enfer, Yoshihiro Tatsumi (Cornelius)
* Johan et Pirlouit: Sortileges et enchantements, Chapter Two, Peyo (Dupuis)
* Les Naufrages du temps, Forest and Gillon (Glenat)
* Operation Mort, Shigeru Mizuki (Cornelius)
* La Riviere empoisonnee, Gilbert Hernandez (Delcourt)
* Taxista, Marti (Cornelius)

This seems a fairly straightforward thing: Katherine Keller offers to match donations on $25 donations to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Meanwhile, there's a small army of Neil Gaiman-related eBay offerings put up by the Fund for your bidding pleasure. Gaiman discusses it here. I urge you to participate.

<a href="http://www.dccomics.com/wildstorm/comics/?cm=10626" title="sorry, DC">sorry, DC

Someone named Rebecca Wilson sent out an e-mail a couple of days ago that bounced around quite a bit indicating that underground comix great S. Clay Wilson is improving a bit, and able to speak to people that come in to see him. <a href="http://www.tcj.com/messboard/viewtopic.php?p=84328#84328" title="She reiterated this on a Comics Journal message board thread">She reiterated this on a Comics Journal message board thread. If true, and I have no reason to doubt it isn't, this would be the best news so far concerning the injured cartoonist.

Peggy Burns in Nashville


Tom Devlin in Vermont

* George W Bush intends to leave office with class by eroding protection for endangered species and, in keeping with the themes of his presidency, basically handing the keys to the country to the oil companies.

* A third of China’s mainland is having the topsoil torn off it by wind and water erosion, to the tune of an incredible 4.5 billion tons of dirt per annum. Basically, Chinese population keeps growing, and the Chinese ability to grow crops keeps dropping. You know what a country with no topsoil looks like? Iceland. China’s around 3.6 million square miles, isn’t it? So inagine a 1.2 million-square-mile Iceland sawn off a country that’s got to feed one point four billion people a day. And when you’re situated where China is, you’re not going to be looking to the neighbours for help.

* I mentioned the new Ebola thing earlier. Which confounds any hope of a vaccine for some while.

* It’s a source of some amusement that the piratical state of Puntland is actually the most stable area in Somalia.

1. The Path Not Taken, 2. They dropped like flies., 3. I’m Yours, 4. Stupid pose. Stupid man-boy., 5. Mariachi on Mission Street, 6. View of Poolbeg Power station from Dollymount, Bull Island, Dublin

It’s 4pm and I’m barely showing signs of sentient life. I spent the first couple of hours of the day pretty much resembling a pseudopod with an overgrown beard stuck on the front. If pseudopods have a front. Anyway. The point is, I can’t be bothered to sort, today, so I’m just going to empty out Feed Demon and see what’s happening…

Yeah. Okay. Five minutes later, I think I’ve stopped laughing at The Love Song To Zo, which I can’t quite bring myself to quote. I know the guy’s first language isn’t English, but I suspect that the sheer mentalism behind lines like "makes the hormones to neigh psalms" would survive a broader vocabulary.

Siege found this yesterday evening: "I was horrified. It’s a baby cockfight - just like somebody put two animals up to fight each other."

Incidentally, this was the first face I saw today, in email:

Took me a minute to remember that Mer had said something last night about getting tickets to a GWAR show…

Jamais Cascio was ranting on Twitter the other day about weakass "futurists" using Second Life for presentations and examples. That’d be the Second Life that becomes harder and harder to access and insists on fucking the paying customers it somehow manages to retain. Well, Bruce Sterling notes that Google has shut down its own virtual-world service, Lively, after barely five months in operation. At some point I want to find the time to get my own final thoughts about Second Life down.

What would you like for Christmas? A new species of Ebola turning up in Uganda? No. Well, please yourselves. How about a new species of dolphin instead? Excellent. Throw the tuna out of that net and bring it to me for lunch.

• Vast stores of water ice surround Martian equator - space - 20 November 2008 - New Scientist
  "Ice glaciers hundreds of metres deep are lurking just underneath the Martian surface around the planet's mid-latitudes." This is potentially huge, not least for the chemical archaeology that must be trapped in there.
  (tags:sci space )
• It’s confirmed: Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations - physics-math - 20 November 2008 - New Scientist
  "Physicists have now confirmed that the apparently substantial stuff is actually no more than fluctuations in the quantum vacuum." I love this.
  (tags:sci weird )
• Live Piracy Map
  "This map shows all the piracy and armed robbery incidents reported to the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre during 2008."
  (tags:crime pol )

It’s Friday, and we’re back: and things blow up.

See this? It’s the print collection of the first 24 episodes. Don’t let any shop tell you they can’t get hold of copies. Avatar printed a shitload. Got yours yet?

Page 1 of 6 -- Continue Reading

Creators: Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Andreas, Stephane Blanquet
Publishing Information: NBM, softcover, 96 pages, October 2008, $12.95
Ordering Numbers: 1561635405 (ISBN10), 9781561635405 (ISBN13)

The latest in NBM's re-packaging of Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim's various Donjon fantasy series combines two 2004 books from the stand-alone Monstres line. If I'm keeping all of my Donjon series straight, Monstres is the one for stand-alone story with a range of guest artists to be placed at any point in the wider Donjon timeline. These are placed in the Zenith era, the one in the far future as relative to the main series. Luckily, the books also comment upon one another, with overlapping plotlines told from different perspectives, and having them together make for an enjoyable reading experience in and of itself.

We follow two characters as they come to immediate terms with Terra Amata becoming a mini-universe of floating island: the foolish and aggressively violent Herbert the Red, and the fiendish, somewhat reluctantly but effectively violent Grand Khan. Unlike the Dungeon stories in their original series, these stories take place in a mish-mash of post-apocalyptical literature and fantasy stories that fail to provide the easy avenues for satire available to the authors in the more staid, traditional settings. There's an appealing but somewhat disorienting anything goes quality. It's hard not to appreciate the lack of sentimentality here: many fantasy stories are conservative in that they posit an idealized form of the present as the long-term status quo by story's end. The constant threat of personal and widespread destruction makes for a lot of uniquely funny moments among survivors whose peccadilloes and desires have taken on extinction-level drama. At the same time, comedy that arises from manic situations can be wearying after a while, and I think that's the case here. I find these stories super-entertaining, but I can see why people might not extend to them their heart. Heck, I'm having a hard time judging their quality beyond that immediate reaction.

I should also mention the thing I enjoyed most about this particular volume as compared to others: Stephane Blanquet drawing monsters. Blanquet has an almost intimidating clarity to his line here. If most comics are chalklines on a wall, Blanquet's looks smooth in the way that only applying finisher might be able to manage. His creatures look hostile to the touch, like they might sting in the way certain frogs do when you pick them up. They don't bleed, they emit blod that curdles like so much red slough. I find myself reading the story and then going back to start at it a bit, the way I usually do with Blanquet. While a few of the art choices Sfar and Trondheim have made haven't been all that inspired, this one was, and makes a solid reading experience -- these are almost always dense comics, that encourage your grappling with them -- that much more involved.

I'm not exactly sure how it escaped my attention, but Nate Beeler of the Washington Examiner has won 2009 Clifford K. and James T. Berryman Award for Editorial Cartoons from the National Press Foundation. Beeler is 28 years old, and has been with with the Examiner since 2005. His work has a classic contemporary feel, meaning that it has the same general "look" of a lot of the best and most successful editorial cartoonists of the last three decades.

Past winners include Steve Breen, Stuart Carlson, Jim Morin, David Horsey, Ann Telnaes and Signe Wilkinson -- a fairly powerful line-up of recent Pulitzer Prize winners -- and it wouldn't be surprising for Beeler to move into their company in the next few years.

Longtime comics writer, comic book editor and all-around booster of the medium Stan Lee was among the 2008 winners for the 2008 National Medal of the Arts earlier this week. Here's a great and probably well-traveled photo of Lee receiving the honor. A transcript of the event can be found here. Here's the NEA profile on Lee. And here's a page with another photo. He's positively beaming.

