Paper Monitor
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Now here's a thing about the G8 summit in Germany that hasn't been widely realised. Eight – that is the word, eight – sounds remarkably similar to the word hate. With that info nugget in mind, Paper Monitor turns to the Sun for a digest of the current state of geo-global political dynamics (ok, we don't know quite what that means).
"G Hate: Who 8s Who" runs the headline. Underneath, there's an illustration of animosities at the summit with the world's eight most powerful leaders inexplicably depicted as Lego figures around a "row table" and listing who hates who.
A taster… "Britain: hated by France and Germany and Italy…"
"Italy: Romano Prodi hated by Blair… also hated by all because he's a great pointless windbag, very pompous and with a big mouth."
"Russia: hated by all."
Talking of Lego, and introducing the new theme of world records you surely didn't know existed, the Guardian's got a picture of the "world's tallest Lego pirate ship mast".
Finally, over to the Telegraph, where Paper Monitor has long silently observed a formula to many of the missives that appear on its letters page. It goes something like this:
• identify an event in the news to comment on
• contort it into a pithy, stinging barb against either Tony Blair or modern life (or, best of all, both at once).
Example from today's letters page:
"SIR - The most common cause of drunkenness is unhappiness. Even the briefest glance at Blairite Britain is enough to make a life-long tee-totaller reach for the Nebuchadnezzar."
"SIR - You report that millions are not aware of how much they drink. What nonsense! We just prefer not to admit it in public because we are heartily fed up with people trying to tell us how to live our lies."
Quite.