91Èȱ¬

I feel I ought to complain. I was reading , and all the conditions were there for a fine example of nominative determinism, BUT THERE WAS NONE. No-one called Gerry Washout, or Martha Deluge. Where exactly does my licence fee go?
Ashley Pearson, Hull

Re : How terrible, people's names and addresses were shown - this is private information, never to be published in, say, a telephone directory?
ElleUSA, Utah ex-pat

In article it was stated: "585 teachers were surveyed.... Exactly half said they favoured weapons checks."

One wonders which school is employing an amoeba capable of bilateral cell-division as a teacher?

Dave, UK

Re :
Wouldn't an underground network from Argentina to New Zealand get very wet? It doesn't sound like a safe place for personal electronics.
Tom H, London

Re : Should somebody tell the man in the video that he's holding his flute incorrectly?
Katie, UK

Re , surely the reason why the Midlands prefers curry is perhaps due to the large Asian population living there, rather than to do with tastebud location?
Alastair, Polmont, Falkirk

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

1. There are 2,500 year old bird nests still in continuous use.

2. The Fred Perry sportswear logo was almost a pipe - Perry was a keen smoker - but his business partner thought this would put off women customers.

3. As a cold-blooded insect, flies are slower in the early morning and evening when the air is cooler, and speed up in the heat of the day.

4. C, the single-letter codename for the head of MI6, dates from when the first boss, Captain Sir Mansfield Cumming, signed himself "C" for Cumming.

5. Streetlights cause problems for bats.

6. The pilot and co-pilot on a passenger plane are not allowed to have the same meal in case they both get food poisoning.

7. The Queen has an allotment.

8. Scotland has the lowest age for criminal responsibility in Europe.

9. Hitachi makes trains.

10. Pak Do-ik, the North Korean footballer, is still known as "the dentist" among Italian football fans for causing them pain by scoring the goal that saw them beaten 1-0 in the 1966 World Cup.

Seen 10 things? . Thanks to Vic Barton-Walderstadt for this picture of 10 bollards.

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Winning entries in the Caption Competition.

The competition is now closed.

This week, Australian Betty Brawn balances two break dancers on a plank for the AIB street performance championships in Dublin. But what's being said?

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

6. SeanieSmith
Joan Collins' wardrobe department test new shoulder pads.

5. TheRealCatherineO
"For the love of God, Piers, BUZZ ME NOW!!"

4. eltelsopwith
In an ancient Salfordian ceremony, Hazel Blears faces her toughest test yet.

3. SimonRooke
DFS announce they're hiring staff and also that they have a new range of sofas.

2. AmusedofSwindon
Initial testing at Silverstone showed that the new Brawn had somewhat reduced handling, but did meet the proposed 2010 cost constraints.

1. generalhague
"It's a film...
Sounds like...
1st syllable....
Brokeback Mountain."

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A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

Is "local television showgirl" a job title that exists in the UK? And if it does, on which programme might said showgirl appear?

It is a job description with a whiff of Vegas about it, but it appears, from news reports, to be Italian for "former model". Or "prospective MEP". Or both.

Aptly nestled amid blacked-out sheets in the Times is the tale of the Italian prime minister and the "local television showgirl" who says she was paid to attend his parties. She's a former model, and a candidate in the recent European and municipal elections. In case you hadn't guessed.

And what's this? Ascot Ladies Day is normally a red-letter occasion for the Daily Telegraph. But today anyone looking to see which attractive filly in a lavish hat makes the paper has to turn to page 15. Fifteen!

That's because pages one through six - seven is a full page ad of pouting starlot (the masculine for starlet) - and eight through to 12 compare and contrast their leaked receipts with the heavily-edited versions released by the Commons authorities. (Incidentally, Paper Monitor has a bad case of newsroom envy after glimpsing theirs during coverage of the saga.)

PS. The Daily Express is today offering a free loaf of Waitrose economy essential white medium sliced. Paper Monitor wonders if this signals that soon the Guardian will run a competition to win your own Primark £3 bikini. Instead of its current win-a-duck-house wheeze.

