90

It's sweeping the internet. Sooty and Sweep with Nelson Mandela a happy ninetieth birthday.

Tiny-size me

Minnies in Chicago are countering the super-size me trend. "Smaller portions, more variety". Here's the menu - hover over each item for a picture and you'll see what they mean.

Run out of petrol to win

I think we can agree that this is a bad idea for a radio competition.

Just you and me, boy

Randy Newman's latest album comes out in a couple of months - here he is at MacWorld in January doing "You've Got A Friend In Me", from Toy Story.

U?

"The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters" collects the correspondence exchanged between the Mitford Sisters throughout their lives. It's a journey through the world of upper class England in the twentieth century.

The six sisters included two Fascists, a Communist, one who married a man who inherited a Dukedom, one who loved the country life, and one who was a renowned author.

It's from the author-sister that this quote comes. Nancy Mitford was the eldest of the six and avoided the political fervour which gripped three of her younger siblings. She wrote novels like Love In A Cold Climate (twice adapted for TV), coined the phrases "U-" and "Non-U" to describe the upper-class and non-upper-class, and in 1957, in a letter to her sister Jessica, re-tells a verdict she passed on the Superpowers:

"Then there was a talk about Russia & I said, 'You must realize that to us in Europe, Russia & America seem exactly the same, two enormous countries where you can't get servants and where everything in the shops is machine-made.'"

Cook by DS

Who'd have thought. Now your Nintendo DS can tell you how to cook.

Ahoy ahoy

Say goodbye to hello.

Log it

Mapmyrun.com - use it to log any type of exercise or activity, from plotting the route you've run or cycled, to how much you've slept and how happy your day's been.

25 notes

Another use for your USB port - turn your keyboard into, um, a keyboard.

Counting

The programme may be off the air, but Radio 4's More Or Less website has plenty of nuggety statistical goodies to make up for it.

Negotiate better through food

Bananas, cheese and salmon will make you a winner. Possibly.

Victory

The world's full of news.

Stories everywhere.

Troubling, encouraging, surprising and, well, like this one.

Verbatim from the BBC News website, it starts like this:

An RAF fighter pilot has won his battle with the United States Air Force over the size of his handlebar moustache.

Write it

Five Timeless Tips on Writing.

Standby for switchoff

There are plenty of eco-friendly gadgets to be had now. John's blog came across one a year ago, although it needed an implausible amount of re-wiring to make a proper difference.

Welcome, then to Standby Buster, as seen on the excellent Gadget Show on Five. The idea is that you plug some of your electricity-guzzling-in-standby-mode devices into the adapters, and then with one click of your remote you can switch them all off. Buy more adapters and you can group different types of devices together on the remote, so that one button switches off the TV, DVD and surround sound, and another button switches off the kit in the other room.

First time with a curly haircut

John Motson's finest lines.

Fontify yourself

I'm not sure if I would ever use this, but from the FAQs page at james.cridland.net, I found Fontifier. You print their template, you fill it in and scan, and it creates a font based on your handwriting. There's mine. Then, if you choose to pay, you download it and install it on your word processor.

Think of a noun. Any noun.

Scientists can read minds. Really. Eeks. All those movies will come true one day.

Q is testing a sofa

We love the internet because it gives us a complete list of gadgets used by James Bond.

Eee

I saw an Eee PC in the flesh the other day, and quite taken by it I was. Now here comes the ten-inch version.

Black words on white paper

Why the typewriter is still around.

What's the nicest thing about Tunbridge Wells?

From the This Is ILR website, comes an interview between Michael Aspel and Kenny Everett. I'm thinking it must date from the early 80s, after Kenny had become a TV star, and whilst Aspel was still doing his mid-morning show on Capital.

Here it is. The highlight, a minute or so into the audio, is one of the least successful radio interview you'll ever have heard, from the BBC archives, featuring... actually, no, let Kenny describe it.