Web Monitor
15:56 UK time, Tuesday, 30 June 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
We trawl the web to give you the most interesting bits. Make sure you share your best links with us by sending it via the comment box.
• If you are one of Ashton Kutcher's 2.5 million followers on Twitter, then you may have noticed that the White House is now using him as their messenger on Twitter. On Sunday ; "I've been asked by the white house to twet this" then linked to a people to get tested for HIV, saying, "If our President and First Lady can get tested -- you can too." which would have been a bit weird given the subject matter.
• the rise of McDonald's and the fall of fine dining in France. He writes that at one point McDonald's would print their posters in triplicate because they anticipated outpouring of anti-"McDo" feeling all over their adverts. But Le Big Mac grew and grew in market share and now France is the second biggest market in the world for McDonald's after the US. Steinberger puts the rise down to the tax system, where a take away such as McDonald's has a 5.5% tax, whilst a 19.6% levy is charged on restaurant food, making McDo cheaper than le bistro.
• a new genre of literature: stripper memoirs. Strip City, Confessions of a Stripper, Girl Undressed, the list goes on. What they all have in common is a lot more than just taking their clothes off. The heroines all seem to be more intelligent than your average girl, quite reserved but love stripping and of course, they have boundaries unlike the other drug addicted strippers, which they are nothing like:
"Even in this genre, which is almost explicitly about how we shouldn't judge the naked girl on the stage, we find the same judgment, the same innate, catty, female dividing of the world into sluts and non-sluts, that takes place in the rest of the world."
Roiphe can console herself that for the authors of stripper genre books, the publishing contract is not all. On a vaguely-related note "Stan Cattermole" writes that a book contract bestowed upon him for his book, was just the start of the anxiety:
"I did all the things I imagine first-time authors do: I developed a fleeting obsession with the Amazon Sales Rank; I skulked into Waterstones, located my beautiful memoir wedged uncomfortably between Belle de Jour and Les Dennis, took a surreptitious photograph and skulked out... I still haven't found the everlasting wholly reciprocated love I was seeking. I still haven't lost all of the weight I was hoping to lose. And if I'm honest, I still struggle with tobacco consumption. But at least now I have a ridiculous fake name."
• looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think. She says people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. She went to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia, to study the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre:
"The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is 'Where are you going?' and the answer should be something like 'Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.' If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past 'Hello'... speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings."
• Last Saturday David Rohde, a journalist for New York Times escaped from his Taliban kidnappers in Pakistan after seven months of captivity. Concerned that more press coverage would give the kidnappers leverage, the New York Times managed to keep the kidnapping out of the news. But that it wasn't so easy to keep it out of Wikipedia. Details of Rodhe's capture cropped up time and again, showing how difficult it is to keep anything off the Internet - even about someone who isn't really that famous. The question Perez-Pena poses now is, how much do we really want openness?
• A stereotypical image of an Amish family in the US is of people who live and work on the farm. that until now that was an out-of-date image, with lots of Amish people working in recreational vehicle [glorified camper van] manufacture. But the recession is forcing Amish people back to their traditional way of making money, away from making cars and back to making jams.
The 
