“Horrific scenes greeted British troops as they entered Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 15 April 1945. They were accompanied by the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby who recorded his first impressions for radio”: Slideshow with audio

SOUSEI NO AQUARION premiered the other day in Japan. It caught my interest because it was apparently created by Shoji Kawamori, who’s designed, storyboarded and written for the likes of PATLABOR, RAHXEPHON and COWBOY BEBOP.

Of course, I find out today that he also did ESCAFLOWNE and some of the MACROSS stuff, which does very little for me. I kind of wish I’d found that out before watching AQUARION.

AQUARION is doing the rounds as a bit torrent fansub right now. If you’ve seen NEON GENESIS EVANGELION, any episode of POWER RANGERS and any slightly wet incidental unrequited romance from any shitty soap opera ever, then you’ve seen AQUARION. AQUARION is like ironing the farts out of a dozen pairs of old trousers, sucking them into a bottle and then trying to sell it as a new perfume. This is such an arse-burgling zombie horror of a thing that I don’t even want you to steal it.

BLUE SPRING: By Taiyo Matsumoto, as adapted/transliterated into English by Kelly Sue De Connick. Some reviews collected here.

No time for a second post, so, this? The final episode is Eisner award-nominated, apparently.

A man arrested in Dayton is accused of using a Star Trek club to lure young boys to his home for sex…

Police arrested Otto Hohm in Dayton, Ohio on two counts of unlawful sexual conduct. He’s a registered sex offender.

Police say Hohm refers to himself as “The Commandant of the Starfleet Officers Club Marine Corps” and its “Chief Diplomatic Officer” …

(Found by Jeff Patterson, thanks)

An Indian farmer has written his will – leaving his body to wild animals.

New World Laldingliana, 46, wants his remains to be devoured by animals after his death.

Asian News International reports he wrote in his will: “I, New World Laldingliana, have decided to give my body to wild animals when my life on earth is over to show that I had given my life for them. One of my greatest wishes is to throw a feast for the wild animals in Phawngpui forest with my own body. As such, I have made my will without any coercion or motivation from anyone…”

Albania’s most wanted man fought off special police and eluded capture for years only to blow himself up while fishing with dynamite, police and newspapers said Friday.

Dubbed the “Last Cowboy” in northern Albania because of his gunfights with the law, Riza Malaj, 34, failed to accurately gauge the length of the fuse as he tried to blow up trout.

Doctors at the Bajram Curri hospital said he had lost both hands, badly hurt his eyes and suffered serious wounds all over his body. His family rejected offers to have him flown to a Tirana hospital where he would have been arrested immediately. Malaj was taken to a hospital in nearby U.N.-governed Kosovo.

He was sentenced in absentia to five years in jail on charges of leading an attack on the Bajram Curri police station last year. Since 2000, warrants have been issued for Malaj’s arrest on charges of willful murder, armed robbery, armed assault and battery of the education directress of the town…

Sometimes also know as L’Orchestre Tout Puissant Likembe Konono No. 1, this is a group of Angolese/Congolese musicians who work with handmade amps and percussion and the likembe instrument, an electrified thumb-piano that sounds like the rawest, dirtiest, most blown-out guitar you ever heard. This is driving, clanging, stamping music — tribal, street party and primal fucking rock.

There’s an mp3 here.

“…accepting digital video files of any length and size. Simply sign up for an account and upload your videos using our Video Uploader (please be sure you own the rights to the works you upload), and, pending our approval process and the launch of this new service, we’ll include your video in Google Video, where users will be able to search, preview, purchase and play it….”

Add to that Broadcast Machine, and OurMedia a few weeks ago….

salaTHRUStra on Key 23:

…with emerging trends in broadband delivery (up to a 1600% increase by 2008, according to some recent reports, see
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-04-05-speed-usat_x.htm), free web-based long distance and conference call services like Skype, 3D meeting spaces like www.digitalspace.com, and open-source learning methods such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare, we may be but years away from having the ability for the enaction of fully-immersive peer-to-peer ritual spaces and meta-participatory esoteric learning communities, all for the price of an account with Blogger today (that is, free)…

Mick Mercer’s THE MICK #15: periodical PDF per postgoth propaganda. A quick look over sees it features an interview with Katzenjammer Kabarett, amongst much, much else. Free as air, available for limited time only.

“After a few seconds of searching aimlessly through imaged suburbs on the outskirts of Vegas, the realization finally dawned on me…maybe Area 51 could be located with this thing…”

A Greek court on Wednesday has lifted a ban on selling a cartoon book from Austria depicting Jesus Christ as a drinking buddy of Jimi Hendrix and a marijuana-smoking, naked surfer.

Austrian cartoonist Gerhard Haderer had been found guilty by a Greek court of “malicious public blasphemy” earlier this year and given a six-month suspended prison sentence for his take on the life of Christ…

A talking Jesus doll is due to go on sale in May, along with versions of Moses, the Virgin Mary and David, as a teddy bear maker tries to find a market with churches and religious families.

The foot-tall Jesus doll will be able to recite five Biblical verses at the push of button on its back, while the Moses doll will recite the Ten Commandments. The Mary doll will recite a long Bible verse.

The company expects to sell about 50,000 of the Biblical dolls by the end of the year, with the Jesus doll — not surprisingly — expected to be the top seller. It hopes to also bring out an Esther doll by the end of the year and hopes to have other Biblical character dolls introduced in future years.

The line of Biblical dolls is known as Messengers of Faith.

The dolls will cost $24.99, although Livingston said there will be discounts for churches as well as free shipping for those who buy three or more of the dolls. They will have hand-sewn period clothing, with Jesus wearing sandals and veils for the Virgin Mary. They will also have movable limbs and hands that can grip objects…

A 17-year-old Morrisville youth was being held on $100,000 bail after police said he raided a tomb in a cemetery and removed a head from a corpse…Court documents said the suspect allegedly talked of using the man’s head as a bong or a pipe for smoking marijuana…

No longer the website of the beast.

Milk and meat from cloned cattle appear safe for human consumption, a pilot study has found.

Scientists in the US and Japan found that meat and dairy products from a bull and cow cloned using the “Dolly” technique met industry standards. The team says its results suggest cloning techniques could be used to boost food production, particularly in developing countries…

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) could be taking the wrong approach. Instead of listening for alien radio broadcasts, a better strategy may be to look for giant structures placed in orbit around nearby stars by alien civilisations.

“Artificial structures may be the best way for an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation to signal its presence to an emerging technology like ours,” says Luc Arnold of the Observatory of Haute-Provence in France. And he believes that the generation of space-based telescopes now being designed will be able to spot them.

Arnold has determined the characteristic transit signal that differently shaped objects would produce, including a Jupiter-sized equilateral triangle and a louvre – parallel slats with gaps between them. Corot and Kepler will be capable of distinguishing these objects from most planets, though they could still be confused with a ringed planet like Saturn, he says.

To ensure the signal is unambiguous, an alien civilisation would have to launch a number of objects into orbit around a star. As an example, Arnold imagines 11 objects orbiting a star in groups of one, two, three and five – the first prime numbers…

Caehl:

Camel racing is to be transformed as a spectator sport in the United Arab Emirates with robot riders taking the place of child jockeys: