I think I need a "WTF" category tag. Received on Whitechapel today:

Greets Sir Warren Ellis and friends,

Eternal Elilsian and Experimental Recording Artist Ure Thrall hear, admonishing you Mr. Ellis for irresponsibly unleashing your mind blowing powers of synchronistic manifestation in my general direction. The following is announcement of another expected appearance of the TULPA of your infamous DOKTOR SLEEPLESS Persona on KPFA 94.1 FM’s No Other Radio Network (taking place during the 1st 1.5 hours of 4/23/08 (Pacific Time) as well as the first live DJ slot on this plane by the DOKTOR SLEEPLESS tulpa who will materialize at the RUBY ROOM (Located at 132 14th street in Downtown Oakland, CA.) from the 17th to the 22nd hour on 4/25/08, these entities having manifested as a direct result of your cosmic "Ellisian" reverberations.

WE pray you do not take offense at our humble attempts at bio-alchemical mimicry, rather we hope you will take it as the direct HOMAGE we intend it to be. BUT, if for some reason this is contrary to your intelligent design, well perhaps you shouldn’t go creating such HIGHLY RESONANT CHARACTERS for mass consumption In the 1st place, my friend…

Our dimension’s version of DOKTOR SLEEPLESS is quite formidable in his media manipulation prowess, and he has even managed to lasso that MUSLIMGAUZE track remixed by the JAPANESE RAPE DIVISION and hauled it into our dank little corner of the multiverse specifically to be played on the NO OTHER RADIO NETWORK with the kind permission of the show’s longtime host MR. HATE. We include it as a link
http://soundclick.com/share?songid=6482222
in this e-mail for your enjoyment.

DOKTOR SLEEPLESS can be heard AT ANY TIME via KPFA’s steaming internet radio broadcasts which you can access via the program links on NO OTHER RADIO’s myspace page at www.myspace.com/nootherradio

or type in wed. 4/23 at
http://www.kpfa.org/archives/
and look for the archived NO OTHER RADIO program in the 12:00 am time slot.

So we hope you will give a listen to determine whether we are doing the good DOKTOR justice with our interpretation. It seems to be garnering some interest!
And I will also be offering a free DOKTOR SLEEPLESS COMIC BOOK in an on-air promotion as well as handing out copies of DOKTOR SLEEPLESS comics to read at the club.

NOW bear in mind that WE will CERTAINLY BE MAKING IT CLEAR what the TRUE ORIGINS of DOKTOR SLEEPLESS are (Namely the nether regions of that wondrous imagination of yours, Sir Ellis). But we also want to BRING The good DOKTOR into OUR world so we can do our part to let everyone know that the FUTURE Is happening RIGHT F**KING NOW, baby!

Thanks for creating such a timely character to help inspire WE to get that message OUT!

Best of Dreams,
Ure Thrall
playing the role of DOKTOR SLEEPLESS on this plane with your kind permission…space age goggles and all (We’ll e-mail u pics!)

creator of the "Arabian Knightmares" CD on TESCO

www.diskorp.com

I am, of course, absolutely gobsmacked. The bastard’s gotten loose in the outside world.

Just received the following from HarperCollins Canada:

Thank you to all those who nominated a bookseller for the HarperCollins Handselling Award! All entries were astounding and deserving of recognition and praise. Managers: be sure to visit here for information on the next round of submissions. We sincerely thank those of you who worked so hard in support of HarperCollins titles.

We are pleased to announce that Chadwick Ginther—pictured with store manager David Lawrence (right) and sales rep Terry Toews (left)—from McNally Robinson Booksellers in Winnipeg is the winner of this season’s HarperCollins Handselling Award! For his support of Warren Ellis’s quirky and brilliant novel Crooked Little Vein, Chadwick was awarded $500 cash and McNally Robinson will receive $1000 co-op for its support of this season’s top handseller. Congratulations Chadwick, and thanks once again to all the other entrants!

STARLIT’s cover of "Modern Love" cracks me up. Wait for her to get to the chorus, a couple of minutes in.

