“Red Paper” is another jewel by Theory Anesthetic, who’s been on a bit of a run this summer. Ambient dreampop, loping and sparkling, dusty and drunk and smiling. Streaming-only, but, seriously, give it a listen.

Melissa Gira:

Phrase I never thought I’d hear: “My husband doesn’t let me blog about…”

Astronomers have detected what they are calling the ’10th planet’ orbiting our Sun.

It is bigger than Pluto, the ninth planet, which is 2,250 km across, and was discovered by three US astronomers. It is the largest object found in our Solar System since the discovery of Neptune in 1846.

The object, designated 2003 UB313, is currently 97 Earth-Sun distances away – more than twice Pluto’s average distance from the Sun…

November 2005.

Click for bigness:

Defamer:

Notoriously stuffy (No such thing as “Casual Friday”) Paradigm is having a dress down day. My guess is that they are just checking the assistants for track marks.

Rumors are circulating that this might be a good time to announce something to the whole company.

Probably that they just noticed they still represent me for books. Someone’s getting fired.

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

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

Direct download: here (8.5MB)

And you can stream it using the player in the right-hand menu bar here.

All previous mixtapes: here

LiveJournal user icons, donated by the faithful:

Here, someone has assembled scanned pages from several issues of PLANETARY to illustrate the build-up to the end of #23. It makes me look very clever. Which I’m not, but the illusion is quite compelling. I was quite impressed with myself for a minute there, I tell you…

Site was hacked — reloading old template, as it seems that’s all the hackers got to.

Nasa is investigating two cases of apparent debris seen falling from the space shuttle Discovery as it blasted off for Earth orbit.

The events were captured in onboard video and the agency says it now needs to consider their significance.

In one case, a heat shield tile seems to have been affected on the underside of the shuttle…

Don’t look.

(edit: this is an image from http://www.bmezine.com with the URL and logo cropped out. As you might expect, the image was intended for comedy purposes.)

Selected images now available as prints:

Negotiations with the ABC network for a Ron Jeremy reality-TV show are progressing, according to publicist Steve Banan, who revealed that in a conversation he had with executives last Friday, interest was shown “in having several ABC reality show producers take a look at the project.”

Mark Evanier:

Next year’s Comic-Con International will be held July 20-23. Good time to start looking for a parking space near the convention center.

Expect every hotel in San Diego to be booked out by the end of the day.

Jewish ultranationalists put a death curse on Ariel Sharon, saying only God could breach the heavy security around the Israeli prime minister, the Ynet Web site reported Tuesday.

“It’s preferable that God, rather than a mortal, kills him because his bodyguards are just too good,” Ynet quoted one of the participants at a “Pulsa Denora,” an ancient Jewish ceremony which it said was held at a cemetery at the weekend…

A top opposition leader in former Soviet Azerbaijan has defended his track record as a heterosexual after accusing the oil-rich state’s authorities of launching a gay smear campaign against him.

“If anyone has doubts about my manliness, let them send me their wives and they will become convinced of my prowess for themselves,” the leader of the Popular Front of Azerbaijan party, Ali Kerimli, told journalists.

Kerimli called the press conference a day after a national television station aired comments suggesting the Popular Front leader had been raped while awaiting trial in a jail in 1994…

I hate you, hep.

Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head.

Kushnir, 35, headed the English learning centers the Center for American English, the New York English Centre and the Centre for Spoken English, all known to have aggressive Internet advertising policies in which millions of e-mails were sent every day.

In the past angry Internet users have targeted the American English centre by publishing the Center’s telephone numbers anywhere on the Web to provoke telephone calls. The Center’s telephone was advertised as a contact number for cheap sex services, or bargain real estate sales.

Another attack involved hundreds of people making phone calls to the American English Center and sending it numerous e-mails back, but Vardan Kushnir remained sure of his right to spam, saying it was what e-mails were for.

Under Russian law, spamming is not considered illegal, although lawmakers are working on legal projects that could protect Russian Internet users like they do in Europe and the U.S.

(Found by “Albert A. Alien”, thanks)