Paper Monitor
10:57 UK time, Friday, 22 August 2008
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Like buses, you see no mention of the Silly Season all summer and then suddenly two come along at once. Here's the first, from Wednesday. And here's the second: today's story about "Britain's oldest light bulb".
Yes, it's "official", Mo Richardson's Swan Edison light bulb, which was first switched on in 1938, is "Britain's oldest light bulb". How do we know? Not because there's any documentary evidence (there isn't) or some authenticator from the Guinness Book of Records says so (s/he doesn't) but because the Daily Telegraph, Times and Daily Mail tell us so.
If Paper Monitor's memory serves it well, a story like this, about Britain's "oldest fridge", spawned a rash of claims from other people claiming their fridge was older. So brace yourselves from a slew of oldest light bulbs tales from here on into that start of the party conference season*.
After yesterday's mention of the Daily Telegraph's Bodies of Beijing quiz which featured a bikini-clad bottom, there's more on the latent sexual tensions wrought by scantily-clad Olympians in today's Times - with a piece basically speculating about how many athletes are going to cop off with one another at the closing celebrations. Although not at the closing ceremony itself.
"In the Olympic village tomorrow night, thousands of young men and women with the most fit, ripped, toned and muscled bodies in the world, who are at the peak of their physical prowess and haven't had sex for at least two weeks, will mingle for the last time before they fly home," runs the oh-so restrained set-up for the piece.
Paper Monitor hasn't time to read the full feature, but this "pull quote" - highlighted from the body text - piques its interest: "It is common to see eliminated athletes gorging on Magnums." Eh?
Staying with the Times, it is always a blow when one's dreams are shattered. Still smarting after Hugo Rifkind, late of the People column, never showed to squire Paper Monitor to the Magazine's fifth birthday party a month or so back, it comes as something of a shock to find out why. In his opinion column in today's paper, Rifkind casually mentions that he - And. His. Wife - dodge invites to North London dinner parties.
Hey-ho. To paraphrase Vince, the puppyish one in the seminal (in every way) 1990s drama Queer as Folk, the good thing about unrequited love is that it never grows old. Or suggests, for instance, through gritted teeth, that the natural habitat of dirty socks is *in* the laundry basket, not *in the general vicinity* of the laundry basket.
All of which makes for a disconcertingly breezy run up to today's mention of the Gary Glitter saga - and Independent columnist Matthew Norman's revelation that Glitter sang a nine-year-old Norman and his mate a lullaby while sitting at the end of his bed, in 1973. Norman's best friend's dad was Glitter's manager at the time. And, Norman assures us, it was all very innocent.
The column also contains this refreshingly frank admission from Norman reflecting on readers' likely level-headed response to the recent Glitter story: "Unhappily... the vast majority of Independent readers constitutes an infinitesimal minority of the population."
Oh, to be a fly on the wall at the Indy Christmas party when Norman comes face to face with the ad sales team.
*The official end of the Silly Season.
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