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 )

A guest edition of OVERCOMPENSATING by one John Keogh reveals that, yes, that IS what I look like under the coat.

Shut up.

Sarah‘s been going on about this film for a couple of days, so I finally broke down and watched the trailer.

Now you must watch it too. If only to confirm that I really saw it.

Collecting the first eight issues. Available from better comics stores and bookshops from this Wednesday in North America, and from Thursday in the UK and elsewhere. Below, the cover for the paperback edition:

Ever had an operation? Ever worry about what might go wrong? You might not wake up again. The surgeon might slip with the knife. They might leave something inside you. You might get the wrong procedure. Standard stuff. How about having your throat set on fire? Ten-centimetre flames gushing out of your exposed trachea? Yeah, that’s a new one. Living in the 21C — never boring.

Remember hearing about Aiko, the robot that was being designed to "feel" pain and react to the threat of pain? Sure you do. An unconnected but equally helpful team are working to ensure that robots can also be equipped with reactive skin ready to be slashed open. Presumably with a blunt butter knife or rusty tuna can lid. Luckily, Aiko will probably be too encrusted with its creator’s semen for most edged weapons to cut through.

No such worries for the US Army, though. Its Active Denial System of truck-mounted microwave sprayers will likely be in the field by the end of 2009. The "pain ray," having a range of 250 metres in the version being ordered, is a "non-lethal weapon" (a field that’s been producing fascinating reading for me since the early 1990s, when people like the peculiar sf novelist Janet Morris were involved) — like plastic bullets. And, like the plastic bullet, it’s not exactly a guaranteed non-lethal device. In fact, without a limiting device that currently doesn’t exist, there appears to be a high possibility of simply frying the targets where they stand.

The same article reports that there is interest in procuring rifle-sized versions for American law enforcement.

* Marie Javins appears at Bookculture in NYC on Nov 15 in support of her children’s book 3D WORLD ATLAS AND TOUR.

* Billy Gray, late of the Meltdowns, releases a demo piece.

Okay, so I made the title up.

I’ve been kicking this idea around for a few years, and have never really gotten it to settle. Answers on a postcard to degaussing at googlemail com if you have an informed opinion as to its technological solution (or even extant reality).

It once occurred to me that buildings could cast a digital shadow. Imagine an old building still in use, or an old shop location recently renovated or reactivated. Imagine walking past this place, and, say, the place finds a bluetooth connection on your phone and pings you a message inviting you to activate a proffered weblink. Which leads to, for example, a history of the building you’re just passing, structured in blog format. Or maybe it’s a residential building, or a building being used as offices for several start-ups, and they all contribute to a groupblog for the building.

Less invasively (but less interestingly) perhaps the building sprays free wifi, and the landing page for the wifi connection is that blog.

This actually occurred to me on a walk through/past Brick Lane years ago, where lots of old buildings were being re-rented as start-up digs. And I was looking up at one of them and trying to remember what it’d been before it’d gotten an infection of Nathan Barley nethipsterfailures and goofy plastic signs. And I got to thinking — why aren’t I being pinged a link to the history of this structure? Why isn’t there a Semacode in the window for me to shoot (the least invasive option, but also probably the least distributed solution)?

Can you imagine what a walk through the deep history of central London would be like, if almost every building you saw was capable of talking to your internet device?

EDITED TO ADD: As ever, Matt Jones is ahead of me, albeit from the DIY earliest-possible-adoption perspective. Just looking at geotags gives me maths-fear. Also reminds me I need to catch up with Adam Greenfield’s most recent stuff.

Corey Lewis at Design By Humans: