I've heard some pretty strong language in my day but nothing could have prepared me for what I heard from a young man for whom things were obviously going badly yesterday. As I walked towards him on my way home from work, I saw him jumping up and down, throwing his fist into the air. When I got close enough to hear, he was yelling ... "Curses!" I immediately felt like I'd been transported into a Victorian melodrama or, perhaps, an episode of Wacky Races where Dick Dastardly's evil plans had come unstuck yet again.
PS: In this interview about the controversial Sex:Cubed production at La Boite, did d

All the attention might be on YouTube this week, thanks to the takeover bid by Google. However, according to new research by comScore Media Metrix, MySpace is the No. 1 portal for people who wanty to watch videos online. The research reveals that 37.4 million unique individuals watched a total 1.4 billion videos on the service in July alone. A media statement based on the research says the MySpace video serive, launched just six months ago, already accounts for 20 per cent of the 7.2 billion streams across the Web. The statement says YouTube ranked third in the survey, with 649 million video streams.

At 35, Kiran Desai has become the youngest female winner of the prestigious Booker Prize for British and Commonwealth authors. Her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, beat short-listed novels by Sarah Waters, Hisham Matar, M J Hyland and Edward St Aubyn and Australia's Kate Grenville. The BBC has details here, where, at least at the time of writing, Grenville's name is misspelled Greenville.