THE CABINET OF DR CALIGARI, the original Expressionist 1919 version starring Conrad Veidt, has been released on the Internet Archive as a free stream or download. The Grey Lodge has all the details.

I’ll be attending Heroes Con in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA on its 25th anniversary date, June 30 – July 2 2006.

UNCIVILISED PLANET by Jiro Matsumoto is an astonishingly mean, fucked-up manga about three childhood friends held together by a sticky web of lust, hatred and aspiration.

Has anyone gotten a forum up using the Lussumo Vanilla software? I’d really like to take a look at how it works, and the Lussumo/getvanilla sites have been dead for the last two days…

warrene @ aol.com if you can help, I’m kind of curious…

– W

It sounds like del.icio.us-ing while pregnant, but it’s really a new feature rolled out by Joshua Schachter and co. It works like this: if you come across a link you think one of your cohorts might like, you can send it to a special “sent by others” inbox by tagging it for:username. To check out what others have sent to you, go to del.icio.us/for/ which, via the magic of cookies, will take you to your “inbox from others” (assuming you’re already logged in).

project.sigma’s “You Don’t Even Know” is a really nice, simple, propulsive little piece of lo-fi electropop. Streaming-only, the download doesn’t work.

MEDIA ALERT: Prophet Yahweh, Seer Of Yahweh, Will Call Down UFOs For Radio And Television News And Talk Shows In All 50 States Of America, One State At A Time.
Prophet Yahweh, Seer of YAHWEH, was blessed to discover the lost, ancient art of summoning UFOs and spaceships on-demand. Since 1979, hundreds of UFOs have appeared on his signal for witnesses to see.

(WMV video)

Prophet is willing to call down UFOs for your station’s news or talk show to video and photograph…

“The spaceship would never have appeared if I was not filmed calling it down. This is what the space beings wanted. They wanted me captured on film with their spaceship so everyone would know that these beings have chosen me to speak for them and no other person.The space beings kept their end of the bargain by sending a real UFO, on my signal, that was documented. But, Las Vegas media refused to film me calling down the spaceship. That’s why it never happened.”

Prophet Yahweh is now calling on all radio and television news and talk shows to allow him to come to their cities and summon sightings for them to document. Don’t let Prophet Yahweh be blacklisted because the powers that be don’t want humanity to find out that UFOs are real.

“We were really close to these tornados. It was just after that we thought, ‘Let’s build a vehicle that can take some abuse.’ A vehicle where if you get hit by a tornado, even a violent one, you’re probably going to be okay.”

So he built the TIV (Tornado Intercept Vehicle), a long-wheelbase 1997 Ford F-450 diesel dually pickup. No one at Ford would recognize it, though. The body has been replaced by inexpertly welded thick steel plates, and incorporates a roof turret housing the large IMAX film camera. Occupants peer out through prison-window Lexan portals.

“It’s so ugly! It’s just a big mobile tripod for the camera…” Casey has collected about 15 minutes’ worth of IMAX footage in seven years, much of it while latched under the turret of the TIV…

A 40-year-old rapist forced a teenage girl to take methamphetamine during an assault at a Klamath Falls motel, authorities said. He had help from another teenage girl, who was paid off in meth for helping hold down the victim.

“It’s a sign of the severity of meth epidemic locally and nationwide,” said Chief Deputy Rod Dailey of the Klamath County sheriff’s office.

The victim was 17 years old, and the accomplice was 15…

New Smyrna Beach, Florida police are on the lookout for the naked tickler.

Investigators said they believe one man could be responsible for a series of bizarre break-ins in which a naked man enters victims’ rooms while they are sleeping and tries to tickle their feet.

The naked tickler struck again in New Smyrna Beach over the weekend.

Investigators have been working on five similar, unsolved cases since 2001. Most of the victims are women over age 60, said police Cmdr. Wade Kirby. Kirby said no arrests have yet been made because they don’t have a lot to go on.

Volunteers taking part in tests of the Pentagon’s “less-lethal” microwave weapon were banned from wearing glasses or contact lenses due to safety fears. The precautions raise concerns about how safe the Active Denial System (ADS) weapon would be if used in real crowd-control situations.

The ADS fires a 95-gigahertz microwave beam, which is supposed to heat skin and to cause pain but no physical damage. Little information about its effects has been released, but details of tests in 2003 and 2004 were revealed after Edward Hammond, director of the US Sunshine Project – an organisation campaigning against the use of biological and non-lethal weapons – requested them under the Freedom of Information Act.

The tests were carried out at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Two experiments tested pain tolerance levels, while in a third, a “limited military utility assessment”, volunteers played the part of rioters or intruders and the ADS was used to drive them away.

The experimenters banned glasses and contact lenses to prevent possible eye damage to the subjects, and in the second and third tests removed any metallic objects such as coins and keys to stop hot spots being created on the skin. They also checked the volunteers’ clothes for certain seams, buttons and zips which might also cause hot spots.

The ADS weapon’s beam causes pain within 2 to 3 seconds and it becomes intolerable after less than 5 seconds. People’s reflex responses to the pain is expected to force them to move out of the beam before their skin can be burnt.

But Neil Davison, co-ordinator of the non-lethal weapons research project at the University of Bradford in the UK, says controlling the amount of radiation received may not be that simple. “How do you ensure that the dose doesn’t cross the threshold for permanent damage?” he asks. “What happens if someone in a crowd is unable, for whatever reason, to move away from the beam? Does the weapon cut out to prevent overexposure?”

The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.

Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.

“He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species,” says Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, US. “It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity…”

…New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman’s main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says…

As provided by Irene, bless her fucked-up dancing brains:

so i was in the basement touching myself while dressed like a skeleton because it’s the only way i can get off anymore…

An Indian court jailed five employees of an insurance firm for sedition after they glorified Osama bin Laden in a sales campaign, police said on Thursday.

The internal campaign, named “Mission Jehad,” addressed sales agents as “Dear terrorists” and compared selling life insurance policies to killing people, the Times of India newspaper said.

The posters were used at a meeting of sales agents for the ICICI Prudential Insurance Company in the northern Indian city of Kanpur.

“Kill 10, take a branded T-shirt and be the best terrorist in the group,” agents were told on posters ostensibly signed by bin Laden, the newspaper said. “Jihad begins from July 18-20,” the posters said, announcing the start of the sales campaign.

In a statement, the company said the slogan was an internal campaign confined to its Kanpur team and not a public scheme. “The company condemns the choice of theme and sincerely regrets any sentiments that may have been hurt,” the statement said, adding that it had started an investigation.

Police in Kanpur said five employees, including the branch manager, had been arrested Tuesday and charged with sedition. “We saw the posters and we decided to take action and book them for sedition,” police officer R.K. Parasher told Reuters from Kanpur.

A Kanpur court sent the five to jail Wednesday saying the Indian government recognized bin Laden as a terrorist and that their sales motto glorified him. It was not clear how long the jail terms were, but the accused were given the right to appeal to a higher court.

The company is a joint venture between ICICI Bank Ltd., India’s second-largest bank, and Prudential Plc, Britain’s second-biggest listed insurer.

Police confirmed they had been called to “incidents” at Warren Street, Oval and Shepherd’s Bush stations. There have been reports of smoke coming from the stations and all three have been evacuated. The whole of the Northern Line has been suspended, along with the Victoria Line and the Hammersmith and City.

I’m off to the pub: watch http://news.bbc.co.uk/ for updates.

And appears to have lost her last few remaining marbles:

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

(note: iPodderX may be having issues with the Mixtape. Check your settings.)

Direct download: here (8MB)

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

All previous mixtapes: http://warrenellis.libsyn.com

“If you have broken your arm and leg, please don’t wave them around, as the sight of your bones trying to protrude through the skin isn’t a pretty one.”

Aged 85, just as I discover this photo:

President Bush will select U.S. Circuit Judge John Roberts Jr. to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the nation’s highest court.

A quick google finds this:

…those who know Roberts say he… is a reliable conservative who can be counted on to undermine if not immediately overturn liberal landmarks like abortion rights and affirmative action.

Indicators of his true stripes cited by friends include: clerking for Rehnquist, membership in the Federalist Society, laboring in the Ronald Reagan White House counsel’s office and at the Justice Department into the Bush years, working with Kenneth Starr among others, and even his lunchtime conversations at Hogan & Hartson. “He is as conservative as you can get,” one friend puts it. In short, Roberts may combine the stealth appeal of Souter with the unwavering ideology of Scalia and Thomas…