[comics] The art of Dave McKean. Really great looking site.

[london] Feed on London and the London Eye — includes Quicktime panorama view of the Eye. [via Guardian Weblog]

[weblogging in the UK] UK blogging gets attention from PCFormat computer magazine…

[comics] August’s Preview Picks — good list of the best comics out in August.

[stuff] This is kind of site you can waste an afternoon on: 200 Most Entertaining Moments of the Millenium. “#126 Anyone who remembers watching the CNN coverage of the Gulf War, gape-jawed, can’t help but to have been impressed by missiles flying down ventilation shafts. Obviously war is terrible, but buildings blowing up will continue to be cool forever.”

[film] Media Nugget of the Day reports on The Conversation.

[hells angels] newsUnlimted profiles Sonny Barger. “‘Keith Richards had then threatened to stop playing unless the Angels halted their violence, telling Barger: ‘Either these cats cool it, man, or we don’t play.’ ‘I stood next to him and stuck my pistol in his side and told him to start playing his guitar or he was dead,’ says Barger now. ‘He played like a motherfucker.'”

[comics] Salon reports that Lex Luthor is to run for president. [via Ghost in the Machine]

[tech] UK ADSL Guide. [I have a crazy dream — cheap unmetered internet access in my lifetime… ]

[BOFH] Who wants to marry a SysAdmin? “There’s no time to waste. We’re all getting fatter and paler by the second. Hook up now before we can’t keep track of our processes anymore and our hair forks all to hell.” [via Just Daz]

[minogue] Charlotte Raven on Kylie’s bottom. “Only clearing the net by a couple of inches, Kylie plainly hasn’t spent the day playing tennis. Her racket is loose in her left hand and the all-over-sheen of her body suggests that she’s spent longer being airbrushed in Photoshop than in the elements.”

[MP3] Napster endgame — The US Music Industry moves to close down Napster. Totally pointless, of course, the Net has moved on… check out Gnutella.

[weblogs] How can I have missed UberSearch? [yet another weblog search engine]

[music] newsUnlimited on the semi-breakup of Oasis. “What’s going on is that I’ve had a major disagreement with monkey boy, the singer[…]”

[monarchy] Christopher Hitchens on the the British Royal Family in newsUnlimited. “An old English radical slogan has it that the problem is not the will of some to power, but the will of others to obey. I think that it’s literally true that many people can’t imagine life without the Windsors. And my quarrel is with that very mentality, much more than it is with any actual or potential monarch. One doesn’t wish to demolish people’s household gods, or rip away their comfort blankets, but couldn’t they be just as happy as Jacobites once were, cultivating nostalgia and illusion while leaving the rest of us to get on with it?” [via BlueLines]

[tv] Seven Deadly Sins of Gilligans Island. I’ve been interested in Gilligan’s Island for years… but I’ve never seen an episode! As far as I know it has not been shown on British TV in living memory… but Americans seem to refer to it endlessly in comics and on the internet and for ages it has fascinated me — Who were Gilligan and Skipper? What were they all doing on that Island? Eventually, I found out all the details… but I’ve still never seen an episode… and I’m not sure I’d want to! [via pearls that are his eyes]

[kylie] Following on from yesterday’s post — here is photographic proof of Minogue’s tiny deformed ears… and interestingly it took me ages plowing through Kylie fan sites photos to come up with ones showing her ears. Conspiracy?

[weblogs] Amusing as hell: neighbour sex “uhhhnngghhh…..ahhhhnnghhhh…..pullout, pullout, Pullout, PULLOUT, PULLOUT!!!!” [via Steal This Blog!. It’s being blogged everywhere but I saw the line above and thought: “If that’s not a Linkmachinego quote I don’t know what is!”]

[therapy] I was very tempted not to blog this story about Minogue…. but I decided I just wanted to mention… um…. that Kylie Minogue has tiny deformed ears! Why has nobody else noticed this? Her head is to big for her ears! Why is nobody in the media covering this? I, for one, am not interested in Minogue’s arse!!

[tech] Danny O’Brien on mobile phones in America. “Sometimes, when I’m swearing at the bizarre features of my clunky little American phone, I show engineers my old Virgin Nokia. Everyone coos over the dinky size and curved-form factor. They’re delighted by the cutesy interface. One friend’s jaw physically dropped open when he turned the machine off and a little hand icon waved him goodbye. When I tell them about how kids send text messages to one another during class, they go bug-eyed. It’s as though I’d announced that all Europeans all have their own personal fork-lift trucks.”

[comics] Nice summary/FAQ about Kevin Smith’s comics from ViewAskew

[good links] The Weekend section in todays Guardian has a particularly good week: On The Road Again — good article about young people who take time off to travel round the world and how this type of travelling has changed since the sixties. And Mothers without Men a profile of women who choose to have babies via donor insemitation. “Increasing numbers of heterosexual women in the thirties are deciding to do without a man, and are choosing to have children on their own. Women who don’t find Mr Right no longer have to settle for Mr You’ll Have To Do, nor “accidentally” get pregnant by a lover reluctant to commit. They no longer have to accept that, if they cannot find a suitable partner, they’ll never have children, either.”

[web] newsUnlimited reports that Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t like ads on web sites. “Newspapers insert a line saying an ad is an advertisement when it looks confusing. I want to see something similar on a web page. Perhaps the mouse should change shape when it passes over an ad to alert you to the fact.”

[comics] Warren Ellis interviews Grant Morrison. “Fans of comics like INVISIBLES and JLA may be interested to know that I was Mr. DeFalco’s unwilling ‘bitch’ for most of the late 80s. Because I was quite young-looking and fairly skinny, I could quickly be done up with a bit of curtain as an ideal ‘visiting niece’ whenever one of Tom’s morbid testosterone build-ups was giving him grief.”

[books] newsUnlimited reports that christian apocalyptic fundamentalists set to knock Harry Potter off top of the book charts in the US. “In interviews, Mr LaHaye appears to be the more driven member of the successful duo, saying that the books’ message ‘is the greatest message of hope in the world’. Mr Jenkins, by contrast, seems more worldly. ‘There are some times when I think I was born for this project,’ he said recently. ‘Other times I think I was born to play golf.'”

[comics] Yesterday was a good day to visit a comic shop…. The first issue of Grant Morrison’s Marvel Boy came out along with Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics. “Comics offers a medium of enormous breadth an control for the author — a unique intimate relationship with it’s audience — and a potential so great, so inspiring, yet so brutally squandered, it could bring a tear to the eye.” — Scott McCloud

[webbogging in the UK!] writetheweb points out that UK bloggers are getting organised…

[news] Michelangelo’s David has a squint! The trick of perspective – which has taken 500 years to rumble – was a typical stroke of Michelangelo genius, according to Marc Levoy, the computer scientist from Stanford University, California, who made the discovery. He suspects it went unnoticed for so long because David’s more obvious attribute – his genitalia – blinded successive generations to the “flaw”.

[weird science] Two links that prove we have left the 20th. Century: Scientists transplant brain of eel into robot and discover that some things travel faster than light.

[comics] Grant Morrison issues a call to arms. “This is simple: if you really hate comics so badly you want to see them die, then keep filling the message boards with frustrated, ignorant bile (I’ve been reading some of this stuff and a lot of guys out there really need to get laid or take up meditation). Otherwise, let’s have a momentary ceasefire to figure out ways of rebuilding the profile of the entire comics medium. The responsibility is with us; we all know how awful it is and how crap comics are. We’ve all heard that tired old song of self-loathing long enough and it’s getting to be a real drag. If you think there’s no hope then please f*** off, die quietly and prove yourself right.” [via Barbelith]