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1 August 2006
[murder] 39 Years After Boy’s Murder, Police Arrest Two Men‘It was almost 40 years ago that a young grammar school boy set off on a sunny Saturday afternoon to buy a geometry set, still wearing his distinctive uniform as he wandered down a rural bridle path nick-named Happy Valley. Harold Wilson was in Downing Street and the new car sensation was the Mark 2 Ford Cortina, but both were wiped off the front pages by what happened to 12-year-old Keith Lyon before he reached the village store at Woodingdean, near Brighton. In a brief attack, he was stabbed 11 times in the stomach with a serrated kitchen carving knife after a mob of older teenagers from a rival school jumped him, according to local people, then left him to bleed to death on the path.’
[wiki] My Wikipedia Contrail: Fallen Astronaut‘Fallen Astronaut is an 8.5-cm (slightly over 3″) aluminum sculpture of an astronaut in a spacesuit. It is the only piece of art on the Moon.’
2 August 2006
[lists] Merlin Mann’s 5ives — amusing lists of five things …

Five suggested Flickr tags
  1. “Rows Of Seated White Men Typing At Conferences”
  2. “My Underlit Dessert With One Bite Missing”
  3. “My Defenseless Child In A Funny Shirt I Made Him Wear”
  4. “Attractive Man In His Twenties Playing An Electric Guitar”
  5. “The Photo From This ‘Impromptu’ Self Portrait Series That Suggests I Don’t Have A Dewlap”

3 August 2006
[wtf] The Daily Mail uses Del.icio.us‘Square-shaped watermelons created for easy storage are to hit stores in the UK.’ [via qwghlm.co.uk]
[comics] Alan Moore on Lost Girls — long interview in the Onion’s AV Club [via Robot Wisdom] …

‘The way that we worked on Lost Girls was actually different than the way I’ve worked on any other comic I’ve done. I’m known for turning out book-sized scripts with detailed written descriptions of each panel and all the dialogue and captions and sound effects. But Melinda had never worked with a scriptwriter before, so she looked at these enormous scripts I’d written for the first four or five episodes, and I think it crushed her spirit. She wasn’t comfortable, and she suggested that maybe I could do thumbnails, which is something I haven’t really done for other artists because I’m so lousy at drawing thumbnails. I have to write pages of explanation to tell them that this little blob down in the right-hand corner is actually the leading character’s head and shoulders. But Melinda, since she was living up here, I could talk her through all the breakdowns. She’d take my rough thumbnails and a pep talk and would go and turn out these lovely pages. Then I would do the dialoguing after the artwork was done, so that I could have a look at the expression that Melinda brought to the work. I could fine-tune the dialogue for the images so everything was much more synchronized. Lost Girls probably marks the closest that I’ve worked with an artist on a comic, perhaps unsurprisingly. With the nature of the material, it more or less demands an intimate relationship between the creators. Not just intimate in the usual physical sense, but also intimate in a mental and creative sense.’

