Archives for July 26, 2009 - August 1, 2009

Snippets from the week's news, sliced, diced and processed for your convenience.

1. Stoke City were huge in Norway in the 80s.
More details (the Times)

2. A third of England's coastline is inaccessible.
More details

3. Police officers are not required to be able to swim.
More details (Teletext)

4. 10 million people drive to work every day.
More details (Daily Telegraph)

5. The dye used in blue M&Ms can help mend spinal injuries.
More details (Daily Telegraph)

6. Poverty, as measured by the government, can decline during a recession.
More details

7. Broadband speed is decided before the signal even leaves the exchange.
More details

8. Poet Robert Browning used the T-word while thinking it was an item of clothing for a nun.
More details

9. Chimpanzees are biologically programmed to appreciate pleasant music.
More details

10. Bees warn other bees about flowers where dangers can be expected.
More details

Seen 10 things? Send us a picture to use next week. Thanks to Anita Bekker for this picture of 10 boats.

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A brief power cut, presumably?
C, Warks, UK

Being a Darlington FC fan I did wonder if this was a new tactic by our manager to improve team bonding.
Karl, Nottingham

Do I notice a small helping of nominative determinism in this story?
Graham, Frome

To Tim Barrow (Thursday's letters), would you prefer "ferocious, feral feline unfettered"? Nobody panic.
Fi, Gloucestershire, UK

Re Friday's quote of the day: If Alan Johnson says he believes the ID card will be welcomed, then I believe him. But I think we should be told whether he also believes in unicorns.
Adam, London, UK

My word, Daniel Taylor the 20-year-old undertaker is the oldest looking 20-year-old I've ever seen. I assume that's him in the foreground?
Martin, Bristol, UK

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Winning entries in the Caption Competition.

The competition is now closed. Full rules can be seen here [PDF].

This week, a seal in sunnies. But what's being said?

Thanks to all who entered. The prize of a small amount of kudos to the following:

6. SimonRooke He's never been the same since David Attenborough did that three minutes to camera next to him.

5. Lynxboy252
Paul McCartney issues new disguise for seals wishing to avoid being hunted.

4. MuteJoe
It's chloasma okay!

3. Prisoner_61259
Good God, that Timmy Mallett has not aged well at all.

2. gm_coates
In a dark attic there exists a portrait of Elton John...

1. eltelsopwith
Although discovered on Darwin's first voyage all the field notes were sadly misplaced.

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A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

To the red tops...

The Sun has got itself all worked up over the story about Jude Law becoming a dad again - this time to a child he has fathered with an "unidentified woman" - well, that was how the BBC News website left the story yesterday.

But there has been lots of chatter on that there internet about the identity of the mother and, in lieu of a major news agency - Reuters, AP etc - getting into the nitty gritty of Jude Law's love life, the Sun is left quoting the "usually reliable showbiz website TMZ".

Hmm, usually reliable. Would that be 60% reliable? Ninety-five percent reliable? Somewhere in between? It's an interesting approach and one that Paper Monitor might just suggest to its overlords when weighing up, for example, whether or not to run with a breaking news story.

Further into the paper, Sun columnist John Gaunt, currently on tour with the newspaper's radio station, SunTalk, in Spain, has taken the novel approach of contracting out parts of his one-page column to other contributors - thereby, rather defeating the point of a column, no?

Anyway, cue "Sam... from Page 3" who is on tour with "Gaunty" and tells readers the pair don't always see eye to eye - at least that's what Paper Monitor assumes she is saying, when she writes "he doesn't half get on my t**s sometimes!"

It's a strange policy - while the word itself is too naughty to reproduce in full, the Sun has never hesitated when picturing said appendages... every day of the week.

Over at the Mirror, they've been wrestling with how to handle the story about Sky TV's plans to launch a 3D channel. Sky of course is part owned by the Sun's proprietor, Rupert Murdoch.

"Pie in the Sky" runs the headline, with the Mirror choosing to focus on the fact that today's television sets aren't equipped to deal with the 3D technology.

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Welcome to the Weekly Bonus Question.

Each week the news quiz 7 days 7 questions will offer an answer. You are invited to suggest what the question might have been.

Suggestions should be sent using the COMMENTS BOX IN THIS ENTRY. And since nobody likes a smart alec, kudos will be deducted for predictability in your suggestions.

This week's answer is TWO INVISIBLE UNICORNS. But what's the question?

UPDATE 1635 BST: Thanks for all your wrong entries. The correct question is: what are children at the summer athiest camp in Somerset told to imagine to make them think about godlessness?

