Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of journalism in books like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” fatally shot himself Sunday night at his Aspen-area home, his son said. He was 67.

“Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family,” Juan Thompson said in a statement released to the Aspen Daily News.

Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a personal friend of Thompson, confirmed the death to the News. Sheriff’s officials did not return calls to The Associated Press late Sunday.

So by Monday morning, everyone will have seen the photos, phone numbers and notes from Paris Hilton’s hacked T-Mobile Sidekick II hiptop.

Now, supposedly, the rumour doing the rounds today is that her password was conned out of her by someone. And bearing in mind how crap the girl is at, say, keeping her home-made fuck tapes in the drawer, it’s entirely possible.

However, I would point out that any hiptop owner who uses T-Mobile and does not immediately change all their passwords tomorrow is a bloody idiot. The Sidekick II stores all its data on T-Mobile’s servers. If Ms Hilton wasn’t scammed out of her password, then there’s a hole in T-Mobile you could run a truck through.

I think I have Xtina Aguilera’s phone number now, by the way.

– W

Maura Green: downtempo 8bit — the flipside to Bit Shifter, if you like.

Rachel Goldstar: “Letting You Know”, the one downloadable mp3 on the page, is a gorgeous swirly piece of glide-guitar dreampop. According to the page, she’s also recording with the excellent Jessica Bailiff.

Amanda:a – experimental rhythm, digitised textures, robotic noise crush. Streaming-only. Listen to “Angel Eyes” first.

Egyptian doctors said they removed a second head from a 10-month-old girl suffering from one of the rarest birth defects in an operation on Saturday.

Abla el-Alfy, a consultant in pediatric intensive care, told Reuters at the hospital in Benha, near Cairo, that Manar Maged was in a serious but improving condition after the procedure to treat her for craniopagus parasiticus — a problem related to that of conjoined twins linked at the skull.

“We are still working on the baby. After surgery … you get unstable blood pressure, you get fever. But she is stabilizing,” Alfy said. “We have some improvement.”

As in the case of a girl who died after similar surgery in the Dominican Republic a year ago, the second twin had developed no body. The head that was removed from Manar had been capable of smiling and blinking but not independent life, doctors said.

Video footage provided by the hospital, a national center in Egypt for children’s medicine, showed Manar smiling and at ease in a cot with the dark-haired “parasitic” twin, attached at the upper left side of the girl’s skull, occasionally blinking.

Alfy said the 13-strong surgical team separated Manar’s brain from the conjoined organ in small stages, cutting off the blood supply to the extra head while preventing increased blood flow to Manar’s heart, which would have risked cardiac arrest.

The doctors decided not to carry out Manar’s operation soon after her birth. “We studied the babies well,” Alfy said. “We had to study how the blood supply of the parasite is working.”

The condition occurs when an embryo begins to split into identical twins but fails to complete the process and one of the the conjoined twins fails to develop fully in the womb. The second twin can form as an extra limb, a complete second body lacking vital organs, or, in very rare cases, a head…

(Found in the dead of night because of Siege, my Alpha Freak brother)

I had to kill the pig.

It was a GM Vietnamese potbellied pig that some freak had meatfitted with a voicebox and the frontal lobe of a grown-up crack baby.

It scuttled across the carpet on fat little legs, firing hideous acidic turds out of its fortified arse like it was Satan’s vending machine. I loaded the harpoon gun I’d borrowed from Sunil. There are a few parts of the world where you can legally hunt humans who have gone aquatic, and Sunil owed sexual favours to all of them. The pig turned, rasping “Fuckpig! Fuckpig! Fuckpig!” I’d not yet worked out whether he was talking to me or telling me his name, but it seemed to be the only word he knew. I’d been listening to it for two weeks. Two. Weeks.

The harpoon locked down into the receiver chamber, and the air compressor hissed, charging the gun.