4 August 2006
[religion] Hatemail to the Flying Spagetti Monster‘PASTAFARIAN?!? that doesn’t even make sense!! why the hell would god be PASTA?!?’ [via linkbunnies.org]
[ukblogs] Blogs in focus at Festival Fringe‘Blogs are taking centre stage at this year’s Festival Fringe in Edinburgh, with three different productions tapping into the world of online writers. One of them, Bloggers: Real Internet Diaries, is based entirely on British blogs.’
[crab] Crab vs. Pipe — old viral video on YouTube … ‘An undersea robot is sawing a 3mm wide slit (1/10th of an inch … remember that width) in a pipeline. The pressure inside the pipeline is 0 psig, while the pressure outside is 2700 psi, or 1.3 tons per square inch. Then a crab comes along….’
5 August 2006
[lightbulb] Livermore’s Centennial Light — Apparently, the oldest working lightbulb in the world … ‘Age: 104 years and counting (as of 2005)’
6 August 2006
[soundboard] Curb Your Enthusiasm Soundboard: ‘I might be losing a testicle.’
7 August 2006
[comics] The Brothers Freud — another interview with Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie about Lost Girls [slightly NSFW] … ‘We are trying to present sex and war as alternatives to one another. The pornography in Lost Girls is a testament to the human imagination, and particularly to the human sexual imagination, and the war that builds ominously throughout Lost Girls is the exact opposite of the human sexual imagination. I perceive war as the ultimate failure of the imagination. When we can’t think of anything else to do, then we kill each other in staggering numbers.’ [via The Comics Reporter]
[blogs] Belle de Jour on staying Anonymous — some good, common sense advice for anonymous best-selling bloggers … ‘Trust no one.’
[books] The Digested Read: Positively Happy by Noel Edmonds‘Allowing room for the good things means letting go of the bad. That’s why, although I’m happy to talk about all my other TV programmes, you won’t find a single word here about the Late Late Breakfast Show, in which a member of the public died performing a pointless and dangerous stunt.’
[books] Support Abby: Buy Girl With A One Track Mind on Amazon Here.
8 August 2006
[ukblogs] Casino Avenue: ‘As for Anna Mikhailova? She’ll still be bumping along on the Sunday Times, and being asked why every time her name’s entered into Google, it returns a list of pages slagging her off. Add that to your CV, eh?’
[comics] Thrill Power Overload — David Bishop an ex-editor of 2000AD is writing a history of the comic and blogging his progress … On Censorship: ‘Even the most innocuous phrases could cause problems. Both [Alan] Grant and [Steve] MacManus recall a sound effect in Robo-Hunter being censored. Barry Tomlinson had taken over from Bob Bartholomewews the managing editor responsible for passing each issue of 2000 AD as fit for publication. ‘The original speech balloon on Prog 278 had Kidd saying, “Do something, Slade! I’m gonna pop!”,’ MacManus recalls. ‘Tomlinson said you can’t have the word pop on the cover, it means fart.” [via Pete’s Linklog]
[comics] 1963 Comics Ads — amusing spoof Comics Ads written by Alan Moore.
9 August 2006
[xmas] Only 138 Shopping Days to Go — Harrods opened it’s Christmas Department yesterday… ‘Christmas World was packed, with an ominous background tinkle of shoppers edging past racks of glass baubles. The fairylights were eclipsed by the barrage of camera flashes as tourists immortalised themselves in T-shirts and shorts standing in a glade of £119 slimline artificial trees. “It’s so English,” a Chinese woman said fondly, admiring a £14.95 glass Eiffel Tower tree decoration – made in China.’ (more…)
[ukblogs] Jeffrey Archer’s Official Blog‘I read in another newspaper that I’m converting to Roman Catholicism. One phone call, and they would have discovered that it hadn’t even crossed my mind.’ [thanks Phil]
10 August 2006
[vids] How to Undress in Seven Seconds — this isn’t a lifehack I’d try at home … [via Sore Eyes]
[ronson] Hello Jon Ronson. Yes, the bloggers are watching you… Just be thankful we are not the Secret Rulers of the World.

