Direct-download links to the most recent Superburst Mixtapes:

02: Dynaflo – Blitzkriegbliss – Tara Vanflower

03: Schizowave – Zizuph – Annastatsea

04: Ivy’s Itch – Pornorobo – Versailles

05: The Does – Rachel Goldstar – The Vampires

06: Castor & Pollux – The Ex-Girlfriends – Binary Riot Squad

Found in Southend today:

Two new retroviruses – the type of virus which causes AIDS – have jumped from primates to humans, a new study reveals.

The study of blood samples from nearly a thousand bushmeat hunters or handlers in Cameroon showed that at least six viruses had crossed from monkeys to the people who were exposed to freshly caught bushmeat. And two of these viruses have never been seen before in humans.

The newly discovered human T-cell lymphotropic virus 3 (HTLV-3) and HTLV-4 are closely related to the known viruses, HTLV-1 and HTLV-2. These are implicated in cancers like leukaemia and can cause inflammatory or neurological diseases.

Retroviruses such as HTLV or HIV insert their genetic material into a host cell’s DNA. The emergence of HIV is widely blamed on a primate retrovirus, SIV, jumping to humans. Previously, it was thought that the emergence of these viruses was limited by the rarity of successful cross-species transmission.

But the identification of two entirely new human retroviruses from one study, along with a previous discovery by the same group that simian foamy viruses can jump from monkeys to humans, may be ominous.

“What’s increasingly clear is that the hunting and butchering of non-human primates is associated with the transmission of retroviruses to humans…”

(Foamy viruses! They make this shit up just to please me, I swear. More on the yummy Foamy Viruses here)

“Peed-in panties don’t always turn to gold”:

“For the panties alone, you’d get 5,000 yen, but 8,000 yen if you took them off in front of the buyer. If you peed in them first and then removed them in front of the buyer, you’d get about 10,000 yen. That’s a pretty special price…”

Ryann Connell is some kind of mad god.

Time was that a world-changing news datum would come every ten years or so, if that. The world was slow. Around the time of the Industrial Revolution, that ramped up to a dizzying rate of one a year. Towards the end of the Twentieth Century, the rate was up to one a week, quickly reaching one a day in the early 21st.

Today, the rate is one every fifteen minutes. And here’s what’s at the top of the hour: turns out girls from San Francisco can make dead men come after all.

Either that or there’s a necronautical anomaly restricted to the Bay Area, but I like my version better.

As news-rich as we are now, there’s still no way to determine exactly how this began. I mean, how do you discover that you can give dead men erections? And, frankly, what kind of freak swallows, in that situation?

Nonetheless, word got around that, in NoCal at least, you can get dead men off. And there was a reason that the news spread. It turned out that corpse-loads, black and red and with the consistency of passion-fruit pulp, conferred some kind of near-psychedelic experience. The legs of perception spread wide and led you into the world of the dead. Which appeared to be a men’s toilet in an industrial club sometime after 1am on a Saturday.

It wasn’t long before communion-girls (and a smattering of men) began spitting instead of swallowing. Dribbling blackened cadaver-jizz into little plastic vials. And selling it. Dead Men’s Pearls, it’s called. Fifty bucks a pop, which is putting an awful lot of girls through media studies courses at UC Berkeley. And introducing a lot of guys to the taste of semen. Which is doing wonders for the social fabric of the Bay Area, in a “Honey, do I really taste like that?” “Honey, this is why I keep mints by the bed” kind of way.

We have made contact with the world of the dead. And it’s an endless corridor of toilet cubicles full of people throwing up with Einsturzende Neubauten playing tinnily in the background. Which, perhaps, is as it should be.

And since it’s taken fifteen minutes for me to explain all this to you, we’re now due the next world-changing new discovery.

Can’t wait.

(Written May 2004, very quickly, to try and get it the fuck out of my head.)

And regardless of when you’re reading this, it features some of Defamer’s crazier moments:

6:24: Cate Blanchett wins for Best Supporting Actress for her Kate Hepburn impression. Thanks her agent right after her husband—she knows where her bread is buttered, and will be getting a fresh basket of delicious Chinese babies from CAA in the morning.

Morgan Freeman wins for Million Dollar Baby. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, here’s a spoiler: Freeman plays a one-eyed former boxer who is impregnated by Clint Eastwood’s grizzled trainer and gives birth to a bag of money, played by Hilary Swank.

Songs made freely available for download on the internet by the artists, put into a single file and
released as a podcast mixtape for several hundred of my closest friends.

