For the love of God, somebody stop me.

“Even after he shot it, that cat was so hopped up — we’re talking about a little, eight-pound cat — Mickey ran down the hall into the bathroom and jumped into the tub. He didn’t die for at least five minutes …”

Singer Edwyn Collins, known for fronting 1980s band Orange Juice and his 1990s solo success, is seriously ill after a brain haemorrhage…

John Halpern clearly remembers what made him change his mind about psychedelic drugs. It was the early 1990s and the young medical student at a hospital in Brooklyn, New York, was getting frustrated that he could not do more to help the alcoholics and addicts in his care. He sounded off to an older psychiatrist, who mentioned that LSD and related drugs had once been considered promising treatments for addiction. “I was so fascinated that I did all this research,” Halpern recalls. “I was reading all these papers from the 60s and going, whoa, wait a minute! How come nobody’s talking about this?”

More than a decade later, Halpern is now an associate director of substance abuse research at Harvard University’s McLean Hospital and is at the forefront of a revival of research into psychedelic medicine. He recently received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to give late-stage cancer patients the psychedelic drug MDMA, also known as ecstasy. He is also laying the groundwork for testing LSD as a treatment for dreaded super-migraines known as cluster headaches.

And Halpern is not alone. Clinical trials of psychedelic drugs are planned or under way at numerous centres around the world for conditions ranging from anxiety to alcoholism. It may not be long before doctors are legally prescribing hallucinogens for the first time in decades…

Contrary to popular belief, hydroelectric power can seriously damage the climate. Proposed changes to the way countries’ climate budgets are calculated aim to take greenhouse gas emissions from hydropower reservoirs into account, but some experts worry that they will not go far enough.

The green image of hydro power as a benign alternative to fossil fuels is false, says Eric Duchemin, a consultant for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “Everyone thinks hydro is very clean, but this is not the case,” he says.

Hydroelectric dams produce significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, and in some cases produce more of these greenhouse gases than power plants running on fossil fuels…

(Edit: got it. Thanks to Janie and Mary.)

My friend Margo Eve is desperately hunting an MP3: “Slide” by a group named Junkster. If anyone out there’s got it, drop me a line?

Margo Eve would be very happy and would stop giving you that funny look.

A tutorial for wiring a sex toy into an XBox. Force-feedback signals + vibrator + XBox Live = DIY teledildonics:

In dedication to JG Ballard (and to a lesser extend, David Cronenberg), I decided to use Burnout 3 in Crash mode. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as watching a dildo run due to the fact that you just crashed your car into a crowded intersection…

(Found by The Reverend Scott Crawford, thanks)

“Yes, I’ve escaped your fiendish deathtrap. And now I’m going to go back in time, stand your mother on her head and piss into her womb.”

I mean, why didn’t that ever happen? “Davros, you’re a blight on the universe, so I’m nipping back fifty years and sawing your dad’s willy off with the sonic screwdriver.”

“The Daleks hate me because I shat in one.”

(Written 2003. I obviously wasn’t very well.)

(I write on my mailing list when I travel. I’m usually drunk. February 2003:)

The searchlight atop the Eiffel Tower strobes into my hotel room. Mist wreathes the midsection like a smoke ring. Brandy in the glass, cigarette in the small elegant ashtray. Listening to a mix CD Laurenn gave me in San Francisco. Stack of research material arrived earlier for the next set of meetings. 34 years old and I’ve got bloody homework. A Samsung DVD player squats in the corner, awaiting a disc that is evidently being couriered to me.

The hotel is beautiful, and so is the room. Boobytrapped with fashion magazines, however, and the TV was tuned to The Fashion Channel, a constant parade of skeleton sex zombies (Ray Harryhausen doing softcore) stalking towards the camera in an infinite wardrobe of unwearable art, backed with ambient audiowash. THE FACE magazine confirms that zombies are once again Cool, and informs that Celt-ambient Enya-style is dans la vent somehow. I have sudden visions of zombies eating live flesh in a huge mall to the strains of “Orinoco Flow”.