I hefted the gun and took aim as the bastard dropped another shit on the carpet, burning another hole in it. “This is it, you disgusting fucking object. Melissa left me with a disease so unusual and horrible it does not have a name, a weird Japanese doll that sucks out its own urine, and you. I’ve had my urethra irradiated, I listened to the doll scream as I shoved it into a wood chipper, and now there’s only you left. The pet pig.”

“Fuckpig!”

The compressor stopped hissing. The gun’s chip crooned to me, for no good reason, in the synthesised voice of Peter O’Toole: “You may kill things now, young man.” I threw the receiver lock to open the barrel and fired at the pig’s smoking anus.

Of course I bloody missed.

The pig hurled itself to one side like it was an action movie hero, rolling and coming up poised and ready on its foul black trotters. The harpoon thudded into one of my speakers. I fumbled another one into the chamber and slammed down the receiver lock, hoping there was enough push left in the compressor for another shot at the little crapmachine. I waved the harpoon gun at it. You couldn’t see its eyes; they were dark wet slits surrounded by great folds and swells of warty pigflab. But you knew it was scheming. I edged between it and the clear run through my long thin apartment to the front door. I had it pinned here in the back bedroom. Nowhere to run.

It feinted to my left like Ali, with a rasped “Fuckpig!” I pretended to follow the feint, and then snapped the gun back as it launched itself for the opening it expected between my right and the doorjamb.

It realised I had it and pissed itself in mid-air, an evil green sprinkler. Twisted its immense gut around to carom off the wall. I kept a bead on it as it bounced off my bed – realised too late that it was aimed for the window.

Fuckpig! and it hurled itself through the window. I ran to the sill, trying to keep my hands away from all the broken glass. The pig had launched itself with some force, I gave it that. There was a chance it could reach the shopfront awning on the other side of my narrow market street. The odds were better that it’d miss and splatter. But I don’t like gambling, really, and this was a personal thing.

I put a harpoon through the bastard pig from arsehole to breakfast-time, skewering it in mid-air.

It dropped down into the market, landing on a fruit stand. Its guts let go and the awful flow dissolved all the apples. There was a storm of swearing in Croatian, and then the retching started.

And, you know, this is as good as the next month or so got.

(A fragment, written July 2003)

There’s a woman in town who has a powered wheelchair. She has a banner mounted on it reading VERBAL POET FOR HIRE. The idea is that you give her a couple of quid and she reads you a poem. I saw someone pay her for a poem once. She sat up straight in her chair, cleared her throat, and then yelled:

“Fuck you
Fuck you
Fuck you
You fucking wanker.”

And then powered off to the supermarket to buy a couple of cans of beer.

As found on the Gingerbox forum:

- taking a life drawing class and having the model be an old man you know from the local rocky horror picture show. i am never going again.
- sleeping in the same room with someone who’s drunk with a history of sleep walking and peeing on things.
- Agree to date an ex-girlfriend just to sleep with her and realizing you hate her 10 seconds before its over
- falling asleep while having sex with multiple partners
- showing my dad that “everytime you masterbate god kills a kitten” image on the internet, going to my bed room, dad busting in screaming “GOD HOW MANY LIONS HAVE YOU KILLED IN THERE”
- Locked out of room while your roommate is fucking some guy and you scream that the devil lives inside her cervix and expecting to be let back into your room.

Songs made freely available for download on the internet by the artists, put into a single file and

released as a podcast mixtape for several hundred of my closest friends.

Podcast address: http://warrenellis.libsyn.com/rss

Direct download: here

(Download count: Mixtape 02 – 896 times/03 – 536 times.)

MySpace’s music downloady thing is fucked, so I can’t grab this and stuff it into the podcast, and you can’t grab it and stick it in an mp3 player — you’ll have to stream it off the site.

“I Need It” by the Vampires, the fourth track on the site’s streaming player. It’s tinny, and raw, and rough as hell: the sound quality’s so bad that he might be playing a fucking banjo. But I love it. It reminds me, just a little bit, of early Aztec Camera.

From Manga News Service:

In a landmark ruling in the Japanese court system, the first judgment stemming from obscenity charges has come down against a manga.

The key figure in the case is Motonori Kishi (54) who first started his publishing company Shobunkan in 1968. He was arrested pending the release of his manga Honey Room, the charge being distributing obscene material. Tokyo’s District Court found Kishi guilty on January 13, sentencing him to one year in prison and suspension for three years. The verdict has the adult rich comics industry in Japan in quite a nervous state. Ashita No Joe mangaka Tetsuya Chiba appeared in court as a defendant side witness. According to the testimony of A Tokyo Metropolitan Police inspector, the investigation was started based on a memo from LDP Diet member Katsuei Hirasawa. The defendant’s side argued that charge violated the constitution that secures the freedom of expression. An appeal is currently underway and a hering is scheduled for March 17th.

Japanese bothered by an unforgettable romance that later soured and continues to niggle need never worry again, because the wasuresaseya are there to help them forget their lost love…

Wasuresaseya, which literally means “professionals who make you forget,” exist to help people get over — or get out of — relationships they may once have wanted to remember forever but have now developed a change of heart.

“Rehabilitation of the mind” is a process that usually takes about one to two months. The period for forgetting is decided during the initial psychological counseling session. Severe cases, however, can take up to half a year. Wasuresaseya are expected to rush to the client’s side no matter where they are or what time they call for aid…

Saturn’s small snow-white moon, Enceladus, has revealed a turbulent past, according to the latest images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

The moon is covered in snaking ridges, chasms and scratches, which probably means that the moon has been repeatedly squeezed and stretched.

Cassini passed within 1200 kilometres of Enceladus on Thursday, taking detailed pictures of its surface, resolving details as tiny as 60 metres across. The landscape revealed is remarkably complicated for such a small moon – only 500 kilometres across.

“Enceladus is a geologist’s paradise,” says William McKinnon of Washington University in St. Louis, US. “It has endless sets of closely-spaced fractures and faults.” He adds there are also blocks of high terrain and a variety of rifts.

This is all evidence of a tumultuous past, according to Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, US. “It has been pulled, stretched and compressed in multiple episodes of deformation and relaxation.” The gravity of Saturn and another moon, Dione, are probably combining to disturb the interior of Enceladus, causing these upheavals, he says.

The same processes may be destroying old craters, heating the surface so that it slowly slumps – even causing floods of icy lava. “I’m betting that liquid ammonia-water is involved,” says McKinnon. He also points out what seem to be volcanic ice ridges.

And Enceladus’s bright surface suggests there may be even more energetic volcanism at work. It is the brightest body in the solar system, so close to pure white that it must be covered in fresh ice – or snow – fired out of ice geysers. These geysers might blast some of that snow into orbit around Saturn, forming the planet’s tenuous E ring, suggest scientists. They are looking out for volcanic plumes on the moon’s horizon, where they would be easiest to spot against the inky blackness of space.

Silicon breast implants could be replaced by tissue grown from a person’s own stem cells within a decade, suggests new research.

Jeremy Mao of the University of Illinois, in Chicago, US, took human stem cells and used these to grow fat tissue using a biologically compatible scaffolding. He then successfully implanted the tissue into mice with an immune deficiency to prevent them from rejecting the implants. The implants had maintained their size and shape after four weeks.

Implants grown from stem cells could provide a safer alternative to silicon or saline implants, which can rupture and also interfere with breast cancer detection. They could also be aesthetically superior, keeping their shape and size for longer than artificial inserts, which typically shrink by 40% to 60% over many years, through spreading…

See the one with the fishnets and the grin? That’s the illustrator of QUIT CITY, that is — and you can still buy it here. Just barely — we’re at the end of the printrun on all the Apparat books now.

QUIT CITY, that is. Not the girl in the fishnets. But you can throw money at her anyway. Go on.

