´óÏó´«Ã½

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

1. Baseball was played in Surrey in 1755.

2. There are algae that can bend light.

3. Women are more prone to nightmares.

4. The British Antarctic Survey needs a full-time plumber.

5. While everything else is getting more expensive, broccoli is getting cheaper.

6. Radio adverts can be banned for being too quick.

7. Zoroastrians were the first religious adherents to incorporate the end of the world into their beliefs.

8. Portraits of famous people often look like the painter instead.

9. When the police fire a baton round, they aim for the belt buckle.

10. Goats are a cost effective way of clearing waste ground.

Seen 10 things? . Thanks to Margaret Emerson, of Coventry, for her picture of 10 dormer windows.

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Monitor note: Happy 500th edition of Your Letters, everyone.

Please can an American help me - I want to know what on earth a "hockey mom" is. Does this mean she plays hockey and is a mother? Does the same logic make Bill Clinton a "saxophone pop"? And so what either way? I am at a loss as to what the significance is and on earth the term matters in a presidential election.
Martin, Bristol, UK

In , you really need to change your terms of reference - "travellers can take more than 10 trips on the Eurostar between London and Paris before recharging" - in light of .
Colin Larcombe, Orleans, France

and it also helps epilepsy. To the point where I grow it in the garden and on a bad day sprinkle it under my pillowcase. Marvellous stuff.
Mel, Godalming

The cost of the is said to be £910m. Where does this figure come from? The UK population is only 61m so if they gave us a £1m each to pay the gas bill it would be much cheaper. How can giving pensioners £25 a week if it gets chilly, and paying for insulation, come to over £10m for every person in the country - spin or bad maths?
MJ, Ingatestone

Fingers crossed my XL underpants don't go bust as well.
Mike, Newcastle upon Tyne

Motion, potion, lotion, ocean, emotion, commotion... I wonder why none of our aspiring limerick writers tried rhyming Laureate?
Matthew D, Lincoln

Paul T, worried about shots fired near vulnerable parts of the body (Thursday letters) - is this a bad time to mention that impact rounds are low velocity, so tend to hit the target a bit lower than where you were aiming?
Caroline Mersey, London, UK

Was browsing , picture 11 is surely not the Colin Montgomery? Is this his way of getting away from the Ryder Cup?
Jordan Dias, London, UK

Following How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria, Any Dream Will Do and I'd Do Anything, I shall be most disappointed in the ´óÏó´«Ã½ if the show searching for a - isn't called I'll Get You My Pretty - And Your Little Dog, Too.
Wells of Tunbridge Disgusted, Kent, UK

Re the Queen and the misdelivered lager turned away from Windsor Castle - I bet Phillip was upset.
Helen, Leicester

Congratulations to eltelsopwith, the winner of Friday's caption competition. It's a shame I don't get it. Am I alone?
Richard Place, Barnstaple, UK

Aaaagh! I wanted to enter the caption competition but am like two minutes late. Is it TOO LATE!?
Paul Speed, Grimsby
Monitor note: Yes. Better luck next week.

I didn't think ?
Stuart, Croydon

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Winning entries in the caption competition.

This week, Chucky the murderous doll takes a swing at a hapless commuter in Manhattan. But what's being said?

The competition is now closed.

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

6. stigmondo
There was something about Class 4C that unnerved him, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it.

5. John_Sevenoaks
''On the other hand,'' he thought, ''if God doesn't like us trying to recreate the Big Bang, what can he do about it?"

4. SundayParkGeorge
The casting director for the revival of Guys and Dolls had clearly misunderstood his remit.

3. DavidDeeMoz
Few people understand the rules of Mornington Crescent.

2. whatashocker
Ed now wished he hadn't asked Simply Red to keep the music down.

1. eltelsopwith
Right let's check these off - id, ego, super ego... er...

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A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

He hunts tigers. He wrestles bears. And he eats like a supermodel. No wonder the Russian Prime Minister is a figure of some fascination, and not only to himself.

If the only difference between a "hockey mom" and a pit bull is lipstick, then the only difference between Sarah Palin and Vladimir Putin is, er, lipstick.

