• BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Secrets hope as Hitler aide dies
  "The fly had been buzzing around the room during a strategy conference in July 1944, irritating the Nazi leader. Hitler ordered Mr Darges to get rid of it, but the SS adjutant suggested that as it was an "airborne pest" the job should go to Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below. He said Hitler then flew into a rage and dismissed him, saying: "You're for the eastern front." "
  (tags:mad war pol )
• ‘Miracle’ as communion wafer becomes heart tissue – Telegraph
  "The Catholic Church in Poland is investigating claims of a miracle after a piece of communion wafer was reported to have been transformed into human heart tissue after falling into water during a mass."
  (tags:cult weird mad stupid )
• Darpa Looks To Send The Internet Into Orbit
  "…part of a larger movement to extend terrestrial networks into space, and eventually build an "Interplanetary Internet.""
  (tags:space net )
• BBC NEWS | England | Hereford/Worcs | Father uses son’s ashes in tattoo
  "A father from Herefordshire is to have a portrait of his dead son tattooed on his chest using the child's ashes."
  (tags:bodymod tattoo death )

Because it’s Friday.

Did you read BONESHAKER yet? It’s probably my favourite "steampunky" novel, probably because it wears the steampunkiness so lightly, while genuinely having a touch of the punk to it (which, let’s face it, most steampunk doesn’t). It’s actually a fairly mental alternate-world story of mad scientists, outcasts, sealed cities, airships and, yes, zombies. And the whole melange works. More than works — it has a crazy prologue, a melancholy and foreboding beginning, and then about eighty pages in it starts stoking the furnace and rattles up to a glorious speed and doesn’t let up. It’s terrific fun. Also, Mike Mignola really liked it.

It’s just gone to a third printing, so all your decent bookstores and your Amazons will have it. I think that, in the US, Barnes & Noble are doing a special promotion with it for another week.

At Newsarama.

• Eating Bark: the church of solitude
  "Proposal for a cathedral for the recovery of solitude, buried into the bedrock of Manhattan Island, designed by Gaetano Pesce between 1974 and 1977"
  (tags:architecture weird )
• McDonald’s staffer worked to death – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
  "The labour office says the McDonald's manager was doing more than 20 hours a week overtime when she suffered a brain haemorrhage and died in 2007."
  (tags:crime )

Warren Ellis dot com. Back later: off to pub, and then to perform domestic tasks.

(photo by Cait Kittredge)

“Hollow Life,” from the record THEE ONLY ONE, is available for your listening pleasure at last.fm.  Click through. Perfect music for a misty night, the way it is here in Southend right now.

A book you might like. Writer and photographer Sarah Sharp (better known to warrenellis.com readers as Trixie Bedlam) travelled to all fifty states of the USA. And then made a book about it. Which you can preview here.

Let me be blunt: I’ve been posting her work here for years — just run "Trixie Bedlam" through the site’s search function. I love Sarah’s work enough that I helped fund her trip through Kickstarter. So I’m a little biased. But please, go and have a flick through the book.

And, if you feel like it, please log in there and vote for her in the Blurb book contest.

I am informed that a new Moon Wiring Club record approaches. Make merry and throw another dog on the fire, for we will have cold visitors from a place beyond weather.

Photojournalist specialising in fringe/criminal/pov environments. Superb, sometimes harrowing work. Personal site here, discovered via a collection of her St Petersburg images on English Russia.

The new haunted park of Europe, via Mammoth:

The European Green Belt is an initiative to develop a pan-European conservation system as “an ecological network that runs from the Barents to the Black Sea”. Picking out the Cold War line of division between East and West, the initiative aims to thicken and de-civilize that political line, so that the ghostly trace of a militarized landscape becomes a feral and wild preserve…

On Zo’s Style Dispatch for today:

(Be advised that Zo currently thinks she’s Batman and is also dreaming of me reading to her naked. If you see her approaching you, dart her in the neck or something.)

This is warren ellis dot com. Good morning.

And this is "Clay Bodies" by Zola Jesus.

"I Want Your Love."

Good night, internet.

Sarah Deaton just made me look at this AND NOW YOU HAVE TO LOOK AT IT TOO GOD DAMN YOU.

It’s that time of the day where one needs a sound like this. I’ve only heard the one album by Cymbals Eat Guitars, and I’m hoping for a second one where they’ve swept out the nervousness and slight insecurity and just focus on blowing off the backs of people’s heads. "…And The Hazy Sea" is from WHY THERE ARE MOUNTAINS by Cymbals Hate Guitars. It’s a little bit like the Arcade Fire got sent to Hell and discovered the place is run by Frank Black.

Approaching the end of the first volume, now:

From up here, maybe we can see what we’ve been talking about this whole time. A world that, from up here, looks like Jack Kirby’s Ego The Living Planet, but instead of its face being a wizened old man, it does of course strongly resemble the robot head of Jack Kirby.

Our parachute opens, billowing, capturing the air of comics and slowly bringing us back to this strange earth. From up here, we get the overview, and descend and decelerate into the details.

From up here, you can only see the geographical details of Jack Kirby’s face. There’s no sense of what weather cut those features into the topography, those lines and trenches and pits.

Since I began writing this, other comics creators have come to me with stories of Jack. Jack the angry man, Jack the wall-puncher, Jack the bitter man, Jack the betrayed. Jack the furious, who never raised a hand to anyone but never left any building he resided in without the pockmark of fist-shaped holes…

Mal has a new poster up at INPRNT:

"In case you’ve not been following the local press, the town of Southend-on-Sea is bidding to become the UK’s Capital of Culture 2013."