The Association des Critiques et Journalists de Bande Dessinee has announced its 15 finalists for its Prix de la Critique 2008. Unless you're completely hopeless at the roots of language, you probably figured out -- or maybe you already knew -- that the ACBD is the French-language market's major writers about comics group. It looks like they narrowed down the list below from this pre-selection list of 95 books. Among the titles available in the states represented here are Alan's War, Tamara Drewe and Castle Waiting. That may be all of them, in fact.

* La guerre d'Alan T3, Emmanuel Guibert (L'Association)
* Chateau l'Attente, Linda Medley (ca et la)
* Le gout du chlore, Bastien Vives (Casterman)
* R97: les hommes a terre, Christian Cailleaux and Bernard Giraudeau (Casterman)
* Shutter Island, Christian de Metter after Dennis Lehane (Casterman)
* De Gaulle a la plage, Jean-Yves Ferri (Dargaud)
* L'heritage du colonel, Lucas Varela and Carlos Trillo (Delcourt)
* Tamara Drewe, Posy Simmonds (Denoel Graphic)
* Le roi des mouches T2, Mezzo and Michel Pirus (Drugstore)
* Spirou, le journal d'un ingenu, Emile Bravo (Dupuis)
* Martha Jane Cannary T1, Matthieu Blanchin and Christian Perrissin (Futuropolis)
* Matteo T1, Jean-Pierre Gibrat (Futuropolis)
* Il etait une fois en France T2, Sylvain Vallee and Fabien Nury (Glenat)
* Le reve de Meteor Slim, Frantz Duchazeau (Sarbacane)
* Tout seul, Christophe Chaboute (Vents d'Ouest)

two, three

* in continued Watchmen holy shit that word sells a lot of books news, there was apparently a 100,000 print run on Watching the Watchmen and they're going back to press again. Is anyone not happy for Dave Gibbons?

* the always-interesting Frank Santoro writes on one of the top ten comics efforts of all time, E.C. Segar's Thimble Theatre.

* you gotta love <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2008/11/17/kramers-ergot-no-7.html" title="this picture of Alvin Buenaventura and Kramers Ergot Vol. 7">this picture of Alvin Buenaventura and Kramers Ergot Vol. 7. It's also fun to take a second look at it and imagine Alvin's like three feet tall. Go here for a round-up of photos from Sunday's KE signing.

* a happy tenth anniversary this month to About Comics. Also, let's re-use the candles on a cake for the Penny Arcade team, who celebrated the same birthday earlier this week.

Craft
Not Sure What This Is About, But I Enjoyed It

Exhibits/Events
Comic Craze Preview
Portsmouth Comic Book Show

History
On Osamu Tezuka
Seuss Vs. KAL
Very Rare Comic Book

Industry
Interviews/Profiles
<a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6615279.html" title="PWCW: Mike Allred">PWCW: Mike Allred
<a href="http://www.comicon.com/new/ubb/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=529209#Post529209" title="Pulse: Jim Mahfood">Pulse: Jim Mahfood
<a href="http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=18869" title="CBR: Bill Kelter">CBR: Bill Kelter

Not Comics
The Coolest Thing I've Seen Today

Publishing
<a href="http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/blog/2008_11_01_archive.php#7537833072087673668" title="More On Don Freeman's Skitzy">More On Don Freeman's Skitzy

Reviews
<a href="http://wausaucomics.com/blog/?p=82" title="JLS: Honey & Clover Vols. 1-2">JLS: Honey & Clover Vols. 1-2
<a href="http://warren-peace.blogspot.com/2008/11/real-i-sure-feel-like-it-is.html" title="Matthew Brady: Real">Matthew Brady: Real
<a href="http://www.comixology.com/articles/153/Of-Garlic-and-Grawlix-i-Anita-Blake-Vampire-Hunter-Guilty-Pleasures-i-Vols-1-2" title="Kristy Valenti: Anita Blake -- Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures Vols. 1-2">Kristy Valenti: Anita Blake -- Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures Vols. 1-2
<a href="http://comicsforserious.blogspot.com/2008/11/mesmo-delivery-uh-delivers.html" title="Brandon Soderberg: Mesmo Delivery">Brandon Soderberg: Mesmo Delivery
<a href="http://www.ivyparisnews.com/2008/11/bd-review-paul-%C3%A0-la-p%C3%AAche-by-michel-rabagliati.html" title="Adrian Sanders: Paul a la Peche">Adrian Sanders: Paul a la Peche

