if it’s news to me, it must be news to you!
Things I didn’t know last week: Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office and morgue has a gift shop where you can buy personalised body bags, toe tags and beach towels with a chalk body outline design. Sadly the store is offline at the moment. (Via the Danny Baker Show podcast)
Things I didn’t know last week 2: All the blue plaques in London commemorating the great and the good are made by husband and wife team, Sue and Frank Ashworth.
Two bucks sucks: Two-dollar bills are legal tender in America, but not when you’re trying to use one to buy chicken nuggets in a Texan school cafeteria apparently.
Cartoon of the week: In light of Leicester winning the Premiership title. (And here are 11 things more likely to have happened)
Racist of the week: Rhodes protestor (and Rhodes scholar) Ntokozo Qwabe who refused to tip a waitress because she was white. The Obz Cafe is where Mrs P dislocated a rib back in 2010 and is in Observatory, one of the most vibrant, multi-cultural areas of Cape Town in my experience.
Ban of the week: Eurovision Song Contest organisers after banning the Welsh flag: The flag of the European Union will be allowed, as will the rainbow LGBT flag, provided it is not waved in a ‘political manner’.
Boys will be boys: Tetbury held its annual Wacky Races on Bank Holiday Monday with its usual wacky entrants. (Yes I know its named after the cartoon series, but in English, whacky really should have an H)
Boys will be boys 2: The UK Scouting Association has at least 35,000 youngsters on its waiting list thanks to a lack of volunteer supervisors put off by the bureaucracy of back ground checks and suspicion of anyone wanting to be involved with young people.
Adage has its day: Ella Fitzgerald may have sung ‘cry me a river’ but researchers at Leicester University have demonstrated that this is a feat that not even the whole of humanity could manage. They could fill an Olympic sized swimming pool though, so not all bad.
Toilet paper: Farmers in Africa are supplementing their incomes by making paper out of elephant dung. Which is all very well, but what about the dung beetles?
Unstable table of the week: A fixed roulette table built for Al Capone is uncovered in Guildford.
Brief lives: One I missed last month, Malick Sidebé, the shepherd turned photographer who captured Malian pop culture; Castleford and Hull Kingston Rovers rugby league legend, Roger Millward; Guardian crossword setter, Gordon Holt; Ruth Terry, last of the screen cowgirls and; Daily Mail astrologer, Jonathan Cainer, but the question is, did he see it coming?
Sir Harold Kroto, Nobel Prize winner for the joint discovery of ‘bucky-balls’, the new form of carbon in which the atoms are arranged in a ball; Frank Levingston, the oldest US World War Two veteran; Michael ‘Dandy Kim’ Caborn-Waterfield, adventurer, womaniser and gun-runner who also set up the first Ann Summers sex shop.
And The New Day newspaper just nine weeks after it was launched.