Three red grapes and a cup of tea. The Times notes this is all Mr Putin ate during a marathon question and answer session with Western academics and journalists at a Black Sea resort.

"Mr Putin is short and wiry, with piercing blue eyes and the physique of somebody who works out and watches his weight."

No wonder he is so keen to get his bod out for the cameras, just like a supermodel. Although the Times resists the temptation to reprint those holiday snaps of the Russian leader in his (almost) all-together. Unlike Paper Monitor.

Meanwhile, the Daily Star has little Theo Walcott's girl Melanie Slade on its front page. She's wearing little more than Mr Putin's fishing outfit. Still, she does have her top on.

And this from a lass who so recently said that to be called a Wag was a "real insult", and opted not to watch Theo from the stands in Zagreb as she was getting ready to go to university.

Great to see a young woman who is prepared to get by on her brains, not her looks. Oh, hold on...

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See the Quote of the Day every morning on the .

"It was very funny - but there's no way the Queen sits down in the evening with a pint" - Windsor Castle spokesman after it received 2,000 pints of lager destined for the Windsor Castle pub.

Too right - her favoured tipple is a gin and Dubonnet with a twist (also the for her mother). So when 12 barrels of lager arrived at the gates of the Queen's residence, there was no record of any such order. An officer rang a pub of the same name in nearby Maidenhead, which was indeed awaiting a delivery - although it arrived too late for England's football match with Croatia.

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A limerick you ask?

It's thankless lamented A Motion
Not meaning to cause a commotion
It's not just a rhyme,
But a moment in time
When poets require devotion.
Candace, New Jersey, US

There was an old poet called Motion,
Who sought royal love and devotion,
The Queen as his muse,
Was really bad news,
And so he made a great commotion
Alan, New York

There once was a poet called Motion
Who kicked up a stinking commotion:
"My job's really hateful,
The Queen is ungrateful,
I may as well jump in the ocean."
Rachael

Monitor: And so on ad infinitum.

Amazing how the very anaemic-looking chld on the becomes a healthy pink in the article on cord blood - well done ´óÏó´«Ã½, superb SFX.
Janet Hayes, Pontypool, Wales

According to your , impact rounds are "to be aimed at the target's belt buckle, so avoiding the more vulnerable parts of the body". Not by much.
Paul T, Manchester, UK

Re Paper Monitor: I think a new and possibly apt name for the Large Hadron Collider might be LAST - Large Apocalyptic Scientific Thingy
Stig, London, UK

Paper Monitor, may I suggest to you (albeit in a delayed fashion) that you explain CERN in the manner that I and several other previously self-respectingly sixth formers explained it to the rest of the school. Take two students, send them running in different directions and have them crash, simultaneously setting off party poppers and throwing glitter, just in front of the headmaster, preferably making a big crash behind said headmaster's head. Works a treat, and disguises the fact that, A2 level physicists we may be, we don't know it in much more detail than that.
Louise, Surrey

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A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

Yup, it's the morning after the day before and the biggest story in town is also the most infinitesimally small. The Large Hadron Colander - not a slip of the tongue, but a bid by Paper Monitor to win the £500 prize offered by the Royal Society of Chemistry, and noted in Metro, for anyone who can come up with a more exciting name for the Large Hadron Collider.

Hold on, CHEMISTRY! Paper Monitor thought the physics dudes had this CERN gig wrapped up for themselves.

No matter (if you'll excuse the physicist-style pun). The BScs can argue that out for themselves. The challenge for the papers is how to convey this Big Physics stuff to your average arts graduate - cf yesterday's Guardian exploits with .

To the Daily Mail - which, with its picture of Captain Birds Eye to explain the Higgs boson particle (bosun, geddit???) risks being clever-clever in its efforts to dumb down.

Telegraph writer Neil Tweedie shows how it should be done, especially given the challenge of going all the way to CERN HQ in Switzerland to write an entertaining colour piece about the atomic equivalent of the 400 meters sprint.

The switch-on itself is a lot of hype, we're told, in advance of the real fireworks some months down the line when they actually start smashing protons into each other.

Or as Tweedie tells it: "In reality, yesterday's global media event was the equivalent of turning on your new Ferrari, letting the engine tick over for five minutes and going back inside for a cup of tea."

Delicious - the prose that is, not the tea, which never is on the Continent.

Not that such trifling issues will be troubling your average England fan, making his/her way back from Croatia after last night's 4-1 victory, thanks in large part to the footwork of Theo Walcott.

Paper Monitor is old enough to remember the high jinks and japes headline writers got up to when a certain Wayne Rooney burst on to the England scene, with all that Roo-tiful, Roo-One etc.

So, any promising puns for England's new bright young star? "TRIO WALCOTT" chirp the Sun and Guardian. "ENGLAND'S NIGHT OF GLORY ONE! TWO! THEO!" says the Mirror.

The boys done well, but it's still early days, Brian.

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"Sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length" - Telling it like it is, in a report into US oil officials' alleged behaviour.

While perhaps not impossible, it would take some doing to engage in sexual relations with a partner held at arms-length. But that is too literal a reading of an official report that found a handful of employee of a department responsible for collecting revenue from firms drilling on US land had accepted gifts from and been intimate with oil company reps.

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Hello! Is anybody there? I've been stuck at my desk since 8 o'clock this morning and I'm wondering if the world has in fact ended without me knowing and the microcosm that is my office is the only thing left. If so I need to plan how I'm going to survive the rest of my life behind my computer screen. There is only a certain amount of social networking you can do with the rest of humanity having expired.
Alastair, London

Monitor note: Gotcha!

Thanks doom mongers. Thanks a lot. Expecting the end of the world, I decided last night to go on a bit of a truth mission. Taking this last chance to tell people what I think.
It now turns out we are going to be just fine, and I have a lot of apologising to do. A lot.
Kev Guthrie, Sheffield

May I take the opportunity to address all those sighing in relief at the . The world was never going to end today because this potentially infernal contraption is merely being put through more tests, albeit this time at full scale. The danger arises when it actually comes to colliding stuff, which hasn't happened yet. So far the team are merely making sure they can successfully make particles move in a big circle. Go science!
Craig, Chester, UK

I'd like to nominate a fact from your as "fact of the week" - a proton in an LHC experiment has about the same energy as a mosquito in flight.
HB, London

Re : I haven't laughed so much since a man married one. Fabulous police quote: "The minister said many police had serious gaps in their knowledge and they would be sent for retraining." Priceless. (Oh and no-one and I mean no-one is to searce for the man marries goat story - we don't want it in the top read stories again, the goat is dead, get over it.)
Naomi P, Sussex

: For a second, I thought school biology lessons were getting a whole lot more technical.
Jinja, Edinburgh

I am surprised at the lack of letters/coverage of the . Currently Team GB are top of the medals table, surely that is something to be proud of? Congratulations to all the medallists.
Alex Kennett, Bath

I'd like to know why the iPlayer won't let me listen to some Radio 4 comedy programs but the error message it gives me makes me suspect that I won't get a straight answer:
"Mark Watson Makes the World Substantially Better: Series 2: Honesty is unavailable at this time."
Michael Daw, Rockville, MD, US

QJ, you couldn't use seawater to put out the fire on Weston-Super-Mare pier (Tuesday's letters). The tide was out and, as anyone who's tried walking to the sea knows, after the sand there are estuarine mud-flats, which don't support the weight of people very well, let alone fire engines.
Sharon, Portsmouth, UK

So the ; paid to write a poem occasionally and HM QE2 doesn't pat him on the back and say, "Well done! One loves the way you rhymed hat and cat on the second and third lines!"
The poor lamb.
My heart, liver and one or two other entrails go out to him as he experiences the stark reality that most of us live with every day. There's got to be at least a limerick in this... trouble is that whenever I try to think of something appropriate to rhyme "Motion" with, all I can think of is "motion".
Mark Kite, Halesowen, UK

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A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

So sorry for the delay, Paper Monitor has only just managed to escape the eddying currents that threatened to suck it in the general direction of Switzerland.

Or was that just wind?

Either way, now protons are being fired around a circuit at a rate of super-whizziness (to give 99.9999% of the speed of light its scientific name), Paper Monitor can turn its attention to how to explain it all to Caption Competition and 10 Things, who can be bears of very little brain about such things.

