That’s right. That’s a drunken Orson Welles shilling for a California sparkling wine.

A half hour of beautiful decay and noise for you to listen to.

My brain is far to dead for it to only be Wednesday. But, that could be due to the bottle of scotch that Alpha and I got into last night.

Regardless, my brain is running on fumes and I’m listening to music that sounds like a representational recording of the oxidation of metal. It is grinding and slow and creaking and cutting and gives you the smell of copper filings in your nose. I think it goes on like this for another 90 or so minutes. Hmmm. Yes, I’m sure that will do me well.

So, unless the Internet gives up gold at some point today, don’t expect much out of me.

Oh god, I love it when you stumble across something so perfect that you can’t even believe it is real.

I give unto you, the Pineapple Primary. The Chicago Republican Mayoral Primary of 1928, quite possibly the bloodiest election in United States history.

It all takes place in Chicago, and like all good stories from Chicago, it involves corruption, booze, and gangsters. This one starts out with a 26 year-old assistant prosecutor to the state attorney named (this is why this is so great) William McSwiggin. Turned out that McSwigging wasn’t so much of a boy scout, and got himself mowed down in a speakeasy in Cicero. By-standers say it was none other than Al Capone that did the honors (wait, it gets better). Turns out that Capone thought that McSwiggin was a guy named Earl “Hymie” Weiss (no wait, still better). Don’t worry, Capone would later manage to kill Hymie Weiss on the steps of the Holy Name Cathedral.

But, the death of one of Chicago’s rising stars bolstered the ambitions of reformer candidate Charles S Deneen to remove the political machine of Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson, a man who was so deep in Capone’s pockets, he was probably picking lent out of his teeth. But, like all politicians in Chicago, Deneen had his own backers. In this case, Guiseppe “Diamond Joe” Esposito (yep, that’s it), a rival of Capone’s. Esposito was planning on using Deneen to force out Capone’s political machine and replace it with one of his own.

The bombs started flying shortly after the lines had been draw. The Deneen/Esposito contingent was the first to strike - bombing the homes of the city controller and the commissioner of public service. After the first round of bombings, the mayor publicly boasted “When the fight is over, the challengers will be sorry.” So, Esposito blew up over a dozen more homes of Thompson backers.

Capone’s counter attacks were more effective. He blew up the home of a judge that was allied with Deneen as an opening salvo. Then, Capone’s men shot down Guiseppe “Diamond Joe” Esposito in the street, in front of his wife and children. The next morning, he bombed Deneen’s house while he was at the wake for Esposito.

However, the noise from all those bombs drew national attention. Federal pressure was put on the Chicago crime problem, and while Capone’s men carried the primaries through ballot stuffing, intimidation and blood, the general election was a much stricter affair. One that saw the entirety of Capone’s political machine swept out of office.

Over the course of that primary, 61 bombs went off. The murder count is still up in the air.

Oh, and if you hadn’t guessed why it was called the Pineapple Primary, think about the shape of a grenade.

God, I have to do something with this.

I’m working up character descriptions and background for the guests at the Curio, and I’m going to share them with you. Expect two or so a week until I work through all 6 major guests.

The Shaman.

Not his real name, nor even the name that I’ll use for him in the comic, but it is best short hand I have to keep track of him.

No one knows exactly who the Shaman is, or how long he’s been around. The earliest authenticated recordings of an Esoteric fitting his description comes from a 17th century Dutch sailing vessel. The record holds that a ship headed toward Bonaire in the West Indies fished a man out of the trade waters. He had apparently been in the water for days, and was muttering to himself in a language the sailors didn’t understand. His body was covered in strange tattoos and scar patterns. The castaway had a condition that had covered most of the right arm and upper torso with a rough, brown skin - not unlike the bark of a tree. But his eyes were the most striking things. One was bright sky blue, with a horizontal pupil, like a goat’s eye. The other was normal brown eye, just like you’d see on any person on the street. The crew took the strange man into the galley and tended to him. Once he woke, the man wrapped himself from head to toe in cloth and never said another word. For the last week of the trip, he just sat in the far corner of the galley, not speaking to anyone, not moving, not eating, not drinking. When the ship reached port, the crew came down to tell their strange passenger they had arrived, only to find him gone.

