So it is said.

Via Exhibit A Press:

Via Shay via Josh Brown:

And, yes, it’s going to be a mostly photoblogging kind of day. Not in the mood for wading through my feeds today.

Melissa Gira, en route to BlogHer. Two BlogHer-related posts: here and here.

Rowland’s gone Hollywood. The Slackmistress is apparently assaulting random strangers. And Nef is asking for trouble.

(original)

Originally uploaded by tetheredtothesun.

A strange Flickr photoblog that (I think) Katie West introduced me to:

Albert Alien:

• mothball sniffing warning issued
  18-year-old French girl had to be hospitalised when she developed scaly skin on legs and hands, unsteadiness, mental sluggishness: BECAUSE SNORTING MOTHBALLS WASN’T ENOUGH EVIDENCE OF MENTAL SLUGGISHNESS
  (tags: drugs stupid)
• Yogic flyers build ‘shield of invincibility’ around Israel
  Yogic flying, derided by critics as glorified bum-hopping, is the purported ability to levitate through the advanced practice of transcendental meditation
  (tags: mad cult tards not+fucking+working+yet+is+it)
• Jung Myung Seok :: Japan Lawyers Eye Accusing S. Korean Cult Leaders of Rape
  lawyers are considering of filing charges against Jung Myung Seok, founder of the group JMS and the leader of a Japanese arm of the cult called “Setsuri,” or providence, in Japanese.
  (tags: cult crime)
• Hate Groups :: Four jailed Aryan Brotherhood members convicted
  Barry “The Baron” Mills, Tyler “The Hulk” Bingham, Edgar “The Snail” Hevle and Christopher Overton Gibson were the first defendants to stand trial in the federal racketeering case aimed at dismantling the feared Aryan Brotherhood
  (tags: crime)

Just got an email from Fraction reading “WYATT EARP!” And, indeed, Wyatt and Morgan Earp are riding in on the crest of a bullshit excuse. According to HBO, “Langrishe… offers to perform long-term therapy on Hearst’s chronic aching back.” Brian Cox as a masseur is not something I expected to see before I die. (And also makes me think of ZATOICHI.)

As ever, my copy gets transported to me for the morning. Feel free to use this space to talk about tonight’s episode, before and after.

So Friday we crossed the country to Berkeley Castle, where we attended a small private banquet whose high point was a performance by the Medieval Baebes. Somewhere, I have the first record by Miranda Sex Garden, Katharine Blake’s first band, from 1990 or thereabouts. Sadly, Blake wasn’t at the banquet performance, having apparently been suddenly taken ill with a pregnancy complication. My daughter loves the Baebes — the music, but also that they’re obviously smart and educated and yet plainly are women who do not get out of bed early in the morning if they can help it. She could do a lot worse for female role models.

Prosecutors say a man shoved a cellphone down his girlfriend’s throat because he was angry and jealous. But the defence insisted as a trial got underway that the woman swallowed the phone intentionally to keep him from seeing whom she had been calling.

Marlon Brando Gill, 24, is charged with first-degree assault in the December incident involving 25-year-old Melinda Abell.

Abell has given inconsistent accounts of what happened before she was taken to a hospital, where an emergency room doctor removed the phone.

She testified Tuesday on the first day of Gill’s trial that she couldn’t remember how the phone got in her throat, saying she had too much to drink that night.

She said in court that she could not recall writing a statement to police after the incident, in which she said: “I think he thought I’d been talking to other guys. . . . He took my phone to see who I had been calling.” However, the statement added: “If I didn’t want him to see my phone, I would have just thrown it out the window and busted it.”

She testified that he had verbally and physically abused her, but under cross-examination she acknowledged she never told police about the abuse and continued to live with Gill until the cellphone incident…

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• From the present to the past (June 2006) – News – PhysicsWeb
  Hawking Posits Universal Superposition
  (tags: sci mad)

• San Francisco to insure uninsured
  The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted unanimously in favor of a plan to provide universal health insurance for San Franciscans
  (tags: pol)
• Prelife molecules present in comets
  Evidence of atomic nitrogen in interstellar gas clouds suggests that pre-life molecules may be present in comets, a discovery that gives a clue about the early conditions that gave rise to life
  (tags: space)
• In Brief Mobile TV demand seen reaching 24 M by 2010
  up from 7 million this year
  (tags: tv phone)
• KickApps — User-Generated Video & Social Networking at Your Website
  (tags: sns)
• Crowd Factory
  Make vibrant communities with Crowd Factory, a powerful platform that allows you to create a social network site similar to MySpace
  (tags: sns)
• Shoot up and cool down fighting global warming
  Injecting sulfur into the atmosphere to slow down global warming is worthy of serious consideration, according to Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen (geoengineering)
  (tags: eco viridian geoengineering)
• Scientists Warming triggers ‘dead zone’
  fish and crabs washing up dead on Oregon beaches are being killed by a recurring “dead zone” of low-oxygen water that appears to be triggered by global warming
  (tags: eco)
• Japan rivers could spawn drugresistant bacteria report
  Major rivers in Japan are so contaminated with ingredients of antibiotics and other medicines that they may spawn drug-resistant strains of bacteria
  (tags: eco med)

This mumbling, short-armed, wattle-necked, swollen-faced, beady-eyed charisma-free thing in an orange tie is the great and terrible Republican threat in ’08?

