Stephen nominates "The Great Firewall of China" as his headline of the month, but I Googled it and it's been used a few times. However, it did remind me of one a friend told me about. The story concerned thirty or forty Chinese labourers buried in a landslide and the headline was "Sons of Toil 'neath Tons of Soil". I've Googled that too with no result so it may be apocryphal.

Anyway, on to this week's lollies! Stephen points to this Register story about strange Romanian mobile phone activity. Mark likes this piece on the death of the independent bookseller - and of consumer choice.

Chris likes this Atlantic article on the best journalism never published. It includes this version of the Gettysburg Address as it would have been handled on the Boston Globe's copydesk:

Fourscore and seven years ago (can't we just make it 87 years ago?) our father (WHO ARE THEY?? Any mothers???) brought forth on this continent (North America?? Northern Hemisphere??) a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men (people, men and women, what???) are created equal. (Why don't we just say they founded the United States and leave it at that?
Pacing's better.)

Mark likes this on Jewish humour from The New York Times' review of Michael Wex's Born to Kvetch. On Yiddish:

It is, Mr. Wex writes, "the national language of nowhere," the medium of expression for a people without a home. "Judaism is defined by exile, and exile without complaint is tourism," as Mr. Wex neatly puts it.

Mark also likes this Barbara Ehrenreich interview (scroll down) on her new book Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Search for the American Dream. Also this on pick-up king Neil Strauss from our own Kirsty Gunn.

Ciao.