Handy, then, that among the throwage of Wednesday's Guardian - Paper Monitor is not currently looking for work as Change Manager in Charge of Social Inclusivity and Collaborative Change, thanks, so out goes the super-size Society section - there is an explainer in G2 that translates boffin-speak.

There is an artist's impression of invisibly small objects - comparative units of measure include the Jelly Tot and the Gummy Bear. There are charts which make liberal use of the colour mauve because it's "always nice". Fairport Convention gets a mention. As does Gruyere. Hmmm. Might still be a bit too technical for Caption Comp, although 10 Things should be able to grasp the basics.

The Daily Telegraph hedges its bets with the headline "If it's 8.31 and you're still reading this...

... then Professor Hawking was right."

Matt's cartoon, however, is but a dot. "Big bang experiment sucks cartoon into black hole."

The Independent points the curious to its features section. The cover of which is emblazoned with a snap of Paris Hilton. The rise of whom some may regard as the first horseman of the apocalypse. Which does rather play into the hands of those who regard Cern's scientists in much the same light.

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"If The Enchantress of Florence doesn't win this year's Man Booker I'll curry my proof copy and eat it" - Ex-Booker judge John Sutherland might be reaching for the turmeric

Prof Sutherland made this bold statement several months ago. Now Salman Rushdie's opus has failed to make the Booker shortlist, making it exceedingly unlikely that it will now win. The venerable critic that backed it has yet to indicate whether he favours Vindaloo or Thai Green.

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I'd just like to congratulate all concerned for a smashing crop of letters yesterday. Every one made me smile.
Tom, London

Clarissa Dickson Wright's comment about supermarkets is a bit rich - I've regularly seen her pushing a trolley around Waitrose in Andover. Or doesn't Waitrose count as a supermarket?
Catherine Hegerty, Andover, UK

First and (amongst others), now . Why is it that piers, essentially structures built out over the sea, are so frequently gutted by fire? And why is the fire service always at such a loss under these circumstances? Is there some pyromaniac going around trying to rid the UK of these fine Victorian structures, or is God yet again trying to be ironic?
Rob Falconer, Llandough, Wales

"Fire crews are pumping water from a boating lake a mile away to help control the blaze" (). Am I the only one to think "hang on ... it's a PIER."?
QJ, Stafford-on-Sea, UK

So researchers have found some ? Maybe these reseachers ought to find out exactly what coal is.
Simon Robinson, Birmingham, UK

Bill Nighy (yesterday's letters) doesn't have to be completely nigh to live up to his name - he just has to be a bit nigh, just as irony is a bit like iron.
John Whapshott, Westbury, Wiltshire

Is it possible to move the Caption Competition forward a few days? If you could print up the winners before they switch on the Large Hadron Collider that would be most appreciated.
Darren, Leicester

As it is potentially the end of the world tomorrow with our impending doom shadowing over us can I be the first to send a fond farewell to the Paper Monitor and all Monitorites. I bear no grudges that my letters are often put to the back of the pile and never published, I also forgive you for not ever finding my captions funny enough to get to the top six in the Caption Competition. Now with all that off my chest could you please print this at the bottom so my letter will be forever the last the Magazine Monitor has ever published? It would be my one final wish granted.
Felicity, Cheltenham

Monitor note: We would like to draw readers attention to the fact that the world will, in all probability, . Either way there will still be letters.

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A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

Hats off to the Americans - when it comes to mortgage lenders, they can at least humanise faceless financial institutions by giving them folk s y names: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Unlike, say, Halifax or Nationwide, Fannie and Freddie reach out beyond the headlines to non-business sorts, drawing them in with the vague promise this story could be about something more than percentage signs, dollar symbols and abbreviations such as SEC and FSA.

But the Sun takes things one step further. As any good hack knows, it's faces that really turn people on to stories. So a Sun scribe has been despatched to track down a (in this case retired teacher Fannie May), who is trying to "beat the crunch by going back to work as a rock singer" and Freddie Mackie (who we are reassured is "known as Freddie Mac". Well, he is now).

