• Russian sect prays to Putin icons, claims he is the ‘chosen one’
  “My soul exploded with joy! ‘An ubermensch! God himself has chosen him!’ I cried.”
  (tags: cult pol mad)
• Scientists trap light in nano-soup
  Physicists at the Bhavnagar University in Gujarat, India, have demonstrated how to trap and retrieve light using a soup of micro- and nano-sized magnetic spheres
  (tags: sci)

According to Deathclock, I won’t die until 2058.

How do you like the taste of that shit, cancer?

Cigarette Of Victory, I think.

Ukrainian junk-sculptor Andrei Severinko:

Laying around with my kid laughing all afternoon, and coming home to a long email with travel photos from Svetlana Chmakova.

But now I have to work all night. Bah. Time to open the last bottle of Domesday mead.

Apparently originally released on the web by creator Kato Kunio from 2003, you’ll find several episodes of this strewn across YouTube. Like Renee French went back to 1973 to get really incapably stoned with Moebius and the young Terry Gilliam:

• Amazon.co.uk: Books: MI6 and the Machinery of Spying (Studies in Intelligence)
  (tags: spook mi6)
• “Chester 5000 XYV” By Jessica Fink
  (tags: webcomics)

Wherein Julian Cope delivers the best-targetted kicking yet to that mad old knobend Morrissey. And also takes a lovely photo:

Via Cherie, this: Noctem Aeternus is a free quarterly PDF magazine launching next month with new fiction by Ramsey Campbell and Cherie Priest herself, among others. The approach seems to be something of a genre kaleidoscope: it’s technically horror, or at least horror-tinged, but otherwise it’s all over the genre map. The interesting trick, to me, is that it’s “subscribed to” — it looks like they’re going to push the PDF, or at least a link to download, via a Yahoo! Group.

Go here to read about it and sign up.

Humans are evolving faster, apparently. To the tune of one hundred times faster in the last five thousand years than in any other timeframe in human history you care to name. Ten thousand years ago, nobody on the planet had blue eyes. Today, a human being can survive having internalised the dead bodies of her own triplets.

And so have really not been paying enough attention to this page. Will rectify later. In the meantime, I present for your consideration the state of popular music (and a strangely frightening proto-Bez figure) in Czechoslovakia circa 1978:

EDIT: the guy with the criminal bowtie turns out to be Czech musician and comedian Ivan Mladek, who is also credited with the invention of the hideous Guitariano. According to this page, the above song…

…”Jozin z bazin” (Joe from the Swamps) …is about a swamp monster that specializes in devouring citizens of Prague and which can be destroyed only by a crop-dusting plane.

2000AD, Britain’s greatest weekly comic since 1977 (and also a science fiction anthology title) launches a downloadable version via Clickwheel on December 19.

Print sale:

(stumbling block)

My old friend, Dr Joshua Ellis of Las Vegas, is editor in chief of the new travel blog Volette:

Volette is going to focus on travel narratives, with lots of hot info on travel gear, trip planning, cheap fares/hotels. We’re geared less at tourists and more at travelers. And if I’m involved, you know it’s gonna get weird… In the days and weeks to come, we’ll be adding video features, more pictures, and a lot of general goodness to the site. We plan to make Volette something more than just another blog — we want to make it a multimedia destination for people who are interested in travel and travelling…

There’s a particularly good, if broad piece on Oslo, an occasional destination of mine, up there right now, with a wonderful line in the middle that sums the place up for me:

My Norwegian friends’ motto is; “having fun should hurt a little.”

New Yorker Alison Wilson was walking down Prince Street in SoHo last week when she heard a woman’s voice right in her ear asking, “Who’s there? Who’s there?” She looked around to find no one in her immediate surroundings. Then the voice said, “It’s not your imagination.”

That’s right — some bunch of fuckheads have invented street ads that beam their vocal pitch right into your goddamn head:

The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an “audio spotlight” from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium.

I’m starting to feel like sf writers such as myself should be running apologies on the inside front covers of our books.

(thanks to Ryan Thomas)

From Lenora’s MERRY TITMAS show in LA this past weekend. And, yes, the boy in the bad dress playing with Lenora’s tits is indeed microcelebrity Chris Crocker, well on his way to becoming the next Jeffree Star…

But Scott Brown & Hellfire Ltd always send amazing cards. Thank you.