PPS. On Monday one suggested that one might do something embarrassing if one's Facebook fan tally reached 1,500 by midweek. But that figure wasn't reached until the end of the week. Whew! Besides, Paper Monitor doesn't embarrass easily. Except when asked never mind.

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"Terri has to leave half an hour before she intends to because people just keep stopping her to talk to the duck" - Restaurant owner Liz Cottingham on the manager being shadowed by a duck

Terri Seabright is a human and manages a restaurant. Crispie is an Aylesbury duck. Crispie thinks Terri is her mother. Ahhhhh, it's a local news classic.

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Welcome to the Weekly Bonus Question.

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

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

This week's answer is A WONKY JAW.

UPDATE, 1605 BST: The correct answer - what was one of the identifying marks on a cat which went missing from a vet's surgery in Cheltenham (and which the vet distributed 20,000 posters trying to find).

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And there I was thinking was going to be a tale of how not even the great and the good are immune from squirrels invading their gardens...
Laura, Preston, UK

So, Prince Harry is going to be . He'll be giving 110% then?
Alex, Reading

Re Nick Morton (Wednesday's letters): I'm sure I won't be the only one to point out to him, that if the government do decide to pay for an extended broadband network, that money will come through taxation, so is entirely equivalent to a new tax, unless something else is cut. I'd also like to say that not wanting to pay tax to fund something that you don't use yourself is incredibly short-sighted. One of the reasons the government wants faster broadband for all is that it will be beneficial to the economy, and make us all richer.
Sam, Cambridge

I was worried to read at 13:28 today that will "be used to take spectators from St Pancras to the 2012 Olympics site at Stratford in east London in seven minutes." Seven minutes? Yikes, I thought we had until 2012! Is the site ready yet?
Aaron, Reading, UK

I have devised, on this slow Thursday afternoon, a game that all pedants can enjoy. I am sure I am not the only pedant to notice that many price-labels and signs nowadays are written with a character similar to the pound sign, but with two lines instead of one. This symbol refers to Lira, not Pound Sterling. The game, therefore, is to attempt to pay for goods and services in a Lira of your choice where the Lira sign has been used, and the winner is the person who completes the highest-value (in GBP) purchase.

Daniel Hayes, St Albans, UK

RE - Bruno isn't an alter-ego, he is a character. The two are such different things I don't think that even counts as pedantry!
Sophie, London

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A celebration of the riches of the web.

Web monitor's been clicking its way through the internet to find the most interesting bits.
Make sure you share your favourite bits by sending your links via the comment box to the right of this page.

• Here's somewhere that isn't featured in that daytime property show A Place in the Sun. how much an Isreali settlement property costs. For example, a two-bedroom house in Tel Aviv comes to about $400,000, but you can get a place for around $180,000 in the settlement of Modi'in Illit just 25 miles away. The outposts, Palmer says, are ripe for the speculative market as they are dirt cheap but risky - they may be knocked down at any moment or could grow into huge communities.

• Whilst the rest of the web is watching the Iranian protests on Twitter (), :

"It was at that moment that I understood, more fully than ever before, why revolutionaries succeed and then fail. It's because they're switching genres. They take over the country in a third-person (or first person) action game, but then they have to play an RTS [real-time strategy] to govern the country.
That's an entirely different gaming skill set. It's much easier to wreck than to build, and not only do they have to build, they also have to stop all those first-person action heroes who want to lead their own revolution."

• the price of buying professional wedding guests. In India a guest would set you back as little as £2 or up to £7 of you want them well-dressed and good looking. It's big business in Korea and paid guests cost around £15, whilst in Japan the price jumps to £125 per guest, more if you want them to make a speech or sing. The balancing of guests to make sure each side has the same amount is a big motivating factor.

