NOTE: Please please please don’t bring me booze. I travel light, and won’t be able to carry it home.

Friday, 30 June, 2006

1.00 pm
Featured Signing: Warren Ellis
Location: Signing Booth C
(2hrs approx)

3.30 pm
Up Close And Personal With Warren Ellis
Location: Ballroom A
Stage interview with Heidi MacDonald of The Beat.
(1hr approx)

9.00 pm
After Hours With Warren Ellis
Location: Hilton Ballroom
Cash bar available.
(no idea how long this’ll run — anything up to 3hrs, I imagine)

Saturday, 1 July, 2006

12.00 pm
Featured Signing: Warren Ellis
Location: Signing Booth D
(2hrs approx)

4.00 pm
Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch: Two Guys and Several Hundred of Their Closest Friends
Location: Ballroom A
(1hr approx)

Sunday, 2 July, 2006

1.00 pm
One On One With Warren Ellis
Location: Ballroom A
Audience Q&A
(1hr approx)

• Home – PornoTube.com
  the porno version of YouTube, it would seem
  (tags: web video sex sns)
• CONSUME :: Buy Stuff That Doesn’t Suck (a blog from the minds behind Consumating)
  Damn nice of Josh Goldberg to plug FELL on the blog of his social network system consumating.com
  (tags: fell sns)

The work of Jaqueline Vanek:

• Russian alcohol ‘kills many’
  Poisoning by counterfeit alcohol kills 42,000 Russians every year, the country’s interior minister has said: bottles of alcohol on sale in Russian shops often contain poisonous liquids
  (tags: social pol)

© Katie West 2006

I’ve got a friend headed out to Moscow in about 48 hours. It’s been a while since that person has been there, and so they have no clue what it’s like right now, or, more importantly, where to go (internet cafes, clubs and otherwise “cool” places, for instance).

If there’s anyone on the list currently in Moscow or with RECENT experience of the place, I’d appreciate some pointers to pass on.

(Don’t send me website links in an attempt to be “helpful”, eh?)

Thank you for your kind attention.

Joe Killian sends me a note reading:

The weather here (in NC, near Charlotte) is nuts right now.

Today I walked outside at 9 a.m. and was sweating through my clothing.

At a little after 5 p.m. the sky opened up and a torrential downpour of rain and hail made it nearly impossible to drive, lightning setting fires and knocking down trees, exploding transformers as roads flooded and people were trapped in restaurants.

A few hours later all was dark and quiet, and so hot you feel you’re walking around in a wet, warm blanket.

And I had to write the weather story for the local daily.

It felt like I was tapping out a bad parody of Revelations.

• Our grip on reality is slim, says UCL scientist
  there’s a thing called “brain area 10″?
  (tags: med)
• Diamond by-product of hydrogen production and storage method
  there appears to be nanocrystalline diamonds at the end of a process to produce and store hydrogen using anthracite coal
  (tags: sci)

Funny, grotty, increasingly mean-spirited video for an oldschool footstamping sleazy Primal Scream pop song:

Heroes Con looms.

Car service to airport arranged. Last fitting for suit done (cost: one kidney). Earphones need replacing. Find boots.

Fly out Wednesday, arriving in Charlotte, North Carolina late Wednesday afternoon. Spend Thursday in bed recovering from nine-hour flight.

Heidi MacDonald emailed to tell me she’s interviewing me on stage at some point during the show. That will be painful. Hopefully she’ll get a dose of Montezuma’s Revenge, as she did in Toronto the other month.

Have decided to not leave air-conditioned space during my stay. My poor old lungs do not cope well with humidity. Current conditions in Charlotte: 85 degrees, 80% humidity, strong chance of thunderstorms: “Storms are capable of producing brief heavy rainfall and possible urban flooding with little or no warning.” I appear to have gotten a direct flight to Hell.

Leg is playing up again, so I will definitely be on the cane throughout the convention.

Have yet to write the talk for Friday night. Was writing something about Philip K Dick, but it’s not funny enough. May re-use Toronto talk from 2005.

Need to load some tv shows onto the flash card for Box. Also need to clear out and reload The Rugged Manly MP3 Player. Need to put “Fly” by Lamb on there, my totem song for travel.

