Received in email:

Hey Warren–

I just saw this review of the third TPB of PLANETARY on Amazon.com and
thought you might get a kick out of it. Dig that crazy syntax, man!

“The writings of Warren Ellis, well they promote drugs, paranoia,
inmature dialoge between men and women, and commentey by a man who
clearly hates himself and the world around him. As this load of
garbage shows. DC Comics should have nothing to do with this quack’s
wriings, and speaking as someone who works in the publishing field as
both editor and writer. I would not give the man’s scripts one passing
thought, They are not worth it.

“-John Q. Public ‘vhspreowner’”

Old Jellaby, when he first came to the Vale, sought to ingratiate himself with the great and the good by holding elaborate soirées at the Lodge. These mostly revolved around the selection of ordeal poisons he’d brought back from Africa. “Don’t worry,” he’d rasp around his giraffe-hide tongue. “These saucy little essences can have no effect at all upon the sound of mind and kind of heart.” The Reverend died almost immediately, of course, in appalling contortions. His bollocks exploded like handgrenades, taking Mrs Naismith’s hand off at the wrist and knocking Dr Gideon’s dentures down into his left lung. Where they remained, chattering eerily each winter as the snow covered the small children that the Women’s Institute would nail to the village green every December to get them some fresh air. Some people still believe they hear Dr Gideon’s lung-teeth singing hideous numbers from “The Music Man” and occasionally yelling for Pure Boys, despite the local constabulary having helpfully worked his cadaver over with iron bars prior to the funeral, “just in case the uncanny little bastard tries to come back.”

That sort of thing had been a local problem since I was a boy, when Farmer Hobble contracted the fabled “terrible cock-mange” from the sheep who ate the dumped army chemicals and learned to have sex in the missionary position.

But that, my darlings, is a tale for another time, for I see that the horse tranquillisers have already taken effect.

Good night.

((C) Warren Ellis 2004. Written last year. I was trying to replicate some of the effects Vivian Stanshall got in his “Rawlinson End” stories (and also a half-remembered Garrison Keillor piece). You test these things out to see how the effects work, so you can pull the cogs and levers apart and work them into your own style.)

Small clouds of dark matter pass through Earth on a regular basis, suggest new calculations. The clouds may be remnants of the first structures to form after the big bang and could be detected by future space missions.

Dark matter interacts gravitationally with normal matter and appears to be seven times more abundant in the universe. But physicists do not know what the mysterious matter is made of or exactly how it is distributed through space.

Nonetheless, they have devised a number of hypothetical dark matter particles that were created in the big bang. These particles formed the universe’s first structures, where mysterious “quantum seeds” caused matter to clump more densely in certain spots. Dark matter slid into these spots which grew into structures that merged to become giant clouds – or haloes – with millions or trillions times more mass than the Sun.

For their study, they used the leading candidate for dark matter, a particle called a neutralino which has the mass of about 100 protons and interacts only weakly with normal matter. Their predicted energies and motions made them settle into structures about 30 million years after the big bang. The structures took the shape of flattened spheres or cigars with diameters about 4000 times the distance between the Earth and Sun.

“We estimate that lots of these small clumps can still survive in the Milky Way,” says Diemand. Perhaps a million billion of them drift around the large dark matter halo that is thought to enclose our galaxy. Such a cloud may float through Earth every 10,000 years in an encounter lasting about 50 years.

But the phantom clouds do not affect the Earth, says Diemand. Their relatively wispy densities mean they could only nudge our planet out of its normal orbit by less than a millionth of a metre per second…

A mystery chemical that young women deploy as a sex attractant pheromone seems to work for post-menopausal women too.

Joan Friebely of Harvard University, US, and Susan Rako, a private physician in Newton, Massachusetts, US, have studied 44 post-menopausal women. Half added Athena Pheromone 10:13, originally isolated from a woman’s armpit sweat, to their perfume while half added a dummy compound. Neither the women nor the researchers knew who was in each group until the results were in.

In diaries kept by the women for six weeks, 41% of pheromone users reported more petting, kissing and affection with partners compared with 14% receiving the placebo. Overall, 68% of pheromone users reported increases in at least one of four “intimate socio-sexual behaviours” such as formal dates and sex, as against 41% on the placebo…

Cops recently had to deal with a bizarre incident in an older part of Tokyo until now best known for its high concentration of hideouts for AUM Shinrikyo, the doomsday cult that fatally gassed the capital’s subway system a decade ago… Fortunately, however, the cult had nothing to do with the baffling mystery behind the evil odors emanating from an Adachi-ku apartment, but that’s not to say there wasn’t some weirdness at work. In fact, what investigators unearthed could have been even worse.

Behind the putrid smells emanating from the otherwise ordinary apartment was the body of 74-year-old Kisaburo Suzuki. He’d spent the last few years of his existence bedridden and battling illness.

And though Suzuki’s corpse was found in January, almost a year after his death, he was not one of the tragic cases where a neglected old person has died alone and their body allowed to rot in oblivion. Far from it, as it turns out. The body of Kisaburo Suzuki went undiscovered for so long because there was somebody who could not bear with the thought of leaving it alone.

Kisaburo had been cared for by his younger sister, 68-year-old Michiko, who lived in a home about 50 meters away from his. Michiko Suzuki said that her brother had died on Feb. 10 last year. She said that he was her last remaining sibling and she couldn’t bear the thought of being left alone, so didn’t tell anybody that he had died…”

England’s first prostitution tolerance zone could be set up within months after councillors in Liverpool approved the move.

They will now write to Home Secretary Charles Clarke to get his approval for the scheme.

Up to five areas of the city could be earmarked as vice-friendly zones but council leaders say the locations have not been decided. Under the plan, sex for sale would be allowed during the night…

The Fire And Reason: can you picture PJ Harvey’s younger sister kicking electroclash back towards glam with big stompy boots while waving a chainsaw? Well, possibly not. But I’m quite fond of their song “Death Parade.”

Below, detail from the new book design for the next printing of Brian Wood’s excellent political sf graphic novel CHANNEL ZERO. Click here to bring up the full version.

The Invisible Man.

Out from today.

From the Salt Lake City Weekly:

BEST WRITER: Warren Ellis. The year was a crash course in the works of Warren Ellis, and made me a huge fan. He’s been writing comics for years, and I feel like I’ve been missing out this whole time. He took his blend of science fiction and horror all over the industry this year, launching Ocean and Ultimate Nightmare, got his Planetary series rolling again, set out with his own line of books called Apparat, and his Global Frequency series and his short Hellblazer run were also made available. I read it all, and was never disappointed.

(Thanks to Scott Catron for finding it.)

Ferret. Yes.

A US serial killer who raped and strangled eight women and girls has tired of Death Row and wants to be executed this week. But with just days to go until his lethal injection, he has run into a legal obstacle: a federal judge issued a last-minute stay of execution on Monday night…

Via Heidi Mac at The Beat:

Faster than a speeding snare roll: It’s Ringo Starr, superhero.

The former Beatles drummer has undertaken a joint venture with Stan Lee’s POW! Entertainment to develop a multimedia franchise in which Starr will play a superpowered animated version of himself.

The Starr-Lee project initially will be launched as a 60- or 90-minute DVD, but POW! and Starr’s entertainment company, Rocca Bella, plan to explore TV, feature film and other avenues.

Starr called Lee “a great creator. (This project) wasn’t anything I was looking for. But he had this idea of a musical superhero — what I like to think of as a reluctant superhero. . . . I’ll zoom in to save the world, or a damsel in distress, or a small village. Who knows where he’ll go?”

(Found by Fraction)

Trojak.