I picked up an odd piece of information the other day.

I’ve long been interested in the chambara form, the Japanese stories of wandering heroic swordsmen. Chambara is a subset of what the Japanese called jidai geki, period drama. I bet you’ve all seen one of them — YOJIMBO, SEVEN SAMURAI, RAN. And you’ve all seen THE HIDDEN FORTRESS, though you know it better as the first STAR WARS film. George Lucas was, of course, a huge fan of Kurosawa.

It didn’t occur to me until I read this tidbit the other day that Lucas, famously struggling with the writing of STAR WARS in San Francisco — neurotically slicing off bits of his hair, getting OCD about his writing materials and forgetting how to spell Chewbacca every day — would of course have been reading books and articles on Kurosawa, and, in looking for his faded knights of dynasty, would have coughed and California-mispronounced jidai into Jedi…

Just struck me as curious and funny, is all, and I wanted to note the thought before it left.

Howard Chaykin talks to Eisner’s biographer Bob Andelman about his experience and perceptions of Eisner. This is fascinating, not least for the side issues that leak out, including the real genesis of A CONTRACT WITH GOD.

Katie West say:

This just in: I am only selling prints (in the fashion I have been doing) until the end of June. So if you have any requests, tell me now, because after June 30th, the Katie West vaults are being closed and only new stuff will be sold and only in limited edition runs.

• Perpetual Ocean ~ Peter Miller
  “The images in this room are created entirely from mathematical algorithms. If you find them offensive in any way, all I can say is that beauty (or obscenity) is in this case most certainly in the eye of the beholder”
  (tags: art digital)
• VOX
  (tags: sns blog)

For those who might be just joining me:

My name’s Warren Ellis. I write comics and graphic novels, among other things. I’ve done quite a lot of them. I have several comics works floating around on the internet for free:

TRANSMETROPOLITAN: Another Cold Morning. | FELL: the first story. | JOHN CONSTANTINE, HELLBLAZER: Shoot. | SUPERIDOL.

I’m travelling: I’m at Heroes Con in North Carolina June 30-July 2, and at the Helsinki Comics Festival September 23-24. I’m expecting to be in NYC and LA on business this year, but nothing’s confirmed yet.

These are the places you can find me on the internet. There’s a fair few of them, too:

Bad Signal is my email journal. It’s announcement-only style, which means you only get email from me, not the 9700 readers and counting who are on the list. I use it for thinking out loud. Sometimes you won’t hear from me for a week. Sometimes you’ll hear from me five times a day. Often I will be drunk. Sometimes I will be naked. People on Bad Signal tend to cry a lot.

My LiveJournal, I use for short bits of fiction and messing around with the 3000 LJ users who have the page in their friends list.

http://www.myspace.com/warrenellis = I add anyone, me. I’m tempted to start a religion there, but Rupert Murdoch would come for me. And nobody needs that. In any way.

I’ve recently opened accounts at social network systems Subkultures (because the system looks interesting to me) and mynetspot (because someone asked me to).

http://www.flickr.com/people/warrenellis/ = where I store my photos. My friends-and-contacts list there is usually full of interesting stuff, as I know many mentally ill lovely people.

I run two online communities. The Engine is devoted to comics (and music and other stuff). Die Puny Humans is devoted to tracking outbreaks of the future. I have had no time to devote to them in over a month. I’m not even sure if one of them is still there.

http://www.bloglines.com/public/warrenellis = my daily reading list.

I don’t use IM. I can most easily be found on warrene @ aol.com.

– W

A top US official has described the suicides of three detainees at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a “good PR move to draw attention”.

Colleen Graffy told the BBC the deaths were part of a strategy and “a tactic to further the jihadi cause”, but taking their own lives was unnecessary.

Speaking to the BBC’s Newshour programme, Ms Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, said the three men did not value their lives nor the lives of those around them. Detainees had access to lawyers, received mail and had the ability to write to families, so had other means of making protests, she said, and it was hard to see why the men had not protested about their situation.

Ms Graffy said closing down Guantanamo was a “complicated process” which needed to consider what would happen to detainees if the centre was shut down…

The suicides of three detainees at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, amount to acts of war, the US military says.

