(or re-watching, anyway)

• Face-busting fisticuffs hailed as new path to social harmony
  Bushido, the Way of the Warrior that guided samurai behavior through the centuries … is now being recommended as a guideline for modern Japanese social relations
  (tags: japan social)
• PM claims five-knuckle shuffle, not wedlock, helps secure grip on power
  “You know they used to call them ‘hygiene sacks?’” Shukan Gendai quotes the prime minister telling the much younger vice minister. “We used to blow them up and play with them like they were balloons”
  (tags: japan)
• juliette and the licks – barfly on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
  (tags: photography)
• schizopheric
  ambient spooktronica
  (tags: music mp3)

I shouldn’t make fun — I love that my old friend Chad Michael Ward is now directing music videos. He just put this in his journal, and I know a fair few models read this site, so:

I’m looking for 10-20 smoking hot girls to be in the music video featuring Billy Idol and Velvet Revolver’s Slash that I’m directing next weekend.

Prospective girls should have a skinny/athletic build and be available for the entire 12 hour shot on Sunday, June 25th.

If interested, email me a headshot AND full body shot to chad(at)digitalapocalypse.com with the subject line reading “MUSIC VIDEO MODEL”. Please also include your phone # with your submission.

• Béla Kiss
  a Hungarian serial killer. He is thought to have murdered at least 24 young women and attempted to pickle them in giant metal drums that he kept on his property
  (tags: crime)
• TypeNavigator
  world’s first interactive visual font search system
  (tags: font typeface web)

I have been engaged by the American cable company AMC to write the half-hour pilot for a TV series I created. The contract calls the show “black comedy/science fiction.” Christina Wayne at AMC, who, along with Vlad Wolynetz have just been unreasonably good to deal with, recently described it as a “sf/entertainment-industry ‘dramedy’.”

As with all TV Things, everything could go horribly wrong. But this is the deal I’ve been waiting for, with people who understand the project and format I want to work in. And you know something’s going right when people in TV are telling you to go more experimental and take more risks. This isn’t your US network tv experience.

I’m writing the pilot at the moment. (And I should particularly thank Joss Whedon and John Rogers for their insights into the process.) More details will hopefully follow as the project progresses. Or, you know, a tearstained screed if it doesn’t.

Weapons collected during a British knife amnesty:

My acquaintance Morgan Murphy headed out to the Bonnaroo Festival (which I keep mistyping as “bonobo”) yesterday:

I’m at the Memphis Airport drinking a “big draft” of Bud Light (it was only $1 more than the regular draft). Drinking at airports is a unique thrill. “I’m calming my nerves” is a wholly acceptable excuse for guzzling liquor on or between flights, but not so well-received at 9am on a Tuesday, at the bar where prostitutes go to shower in the sink. I changed seats a number of times on my flight to accommodate a family (who for some CRAZY reason) wanted to sit near their son. I should mention that their son was nearly vegetative and had to wear a helmet. The appreciative father wanted to buy me a drink on the flight…I declined, but he force-fed me $5 nonetheless. I’ll probably give it to a homeless man so HE can buy a drink. I won’t enable homeless women, however. They should be at home. (call me old fashioned)

Will, I’m told, be released next summer. That is apparently hard and fast now. It does have a new title — the Amazon entry is wrong in all particulars, including imprint.

More details next week, as I get permission to share them.

• Casiopea – Borges, Ellis, Gibson y Gaiman.
  “puto” means “whore”, right? “El blog del puto Warren Ellis” ….that’s not so good, right?
  (tags: me hmmm possible+wanker)
• Lightning
  Victim struck by lightning, circa 1920s. The bottoms of his feet were blown off
  (tags: med)
• Failed Mission
  what sniper bullets do
  (tags: war)
• New glacier theory on Stonehenge
  Open University geologists say the stones were in fact moved to Salisbury Plain by glaciers
  (tags: history)
• ‘Glass carbon’ is a world first
  The new material has been baptised amorphous carbonia, or a-CO2
  (tags: sci space eco)
• Thinglink : Home
  Thinglink is a free product code for creative work
  (tags: spimeworld)

John Rogers is correct:

…talking to some humans about coming back to TV, but specifically in the cable world. First off — 13 episodes. No more, no less on the pickup. And second — The Closer’s premiere numbers were 8.28 million, beating every network except CBS. Explain again why, if your primary interest is in telling a good story, you should care about dealing with the enormous bullshit that comes with network TV?

Two weeks from today, I’m going to be in Charlotte, North Carolina for Heroes Con.

“Making a rare States-side convention appearance, Warren is sure to be one of the most entertaining hands you’ll shake all weekend!”