Also required: wetsuit, boat, breathing apparatus, atropine, small gun with single bullet.

From Charlie’s Diary: Thoughts from the coal face:

“You were one year old when the Cold War ended. You were thirteen when the war on terror broke out, and eighteen or nineteen when Tony Blair was forced to resign as Prime Minister. You graduated university owing £35,000 in student loans, at a time when the price of entry into the housing market in the UK was over £150,000 (about 4-5 times annual income; the typical age of first time buyers was 35 and rising by more than 12 months per year). Unless you picked the right career (and a high-earning one at that) you can’t expect to ever own your own home unless your parents die and leave you one. On the other hand, you can reasonably expect to work until you’re 70-75, because the pension system is a broken mess. The one ray of hope was that your health and life expectancy are superior to any previous generation — you can reasonably expect to live to over a hundred years, if you manage to avoid succumbing to diseases of affluence…”

One of my favourite cartoonist, Hugleikur from Iceland, has just turned up on my MySpace list: his page.

• 3000-year-old “pyramid” discovered in NE China
  Chinese archaeologists have discovered a group of ancient tombs shaped like pyramids, dating back at least 3,000 years, in Jiaohe City of northeast China’s Jilin Province
  (tags: history)
• Quake fears for south California
  The southern part of the San Andreas fault is overdue for a large earthquake, according to a study in the journal Nature: “The southern section of the fault is fully loaded for the next big event”
  (tags: sci doom dooooooooom crack+crunch+squish+aaaaaa arizona+bay)
• These are our toys [and we don't want to share them]
  brilliant piece of writing on finding an old and gorgeous piece of technology — a fine description of machine fetish and refined eyes for treasure
  (tags: writing tech)

When most people post a comment here, they get the following page:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, and inform them of the time the error occurred and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

I know about it. Something’s died in my current WordPress install. But the instructions to upgrade to WordPress’ current build make the process look extremely complex and time-consuming. And, frankly, I don’t have that kind of time right now. So you’ll have to live with the error page when you post a comment until such time as I have a free day to upgrade WordPress. Your comment is processed every time, it’s just that that page is thrown up every time too…

An early page from FELL #6, illustrated by Ben Templesmith, for those of you bemoaning the lack of Nun In The Nixon Mask in the previous issue:

Three new songs (streaming-only) at Blitzkriegbliss’ MySpace: “Bella”, “White Light” and “Hold On.”

“End times” religious groups want apocalypse sooner than later, and they’re relying on high tech — and red heifers — to hasten its arrival.

For thousands of years, prophets have predicted the end of the world. Today, various religious groups, using the latest technology, are trying to hasten it.

Their endgame is to speed the promised arrival of a messiah. For some Christians this means laying the groundwork for Armageddon. With that goal in mind, mega-church pastors recently met in Inglewood to polish strategies for using global communications and aircraft to transport missionaries to fulfill the Great Commission: to make every person on Earth aware of Jesus’ message. Doing so, they believe, will bring about the end, perhaps within two decades.

In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a far different vision. As mayor of Tehran in 2004, he spent millions on improvements to make the city more welcoming for the return of a Muslim messiah known as the Mahdi, according to a recent report by the American Foreign Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank. To the majority of Shiites, the Mahdi was the last of the prophet Muhammad’s true heirs, his 12 righteous descendants chosen by God to lead the faithful. Ahmadinejad hopes to welcome the Mahdi to Tehran within two years.

Conversely, some Jewish groups in Jerusalem hope to clear the path for their own messiah by rebuilding a temple on a site now occupied by one of Islam’s holiest shrines. Artisans have re-created priestly robes of white linen, gem-studded breastplates, silver trumpets and solid-gold menorahs to be used in the Holy Temple — along with two 6½-ton marble cornerstones for the building’s foundation.

Then there is Clyde Lott, a Mississippi revivalist preacher and cattle rancher. He is trying to raise a unique herd of red heifers to satisfy an obscure injunction in the Book of Numbers: the sacrifice of a blemish-free red heifer for purification rituals needed to pave the way for the messiah…