• Web Monitor's daily splurge on blogosphere opinion makes it more than aware of the pundit, who is prepared to say anything on radio, on TV and online. So it's no surprise that this , appealed. He wants to make pundits accountable as nothing happens to them if their predictions are wrong. The ways of regulating the rent-a-gobs go from ridiculing the worst offenders on late night talk shows to to basing a whole corner of the betting industry on the reliability of the comments.

• The that investigative journalist Peter Lance has found a friendship blossoming between the mob and al-Qaida. He says he discovered Ramzi Yousef and mobster-turned-informant Gregory Scarpa Jr were placed in adjoining jail cells and started passing letters to each other. Lance says one such letter was a step-by-step instruction sheet entitled "How to Smuggle Explosives Into an Airplane".

• So the official MPs' expenses are out today (You can ). their nursery rhyme interpretation in January of Harriet Harman's expenses, blacking out almost everything. This isn't far from the truth - not the nursery rhyme bit, the blacking out bit. Page three of and page 31 of are just two examples when the whole page has been almost completely blacked out.

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A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

The debate about the anonymity of bloggers goes on, not with reference to Paper Monitor's gender, thankfully, but over at the Times following the paper's court victory over the naming of a secret policeman blogger (see yesterday).

The paper is being flamed by angry readers, who give it the kind of treatment ("shame on you") that we're accustomed to getting here at the 91Èȱ¬. But there are a few palpable hits, for instance: ""

Most interesting of all is a blog by the paper's own crime correspondent, who is : "We must confess to mixed feelings about the High Court ruling which allows the name of the award-winning blogger Nightjack to be published. His revelation as Detective Constable Richard Horton is the 'fruits of detective work' by our colleague Patrick Foster, The Times' media correspondent. A dogged piece of journalistic digging."

Get him!

Meanwhile, the expenses scandal is back, by the way. Feels like an old friend coming back off holiday. The heavily blacked-out documents have now been published by the House of Commons authorities - you can do a postcode search for your MP's receipts on on the 91Èȱ¬ News website.

The Daily Telegraph, which as you'll remember has all the uncensored documents, announces that at the weekend it will be including a free magazine with all MPs' expenses in it. The magazine will, rather nicely, have a duck on the cover.

Paper Monitor just feels sorry for the nation's paperboys and papergirls as they lug hundreds of extra pages around on Saturday morning. Industrial injuries on a massive scale are sure to be seen. The MPs didn't think of that when they claimed for their Tunnocks Teacakes and porridge, did they! Inconsiderate bunch.

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"They are the devil's vegetable" - Royal Navy Captain Wayne Keble, who has banned Brussels sprouts aboard HMS Bulwark

This has nothing to do with flatulence, says Capt Keble. He has taken umbrage against the vegetable simply because he hates it.

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A celebration of the riches of the web.

What do Afghan love letters, Japanese grass-eating boys and communist era fashionistas have in common? Well they're all in Web Monitor. If you come across an interesting view on your travels through the web, however random, send the link by commenting in the box to the right of this.

• Why is there so much unemployment in a depression? that his question isn't stupid, after all why don't prices and wages just fall and, as a result, the original demand be restored? His answer is that 100% of a company's savings are rarely passed on to the customer, companies have costs they can't change but most of all, even when people can afford to buy again, they're just too scared.

• Some demand is created by more than just the fluctuating markets. This is where the . It looks at how high end prostitutes can charge $1000 an hour - a wage comparable to a top lawyer. A recent study shows that earnings of high end prostitutes peaks at mid to late twenties and says by choosing to work as a prostitute during their prime years of fertility escorts forgo the economic benefits of marriage, hence a pay peak.

• on a new type of metrosexual males in Japan who not everybody is happy about. Soushoku danshi, which literally translated means "grass-eating boys" are named for their lack of interest in sex and their preference for quieter, less competitive lives. They're provoking a national debate about how the country's economic stagnation since the early 1990s has altered men's behaviour. Companies, Harney says, are worried grass-eating boys are less status driven and women worry they are commitment-phobes.