evidence of jon ronson's ego-surfing

My advice to you is relax, and perhaps don’t ego-surf so dilligently. I only posted that link to the Chosen Ones two hours ago… Shouldn’t you be working?
[weird] The Chosen Ones — Jon Ronson meets Indigo Children who apparently are “super-evolved, psychic beings” … ‘I’m curious to know more about the Indigo children – this apparently vast, underground movement. Although Indigos say they communicate telepathically, they also communicate via internet forums, such as Indigos Unplugged…’ [via As Above]
11 August 2006
[comics] Judge Dredd: Origins — a flash trailer for a new Judge Dredd series by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. [via Jez]
[ukblogs] YouTube: Tom Reynolds, of Random Acts of Reality on ITV’s London News.
12 August 2006
[ukblogs] Greenslade — Roy Greenslade is keeping a nicely done blog about the British Press and Journalism.
13 August 2006
[comics] The New Adventures of Hitler — scans from Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell’s controversial comic about Hitler visiting Liverpool in 1912 … ‘I was born to suffer. There is no end to it. I was born to suffer and I shall surely die here, on this miserable English toilet. I tell you, I have never known a greater enemy than my own rebellious bowels. Traitors! Treacherous bastards! They will be the death of me.’
14 August 2006
[comics] Criminal Preview — a few pages from the first issue of Criminal from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.
[comics] Keep On Truckin’ — from the Perry Bible Fellowship.
[ww2] Any Officer Who Goes Into Action Without His Sword is Improperly Dressed — a summary of the almost unbelievable wartime adventures of Captain Jack Churchill

‘In 1940, some of the German commanders who were overseeing the push into France began to receive seemingly random reports of soldiers having been killed with broad-head arrows or hacked with a English Claymore. Effective enough weapons it would seem, but archaic even in that day and age. They likely could have guessed the bowman was an English soldier, but they couldn’t have appreciated these as the calling card of the rabid eccentric, Captain Jack Churchill.’

‘Commando training ended with an attack on Nord Fiord, Norway. While the two companies he commanded advanced on their target, Jack stood in the lead craft, and played on his pipes “The March of the Cameron Men”. His report at mission’s end was simply: “Maaloy battery and island captured. Casualties slight. Demolitions in progress. Churchill.”

‘In 1944 Jack’s luck and tenacity took a slip when he was ordered into an impossible situation. Most of his squad was killed, and Jack was taken captive. After being hauled to Berlin for questioning, he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was meant to stay until war’s end. He might have done so, but one night the power went out, and Jack was prepared: he had a rusty can and some onions. It was all that he needed. In the darkness he just walked away and made his escape.’

[blogger] The New Blogger — Google are prepping a new version of Blogger.com.
15 August 2006
[tv] Jon Ronson is blogging at Amazon.com and the Guardian’s Comment is Free‘It is a Friday in December. I have now been dressed as Santa for five hours. The heating in our house in on full-blast. The costume was itchy when I put it on all those hours ago. Now I feel as if I am covered in ants. “I need to take the beard off,” I say. “No!” yells Joel, my four-year-old son. “I’m getting a rash,” I say. “Please stay with me, Santa,” says Joel.’
[music] Brian Jones vs. Indiana Jones‘Indiana Jones fought a scimitar with a whip. Brian Jones crushed butterfly on a wheel’
16 August 2006
[blogs] True to Type — the Guardian reviews a number of Edinburgh Fringe shows which adapt blogs into theatre productions … ‘It’s [the] interactive aspect of blogging that needs to be addressed if theatrical adaptations are truly to take off. For now, it looks naive and fairly opportunistic in its approach. Yes, people are turning to the internet to make their confessions – but that doesn’t necessarily mean their words make riveting theatre. Blog-based theatre is a bit like flat-packed furniture: even once you’ve put it up, you still associate it with the box it arrived in.’
[comics] Diesel Sweeties: 128-Bit Encrypted Flirtation.
[london] London Walks for your MP3 Player‘Forget about guide books and maps. Listen to my description as you walk through London.’ [via Londonist]
17 August 2006
[ba] Breaking News: BA Has Halted All Flights From The UK. [via linkbunnies.org]
[watch] Zefrank on the ten stages of the Illness Communication Exaggeration Curve.
[redrum] Will’s Room — 71 Photos of Will Self’s Writing Room – if you look very closely you will see ‘Redrum’ repeatedly written on each Post-it in the photos.
18 August 2006
[ww2] Fighting Jack Churchill Survived a Wartime Odyssey Beyond Compare — More details on the wartime exploits of Captain Jack Churchill …

‘He became so good with the bow that he shot for Britain at the world championships in Oslo in 1939. By then, however, the long ugly shadows of war were stretching across Europe. As the German Army smashed into Poland, Churchill returned to the British Army and the Manchester Regiment, and was shipped off to France. “I was,” he said later, “back in my red coat; the country having got into a jam in my absence.”

