a tale of two poles-- no, not those poles.

Last night I watched Wit. Emma Thompson, gave one of the most wonderful performances I have ever seen in film or theatre, in her "incredibly realistic" portrayal of an English Professor suffering from ovarian Cancer (-quote a friend who lost her mum to cancer). Not only is Thompson's performance wonderful, so is the script and the cinematography. It is a genuinly good movie.

In other movie news, Fugitive Pieces finally has its own IMDB page-- no useful information yet, but still, its there.

And on a happier note, seeing the depressiveness of both those movies:

SEVERAL readers, among them Jenney Shepherd, Caroline Hauxwell and Jackie Leung, have alerted us to an intriguing paper in the British Medical Journal, "The case of the disappearing teaspoons" by Megan S. CLim, Margaret E. Hellard and Campbell K. Aitken of the Institute for Medical Research and Public Health, Melbourne, Australia.

This sets out to answer the age old question "Where have all the bloody teaspoons gone?" using a classic release-and-capture methodology.

The half-life of the 70 teaspoons studied in the institute's tearooms was 81 days, with 56 (80 per cent) disappearing during the five-month study. This led to the alarming conclusion that "an estimated 18 million teaspoons are going missing in Melbourne each year. Laid end to end, these lost teaspoons would cover over 2700 kilometres - the length of the entire coastline of Mozambique - and weigh over 360 metric tonnes - the approximate weight of four adult blue whales."

The authors say that "no plausible explanations were advanced for the high rate of teaspoon loss", though they did note the theory of Douglas Adams et al that Somewhere Out There is a teaspoon planet to which they repair.