http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=7512

I note my fourth WIRED UK column has been pushed to the web for your free reading "enjoyment." Here it is:

I speak to you now as a man who survived the bird flu. I acquired the lethal, human-transmissible H5N1 from looking at a turkey at a farmer’s market in north Essex. For weeks, I battled the deadly disease, bedridden, close to perishing entirely. I could hear the Grim Reaper using the toilet and everything…

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=7511

And this is warren ellis dot com. Good morning.

(via)

First, here are some arts and crafts for the people who only read my journal for the art. This is a little bee I made of pipe cleaners. My daughter was playing with a crafts for kids book and there was this bee that looked cute in the picture, so I did it. Except when I finished it in real life it looked stupid. It had no wings, no legs and no stinger. So I took it all apart and added legs and wings. Then I torn it apart again and made even better.








Second, here are some various items for people who read my journal for me. I have not updated my journal in a while. Life has been weird.

• I have spent most of my time either taking care of the kids or job searching. The kids are home on summer vacation, so it eats up a big portion of time.

• Clara had a pediatrician appointment and the doctor said she was just perfect and then coo-ed all over our baby. Oh sure, Clara is cute, but she is also starting to teeth which means she does not sleep very well.

• Last month I had a three-week freelance graphic design gig. It was really nice to work again after being unemployed for so long. I enjoyed the company and I just wish it could have been longer.

• I finally moved my website away from geocities. The new address is at webpages.charter.net/davidano. While I was working on my website, I updated my digital portfolio. I have not updated it in over a year, which should help in my job searching.

• Last month was the twins’ birthday. It is hard to believe that Abby and Emily are four-years-old now. We had family over and then we went with friends to the Hamburg Funfest. The kids loved playing games, riding the rides and going to the petting zoo. I wish there was a carnival that took place at the same time as my birthday.

• I am also doing some BAM Too! stuff here and there. The editors are still working on somefinal details before we go into production. I guess if you missed the deadline you could probably send something in at this point and maybe we can fit you in.

• Sydney and I had some health issues due to high caffeine toxicity levels. We got a new brand of locally roasted coffee bean that are just fantastic, but what we did not know is it has four times the amount of caffeine as regular coffee.

• Last month, we had a small fire outside our house. It was sometime after 10pm and we heard a thud and a whoosh and then smelled smoke. Sydney looked out the window and saw flames from a pine tree by the road. I ran outside and started the garden hose and Sydney called 911. The fire department came and completely soaked the tree and made sure it was all out. The fire captain said he might of smelled gasoline.

• Money is really tight and July is going to really suck. A lot of bills are due at the same time. Rent is late and I sure could use some money really fast.

• Emily has her final surgery this month. They are going to remove her ovaries due to issues occurring with having Turners Syndrome Mosaic. This will be a laparoscopic surgery and they will also fix her abdominal hernia from her previous surgery scars. And speaking of previous surgeries, Emily had a couple of ultrasounds in May and they showed her Mesocaval Shunt (to fix the blood flow around a blood clot in her portal vein at her liver) is still flowing nicely.

I note my fourth WIRED UK column has been pushed to the web for your free reading "enjoyment." Here it is:

I speak to you now as a man who survived the bird flu. I acquired the lethal, human-transmissible H5N1 from looking at a turkey at a farmer’s market in north Essex. For weeks, I battled the deadly disease, bedridden, close to perishing entirely. I could hear the Grim Reaper using the toilet and everything…

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

And this is warren ellis dot com. Good morning.

(via)

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CrBriefings/~3/_vwewPv0Fbc/

Joining a long list of fellow travelers in altering the size and shape of its Sunday comics offering, the LA Times informed its readership via an open letter that they'd be switching their from eight comics pages to six. In the process, they'll be dropping the Tokyopop offering Undertown and Jan Eliot's Stone Soup (panel from which above), and, one assumes changing the way the remaining comics and features are displayed.

