There are two things that I love about this story. One is that the club was called the Booby Trap. The other is the concept of a pole dancer having safety as their primary consideration.

A Margate man suing a Pompano Beach club claims a performer’s shoe flew off during a pole dance, shattered the mirrored ceiling and caused glass and the shoe to hit him.

The lawsuit filed in Broward County by 35-year-old Charles Privette says the Booby Trap breached its duty when its employee failed to perform her routine in a reasonably safe manner.

Man sues strip club after injury | 10connects.com | Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater

From this morning’s Telegraph:

At the end of last month, Palin was interviewed by Katie Couric, the main news anchor for the CBS television network.

Couric asked Palin whether the $700 billion for the Wall Street bail-out, which had at that point not been approved by Congress, might be better spent helping out middle-class families.

Palin replied: “That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, we’re ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out.

“But ultimately what the bail-out does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Helping the – it’s got to be all about job creation too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track.

She went on: “So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans and trade – we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing, but one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today – we’ve got to look at that as more opportunity.”

Sarah Palin dives in poll ratings as Tina Fey impersonates her on Saturday Night Live - Telegraph

Does anyone else understand what this is all about? I’ve heard Bush speak some gibberish during his time in office, but this is so confused it’s beyond me.

The BBC, bastion of all that is good and reliable about British broadcasting, is the first place to look for the latest bad news on the stock market. It keeps a ticker running on the front page of its news site with minute-by-minute updates all day long.

Today, by all accounts, has been a shocker with the FTSE dropping from a little over 4000 at the start of the day to close down 381%.

Really?

Shurely Shome Mishtake?

Libraries are closing down at an unprecedented rate. 40 closed last year according to this story in The Times. But rather than stick to their guns and provide the kind of services a library should - a quiet area in which to read and work - the Society of Chief Librarians and ‘other cultural bodies’ have been advising libraries how to change if they want to stay in business.

Their idea? Introduce Nintendo Wii consoles, lift the ban on talking, welcome mobile phones with open arms and allow people to eat and drink among the stacks.

Camden, north London, is going to be one of the first to implement changes along these lines, lifting the mobile phones, snacks and drinks ban next month.

Hillingdon is going one step further and introducing Starbucks outlets to all of its libraries between now and this time next year.

If there’s one thing guaranteed to hasten the demise of the public library, it is radical, knee-jerk changes of this sort. If kids of today would rather play Wii, let them - in their homes.

The Times tested the new approach yesterday at a library in Whitechapel, East London, which has been renamed an Ideas Store and diversified to attract a different clientele. The noise inside was almost as loud as the din on the street outside, with a series of public information stands set up in the foyer. Health professionals were taking blood for diabetes tests and recruitment officials chatted to people.

Read the full story here.

Birmingham City Council has admitted sending out leaflets which showed its US namesakes skyline instead.

About 720,000 pamphlets praising Brummies for their recycling were sent around the city at a cost of £15,000.

But instead of showing landmarks such as the Rotunda and the new Selfridges building, it showed downtown Birmingham, Alabama, instead.

Full story on BBC News.

I don’t know what’s more worrying - the stupid mistake or the fact that to celebrate the city’s impressive record in recycling the council printed almost three quarters of a million leaflets saying thanks… which will then need recycling.

There’s a great quote in the current edition of The Week, given by Doc Mtusi from the Zimbabwe Finance Ministry to Cape Times:

The unpatriotic hoarding of food gives the impression that we have a problem, which clearly we haven’t, except in the South African media’s mind. We do not call it starving, we call it fasting. Fasting is actually good for you. Lots of famous people have fasted for the benefit of their people. Gandhi, for instance. In our case, the people themselves will be encouraged to fast, thereby strengthening themselves against the onslaught of colonial imperialism. We have no objection in principle to people eating. Those of us in government all eat, but only because persons in our important positions have to. What we mst guard against is the belief that people have the right to break the law if they are hungry.

The BBC launched the iPlayer today. After months of user testing (or non-testing in my case, since I was sent a beta test invite some months back but have yet to take it up), it reckons it’s ready to go. Roll-out will be carefully managed, and ramped so that progressively more applicants gain to the service over time.

