Watch it. It’s pretty good. But do you want to know how I know that Aaron Sorkin is still using controlled substances?

Sarah Paulson – Anita Pallenberg.

You’ll see.

The Flowers Of Hell.

“Parish Bells” – Captain Black

(from here)

And political cartoonists everywhere weep as John Bolton, the creepy American “diplomat” who embodies a certain strain of black, doomed comedy simply by standing there and fluffing his electrified moustache, falls victim to new Democratic power:

The US ambassador to the United Nations is to leave his post when his temporary appointment runs out, officials say. John Bolton was unable to win the necessary Senate support for him to continue in the job.

• LiveScience.com – Startling Discovery: The First Human Ritual
  70000-year-old artifacts and a python’s head carved of stone appears to represent the first known human rituals: previously thought human intelligence had not evolved the capacity to perform group rituals until perhaps 40000 years ago.
  (tags: history)
• Aya Kato
  (tags: art)

Nokia wizard Matt Jones says:

Nokia Design: Explore Concept 2012… Concept work here by the lovely people in our Calabasas studio illustrating what Nokia Nseries could do in 2012.

Apparently, in the future — which will look and sound like a bit of ultra-cheap “youth TV” from BBC2 in 1983, with music just one step away from that hideous electropop song “Questionnaire” — we’ll be able to do almost anything we can do with mobile phones now, only with a touchscreen interface and, evidently, someone else paying for our bandwidth and guaranteeing high speeds all over the world when I currently can’t get 3G coverage at my girlfriend’s mother’s house six miles away.

It does not escape my attention that my Nokia N73 can, right now, both post directly to a Flickr pool and monitor it for reading any time I like.

I guess the most telling thing is the sudden awareness it brings that 2012 is now only six years away, and so, you know, of course the phone isn’t going to have its own jetpack. The innovation curve for phones had to flatten out. The message this video sends me is “2012: don’t expect too much.” Watch it and judge for yourself.

Nokia Design: Explore Concept 2012 on Vimeo

In November 2006, this website was abused in the following ways:

Unique visitors: 129362
Number of visits: 412551
Pages served: 794894
Total hits: 3620487
Bandwidth eaten: 57.39 GB

People keep asking me to talk about TORCHWOOD. No time right now, but, as a beginning, consider this. First, the return of perhaps Britain’s greatest television series:

And then, an equally important event — the first adult-oriented spin-off series from that show:

One of these has grandeur, and an awareness of its status as an event, just loaded with semiotics screaming “I am here and I am mighty, pay attention scum.” One of them looks like it was knocked together by my daughter in a Flash program with some royalty-free placeholder music, and is almost apologetic in its presentation. Can you tell which is which?

Italian Mario Scaramella, a contact of dead ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko, has tested positive for polonium-210.

The wife of dead ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko has tested positive for polonium-210.

Former Russian acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar became violently ill during a visit to Ireland last week, and his daughter Maria told the BBC that doctors believe he was poisoned.

British intelligence sources increasingly suspect that the former spy, killed by polonium 210, was the victim of a plot involving “rogue elements” within the Russian state, it was reported today. While ruling out any official involvement by Vladimir Putin’s government, investigators believe only those with access to state nuclear laboratories could have mounted such a sophisticated plot. Officials now go so far as to say that the involvement of individuals within the FSB in the affair is “probable”.

Movladi Baysarov, a lieutenant colonel from Chechnya with the federal security service (the FSB, the successor to the KGB), was gunned down in central Moscow two weeks ago.

Polonium 210 is now being sold over the internet for USD $69/dose by infamous UFO prankster Bob Lazar.

This would appear to be the site.

“Misc Radioactive Items”…!

The Wikipedia page on Lazar is a reasonable start.

Good morning, Lenora. (Who the hell turned that into a gif?)

Lenora Claire appears as “The Muse” in the Dean Karr-directed music video for Billy Talent’s “Fallen Leaves”. Featuring cameos by The Enigma and Goddess Bunny.

• Acoustic sensors make surfaces interactive
  The system is called Tai-Chi (Tangible Acoustic Interfaces for Computer-Human Interaction) : “We have made a system that can give any object, even a 3D one, a sense of touch”
  (tags: tech)
• Woman received dad’s body in post
  A Romanian woman was sent the body of her dead father in the post after a cemetery was sold to developers.
  (tags: crime)
• LiveScience.com – Scientists Levitate Small Animals
  Scientists have now levitated small live animals using sounds that are, well, uplifting.

  (tags: sci)