The interesting things about this are the Times' size and importance, its obvious role the last 18 to 36 months as a paper looking to cut costs, its aggressive attitude towards comics (I believe they dropped or considered dropping some '70s mainstays that other papers might not touch), and its role as a potential facilitating agent for Tribune Media comics. It's also probably a blow to each feature in terms of having a number of high-profile "flagship" papers, and my gut says it could be seen as a particularly bad sign for Undertown.

thanks, Alex Chun

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CrBriefings/~3/L0UP1DTLfIU/

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MUM LANDED
WE WENT UP TO THE GREAT DIVIDE.

NEU VIDI COMMUNG SOON.
THE YOUTUBE IS JUST MAC.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CrBriefings/~3/_Drhzahx1iM/

According to their press release, the American Jewish Committee has announced their condemnation of El Pais for publishing a cartoon by the cartoonist Romeu they believe is anti-Semitic. The cartoon, which they have identified as being published on June 29 but seems to have run June 30 (according to dates on the El Pais web site), shows a character asking a stereotypically-drawn Jew how Israel is allowed to violate laws and the Jew responding that it costs the nation a lot of money.

The group says they protested another Romeu cartoon that was published in late 2008. The press release cites the group's dismay at what they feel is the anti-Semitic characterization of both the joke and the drawing, and notes their concerns regarding the growth of anti-Semitic expression in Spain.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CrBriefings/~3/SmwOOCboduk/

thanks to Aaron F Dumin

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CrBriefings/~3/eQ1Y8nLMyb4/

While the rest of us were cooking out and watching parades, Daryl Cagle was hard at work at the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists' yearly convention doing impromptu interviews with various cartoonists. While we wait for some of the attendees to pen their impressions of the convention -- both the formal programming and a sense of the mood of those in attendance -- anyone interested in the state of editorial cartooning might want to watch the following.

* Tim Eagan
* Steve Kelley
* Matt Bors
* Various Cartoonists On Using Social Media
* Various Cartoonists On Where Ideas Come From?

The only thing I've read from the convention in terms of a report or sort-of report on the show itself is Ted Rall's tweet that attendance was up 30 percent from last year's show.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CrBriefings/~3/dH0O3I2VZp4/

This is a report I'll probably repeat in this week's "Bundled," but this article says that there's an English-language edition of Naji al-Ali's Handala cartoons out right now, complete with an introduction by Joe Sacco. For one thing, I wasn't aware that there hadn't been an English-language collection before. But mostly I'm interested in seeing the book as Al-Ali enjoyed one of the most potent cartooning careers of the last 50 years, culminating in his assassination in London 22 years ago this month.

Today at 4pm PST, I'll be broadcasting live for another episode of Dice Club! We'll talk movies, and more importantly we'll have fun.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CrBriefings/~3/7J6QiH1HGU8/

no Love and Rockets or RAW or Weirdo or anything like that and I'm sure they're fine with that; will Steve Gerber be remembered by mainstream-centric comics fans?

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CrBriefings/~3/Yiem1W85J0o/

* congratulations to Ted May and Sacha Mardou; congratulations of equal fervor are due Shelton Drum and Linda D'Olivat.

* the cartoonist Rick Veitch is describing the secret history of Marvel's Sentry character in a series of posts at his site. It's been surprisingly fun given how little I'm interested in Marvel's Sentry character.

* I always enjoy seeing these updates from Craig Thompson on the status of his progress on the forthcoming Habibi.

* the artist and cartoonist Frank Santoro provides some notes on Mat Brinkman's Multiforce, maybe the surprise release of the year. I just received the book, and I like it a lot.

* the writer and critic Jeet Heer finds a way to related the Sarah Palin resignation story to comics.

* Jason Thibault presents 23 Ways For A Comic Artist To Survive And Thrive In Any Economy. I keep putting off reading it, but I thought I'd get a link up in the meantime. At the very least, the story points out that I probably need to update a lot of this site's resource material at the end of the year, so I'm making that a goal.

* finally, I totally whiffed this story about an issue of the comic book The Boys not being sold in Germany because of a swastika on the cover. Marc-Oliver Frisch discusses the law in question.