It’s already been well publicised (and well debated and well criticised) that the system needs Windows XP to run. Open-source advocates, Mac users, Microsoft critics and Vista users have bemoaned the fact that for the moment they’re all locked out, despite being license fee payers, and the BBC has promised to include one and all just as soon as it can.

But what about those of us who have no licence at all? I don’t have a TV in the house to which I’m moving, which annoys the fee collectors no end, to the extent that they sent out investigators to bang on my door and check I wasn’t lying.

They went away disappointed.

So if the iPlayer blocks access to viewers outside the UK, who can’t possibly have a licence, should it also block access to me? Am I any different to an Australian, who can listen to BBC radio, but shouldn’t really be watching BBC TV?

Maybe.

But what I’d rather see is a levelling of the playing field, whereby anyone, anywhere in the world can buy a licence and watch TV through the iPlayer. It would provide a massive, welcome boost to the BBC’s coffers, which could be ploughed back into programmes like Coast, How We Built Britain and The Proms.

Programmes like these would the iPlayer an invaluable asset in an online world otherwise dominated by the 30-second frippery of YouTube.

I don’t know how this happened, especially as my privacy settings were such that only my friends and students in my networks could view my photos… It’s quite unbelievable and I am very pissed off…

What I find quite unbelievable is the naivety of the person who made this comment, as quoted in The Guardian. Not only is she showing a lamentable lack of understanding of the net as a public medium, but she’s also a student at Oxford University, and so at the pinnacle of British academic achievement.

The story is this: proctors at Oxford have been logging on to Facebook, trawling the photos for any that might suggest misdemeanour on the part of graduating students and then hauling them up for their behaviour, either fining them £100 (a surprisingly hefty blow, I’d imagine, when you already have a considerable student debt racked up), or delaying their graduation until they’ve stood before a disciplinary board.

The quoted student, Alex Hill, seems to think that restricting your photos to just your friends and other members of the networks of which you’re a member will keep you safe, but with Facebook networks being so easy to join that’s like leaving your front door key under your front door mat. With the corner of the mat turned up. And a large pointy sign saying ‘key here’. Illuminated.

The Students’ Union made a middle of the road comment about privacy, clearly minded not to inflame the proctors any further:

While the Student Union does not condone unruly, violent or disorderly behaviour, we believe that the privacy of our members should be protected and that disciplinary procedures at all levels within the University should be fair and transparent.

They are sentiments with which few could disagree, but at the same time it’s hard to feel that these student’ privacy has been compromised when they, themselves, were foolish enough to post images to what is, at best, a semi-private, semi-public forum.

Passwords and privacy are not the same thing. One day, perhaps, our educated elite might realise that.

The Evening Standard: grammar’s not an issue. Looks like spelling could do with some work, though.

‘If the customer is an extremely strict vegetarian, then we are sorry the products are no longer suitable, but a less strict vegetarian should enjoy our chocolate,’ said Paul Goalby, corporate affairs manager for Masterfoods.
Source: BBC News

Masterfoods has gone temporarily insane. Actually, I suspect it’s a less than temporary measure, as it’s a cost-saver, but it is nonetheless very disappointing, and that quote from Paul Goalby, above, shows just how little the company understands what vegetarianism is about.

The company has made the decision to start using calves stomachs in its products - specifically Mars Bars, Bounty, Twix, Snickers, Milky Way and Malteesers. How they can think that ‘less strict’ vegetarians would continue eating them, I don’t know, since the whole idea of being a vegetarian is that you don’t eat animals, not just that you don’t eat them if the bit you’re eating still looks like a liver or rump (or, in the case of burgers, an eyelid, scrotum or spleen).

So, if you boycott Nestle because you don’t believe its activities in the developing world are ethical (and so don’t eat KitKat, After Eight, Crunch, Smarties, Quality Street, Lion Bar, Drifter, Yorkie, Animal Bar, Walnut Whip, Toffee Crisp, Milky Bar, Caramac, Rolo, Munchies, Toffo, Black Magic, Dairy Box, Matchmakers, Polo, Fruit Pastilles, Breakaway, Blue Ribband or the new ‘Heaven’ range), then you may as well drop chocolate altogether and start a lifelong Lenten fast.