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"I believe the ID card will be welcomed as an important addition to the many plastic cards that most people already carry" - Home Secretary Alan Johnson

Alan Johnson has identified that people like having lots of plastic cards in their wallet/purse.
More details

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So it's claimed Men at Work used a riff from a nursery song about a noisy bird sat in a gum tree. What about the guitar riff in the song Turn Turn Turn, which sounds similar to the theme tune of Crossroads?
Colin Bartlett, Abingdon, Oxfordshire

Sat-nav problems aren't as rare as you'd think (7 questions on...). I searched for a specific hotel in Leicester by postcode, and Google Maps took me to a location about half a mile from where I wanted. No problem you'd think, but having never been there, it took me 45 minutes to find the hotel. At least I wasn't the only one, six other people in our group had identical problems. Embarrassingly, we all work for a logistics company.
Alex, Birmingham, UK

Is it just me, or does the term "big cat" fail to do justice to the terror implicit in the suggestion that there's a panther (or similar) on the loose? My parents have a big cat. It's called Sylvester and it's not in the least bit scary.
Tim Barrow, London, UK

I would love to submit a caption, but the "comments box" link just takes me to a previous caption competition. Am I missing something?
Alex, Birmingham
Monitor note: Sorry, fixed now.

I know I'm too old for this, but I'm sure I'm not the only one driven to giggles by the headline Dongle users face stiff penalties.
Aimee, St. Andrews, Scotland
Monitor note: Titter. She said *dongle".

So at £10 for just over half a pint, even at 18.2% ABV this beer is not going to be the drink of choice for a binge.
Alan, Southampton, UK

Re John Airey's proof of the non-existence of unicorns (Wednesday letters): spiders, ants, butterflies and moths don't leave footprints either.
John Whapshott, Westbury, England

Neither do fish.
Dave Godfrey, Swindon, UK

Ah, but John, how do you know unicorns don't leave hoof prints?
Aine, London

I can't see unicorn footprints all over the place, so that must prove that there are millions of them.
Put that £10 back in your wallet, Professor Dawkins.
Clive DuPort, Vale, Guernsey

Web Monitor, the usually quite brilliant Anthony Lane, the New Yorker's lead critic and a Britisher to boot, gave In The Loop a rather scathing review last week.
Oliver, Paris, France

Lee (Wednesday letters), I got caught out twice. Not only did I look for the asterisk in the article, I also searched for it at the bottom of the letters.
Lydia, Manchester

The headline Actor Law to become father again got me thinking... can one really become a father more than once, without ceasing to be a father in between? Do any Monitorites have any other examples or such linguistic curiosities?
Aaron, Reading, UK

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A celebration of the riches of the web.

Web Monitor ponders what happens to creativity when a celebrity goes sober and hopes one little internet alien won't crack under the glare of recent publicity. Remember to share your favourite bits of the internet by sending a link via the comment box.

• The tale of the relationship between creativity and addiction is nothing new, more than a hundred years before the paparazzi started documenting Amy Winehouse's addiction troubles, poet Samuel Coleridge was addicted to opium and both of their addictions fuelled their material. But Tom Shone in the Economist's More Intelligent Life asks what happens when creative types go sober and if they can use that experience to inspire more works:

"When [F Scott] Fitzgerald went public about his creative decline in Esquire, in a piece entitled The Crack Up--a prototype for all the misery memoirs we have today--Hemingway was disgusted, inviting him to cast his 'balls into the sea--if you have any balls left'. Today, of course, The Crack Up would be shooting up the besteller lists, and Fitzgerald would be sat perched on Oprah's couch talking about his struggle and his co-dependent relationship with Ernest, proudly wearing his 90-day sobriety chip, but in the 1930s, the recovery industry, then in its infancy, was regarded by most with the enthusiasm of a cat approaching a bathtub."

• Reddit, a bookmarking site which allows you to share your favourites and look at other people's recommended links, similar to Delicious, Digg and Stumble Upon, has been accompanied by the Reddit Alien for some years now. Web Monitor has been guilty of ignoring the poor little alien when searching for the best links even though he makes the effort to change his outfit everyday. Now one dedicated follower has made a YouTube video to help you catch up on Reddit Alien's wardrobe choices. This is a tribute to Noah Kalina's viral film, created usingphotos he took of himself everyday for six years. Not much happened in that time, unlike Poopmustache's YouTube video charting his beard growth.

