LACK OF COMMUNICATION

Have you noticed that the more advanced we become with communications systems, the less we actually communicate. Make a phone call, and you get a voicemail. Send an e-mail and you get an automated response – maybe something like this:

* You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you would not have received anything at all.

* I will be unable to delete all the unread emails you send me until I return from vacation on 20/9. Please be patient. Your email will be deleted in the order it was received.

* Thank you for your e-mail. Your credit card has been charged $5.99 for the first 10 words, and $1.99 for each additional word. Ask now about our special attachment opening rate.

* The e-mail server is unable to verify your server connections and is therefore unable to deliver this message. Please reinstall your version of Microsoft Windows and start again.

* Thanks for your e-mail, which has been placed in the queuing system. You are currently 351 in place and should receive and answer within 6 weeks. If your message is urgent, please contact me by telephone and leave a message on my voicemail.

* I will be out of the office from 16/09 until 23/10 for medical reasons. As from 24/10 please address your messages to me as Kate instead of Ken.

And as far as voicemails are concerned, my favourite is still:

“Hallo, this is Krishna Kelly the mind reader. I am unable to take your call right now. Do not leave a message. I know what it’s about.”

BATTLE OF THE BULGE

How long will it be before America’s powerful National Cattlemens Beef Association get their act together and draw up battle plans for dealing with the Californian cleavage clan who call themselves the Vegan Vixens?

Led by a carrot crunching and lettuce loving sex bomb with the unlikely name of Sky Valencia, the Vegan Vixens are not a vegetarian basketball squad, but a group of models and would-be actresses who have turned vegan lifestyle into a television series -- Charlie’s Angels meets the Cabbage Patch Kids.

"Party with the world's sexiest vegan girls while they arouse your senses and put you under their spell," runs a seductive trailer for the series. "It's like no other show you've ever seen."

The series started off on Californian cable channel (where you can also watch a programme called Exotic Erotic Balls, but I won’t go there), and has spread to other states. Naturally, the American press has been having a field day with it all: the New York Daily News has dubbed the Vegan Vixens "the soy of sex”.

Whether the Vegan Vixens will succeed in titillating, tantalising and ultimately transforming obese burger bingeing American males into a brigade of slim-line broccoli munchers has yet to be seen, but they seem to be having fun trying – and are making some steady merchandising money with their aromatherapy skin candles.

No Vegan Vixen Diet Book yet, but you can bet the last pea in the pod that it’s only a matter of time

TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR OUR TIME

I am indebted to the Guardian Newsblog for bringing the Public Service Leaflet on Blog Depression to my attention. It's a must read.

In the meantime, I thought it useful to remind all you bloggers out there of the Ten Commandments (as adapted for the blogging world).

Thou shall not have any other blogs before me

Thou shall not post any graven image (it takes up too much bandwidth)

Thou shall not take the name of my blog in vain

Remember the blogging hour, to keep it holy

Honour thy father and thy mother (don’t knock them in a blog)

Thou shall not kill (or recommend terrorist actions in a blog)

Thou shalt not commit adultery (so much time blogging, chance would be a fine thing)

Thou shall not steal text from another blog

Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbour (or Bill Gates, George Bush, Tony Blair and so on)

Thou shall not covet thy neighbour's blog

SIZE DOES COUNT

Plans to make a 750-metre-long sandwich along a roadside in the West Bank town of Jenin were stopped by Palestinian Authority health officials this week. They judged that 180 kilos of meat, as well as vast quantities of vegetables, might rot in the sun. The organisers say they will set another date to make an attempt on the record - this time in the shade.

For some reason or other, August seems to be a popular month for trying to break the ‘longest sandwich’ record. Just a year ago, the 700 or so villagers of Kfar Qatra, a village 25 kilometres southeast of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, used 3,500 loaves of the local type of bread, 140 kilos of labneh (a Lebanese yoghurt), 21,000 olives, and 280 kilos of tomatoes and cucumbers to make a giant sandwich that measured 720-metres long.

The Kfar Qatr sandwich, which was cut into 14,260 pieces, was an effort to beat the Guinness Book of Records entry for the ‘longest sandwich’ set up five days before the Lebanese big bake by Pietro Catucci and Antonio Latte in the Italian town of Mottola.

The Italian job, which measured 634.50 metres and included 920 kilos of flour, 512 litres of water and 25 kilos of salt, was filled with 547 kilos of salami and mortadella and decorated on top with mayonnaise and tuna: it was eaten by 19,000 people in aid of charity.

The recent Palestinian record attempt was evidently more political than charitable. "Jenin is well known for fighting the Israeli occupation, and we wanted to give a civilised view of the city," said the sandwich project's manager.

Will the Israelis hit back with a ‘biggest bagel’ attempt? If so they will have to beat the record set up in July 1988, when Lender's Bagels of Mattoon, Illinois, made a blueberry bagel that was 34.9 centimetre high, had a diameter of 149.86 centimetres, and weighed a record 323.86 kilos.