• how haute couture survived in communist East Germany. Among the inventiveness was adapting durable plastic that farmers use to cover strawberries as a fashion garment. It was a material that served the underground designers well, as they had little in the way of quality fabric, most having been reserved for export. Winter says that East Germany was far from a fashion dead-end:

"In fact, creativity and individual style flourished in the context of East Germany's tight economy. A handful of independent designers profited from selling one-off items to a population with mostly hand-me-downs and ill-fitting, mass-produced government garb at its disposal. Improvisation was also common."

"To disclose their love would mean the end and perhaps worse. That day I realised that love existed in Afghanistan--in a single glance, a certain tone, the shadow of a school yard--but not without grave risk or consequence."

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A ? No way. If you want broadband, you pay for it. I'm computer literate (I teach IT), but all I use the net for is shopping and I could live without that. I'm certainly not prepared to pay so someone can waste time on playing a game. If the government wants broadband so we can all buy our car tax online, why don't they pay for it?
Nick Morton, Camborne, Cornwall

Only 3/7 in the . That tells me that either I was never any good at PE (true) or went to pieces after seeing the picture of Rafael Nadal's chest (also true). In any case, I ought to do the quiz again.
Andrea, Cheltenham

The of the double-decker bus unit of measurement is revealed. "It will be huge - the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris".
Martin, Belfast

Re ... I think I'll give up eating carrots then.
Jenni, Lancaster

The short ringfoot katydid, the typophyllum katydid ()... phew! What katydid next?
Edward Green, London, UK

So how does one start the Freedom of Information Act proceedings to out Paper Monitor?
Dan, Cambridge

Hey Web Monitor, I'm a bumper-car-enjoyer-who-should-watch-Peep-Show too! Wanna hang out?
Aaron, Reading, UK

An occasional pedant writes to Dan, Oxford (Tuesday letters), who thought Stephen Dodds (Monday letters) needed a full stop at the end of his sentence rather than a question mark. But he wanted a question mark so used one.
Vicky, East London

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A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

Yesterday in a High Court ruling, the Times won a case against the secret policeman blogger known as NightJack. The blogger had been seeking an injunction against the paper, which wanted to identify him publicly, but the Times fought the case and won. The judge ruled that blogging was essentially a public thing to do rather than a private thing.

NightJack was an acclaimed blog - indeed it won the Orwell prize for political writing - but now the author (who we may now know as Detective Constable Richard Horton) has deleted it as he faces disciplinary procedures.

An odd position, one might think, for a proud newspaper to find itself in, where it could be seen to have been responsible for identifying someone who is publishing sometimes inconvenient things about a public authority. One senses this dilemma goes quite a long way into the Times - its blogger-in-chief Daniel Finkelstein has written a short piece in today's paper in which he stops some way short of robustly defending his paper.

"Although the journalist part of me applauds any insight provided into the secret world of the police, there is a large part of me that sees why they would want to close NightJack down... It may have been been entertaining and informative to blog about current cases and police action. But was it ethical? Or loyal to your colleagues? Those, however, are issues for the author and his employers to sort out. For the rest of us, well, NightJack was superb. To me, blogs which build a picture of real life are the king of our form."

Deconstruct that!

And even weirder is the fact that DC Horton has written an article in today's Times as well. There seems to be no bitterness, no daggers drawn despite the dispute, just an acceptance that "it was decided that the public right to know about me outweighed any claim to personal privacy".

A link at the bottom of the column points to "a longer version of the article" being available on the Times website. The that even after the blog won the Orwell prize, none of the newspapers or TV stations which reported on the blog "seemed to want to publicise who was behind my blog".

He adds: "Then one morning I heard a rumour that the Times had sent a photographer to my home. Later in the afternoon came the inevitable phone calls from the Times, first to me and then to Lancashire Constabulary asking for confirmation that I was the author of the NightJack blog. That was easily the worst afternoon of my life."

Sadly there wasn't room for those lines to make it into print.

In any case, Paper Monitor has to ask him- or herself, why would a blogger really want to be anonymous anyway?