• trajectory – Progressive Science Fiction Festival
  (tags: event sf)
• Internet Archive: Details: Brian Amsterdam Live Ambient Set 02-29-08 NYC
  ambient set performed by brian from the Werewolves live
  (tags: music mp3)
• An Anti Pragmatic-Manifesto by Mark Jarzombek | varnelis.net
  “I predict a new fascination with carelessness, a new tolerance for “whatever” in a “whatever generation” – an architecture that prides itself on neither history nor theory”
  (tags: manifesto)

Matt Jones and I insist that you Tenpole a rickroller — or, perhaps, swordroll them. Behold the greatest song in the history of the world to go “baDUMP ding-dong”:

(set with larger versions)

From today (Monday) until Friday, Matt Fraction, co-creator and author of CASANOVA and THE FIVE FISTS OF SCIENCE and writer of PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL, THE ORDER and the forthcoming INVINCIBLE IRON MAN (and co-writer of UNCANNY X-MEN & IMMORTAL IRON FIST) and one of my best friends in this business will be hanging out in this thread on my message board Whitechapel to take questions, jabber about baseball and bands I don’t like, and basically shoot the shit and talk about whatever he wants to talk about.

The world’s first cloned sniffer dogs have begun training in South Korea.

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | S Korea trains sniffer-dog clones

Old acquaintance Andrew Dabb has got a gig on the writing staff of tv series SUPERNATURAL. I’m delighted. Congrats, mate.

So how did this happen? Well, there’s a Long Version and a Short Version of that story. The Short Version is: last summer Loflin and I wrote a pilot, it got us a TV agent, after the WGA strike our agent started getting us meetings, 6 weeks ago I moved to LA, last Thursday we got the offer to write on Supernatural, five days later the deal was closed, on May 1st we’re going in to set up our office, and on May 5th the work begins.

A lip and eyelid sewing ritual, via ModBlog:

The sewing ritual helped me come to terms with the fact that events in my life are not always within my control, and that sometimes I am subject to the uncontrollable forces of the world. After understanding and accepting my own lack of control – and that it’s okay – I realized my ability to overcome my own fears and physical pain by focusing my mind and its thoughts.

Many more larger and stunning images at http://englishrussia.com/?p=1869:

“It’s been believed in the past that the camera steals souls. I once thought this preposterous. Now I think it’s self-evident.

This is why we photograph. The fear of oblivion, ours and our worlds. We will inevitably die, but our photographs, if they’re honest, if they show our lives with clarity, unafraid, our photographs will preserve us. Our souls at least. Who we were inside, and the things we saw. Our images? Particles of light that have been traveling forever bounced off our subjects, were focused through our lens into the tender tissue of our eye, and our brain, and our film. Now, those very same shapes, made by those very same particles, the same ones we saw, others can see. Forever, they can see that fraction of a second we saw.

That’s immortality.” -Clayton Cubitt, 2005

The Constant Siege

Werewolves. Oh yes. Because daddy needs that clang and stomp and drone on a Monday. Elements of that “new shoegaze” in places, but definitely tempered by the need to hit things. “Pillbox” is the one to start with, it seems.

Illustrator Katelan Foisy has her new website up.

Someone scraped the contents of Darren Di Lieto’s website and published it into a 350-page book being sold online for $100. Publishers have faked their details, resellers refuse to pull the book.

Fox Hollow: if you leave a comment, tell them I sent you.

Live informatics signage on Old Street, Shoreditch:

Jason Stoddard gets to his 5 Big Things Science Fiction Can Do To Improve Its Image.

Now: it’s me who prefixes this with the "SF Magazines" tag, not him. I’m just collecting all the thoughts relevant to that topic under an easy search string. Jason Stoddard is not directly speaking to the plight of sf magazines.

That said: simple tenets like his #5, Define your messages, could certainly stand to be applied to some magazines. Jason’s coming at all of this from a marketing perspective, and he’s looking at the condition of the entire American genre, which is why some of his suggestions seem to tend towards a “Got SF?” approach. But it’s very interesting reading nonetheless.

Southern Californians, get ready for higher home insurance. The US Geological Survey has just released its first ever statewide earthquake forecast for California, and the odds aren’t great. The study finds a 99.7% chance that an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or greater will hit California by 2037, while the probability of a quake of magnitude 7.5 or greater is 46%.

Giant quake will trash Los Angeles, say forecasters – earth – 15 April 2008 – New Scientist Environment

A team of disease hunters has announced the discovery of a deadly new virus, found in a remote village in South America. Experts say the virus – named Chapare – is probably limited to a small swathe of Bolivia, but urbanisation and climate change could expand its range.

New kind of killer virus discovered in Bolivia – 18 April 2008 – New Scientist