One of his brother officers, an old friend, saw him about that time chugging across the Flanders plain on a small motorcycle, his bow tied to the frame, arrows sticking out of one of the panniers on the back, a German officer’s cap hanging on the headlight. “Ah!” said Churchill, spotting his friend, “Hullo Clark! Got anything to drink?” Once Churchill had dismounted, his friend noticed dried blood smeared across one ear and asked Churchill about the injury. German machine gun, said Churchill casually. His men had shouted at him to run but, he said, he was simply too tired.

In later years, Churchill served as an instructor at the land-air warfare school in Australia, where he became a passionate devotee of the surfboard. Back in England, he was the first man to ride the Severn River’s five-foot tidal bore and designed his own board.’

19 August 2006
[comics] The Origin of Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work — a blogger has bought the original copy of Wood’s 22 Panels and has found out it was put together by Larry Hama when he worked as an editor at Marvel … Hama: ‘I don’t believe that Woody put the examples together as a teaching aid for his assistants, but rather as a reminder to himself. He was always trying to kick himself to put less labor into the work! He had a framed motto on the wall, “Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.” He hung the sheets with the panels on the wall of his studio…’
20 August 2006
[funny] MP3 of a Psychiatric Office Answering Machine‘If you are delusional, press 7 and your call will be transferred to the mother ship. If you are schizophrenic, listen carefully and a small voice will tell you which number to press. If you are a manic-depressive, it doesn’t matter which number you press because nobody will answer.’
21 August 2006
[books] What I Have Read Since 1974 — a list of every book one man has read – from The Digging-est Dog to The Great Influenza.
[blog] Indexed — amusing graphs and diagrams which tap the same vein as Gapingvoid’s cartoons on the back of business cards

a amusing pie chart diagram about people who never fart
22 August 2006
[comment] Charlie Brooker’s Columns on Comment is Free — On Dark Matter: ‘There are millions of people who essentially consist of dark matter; unknowable swaths of the population I have never encountered and will never understand. People who watch Emmerdale, for example. Emmerdale is Britain’s third most popular soap opera – second, actually, when EastEnders is having an off day. It attracts something in the region of 5 million viewers, which means approximately one in 12 Brits regularly tunes in. Yet I’ve never actually met anyone who watches it.’ [via linkbunnies.org]
[comics] 10,000 Reasons Civilization is Doomed‘Reason 281: Frank Miller’
23 August 2006
[tv] Naked Keith Chegwin hits the Heights of ‘Memorably Rotten’ TV — a list of the Top 10 Worst TV Programmes. The list is:
  1. Naked Jungle .. Cheggers Plays Cock – NSFW Picture.
  2. Minipops .. Pan’s People for Paedophiles.
  3. Triangle .. 80’s Glamour on a North Sea Ferry.
  4. Quickfire Balls .. Bingo On TV.
  5. Annie’s Bar .. Seems totally unmemorable rather than awful. YMMV.
  6. Wright Here, Wright Now .. I suspect the compiler of this list supports Spurs.
  7. Love Thy Neighbour .. Racist 70’s Sitcom.
  8. Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends .. Is this really that awful?
  9. Through The Keyhole .. LLoyd Grossman is immensely annoying.
  10. A Year In Provence .. The BBC and John Thaw don’t mix?
24 August 2006
[comics] Tales of the Black Freighter: Marooned — a reconstruction of the Pirate Comic from Watchmen … ‘Waking from nightmare, I found myself upon a dismal beach-head, amongst dead men and the pieces of dead men. Bosun Ridley lay nearby. Birds were eating his thoughts and memories. Reader take comfort from this: In Hell, at least the gulls are contented.’
[blogs] Blogger is 7 … Ev: ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’
[comics] Morrison In The Cave — Newsarama interview with Grant Morrison on Batman …