PS. The Daily Express is today offering a free packet of Waitrose economy essential tea bags. The cultural dissonance still makes Paper Monitor's brain hurt.

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"Mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, molluscs and nematodes" - some of the kinds of animals in which "same-sex behaviour" has been observed by scientists in California. The behaviour includes courtship, "pair bonding", right through to copulation, found Nathan Bailey and Marlene Zuk.

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A celebration of the riches of the web.

Web Monitor couldn't make decisions on what to put in the post today. Luckily, a new website is coming to the rescue. If you have an interesting link, send it by commenting in the box to the right of this page.

• an exquisite horror. He argues that the newest pop princess is actually pretending to be stupid, but instead is playing with the idea of femininity unseen since the days of Madonna's pointy bra. This one, he says is "a savvy media manipulator engaged in an elaborate, Warholian pop-art project".

• If you have problems making decisions, there's now a website to tackle that. asks tick box questions from whether you live in the suburbs or city to if you like bumper cars and based on that helps you make decisions on things like what you should watch on TV or where you can go on holiday. Web Monitor should watch Peep Show (and likes bumper cars).

• on a new campaign to fight diseases of the wealthy in developing countries. They say noncommunicable diseases that afflict the wealthy such as strokes and cardiovascular diseases now account for 44% of all premature deaths.

• Megan at the blog that the answer to global warming may be overpopulation. The reasoning behind the research from scientists at Cal-Tec is that if there are more people, more nitrogen is produced which in turn would cool the planet. The only problem is that for the plan to work, once overpopulation has saved the world, we'd have to start killing ourselves off.

• A writer of M*A*S*H, Ken Levin, is opening himself up to questions, any questions you have about writing a sitcom in his website . He says on his website that he's conducting this survey to find out what people around the world most want to know about writing television situation comedies, then he's going to conduct a 'teleseminar'.

• Uh, oh Web Monitor feels like it's been told off by the teacher. A few weeks ago we linked to a . Now the that lecturers are seeing more and more corrupt files replacing the old 'dog ate my homework' excuse. Inside Higher Ed state their agenda behind reporting on this site:

"Despite all the sentiments expressed about helping students avoid cheating, Corrupted-Files.com indicates on the top of the Web site that it would prefer not to be too well known, lest professors suspect. "Keep this site a secret!" the site says. In the interest of professors who may have noticed an uptick in the number of corrupt files they have received, we're sorry we can't oblige."

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Dear Paper Monitor, I used to read the international version of the 91Èȱ¬ news site, and never had any trouble finding Magazine. So don't worry, m'kay?
Ross, Lancaster, UK

So . Whilst I admire the effort; what self-respecting homicidal maniac would buy one if offered a choice?
Graham, Hayle

Stephen Dodds (Letters, Monday) - was it really? I didn't know that. Incidentally, I think you wanted a full stop, not a question mark, at the end of your sentence.
Dan, Oxford

Today's contribution - should there be some sort of alert and maybe an enforced name change procedure for when we see these actions coming a mile off?
Kat Gregg, Coventry

I was just on the phone to our lawyers and I accidentally used the term "misunderestimate" (a la George W Bush). The lawyer went on without blinking and perfectly understood what I meant. Is THAT how stupid words get into the English language?
Michael B, London

Beneath the following words in Web Monitor: "...then try out the SEO rapper who writes poetically about website design coding. No, really."
In my browser, appeared these:
"In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 91Èȱ¬ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content."
It doesn't even rhyme.
James, London

Great semi-pun in about artistic tree trunks... "A British firm, Timbmet, is helping with logistics." Genius.
Roobenstien, Belfast

Talking about copy and pasting, fans of it will be pleased to know the most copy and pasted man in politics is back for a second term, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Martin Comer, London UK

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A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

The Sun's Page 3 girl today is Lisa, 530, from Florence.

She doesn't, sadly, give her verdict on whether the 91Èȱ¬ licence fee should be shared with commercial broadcasters, or in fact any other issue of the day. She's not so active (or "bubbly", as the jargon in these parts of the papers usually has it) as she once was, being Lisa as in Mona Lisa.