Podcast address: http://warrenellis.libsyn.com/rss

Direct download: here

(download count: Mixtape02/1228 downloads – 03/782 – 04/884 – 05/1884)

Indian divers have found more evidence of an ancient port city, apparently revealed by December’s tsunami.

Stone structures that are “clearly man-made” were seen on the seabed off the south coast, archaeologists say.

They could be part of the mythical city of Mahabalipuram, which legend says was so beautiful that the gods sent a flood that engulfed six of its seven temples.

The new finds were made close to the 7th Century beachfront Mahabalipuram temple, which some say is the structure that survived the wrath of the gods.

The myths of Mahabalipuram were first written down by British traveller J Goldingham who was told of the “Seven Pagodas” when he visited in 1798….

George W. Bush won the “Razzie” worst actor of the year award on Saturday for his performance as president in “Fahrenheit 9/11″ but his moment in Hollywood’s dubious spotlight was eclipsed by Halle Berry, who actually turned up to receive her embarrassing accolade.

Berry was named worst actress of 2004 by the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation for her performance in “Catwoman” and she showed up to accept her “Razzie” carrying the Oscar she won in 2002 for “Monster’s Ball.”

“They can’t take this away from me, it’s got my name on it!” she quipped. A raucous crowd cheered her on as she gave a stirring recreation of her Academy Award acceptance speech, including tears.

She thanked everyone involved in “Catwoman,” a film she said took her from the top of her profession to the bottom.

“I want to thank Warner Brothers for casting me in this piece of shit,” she said as she dragged her agent on stage and warned him “next time read the script first.”

It is rare for a Razzie winner to show up at the spoof awards held on the night before Oscars — but Berry did, saying her mother taught her that to be “a good winner you had to be a good loser first.” She received a standing ovation…

As in this, at ThinkAttack.

Anyone know how to make one of those?

– W

Out this week in paperback and hardcover: MINISTRY OF SPACE by myself and Chris Weston with Laura Martin.

A bacterium that sat dormant in a frozen pond in Alaska for 32,000 years has been revived by NASA scientists.

Once scientists thawed the ice, the previously undiscovered bacteria started swimming around on the microscope slide. The researchers say it is the first new species of microbe found alive in ancient ice. Now named Carnobacterium pleistocenium, it is thought to have lived in the Pleistocene epoch, a time when woolly mammoths still roamed the Earth.

NASA astrobiologist Richard Hoover, who led the team, said the find bolsters the case for finding life elsewhere in the universe, particularly given this week’s news, broken by New Scientist, of frozen lakes just beneath the surface of equatorial Mars…

The list of things in my life that I did not need to see include but are not limited to Fred Durst making his Sex Face at me.

I am, however, getting interested in the Why of all this…

A mother has been jailed for five years for killing her nine-year-old son by putting salt in his hospital drip.

David Stocker died in Great Ormond Street Hospital in August 2001 from an overdose of 13 teaspoons of salt which his mother put into his drip feed.

…the court heard David was ill for months but doctors were unable to make him better because his mother was misleading them. Nicholas Hilliard, prosecuting, said the 13 teaspoons of salt poured into a milk drip feed was the last in a series of acts by mother Petrina Stocker.

Stocker had spiked two feed containers with around 18 teaspoons and the boy collapsed after the first one was given to him.

Stocker had put blood into urine samples and manufactured vomit samples, in addition to interfering with his intravenous drip. Mr Hilliard said: “The episode of salt poisoning was the last in a series of acts done in an attempt to fabricate aspects of David’s illness and to produce manufactured or misleading symptoms…”

Someone sent me this: “Organex”, I think?

It is Genius.

Black church and community leaders are calling for action to protect children from the effects of exorcisms.

A spokeswoman for Africans Against Child Abuse (Afruca) said church leaders who believe in possession needed education on child protection.

A BBC investigation suggests only a third of London’s local authorities are addressing the issue seriously. The Newsnight probe suggests some children are being beaten by parents trying to drive out evil spirits.

Afruca spokeswoman Debbie Ariyo said she was not surprised by the findings because the driving out of demons was known to be a widespread practice within the African churches.

“It’s part and parcel of what churches do in terms of freeing people from what they see as the stranglehold of the devil. But it does worry me that local authorities are not making the effort to link up with the churches in terms of their practices regarding child protection.”

The Newsnight investigation comes on the fifth anniversary of the death of eight-year-old Victoria Climbie, killed by carers who claimed she was possessed by the devil.

The Metropolitan Police is currently investigating a number of cases of so-called “faith crimes”…