Bob Dylan is considering lending his voice to a SatNav system, raising the prospect of having the music legend growlingly tell you: "You have reached your destination", spiritually or otherwise.
The veteran singer - whose hits include Highway 61 Revisited and On the Road Again - would become the latest celebrity to licence their voice to give motorists directions on their vehicle's satellite navigation systems.
"I'm talking to a couple of car companies about being the voice of their GPS system," he said in the latest edition of his late-night radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, broadcast on BBC radio.
ATMs offer Cockney option
Cash machines in east London are offering customers the option of using the local Cockney rhyming slang to get their hands on their sausage, so to speak. Five automated teller machines (ATMs) in the East End are going Cockney for three months from next week.
While cash machines with several language options are commonplace in some countries, the chance to use rhyming slang could leave those unfamiliar with the east London lingo in a right load of Barney Rubble.
Anyone opting for Cockney rhyming slang will be asked to enter their Huckleberry Finn (PIN) before choosing how much sausage and mash (cash) they want.
Those wanting to withdraw 10 pounds will have to ask for a speckled hen, while the machine may inform users that it is contacting their rattle and tank, rather than bank.
Homing pigeons bumped off
The world of Belgian homing pigeons is in a flap over fears that Chinese criminal gangs are bumping off their prized racers, after a gruesome discovery in the northern town of Antwerp.
Last week a passerby spotted two men of Asian appearance dumping rubbish bags in a wood in Mol, near the Dutch border. However, the sacks were found to contain the bodies of 14 racing pigeons.
All the birds had one foot cut off and therefore lost their identification tags. The birds were believed to have gone missing the same day from a well-known local pigeon breeder.
The top-performing birds can change hands for hundreds of euros and sometimes much more.
The pigeons have even drawn the attentions of Chinese criminal gangs, according to the Royal Belgian Federation of Pigeon Fanciers, which has already recorded 10 robberies this year. Rather than attempting to smuggle their prey abroad, the birdnappers merely kill their victims and cut off the identifying rings.
They than fit the stolen identification rings in China onto a bird worth a fraction of the value, which they then pass off as an ace racer.
Shanghai tackles bad English
Tourists visiting Shanghai for next year's World Expo could be confused by signs on wet floors reading "Slip Carefully!" So authorities in China want to make sure they never see them.
The Shanghai government, along with neighbouring Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, published a 20-page guide book this week to standardise signs and eliminate notoriously bad, and sometimes amusing, English translations.
"A number of the English translations are quite baffling, others are simply awkward," Xue Mingyang, director of the Shanghai Education Commission, was quoted as telling the China Daily.
At Shanghai's iconic Oriental Pearl Tower, visitors are warned "Ragamuffin, drunken people and psychotics are forbidden to enter", according to the Shanghaiist city blog.
Beauty tips for police recruits
Bangladeshi police officers will hit the streets a little smarter and more confident after a beautician was called in to give grooming tips to new recruits.
Kaniz Almas Khan, who owns beauty parlours in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka and in Thailand, was asked by police chiefs to give lessons to 140 new recruits at an academy in the northwest of the country, she said yesterday.
"I was surprised to be asked but it's great that people are becoming more conscious about their appearance," she said. "Male officers were just as keen as female officers, if not more, on looking good. They wanted advice on everything from colours they should be wearing to the type of perfume that would suit them."
The chief of the Sharda Police Academy in northwest Bangladesh, Mazharul Haque, said the project would boost officers' confidence as well as improve their appearance.
Game promotes US of Africa
What's the most widely spoken African language? The longest African river? Just two questions from hundreds in a new board-game seeking to promote the "United States of Africa".
The pan-African brainchild of a Senegalese man, the game is based on snakes and ladders, with different factors steering the continent towards unity.
"I've been travelling around the continent for 15 years, usually as part of the fight against AIDS, and I've seen the development gap with Europe or Asia," says the game's inventor, Salif T. Ba, who heads a public relations company. "I said to myself 'shouldn't all the nations of Africa come together?'"
Jeka ben ("Let's unite" in the West African language Bambara) seeks to improve people's knowledge of Africa, providing answers like those for the above questions, Swahili and the Nile. But Mr Ba says another aim of the game is to educate people on the continent about the very idea of the United States of Africa.