This winter:

• Flower-shaped nanoparticles may lead to better batteries for portable electronics
  "Chemists are reporting development of flower-shaped nanoparticles with superior electronic performance than conventional battery materials. These "nanoflowers" may power next-generation electronic devices…"
  (tags:sci tech nano )
• Satan worshippers kill and eat four Russian teenagers after stabbing each of them 666 times | Mail Online
  "After arresting eight people in connection with the murders, police realised all four victims had made phone calls to the flat of alleged gang leader Nikolai Ogolobyak, a former church choir boy."
  (tags:crime )
• Dark matter ‘bridge to nowhere’ found in cosmic void – space – 15 September 2008 – New Scientist Space
  "More than a dozen galaxies seem to be lined up along a bridge of dark matter inside a region of nearly empty space. This 'bridge to nowhere' could shed light on how small galaxies formed in the early universe."
  (tags:space )
• USS – a portfolio of probabilities – a set on Flickr
  "…once were give-a-ways from "United States Steel International" to show, how the future might look like – from a early 60s perspective."
  (tags:future design retro )
• Cunning Folk: Traditional Paganism and the Cunning Artst
  "…buried in an unmarked grave in Hadleigh churchyard, beside most of his twenty children… death certificate laconically states "James Murrell: Profession Quack Doctor: Natural Causes"…The ghost of Cunning Murrell was seen gathering herbs by the roadside after his death."
  (tags:magic history essex )
• James Cunning Murrell
  "In his final hours, the village vicar tried to minister the last rites to him, but when Murrell could stand it no longer he fixed his piercing eyes on him and roared: ?I am the Devil?s master?, at which this the vicar ran from the room in fear."
  (tags:magic history essex )
• The Cunning Men of Essex
  "Dubbed the last witch doctor in England, James Murrell was born in 1812 in the village of Hadleigh, just inland from the coastal town of Southend-on-Sea."
  (tags:magic history essex )

Story by me, adaptation into script by Mike Wolfer, art by Oscar Jiminez:

• In London for another meeting. It’s grim-looking up here. Red Bull power-up. #
• Post-meeting: more Red Bull yes. #
• One day I will write an advice column called “Warren Ellis Knows Everything And If He Doesn’t Then He Lies” #

* Pencils for a new Jamie McKelvie print:

* ZO!

* Mer:

* Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips have a new comics project:

* And Emma Vieceli returns home married. She only nipped around the corner for a loaf of bread, too.

• Judge Rules Banks Not Competent to be Executed
  "Judge Conahan maintains Banks is psychotic and unable to comprehend his death sentence or participate in his own defense."
  (tags:crime )
• Man’s Body Found 11 Months After Suicide
  "Sohn seemed to have hung himself from a pipe in the kitchen, police said. The new owner, Kim, had mistaken the body for a mannequin twice before realizing that it was a dead body."
  (tags:crime )
• Nathan Rees minister Matt Brown resigns over simulated sex with MP | The Australian
  "Police Minister Matt Brown "mounted the chest" of Wollongong MP Noreen Hay… (and) called out to Ms Hay's adult daughter during the performance: "Look at this, I'm tittie-fucking your mother!" "
  (tags:pol crime )

* Steven Shaviro on the Sarah Palin effect.

* A fine excerpt from Susannah Breslin’s novel in progress.

* Marie Javins wrote THE 3-D WORLD ATLAS & TOUR.

* Meredith Yayanos captured performing with Faun Fables at The Knitting Factory the other week:

• Run away with me. (I promise not to sell you for food later on.) #
• Okay, I admit it. I wouldn’t sell you for food, but I would trade you for uppers or monkey glands. #
• @leahmoore cover quote for your next tpb: “Leah Moore is worth several monkey glands. People have told her so.” #
• One of you people has stolen my brain, and I want it back raight naow bfoor tinghs gtt ny wurs #

(via Siege)

A partially-collapsed stone burial chamber down the field from the Rollright Stones.

Their proximity to the Rollrights, rough contemporanity and siting on a posited ceremonial track that is believed to run around and west to the Rollright ring, says to me that this was an intended statement. I mean, all portal dolmen chambers are. But the Knights constitute a big bugger, standing on the limb of a big hill looking down a broad sweep of the West Country. They’d been standing some three thousand years before those became the lands of the Saxon leader Hrolla, the "Hrolla-landriht" that became the modern-day corruption Rollright. This is a dolmen that marks the passing of people who worked to make this country fit for living in. People like me: the genetic characteristics of Britons remain around 80% the same as the first Britons to occupy the country after the last Ice Age. People who worked against insane disadvantages, the worst of which was the lack of history — the inability to pass down knowledge except through lossy oral tradition, the inability to build on a repository of ideas. They marked the land as best they could to show that they were winning, slowly, generation by generation. This is the beginning of history.

