[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]

[church] newsUnlimited asks: Should you trust a Vicar?“In the case of Peter, a young and successful minister, church elders at first told him he must be mistaken when he came out as homosexual: “Don’t be silly, you’re much too hairy,” was one comment.”

[music] newsUnlimited profiles the Dandy Warhols. “They put the ease into sleaze. Like the story of one of their label bosses who, Taylor says admiringly, ‘is a sleazy, sleazy man. He’s the coolest guy in corporate rock. If we had 10 of him at Capitol our worries would be over.'”

[comics] Great Steve Bell Cartoon on Elitism and William Hague in the Guardian today. “I, Commonsense Man shall wreak vengence on the Liberal elite”

[THE HORROR!! PART DEUX] Not So Soft provides a link to an image of KEITH CHEGWIN’S KNOB ON TELLY LAST NIGHT!! [He’s the nude guy in the pith helmet.] Plenty of commentary about this from UK Blogs: Blogging The Line, I Just Type and LukeLog.

[comics] Warren Ellis asks: Why Comics? “Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.” — Harvey Pekar.

[THE HORROR!] Sorry for the crudeness but DID I REALLY SEE KEITH CHEGWIN’S KNOB ON TELLY LAST NIGHT? I’m slowly going mad! I’m sure of it… [Not so Soft and Blogging the Line provide metal relief — they saw it too. It was either a shared hallucination or broadcast as part of Channel 5’s Naked Season]

[news] Julie Burchill on Danniella Westbrook’s nose.

[comics] Bill Clinton tells Russia that he had in the past a used comic book business: “”In my lifetime, I probably had ? earned money doing 20 or 25 different things. I’ve built houses, I’ve cleared land, I’ve worked in a grocery store. I had a used comic book business. Obviously, I was a musician. I made money as a musician. I’ve been a teacher. I’ve done a lot of different things in my life.”” Totally weird if it’s true… [via Ghost in the Machine]

[buy stuff!] How much did my flatmate bung me to link to the Gardener’s World website? Nothing! [Note for Chris: Many webloggers stick loads of flatmate angst into their weblogs but not me. I just expect a brown paper bag stuffed with drugs, sweets and cash under the coffee table every month and you get a happy flatmate plus links to Charlie Dimmock screensavers into the bargain!]

[comics] Yet another Dave Sim Misogyny Page. “Behind this…lies the Greater Void, the Omnivorous Engine which drives every… institutionalised waste of human time and energy, which drives, in point of fact, our entire degraded society. The wife and kids.”

[music] Some crazy Ramones MIDI’s… I Wanna Be Sedated is particularly good listening! [via pearls that are his eyes]

[news] The story of Sealand continues in the New York Times [my earlier story] “On Monday, a small international group of computer rebels plans to introduce what they are calling a data haven, perched precariously on a World War II military fortress six miles off England’s coast. They are hoping that the installation, connected to the Internet by high-speed microwave and satellite links, will become a refuge from governments increasingly trying to tame and regulate the Internet.” [via metafilter]

[comics] newsUnlimited profiles Steve Bell. “Steve has the idea, writes the words, does the drawing. He can do leader- page cartoons which – in their infinite detail – look as though they must be condensed versions of a much bigger cartoon. (Not so: what you see is virtually the size you get.) He can do illustrations that can dominate a whole page. And then there are the strips. Then there is If?”

[history] People are still looking for lost Nazi treasure. The haul is believed to contain top-secret Nazi documents detailing how assets from the Third Reich were deposited in Swiss bank accounts, as well as art objects, gold and the records of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. Documents detailing the assistance of the Vatican in transferring funds to South America, and some gold, are also believed to be concealed there.”

[murder] newsUnlimited covers a nasty murder on a bridge in London last year. “‘We’ll never know what happened that night,’ she said. ‘It seems inexplicable. I believe there was a group dynamic which forced them to do what they did. Peer pressure and a boy shouting “throw them in the river” was enough to create an atmosphere in which there was no going back. It will have been one person who started it and the others would have followed like sheep.'”

[mp3] New version of the MP3 player Winamp available.

[weird world] BBC News asks: Was Elvis Welsh? “According to Mr Breverton, his roots are in west Wales – the name Presley is related to Preseli – a hill range in Pembrokeshire. Supporting his theory is the legend of St Elvis of Muster who, it is said, baptised St David. Mr Breverton claims the family could well have had links with a nearby chapel dedicated to St Elvis – the only one known in Britain.”

[phones] newsUnlimited on Text Messaging. “But there seems to be something more than practicality about the appeal of text messaging: something that gives them that brown-paper-packages-tied-up-with-string quality, and qualifies them for life’s range of small, good things. Text messages are like little sugar-rushes of contact, postcards for the people’s cyberspace, the real reason God gave us both thumbs and the capacity for language (alright, alright, I know).”

[comics] Alan Moore discusses the plot to the unfinished Big Numbers. [Part One] [Part Two]

[tory] Tebbit on Hague: “”Something somewhere sparked him off and suddenly he became an interesting politician – having previously been uninteresting,” he says. But he adds, crushingly: “As he gets more interesting, people forget that he’s bald, he’s got an unusual voice and he’s small.”” After the untimely death of Barbara Cartland I think Norman Tebbit may well fill the “mad quote” void on linkmachinego…

[comics] The Grand Comic Book Database — These people take their comic books seriously!