Have you ever wanted to just drill someone to the spot and make them gasp, with nothing more than what came out of your head?

Ever heard “Telstar”? Instrumental from the Fifties, created and produced by Joe Meek. Inspired by the launch of the first telecommunications satellite, of all things. And it’s one of the most purely joyful things you ever heard. I knew a guy who seemed to spend half his life collecting versions of “Telstar.” I’m listening to a live recording of a band called Laika And The Cosmonauts covering it at the moment. Joe Meek was Britain’s first independent record producer. His later stuff, with the Blue Men, still sounds weirdly contemporary. The best Joe Meek songs, like “I Hear A New World,” are like sitting in an alien church. Music that imparts joy and glory from another planet.

Joe Meek was a Mind Gangster.

I think either Chris Sebela or Matt Fraction introduced me to the term, talking about Phil Spector. The term derives from something Brian Wilson said during his craziest period: he believed that Phil Spector was telepathically stealing all his ideas, and called him “a Mind Gangster”.

Go grab a copy of, say, “River Deep Mountain High,” which a critic once described as the sound of God hitting the world and the world hitting God back. Possibly the apotheosis of his Wall Of Sound technique, that immense wave of presence. He was way ahead of his time. When he started out, the Hollywood recording studios he strived in didn’t have the capacity to contain his sound — the mics couldn’t cope with the vast surge of information being thrown at them. But when the apparatus caught up with him, my God, Phil Spector could drill people to the spot. He almost single-handedly invented teenage angst in music.

Mind Gangster.

Andrew Loog Oldham invented thievery in Western music. When people talk about “pop Svengalis”, they’re talking about Oldham. He managed, produced and essentially invented the Rolling Stones, at age 21, a feverpitch criminal brain showing Jagger and Richards how to creatively steal from the blues and their contemporaries and any other damn thing that was laying around, and making their every breath into a Media Event. (And, on the side, pretty much signing Brian Jones’ death certificate.) In the days before miniature tape decks and dashboard CD players, Oldham was the guy who had a record player in his Rolls Royce. Unlike Spector, he barely touched the production board. He created the ambience. He had the Knowledge. He was conducting, his head out in the Superflow, waiting for the sound that’d make the world skip a beat under its needle.

Mind Gangster.

These are all stories from the days when rock and roll was new, the music business was small, everyone knew everybody but no-one knew anything. There was space.

Joe Meek killed himself. Phil Spector went crazy. Andrew Loog Oldham fried himself with money and drugs and now lives quietly in South America. Because, you know, crime doesn’t pay, and even Mind Gangsters come up hard against natural law in the end.

But isn’t it worth it, for those blazing years when you can control someone’s breath and take them somewhere they didn’t know existed?

( (c) Warren Ellis 2004. Another piece from last year that I feel like preserving. Since the writing of it, I believe Andrew Loog Oldham has moved to sedate Vancouver.)

New STREAMING column, mostly about flipbook comics, with a bit about the cover to “London Calling”, is up.

Also, if you go here, you’ll find the archive of previous editions.

William Patrick Butler at the Jackson Free Press covers DESOLATION JONES:

So, what is “Desolation Jones” all about? You probably can’t say it better than Ellis himself:

“‘Desolation Jones’ bears a ‘Mature Readers’ advisory, which means, in the world of comics, that it is Not For Children because it contains such elements as Satanic Language, Marijuana Use, A Bit of The Old Ultra-Violence, and Hitler’s Porn.”

Yes. He’s not lying. There is indeed Hitler Porn in the first issue. We never see it, but it is the catalyst that starts the story moving. The Hitler Porn, made and occasionally acted in by Hitler himself, has been stolen, you see? It must be found. It’s considered priceless to true connoisseurs in the porn community. To find this prize, the owner turns to Desolation Jones…

…a tight script filled with Ellis’ trademarked wit and brutal detail of non-sanitized ultra-violence, “Desolation Jones” is a comic to watch.

“What’s holding up our milks?”