Xinhua has a nice photo collection entitled “Think you can hold back your laugh?” Humour is notoriously culturally-linked, so I had my doubts. And despite political correctness, East vs West, what startled out as a smile went to a chuckle and – you betcha – a laugh. Try it.

“The survey of primary and secondary school children in the UK suggests there is some confusion about key scientific achievements.” The BBC put this delightful sentence halfway through an article that starts out saying that one in 10 children in the UK believe the queen invented the telephone.

My guess is that the two, the queen and phone, seem equally archaic if you’re 10 years old and messaging your pals to ask who invented the phone because some twit of an adult is asking you for the answer.

The article refers to the results of a March poll of 1, 000 children in the UK.

A couple of nice headlines to go with the morning coffee:

• from Xinhua, “Men want sex until almost dead” (women have better stamina?)
• from the UK’s Telegraph, “Thousands of police could face axe” (uncivilized Brits! Americans just use guns)
• and from the Belfast Telegraph, “Wife’s breast milk cheese sold at restaurant’ takes the cake for being intriguing and having a fun first sentence: “A New York restaurant has gone from brasserie to brassiere.”

Barbie falls for Mad Men!

I admit I’m getting confused about reality. I thought Mad Men, the US TV show, was about real life, admittedly an outrageous little patch of it during a certain era. I confess I love the show and can’t wait for season 3 to be available in Switzerland on DVD in another couple weeks. I love the women who think they are Barbie dolls, the silly glitz, the – but wait, now it seems that Barbie has invited Mad Men to be part of her world! Don Draper, with those wonderfully creased suits and some of the dubious people he works with, will be showing up in her dollhouses, complete with their wardrobes.

They will all get along famously, I’m sure – old Barbie standby Ken, Don’s wife Betty, oohlala Joan.

Maybe the overdose of sleeze and glamour will encourage the next generation of women to give up these dollhouse fantasies. But don’t hold your breath, feminists, and please don’t turn over in your grave, Mr Ibsen.

Meanwhile, I’m getting the popcorn ready for the next episode. Now I can fret over which clothes Don will take to Barbie’s house.

Ed. note: all work and no play makes for a dull editor.

The world is a funny inter-connected kind of place when you’re sitting in a small town near Geneva, Switzerland and you see in the Los Angeles Times page for local animal-lovers that a couple of kangaroos have had a gooooood kissing and cuddling session in Basel. Check them out (warning to Australians: you might find them less cute than some of us). Much easier than going to the zoo in Basel in this icy Swiss weather. Clearly, Australian animals win the cutes prizes today.

I was puzzled to see that the Guardian has an article today on Libya, Switzerland, the European Union and the ban on travel by top Libyan officials. I read nearly to the end before I found the news peg – normally higher up in a story, but when the news is old and editors are looking for an excuse to run it late, the peg gets hidden a bit further down in the story. Here it is:

The problem was sufficiently worrying for Libya’s man in London, Omar Jelban, to convene a rare press conference at the Knightsbridge offices of the people’s bureau (embassy) to “clarify” Tripoli’s position. “It is now difficult for any EU citizen to come to Libya,” he said on Tuesday, insisting that Libya had been forced to take reciprocal action because of Swiss bad faith. “We are ready to resolve this problem with the Swiss. This is a bilateral issue that has nothing to do with other European countries.”

That doesn’t tell me why the Guardian wanted to bother running this, since there is nothing new in the story, just rehashing. I think the clue is the last sentence. My guess is that the editor couldn’t resist running this sentence, a good decision:

Gaddafi-watchers say the key to understanding these rows with the Swiss and the Americans is his acute sense of personal honour – the slight to his son, his family and to himself. In reflective moments, Libya’s diplomats must sometimes hark back to simpler times before their leader abandoned terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and came in from the cold.

Link to story in the Guardian, UK

Today’s best headline and summary prize goes to The Guardian in the UK:
Vatican hit by gay sex scandal
Chorister sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for ceremonial usher of the papal household.

Editors are always scrambling to make sure they have headlines that grab attention, especially on the Internet where the headline evolves into the whole story by the time it reaches Twitter. It’s tough to make them catchy without being obscene (that gets readers) or using celebrity names (Michale you-know-who). But the Guardian’s headline reads like a Medieval whodunnit. Here’s the rest of the story.

GenevaLunch covers little celebrity news because we don’t think this is why most of our readers (70,000+ mainly news pages viewed a month) follow us. They’re looking for local or regional news or world news that has an impact on them. And boosting our site traffic with yet more stories about Michael Jackson isn’t part of our business plan.

But two CNN stories today, about two recent actors’ deaths, do give pause and should touch us.

US actress Brittany Murphy’s autopsy results have come out and they show that she suffered from acute pneumonia without being aware of it and died from a combination of drugs that were all legal and were being used mainly to treat common cold and flu symptoms. There’s a warning for all of us in this: get to the doctor early enough and don’t just pile on over-the-counter medications assuming they are safe.

The other death is of 41-year-old actor Andrew Koenig, whose body was just found in Stanley Park in Vancouver, Canada. His father, also an actor, announced the news. He pleaded with other families not to ignore signs of depression in their family members – and addressed those contemplating suicide, saying “If you’re one of those people who can’t handle it anymore, you know, if you can learn anything from this, there are people out there who really care,” he said. “You may not think so and ultimately it may not be enough, but there are people who really care.”

Pamp (Produits Artistiques Métaux Précieux) in Switzerland is the world's largest private refiner of precious metals, including gold ingots

I’ve just had a good chuckle reading Chris Bowlby’s BBC article on the gnomes of Zurich, where he takes us back to 1964, when British political leader George Brown apparently used the phrase for the first time. Bowlby relates a little Swiss banking political history and mythology, ending with musings on today’s British bankers who are moving to Switzerland to escape the UK tax man, public outrage and regulation. It’s an enjoyable read. He ends by wondering if someone will come up with another catchphrase for the next group the government will blame if ex-Brits who know the banking world start to speculate against sterling.

My guess is that we’ll come full circle. “Gnome” appears to have been popularized by Paracelsus, a Swiss (of course!) alchemist who used the word to describe people who could “move through solid earth as fish move through water”, according to Britannica. The British may find that they need those Zurich gnomes, or alchemists, to turn poor sterling into something more solid.

The “Paracelsian Debates“, ironically perhaps written up on a US government web site, were heated. Paracelsus’s ideas were sometimes called immoral and the man himself arrogant. They pitted the British and French against the ideas of the Swiss man who, despite their tirades, built a reputation for knowing his business.

Sound familiar?

Google has asked the US National Security Agency to help protect it from the Chinese government and cyber attacks, Telecom TV says. This is the strangest bit of Friday news I’ve read, beating out the US Tea Party with out-on-bail thug Joseph Basel joining Sarah Palin, or the death of Boa Sr, “the 85-year-old last speaker of ‘Bo,’ the oldest member of the Great Andamanese tribe” on a remote island of India, reports Reuters. Bo is now officially dead, and some might say the same of a world without Big Brother watching over us.

The report of this death might be exaggerated, of course, but only if you really believe China = evil and the US = good, with no gray areas. Personally, I am a skeptic on this point.