Writer Lee Goldberg was recently contacted by an actor seeking a screen test as James Bond. What follows is an excerpt from the actor’s cover letter:

If I may have a moment of your time. I enjoyed reading your profile of James Bond, very astute. I am contacting you to see if you can help me procure a screen test to play the next James Bond. I’m a leading actor of Irish/Canadian/American descent. Although I would be following in the foot steps of Sean Connery as “a virtual unknown”, my stature is increasingly expanding.

I am a renaissance man on the leading edge of his masculinity with a foot in both traditional and frontier notions of what it means to be a man in this modern age. I’m a man who operates from his heart, humor, and his purpose. I’m considered sexy, charming and appeal to both men and women.

I have lived in or visited most continents. Speak English, French and Spanish and know a dozen more accents. I’m more London than New York, more croissant than Burger King, and more Han Solo than Luc Skywalker.

As an actor I play leads, I play me.

Slinka:

The geniuses behind “I Am A Star I Am An Angel” and “Hey! Beat Takeshi” are back, on Sea Records. New 12″ to come — and if I don’t get mp3s or a CD of that, I’m going to Southport to burn Jim Cassius’ house down.

Vintage media captured by Graham Reznick:

Bruce Sterling I don’t care how big your tree is STOP HUGGING IT AT ONCE.

“Misomiso”:

One of the classic props of British political broadcasting is the Swingometer, as driven by the, um, overstimulated broadcaster Peter Snow. Now, the BBC have created a digital Swingometer for webplay. British TV still has some genuine eccentricity in it, and Peter Snow and his bloody Swingometer make a perfect example.

“I need a mommy to breast feed me, powder my little bottom, diaper me and put me to bed in my crib, and here is the best part, you take my freshly powdered cock out of my diaper and we have sex in the crib.”

(Found by Wendell, curse you my eyes my eyes they burn)

MontiLee Stormer:

Jean Snow:

Pope John Paul II is being reborn in a Colombian comic book as a superhero battling evil with an anti-Devil cape and special chastity pants.

The first episode of the “Incredible Popeman” is about to go on sale in Colombia and shows the late Polish pontiff meeting comic book legends such as Batman and Superman to learn how to use superpowers to battle Satan.

“The pope was a real-life superhero, of flesh and blood,” said Colombian artist Rodolfo Leon, a non-practicing Catholic who has been working on the comic book for about a year.

Like any self-respecting superhero, the Incredible Popeman has a battery of special equipment. Along with his yellow cape and green chastity pants, the muscular super-pontiff wields a faith staff with a cross on top and carries holy water and communion wine.

In the comic book, the pope dies and is reborn with superpowers beyond the infallibility Catholic doctrine gave him on Earth.

Leon said he was saddened by the death Saturday of John Paul II, whom he admired. The artist worried some people might be offended by such a revered figure becoming a comic book hero, but said the reception so far has been good.

Apart from predominantly Catholic Colombia, the book will be sold in Poland and publishers in Mexico, Canada and the United States have expressed interest, Leon said.

He also plans to produce Incredible Popeman action dolls.

“He isn’t John Paul II any more,” Leon said. “From now on, he’s the Incredible Popeman.”

A robot suit has been developed that could help older people or those with disabilities to walk or lift heavy objects.

Dubbed HAL, or hybrid assistive limb, the latest versions of the suit will be unveiled this June at the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, Japan, which opened last month. A commercial product is slated for release by the end of the year…

(large image)

Two control systems interact to help the wearer stand, walk and climb stairs. A “bio-cybernic” system uses bioelectric sensors attached to the skin on the legs to monitor signals transmitted from the brain to the muscles. It can do this because when someone intends to stand or walk, the nerve signal to the muscles generates a detectable electric current on the skin’s surface. These currents are picked up by the sensors and sent to the computer, which translates the nerve signals into signals of its own for controlling electric motors at the hips and knees of the exoskeleton. It takes a fraction of a second for the motors to respond accordingly, and in fact they respond fractionally faster to the original signal from the brain than the wearer’s muscles do…

A glowing loop of X-rays as wide as 20 light years across has been found near the centre of the Milky Way. It may represent a new source of mysterious charged particles called cosmic rays, say astronomers.

The loop’s X-rays reveal they are caused by charged particles moving at nearly the speed of light – producing temperatures in excess of several hundred million degrees.

Such loops have been seen previously around supernova remnants, the expanding shells of gas blasted away from exploding stars. The shells are the leading suspects – within our galaxy – for the sources of the energetic cosmic rays that pelt the Earth from every direction.

But no supernova remnants have been found near this latest long loop. Instead, a crowded knot of stars called the Arches cluster appears to lie nearby.

