Headline of the year: devon cornwall water bill bills south west water
Behn, Plymouth

So according to 7 days 7 questions and which Jedward is which, "like Ant and Dec, they try to always stand on the same side to help people differentiate". I find it quite easy to differentiate between Ant and Dec, due the fact they're not twins and look completely different anyway.
James Dawkins, London

Ah, Vanity Fair...
Maisy, Milton Keynes

Woo Hoo! For the first time ever in four years I've scored 7 out of 7 on the 7 days quiz! Tunnocks teacakes are on me, folks...
Charlie, Wantage, UK

For the first time in absolutely years, I got 7 out of 7 on the news quiz. Any chance I can have some kudos? Also, can I collect the kudos which I won for back-to-back top six captions from summer '08?
Jordan D, London, UK
Monitor note: Catch!

Chookgate (Thursday letters), that may be the definition of osmosis when used metaphorically, but it's not the scientific definition. And since Paper Monitor mentioned a science teacher, the scientific definition is the one that is implied.
Alexander Lewis Jones, Nottingham, UK
Monitor note: Paper Monitor has left the building

I had to reread the first paragraph of this story three times and I'm still not sure I understand what happened...
Dave W, Liverpool, UK

Dear Pedants' Corner,
Re Paper Monitor's "It's political correctness gone mad..."
No, no, no. It's health and safety gone mad. I refer you to Stewart Lee's recent and excellent TV programme on the distinction for further clarification.
Thank you.
Saffron Garey, Farnborough, Hants
Monitor note: Oh Saffron, you of all people should have got it then...

Is it wrong for me to think the health 'n' safety Christmas tree looks quite nice? Also the town centre manager stuck to the public's wishes.
K Morrison, Rochester, UK

Gerry (Thursday letters), the "sixth form" consists of the sixth and seventh years of secondary school, while the fifth year of secondary school has been referred to as "year 11" since 1990.
Mandy, Cambridge

What is Jedward?
Paul Jorgensen, Oman

1. Michael Jackson's iconic white glove is a modified golf glove.
More details (The Scotsman)

2. To be a Beefeater you have to have done 22 years military service.
More details (The Times)

3. Seemingly vegetative patients are asked to think of playing tennis while being scanned for evidence of consciousness.
More details

4. The UK had its first curry restaurant in 1809.
More details

5. The hamlet of Seathwaite in Borrowdale is, on average, the wettest inhabited place in England.
More details

6. All British infrastructure, including bridges, is designed to at least withstand the kind of flooding that would happen on average once every 200 years.
More details

7. Hammerhead sharks can actually see rather well.
More details

8. And humans use their skin to "hear".
More details

9. Google will only remove images from its image search facility if legally ordered to do so.
More details

10. Christmas trees can be dangerous.
More details

Seen 10 things? Send us a picture to use next week. Thanks to Catriona Morrison for this picture of 10 legs.

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

This week it's French artist Alice Daquet preparing for a performance in a huge balloon at the opening ceremony of an art festival in Tokyo.

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

6. Candace9839
Guitar Hero post-H1N1

5. aberdeen_girl
*sigh* Looks like I'll be playing Portmeirion again...

4. jellyba
Why Debbie Harry never ages.

3. bennym22
Producers vehemently deny that they are starting to run out of ideas with the Saw Christmas Special.

2. LaurenceLane
Morrissey suggested it for my next gig in Liverpool.

1. discom8
New method is revealed to prevent Sheffield students from urinating in the street.

Sorry for the delay - last night Paper Monitor was lured out for a pre-pre-Christmas drinkie, stayed out past bedtime, and is feeling a little worse for wear. Even after a coffee and breakfast bap. And - and! - someone's snaffled most of the papers.

(Fortunately, this wasn't on tap, otherwise your columnist would be most unwell today.)

It being nearly December, Christmas lights bedeck many a High Street, and festive trees are being erected in squares and shopping centres up and down the land. The rest of us may look at these and coo (so long as they don't go up too early), but those in charge of such decorations have but one thought in mind - it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

Cue the inevitable photo of what's sure to be dubbed "Britain's worst Christmas tree", which has recently appeared in a shopping precinct in Poole, Dorset.

