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."

• Brain is spinning in place. Either it’ll build up enough revs that it’ll go somewhere very quickly, or the transmission will burn out. #
• Does It Offend You, Yeah? make possibly the least offensive sound I’ve heard this year. #
• Ah, The Faint are back. What a shame. #
• It’s Monday. Every Monday I play the new releases through piccadillyrecords.com ‘s “magic mix” service. It’s a bit fucking grim this week. #
• Dan Johnson ( @dcurtisj ) just said to me: “McCain’s VP should be the guy who tortured him the most in Vietnam.” #
• The McCain/Water Snake Fang ticket might be just what America needs. #
• And still preferable to McCain/Lieberman, I’d imagine. #
• Someone please give my brain a good slap so it’ll start going in some direction. Any direction. #
• Just wrote a column about @templesmith’s WELCOME TO HOXFORD for a UK mag where I imply he should be sterilised for the good of humanity. #
• Okay, I don’t imply it. I come right out and say it. #

Believe it or not, I can’t actually stand the sound of my own voice, so I won’t be listening to this audio interview with me conducted by HarperPerennial around the time that CROOKED LITTLE VEIN was released in paperback. But you might find it interesting, if only to learn what I sound like just a few days after getting over some lungplague that left bits of dead Lovecraftian beasties decomposing in my chest.

• DEVELOPMENT-UGANDA: Looming Problems With Kampala’s Water
  increased run-off causes heavy flooding in the valleys, where the poor people who cannot afford hillside residences have built their homes… faeces are getting into the water because most of Kampala's sewage flows untreated into Lake Victoria…
  (tags:eco gmf grim+meathook+future )
• Israeli demand draining Sea of Galilee
  There's a headline for you.
  (tags:eco pol )

Fine music label Highpoint Lowlife presents POST-SINGULARITY, an evening of live sets and strange stuff, on Sunday August 31st at the Cafe Oto, Dalston (London). £5 entry / doors 8pm.

Thor at Highpoint describes it as "weird psychogeography themed around Dalston, drones, guitars, electronic noises and movies, and also nice beers," which works well enough for me that I’m hoping to make it there. Details are at the link, and you can investigate the four acts involved right here at Highpoint’s site.

Remember: if you see a big pissed bloke with no hair slumped in the corner, that’s not actually a drummer. That’s me.

The 4am is a selection composed entirely of music sent to me by artists. If you want your music to be played on The 4am, email your 128kbps-plus mp3 files directly to warrenellis@gmail.com. The 4am is mixed down to 128kbps, is of no set length and is released on no set schedule. If you like the 4am, please tell people.

The podcast feed for The 4am is: http://warrenellis.com/?feed=podcast

15: Janglenauts

 

 The 4am: 15 - Janglenauts [17:13m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3094)

Parlovr – “Pen To The Paper” (4:38)

Hot Pink Zer0 – “Edie Edie Edie” (3:33)

BlackMath – “Reading Mysteries” (1:39)

Ancient Pistol – “Massive” (3:26)

Shiverdrain & The You And What Army Faction – “Quarantine” (3:54)

Not much in the way of notes this time, as I’m pretty exhausted from a week’s holiday (funny how it always works like that).

Parlovr live in Mile End in the middle of Montreal, and have an album forthcoming this October. And they make that chiming sound I love so much. Just like the way Hot Pink Zer0 invoke Edie, thereby evoking that Sixties/Factory-obsessed period of my youth. “Reading Mysteries” is, I think, the shortest track from the demo they sent me, which I mention because they have a huge amount of stuff for you to seek out.

Ancient Pistol’s Mike Feeney notes ” Also am the principle of Questionable Priorities Records, a label for AP releases and under construction. I figured truth-in-advertising was the best path and frankly defense.” Shiverdrain & The You And What Army Faction plainly have the best band name since Lothar & The Hand People — I was actually surprised to find their piece to be an evening tide of minimal electroacoustics, and a fine way to play out the programme.

A bittersweet hallucination from Yoon Ha Lee at CLARKESWORLD:

It’s harder than you thought, walking from the battle at the end of time and
down a street that reeks of entropy and fire and spilled lives. Your eyes aren’t
dry. Neither is the alien sky.

• Nuclear Winter in Chernobyl | Stuck In Customs
  Photographer Trey Ratcliff visits Chernobyl's "RAD forest" in winter.
  (tags:photography )
• Untitled on Flickr – (title your fucking photos, Chad!)
  Chad Michael Ward photographing a model in a Mother of London design.
  (tags:design )

• Hitting the road, boomerang trajectory. Good morning to the 6,911 people now following me on Twitter. #
• Back from a week of walking England, standing in stone circles and crouching in burial chambers. Mission Control resumes normal service. #

* Saturday Night Open Mic is up.

* Also, we have discussion threads open for ANNA MERCURY #3, this week’s comics releases, and, of course, yesterday’s FREAKANGELS.

So hold on. Obama thinks placing an old white guy as his running mate makes him more electable? Does that make sense? Because the other party has an old white guy at the top of the ticket. Which, by that logic, makes Top Old White Guy much more electable.

Learn to love the taste of water rats, America. Because John McCain did during the 18 years he was floating upside down in a flooded Vietnamese paddy field, and in November that’s what you poor bastards are getting for dinner.

* slugline to an issue of comics anthology BUZZ, many years ago