A German city is rushing to install a series of drive-in wooden “sex garages” in time for next year’s Soccer World Cup and an expected boom in the local sex trade, a city official said on Wednesday.

Dortmund, one of 12 cities to host World Cup matches, is anxious to keep prostitutes and their clients off the streets by providing them with discreet places to do business.

Experts estimate as many as 40,000 prostitutes may travel to Germany to offer their services to fans during the tournament…

Apollo moon mission astronaut Neil Armstrong has threatened to sue a barbershop owner who collected Armstrong’s hair after a trim and sold it for $3,000.

Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, used to go to Marx’s Barber Shop in Lebanon about once a month for a cut. That stopped when he learned that owner Marx Sizemore had collected his hair clippings from the floor and sold them in May 2004 to a collector.

“I didn’t deny it or anything,” Sizemore said. “I told him I did it.” Sizemore said Armstrong asked him to try to retrieve the hair, but the buyer did not want to give it back.

Sizemore said he sold the hair to an agent for John Reznikoff, a Westport, Conn., collector listed by Guinness World Records as having the largest collection of hair from historical celebrities. The collection, insured for $1 million, includes hair from Abraham Lincoln, Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein and Napoleon…

‘Kidnappers’ who stole a Dalek from a Somerset tourist attraction have sent its owners a ransom note – and the robot’s amputated plunger.

The 5ft model, believed to be an original from the cult BBC Dr Who series, was taken from Wookey Hole Caves near Wells on Monday. On Thursday, staff found the plunger arm and a ransom note on a doorstep…

Charlie Stross has set up a website for the imminent release of his breakthrough sf novel ACCELERANDO here.

I read the manuscript last year and recommend the novel to you without reservation.

Russian police have found four people from three generations of the same family dead in their apartment where they had lain for at least two years.

A spokesman for Moscow city prosecutors told local media skeletons were all that remained of the man and three women who seemed to have died at different times in the past decade.

“The oldest family member, a grandfather born in 1912, died about 10 years ago. Five years later his wife, who was born in 1914, died,” the spokesman told Interfax news agency. “The deaths of the others, a daughter born in 1942, and a grand-daughter born in 1971, also came at different times.”

Itar-Tass news agency quoted neighbors as saying the dead people had been secretive members of a religious sect.

Pieces of a man’s body fell from the wheel well of a South African Airways passenger plane bound for John F. Kennedy International Airport Tuesday and landed in the yard of a suburban home, police said.

A U.S. customs inspector discovered the rest of the man’s body at 7:30 a.m. (1130 GMT) after Flight 203 landed in New York from Johannesburg, South Africa, said a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees area airports.

A South African Airways spokeswoman said it appeared to have been a stowaway attempt. She said the plane had stopped in Dakar, Senegal, on its way to New York.

The body parts, which included the right leg, part of the spine and a hip, struck a garage roof of the home in South Floral Park, New York, before landing in the backyard…

…a new breed of politically conservative filmmakers who, tired of waiting for Hollywood executives to give ‘em a break, are creating companies to make and distribute their Republican-friendly works.

And lest there be doubt about their political agenda, they have given the companies such names as American Pride Films Group (APFG) and RightSide Video.

Some outnumbered Republican entertainment workers not only yearn for equal access to filmmaking in famously left-leaning Hollywood but also consider themselves at war against a hostile left-wing majority, with battles being waged on the Internet, in books, at film festivals and even in nightclubs (hence a comedy troupe named the Right Stuff). They’re even — gasp! — organizing in groups like the Hollywood Congress of Republicans, which sponsors luncheons at which celebrities including Ben Stein and Morgan Brittany offer moral support to a like-minded political minority that is sick of being mocked by industry taste-setters…

Akita… a prefecture so bleak, dull and dreary, people are killing themselves to get there…

Topping more than 30,000 a year for all of this century, Japan’s suicide rate is now the second highest in the world, trailing only Sri Lanka.

With over 100 Japanese a day taking their own lives, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare is doing its utmost to keep people alive, conducting a series of projects aimed at getting the number of suicides below 22,000 within five years.

Nowhere is the suicide dilemma as obvious in Japan as in the Tohoku Region’s Akita Prefecture, which has the dubious honor of having been home to the greatest number of suicide victims in the country every year for the past decade…

“Spring and autumn, when the farming business is busiest, are really dangerous times. That’s when old people are left alone when everybody else goes out to work in the fields and it’s the most likely time for them to commit suicide…”

The spy was definitely not called Bond, for that name is not among the military officers selected 40 years ago to conduct reconnaissance missions for the US from an orbital laboratory in space.

But secret agent Bond shares a number – 007 – with one of the US spies-in-training.