"The health and safety Christmas tree: there's no mess and you can wipe your feet on it" - the Times

"When is a Christmas tree not a Christmas tree? When it is a giant cone covered in what appears to be green doormats...
It has no trunk so it won't blow over, no branches to break off and land on someone's head, no pine needles to poke a passer-by in the eye, no decorations for drunken teenagers to steal and no angel, presumably because it would need a dangerously long ladder to place it at the top."

The Daily Express headlines the story "Oh joy, it's the Elf and Safety Christmas tree".
"Christmas cone baffles shoppers" - Daily Telegraph

And the Daily Mail? It talks to the man who chose it, town centre manager, Richard Randall-Jones.

"'People think you can just go into the woods, chop down a tree and put it up in the high street. But if it blows over and kills someone then somebody is liable for it. We have to have guy ropes and hoardings to stop it from falling over and hitting somebody.
'Last year the board said they and the public didn't like all the ropes and hoardings around the Christmas tree. So I was tasked with finding a solution and we came up with the cone tree.'"

It's political correctness gone mad...

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 1x SHRUNK WISHY WASHY. But what's the question?

UPDATE 1638 GMT: The correct question is, name one of the neatly labelled props waiting in the wings for panto season to start?

Of your imaginatively wrong questions, we liked:

• Clarence_E_Pitts' In the Hogwarts version of The Twelve Days of Christmas, what precedes 2x Ghouls-a-courting?
• BeckySnow's How did my mother refer to my last boyfriend?
• philjwade's What is the age old problem experienced by men when they jump into an ice cold bath?
• MightyGiddyUpGal's New dance craze for the ambivalent?

There are more brickbats than bouquets for Tactical Nuclear Penguin, a Scottish beer that seems designed to cause a furore.
More details

Re Andy's letter... which is why Paper Monitor called it news osmosis. PM could have called it newsmosis I suppose and then no one would complain but then again no one would understand either. Personally, I thought it rather clever.
Chris Clarke, Grenoble, France

Andy, that'll be a Gore-Tex coat presumably.
Owain Williams, Regensburg

Re this story, it's good to see that Gordon has found time for things other than football punitry since leaving Celtic.
Simon Rooke, Nottingham UK

Re the headline "Urinating student avoids prison"
I wouldn't have thought it would have been too difficult.
Dr W B Chellam, Bradford

Well, Adam Wednesday's letter) and Christopher (Tuesday's letters), perhaps Paper Monitor isn't so much revealing his or her age as his or her country of secondary education. Scottish schools don't refer to the amalgamated fifth and sixth years as a "sixth form". "Fifth form" is thus still acceptable. Coupled with the north-of-the-border-sounding "Ms McLeish", this could suggest a Caledonian cultivation.
Gerry, Glasgow

Why oh why did you have to use that image for this story? I'm gagging for a curry now!
rousemedia@bbc_magazine

Today in Web Monitor: A new space mission from an old spaceman, turning a negative into a positive and answering the phone like a sailor.

• In the Huffington Post Buzz Aldrin is getting hot under the collar about Nasa's new spaceships. Accidents and budget constraints mean Nasa are going back to capsule-shaped spaceships instead of shuttles with wings. Aldrin says this is going back a generation:

"It seems we have decided to throw away our Shuttle experience and go 'back to the future'."

Instead of retiring the shuttles Aldrin wants to use them for the next five years and get private businesses to help along the way. He's calling it his Unified Space Vision and is promising more snippets of his plan in the future.

• Christopher Beam in Slate asks if the reviews plastered over film posters are ever true.

In amongst the examples of positive words plucked out of negative reviews is a nugget of a negative review interpretation:

"Companies will occasionally use negative quotes in promoting a film. When Siskel & Ebert gave 1997's Lost Highway 'two thumbs down,' director David Lynch proudly ran the quote along the top of newspaper ads, calling it 'two more great reasons to see' the film."

