• @templesmith I’m actually planning a project about Henry VIII’s later days when he was basically Mad Cheeseburger Henry VIII in his cart… #

1. Day#93, 2. Boris I, 3. Four Parts Sandalwood, 4. Unprepared, 5. 16:27 Edale, 6. Over Italy, or possibly Austria

A peculiar, manic-depressive little story about Hollywood, the way men think about women, and being Russian.  In three parts.  1 2 3.  Shepard remains a gloomy, drunken wizard with language.

• Algorithmic Architecture | Smashing Telly - A hand picked TV channel
  "Natural things,including DNA and medieval towns are more like aperiodic crystals, with variable repetition. To create these structures, requires an algorithm rather than a single equation"
  (tags:video architecture design sci )
• Heuristic England: The Cult Of The Ku
  ?The Black Magic in China Known as ku?
  (tags:magic )

• 

  Irene Kaoru

• @BrianReed Suck it up, hippie. Sarah Palin could break your limp wrist simply by flexing her womb. You Yank owl-huggers are in for it now. #

Siege’s occasional diary of his people’s recovery from Katrina never fails to give me a chest pain. Three years on, in the teeth of Gustav, he’s posted a new instalment:

Russell had nineteen brothers and sisters, in a family poorer even than mine. Now he lives in a FEMA trailer on an abandoned lot with two dogs, a bunch of Katrina junk, a statue of the Virgin Mary he hand painted, and an old school bus backed up to a canal cruised by alligators, which he fishes out of for meals. His sister was murdered in New Orleans last week.

1. Box purses, 2. something in blue, 3. Following in the Shadow., 4. THB:M3, 5. Lovefest, 6. photo.jpg

I’ve always wanted to create my own ghost. One idea I had was to buy a Russian Cosmonaut suit and set up some fake debris in a field, late at night. Then from the early morning, donning my outfit I would wander around the field near my crash landed module, looking terribly dazed.

— English Heretic

• Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters
  "Hipsterdom is the first ?counterculture? to be born under the advertising industry?s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations."
  (tags:culture bullshit )
• Hurricane Tracker - - MSNBC.com
  A tracker for Hurricane Gustav, built by Stamen.
  (tags:web dooooom )

• In case you missed it, Gov Sarah Palin of Alaska is McCain’s VP nominee, according to CNN newsburst. NRA, pro-life, confused on gay issues. #
• @radiomaru tweets (to someone else): “you’re a tiny little scrawny piece of shit! I weigh like eight million pounds. I am ten suns.” #

Would have been this week.

• Although the assembly of the shots is responsible for the structure of the film, it does not, as is generally assumed, create its rhythm; the distinct time running through the shots makes the rhythm of the picture, and the rhythm is determined not by the length of edited pieces, but by the pressure of the time that runs through them. The pieces that won’t edit, that can’t be properly joined, are those which record a radically different kind of time.

  - Tarkovsky

In which we speak of holidays, vole blood and rubber gloves.

1. Dusk over Hindukush, Romboor , 2. Obama, 3. Left, left, left - right - left, 4. An Old one., 5. we are the future, 6. Eye

• Lockerbie evidence not disclosed
  Scottish police had information that might have changed the outcome of the Lockerbie bombing trial, a BBC TV programme has learned
  (tags:war crime pol )
• ‘Lost towns’ discovered in Amazon
  The remote Amazon river basin was once home to densely populated towns and villages
  (tags:history )

• Ways in which the future has failed me: even now, no-one will sell me a dolphin sandwich. #
• Happy birthday @LibbyBulloff ! #
• I’d pay real money to hear Obama open his speech today with “Brothers and sisters, I have a SCHEME…” #
• @mckelvie I’m Warren Ellis, and I am not like the others. I am not actually your friend at all. #

• 

• For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

  - Brian Eno

• good morning 7001 people following me. I need a name for you other than “7001 people following me.” so today you are the Meatbag Armada. #
• Pfff. #

The Ridgeway is Britain’s oldest known road: a trackway running eighty-odd miles across the south of England, curving over the tops of hills from the Ivinghoe Beacon to Avebury in the west.

Last week I had to walk a couple of miles of it for the first time, arcing from the White Horse cut into the chalk hill at Uffington down along the Ridgeway to reach Wayland’s Smithy.

