• 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."

Today on my internet spiderhole:

* The Starry Wisdom Of Warren 27oct09 - jabbering about message boards, tribes, making things, shagging

* Looking for new industrial/electro recommendations

* The London MCM Expo Aftermath Thread - last day for ruminations and memories in re: last weekend’s comics event

* Musicians, Bands, Singers, Noisemakers - plug/talk thread

* Food & Cooking Oct 09 - learn how to poison your friends and relatives

* Halloween Costumes — Bat-Bloomers, in the name of god

(sound of trumpets)

(out into the freezing bloody cold)

This is Warren Ellis dot com. I’m a writer. Good morning.

(image by padraig)

I am greatly fond of Natural Snow Buildings, an experimental/postrock unit from France. And last.fm has a bunch of their stuff for free download. Good old last.fm — don’t know how it’s taken this long to root through their free-mp3 archive. Here’s the page you can grab this track from. It has superficial resemblances to, say, the peak work of Godspeed You! Black Emperor: but instead of GY!BE’s ascents (or perhaps escalantes, if you’re Matt Webb), they produce zones, spaces, still fields. Good night music. (And it’s dark here in Britain.)

If you go to Brian Wood’s flickr stream right now, you’ll find the first five pages of his new NORTHLANDERS sequence, THE PLAGUE WIDOW.

At my internet bumhole tonight:

* Emma Vieceli’s DRAGON HEIR: REBORN - online and for free ^_^ - reminder (because part 3 went up today) and discussion thread

* The London MCM Expo Aftermath Thread

* T-shirt Of The Week #001 - LOVE - discussion thread

* The Weekly Listening Thread (26octo9)

* Halloween Costumes - because Goth Christmas is almost upon us.

* Sarah Sharp’s CHANGING STATES - in support of the excellent book, which needs your vote at the Blurb book contest, too

* 8tracks Mixtapes - we love 8tracks. Give me more stuff to listen to.

I just noticed that Zoe Keating’s sublime "Sun Will Set" is offered as a free download by last.fm. You can click through to last.fm here and grab one for yourself. I talk to Zoe occasionally on Twitter. She is very nice.

New photos of his time in Greenland and the Arctic. I’m just going to show you one of the new photos here, prefaced by Dave’s note:

Ice sheet sliding towards Helheim Glacier, Sermilik Fjord, East Greenland. to get a sense of scale, that ice-filled Fjord in the background is about 6km wide…

Matt Jones:

My talk at DxF2009 in Utrecht last week was an hour’s wander around the idea of Time, particularly historical and cultural ideas of time.

My focus was time as a material for interaction design that we should deconstruct and reconstruct in order to create products and services that take advantage of new real-time web technologies.

I has a scheme. Or, more properly, Ariana and I has a scheme. On Twitter, I’ve been joking about turning some of my stupider comments into t-shirts. And then I thought, hold on, there’s only one way to make this joke funnier. And that’s to actually do it. So Ariana set up a Cafe Press store (because this is a joke and engaging with a serious maker of t-shirts would be less funny to us), and… well, this is what we’re going to do.

Through this website and this Cafe Press store, we’re going to release one t-shirt a week. It’ll go live on Monday… and it’ll die Sunday night. Each one lives for a week, and then it’s replaced by the next week’s shirt. Until I either run out of dumb ideas or Ariana’s brain explodes.

So, every Monday, I’ll post the new shirt here, and you can peer at it more at http://www.cafepress.com/electrophonic.

Anyway. I present to you T-Shirt Of The Week #001: LOVE:

Also, for this first week, we’re also offering a couple of other things that will be perennial items. Mostly because I wanted one of these for myself:

(And also a MAN COOK MEAT WITH FIRE "splatter-shield", because Ariana’s crazy)

Thank you for your kind attention.

I’m awake. Really. Was up til 4am finishing my end of the WOLVERINE Marvel Anime. Am at the pub, throwing the end of Red Bull number three into my head. Things are afoot today. As Benjamin Zephaniah said: brothers and sisters, I have a Scheme.

So give me an hour or so and I’ll show you.

Also I have lots of things to show you today. Broadcasting commences after I have hunted down some lunch, out here in the wilds of old Southend…