Space historians are trying to find out who the mystery man is after his spacesuit turned up, along with an identical outfit bearing number 008, in an abandoned space agency (Nasa) blockhouse last used to launch Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom into space in 1961…

Whenever I want to get really depressed, I go to Done Deal Script and Pitch Sales to find out how other people are getting rich:

Title: Red-Tails in Love
Log Line: Romances occur between a group of bird watchers in Central Park when they become captivated by Pale Male and its mate when they set up a nest at the co-op, an exceptional occurrence. The group chronicles the activities of the birds and gets involved when residents of the co-op serve an eviction notice.

Title: Hotel for Dogs
Log Line: A teenager secretly fills a vacant house with stray dogs after she moves in with her aunt and has to leave her “best friend” behind.

Title: Stay at Home Tom
Log Line: A father has to learn to take care of his two young children when his wife goes back to work.

Title: Camp Couture
Log Line: A spoiled, trendy teen is forced by her parents to go to a “regular” camp filled with misfits and not the famed elite fashion camp known as Camp Couture that she would like to attend.

Title: Untitled Holden Pitch
Log Line: A romance develops between a blue state city boy who is always on his Blackberry and a red state country girl who has grown up on a peach farm

Apparently, there’s a rumour going around to the effect that Games Workshop are planning a line of GLOBAL FREQUENCY prose novels.

I’m fairly sure that people have to ask me first. And since they haven’t, you can be fairly sure that Games Workshop are NOT planning a line of GLOBAL FREQUENCY prose novels.

– W

I should get one of these for my agent:

Need thinking time. Usual bullshit will resume tomorrow, probably.

– W

Paramount has pulled the plug on its proposed film version of Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ celebrated superhero graphic novel, Variety reported.

Producers Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin were taking the project, with British director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy) attached, out to other studios, the trade paper reported…

Something for the creative types:

If you go to http://www.telepathine.net right now, you’ll see a black block on the right hand side. That block is 275 pixels across and 500 pixels high.

That’s actually set inside an image randomising tool.

What I want are images to go in that space. Exactly 275 pixels across by 500 pixels down. Art, photography, collage, scribbling, text shoved into a graphics file, anything you like. Mark it on the bottom with your name and an URL. And the ones I like will be thrown into the image tool, appearing at random when telepathine.net is accessed.

Have something to say. Frankly, I don’t care if it’s a column of three webcam shots of you naked and repeatedly stabbing a midget wearing an Avril Lavigne mask and a Coldplay t-shirt. Make it a little more than just a pose or a thing or a pretty picture. Say something. Even if it’s just a couple of words daubed on your penis/breasts/hideous-pansexual-shagging-organ-grown-in-a-vat-in-Japan.

Send it to, not my usual address, but warrenellis @ gmail.com. So I don’t lose it.

Back to assembling the new playlist, in between the actual paying work…

– W

Dan Curtis Johnson:

When they came for the pitbulls, I said nothing, because I didn’t have a pitbull.

When they came for the german shepherds, I said nothing, because I didn’t have a german shepherd.

When they came for the dobermans, I said nothing, because I didn’t have a doberman.

But when they came for my rottweiler, I opened the door and said KILL, BRUNO, KILL EM SIC EM YEAH YEAH FUCK YEAH HIS EYES TOO YEAH YEAH HELL YEAH! GOOD DOG!

Nobodaddy’s moblog:

yuriko built a series of instruments for a performance she is calling orga[ni]sm – that taiko in the background is one (it blows smoke rings) – playing her hair like a violin is another – this one uses a big bass tube to blow a sonic bubble. they all deal with the ephemerality of sound. i think she’s brilliant.

Songs made freely available for download on the internet by the artists, put into a single file and released as a podcast mixtape for many hundreds of my closest friends.

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

Direct download: here

All previous mixtapes: http://warrenellis.libsyn.com

Recent stats: Mixtape 15 is at 1558 downloads, 14 is at 1922 downloads, 13 is at 2461 downloads, 12 is at 2213, and 11 stands at 2797 downloads…

Has anyone got a decent-quality mp3 of “18 Carat Love Affair” by The Associates? I just got through the section about The Associates in Simon Reynolds’ excellent RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN, and wanted to hear it again (it’s not cited in the book so far, but I actually like it as much as, if not more than, “Party Fears 2″).

Answers on a postcard to warrene @ aol.com. Ta.

Got it now, thanks to all.

– W

The excellent Mark Kermode (met him very briefly once, diamond bloke) talks about film for a living, and does it very well. His BBC radio broadcasts are now being made available as free mp3 downloads and a podcast.

The BBC? Fucking brilliant, mate.