The new collaborative project by Broadcast and The Focus Group.

COILHOUSE are extending their deadline for their Small Business Ads section to September 30.

Which means you can advertise your stuff in my favourite magazine for as little as 99 US dollars.

• polis: In Suspense
  "The program for airport terminals is becoming so demanding and complex that we are experiencing a phenomenon of a select few architectural firms designing nearly all of the new terminals around the world. It is hard to come by a more clear and striking image of globalisation than seeing airports in Philadelphia, Abu Dhabi, and Tianjin all designed by the same company"
  (tags:design architecture culture monoculture )
• Muslims mass-producing children to take over Africa, says Archbishop -Times Online
  "One of the most powerful figures in the Anglican Church believes that Africa is under attack from Islam and that Muslims are ?mass-producing? children to take over communities on the continent"
  (tags:cult mad pol war )
• Stone Trees of Yakutsk
  "One of the cool natural breath-taking places in Russia are the ?Lena?s stone forest? or ?Lena?s Stone Pillars?."
  (tags:photography fantastic )
• Research team launches search for serpent-like Vancouver Island lake creature
  ""Something just went 'ping' on the alarm on the fish finder and we saw this absolutely massive object in the midst of various fish," said John Kirk, president of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club. "
  (tags:weird )
• Morgue Royal North Shore Hospital body
  "SECURITY at one of Sydney's biggest hospitals is so lax that anyone can walk into the morgue and claim a body without showing identification, prompting fears that corpses could be wrongly removed or defiled."
  (tags:crime )
• How elephants ‘talk’ to each other through the ground
  "The American Physical Society (APS), in the latest podcast of 'Life Lines', has explained how elephant vocalizations travel through the ground for great distances, and how other elephants can understand them, just as they understand acoustic sound, which travels through the air."
  (tags:comms weird )
• Using Magnetism To Turn Drugs On And Off
  "Researchers have devised a drug delivery solution that combines magnetism with nanotechnology. "
  (tags:med nano )
• Dolmen with petroglyphs found near Villupuram
  "A big dolmen with four petroglyphs that portray men with tridents and a wheel with spokes has been found at Kollur, near Tirukoilur, 35 km from Villupuram in Tamil Nadu."
  (tags:history )
• SPACE.com — Eerie Cloud Created by NASA Rocket Experiment
  "An eerie cloud that glowed briefly in the night sky Saturday was no UFO. It was created by humans – more specifically a NASA rocket built to make clouds that shine at night."
  (tags:weather eco space )

I wonder why I never saw this before. Just turned it up on the end of a chain of search links. An unaired ad for Playstation. Apparently it was very expensive. Pulled for fairly obvious reasons. The music is an Alphaville song, "Forever Young," remixed by V/Vm. Interesting. Must find out more about it sometime.

A thousand words sketching connections between two dozen people, and half a dozen different terms for "comic," and probably only this bit makes sense:

(1976 soundtrack: “Anarchy In The UK”; “The Boys Are Back In Town”; “Oxygene”: Bowie’s STATION TO STATION. Joy Division have formed. Black Flag have formed. Throbbing Gristle have formed. Brian Eno’s all over the place, recording, producing, collaborating. Eno on his art education in Ipswich, sixty miles northeast of me: “Everybody thought they could do anything.” Things are in the saddle.)

I would like to spend more money buying magazines at MagCloud, but, even with previews, I often feel like I’m buying blind. If you’re publishing a magazine at MagCloud (like my friend Kat Foisy and her CONSTELLATION), maybe you could mention it in the comments?

Sir Norman Foster — whom I believe is technically Baron Foster of Thames Bank? — is reportedly having his architectural firm pitch to ESA’s Aurora programme, to "investigate adapting materials found in space for building purposes, using data from the original Apollo moon landing, and new information gathered by robot vehicles on Mars. Among the objectives would be building permanent structures on the moon."

A spokesman at the London headquarters of Foster and Partners confirmed "there is a tender" but refused to elaborate on Foster’s plans to conquer outer space, possibly by adding a nice glass dome.

There will be many "space Gherkin" jokes. I find this peculiarly fascinating, on an order with Raymond Loewy having been involved with the design of the Skylab interior. It comes close to the space dreams of Sixties radical architectural theorists, Archigram being the obvious reference. Sir Peter Cook of that storied group once wrote:

Can the near-reality of the rocket-object and the hovercraft-object…. carry the dynamic building with them into life?

Because you are educated people. Right?

I saw The Imagined Village do this on Saturday night. Here’s a take of them doing it in ’08. And that is indeed Billy Bragg, who showed up on Saturday night wearing a Pearly suit — or, as he put it, his ancestral garb. We have similar backgrounds. I kind of want one.

It’s an old song, retooled and made contemporary. Which is, after all, the folk tradition. These are living songs.

On release from Weds.  Preview now at bleedingcool.

• reyyy: sun-dried reyyyy
  the idiot savant of the new comics generation strikes again
  (tags:comics )

This is Warren Ellis dot com. Good afternoon.

(Simon Crubellier)

A Ghost Box film:

• Jedi church founder thrown out of Tesco for refusing to remove his hood left ‘emotionally humiliated’ | Mail Online
  "But Tesco hit back in the spirit of the epic space saga and claimed that the three most well known Jedi Knights in the Star Wars movies – Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker – all appeared in public without their hoods."
  (tags:cult dickhead )
• BBC NEWS | Scotland | North East/N Isles | Neolithic carving raises eyebrows
  "A remote Neolithic burial mound on an Orkney island may contain carvings of human eyes and eyebrows, it has been revealed."
  (tags:history )
• Blind Woman Sees With Tooth Implanted In Eye Surgery – ABC News
  "A team of specialists at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine announced Wednesday that they are the first surgeons in the United States to restore a person's sight by using a tooth."
  (tags:med )
• Cheap, Efficient Solar Cells You Can Print

  (tags:sci eco )

Once every week or so on my message board, I run a game for the artists. I name some ancient comics or pulp character, and tell them to reinvent it for the 21st Century. This week, I called out Black Orchid (the original character from 1944 rather than the semi-recent DC character), which has the following entry on a public-domain characters website:

Glamorous Diana Dawn, district attorney Richard Day’s secretary, is – unbeknownst to him – masquerading as the mysterious female sleuth the Black Orchid. She solves crimes with the aid of a magic ring which contains "black gas" that knocks out her opponents. In her first adventure, Black Orchid takes on Doctor Arso to regain some stolen surgical papers, and she fights zombies, too.

When we’re lucky, comics artists come and play. This week so far, we’ve been very lucky. Take a look.

Y THE LAST MAN artist Pia Guerra:

My old mate Ben Templesmith:

LOCAL artist Ryan Kelly:

Totally missed this: the writer Troy Kennedy Martin died yesterday. Today, he’s probably best remembered by most as writer of THE ITALIAN JOB and KELLY’S HEROES. To me, he’ll always be the man who wrote EDGE OF DARKNESS.

He was one of the great writers of British television, an innovator as well as an author of great skill. I imagine he was well forgotten long ago by those currently working in British television.

8.5×11 print by Zoetica Ebb, whose art you’ll know from COILHOUSE. USD $19.99 direct from Zo, details at the link.

In which someone gets shot.