The Washington Post today confirmed that W. Mark Felt, a former number-two official at the FBI, was “Deep Throat,” the secretive source who provided information that helped unravel the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and contributed to the resignation of president Richard M. Nixon.

The confirmation came from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, and their former top editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee.

(Story behind a registration gate.)

In a statement today, Woodward and Bernstein said, “W. Mark Felt was ‘Deep Throat’ and helped us immeasurably in our Watergate coverage. However, as the record shows, many other sources and officials assisted us and other reporters for the hundreds of stories that were written in The Washington Post about Watergate.”

Bradlee, in an interview this afternoon, said that knowing that “Deep Throat” was a high-ranking FBI official helped him feel confident about the information that the paper was publishing about Watergate. He said that he knew the “positional identity” of “Deep Throat” as the Post was breaking its Watergate stories and that he learned his name within a couple of weeks after Nixon’s resignation. “The number-two guy at the FBI, that was a pretty good source…”

I’m heading out at the crack of sparrowshit tomorrow morning for a couple of days of hideous rural experience. Don’t send me links, photos or files until Thursday night UK time if you can help it,
because I won’t be able to click, see or open them. Which kind of defeats the point of you sending them, really.

I expect there will be moblog horror.

My daughter has a thing about birds of prey. One day soon I’m going to wake up with chicken bits carefully sprinkled on my head and a falcon sitting on my chest eyeing me intently.

According to Vanity Fair magazine, former FBI official W. Mark Felt admits he was “Deep Throat” — the source used by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to help uncover the scandal.

Their reporting helped bring about the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.

Felt is now 91, and living in Santa Rosa, California.

Woodward and Bernstein had said they wouldn’t reveal the identity of “Deep Throat” until after his death. C.N.N. is quoting Bernstein as saying he’s going to stick to that agreement.

Felt was second-in-command at the F.B.I. in the early 1970s. The magazine says he kept his secret, even from his family, until three years ago. He initially didn’t want to go public — reportedly telling his son that he didn’t think it was “anything to be proud of…”

Scientists have not only identified a critical gene involved in heroin addiction relapse, but they have also successfully blocked it, eliminating cravings for the drug…

(Yet another new-band-name headline.)

Meredith says:

at 8PM a quick set
then at 9PM we’ll do 3 more songs accompanied by a 20 piece ensemble, the Ambitious Orchestra.

Admission: $10
Venue: Pianos, 158 Ludlow St., NYC

More info. Obey Mer:

Well, it’s Monday night, and no-one’s around. You won’t tell anyone if I put an mp3 up, will you? Course you won’t. You’re so good.

A couple of years ago, I bought a compilation CD from Disposable Music called Disposable Music Vol. 2. Its sleeve is the kind of small pink-striped paper bag that sweet shops used to use when I was a kid. The tracklisting is a photocopied piece of thin card. It lists the songs by order of appearance and, seperately, the artists in alphabetical order. I seem to remember having to go to the website to sort it all out – http://www.disposablemusic.co.uk/. It doesn’t exist any more.

My favourite piece on it was, easily, “Dr Thirsty” — spoken-word by Revporl and music by Stuart Crozier. I can’t find it anywhere else on the net, Disposable have vanished, so screw it.

I doubt the link will last more than a couple of days, but here it is, in a high-quality 192k bit 6MB mp3.

If you like it, use the links above to investigate its creators.

“And the stars on his dressing room door/take flight…”

Found by a friend: Trailer for the forthcoming BMEzine Videos site (WMV).

moblog UK: futurephone enablement system

You can now add ‘tags’ to your posts, allowing you to contribute to the World Live Web, as indexed at technorati.com. Tags are going to integrate further into the site over time, allowing you to build dynamic collections of yours and other people’s images with ease. While those systems are being developed, your tags will simply link to Technorati. See the help page for more information.

RSS feeds for comments – want to keep up on the comments made on a post? Now you can point your newsreader at an RSS feed for each post on the site – see the url at the bottom of the “add comment” box.

One for the calendar: Xinlisupreme are preparing to release a web-only album, NO FUTURE, on July 1.

And you can still get their bonecrunching free-to-download single ZOUAVE’S BLUE by here.

Brian Walden:

I recall an extraordinary character named Konni Zilliacus. He was always being expelled, or about to be expelled, from the Labour Party. For a time he was the MP for Gorton in Manchester and, though I didn’t share his views, I liked him. He’d met Lenin and was forever wedded to a Socialist Utopia. One evening tears trickled down his cheeks as he explained to me the beautiful vision that American capitalism had destroyed.

“Nobody should want possessions,” he said. “Whatever their faults, Lenin and Stalin never had any money. The Socialist dream was to produce a new man who loved society and was loved by society. Capitalism, in general, was no threat. It worked badly. But this Yankee capitalism has corrupted everybody. People want cars, clothes and gadgets. America has destroyed mankind’s future.”

You’ve got to love writer/stripper friends working in wi-fi’d clubs who take their laptops in and pick up their end of conversations about futurity and subculture between acts.

The Catholic Church has decided to use beer mats as part of a campaign to recruit more priests.

Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone has been arrested for drink driving and possession of drugs.

Police said the 58-year-old film-maker was arrested on Friday night at a police checkpoint on Sunset Boulevard, in Beverly Hills, California. Sergeant John Edmundson said drugs were found during a search of Mr Stone’s Mercedes but did not specify what kind of drugs they were.

(Note for foreign types: “piss artist” is a local term for “person who enjoys a large amount of alcoholic beverage.” You are now 1.72% more English than you were a moment ago. Rejoice.)

The boy’s cheek had been slit open to take a car’s exhaust pipe. It had been fed through the side of his face and into his mouth, pulling it down to one side and laying on top of his tongue. It stuck out a good eight inches from his grey lips, leaking dark smoke. His eyes were dead. The boy sat naked in his wheelchair outside the bar, masturbating listlessly.

The ’70′s LCD counter on the town’s Welcome sign flickered and ticked over. Broken Wheel, pop 42. 41.

They all used to gown up when they went into the bar, but some months ago they’d had to choose between buying anti-bacterial scrub and bottled water, and water won.

Jamie was laying dead on the table. Doc Better was pouring himself the last of the whiskey, his other hand white-knuckling the bonesaw in case anyone complained. Annika was hunched over on a cracked leather stool, her tears making the blood on her white vinyl run. Her nails were convulsively scratching at her palm, where the chip was implanted.

Annika and Jamie wanted to be able to feel each other’s pulses. The chips radioed the data representation of their heartbeats, and stimulated the nerves they sat on to reproduce it.

Annika had felt Jamie’s heart stop. Right where he used to hold her hand.

(Written in under five minutes — and I’m sure it shows, but I wanted to get the idea down raw — back in March. (c) Warren Ellis 2005 all rights reserved blah blah the usual.)

The prospect of removing a cancerous 25-pound tumor from John Frick’s liver was daunting enough, but Dr. Sherry Wren got some stunning news the night before his surgery.

Wren, the chief of general surgery at the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs hospital, had always thought she would be able to deprive the tumor’s arteries of their blood supply during surgery. But tests showed that such a strategy would make the surgery even riskier and make the 63-year-old Berkeley man’s chances of survival far lower than the 50 percent she had expected.

“His tumor had arteries in it that were bigger than his liver’s artery,” Wren said. “It looked like a 20-pound turkey sitting in there.”

Although Frick’s weight of about 180 pounds was fairly normal for a man 6 feet tall, Wren said he was malnourished. And instead of having the normal 6 pints of blood, his body had less than 4.

“The tumor was eating before he was,” she said. “It was a giant parasite…”

Or, at best, have forgotten I knew and have been weirded out by all over again. Maddie Greene:

Self-referential marketing often backfires, though, and lately I’ve recalled Chris Gaines. Remember when country music musician Garth Brooks, at the height of his popularity, created a Trent Reznoresque persona? He renamed himself, wore wigs and costumes, and released albums of semi-grunge pop under this alter-ego. It was an embarrassing failure. In retrospect, I love that weirdness.

I don’t remember this At All. I’m going to google this up tonight, once everyone’s asleep and no-one can see me, because, you know…

Apparently, someone somewhere added an RSS feed to their website, and someone else didn’t add a full RSS feed to their website, and someone else is adding ads to their RSS feed.

According to the handful of blogs I scanned this evening while waiting for a download to finish, the above-listed testicle-puckeringly banal non-events now constitute fascinating, enraging and desperately important news on the internet.

Tonight, I would like to be able to send bone cancer down phone lines.