There are tonnes of these videos clogging up YouTube - far too many for Web Monitor to handle. If you have an afternoon free / a life free, and fancy looking through these, pass on your favourites to Web Monitor by sending a comment with the link in via the comment box. For now, just enjoy Reddit alien going through changes.

• In the New York Times, a senior editor at Harper's and author of And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, Bill Wasik adds to the "free" debate Web Monitor is tracking. The idea that we could be seeing the end of the money ecnomy was put forward by Chris "I don't use the word journalism/media/news" Anderson's book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. The debate was fiercely criticised in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell who argued that costs for Internet businesses often stack up when the product becomes popular - a kind of economies of scale in reverse. Web Monitor noted the Snarkmarket blog has been looking at what the prospect of "free" would mean to people working in the liberal arts, specifically Guest writer Matt Penniman's prediction that eventually creative types will do fun jobs for free. Bill Wasik is now backing this up, saying that the annual migration of people aspiring to work in the creative industries to New York is no longer necessary thanks to the internet. This keeps the costs down, allowing them to work for free:

"Wherever young creatives physically reside today, in their endeavors they are increasingly moving online: posting their photos, writing, videos and music, building a "presence" in the hope of winning an audience. Monetary rewards on the Internet are still scarce, it is true, but the cost of living is cheap and, more important, the opportunities for attention are plentiful"

• In the Liberty Central strand of the Guardian's Comment is Free Ben Goldacre tracks an online petition signed by celebrities Ricky Gervais and Stephen Fry in support of a journalist who is being sued for defamation by the British Chiropractic Association:

"Today the Australian magazine Cosmos, along with a vast number of other blogs and publications, reprinted an article by Simon Singh, in slightly tweaked form, in an act of solidarity. The British Chiropractic Association has been suing Singh personally for the past 15 months, over a piece in the Guardian where he criticised the BCA for claiming that its members could treat children for colic, ear infections, asthma, prolonged crying, and sleeping and feeding conditions by manipulating their spines."

• Bidisha in the Guardian's Comment is Free says the depiction of women in adverts is still dire, citing Current TV's Sarah Haskin's analysis of adverts aimed at women:

"Women are idiots, ninnies, nincompoops. Women are drooling, giggling buffoons whose minds are empty except for a few wafting fibres and whose bodies are revolting sacs of malfunctioning fluids and duff organs.
If TV adverts are anything to go by, I'm hardly exaggerating."

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A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

People of Britain, our time is so now.

One of the defining characteristics of the great British populace is the enthusiasm we reserve for talking about the weather.

And so the excitement has been palpable ever since the Met Office first promised a "barbecue summer" a few months back - not only are there barbecues to look forward to, think of the conversational gambits this concept opens up!

Especially now the Met Office has revised this forecast to, er, "summer is cancelled".

And the papers are all over it, from the Daily Express blaming the jet stream - it's always fond of a weather story - to the Sun (in short supplies these days... geddit?).

"Lady and the damp" is the front page headline of the Times, with a photo of a thoroughly disenchanted elderly woman in a plastic bonnet glaring at the raindrops.

(Incidentally, the one defence the Met Office has NOT yet used is that this is a barbecue summer. A British barbecue, where the outdoor cooking is traditionally conducted under a marquee, raindrops bouncing off the hot coals, as guests sip increasingly diluted beers before giving up and eating their charred sausages indoors.)

And finally, no doubt it has been noted before, and will be mentioned again. Quoted in many of the papers today is one Lord Melchett, policy director of the Soil Association (see the Daily Telegraph and the Mail). A hereditary peer, one can only assume that he has long been familiar with the nickname "Melchy".

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"I've put my barbecue in the shed - I don't want it to get any rustier" - Dave, the Met Office press officer responsible for the phrase Barbecue Summer that so got our hopes up.

Asked by the Times' Caitlin Moran whether he too had bought into the dream, Dave - who'd earlier told her that he and his press office chums had made up the phrase - admitted that indeed he had.
More details (Times)

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A celebration of the riches of the web.

Web Monitor wonders why the US is in the loop about something after the UK, what Hootie and the Blowfish mean to college stereotypes and if the debate about a new free economy will ever end. Share bits of the internet that interest you to Web Monitor by sending your links via the comment box.

• Web Monitor was wondering why US reviewers were suddenly getting in the loop about In The Loop, the British satire which was released in the UK's cinemas back in April. Reviews have been popping up all over the place. It all made sense, when we learnt the film wasn't released until the 24th July in the US. So Web Monitor was intrigued what the American reviewers would think of such a damning criticism of US politics. It seems they were impressed.
NPR interview the director Armando Iannucci and their review is glowing:

"The movie is crammed with characters and details, the actors playing it straight but at farcical speeds, leaping back and forth from the minutiae of protocol to problems with their teeth to one-night stands to leaking documents or plugging leaks."

