It can only be a very short period of time before the delightful picture that goes with this story turns up recaptioned on a certain cheeseburger-related website.

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Here’s a truly bizarre news item. Jane Espenson is a very highly-regarded Hollywood producer and screenwriter who has worked on shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. She has a blog called Jane in Progress which aims to give writing and career advice to people wanting to follow the same career path.

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Today The Independent visits Dorset where, in among all the ‘piddles’ that have discreetly been converted to ‘puddles’ is, apparently this gem. What is it with this county and its lavatorial associations?

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Here’s Neil Gaiman’s bid for funniest man in the world, apropos of David Tennant’s decision to temporarily hang up his trenchcoat and blue suit and play Hamlet.

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Here’s that wonderful thing, an expert with a sense of humour.

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Here’s a shocker from The Independent. Thankfully the gentleman in question doesn’t appear to have been severely injured, and you can see how bellringing might very well be an activity with some risks attached, as the churchwarden acknowledges further down the story.

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To celebrate today’s news that the UK’s Ministry of Defence is to release its very own X-files, we bring you a sneak preview of some of the more compelling evidence.

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Robert Rauschenberg, an immensely influential American artist and arguably the father of the modern trend towards making installations, has died.

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Sloths are decidedly friends of this blog, which is why the management was intrigued to read the following masterpiece of scientific research, as reported by BBC Online.

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I admit to being a keen and regular reader of the Salon advice column Since You Asked. The columnist, writer Cary Tennis, is frequently given to bouts of soul-searching and self-examination about his allotted role. And here is his latest, a masterpiece.

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How young Saudi women succeed in subverting the rules they are made to live by. From the New York Times: At Prince Sultan University, where Atheer Jassem al-Othman, 18, is a first-year law student, a pair of second-year students recently spent a mid-morning break between classes showing off photographs of themselves dressed as boys. In [...]

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This little gem, from BBC News, is a few days old – but it only just popped up in a trawl through the feed reader.

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Found this via BoingBoing – an incredibly interesting experiment done by Belgian cultural broadcaster Klara.bi. It took an internationally-important contemporary painter called Luc Tuymans, whose works are viewed reverently in galleries and which change hands for huge sums of money.

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Mortgage rate rising? Global warming. Ken losing in London? Same again. Can’t get a credit card? Blame climate change. England not qualifying for Euro 2008? I think we all know the reason for that… However, you should curb your excessive cynicism. According to The Guardian, the most unlikely phenomena can be attributed to precisely this cause.

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As a card-carrying member of the dislike-of-heights committee, I find the idea of this deeply compelling and repellent in equal measures. It’s a kind of vertigo porn.

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Here’s an old favourite that we must now assume has bitten the dust. Here’s a piece from The Independent on the fate of the last of the Romanovs.

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“As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from desiccation” – Humphrey Lyttleton

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