• Whitechapel – Tea Wine
  Among other things, there's an insane recipe for blackberry port in here.
  (tags:recipe wine )

Received in email:

The latest episode [of TV series FRINGE] (1×05) mentions a Doctor Fisher who performs illegal human experiments including "One subject [that] was pumped full of stimulants and kept awake for a solid year, fed on a steady visual diet of horrific images."

Still working on bringing that book back. News soon, with luck.

I should start a collection of TV shoutouts. My family were watching a vampire show, the name of which escapes me, earlier in the year, and almost fell out of their seats when a character dropped my name.

In other news, TV writers get paid an astounding amount of money and I get paid in beads and alcohol. Rubbing alcohol, at that. Don’t mind me. I’ll be over in the corner, trying to suck sustenance out of the bottom of an old corn flakes box.

* Matt Fraction signing in Santa Barbara, CA:

* Siege:

* Bruce Sterling on iPhone as a 21C Leatherman multitool.

* John Rogers is a Real Writer. How do we know this? Examine the evidence. He has Whisky. He has A Beard. And he wrote the last two episodes of LEVERAGE in two weeks. This is what it means to be A Writer. This is what it means to be A Man.

* Susannah Breslin will be guest-writing at Slate’s XX Factor blog all next week.

Bugger me, it’s Friday already. 

"With a golden color and firm, smooth feel, the Head O State will stand upright and last all night!"

(Found by Lee Hadfield, thanks)

Laurenn McCubbin found this stuck to her car window at UNLV:

Sean Grimm was compelled to make this:

* Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips’ SLEEPER is now being adapted to film by a screenwriter for Sam Raimi.

* Congrats to Sarah Sharp for getting her new photography show (opens Saturday) listed in Time Out New York among other places. Details in link.

* And to Molly Crabapple for getting a full page of her work run in the Village Voice.

* Eliza Gauger, debating a permanent move to Berlin, made… this.

* Kieron Gillen being amusingly incomprehensible on the subject of Z-list indiepop band Kenickie. (Who did at least give the world Lauren Laverne, who actually made her One Great Pop Record with Mint Royale.)

* Cheerful Jamais Cascio reminds everyone in the Bay Area that they’re all going to die.

• /mathlete/ Wake’n'Bacon
  An alarm clock that wakes you up with the smell and sizzle of cooking bacon.
  (tags:tech genius bacon )
• ABC News: ‘Devils’ Trails’ Are World’s Oldest Human Footprints
  "It's official: the oldest human footprints ever found are 345,000 years old, give or take 6000. Known as the "devils' trails", they have been preserved in volcanic ash atop the Roccamonfina volcano in Italy."
  (tags:history )
• In dissection protest, teen’s name is now Cutout Dissection.com – CNN.com
  "The former Jennifer Thornburg — whose driver's license now reads Dissection.com, Cutout — wanted to do something to protest animal dissections in schools. The 19-year-old's new name is also the Web address for an anti-dissection page of the site for PETA, where she is interning."
  (tags:mad culture peta+eats+brains )

Or at least the cover for an IDW comics series for same.

Funny, really: my old AUTHORITY mucker Bryan Hitch was the concept artist on the first season of the new series.

* Bluefin tuna is being pushed to extinction in the Med.

* According to the 2008 Global Hunger Index, twelve states in India have "alarming" levels of hunger and a thirteenth has its nutrition problems likened to those in Ethiopia and Chad. India now contains more malnourished people within its borders than any other country in the world. The number is given as "above 200 million."

* A two degrees Celsius change in average temperature will kill all kangaroos.

* Google’s Larry Brilliant is organizing a project designed to detect early signs of emerging global health crises, called the International Networked System for Total Early Disease Protection. What do you get out of that? INSTEDP? You’d think he’d arrange the words to get SPECTRE out of it.

You ever have those days when you just can’t wake up? I’m having one of those. Blood isn’t moving, can’t stop yawning, shit isn’t happening. There are some CDs I always save for the days when I can’t wake up. Flipping this one over in my hands just now, I realised that I’ve had it for ten years. 1998. Really doesn’t seem that long.

Talvin Singh’s ’OK’ was, in my head, the soundtrack for my comics miniseries TWO-STEP (illustrated so brilliantly by Amanda Conner & Jimmy Palmiotti). I’ve got something like four different mixes of this, but this is the one that unscabs my head, the "Heavy Rotation Radio Refixx". It may only be available on the "OK" CD-single. Play loud.

(Usual standards apply: mp3 is live for seven days only and provided for review purposes only, contact degaussing at googlemail com if you need it taken down immediately)

* D’Is:

(also, his Oct/Nov appearance schedule)

* Susannah has a short, eye-opening piece on the Extreme Associates trial that could easily go under the Your Doomed World header.