‘I want to see a Batman that combines the cynic, the scholar, the daredevil, the businessman, the superhero, the wit, the lateral thinker , the aristocrat. He terrifies the guilty but he has great compassion for the weak and the downtrodden and will lay his life on the line for anybody who’s in trouble. He’s a master of yoga and meditation who has as much control over his body and his feelings as any human. He has a wider range of experiences than most people will dream of in ten lifetimes. This is not a one-note character! So, while I won’t pretend we all live on Sunnybrook Farm, I don’t think its appropriate – particularly in trying times – to present our fictional heroes as unsmiling vengeance machines. I’d rather Batman embodied the best that secular humanism has to offer – a sour-faced, sexually-repressed, humorless, uptight, angry, and all-round grim ‘n’ gritty Batman would be more likely to join the Taliban surely?’

25 August 2006
[comics] PDF of DMZ #1 — the first issue of Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli’s great comic about a young War Reporter dropped into war-torn New York in the near-future. [via Warren Ellis]
27 August 2006
[comics] A Short Interview With Ed Brubaker — on Criminal – his new comic with Sean Phillips. ‘…in the first arc, while pulling the heist, our gang uses the war on terror to help create a diversion. And I think that little part, reminding readers of the reality around them, adds something. But I also think that this world we’re living in right now, with the war in Iraq feeling a lot like Vietnam, the government wire-tapping us and looking at our library records, the internet being used for identity theft, and this sort of creeping fear and paranoia that more and more people have, this “Big Brother is watching and manipulating” feeling that’s so much in the air, helps create an atmosphere that’s very conductive for crime fiction.I mean, when the system is this screwed up, on all ends, who doesn’t want to read about people who live outside of it, or who fight it, or who just hate it as much as them? It kind of feels like the 70s and 80s again, really, but just with a lot better technology.’
29 August 2006
[tv] Jim Rockford’s Answering Machine — a list of the messages left for Jim Rockford on the opening credits of The Rockford Files‘Jim, this is Cal of the Leave The Whales Alone Club. Our protest cruise leaves from the pier Saturday at 3 AM. The whales need you, Jim.’ [via Metafilter]
30 August 2006
[blogs] Radio 4’s Meet the Bloggers — the BBC does a radio show about blogs. The first programme had interviews with Anna and Annie of Little Read Boat and London Underground Tube Diary.
[books] AN Wilson is a Shit‘It is, at first glance, a tantalising insight into the love life of one of the nation’s most celebrated poets. The letter from Sir John Betjeman to his mistress must have seemed almost too good to be true when it fell into the lap of AN Wilson, the late poet laureate’s biographer. It was so convincing that Wilson included it in his new book about Betjeman as evidence of a hitherto unknown “fling”. But it was indeed too good to be true. It now seems Wilson was the victim of an elaborate hoax. The poet, who was born 100 years ago today, never penned the note. The telltale sign that the letter is a joke is that the capital letters at the start of each sentence spell out “AN Wilson is a shit”…’
31 August 2006
[comics] The Comics Journal Relaunches Journalista — one of the best comic blogs returns reading as good as ever after a long break.
[tv] Till Death Do Us Part — the Guardian takes a look at the Sopranos as Season 6 begins in the UK … ‘Many fan pages in cyberspace claim Chase has planted within the drama a systematic symbolism involving food. These web-heads note that when a character eats or breaks eggs, death almost always follows: Tony, for instance, accidentally steps on a carton just before ordering the murder of his cousin. Chase, when I interviewed him recently, insisted that these people were talking out of a hen’s behind: there is no intentional omelette sub-plot. Dr Melfi, however, would perhaps conclude that all this egg stuff is welling up for some reason from Chase’s subconscious.’