* You know, if you’re going to take a sex drug called Power 1 Walnut, you’re pretty much bound to get what you deserve.

* Lithuania operates what appears to be a Museum Of The Classic Soviet Death Camp. "Every visitor has to wear Soviet Russian prisoners cloths and when enters is being humiliated by the staff dressed as Soviet army soldiers. They yell on and almost beat all the visitors, force them to do things, wear gas masks, run distances and many many more things to do."

I kind of want to work there. Y’know, just a summer job.

* Talking of classics: attempting to get high by huffing air freshener is back. On the bright side, it’s not jenkem.

* Organised poaching is back in the British countryside in a big way. I suppose it’s a good sign that they’re doing it for hard currency, as opposed to doing it to stave off starvation.

* "Contradicting nearly two decades of government denials, a congressionally mandated scientific panel has concluded that Gulf War syndrome is real and still afflicts nearly a quarter of the 700,000 U.S. troops who served in the 1991 conflict."

* Pastor Ted Haggard, famous for losing his shit with Richard Dawkins before sucking cocks while crying and doing meth and then lying about the whole thing and then doing it all again, now claims his "problems" stem from being sexually abused at the age of seven. The idea appears to be that if Pastor Ted — quite happily, by all accounts — can convince everyone that copping the bad touch from some mystery kiddie-fiddler made him gay, a tweaker and a pathological liar, then he can go back to preaching the bullshit and running his church and filling the heads of the credulous with poison. For added hilarity: Pastor Ted’s day job is as an insurance salesman.

* The Kingdom Of Yahweh sect, based in Melbourne, has declared itself above Australian law. Which doesn’t seem completely unreasonable to me. Naturally enough, there are concerns about guns, compounds, nutters, etc etc.

Mer’s sitting in with Ragwater Revue Friday night at the Stork Club in the east bay, playing violin and theremin. Go and pay tribute if you’re in the area. And trust me, if you get the chance to hear Mer play, you should take it.

Amanda Palmer’s new one — video directed by my acquaintance Alex de Campi:

I just moved my New Scientist newsfeed out of Bloglines and into Feed Demon so that I can actually bloody read them, and today’s capture is just outstandingly strange, ugly and wonderful. I should just del.icio.us the lot, really, but this is too good to not lump together as a snapshot of What We Learned Today (Or Overnight, Anyway):

I have to say, the NS crew really do have the art of the lede down pat. "Human aerial bombardments might have pushed Neanderthals to extinction, suggests new research." How can you not love that? Studying the bone shapes of Neanderthals and homo saps indicates that humans spent a lot of time doing overhand throws with heavy objects, something apparently beyond Neanderthal capability or conception. The inference is the subject of some doubt, but someone’s got a Neanderthal rib bone with spear damage.

This, too, sometimes gives me pause to think: that homo sapiens has only been without a sibling human species for some 25,000 years, whereas we shared the other with other human species for a period of not less than 160,000 years and possibly some 300,000 years. More time passed with more than one human species than without. And, even stranger to me — we forgot all about our sibling species until discovering and comprehending their bones in the mid-1800s.

And it’s been a hair over 150 years from then to the first test of an interplanetary internet.

A rough draft of the woolly mammoth genome has been extracted. I would love to see a woolly mammoth, and I hope the gene delivery system gets cracked sooner rather than later. The tarsier, it turns out, is still alive. But tarsiers look a bit like someone turned a baby inside out and then rubbed it in the fluff that collects down the back of the sofa, so nobody really cares.