I’ve had a title with no story sitting in the file since ’99 in Australia: “Fuckable Zombie.”

French Film Director is a very nice guy. None of the Director’s Mania. Knows what he’s good at, knows what he wants to do. He tells me that word of French Film Thing has already leaked here, so I’m continuing to code things until the contracts are signed. Which possibility seems to have gotten closer today, as this is clearly someone I can work with, and French Film Producer appears very happy. French Film Producer is one of the great conversationalists of my acquaintance, and has all kinds of great dirt. To some of you, this will mean nothing, but the idea of Mondino having once been interested in a film version of RANXEROX amuses me no end. The excellent video director Chris Cunningham is currently attached to a new attempt at RANXEROX — an extremely perverted and violent Italian sf comic — and I can’t help thinking it’s a hopeless cause.

Stories of Tsui Hark grabbing his camcorder in a Hong Kong restaurant and filming the view, and then him and his wife, in that signature Tsui Hark romantic style.

There are two kinds of smoking in Paris. Heavy and Super.

The local cafes had me briefly entertaining the notion of composing miserable poetry, delicate erotica or manfully doomed romance. Sadly, the general ambience is of ad copywriting. Paris feels a little too much like London (which shouldn’t be surprising). The ethnic mix is ever so slightly different to London (French police seen questioning a confused man of Arab extraction on the car ride in, too), but the rain brings down the same dirt with it.

Okay. Been drinking steadily since half four, and it’s now nearly midnight. Time to apply this finely-tuned French Shamanic state to the research material.

I remain, your fuckable zombie:

– W

(The Film Thing — an intended live-action feature-film version of CAPTAIN HARLOCK — went nowhere, after some reportedly fairly dishonourable behavior from the people we were dealing with. I had to code all this because HARLOCK was huge in France, and our business together was already springing leaks. For the record, the Director was Olivier Dahan, and the Producer was my good friend Jean-Pierre Dionnet.)

Wakey wakey! I’ve been woken by the fucking postman four times in the last two hours. I hate everybody.

Image courtesy Natasha Strange

Bára never fails to amaze me, every damn day:

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: Mixtape 02 – : 935 times/03 – 569 times/04 – 569 times.)

The Does, yes: the sound of PJ Harvey serenading John Lee Hooker as he comes back from the dead to skullfuck every last member of Sonic Youth. I especially love the swamp blues and prettycrazygirl vocals of “Five Over Three.”

Friday March 14, 2003:

At Bruce Sterling’s house in Austin, Texas, Howard Waldrop beams Cory Doctorow an mp3 of some swampy old rock’n'roll from the dawn of time. The next day, across town, his powerbook scorching the flesh off his legs, he beams it over to me in England. I put it up on a private server for Fraction in Kansas City and Laurenn in San Francisco, while reading the first few chapters of Cory’s new book, which he sent to me from an airport a few days before, squatting by the power outlet next to the public toilets. I put down Charlie Stross’ next book for this, shot down the phone from Scotland, presumably before he had to go out with his spear to hunt dinner. Make a note to send the mp3 to Deon Maas in South Africa. Bára sends photos from her balcony in Reykjavik while Andy Cosby threatens my screenplay with substance-challenged 80s TV stars from LA. Jean-Pierre Dionnet says hello from somewhere in Asia, which reminds me I need to speak to Olivier Dahan, who by now is probably in the depths of France, shooting a film with Jean Reno. M Shakti, somewhere between 2003 America and 1920 Paris, lets me know she has audio-blogs up at anaiscam.com. Cory’s document goes in the file with the short story Kenji Siratori sent me from Tokyo.

In 1988, I was living in a room that was six feet long and six feet wide, with no phone, nothing but a record player with tape deck and a portable manual typewriter.

I remember waking up one afternoon and reaching for my last cigarette, that a girl had written “Good Morning” on with a biro before leaving, and thinking: Christ, the world’s got to be bigger than this.