"You laugh -- and laugh -- because the alternative would be to weep for us all."

"The chattering smarty-pants who ran the U.S. government on The West Wing are slow talkers compared with the motormouthed and hilariously imperfect power elite in the brainy British comedy In the Loop."

Richard Corliss for Time Magazine calls In the Loop a:

"Stinging Strangelovean satire... This is insult comedy of the highest order."

Cinematical gave another rave review, saying:

" ...it's achingly, wrenchingly, dizzyingly funny, with a bleak, bitter sense of humor that makes each laugh feel like the people behind In the Loop are not so much tickling your funny bone as they are going at it with an ice pick."

Web Monitor couldn't find a critical US view. If you find one, send it via the comment box.

• "God, Mom, Hamilton is so Hootie & the Blowfish."
No, Web Monitor doesn't know what that means either. Kathleen Kingsbury was told this whilst researching her college stereotype busting piece for the Daily Beast. It's all to do with amusingly specific stereotypes of US colleges invading the internet as American students prepare to go to university at the end of August. Stereotypes say that Oberlin is all hippies, Miami students never stop partying, Chicago students are boring, Georgetown is like so catholic, SMU is all millionaires... The list goes on and on and on. There are so many stereotypes to bust, that Kingsbury has written a second instalment.
The Princeton Review is the place for students, parents and employers to decide whether they are nerds or party animals based on their college choice.

The stereotypes have even been studied - Yale history professor George Chauncey wrote for the university's alumni magazine that Yale has the stereotype of attracting gay students, possibly down to its reputation for "being an exceptionally hospitable and exciting place to be gay" and in turn ex-Yale students went on to influence debate on gay marriage and gay rights.

But this all still leaves Web Monitor wondering what was meant by the Hootie and the Blowfish comment. If you find a fan site which may enlighten Web Monitor as to the typical Hootie and the Blowfish fan, send the link via the comments box.

• The debate about a free future burns on. Web Monitor is tracking discussions on the idea put forward by Chris Anderson's book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. The debate was fired up by Malcolm Gladwell arguing this is impossible. Web Monitor has already flagged up Phil Gyford's blog on the question of if you started to have to pay for websites, which ones would you cough up for. And yesterday Web Monitor noted the Snarkmarket blog has been looking at what the prospect of "free" would mean to people working in the liberal arts, specifically Guest writer Matt Penniman's prediction that eventually creative types will do fun jobs for free. Now Cory Doctorow from the Guardian's technology section is getting in on the debate. Doctorow disagrees with Gladwell's reasoning but agrees with the conclusion - free is impossible - when considering future costs in combatting piracy, when it's so cheap for members of the public to copy material:

"Gladwell's criticisms ring hollow to me, blending a hand-wringing grievance about 'theft' of information with special pleading for Gladwell and his fellow journalists.
Which is not to say that Free is perfect. Indeed, I think it has exactly the same problem as The Long Tail, namely, an unwillingness to consider the wider implications of a world centred on a commodity that can be infinitely reproduced at no marginal cost."

• Yale University's Environment 360 journal is advocating more wolves for Scotland. It lays out the argument that wolves would be bad for red deer but good for Scottish ecology because, as Science Now reports, red deer have been a little bit greedy, "grazing the hillsides bare". It's all come about after the success of wolves being reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the north-western United States in the 1990s. William Ripple, a professor of forest ecosystems and society at Oregon State University in Corvallis said the benefits were far-reaching:

" ...there was an unforeseen bonus: Not only did the elk population go down, but there have been "major ecological effects... The elk now steer clear of areas where they perceive risk from wolves, leading to the regrowth of aspens, willows, cottonwood trees, and berry-producing shrubs."

• Self-certified recovering prankster Dom Joly hasn't pranked for about five years, so Joly's interview on the BBC website's Five Minutes With comes a bit out of the blue. He talks philosophers - his favourite being bugs bunny - with his Keep it Real sentiment, followed by Derek Smalls in Spinal Tap with his slogan 'have a good time all the time'. Joly's own philosophy is more laid back:

"I'm a totally impractical person. Basically my whole philosophy is kind of laziness, it's kind of anything I have to do some hard work for I just don't really do. I can change a light bulb and that's about it."

