The worst thing you could do as a member of BT’s call centre staff was to “zed” somebody. This meant hitting the Z button because you couldn’t find the correct number – when that number actually existed. Again, the customer would get an automated reply. Not one they wanted. I cannot convey the horror that zedding aroused in the professionals of that call centre; the intensity of the response was almost religious.

Calamo: The irony is that in this case the straightforward selfishness of the capitalist free market succeeds because it provides what people want, whereas the ideological correctness of the left doesn’t.

Terry Wogan in The Telegraph: In the beginning, we happy few smiled our secret smiles when others took Eurovision seriously enough to confuse it with a real song contest.

What scientists at Cornell University did was on a much smaller scale, both in terms of events and time. It happened so quickly that it’s not even a blink of an eye. Their time cloak lasts an incredibly tiny fraction of a fraction of a second. They hid an event for 40 trillionths of a second, according to a study appearing in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature.

Pigeons have now shown that they can learn abstract rules about numbers, an ability that until now had been demonstrated only in primates.

THE ARGUMENTS WITH FRANCE are always the same. In the good old days of Mitterand right up to Chirac’s last corrupt moment in office, domestic political failure was hidden under the tarp of anti-Americanism. Chirac must have hummed “God Bless America” every day he was in office.