The paper explains its introduction of oil painting nudes thus: "The saucy portrait gives us a glimpse of what she's got to smile about as it goes on show after laying hidden for hundreds of years." Was that an audible leer?

The renaissance stunner even gets a bit of a plug on the paper's front page, though how many purchasers will be swayed by the prospect of a nude from 1500 is debatable.

It does, incidentally, offer a DVD giveaway, which makes Paper Monitor feel almost retro. That's a green shoot of recovery, surely? Any other ideas for novel measurements of economic recovery via the COMMENTS button please.

Ahh those good times... when you used to be able to get an entire DVD library from what fell out of the day's papers... how far away they seem. But there are still freebies to be had if you're prepared to be selective about what you want and what paper you're prepared to read.

Today's Daily Mirror will give you a free £2 bet at William Hill while the Daily Star does the same thing for Coral. Once upon a time such a thing would have been frowned upon for encouraging people to start betting, but times have changed.

There's another offer in the Star - a cheap copy of the Daily Express which in its way feels a bit like the bookie offer. It's almost like saying "here try this, it's really good stuff you know". The Daily Star as a gateway drug to the hard stuff of the Express. Who'd have thought it?

But what they find when they get there, assuming any Star readers make that journey, may well befuddle them a bit... Today free in the Express.... a giveaway pack of Waitrose long grain rice.

Paper Monitor's brain hurts.

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"I probably should not have called the Queen 'Pam'" - Maureen Lipman regrets her nerves when meeting Her Royal Highness.

The veteran actress of stage and screen is not one to fluff her lines, but when she was introduced to the Queen at a function, she meant to say "Ma'am" but the words came out wrong.

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A celebration of the riches of the web.

Web Monitor has clicked through the web to get you the most interesting bits. Remember to send your links to us by commenting on the box to the right of this.

• Paul O'Grady who owns the production company that makes his telly show that he is happy to take a pay cut as long as it means he and his staff keep working:

"I'm not a businessman. I could pack it in, but I like work. I don't want to sound like Catherine Cookson but I've worked since I was eight, with a paper round and in a fruit and veg shop. Taking a pay cut won't demotivate me, not at all. It's not about money in the first place. It's about the job."

• that we may be seeing the end of the traditionally organised school reunion, thanks to Facebook, Twitter etc. This doesn't mean they are stopping, just that alumni organisations are being made redundant as people find their old friends by themselves and according to Time Magazine, seeing which one of your friends got fat in a photo doesn't stop people wanting to see it in the flesh as well.

• , Monkey See, that she was dismayed to find that Pixar's newest film Up does not have a female lead character. This means that apart from Up's princess sidekick, not one of Pixar's 10 films has had a female lead character. The points out that this debate has been rumbling for some time, pointing towards the sociology blog They chart the main characters in Pixar films so far, expressing most disbelief at the gender of the characters in the film A Bug's Life:

"...which not only is the main character male, the actual behaviours of male and female ants have been switched to fit in with our ideas of appropriate gender roles."

• the possible next leader of North Korea - Kim Jong-un. It's no mean feat given that virtually nothing is known about him. There is thought to be only one photo of Kim Jon-un outside North Korea, from the memoir of his Japanese sushi chef, Mr Fujimoto. It shows Kim Jong-un when he was 11.

• that not one but two invisibility cloak have been invented. They work by deflecting light and in the short term they could be usd for concentrating sunlight. The magazine says that one day, they could indeed be used to make things seem to disappear.

• , the daily news in rap form reached the heady heights Web Monitor hoped to report, despite Paper Monitor's efforts to rhyme the news. But informative rap is still around. After her YouTube hit , the that scientist Kate McAlpine is back on YouTube, this time , again in rap form based on her work at the planned Facility for Rare Isotope Beams.

If you think McAlpine proves that a geek can't pull off a rap with panache, then try out who writes poetically about website design coding. No, really.