• Saying hello was not always the conventional way to answer the telephone Nate Barksdale finds in Cardus. He started his look at how we answer the phone after finding in the language site Omniglot that in many languages there is a separate word for hello on the phone. Predecessors of hello include "are you there" in the UK. Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone's inventor, wanted ahoy to be the conventional answer. This really tickles Barksdale:

"This tidbit opens up in me a great deep pool of longing for a pop-cultural world that might have been: Ahoy Kitty pencil cases, Jim Morrison crooning 'Ahoy, I love you, won't you tell me your name,' Renée Zellweger shutting up Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire with a tearful 'You had me at ahoy!'"

"It's everyone's worst fear... THE NIGHT MY HOUSE BURNT DOWN femail Magazine, 17 sparkling pages"

Gosh, what a way to promo a tragic tale AND a fluffy supplement about dresses and Christmas perfumes at the same time.

One of these things is not like the other, but that's never stopped the Daily Mail in the past. Paper Monitor could ponder the unbearable fascination of the mind that came up with that front page for the rest of the day...

And if the Mail itself does nothing else today, it can revel in victory over its traditional rival. It narrowly beat the Daily Express team in the Press Gallery Pub Quiz held at Parliament last night. The Sun muddled in mid-table, and the Daily Mirror came alarmingly near the bottom.

Right, back to the task at hand. The Daily Star has an interview with a young mum it dubs "Britain's laziest teen". How does it know? The story sheds no light on the criteria used to name her "top slacker".

Meanwhile, here's a headline from the Times that tells a story in its entirety, but which makes you want to read more, more, more:
"Judge rips up mortgage, wipes out $500,000 arrears and hands home to couple to punish 'replusive' bank"

So who is this man sticking two judicial fingers up at a mighty financial institution? It's one Judge Jeffrey Spinner, David to IndyMac Bank's Goliath.

Get in, your honour.

An ailing couple who fell into negative equity - "under water" in the US - went to court expecting to be evicted after interest and penalties on their mortgage took their debts to $500,000 (about £300,000). But as the bank had rejected their every attempt to settle the debt, the judge branded the bank "repulsive" and wiped their slate clean.
More details (Times)

Bob (Tuesday's letters), you've heard of William Tell haven't you? He wasn't British, and yet we recognise the splitting an apple on somebody's head motif instantly.
Louise, Bedfordshire

Basil (Tuesday's letters), I also love the idea of a "media whirlwind of...Pebble Mill, Nationwide and Tiswas" Woo hoo, let the good times roll!
Ellie, Herts

No, Christopher Eio (Tuesday's letters), I beg to differ: I think you are showing your extremely young age by suggesting that talking about the 5th form is anything other than perfectly normal.
Adam, London, UK

Paper Monitor's science teacher may well have reinforced the importance of knowing about osmosis, but was apparently less successful at imparting the crucial knowledge of what it actually is. Osmosis specifically refers to the diffusion of water across a semi-permeable membrane. Passive movement of anything else (including unwanted information) is just diffusion.

I'll get my coat.
Andy, Woking

Today in Web Monitor: The end of uncool, agressiveness at work spotted and a new discrimination.

• Cultural commentators love talking about what's cool and what's not, but Brian Eno in Prospect magazine's blog thinks that with the multitude of choices available, we could be seeing the end of uncool:

"There's a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don't have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It's all alive, all 'now,' in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it's old or foreign has left the collective consciousness."

• John Crace's article in the Guardian [screengrab here] on the how to handle stress at work starts with the provovative "Change a word and I'll kill you". At first glance, it looks like the sub-editors have tartly taken him at his word and left in words that were not intended for publication. But Guardian twitterers (here, here, and here) insist that the aggression was a knowing joke from Mr Crace to jump-start a piece about aggression towards one's colleagues.

• Michael Toscano in Curator magazine claims to have found a new ism - fairyism. That's discrimination against fairies. He charts how fairies have systematically been beaten down in storytelling becoming smaller and smaller, and eventually being depicted as inferior to humans:

"The western fairy is now too impotent to matter, and has become a character in a new myth: the myth of human supremacy. Adults no longer have anything to fear from fairies - and therefore have nothing to learn from them.
However, Peter Pan is just that: truly modern. In it, the fairy is entirely subjected to human power. Today, in films like Ferngully, Shrek, and Hellboy 2, fairies are dominated by humans, and the new myth of human superiority and fairy inferiority is perpetuated."