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Met Office cools summer forecast - sounds like hindsight to me.
Graham, Hayle

Remember St Swithin's day (15 July)? It rained. I put my barbecue back in the shed at once. Won't be needing it again this summer.
C Weed, London

It's easy to disprove the existence unicorns, they don't leave any footprints. That'll be £10 please, Professor Dawkins.
John Airey, Peterborough, UK

This story about Bradley Wiggins' plans for the next few years is great. The best bit is the link to his Twitter feed on which he tweets that the story is "merely rhubarb".
Phil, Guisborough

Why do you deface these stunning pictures with an ugly caption? Do galleries put a sticker right on the canvas telling you about the subject? What an idiotic decision, to mask off the picture with a panel that is the only place where you can read the caption.
J Stewart, Edinburgh
Monitor note: There is a button, lower right, to switch captions off. Hope this helps.

Was I the only person hunting around at the bottom of UK's 'strongest beer' condemned for a footnote explaining the asterisk in Tokyo*?
Lee, Manchester, UK

Re Policeman takes 'big cat' video: Is a labrador similar in size to a panther? The policeman mentions the cat is similar in size to both, I'm sat here thinking a panther is significantly larger than a labrador.
Then there's the fact that, for labrador-sized, that's a small cat...
Daniel Evans, Telford, UK

Are you sure that's Madonna and not Iggy Pop (Web Monitor)?
Phil, Guisborough

Re no named officials and consistent pronouns (Tuesday's Quote of the Day). That would be "it" then?
Candace, New Jersey, US

Caroline (Tuesday letters), gender has nothing to do with it. Bigamy is gender-neutral and only incorrect because of the number of marriages involved - this lady was a polygamist. As the gender-neutral term is the more widely known, it makes sense to use it in preference to polyandrist (or if this had been a male, polygynist). It has amused me to see the defendant in this case being described as a "serial bigamist" - as any engineer will confirm, bigamy and polygamy are obviously parallel processes.
Justie, London

I just got an e-mail telling me I can catch swine flu from tinned pork. I deleted it - it's obviously spam.
Lee Pike, Auckland, New Zealand

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A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

It's been too, too long since the Independent featured a sad-eyed dolphin on its front page. But that doesn't stop Paper Monitor hankering after the good old days, especially when the Indy teasingly squeezes a marine creature onto page one. Only it's not a dolphin. And it appears to be in quite a perky mood.

Also confounding expectations is the Daily Telegraph. It gives over its front page "bronzed filly" slot to a bronzed corporal (reproduced right).

It seems disrespectful to note that he is topless, given that the MoD is trying to claw back most of his compensation for being shot in Iraq. But topless he is. Not even the Sun runs the photo as large as the Telegraph.

There is a topless man, too, on the front page of the Daily Mail (and inside the Express). But he is not as bronzed or as photogenic as the hero soldier. It is Jack Nicholson, heaving himself aboard a speedboat in the south of France. But at least his swimwear holds up to the task, unlike the "go faster" suit worn by the swimmer in today's quote.

And finally, the Guardian also puts a topless swimmer on page one, and he too is a picture - well, his face is a picture.

Grimacing in disbelief, eight-times Olympic gold medallist Michael Phelps emerges from the pool after being beaten for the first time since 2005.

"What, I lost?" is the headline.

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"I felt like the split was almost down to my knees, I felt like I was putting on a pretty good show" - US swimmer whose 'go faster' suit split in a rather crucial area.

As Ricky Berens warmed up ahead of the men's 4x100 relay at the swimming world championships in Rome, the back seam of his swimsuit - one of the controversial skintight polyurethane numbers that is to be banned - came apart at the seams in the buttock area. He still won.
More details (Daily Telegraph)

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I'm glad Nigel in Salford (Monday letters) likes the idea of national memorial services for Great War veterans, but I was sure we had one already on 11 November. Admittedly, it's for all veterans, but I don't think we should discriminate - those who fall in their countries service sacrifice no more or less depending on when they fall.
Ian, York

Hit or miss for charities in recession? paints a fairly bleak picture. I can't help feeling that it's missing the point. The thing I think should be at the heart of this story is how British people are more willing than ever to help those in need. Nice one Britain!
Ian, Redditch

Forget ice falling out of the sky, I'd love to see a story tomorrow proclaiming Man injured by space cheese.
Dan, Cambridge

I know that current fashion is to not use gender specific terms, but I fid it irritating that Emily Horne is referred to as a multiple bigamist. The linguistically correct term would be polyandrist.
Caroline Brown, Rochester, UK

