Summer linkspam picnic

No, really, yay for Harper Lee and Hadley Freeman's riposte to the people who feel it necessary to diss on To Kill A Mockingbird. And with Hadley, we wonder how much of this is Ms Lee's refusal to play the game and be up for 50th anniversary marketing initiatives, etc?

(Also, feel that there is something entirely distinct from Salinger's reclusivity about hers - possibly the noisy 'leave me alone' sirens he blasted? - which is perhaps also to do with sense that she had produced one work that she was, presumably, satisfied with and didn't feel the need to go on to make a career of it.)

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Dept of WTF: The style police are everywhere, even at the school gates. Jess Cartner-Morley finds no respite from fashion on the school run (though honestly, does this or does it not sound like an instant classic in the '6 people I spoke to last week told me = New Trend!' category?)

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Yay for the Head of the Health and Safety Executive debunking the H&S myths. (And here is their website's Myth of the Month section. This is something we feel the Equality and Human Rights Commission might copy...)

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*Puts on Frankie Howerd voice and says 'No - No - Don't Mock'*: Prince Charles: I defend ordinary people against property developers. Prince's private secretary claims he opposed modernist design out of duty to make ordinary people's views heard. A) there is no such thing as an 'ordinary' person, Your RH B) And if you mean people who are unlike One, how many of them have you met in situations in which there could be a free and frank exchange of views on urban planning and modern architecture? (One's valet does not count, srsly.)

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Perhaps I am unduly sceptical, but this sort of thing - Historian claims Plato's manuscripts are mathematically ordered according to 12-note scale - has the woowoo alarm sirening out like mad.

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And I think it would be extending undue graciousness to call the following woowoo: Lower IQs found in disease-rife countries, scientists claim. Energy can be diverted away from brain development to fight infection, explaining 'lower intelligence in warmer countries' Of course, no-one raises the question of that elephant in the room, the culture-dependency of IQ tests, or, indeed, what they actually measure.

Berries... are nice

Pausing at the shop on my way home to make some routine purchases, I saw by the checkout a crate of plastic punnets of strawberries, marked down to half-price.

Aha, says I to myself, they are presumably at that point of absolute ripeness which is about to tip over into unsaleability.

So I bought one box to have with my supper -

And, readers, I was right.*

Yum.

*Just one had tipped slightly over the edge, which I think was very good going indeed.