The story of a film actor losing it by interrupting his curtain call to harangue an audience member is rather compelling. But how to make this tale really sing?

"Harry Potter villain 'attacks' audience member for talking during West End play" - that's the Daily Mail's take on the story.

Harry Potter villain? What, Voldemort?

No, Professor Quirrell. He was in the first boy wizard film. Chap in a turban. Him. Or rather, the chap who played him. Whatsisname. With the glasses. Looks a bit like John Lennon. Actually, didn't he play John Lennon once? Or was it twice?

Anyway, him.

How do the other papers cover the alleged incident?
"Why did he lose the plot? Actor faces police action after lunging at fan in the audience" - Times. And its online SEO-friendly (search engine optimisation) headline is: "Actor Ian Hart faces police action after lunging at member of audience".

Oh, Ian Hart, you say? I know him. But can't. Quite. Place. Professor Quirrell.

In other news, brain training experts claim an hour of sudoku can burn off more calories than are in a choc-chip biscuit. Well, they would, wouldn't they?

How to illustrate this piece? After all, the numbers one to nine being placed in little rows of boxes isn't the most visually arresting of topics. The Daily Express deploys the oldest trick in the book - a photo of a young blonde in her smalls doing the puzzle. So does the Mail, only with a brunette.

By the by, an illuminating reader's comment on the Mail Online seeks to debunk this theory, which, quite frankly, is asking for it:

"Calories burned by the average sedentary woman in a day 2000.
Number of hours in a day 24
Average number of calories burned in one hour: 2000/24=83.33
So girls I'm afraid Suduku will burn around 7 calories an hour over what you would normally use and is thus not all that useful as a weight loss strategy.
Erik, Derby"

Meanwhile, Paper Monitor does not pretend to know everything. And this is today's imponderable. Why dress a three-year-old in heels? Gold strappy sandals, to be precise. In November. When you yourself opt for slouchy biker boots 'n' jeans?

For this is what Katie Holmes has done - again - with wee Suri. The Mail seeks an answer:

"'Dressing Suri in amazing outfits has become Katie's favourite hobby,' said a source... Despite a near-tumble while walking in heels last week, it seems Katie is determined to get her daughter ready for life on the glamorous red carpet. 'Suri can't always walk in her heels, sometimes she just steps right out of them,' the source admitted."

A source? Someone who personally knows the Holmes-Cruise clan, or someone who has looked at the many, many photos of Suri in many, many outfits, struggling to walk in heels?

SPOILER ALERT Soap fans may not wish to read any further.

And finally, what follows is perhaps the poorest deployment of a spoiler alert ever. This is the Mail's headline on an EastEnders article:

Lucas makes sure his wedding to Denise goes to plan... by killing off his love rival Owen
Spoiler alert!

Look away now! Oh. Too late.

Always fond of poking fun at those cheese-eating surrender monkeys, the latest series of The Simpsons stars caricatures of Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni in an episode titled The Devil Wears Nada. And when Homer calls the Élysée Palace - why? long story - the president is pictured at his desk, eating Camembert.
More details (Daily Telegraph)

The date on the freshly minted coin (this gallery, picture five) seems a little off.
Neil, Canada

Oh... for shame on those of us who thought "the thought" upon reading this headline. We should have known that his thetons or whatever they are would have saved him.
Jaye, Rutland, England

A German employee of a German bank in Germany has been found guilty in a German court of transferring money from rich German customers to poor German customers. She has been "dubbed the "Robin Hood Banker"". By whom, exactly?
Bob Peters, Leeds, UK

Re Socs the weight loss cat: "To date he has lost 0.65kg and it is hoped he will reach 8.8kg by January." That's some hope given his progress to date...
Dr Toes, carharrack

I'm sorry, but Paper Monitor's science teacher will be disappointed. That's not osmosis, it's just diffusion.
Alexander Lewis Jones, Nottingham, UK

Didn't Osmosis split earlier in the year? Something to do with Neil and Leon not getting on?
Nik Edwards, Aylesbury

5th form? Monitor, you're showing your age!
Christopher Eio (from the Magazine's Facebook feed)

Embarrassed at being embarrassed? How does that work?
Basil Long (who was born when "Grandma" was number one), Nottingham