Hmmm the government asking for civil servants to "Tweet". I am a civil servant working for a government organisation, and oh what do I find when I go and check my Twitter feeds? The site is blocked! Bugger.
Nick, Hurstpierpoint

"Fantastic Mr Fox is a British film, based on a Roald Dahl book, set in the UK, produced in the UK..." says Wes Anderson. Right after we're told that it stars Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson and George Clooney. Makes perfect sense.
Aaron, Reading, UK

Well thanks a lot John Bratby (Monday letters). I never could spell yatch or dihngy.
QJ, Stafford, UK

Web Monitor might like to note that the phenomenon of people documenting their lives rather than enjoying the moment was reported in a manner very similar to Mr Brooker's report as long ago as 1968 by Ray Davies of the Kinks in his song "People take pictures of each other". (PS - get well soon, Paper Monitor!)
Colin Edwards, Exeter, UK

Dear Paper Monitor, so sorry that you're feeling poorly. Here's a large dose of TLC to be taken with a swig of whatever takes your fancy. And a big hug to make you feel better.
Nicole, London

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A celebration of the riches of the web.

The entrepreneurial skills of Somali pirates and Madonna's health go arm-in-arm in only one place - Web Monitor. If you find an interesting link, share it with us by sending it via the comment box.

• Web Monitor is going out on a limb now, or two limbs to be precise, to talk about Madonna's arms. Her very ripped arms are muscling in all over the internet.
Jo Clements in the Daily Mail compares her to an exhibit by anatomist Gunther Von Hagens.

Other papers can't resist the wordplay, with Mark Swain in the Mirror saying she's always been a big hitter, and The Scotsman declaring "you're so vein".

Dan Buckley in the Irish Examiner goes against the grain of putting the story in the tittle-tattle part of the paper, and instead places it in the business section, saying Madonna looks like "something out of Night of the Living Dead".

The bloggers steer clear of the puns but leave little doubt as to their reaction, with Backseat Cuddler saying:

"When I saw these pictures of Madonna's arms, I threw up in my mouth a little."

• Fabulously successful innovators who reinvest their profits into training and equipment. Sounds like a reference for funding from the Princes Trust, but actually is the appraisal of Somali Pirates from Scott Carney in Wired Magazine. Carney analyses the Somali pirate business model:

"Like any business, Somali piracy can be explained in purely economic terms. It flourishes by exploiting the incentives that drive international maritime trade. The other parties involved - shippers, insurers, private security contractors, and numerous national navies - stand to gain more (or at least lose less) by tolerating it than by putting up a serious fight. As for the pirates, their escalating demands are a method of price discovery, a way of gauging how much the market will bear."

• Web Monitor is tracking the ongoing "Free" debate sizzling online. According to Chris Anderson, everything will become free but Malcolm Gladwell says this is impossible. Only yesterday Web Monitor flagged up Phil Gyford's blog on the question of if you started to have to pay for websites, which ones would you cough up for. And the snarkmarket blog has been looking specifically at what the prospect of "free" would mean to people working in the liberal arts. Guest writer Matt Penniman thinks eventually people will do fun jobs for free:

"Now, in the previous economic paradigm, it was possible to do work that you would have done for less or for free and still be paid well for it, because it was too much trouble for your employers/clients to find someone who could do the work as well and for free. But the internet drastically reduces that barrier. Imagine trying to find people to write a computer operating system and all the associated applications without expecting payment before the internet - now look at Linux.
I wonder if we're heading toward an economy where, to put it bluntly, people don't get paid for doing fun things. If something is fun - for someone in the world who finds it fun enough to become good at it, and to do it without expecting pay - it will no longer pay."

• The taxi dancer is seeing a resurgence in Germany. Dancers for hire from anything from one dance to a whole evening are earning money as singletons latch onto the ballroom craze.
Cornelia Rudat in the Economist's More Intelligent Life is rather taken by the idea:

"Amid the twirling skirts and suited gentlemen in a grand and vaulted space, I fell in love. Everyone moved so well; everyone looked so lovely. When one of the taxi dancers asked me to the floor, I was thrilled. But then I was flustered. Surrounded by such anachronistic grace, I felt all too aware of the fact that my waltz, foxtrot and jive lessons were more than 30 years old (though my professional dance partner was far too good to let me look foolish)."