The camp commander said the two Saudis and a Yemeni were “committed” and had killed themselves in “an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us”.

Lawyers said the men who hanged themselves had been driven by despair.

Rear Adm Harris said he did not believe the men had killed themselves out of despair. “They are smart. They are creative, they are committed,” he said. “They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

They had left suicide notes, but no details have been made available.

• myNetSpot.org | 100% Free Social Networking Online Community For Friends
  (tags: sns)
• WeeWorld – Home of the WeeMee
  Apparently nothing to do with urination at all. Another bullshit webtoy where you make a “cute” big-eyed sexless little avatar of yourself for no good reason — just one with a deeply unfortunate name if you live in a place where “wee” = synonym for “piss
  (tags: web)
• Madame Khufu – Parlor of Incognita
  (tags: masks art)
• Comic Book Drug Reference Appendix B: Transmetropolitan
  Someone has detailed every drug used in TRANSMETROPOLITAN.
  (tags: transmet transmetropolitan drugs med comics graphic+novels)

The band Abney Park, currently featuring my Pygmy Wife trading as Magdalene Veen on backing vocals and hipbones, are on the road right now, and detailing the trip with high comedy on the band LJ. The entries for June 9 and 10 are the ones you want, so far. Funny, funny stuff, with some terrific photos.

Also: they have cheese tours in Idaho? And, my god, I have to gank this shot for posterity:

Three detainees at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have died in what appears to have been a joint suicide pact, officials said.

It was not immediately clear when the inmates – two Saudis and a Yemeni – died, the US military said. They “were found unresponsive and not breathing in their cells by guards…”

• Crows Have Human-Like Intelligence, Author Says
  (tags: sci)
• Beaten with dead chihuahua – Unusual Tales – Specials – smh.com.au
  Missouri woman has been arrested for breaking into a dog breeder’s home and beating her repeatedly over the head with a dead Chihuahua
  (tags: crime weird)
• ‘Mind over matter’ no longer science fiction
  Peter Brunner stares at a laptop computer. Without so much as moving a nostril hair, he suddenly begins to compose a message — letter by letter — on a giant screen overhead
  (tags: sci)

“After years of dead girlfriends, Spider-Man has finally found a way to be intimate with the only woman ever to stand by him… now, with Aunt May safely secured in the sex suit…”

The collaborative photographic work of Zoetica Ebb and Vladimir Perlovich.

I laughed when Old Yeller died.

Next week I’m actually going to be able to tell you what’s keeping me so busy that I can barely post here. It’s a TV Thing.

For now, I would really like a new liver, indestructible lungs, an extra eighteen hours in every day, and something to make my teeth stop grinding.

Also, something to hit. And another glass of whisky.

Exeunt.

• Variable physical laws
  imagine that the fundamental constants – and thereby also the fundamental laws – are not at all constant but have gradually changed over time
  (tags: sci)
• Negative Index Materials From Theory to Reality
  NIMs, which don’t exist naturally, are optical materials that have a negative index of refraction
  (tags: sci)
• Researchers build an ultrasound version of the laser
  Called a uaser (pronounced WAY-zer) — for ultrasound amplification by stimulated emission of radiation
  (tags: sci)

DEADWOOD resumes on Sunday. And thank God. DEADWOOD, for my money, has been the best writing on American TV in the years since Sorkin left WEST WING. The language is beautiful. Just sit there and listen to it, listen to how the sentences are constructed; there’s Shakespeare and Dickens and Henry Miller in there. Anyone who dismisses it because of the swearing is an idiot whom you should shun like a leprous flasher. Swearwords are just words, and have their own music. DEADWOOD has music.

Susannah Breslin (clicky for worksafe image):

On May 23, an 18-count federal obscenity indictment was handed down against two porn companies, including JM Productions, producers of the “American Bukkake” series. Among the adult videotapes involved is “American Bukkake 13.” On the day “American Bukkake 13″ was shot, I was present. The bukkake girl was Sabrina Jayde, outfitted with a cone around her neck, an idea, according to director Jim Powers, inspired by a dog that had been to the vet. Earlier this year, the look was echoed on the runway in Jean Paul Gaultier’s Fall 2006 Ready-to-Wear collection.