Arches is denser than most star clusters, with 150 massive stars “packed in next to each other”. He and colleagues previously discovered the cluster was awash in 60-million-degree X-rays extending about 1 light-year around the cluster… and found radio emissions in the cluster suggesting the stars’ heat was blowing off part of their atmospheres in powerful winds. He says the collision of these winds – which rage at about 1000 kilometres per second – produce shock fronts whose magnetic fields can accelerate particles.

…another possible explanation: a previous supernova – which is no longer visible – might have blown out a “bubble” in space that could still be threaded by magnetic fields. These could act as a fast channel for energetic particles that would then emit X-rays…

Thanks to some military research, this social nirvana just might come true. DARPA, the US Department of Defense’s research agency, is working on a project known as Advanced Speech Encoding, aimed at replacing microphones with non-acoustic sensors that detect speech via the speaker’s nerve and muscle activity, rather than sound itself.

One system, being developed for DARPA by Rick Brown of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, relies on a sensor worn around the neck called a tuned electromagnetic resonator collar (TERC). Using sensing techniques developed for magnetic resonance imaging, the collar detects changes in capacitance caused by movement of the vocal cords, and is designed to allow speech to be heard above loud background noise.

DARPA is also pursuing an approach first developed at NASA’s Ames lab, which involves placing electrodes called electromyographic sensors on the neck, to detect changes in impedance during speech. A neural network processes the data and identifies the pattern of words. The sensor can even detect subvocal or silent speech. The speech pattern is sent to a computerised voice generator that recreates the speaker’s words…

Julian Cope, in his dense volume THE MODERN ANTIQUARIAN, attempts to identify the point at which the world went bad.

It’s his contention that the Neolithic temple builders of the Britain of five thousand years ago set off the modern age. Five thousand years ago, the establishment of agriculture transformed us from a species of individuals and nomads into settlers and communities. We went from worshipping the Earth we wandered to learning some control over it and developing independence from it. Cope suggests that our first great response to this new freedom and power was the creation of the great stone monuments still visible all over the country today. In his words, the “joyous and unconscious act of erecting a standing stone in response to the jubilation of learning to farm” was the moment at which we irrevocably peeled ourselves free of the Earth and felt true separation from it. An enormous psychological act, and a firewall between the points where our life with Earth always made some kind of sense – and the point where, for many of us, life on earth stopped making sense. Perhaps this, too, was the intent of the megaliths – marking the milestone beyond which we no longer understood things clearly. Where we could no longer see the machinery of the world.

Five thousand years later, we erect our own monuments to the world that runs us. Great stacked cairns and dolmens of theory and notion and fear and maybe even a few facts. Conspiracy theory, parapolitical thinking, cult delusion and UFOlogical mad science are the ways in which the people caught on the underside of the culture try to make sense of the bad world. That’s all. Our secret histories and forbidden archaeologies, our beamships and hidden chiefs – these are our bad stones, erected under a dark and oblivious sky, the signs of the people who find Earth too strange and oppressive. Trying to understand how the world really works. So that they no longer have to be afraid of its terrible complexity.

So that, perhaps, they can say sorry for ever abandoning it, and express regret for what the Earth became while our backs were turned.

Warren Ellis
Southend, England
May 21, 2000

Actually, it’s not that bad.

…appears to be completely unsupported. It’s just been set up and abandoned. There’s no support system, they never uploaded the FAQ, there are gaps in the documentation, no clients, no help, no nothing. Just the system.

Loudwire is a desert island in the net.

You know, with that and the apparently half-abandoned tribe.net, maybe some of you people should put on your pirate hats and board them…

Knocking a couple of recent Signals together into one for consideration:

I found this last year and promptly forgot about it because I am senile.

http://yoursite.loudwire.net/

It seems to use the basic LiveJournal code to allow you to bolt your own mini-LJverse on to your blog.

Disinfo have made use of it:

http://www.disinfo.com/site/loudwire.php

Aggregates all the journals in the sphere on to a single page for a groupblog-like appearance analogous to your LJ friendslist page.

Comments and friendslists are the framework in which LJ hangs. Different vibe to message boards.

If you and your friends wanted to start your own microspace of narrowcast call-and-response, this might be an interesting way to do it. Like LJ, it allows you to post by mail, and you can have your IM programs launched off it — the only thing it’s missing is the ability to send SMS to a phone, and that can be hacked with ipipi.com or similar in any case if you’re desperate for it.

And:

As I start the process of preparing telepathine.net for Playlist 2 and general resurrection, it occurs to me that I could link a Loudwire community to telepathine.net, and run it in a sidebar on the main page as a faux-groupblog. (NB: have been issuing vague thoughts on the Signal over the last few weeks about groupblogs and having nothing good to read.) A Telepathine Net, if you like. With each participant choosing their own level of comment moderation.

I labeled Telepathine as “free radio/new culture.” That can mean two things just as easily as one.

And all I’d have to do is put the people together and then let it go. So I would win.

I ALWAYS win.

Trebles and orgasms all round. Exeunt.

– W

Cover by JH Williams: