I don’t care how many of you send me the link. I am not going to watch the Gene Simmons sex tape and you simply cannot make me.

(Lunar Eclipse)

A declassified 1998 Pentagon report reveals exploratory projects involving the use of lasers for what the article calls “non-lethal torture”. These used to be called “non-lethal weapons” or NLW:

Some of the applications the report investigated include putting voices in people’s heads, using lasers to trigger uncontrolled neuron firing, and slowly heating the human body to a point of feverish confusion – all from hundreds of meters away.

…words could be transmitted to be heard like the spoken word, except that it could only be heard within a person’s head. In one experiment, communication of the words from one to ten using ‘speech modulated’ microwave energy was successfully demonstrated. Microphones next to the person experiencing the voice could not pick up these sounds.

I can’t imagine these projects were given up on. If I were the Pentagon, I’d be spending a lot of money on things like domestic crowd control right now.

I’m writing this on the Nokia N95 8GB, using a bluetooth keyboard. My trusty Treo 600 finally coughed its last yesterday evening. It no longer syncs to the computer. So I’ve slaved AOL email to the phone, for now, and will have to sort out word processing on the Nokia 810 I was kindly given a couple of weeks ago. Bluetooth keyboards are a bit mushy compared to the plug-in keyboards I’m used to. And now reading the news incurs a data charge, damnit.
Poor old Treo. It’s been all around the world with me. I’ve written comics, screenplays and most of a novel on it..

• Czech police wonder where bridge has gone | Metro.co.uk
  Police in the Czech republic are trying to find out who stole a 4 tonne railway bridge from the border town of Cheb.
  (tags: crime)
• Forest: Forest Small Book Series
  “This is the Forest Small Book Series, a simple presentation of various thoughts, sketches, collections, and travels, designed and published by us.”
  (tags: publishing)

For the fine birthday package from your excellent label.

Irene Kaoru:

…soon – soon! – I will have my bionic limbs and jewelry box full of different faces.

A handy chart of the places left in America where you won’t get shot or sterilised for lighting a cigarette.

ACEO #23

Originally uploaded by vebelfetzer.

Matt Fraction:

The book is very much an homage/tribute/celebration of golden age adventure books. While writing it, I tried to get it to 40 pages, so that the first page of each chapter could be a golden age-style splash. Alas, it didn’t come to be, but I had written those over-the-top splash pages anyway. I thought I’d reprint them here since, hell, they’re already written and they make *ME* laugh…

Looks like they got you a decent hotel room in London, at least…

Making your phone his whore:

Sandy Pentland… MIT professor of media arts and sciences would like to see phones collect even more information about their users, recording everything from their physical activity to their conversational cadences. With the aid of some algorithms, he posits, that information could help us identify things to do or new people to meet… More significant, cell-phone data could shed light on workplace dynamics and on the well-being of communities. It could even help project the course of disease outbreaks and provide clues about individuals’ health. Pentland, who has been sifting data gleaned from mobile devices for a decade, calls the practice “reality mining.”

Shannon Larratt interviews a guy with a fairly extreme — and self-”cured” – form of body dysmorphic disorder, with his usual empathy and intelligence:

>My friend “Jason” (not his real name) is one of thousands of amputees living with a huge secret. Years ago, after a lifetime of anguish due to having an extra hand — essentially a birth defect in his opinion — he took the radical step of amputating this hand just above the wrist.

Always has a cheery thought for the day:

An unregulated global marketplace is now firmly ensconced in the role of the sole superpower. We are going to find its reign harshly capricious (as in rife with vicious black swans against which we have few counters).

Wild, unexplained perceptual spatial distortions:

I stood up, reached down to pick up the TV remote control from the floor and felt my foot sink into the ground. Glancing down, I saw that my leg was plunging into the carpet… Floors either curved or dipped, and when I tried walking on them, it felt as though I was staggering on sponges. When I lay in bed and looked at my hands, my fingers stretched off half a mile into the distance…

This is my favourite bit, though:

…sometimes, especially shortly after waking up, I would experience a kind of binocular vision. Lying in bed, I would find myself staring out of the window, watching crows flying over trees 100m away, but able to see the details on each bird and treetop as if they were at arm’s length.

• Human right foot found on Valdes
  A third severed foot has washed up on a Gulf Island. All three are right feet, and all were in sneakers.
  (tags: crime)
• Has the military found proof that we are all psychic?
  “It would be easy to dismiss Nella’s guidance to the police as just blind luck. Easy, that is, if she hadn’t spent the following 20 years helping them ensnare murderers and other serious offenders.”
  (tags: crime)
• Man starves himself to death in treehouse – Telegraph
  A man in Germany has committed suicide by hiding deep in a forest and starving himself to death.
  (tags: crime really+fucking+slow+suicide mind+you+its+worth+considering)

FIXED: the massively fucked-up retropunk taxidermy of Lisa Black.

(Thanks to Neo)

My friend Lenora looking completely surreal in this shot by Peter Palladino:

“Local assembly member Carwyn Jones, last weekend said the suspected suicides were spread county-wide, across a 130,000 population and seemed to be unrelated.”

Except, of course, that Bridgend is reknowned as a doomed shithole, utterly broken by chronic unemployment and smack, roamed by hate-filled kids anaesthetised by White Lightning, and presenting absolutely no reason to live for a generation just realising that they will probably never, ever leave any other way.