I’m starting to think that my Democratic friends in the US would be terrified if the GOP ran DONALD FUCKING DUCK in ’08.

Mind you, if I still thought Barack “Look! I can fuck myself in the ass for the Lord! Please love me, Christian Whitey!” Obama was going to be a lick of fucking use in two years, maybe I’d be crazy enough to be scared of this empty old man who can’t field a question from a comedy host who’s being excessively nice to him.

I’m telling you again. In 2008 I want to see Arnold Schwartzenegger versus Jesse Ventura for the Presidency. And I want the debates to take place in a patch of desert, with a ring marked out with stones, see, and two swords thrown into the ring, and the music they always played on the old Star Trek when Captain Kirk had to fight somebody.

Which Katie West made me an image of, because she loves me and you don’t.

Chad’s selling prints.

Suzanne G (better known as Ms Wurzel Tod, perhaps) just got back to Lucerne from London and yet is now off to Budapest and Vienna.

Laurenn post-mortems probably her oddest convention experience yet.

Joanne accidentally has dinner with Dennis Rodman.

• Snow apologizes for stem cell comment
  White House press secretary Tony Snow apologized on Monday for suggesting that President Bush believed stem-cell research amounted to “murder,” saying he was “overstating the president’s position”
  (tags: pol)
• Allergies are increasing in Britain
  (tags: med no+shit+sherlock)
• Bulgaria uncovers 2,000year old temple
  reportedly five times larger than the Acropolis in Athens
  (tags: history)
• California heat wave may be global warming
  (tags: viridian)
• China’s online population hits 123 million – Yahoo! News
  China’s Internet population has jumped to 123 million at the end of June, consolidating the nation’s status as the world’s number two after the United States
  (tags: net)
• Sunlight Labs | Sunlight Foundation – PopUp Politicians for Web Pages
  Popup Politicians is an AJAX-based widget that adds mini-profiles with links of Members of Congress to your page that appear when you mouseover the link – I SO WANT THIS HACKED FOR MY PURPOSES
  (tags: web)
• Professor invents ‘ripeness’ sticker
  stickers will be available to growers next year and should make their way to supermarkets within two to three years
  (tags: sci)
• AVN :: Articles – Rocker Eddie Van Halen Collaborates with Michael Ninn in Sacred Sin
  rock superstar Eddie Van Halen has joined forces with adult director Michael Ninn to write and perform two songs for the upcoming Ninn Worx feature, Sacred Sin.
  (tags: sex film)

CBS is enlisting eggs in its scramble to attract viewers. The CBS logo and slogans promoting the TV network and its series will appear along with coded expiration dates on eggs sold by grocers _ just another promotional measure in the competitive world of television.

More than 35 million eggs will be marked with phrases such as “CSI: Crack the Case on CBS” and “The Class, New Grade-A CBS Comedy” as part of a deal between the CBS Marketing Group and EggFusion, an egg-coding company.

The campaign is part of what the network is calling its “Outernet strategy,” an effort to reach viewers “outside their homes as they go about their daily lives…”

(I kind of want someone to die for this.)

Just one metre square of a new super-sticky material inspired by gecko feet could suspend the weight of an average family car, say its inventors.

The plastic, known as Synthetic Gecko, has been developed by researchers at aerospace and defence firm BAE Systems. Like the reptile’s foot, the polymer is covered in millions of tiny mushroom-like hairs that provide grip.

Future applications could include an adhesive to repair aircraft, skin grafts or even a Spiderman-style suit.

“It would mean that your local window cleaner could dispense with his ladders and climb up the side of your house,” says Dr Sajad Haq a principle research scientist at the company’s Advanced Technology Centre in Filton, Bristol. “There’s a whole host of applications. It’s just a question of your imagination…”

(Anyone remember “Fractite,” I think it was, from the 90s?)

From the graphic novel DESOLATION JONES: MADE IN ENGLAND, released October 5:

Don’t look. Seriously. Something important in you may die.

(Except Siege. I owe you about five brain-scars. You can look.)

Via ModBlog:

Researchers at the University of New South Wales have created a tiny wire that doesn’t even use electrons to carry a current.

Known as a hole quantum wire, it exploits gaps – or holes – between electrons. The relationship between electrons and holes is like that between electrons and anti-electrons, or matter and anti-matter.

The holes can be thought of as real quantum particles that have an electrical charge and a spin. They exhibit remarkable quantum properties and could lead to a new world of super-fast, low-powered transistors and powerful quantum computers.

Quantum wires are microscopically small, in this case about 100 times narrower than a human hair. They are so narrow that electrons can only pass along them in single file.

Manufacturers are keenly interested in them because they hold the potential for new high-speed electronics applications, known as spintronics, where semiconductor devices have both electric and magnetic properties…