What's on Page 11 This Week?

The London commute is unlike most any other.  Add to that the Londoners' love for the daily newspapers and advertisers need to get the word out and you end up with a free newspaper every morning and every evening.  They hand out the papers at all of the Tube stops and Train stations.  Roughly 3 out of every 5 people take one of the papers to read on the train.

The morning paper is called Metro and the evening paper, oddly enough, is called The Evening Standard.  Each is full of interesting articles covering business, world news, entertainment, style/fashion, and US Politics.  As now avid readers of these free papers, we've come across an interesting phenomenon from the Metro (a bit more "cheeky" paper than The Evening Standard) - there is almost always a story you wouldn't believe was in print or couldn't believe is factual.  And it usually appears on Page 11.  Since we will be reading these papers every day for the foreseeable future, we've decided that What's on Page 11 This Week? will likely be a recurring post on the blog.

4 highlights from this week, ranked in the order of peculiarity and interest:

4. From page 11 on 11-Nov-2010:  You actually cannot get Cancer from a toilet seat.  This and several other urban myths were dispelled in this article, most of which were backed up by a government funded research project.

3. From page 11 on 10-Nov-2010: Not an odd one, but of interest to some - There is going to be a new television series that is actually an old series.  That's right British comedy fans, Absolutely Fabulous is going to start taping new episodes again in the spring.  If you've never heard of this show, then this will mean little to you!

2. From page 11 on 9-Nov-2010: A woman in Lewisham was grossly overcharged for her produce at a local grocery store (one called The Cooperative).  She only had about £2 worth of produce and was charged over £7.  In and of itself, this is uninteresting, but read on...in the supermarkets here, the cashiers do not stand at the register as they do in the US.  They sit in comfortable swivel-style office chairs (actually this is true in most of Europe).  At any rate, the cashier in question was nuzzled into her little cashier's space and began weighing the customer veggies - the whole time unaware that her large breasts were resting on the scale and causing the veggies to be overweighed.  The customer asked the manager what was wrong with the prices and the manager replied (and this is a quote from the newspaper) "It appears the cashier's boob was resting on the scale."  That's right, this is news in the Metro, at least on page 11!

1. From page 11 also on 9-Nov-2010 (a banner day!): this one is best started with the printed headline: Cricket's Balls are Biggest on Earth.  Seeing this, one would assume it is a sports-related story about the size of the balls used to play Cricket, a popular British sport.  NOPE.  This was actually a story about the Bush Cricket (one of the chirping kinds) and its Testicles!  According to the article, the Bush Cricket's testicles comprise 14% of it's body weight - making its balls the biggest on earth relative to the animals size.  Interestingly enough, this apparently shattered the previous record of 10.6% held by some beetle from Africa. 

So that's the news this week from Page 11,
Deb and Jon in South London