A thorough inspection of the records of the Society’s Listeners would find many more references to the man with the blue goat’s eye.

A lost journal of Charles Darwin mentioned finding a man wrapped in linen living on the Galapagos Islands when the naturalist arrived. In the journal, Darwin mentions that many of his ideas about evolution sprung from conversations with the strange man.

From Brazil in 1889, a newspaper clipping makes reference to a man with strange eyes saving a ship of rubber traders from burning to death when their ship caught fire on the Amazon. The traders claimed the fire didn’t burn the man’s skin.

Personal accounts from US soldiers involved in the Polar Bear Expeditionary Force that occupied Arkhangelsk, Russia during the Russia Civil War speak of a man, wrapped in thin white cloth. They say the man stole medical supplies from their depot to tend to the towns people that were dying from the influenza epidemic. The soliders claim to have shot him, repeatedly, only to have him walk past them, unfazed. There is no mention of this incident in any official report.

The records of Unit 731, the Japanese medical experiment division during World War 2, makes reference to a man with mismatched eyes and an unidentified skin condition. The referred to him as a specimen of interest. The specimen was apparently immune to all of their germ and chemical weapons.

And now this man has made the Curio his place of residence. He keeps to himself, only ever leaving his room to go to the library, or to claim hot water from the small cafeteria on the first floor. He uses it to brew his tea, a special blend that he mixes himself. When he drinks it, the entire lobby of the Curio is filled with the smell of a warm summer breeze run through a green house of every flower that has ever existed.

The other guests view the Shaman with a some what reverential attitude. They have all heard stories of him, and none of them want to guess if some of the nastier things they’ve heard are true. Even the fat, pompous alchemist seems to understand this is not a person to be trifled with.

An all but forgotten holiday, celebrated nowhere save England, The United States and Australia. If you can even call it a celebration. It is a day of recognition for the exterminators of society.

So here, in honor of the day, and the source of its genesis, I give you the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

You all know I’m completely horrified of the Piper, yes?

Nick Cave - Poppa Won’t Leave You, Henry.

This week is going to be a week of 12-14 hour days, blindingly sober nights, brain boiling heat and all the little things with spines in my head are going to want to come out and play.

So, we’re starting out with a song about a father who takes his son to the local whorehouse, where he is drugged and molested, and in revenge the father and son kill the whores.

Cheery stuff, you know.

One of the most gut wrenching tracks I’ve ever heard. I loved Frankie for his work with Leatherface, and this is something entirely different. As much as Leatherface lifted me up, this brings me down even more. This song makes me want to grab everyone I care about, look them in the eyes and tell me how much they matter to me.

Don’t worry, though. I know how much that would disturb people.

He apparently got ’round to processing the photos he took the night we were at the P&H from 10pm to ~8am. I honestly don’t know how I’m not dead after that night, and what happened afterwards, but I guess I shouldn’t look a gift drinking binge in the mouth.

More here.

If you listen closely, you can hear that the start up voice is the same as the sentry guns in Portal.

Yes, that would be me looking like a pretentious fuckwit on WarrenEllis.com

EDIT: Still waking up, try that again.

We walked on the Luna for the first time. The mission was Apollo 11, its crew consisted of Commander Neil Alden Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Eugene ‘Buzz’ Aldrin, Jr. At 10:56pm EDT, Armstrong descended the steps and issued one of the most famous lines in human history “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Of course, either his radio gave out or he messed it up, because it was supposed to be “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Regardless, across the nation parents were letting their children stay up late on a hot summer night to watch three men, a quarter of a million miles away, changed the face of the future.

It was only eight year earlier that Kennedy had made his declaration that we would go to the moon inside of a decade, a demand some thought unreasonable or impossible to achieve. But we did.
The sad part is that this was almost 50 years ago, and our watches and cellphones now have more computing power than the entirety of NASA Mission Control Center did back then, but it will take us at least 15 years to go back to the Moon this time. Decades more advanced, yet it will take us half again as long to do what has already been done.

If that isn’t a telling reason as to why we don’t have jetpacks yet, I don’t know what is.