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Regarding Dr Mike Beckett's comments on the redesign of : "This is especially true of household products which are freely available to the very young and very old, and used by people who may be clumsy, short tempered, drunk or mentally or physically unwell. Most people fit into one or more of these categories at some time in their lives." I'd like to meet someone who hadn't, at some stage in their lives, fallen into one of these catagories.
Cheryl, Newmarket, Suffolk

Re : If I was in charge it would be called slinky.
Stuart, Croydon

I know I like being cynical, but isn't this just a description of a person and a diamond rather than ? "He saw bodies - large heads, almond shaped eyes... and material that couldn't be burnt, ripped, cut - anything."
Jinja, Edinburgh

What was the first to enter the English language?
Stephen Dodds, Tokyo, Japan

Martin in Bristol (Friday's letters), "twonk" may have been around for many years (love the 'Dwarf episode too) but not every word appears in the dictionary - it's only now it has been added.
Graham, West Sussex

Come on now Paper Monitor: "Now all those things Mr Brule (it's really too tiresome to put those accents in again)." Have you not heard of Copy and Paste? That would have been 52 less keypresses than typing a complaint. And then more time wasted reading this message from me asking why you didn't use copy and paste... And more time wasted copying and pasting it into the letters page?
Kirk Northrop, Manchester, UK

What could Paper Monitor possibly do that is more embarrassing than revealing HIS gender? (Except making HTML jokes!)
Steve Bowman, London

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A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

Paper Monitor spent a lot of the weekend wondering about what makes life worth living. Not that times are particularly difficult, you understand. But what is it that makes life in one part of the world more pleasant than life in another.

In short why should one city (say, Zurich) be ever so desirable, while others, (say, anywhere in the UK) be ever so undesirable.

Oh, don't misunderstand me, this isn't the 91Èȱ¬'s verdict. It's that of the FT's star columnist Tyler Brûlé - the only man Paper Monitor has ever known of whose surname needs two ampersands and two semi-colons (an HTML joke, now making its second appearance in these pages). In a , he says Zurich is on top because of "outstanding and still improving public transport... ample leisure activities, including 50 museums and excellent restaurants.... and its airport, which serves 170 destinations and is now in line for a SFr460m (£262m) revamp". Basically the sort of things that really matter to folk like Mr Brûlé who spend a lot of time visiting cities around the world.

Nowhere in the UK made the cut; London - like New York - was excluded because of the "abysmal quality of its transport, public schools and housing stock".

Now all those things Mr Brule (it's really too tiresome to put those accents in again) identifies in Zurich really are very nice to have. And nobody like abysmal buses, schools or houses. But Paper Monitor can't help feeling that the pleasant little things in life make a big difference... the quality of the newspapers, for instance. The easy availability of credit porridge sarcasm. The freshness of the strawberries. The smell of freshly-baked crusty bread.

Personally you can keep your Zurichs, Copenhagens and Tokyos. Paper Monitor likes a place where there are pictures in the paper of .

• Anyhow, since we're talking about where you live, it might be appropriate to say that there have been a number of changes in the way the 91Èȱ¬ News website works, meaning people outside the UK now cannot see the front page as it appears inside the UK. This means regular Magazine readers might not find such easy access to Magazine features such as the Monitor, 7 days 7 questions or Clive James. You'll find more about it here on the Editors' blog.

But cunning is as cunning does, and so to get round this new state of affairs, regular readers can bookmark this page - bbc.co.uk/magazine - wherever you are in the world. Or follow us on Facebook or Twitter instead. Nearly 1,300 now on Facebook. If we hit 1,500 by midweek, Paper Monitor might be persuaded to do something embarrassing.

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"It's true that we're entrusting tourists to former prisoners ‑ but who knows the risks of the city better than they do?" - Official on Naples's plan to use ex-criminals to guide visitors

In the past, Naples has had a reputation as a something less than salubrious destination for tourists. Now they're doing something unusual to combat it.

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