Author: Warren Ellis

Mary Queen of Scots wrote in code.

Roman dodecahedrons may have been used for secret sorcery:

Its magical purpose could be explained by a variety of factors. First, dodecahedrons were mostly found in the Gallo-Roman Empire, an offshoot of the Roman Empire in which magic rituals were known to have taken place. The lack of written records about dodecahedrons may point to a need to use these objects in secret, as divination and magic rituals were punished severely in the Roman Empire. Dodecahedrons have often been found near burial sites, where these rituals may have taken place.

Mark Power’s Shipping Forecast photographs:

Though the shipping forecast is still broadcast daily on BBC Radio 4, the strange resonance of what Seamus Heaney called “that strong gale-warning voice” may not, in an age of digital information overload, cast quite the same spell it once did on the collective imagination. It nevertheless remains a constant for many listeners, reassuring in its steadiness even as it gives notice of unruly swells and approaching storms in those faraway-sounding hinterlands of Dogger, Viking and German Bight.

“It occupies a deeply rooted place in our culture,” says Mark Power, whose book The Shipping Forecast comprises photographs from the 31 sea areas that are enumerated in the daily radio litany. “For many of us there is an essential mystery to the shipping forecast that perhaps comes from hearing it in the background as a child, but not really understanding it. And, even as we grow older, it’s difficult for most of us to understand it, because we’re not depending on it the way sailors or trawler crews depend on it.”

A superb piece by Richard Foster on the Echo and the Bunnymen album PORCUPINE, which produced what were for me two seminal singles, “The Back Of Love” and “The Cutter:

Shankar had previously added strings to ‘The Back Of Love’, also produced by Broudie, then going under the name of Kingbird, a moniker given to him by a depressed Liverpool mate who saw the musician as a magical figure. This guise allowed him to adopt a more shamanistic, interventionist role than merely being credited “producer” of a Bunymen record. In true Liverpool style Broudie saw the role behind the mixing desk as mythopoeic, an almost physical adjunct to the soul, akin to summoning up a creative unguent akin to the Cthulhu tales