This just came across my Facebook inbox from an Arielle Palmer:

I don’t know if you guys heard, but Adam de la Pena (creator of Code Monkeys & Minoriteam) and Dana Snyder (Adult Swim’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force) just came out with a new show called On the Bubble. They will be on a Friday’s Comic Con panel at 2pm. I can get you guys back stage interviews and an opportunity to meet them and the rest of the cast if you would like. I’m interested in seeing the Brain Release Valve community’s feed back on the new show.

In the mean time, check out this trailer of the show. If you won’t be able to take the Comic Con offer, we would still love to know what your readers think of it.

Here’s the trailer she was talking about.

On The Bubble News Trailer from Andrea Valverde on Vimeo.

The first episode is here.

On The Bubble News - Episode 1 from Andrea Valverde on Vimeo.

If any of you are going to Comic-Con, you know how to find me, and I’ll put you in touch with Arielle. If you were wondering what the hell any of this is about, apparently my web foot print is either big enough or malformed enough that people are now valuing my audience’s diseased opinions. Arielle also works for Undercurrent, a New York market research group, so she wants to know how you people think.

So give the stuff a go, and let her know what you think.

I’ve lined up an artist for The Curio. Meet Christian Schmitt.

More here.

From NewScientistTech:

Oscar Pistorius, the amputee sprinter who runs with the aid of carbon-fibre prosthetic legs, has failed in his bid to qualify for this summer’s Olympics in Beijing, after South Africa’s athletics federation left his name off its 1600-metre relay team today.

On Wednesday, the athlete, nicknamed the “Blade Runner”, ran his best ever 400-metre time, but his 46.25 seconds fell short of the 45.55 second minimum needed to qualify for Beijing. The world record, held by American Michael Johnson, stands at 43.18 seconds.

The article goes on to say that he’s planning on training for the 2012 Olympics, so not all hope is lost for our cyborg athlete.

The San Diego Comic-Con aka Nerd Prom has completely sold out of tickets, almost a full week before the  show is supposed to open. This is sort of a big deal since the con has grown into some kind of unholy union for all things nerd. Movies, comics, video games all stake claim to Comic-Con now, growing it into something I like to call “The last place you girlfriend will ever want to go.” But, because of all the new attention being placed on the event, the attendance has jumped toward the stratosphere in the last 5 years. I think they are expecting something on the magnitude of 125,000 people. More than twice the number of people that lived in the town where I went to college.

That many nerds, in that small of a space.

I really hope a riot breaks out one day between the Star Trek, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica contingents.

Dropping this here for reference later.

Pam sent me this. I don’t know why she was looking up serial pedophiles with a urine fetish, but whatever.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A convicted sex offender who admitted having a fetish for collecting and drinking young boys’ urine must remain on house arrest until his upcoming trial, a judge ordered on Tuesday.

Under the judge’s new bond conditions, Allan Patton is only allowed to leave his home once a week with a probation officer, 10TV News reported.

Patton, 56, must also wear a GPS device and stay away from any bathrooms where children may gather, 10TV news reported.

Late last week, police escorted Patton out of the Hilliard West Municipal Pool, located on Veterans Memorial Parkway.

The incident in Hilliard came a few weeks after Patton was accused of hiding inside public restrooms at Dublin’s Sports Ohio, located on Cosgray Road.

According to police, Patton shut off water to urinals and placed cups inside them. He was subsequently charged with criminal mischief, 10TV News reported.

At the time of his arrest, Patton told officers that he was not hurting anyone and that he suffered from an illness, according to a police report.

In 2006, after he was arrested at a movie theater, Patton told Gahanna police that he suffered from urophilia - a sexual fetish involving urine, 10TV’s Kurt Ludlow reported.

Patton’s next court date was scheduled for Aug. 21, 10TV News reported.

Source.

Empire apparently shelled out a lot of cash and got the exclusive.

It is here.

My opinion? Dunno. I don’t really have one yet.

90 years ago today, the near 800 year rule of the Russian tsars came to a short, violent end in the basement of a home outside of Yekaterinburg in Russia. After being shot, the bodies of the royal family were soaked in acid and then burned. The Bolsheviks claimed it was a rogue regional bureocrat who ordered the executions. But, history revealed that Lenin was personally behind the order. His government was unstable, and he didn’t want to give the rival faction, the Whites, a banner to rally behind.

So he had them all killed.