Do you read fivecc? Tis the feed for the http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com website, which is a collection of blogs about bad newspaper journalism that shows its working.

Excellent article here, on the recent immigration scare figures being a collection of data distortions from various ( Read more... )

Discovered Poe's Law, recently. (More excellent internet adages detailed here, strangely collated without referencing XKCD"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor," said Nathan Poe, "it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing ( Read more... )

From The Futility Closet, a tale of a English minister, George Harvest, who woke up in Calais without his friend and had to figure out how to find him....

He could not speak a word of French, but recollecting that Lord Onslow was at the Silver Lion, he put a shilling in his mouth, and set himself in the attitude of a lion rampant. After exciting ( Read more... )

Oh Yahoo! Answers. You're like the Just 17 problem page, but for the chimping WORLD.

If you get punched in the breasts a lot? Is it true you can get breast cancer?

Where be the Houyhnhnm! Answers, anyway? Or do horses get too angry to type when all the questions are about why the new Gulliver's Travels movie has carefully removed all the ( Read more... )

When Douglas Adams met two brisk, efficient, condescendingly well-prepared and really rather rude young blond men, on a trip to Zaire to try to see mountain gorillas in their natural habitat, he was resentful of the fact they were also German. Too easy and too obvious, they conforming so rigidly to stereotype. He determined to think of them as ( Read more... )

This morning I did espy a rescue truck parked in a rush-hour bus stop, towline attached to 4x4 wedged immobile across a pelican crossing. A vehicular arrangement which could only have been less helpful to surrounding humans if on fire and slowly spinning. Excellent work, London.

Saturday 30 June, 1666
Samuel Pepys used a parenthetical aside to slam the Lord Mayor. His diary records that Sir Thomas Bludworth is "a silly man, I think".

Sunday 2 September, 1666
Bludworth is woken and told of the start of the Great Fire. He insists "a woman might piss it out". Pepys proven right.

Extraordinary logic in the face of facts: woman on phone, insisting the photograph cannot be too big to email as it's only of a tortoise-shell banjo.

Overheard two women yesterday, worrying over influenza pandemics, as is so very zeitgeisty right now. One seemed to be harking back to the glory days of the bird flu scare, as you knew where you were then*. (Presumably, ‘not dead’.) Both were at a loss to understand how it was set to spread. As you could only get it if you were bitten. By a bird. ( ( Read more... )

Galaxy's centre tastes of raspberries and smells of rum, say astronomers.

Sorry, yeah. That happens to everything that's spent some time in my bag.