Unbidden, my daughter twisted together a circle from corn and flowers, and left it as an offering on the fallen Knight that lays flat between the others.

• World’s First Synthetic Tree: May Lead To Technologies For Heat Transfer, Soil Remediation

  (tags:sci eco )

• Abandoned ionospheric research station
  Empty Russian HAARP installation
  (tags:history sci tech haunt )
• Women Ran the Burnt City 5000 years ago | Astigan.com
  "The Burnt City is a settlement, possibly of urban type, that is associated with the Jiroft civilization in Iran. New clues suggest that women, especially mothers, had a very distinctive social and financial prominence."
  (tags:history )
• Indian teenage suicide over black hole test: reports
  "Chayya Lal, 16, from the central state of Madhya Pradesh, committed suicide after watching television reports on how the particle-smashing test in Geneva could bring about doomsday, Indian newspapers reported."
  (tags:mad )

Mad catching up to do:

* Irene Kaoru’s guestblogging at Coilhouse.

* Eliza’s exhibiting in Seattle today: Lighthouse Roasters, 400 North 43rd Street, Seattle, WA 98103 4pm – 7pm.

* Fraction’s signing… well, probably right now.. at The Laughing Ogre in Lansdowne, VA until 4pm.

* Brian Ashcraft and Jean Snow’s book ARCADE MANIA, what I wrote a back cover thing for, is now on sale.

We had Eliza Gauger design a logo image for the Artbots "robot talent show" that opens in Dublin next week. I believe the plan is to also get this on to a t-shirt. Eliza’s page at Artbots.

• (Yes, I was re-watching an episode of ROME. The Titus Pullo Guide To Modern Relationships.) #
• It’s Friday, it’s gone noon UK time, I’m going to the pub, it’s FREAKANGELS time: http://www.freakangels.com/?p=56 #
• Sometimes you must say fuckit and swagger. ? http://blip.fm/~65fp #

MY WARP MOON IS NINE YEARS LATE

I HAVE BEEN CHEATED OUT OF A FASTER THAN LIGHT MOON RUN BY MARTIN LANDAU

BASTARDS

It’s Friday, it’s just past noon in the UK, and so it’s a new FREAKANGELS episode.

Wayland’s Smithy is a bit of a trek.

Unless you know the local roads — which I don’t — and are prepared to park on the hard shoulder in SUV territory — which I wasn’t — you have to pull up at a National Trust car park and then rough it. Walk up the steps from the car park, which puts the amazing White Horse of Uffington in view, and then turn right, across the fields and down the hill, and turn right again on to the Ridgeway.

The signposting is shit. It’s quite possible to believe you’ve missed it. Judging a mile and a half on the wending Ridgeway isn’t the easiest thing in the world. But it’s worth it.

Wayland’s Smithy is a Neolithic longbarrow and chambered-tomb burial site. The barrow is believed to have come first, around 3700BC, with the stone chambers added four hundred years later. The name of the place is obviously long gone; it was named Wayland’s Smithy by the Saxons, who arrived some four thousand years later.

The chambered are cramped, but a determined person can clamber in there. That said, you can see why one of the chambers was found to contain remains that had first been disarticulated. There’s graffiti, but much less than you’d expect, mostly scratched into the rock.

That’s rainwater in the hollow of that stone. You could scoop out a drink in the palm of your hand. Couldn’t decide if it was dumb luck or a "domesticated" stone.

Time stops here, for a while.

• Bailing out. Going to stand outside in the dark with a cigarette for a while. G’night. ? http://blip.fm/~5gne #
• Wakey wakey internet ? http://blip.fm/~5kaa #
• It has come to my attention that, in my life, I have not strangled enough women and thrown them in ponds. I shall attend to this forthwith. #

According to Twitter, I’ve been nominated for something called a Scream Award.  Thanks very much, Scream Award people.

Found this in email from Molly this morning: apparently a male Dr Sketchy’s model got the shit beaten out of him in the street by some random scumfucks.

Last weekend in Portland, Maine a Sketchy’s model fell victim to a violent hate crime. Found unconscious on a sidewalk by a passing stranger, the 31 year old recalls little of the incident after sustaining a blow to the head. He was walking home after midnight on Friday, when two men approached him, spitting homophobic slurs and eventually resorting to violence, all because the young man “looked gay”. The victim… suffered a concussion and bleeding to the brain…

Like most people in America trying to do something in the "fringe" arts, the poor bastard has no health insurance. Updates on his condition are here.