I didn’t write that. I swear I didn’t.

For those attending the show, you need to know this:

Friday
9.00 pm
After Hours With Warren EllisLocation: Hilton Ballroom

Join iconoclast and Planetary writer Warren Ellis for drinking, smoking and cussing in the Hilton Ballroom! Warren will deliver a talk, then hold what promises to be a rollicking round of questions–and no doubt rejoinders–with the audience. Not only will this event almost certainly not be suitable for all ages, we warn that your children may be irretrievably scarred by some of the language used. But besides that, this is a can’t miss for any fan of Warren’s, or just people interested in talking about ideas, the future, or whatever is currently occupying Warren’s imagination! Cash bar available.

And, no, I didn’t write that either.

Updates to come as Thee Countdown continues.

SAVE ME.

He was a millionaire who dreamed of saving humanity using the sperm of geniuses. But what became of Robert Klark Graham’s master plan?

In the late 1970s, in a underground bunker on his ranch near San Diego, American millionaire Robert Klark Graham set up the world’s most controversial sperm bank known as the Repository for Germinal Choice.

Already famous as the inventor of the shatterproof spectacle lens, 70-year-old Graham was set to turn his hand to a much more infamous career.

He believed that “retrograde humans” were breeding unchecked. He wanted to reverse this trend by bringing thousands of geniuses into the world, fathered by the most brilliant minds. Single-handedly he dreamed of saving humanity using the sperm of clever men…

Over the years, the bank was ultimately responsible for the birth of 217 children. Of the few repository children that have come forward, Doron Blake, 23, was the bank’s second-born child and Graham’s poster boy.

“I turned out very well, my IQ was off the charts and basically I was everything Robert Graham wanted,” he says. “Throughout my life I’ve felt I’ve not had to work as hard for the level of achievement that I’ve reached as most of my peers did. I don’t usually broadcast the fact that I came from a sperm bank because I don’t think it’s that interesting. People find out when it comes up.”

Seventeen-year-old ballerina Courtney Ramm..also a product of the sperm bank, says she finds most things easy. “In school I think I was pretty much in the top. I never found anything too challenging as a child. Everything pretty much came easy for me…”

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the San Francisco Bay area and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are competing to design America’s first new nuclear bomb in two decades.

In Yerevan in the former Soviet republic of Armenia, 18-year-old girl Narine Aivasyan shocked doctors with her unusual disease. The girl complained about an abscess on her wrist that had been hurting her for a long period already. When doctors opened the bandage on Narine’s hand they saw two very thin thorns sticking out of the hand.

The girl was fond of pot plants and devoted much time to looking after her plants. Once, Narine pricked herself on a cactus while watering plants. Some thorns got stuck in her wrist. The parents immediately disinfected the wound but it still festered and even expanded. Narine was reluctant to visit a doctor. She had to go to a hospital in a month when a point of a thorn emerged on the skin right on the place of the red wound. Doctors easily removed the strange object, but more thorns turned up on the same spot soon.

Head of the immunology and virology laboratory at the Armenia research center Tigran Davtyan says the world medicine has never known before that herbal cells may settle down and parasitize on the organism of a human or an animal. Deeper study of the thorns removed out of the girl’s wrist confirmed their vegetative origin. It turned out that the thorns belonged to a cactus that many people had at home.

The only way to save the girl was to perform an operation to remove the fistula to stop the cactus from parasitizing all about the organism…When researchers studied the bigger thorns they arrived at a conclusion that they were no longer of vegetative origin. As a result of mutation, the patient got new unknown cells, some sort of a hybrid of a human and a plant. In other words, the young girl was turning into a cactus…

(Ever seen THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT?)

Actress Billie Piper is to leave Doctor Who at the end of the current series, the BBC has confirmed…

Remnants of a Phillipine woman, murdered and dismembered by her lover in late December, 1920 (rotten.com):

• Floating atomic plant for Russia
  Russia is to build the world’s first floating nuclear plant, designed to provide power for remote areas
  (tags: eco mad tech)

Trixie Bedlam:

Look at this.

…

No, don’t!

A similar scene in my forthcoming novel should be sending my editor at HarperCollins blind right about now.

It may be time to look for a new website host.

Every time I get a high-traffic day, Globat’s stats system breaks. It’s gotten to the point where I know I’ve had a high-traffic day because the stats say there were exactly 0 visitors to the site, as on June 1. Yesterday, after entries on fazed.net and low-level links on MeFi, I got 437 readers. The day before? 14000. Suuuure.

How am I supposed to take over the world if I cannot get an accurate account of the brains I am squatting my eggs out into?

(Yes, savour that image.)