• Ambassador Bolton ‘next casualty’
  Democrat gains in the US mid-term elections have all but killed off John Bolton’s prospects of staying on as the US ambassador to the UN.
  (tags: pol scary+moustache)
• Obituary: Markus Wolf
  The man who came to epitomise the ruthless world of the East German spy machine during the Cold War, Markus Wolf, has died at his home in Berlin.
  (tags: pol spy)

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. And a very early one: LAZARUS CHURCHYARD: “Lucy’s Drowning.”

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 10000 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.

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

http://www.flickr.com/people/warrenellis/ = where I store my photos. Feel free to add me there — I need new feeds. My friends-and-contacts list there is usually full of interesting stuff, as I know many mentally ill lovely people.

I run an online community. THE ENGINE is devoted to comics (and music and other stuff). For those reading on LJ, the Engine is where the Saturday Night Open Mics and other things happen now.

I still have an account on Xpeeps, mostly, I think, because a friend of mine worked on the site. I also have an account at Subkultures that similarly doesn’t get used much, though I do listen to the radio 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 hurricane-like storm, two-thirds the diameter of Earth, is raging at Saturn’s south pole, new images from Nasa’s Cassini space probe reveal. Measuring 5,000 miles (8,000km) across, the storm is the first hurricane ever detected on a planet other than Earth.

Not a joke, apparently:

Alan Moore is to feature in a forthcoming episode of The Simpsons.

Moore, aged 53, recorded his lines at The Lodge studios in Abington Square last month for an episode which will be called Husbands and Knives.

The Simpsons’ production team are long-time fans of Moore’s, whose reputation in the world of graphic novels is legendary.

A chance meeting with his fiancée Melinda Gebbie got the project rolling.

Mr Moore said: “Mel was in America promoting our new book The Lost Girls and one of the Simpsons producers spoke to her and asked if I would be in the show. “She said: ‘Why don’t you give him a ring, he’s very approachable’. “I was happy to do it. I’m a big fan of The Simpsons…”

My daughter’s going to love this. She adores THE SIMPSONS, and treasures the signed book Alan gave her for Xmas a few years back.

• China Holds Sex Culture Festival
  the director of the Guangdong Sexological Society told that “many people do not have a right attitude towards sex issues.”
  (tags: sex)
• Cooking up ‘nanorust’ could purify water
  A new recipe for “nanorust” could give developing nations a cheap tool for removing arsenic from drinking water.
  (tags: sci tech eco)
• Himalaya mega-quakes likely every 1000 years
  A colossal reservoir of energy stored up under the Tibetan plateau has been discovered – and it can only be fully released by mega-earthquakes striking about every 1000 years
  (tags: sci)

“Werewolves In The City” – The Viking Moses

(all mp3s deleted after seven days, review purposes only, write if you need them taken down etc etc)

(He has a funny way of showing it)

ModBlog – it’s what your kids will wear.

Eliza Gauger starts writing at Game|Life. This’ll be worth watching.

Welcome to Earth, little darling. I’ve been waiting to meet you.

Found on Flickr:

Via Hep:

From the BBC:

Looks like Meredith and Brian Wood are about to reproduce. Best of luck, guys.

Warren is an excellent name for a boy. So is Blind Lemon.

– Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is stepping down, sources tell CNN.

– President Bush nominates former CIA chief Robert Gates as defense secretary to replace Donald Rumsfeld.

Hello,

Josh Ellis here, from Zenarchery.com.

I’m writing you because:

A) you blogged something interesting about the Trinity micropatronage project that I did in March/April of this year

(http://www.zenarchery.com/trinity),

B) I know you personally, or

C) I’m guessing you might possibly be interested in these micropatronage projects in general.

Many of you mentioned that you might be interested in helping out with any other similar projects I did. Well, the time has come.

+++ The Road To Kilimanjaro +++

The day after Christmas, I’m going to be traveling to Berlin to deliver a lecture to the 23rd annual Chaos Communications Congress (on the subject of my “Grim Meathook Future” meme that’s been making the rounds). From there, I’m going to be traveling directly to Arusha,
Tanzania.

My goal? To visit Olduvai Gorge, which many archaeologists and anthropologists believe to be the cradle of the human species…and to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, partially to document the melting snow caps before they are gone forever, and partially because I need the exercise, quite frankly. :-)

In return, I’m going to be doing the same things I did on my Trinity trip, only on a larger scale: an 8000+ word essay, a mini-documentary of the trip, and as many photos as I can take. All of these materials will be released under a Creative Commons NonCommercial – Attribution – ShareAlike license, to be shared and used by all and sundry.

+++ How You Can Help +++

First of all, you are under no obligation to help with this at all. Really. (Even if you’re one of my closest friends.) Honestly, you got this mail because I thought you might find this whole idea interesting.

Having said that, there are three ways you can help me with this project, if you so choose:

1) Money. (The root of all evil, I’m told.) The trip is going to cost roughly $4500-6000. I’ve already started raising funds, but I’m going to need help here. Fortunately, you personally don’t have to kick in a whole bunch: if 900 people added $5 to the pot, I’d be ready to go. So I’m pretty optimistic in that direction.

After the trip, 25% of any leftover donated funds will be donated directly to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, a great organization which works to save the mountain gorillas of the Serengeti from extinction.

Another 25% will be donated to One House At A Time, a project to help rebuild houses in Hancock County, Mississippi that were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina that my friend Clayton Cubitt is working with. (His mother and brother lost everything they owned in Katrina, and visited my family and I while refugeeing in Las Vegas.) The rest will go to the Joshua Ellis Solvency fund (i.e. my wallet.)

2) Gear. I have a wishlist of gear I need, accessible from the main project wiki page (see link below: some spam filters block mails with more than one URL link, so I’m only putting the one central link in here). It’s stuff like digital SLR cameras, camping gear, etc. If you have an outdated SLR camera or portable MiniDisc recorder you might want to get rid of, this is definitely a useful way to do it.

3) Promotion, word-of-mouth and good wishes. If you can’t donate money or stuff, don’t worry: I totally understand. But you could definitely help out by linking to the project page or sending people along to check it out. Many of you are influential bloggers with wide readership: your link could genuinely make this trip a reality.

Alternately, if you know anybody who’d be willing to do some sort of low-end corporate sponsorship (like donating Frequent Flyer miles to help pay for the air travel, which is fully half the expense), put them in touch with me.

(By the way: I’m not fronting any sort of silly anti-sponsorship, “damn the Man” sort of attitude on this at any level. If your company wants to sponsor the whole trip in return for a big-ass banner on the finished page or something similar, get in touch with me immediately.)

+++ Why You Might Want To Help +++

Other than the prospect of watching me drag my fat ass up one of the world’s tallest mountains (which might be the comedy feel-good hit of 2007)?

I think this is a really interesting new model for content creation/production. As a long time laborer in the fields of Old Media, I can tell you that the one good thing that Old Media does — or rather, used to do — is pay for trips like these. Not so much anymore. Budgets are tighter and, by extension, sights are set far shorter on the horizon. Back in the day, they’d send Hunter Thompson down the Amazon as a fledgling reporter. Now, he’d be lucky to get sent across town to cover a gun show.

Blogs are cool. I’ve been blogging since 1999. But blogs are, almost by definition, fragmentary.

I’m not blogging this trip. I’m writing a good Old-Media-fashioned travelogue, and editing together an Old-Media-style documentary. I’m a professional writer and I plan to deliver a professional piece.

Think of it this way: you’d pay $5 to read a couple of good, long articles in a print magazine, right? So kick in $2.50 and you’ve got one of them right here.

+++ Full Details +++

For full details, check out the main project page

(http://www.zenarchery.com/projects/doku.php?id=micropatronage:tanzania).

Any questions or comments can be directed to this e-mail address (jzellis@gmail.com). I’m genuinely interested to know what you think about this idea.

I hope you’re as excited as I am to make this trip a possibility. And I truly, sincerely appreciate the time and consideration you’ve already given, just by reading this e-mail.

Cheers,
Josh Ellis

• Global Orgasm – December 22nd, 2006 – Peace through Global Ecstasy
  The intent is that the participants concentrate any thoughts during and after orgasm on peace. The combination of high- energy orgasmic energy combined with mindful intention may have a much greater effect than previous mass meditations and prayers.
  (tags: magic)

(have a cow)

The brilliant Gavin Esler:

“Has there ever been a more negative, dispiriting election?” asks columnist Eugene Robinson, clearly not expecting an answer. So I switched to the New York Times. Columnist Barry Schwartz called these elections “the sorriest, sleaziest, most disheartening and embarrassing in memory.” Then I switched on the TV just to cheer myself up. The presenter was asking a pundit from the Los Angeles Times what it would be like if the Democrats failed to win the House of Representatives.

“Jonestown,” replied the pundit, referring to a bizarre cult involved in a mass suicide many years ago.

So it all sounds fairly promising, then.

1-866-OUR-VOTE. That’s the number to dial. It goes to Election Protection, a nationwide legal team working today to keep your election fair and protect your rights as voters. If you see or experience something at a voting station that should not be happening, dial 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

• Can the US trust its voting machines?
  Millions of people will expect to hear the US mid-term results within hours of the close of polling. But could problems with new voting technology prolong their wait?
  (tags: pol)
• Editorial opens fire on Rumsfeld
  Four US military journals have called for Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to quit, accusing him of losing control of the situation in Iraq
  (tags: pol)
• Plan to create human-cow embryos
  UK scientists have applied for permission to create embryos by fusing human DNA with cow eggs
  (tags: sci)
• Fast condoms on sale in S Africa
  Condoms, which promoters say can be put on in just one second, are going on sale in South Africa this week.
  (tags: sex)

BBC NEWS | In Depth | Vote USA 2006 | National

On THE ENGINE this morning:

Comics Creators’ Plans For 2007: where the professional funnybook makers talk about what they’re intending to do next year.

ENGINE Tribe Of OEL/OGM: Rollcall of English-language manga creators on The Engine. Regulars include Svetlana Chmakova.

The Models Call List: Nov 2006: We still have a lot of photographers pro and am on the Engine, and the original version of this thread that JR Blackwell started had a lot of response. So we’re going to do it again…

The Band Plugs List: Nov 2006: If you’re in a band, or are a solo musician, take a second to tell a couple of thousand people about your stuff…

The Webcomics Call: Nov 2006: Simple. If you’re doing a webcomic, tell people about it here. An URL, a few words, maybe a picture. There are a few thousand people here who want something new to read…