* A lovely little Paul Pope sketch. (fullsize version here)

New American Symbol:

• BBC NEWS | Health | Earliest confirmed TB case found
  The 9,000-year-old remains of a mother and her baby discovered off the coast of Israel provide the earliest concrete evidence of human TB
  (tags:med history )
• BBC NEWS | England | West Midlands | Kebabs made as corpse lay nearby
  "A fast food shop owner was found preparing food while an employee's corpse lay nearby."
  (tags:crime weird unhealthy probably+not+delicious )
• SKorea’s dancing robot can also tackle the chores – Yahoo! News
  South Korean researchers said Monday they have developed a robot which can dance and get emotional when it's not tackling the chores. Mahru can move its lips, eyebrows and even pupils freely to make faces and can emit two kinds of fragrances to match its emotions
  (tags:robot sci tech a+bit+creepy robots+that+fart+fear )
• Giant Cyclones At Saturn’s Poles Create A Swirl Of Mystery
  New images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveal a giant cyclone at Saturn's north pole, and show that a similarly monstrous cyclone churning at Saturn's south pole is powered by Earth-like storm patterns.
  (tags:space )
• Vicar accused of threatening herself – UPI.com
  British authorities say a vicar stands accused of allegedly sending herself a dead hedgehog and dog feces to prove herself a crime victim.
  (tags:crime mad )

Grouper’s DRAGGING A DEAD DEER UP A HILL is a collection of songs and instrumentals that all seem to come from unknown fields in the dawn hours. Thick with mist and the white noise of strange nature. I was torn between this and the howling of "Wind And Snow," but I started to hear a detourned and distorted echo of Fleetwood Mac’s "Albatross in the middle of it. So I’m playing "When We Fall," because it’s just perfectly dark jewelled night music.

You can buy the CD from a ton of places, just stick it into Google and be amazed. Mp3 purchase can be had at eMusic.

G’night.

(Usual standards apply: mp3 is live for seven days only and provided for review purposes only, contact degaussing at googlemail com if you need it taken down immediately)

Thorsten at Highpoint Lowlife kindly dropped off their new release the other day. Kwaidan is a project by Mat Ranson, better known as Fisk Industries. Kwaidan’s two pieces, each almost twelve minutes long, will cause most people to name Burial as a touchstone. I’m going to steal a term from Anthony Braxton to describe them: Ghost Trance. Braxton, in talking around his Ghost Trance Music, described it in part (interviews with Braxton about Ghost Trance are like watching a guy trying to screw fog) as "a sound that doesn’t begin and doesn’t end." And that’s an apt way to describe an often beatless techno-derived electronic music haunted by old Japanese films and the clatter of strange primitive instruments bubbling up through the floor of a contemporary studio.

The release page, where you can buy the lovely mp3s, is here. And below is an excerpt from the second piece, "Masaki."

Excellent latenight work music, Thorsten. Cheers, mate.

* This is what a sewage pipe failure looks like in Russia today:

* DoseNation: "Here’s something you really don’t want to hear your nurse say when you’re lying helpless in a nursing home: ’I can’t believe she’s still alive with all the morphine I’ve given her.’"

* You didn’t forget about the Shining Path, did you? Because they didn’t forget about anybody. Interestingly, their latest attack happened near coca-growing valleys — it’s believed by many that the Shining Path, once Maoist freedom fighters who dealt in cocaine trafficking for essential operating funds, now run drugs full-time.

* Enough heroin to supply the world’s demand for years has simply disappeared. Enough that shortages are now been recorded in Britain. And yet, for the past three years, production has been running at almost twice the level of global demand.

* The economic crisis, the forthcoming immolation of everyone in New Mexico, imminent mass suicides and the end of the world itself are apparently all down to God’s displeasure at the continuing criminal investigation into the life and hobbies of cult leader and alleged kiddie-fiddler Wayne Bent. According to Wayne Bent, anyway.

Some fantastic photography, mostly taken in and around American national forests and state parks, prints offered for sale.

* Forthcoming from PS Publishing, a new collection by sf pop shaman Paul Di Filippo:

* Dave Walsh’s new book HAUNTED DUBLIN launches. Dave Walsh knows his shit. Excellent Xmas present, I suspect.

* Congratulations to my favourite girls at COILHOUSE on completing their first year.

Literate, off-kilter pop seems to have become the mainstay at Moshi Moshi Records these days. I’ve particularly enjoyed a couple of inventive, funny and slightly creepy pieces by Slow Club. Yesterday, I found an EP called PIGEON by The Wave Pictures, and over the last several hours have become particularly enamored of the opening piece, “Long Island”. It reminds me of something I haven’t quite put my finger on yet: that easy, loping shoutalong rhythm that just takes the stress out of my shoulders and has me rolling along with it. Cranked up loud, it’s soothing to these old bones first thing in the day.

You can buy the whole EP on download directly from Moshi Moshi themselves.

(Usual standards apply: mp3 is live for seven days only and provided for review purposes only, contact degaussing at googlemail com if you need it taken down immediately)

• 5th-graders charged with having sex – USATODAY.com
  Two 11-year-old girls, a 12-year-old boy and a 13-year old boy were charged with obscenity, a felony. An 11-year-old boy, the alleged guard, was charged with being an accessory.
  (tags:sex crime victorian+values back+in+the+19th+century+they+just+did+it+in+the+street )
• Fury over cat eating festival | The Sun |News
  "The Gastronomical Festival of the Cat"!
  (tags:weird food culture nom meow )
• WHO | New virus from Arenaviridae family in South Africa and Zambia – Update
  "…preliminary evidence that the causative agent of the disease which has resulted in the recent deaths of 3 people from Zambia and South Africa, is a virus from the Arenaviridae family. Meanwhile, a new case has been confirmed…"
  (tags:med doom )