I believe in the BBC.

Kieron Gillen
on travel

How will the experience of seeing grown human beings trying to dance like videogame avatars alter me?

Elephants may pay homage to the bones of dead relatives in their home ranges, a study of the creatures’ responses to skulls and ivory suggests.

African elephants have been observed to become highly agitated when they come across the bodies of their own, and they have been seen to pay great attention to the skull and ivory of long-dead elephants…

(And possibly play football with them.)

Six-year-old Aisha loves the orange blouse and jeans given to her by the kind woman who rescued her from the chaos of the Kashmir earthquake. She snuggles up to the woman, trying to forget the devastation of her village home and the deaths of her parents 16 days ago. What Aisha does not know is that the woman, Kausar, is a prostitute who has bought her from relatives for 50,000 rupees and plans to put her to work in the sex trade as soon as she reaches puberty.

Aisha is not alone. According to welfare agencies, many of the hundreds of girls and boys orphaned by the October 8 earthquake are being targeted by gangs intent on turning them into prostitutes or street beggars. Other children are being sold for adoption by their parents in acts prompted by the destruction of homes and livelihoods.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s Government is so alarmed by the threat to vulnerable children that it has placed armed guards at all hospitals and ordered that no child is released to anyone until proof of kinship has been verified…

At BUZZSCOPE.

Steven Shaviro

Every commodity has a fetishistic aura…In the same way, each of us has an aura that exceeds – and does not coincide with – our own consciousness or experience… My aura is not my product, however, because it is already myself-as -product, myself as I appear to other people, as I am present in the world as an object of exchange. My aura is not an attribute, or a consequence, of anything that I actually do. It is independent of my agency, just as it is inaccessible to my awareness. My aura is an expression of how I am “famous for being famous…”

Katie West:

Cory Burnell wants to set up a Christian nation within the United States where abortion is illegal, gay marriage is banned, schools cannot teach evolution, children can pray to Jesus in public schools and the Ten Commandments are posted publicly.

To that end, Burnell, 29, left the Republican Party, moved from California and founded Christian Exodus two years ago with the goal of redirecting the United States by “redeeming” one state at a time.

First up for redemption is South Carolina. Burnell hopes to move 2,500 Christians into the northern part of the state by next year and to persuade tens of thousands to relocate by 2016. His goal is to fill the state legislature with “Christian constitutionalists.”

Christian Exodus officially started in May 2004, reaching people mainly through the Internet. Since then, five families and two individuals have relocated to South Carolina, Burnell said. The organization, which claims about 1,000 members, held its first conference October 15-16 to promote its agenda. About 50 people from as far away as Ohio and Oregon attended.

Burnell picked South Carolina partly for its Christian majority and conservative politics. “Historically, Southerners do have a states’ rights mentality,” he said. “Christians in the North are experiencing the most liberalism, or you could say persecution…”

The strain of the bird flu virus lethal to humans has been found in Croatia, the European Union has announced.

The virus, also known as avian flu, was discovered in wild swans found dead at a pond in eastern Croatia last week.

Also, German officials said two geese had tested positive for the flu in initial checks.

The stainless-steel Octacube is a striking object of visual art and also a mental portal to the fourth dimension, a teaching tool, and a research object bringing together many branches of mathematics and physics connected to the structure of symmetry.

The sculpture, which measures about six feet in every direction, presents the three-dimensional “shadow” of a four-dimensional solid object…

(See also freaky Flash animation on site)

Anya Galkina:

As usual, I try stupid things because I read about them on warrenellis.com. Earlier this month, I found myself ass-deep into making a comic book, instead of taking up law like my mother wants me to.
Today, I went ahead and drank a bunch of Red Bull. Now burly men are scraping me off the ceiling WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! CAFFEINE!!!!!!!!!!!111`~A;LDFKJASI!!
CLASHMOGASTIC! BOOM! BOOM! YEEEEEEAAAAAAAAH!
sdSWekfjkdl;
pl,,ease sen~d downersssssss.

I hate you Shannon.

“It takes half an hour to put the make-up on and wig on and then a special man comes to put the kimono on. To wear the kimono properly for a long time I need a man’s hands to tighten it…”

“Robots Living Among Us” seems to be the bar that all motion-graphics companies feel they have to clear these days. Here’s another, from 1st Ave Machine.

The author of a new New Mexico law that allows felony charges against owners of dangerous dogs was hospitalized over the weekend after his own dog attacked him. Bob Schwartz, who also is Gov. Bill Richardson’s crime adviser, was hospitalized at University of New Mexico Hospital on Sunday night with bites on both his arms, said Pahl Shipley, a spokesman for the governor…

(thanks to Jeff Moore)

‘Scuse the mess: today, I’ve been looking at changing how I do some things on the blog. The place has been feeling a bit stale for the last couple of months, so I’m trying out a few different approaches to break up the pages a bit. Forgive me if it all looks a bit weird and scrappy for a bit. I’m still working some of this stuff out.

It also occurs to me that the circle of writers/models/photographers/artists I used to know and write about in the diepunyhumans days have drifted to the four winds (as “scenes” and circles tend to do — even faster, in the accelerated time of the internet), and so there’s been a lack of documenting the mad and the beautiful on the fringes of netculture, and more of a focus on the research material (which you might call the mad and the ugly). Which is fun for people, it seems — the traffic averages 11,500 unique visitors a day, not including RSS, Feedburner, LJ syndication and the like — but sometimes feels a little bloodless to me.

Anyway. Yes. Breaking stuff.

Taken from my Flickr friends page this evening. Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

John Rogers
on pitching TV shows

“Don’t be stupid. You don’t blow someone for a pilot script commitment. You blow someone for a time slot.“

A Steilacoom student is fighting a decision by school officials to suspend him for three days after he appeared in an inflatable penis costume outside another school’s homecoming dance… (video at link)

Yogomaia, the chiefdom headquarters of Sengbeh chiefdom, and one of the two towns that form Kabala town in the Koinadugu district is at present under panic as a mysterious animal that has been rampaging the area for the past one month kills four people.

Sources from Yogomaia state that the animal kills its prey by breaking their neck and ends up eating their entire entrails. Sources also indicate that the animal suddenly appears before its victim and is capable of running faster than humans. “It can run at a speed that is unbelievable,” said Manteneh Marrah, whose brother has been the latest victim of the mysterious raid.

“This animal attacks people either on their farms or on their way to or from their farms,” Hon. Kakay stated, while describing the animal as very mysterious. To qualify his assertion, he disclosed that a huge pile of shit supposedly from this animal which is carnivorous turned to be a shit of an herbivorous but quite different in form and substance from the normal kind associated with cows, sheeps, and most bush animals…