Did you ever walk a road that’s five thousand years old? People have been crossing the country on The Ridgeway since Neolithic times. In some context: when the Ridgeway first came into use, the average lifespan was around 35 years. And those people were in the grip of massively disruptive conceptual revolution: the revolution of farming. The Ridgeway was the connective tissue between these new things, settlements, forming on the dry chalk hills. And with the advent of the continuity of a generation or two in the same place for the first time came the first inkling of history. The Ridgeway predates the White Horse, and Wayland’s Smithy, and very probably Avebury and Stonehenge. This is the path people walked when they first thought about how to talk to time.

I’ve read that it used to run longer — that it used to run down from the west to the southern coast of Dorset, and east all the way to the sea at Norfolk. A diagonal cut across the country from sea to sea.

Funny thing: walking the Ridgeway, everyone who passed gave a smile and a sunny "Good afternoon!" or "Hello!". Everyone, in other words, suddenly became terribly English.

• 

  my notebook, August 20 1998 - almost exactly a decade ago

• 

I was just sorting through a stack of CDs, and found this somehow interleaved between them. I’d gotten some old photos from my stepmother when my father died a few years ago, and this was among them. God knows how it got separated from the others.

My dad was a sailor for a while: he always said he simply couldn’t resist the idea of being paid to see the world. And, as far as I know, he served chiefly on the Oriana. I think it may have been the first passenger liner of its type to have a swimming pool — he was certainly under the impression it was. His career as a sailor seems to have been as fraught as his career in the Queen’s Lifeguards (where he was once complicit in giving the Queen a horse with the shits for a public appearance), the high point probably being his missing the ship entirely during shoretime on Fiji and being "imprisoned" for jumping ship in what was basically a hut he was politely asked to return to at nights.

He was in his early twenties when he sent this postcard — presumably nicked out of the ship’s shop — to my grandma. I’m not sure which direction the Oriana would have been steaming in, at this point. Research tells me that she was off Long Beach in March 1962, getting a gash cut in her side by an aircraft carrier. Dad never mentioned it. He never talked a lot about those years, because it bugged my mother, who had never gotten to travel and somehow resented my dad for his experiences. So I never got many details: just the sense that travel was worth doing, and that my dad believed he’d been made a better man by it.

I didn’t get to New Zealand and Australia until my early thirties. But I got there. It’s a weird thing, I suppose, to see the path of your father’s footsteps curling around the entire world. But I like it.

I also like that the silly bastard’s pen ran out during that unintelligible squiggle at the end and he just had to get a pencil to explain that.

• Open the Future: Viropiracy?
  Here's a term to add to the jargon pile: Viral Sovereignty. This extremely dangerous idea… asserts that deadly viruses are the sovereign property of individual nations (Indonesia withholding H5N1 samples)
  (tags:med pol gmf )
• How does it feel to die? - being-human - 13 October 2007 - New Scientist
  Just as uplifting as it sounds. The experience of dying in several different ways. Drowning - A TEARING SENSATION.
  (tags:death )
• Pollutants cause birds to sing tainted love songs - earth - 26 August 2008 - New Scientist Environment
  Wild chickadees exposed to permitted levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) can't keep a tune as well as other birds. Because females go for males with the best songs, PCB-exposed birds might lose out on mates
  (tags:eco gmf )

• “A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.”
  
  - JG Ballard
  
• 
  
  (books I have owned and probably lost)
  

At my internet cave system today:

* Ordering the people on Whitechapel who want to make comics to reveal themselves.

* The audio of Willow Bl00’s most recent Seattle Transhuman Salon

* The provisional list of comics singles and graphic novels on release this week (already corrected by Jonathan Hickman)

* More new mixes posted by the Whitechapel DJ community

* And The Weekly Listening Thread

Available from this Wednesday in better comics stores and bookshops. You can see some pages from it here and here. This second printing comes with a new cover:

Vanessa Yaremchuk, who works in the field of artificial neural networks with special application to music, just pointed me at this.

The T-Stick is "a gestural musical controller designed and built by Joseph Malloch. The T-Stick can sense where and how much of it is touched, tapping, twisting, tilting, squeezing, and shaking."

And at Mapping The T-Stick, there is a sequence of videos showing the thing being played.

Vanessa says "I recommend playing all the videos at once, personally. The sound is
more fun that way." And it is kind of weird. She adds: "Joe is already in the middle of the next version of this thing, and this time it is made out of bamboo with sensors on the inside and it is looking very cool."