The headline of the day, mind you, is probably still Woman Receives Windpipe Built From Her Stem Cells.

The old idea of using the temperature differential between layers of the ocean to generate power is being revived again, this time by Lockheed Martin of all people: but they’re being outpaced by, believe it or not, the US Army, who’ll have a major military base powered by ocean-thermal by the end of 2011. It seems that they also get the desalinisation of 1.25 million gallons of seawater per day out of the deal, which is also interesting. I imagine all those parts of eastern England that are due to be flooded out in the next ten years can at least be converted into ocean-thermal fields to provide cheap power for those of us on high ground. Fuck you, Great Yarmouth, I have machines to run.

Received from Emma Vieceli:

From Wed 26th Nov, for one week only, the DFC will be available in Tesco stores around the UK for a special price of £1.99. If you haven’t subscribed to the weekly comic yet, this is your chance to find out what the buzz is about. As always, head to www.thedfc.co.uk for the lowdown on what’s been referred to as an injection of enthusiasm into the UK comics scene.

Creators: Jock (cover), Adam Freeman, Marc Bernardin, Bruno Redondo, Sergio Arino
Publishing Information: DC/WildStorm, comic book, 32 pages, November 2008, $3.50
Ordering Numbers:

Man, what the hell happened to the WildStorm imprint? There was a time I think about five years ago that between the efforts of writers like Joe Casey and Alan Moore it looked like Jim Lee's company had become a decent little publishing duplex. Renting out one side you had a handful of high-end creator-owned projects. Living in the other half you had the shared superhero universe that by emphasizing its interstellar war elements had seemingly sidestepped the problem that universes not ground in Jack Kirby's imagination seem to have of cycling through all potentially interesting plotlines and wider sagas within a few short years. Most of what I see from them these days is videogame adaptations and comics that draw on such generic ideas and plotlines they read like role-playing game manuals from 1986 or so.

Push #1 falls into that latter camp. I guess it could be in the first camp; I honestly don't know. As for the book itself... I hate saying this, because creating is hard, and people almost always work on things with the best of intentions and with as much integrity as they can muster, but this is almost a parody of a certain kind of comic book. The government has an agency of psychic beings with special powers, which we see displayed on a mission that involves taking out a facility that seems to be populated solely by husky, armed guards. There is tension at the agency over the uses of these beings, and we meet a few in a way that fills us in on the first line or two in a future character profile. On a subsequent mission our lead -- loyal to the agency for personal reasons, of course -- finds out that there may be more to the eye in terms of the missions than we might expect. It's like a syndicated TV show that someone might have put together blending the X-Men movie and Alias that runs on WGN at 5 PM on Saturdays, or something that a machine might make cutting and pasting from old Caliber books and grocery store serial adventure novels. It might make for a good film or television project because it's certainly a blank slate of comfortable plot elements that someone could make come to life. But as a comic, particularly a comic for anyone who's read any type of similar work and doesn't have a bottomless appetite for seeing one more book working that same neighborhood, it almost makes a case all by itself that comics are a creative dead end.

• He has no words and must design
  "(Peter Molyneux)… didn?t have the critical language to describe what he (or more correctly, his teams) had created. He isn?t nearly as literate in why his own games work as the current generation playing his games."
  (tags:games media culture )
• Why the universe may be teeming with aliens - space - 19 November 2008 - New Scientist
  "As astronomers explore newly discovered planets and create computer simulations of virtual worlds, they are discovering that water, and life, might exist on all manner of weird worlds where conditions are very different from those on Earth. And that means there could be vastly more habitable planets out there than we thought possible."
  (tags:space )
• Safer sex in a pill - health - 19 November 2008 - New Scientist
  "People who have unprotected sex could slash their odds of getting AIDS just by taking a daily pill"
  (tags:med )

I’m in the midst of having some kind of brain seizure, and have reactivated comments on an experimental basis. Note that all comments, in the early phase of this trial, are moderated, and so they will not appear on the page immediately after you post them.

The experiment will last until people start pissing me off again.

If you can't afford to have me for tea (and at those prices, who can blame you?) it mi