I also remember thinking she was trying to poison me with biro ink.

(Written on, yes, Friday 14 2003)

People keep asking if I’m going to say something about the death of Hunter S Thompson. Hell, a couple of newspapers have asked. This is because I wrote a graphic novel series called TRANSMETROPOLITAN, the creation of whose protagonist was somewhat influenced by Thompson’s writing, persona and life.

I got the news from a friend at CBS at four in the morning, two minutes after it hit the ticker. I was, and am, numb. I’ve tried to write about it a couple of times. When John Peel died, I was wrecked. This time, I’m just numb.

I read an article a few years ago, that I haven’t seen cited in the obituaries yet, wherein it’s stated that Thompson’s body was pretty much packing up on him. His stomach was having problems with toxic substances like, um, food, and his diet was mostly liquid, mashed avocado and yoghurt. He’d spent time in a wheelchair in recent years. His drug use had always been exaggerated for comedic effect, but, at 67, he’d been hammering his body in a committed way for some 50 years. And, at 67, you don’t grow back the bits you killed. There’s a fair chance he was looking at years of dependency, chronic illness, and listening to his own body die by inches. Anyone would find that frightening.

He always wore his influences on his sleeve. JP Donleavy, Faulkner, Mencken, Fitzgerald, Kerouac,
Hemingway. He used and re-used the last line from A FAREWELL TO ARMS, over and over: “I walked back to the hotel in the rain.” Legend has it that he retyped a Hemingway novel to understand how the writer got his effects.

Hemingway, of course, shot himself in the head. Old and sick and unable to live up to his own ideas on manhood.

I always thought it peculiarly apt that the man who wrote that line, whose work was all about keeping the expression of human feeling underneath the surface, sat somewhere quiet and alone and put a shotgun in his mouth.

Hunter Thompson waited until his young wife left the house, and then shot himself in the head with a pistol. He must have been quite aware that either she, or his son, there in the house with his grandson, would find his corpse. Dead bodies don’t lay neatly. They splay, spastic and awful. There is often shit.

I never met Thompson. Had the opportunity a couple of times — magazines wanting to send me out to Woody Creek, that kind of thing — but turned them down. I’ve been lucky so far, in meeting my great influences. But they don’t always go well. Friends of mine have had horrific experiences with their personal heroes, and it often leaves them unable to enjoy the work afterwards. And I wanted to keep the work. So I don’t know what kind of man he was.

And the numbness, in part, comes from now finding that he was the kind of man that’d let his family find him like that. I have a personal loathing for suicide. It’s stupid and selfish and ugly and cowardly and reeks of weakness. Someone said to me yesterday about Thompson, “What a ripoff.” And I kind of know what he meant. It’s become convenient to write Thompson off as parody in recent years, and there’s a case to be made that he peaked around the age of 36, with FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL ’72. But he could still make me laugh, even in the most recent collection, HEY RUBE. ” ‘We have many cigarettes here,’ I said suavely” still makes me smile. Writing had clearly become difficult, and a job, but every now and then you’d get a clear burst of the old anger, as in his support for Lisl Auman (google it). He was done with the big fireworks, but the devil was still in him. Probably his great work of the last twenty years was in Being Hunter Thompson. In performance.

But how you leave the stage is at least as important as how you enter it. And he left it alone in a kitchen with a .45, dying in — and wouldn’t it be nice if it were the last time these words were typed together? –

– dying in fear, and loathing.

Warren Ellis
down by the sea
February 2005

From the Gingerbox message board:

- seeing how long you can hold your pee drunk.
- later in an atempt not to piss your pants you run to the back yard to pee and the dog won’t leave you alone.

- admiting that you’ve peed on your friend’s dog.
-throwing a dart in the house and having it land in the back of my bro’s head
-getting a tetanus shot because a friend of mine threw a rusty ski pole in my foot
- being mildly electrocuted while plugging in the television in the dark. still trying to plug in the television afterwards.

Yes.