• Still in Germany David Crossland in Der Spiegel has been following a case that will determine who owns the right to yodel:

"The textless singing in rapidly changing pitch has been used since the Stone Age to seek help, express delight at the wonders of nature and woo milkmaids ... The legal dispute focuses on who composed the unforgettable yodelling refrain "Holla-rä-di-ri, di-ri, di-ri" in the Kufstein Song, one of the most famous Alpine folk songs, a perennial hit in beer tents at the Munich Oktoberfest."

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A [snuffle] service highlighting the [cough] riches of the daily press.

Don't step too close. Paper Monitor has been off ill. Maybe it's a summer cold, perhaps something rather more, er, topical - although no temperature, so one assumes it's unlikely to be the latter. Unless... and this is hazy... it might be wine flu.

But just in case, Paper Monitor is writing this from within a plastic bubble, while wearing a protective suit and yearning to gallop off into the sunset.

This is taking things a little far, as plastic bubbles and protective suits do not figure in the Guardian's cut-out-and-keep guide on how to spot and treat swine flu. And this is not just any cut-out-and-keep guide, but "the definitive cut-out-and-keep advice in partnership with the British Medical Journal".

Instead it is altogether more sensible and less alarmist, but does feature a massive photograph of a woman in a surgical mask - the agreed visual shorthand for swine flu, even though there is - take it away, BMJ - "no good evidence that wearing masks will protect you".

Meanwhile, the papers also mourn the passing of legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham. Paper Monitor mentions this mainly because, despite being sufficiently interested in modern dance to have seen the Merce Cunningham troupe perform, one had always assumed Merce Cunningham was a woman. Only it turns out he's not.

Disconcerting when one's preconceptions about another's gender are blown out of the water, no?

The Daily Mail, too, is much concerned with preconception-busting, musing on what it is about a man with "grey frizzy hair, spectacles and squinty smile" that attracts the ladies.

For Lembit Opik has a new soulmate - a 21-year-old underwear model. He says he likes her because she's "beautiful, smart and attractive". She says she's always "liked an older man and it's refreshing that he sees me as intelligent".

Ain't love grand?

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"Though the account will be anonymous (ie, no named officials will be running it) it is helpful to define a hypothetical 'voice' so that tweets from multiple sources are presented in a consistent tone (including consistent use of pronouns)" - extract from the Cabinet Office's 20-page guide to writing a 140-character Twitter entry.

The guidelines for writing official "tweets" also says the tone should be "informal spoken English", and that government departments should not follow individual users uninvited, as this may be interpreted as "interfering 'Big Brother'-like behaviour".
More details (The Guardian)

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A celebration of the riches of the web.

Web Monitor is feeling perkier now (unlike its poorly sibling) and is back in the driving seat of the Monitor Towers pick-up truck, cruising the internet, stopping off only to gather interesting bits, sling 'em in the back and bring 'em home to you.

• Honesty Lab looks at how subjective honesty has become and is trying to get a consensus, according to criminal lawyer Stefan Fafinski talking to the BBC. In a style similar to the charming and self-explanatory Scenic Or Not, you can rate fibs, thefts and insurance scams in terms of how morally corrupt you find them. Lawyers and scientists are involved because the findings have implications for how juries work. The findings from the experiment will be presented at the British Science Festival in September. So could this herald a new age in crowdsourcing justice, or is it an early prototype for digital mob rule? Newspaper columnist Tom Sutcliffe doesn't have very high hopes, questioning the validity of results because they are online and, in his eyes, superficial. The New Law Model, a blog which helps "lawyers to thrive in the digital age" describes Honesty Lab as the 1982 Ghosh Test dragged into the 21st Century. Ghosh was a surgeon convicted of obtaining money by claiming fees for work that others had carried out. In his appeal, the judge told the jury to use their common sense to decide whether Ghosh had been dishonest.

• A perfect example of changing morals can be seen in attitudes towards downloading music and films, and more generally what we're prepared to pay for online - a topic discussed in Phil Gyford's blog. Should we be welcoming in a new era of free stuff and finding new ways to fund it? Web Monitor has spoken of this before, and has watched the debate between Chris Anderson (everything will become free) and Malcolm Gladwell (free is an impossibility). Mr Gyford (he of Pepys' Diary) seriously considers which websites he would be prepared to pay for and lists just three - Daring Fireball, which puts together articles about Apple, Kottke, and David Smith's Preoccupations ...which happens to be a favourite of Web Monitor when fishing for tasty treats.