The computer crash that put London's stock market out of action yesterday is another financial tale that threatens to leave 99% of the population utterly bamboozled. The Financial Times toughs it out, of course, telling us the outage is called a "Black Swan event", caused by "problems with the electronic connections that allow traders to place buy and sell orders on the exchange's trading platform".

Confused? Perhaps the Mail can cast some light.

"The traders' frustration was clear as computer geeks spent a painfully slow eight hours..."

Now, that's more like it.

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"I think supermarkets are the Antichrist" - TV chef Clarissa Dickson Wright sticks it to TV chef Jamie Oliver

When two chefs go to war one is all that you can score - to paraphrase Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Apparently the former Fat Lady is unhappy with the currently solidly built pukkachef - namely that he takes supermarket money and runs restaurants that aren't good enough.

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Disappointed to see the use of a "headline comma" in place of an "and" on the today ("Hugging, stroking benefits fractious chimps"). I just can't take them seriously after the classic Onion headline "Area Man Waxes Lyrical, Truck".
Paul T, Manchester

I know fuel prices are rising, but is a little extreme.
Stuart, Croydon

Am I getting old or have the couple in the photograph in gone some way beyond mere "flirting"?
David Richerby, Leeds, UK

Oh no, I hope no goods destined to or from me are . Remember the ?
Robin, Herts, UK

The scientists at here - if the LHC doesn't destroy space-time they will be proved right, if it does, it will happen at the speed of light, so there will be no time for them to say sorry.
Dave, Walsall UK

If the world were to end on Wednesday, it will be quite sad and probably typical of Manchester City's luck - all that money and the world ending before they get a chance to win anything.
Omosare Omogbagi, Leeds

Apparently the "Big Bang" occurred when a group of scientists in a previous universe tried out their new particle accelerator. Roll on Wednesday.
Chris, Tokyo, Japan

Is Bill Nighy nigh? And if he's not, could he be prosecuted under the Trades Descriptions Act?
James, Stockport

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A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

When journalists are little cubs in journalist school they get told about a bad thing.

This bad thing is called "journalese". Journalese means words that no member of the reading public actually uses.

The young cubs nod respectfully but on their departure they fall into the clutches of older chief subs who care little about journalese and just want the words to fit in the boxes set aside for the headlines.

Journalists of the "quality" papers think they do less journalese. This is not always true.

On today's Daily Telegraph front page there's a classic in "postcode lottery". These lotteries very often occur in the NHS, apparently. According to LexisNexis, there have been 526 references to "postcode lottery" in the last year.

At the other end of the spectrum is the front of today's Daily Star which reads: "BB SARA: MY DRUGS, LESBIAN ROMPS & SEX TAPES." It's that word "romp" which is classic journalese. Has any civilian ever described a sexual encounter, no matter how unconventional, as a "romp". But the newspapers have used the phrase "lesbian romp" 39 times in the last year.

Then there's the word "axe". People are often "facing the axe" (today's Star), or a politician "hints at axe" (today's Daily Mail) or "jobs are axed".

In the Daily Mail a girl is involved in a "tug-of-love" in Russia. It's as journalese as it gets and has clocked up 82 uses in the last year.

Fundamentally, there are two categories of journalese - terms that are made up by hacks and are never used by ordinary people, and a second category that first appear in newspapers but feed back into the language.

Stealth tax is now definitely in the second category. This recent Mail headline manages to use two.

"ROAD TOLL POSTCODE LOTTERY 'IS STEALTH TAX ON MIDDLE BRITAIN'"

Lovely.

Some journalese crackers are more sparingly used because of their sheer ridiculousness - "mercy dash" fits neatly into this category.

And for the record, Paper Monitor's favourite bit of journalese is "love rat". It has clocked a mighty 655 references in the last 12 months.

If you feel there's any snippets of journalese we should have included, send in your suggestions using the comments form below.

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"Brown bread is awful stuff - I will simply not have brown bread anywhere near my plate or palate" - Astronomer Patrick Moore explains the secret of his longevity.

OK so brown bread is good for you. We tell this to kids all the time. But Patrick Moore is pretty old, 85 years to be precise. And he's going strong. So maybe he's right.

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