London electropunk mutoids Katscan soundtrack Tokyo radical sf writer Kenji Siratori:

We were approached by legendary Japanese cyberpunk author Kenji Siratori (Body Electric, Human Worms, Debug), to write a piece of music to compliment a short prose he had written called ‘Spiral World’…

• MIT Convergence Culture Consortium: Is the Sci Fi Brand Extreme? Wrestling Joins the Network
  World Wrestling Entertainment is re-launching the cult favorite wrestling brand Extreme Championship Wrestling, a former competitor-of-sorts, on the Sci Fi Network next week
  (tags: tv wtf)
• Fred Phelps Is Still Alive, Damnit
  “…they struggle to hold up signs that read… “God Hates Your Tears.”"
  (tags: scumfuck mad religion weird)
• Gilbert Deya Ministries :: Gilbert Deya & Missing Babies: God Knows
  Nineteen babies appear mysteriously in Kenya. Are they the work of God, miracle births? Or have they been stolen? And how is the man suspected of being the ringleader allowed to carry on preaching in Britain?
  (tags: crime)
• igargoyle: MicroOptical’s new “myvu” Display
  personal video viewer
  (tags: tech)

Halfway down this page:

Yes. This is an actual Marvel comic.

A German historian has claimed in a new book presented on Monday that Nazi scientists successfully tested a tactical nuclear weapon in the last months of World War II.

Rainer Karlsch said that new research in Soviet and also Western archives, along with measurements carried out at one of the test sites, provided evidence for the existence of the weapon.

“The important thing in my book is the finding that the Germans had an atomic reactor near Berlin which was running for a short while, perhaps some days or weeks,” he told the BBC. “The second important finding was the atomic tests carried out in Thuringia and on the Baltic Sea.”

Mr Karlsch describes what the Germans had as a “hybrid tactical nuclear weapon” much smaller than those dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki…

“Karlsch displays a catastrophic lack of understanding of physics,” wrote physicist Michael Schaaf, author of a previous book about Nazi atomic experiments, in the Berliner Zeitung newspaper…

Further to this, reader Simon did a quick translation of the original article:

I’ve had a crack at translating the article. I’ve done my best, but you people aren’t paying me, so it’s a bit of a rush job:

In the future it will cost more than 2,000 DKR annually to own a computer with internet access. This is one of the results of the media settlement.

More and more Danes watch TV on their computers. Which is why it will now be included in the licensing agreement.

That is the gist of the media settlement that wide majority in Parliament agreed upon this afternoon.

Licensing fees to rise:
The new media license covers all appliances capable of receiving picture programs and services, including computers and certain cellular phones, according the settlement.

The media license will be on a level comparable to the current color-TV license, and in the period from 2007-2010 it will follow the general price and wage increase.

Accordingly, it will cost an estimated 1,075 DKR biannually in 2007 and 1,130 DKR biannually in 2010.

In return, every license-requiring appliance in the domicile is then included.

Economically struggling senior citizens as well as the blind and the sight-impaired will still have the option of receiving a reduction in or exemption from the fee.

Victory for Plummer:
The new media license is a victory for Danmarks Radio.

The General Manager of the station, Kenneth Plummer, has argued hotly for an expansion of the license and has previously said, that DR stands to lose 30 million DKR in 2006, because roughly 15,000 Danes watch TV on their computers, thusly avoiding the licensing fees.

No to Annulment:
On the other hand, DR failed to achieve their desire to make viewers actively annul their license. As always, you still have to actively register yourself in the future in order to pay the licensing fee.

The question has been one of the deciding snags in the negotiations – both the Social Democrats, the Radicals and the Minister of Culture, Brian Mikkelsen (the Conservative People’s Party) have desired an annulment model, wherein every household automatically pay the fee, unless they actively annul their license.

But opposition from several prominent Venstre-politicans [note: the right wing party currently in government with the Conservatives] has led to the suggestion being aborted.

With the settlement it is also established that DR must create a digitally combined Children’s-and-History channel, as well as broadcast news in languages commonly spoken by immigrants and refugees.