• As the Financial Times reports that Apple is trying to bring back albums, The Quietus reminisces about one of the format's many so-called "golden age"s: the Britpop '90s. Garish patriotism or unparalleled optimism? Luke Turner isn't sure:

"So Britpop was at its worst when it was waving Union Flags, indulging in Blur's shape-shifting class tourism and hovering chisel in the bogs of the Groucho Club. It was at its best when, like the Auteurs' entire catalogue or Pulp tracks like 'I Spy', archly and intelligently depicted the seedy undercurrents to Englishness, or, however superficially, helped out sexually confused youth."

• Dan Hill (formerly of a nearby parish) in the blog that accompanies the Speechification podcast backs up one of the theories that Web Monitor has been investigating: that there is an online audio revolution going on. Among his favourite sites of sound are The Monocle Weekly (from another of Mr Hill's erstwhile homes), the Guardian's Football Weekly and The New Yorker's fiction podcast. And as well as AudioBoo, another audio-sharing website that's emerged recently is Spoken Word.

• Do you wonder whether certain among your friends have had any time to enjoy their holidays after the time-consuming output of pictures, blog posts and Twitter updates they've been feeding you, asks social media expert Danah Boyd. She says that they could be addicted to documenting their lives, something Charlie Brooker noted in the Guardian back in 2007:

"They were all photographing themselves. In fact, that's all they seemed to be doing. Standing around in expensive clothes, snapping away with phones and cameras. One pose after another, as though they needed to prove their own existence, right there, in the moment. Crucially, this seemed to be the reason they were there in the first place. There was very little dancing. Just pouting and flashbulbs."

Talking of Mr Brooker, a dating website called OK Cupid wants to grab your attention by quizzing you on how similar you are to Charlie Brooker. Web Monitor was described as vanilla ice-cream, and will now spend the evening wondering whether to take that as a compliment.

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If we are to have a national memorial service in memory of the the Great War veterans, then surely it should be truly national with all major cites taking a feed on to big screens in open areas. Even those of us who are not religious or are anti-war would like to pay our respects to all of the brave people from that generation.
Nigel, Salford

Suz, Jamie, Lauren (Baptism vs Christening - Letters, Friday) - you're all wrong! See here - two words with the same meaning, but one perhaps used more colloquially than the other. Which makes me smile when I see stories like this: I rather like the idea of a ship being made one with Christ.
Aqua Suliser, Bath

Christening anciently means anointing the child with chrism, blessed oil, which is done after the baptism to show that the child is now a Christian - marked with the sign of the cross on the forehead. Over time, the term came to be used as a synonym for baptism, especially among the unchurched. Nowadays, church folk always use the term baptism for the rite as that is the correct term, but I, for one, would never correct someone who used christening as a synonym - that's just being pedantically rude - we all know what is meant.
Susan Thomas, Brisbane, Australia

I'm pleased to see that "Fertility donor pay debate call" is an all-noun headline that really is all-noun, without any cheating. Although if you were going to be completely pedantic, you might argue that "fertility" is used adjectivally in the noun phrase "fertility donor", and similarly for "pay" in "pay debate", and indeed that the compound nouns "fertility donor" and "pay debate" themselves adjectivally modify "call". So isn't it lucky that no-one here would ever be completely pedantic.
Adam, London, UK

"That's gravity for you!"
Paul Greggor, London

Was Keith from Guildford (Letters, Friday) addressing Magazine Monitor? Is the truth about the monitor finally out?
Laurence, London

Re: the "10 things" picture of 10 yachts. I've got a horrible feeling it may actually be 9 yachts and one dinghy. Never mind - worse things happen at sea.
John Bratby, Southampton

Aaron from Reading (Letters, Friday) - you can have your geek points when you learn to spell 'its' properly.
Aimee, St. Andrews, Scotland

This kind of heartwarming tale (or tail) seems to be something of a silly season favourite
Wilkins, London

The first real maize maze may date from 1993, but there is a fictional one in the BBC micro adventure game "Kingdom of Hamil", published by Acornsoft in 1983. So the BBC got there first!
Hamish McGlobbie, Leeds, UK

To the Rt. Hon. Lady Monitor of Shepherd's Bush. VSOP, BBC, GCSE. You and your husband are cordially invited to a 'lads only' drinking and poker evening at the stag next Monday night. RSVP
Colonel Cholomdeley-Smyth Esq., Newcastle, UK

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Paper Monitor is feeling unwell.

It will be back tomorrow.

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"I don't like you" - Gordon Brown's three-year-old son, Fraser, greets Piers Morgan.

The Britain's Got Talent judge is paid to issue insults at other people. And having edited the Daily Mirror and News of the World, he's received a few too, but Fraser is surely one of Morgan's youngest antagonists.

More details (Daily Mail)

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