Our Director-General is high-level lunching, discussing Stage One of our “cultural change” programme with senior government officials, so lolly duties and muse worship fall to me this week.

NZBC reader Chris Keall kindly alerts us to the American Society of Magazine Editors’ ambitious selection of the “Top 40 Magazine Covers Of The Past 40 Years”. As Mark notes, just one (The Economist) is from a non-US publisher; another example of “World Series” cultural imperialism? And Raygun, Mondo 2000, Brill’s Content and all those other dotcom-era darlings are notable by their absence.

London reader Richard Cooper draws our attention to a competition sponsored by print-on-demand company Lulu.com, dubbed “the Blooker Prize”, for books that originated as blogs. There’s no entry fee, but you must submit three copies of a bound “blook”. It’s not obligatory to publish them through Lulu, but their links are all over the blooking place. “Draw your own conclusions,” says Richard.

Stephen offers this article in counterpoint to Rob’s recent post about private health care and wasted money: as a percentage of overall US health care spending, the spending for the last year of life amounts to just 7 per cent, Tech Central Station claims.

Mark points out how Wired’s cover story zooms in on Peter Jackson’s understanding of the internet’s power to subvert the industrial-publicity complex. He also likes Clive Thompson’s New York Times article about people who suffer “an endless stream of interruptions” at work. Is he trying to tell me something? Says Mary Czerwinski, one of the world’s leading experts in interruption science: “When someone is interrupted, it takes 25 minutes to cycle back to the original task.”

Fortunately, as we’ve discovered at NZBC, blogging offers the cure, in the form of occupational amnesia. “What original task…?” While I was supposed to be doing something, I discovered this, at the Guardian website. I’m one of about two million people who’ve read Audrey Niffenegger’s extraordinary novel, The Time Traveller’s Wife. Her first book, The Three Incestuous Sisters, took her 14 years to complete because she made the entire print run of 10 copies — including the paper — herself. She then sold them for $10,000 each. It’s just been republished by Jonathan Cape in the UK, for a more affordable sixteen quid.

The ever-fascinating Boing Boing led me to FlapArt, which asks: “When was the last time you played with a stranger’s mind?” It offers alternative book covers to freak out nosy people on public transport.

Finally, in spite of Rob’s current high-level negotiations, he has had time for some more Tory-baiting over at what we NZBCers affectionately call Sir Humpty’s place; indeed, you’ll find him wherever there's an MSM guy being stiffed, eager to find the culprits on the back foot, with their front foot lodged firmly in their mouths.

Have a good weekend — and if you’re worried that you’ll forget your original task, just write it down on a piece of paper and keep it under your NZBC trucker’s cap to protect it from the rain.