Web Monitor
17:16 UK time, Monday, 2 November 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: the easiest audition, a dog's dinner and extreme-niche blogging.
• Jerry Springer has had a long and varied career from Cincinnati mayor to West End performer via host of The Jerry Springer Show, airing a rich array of people's problems. But on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs Springer says it's all down to luck. This may sound modest until how you hear he was cast as Billy Flynn in the musical Chicago:
"It's the first time I've ever been on stage in a play. I mean most people were in plays in high school. So here I am at 65, and they say 'we want you to be in this musical' and I'm not a professional singer or dancer. I figure if they were crazy enough to ask me, then I've got to have at least the guts to say yes. I think they may have been drinking at the time. But they never bothered to figure out if I could sing. Everybody working on the show thought someone else had asked me to sing."
• Dog seems to be on the menu at the moment. "Guilty owner of a medium-sized dog" that dog owners should feel just as culpable for their carbon footprint as SUV drivers. When considering the manufacturing of pet food, a German Shepherd's ecological paw-print is 1.1 hectares. Meanwhile, at what he calls a modest proposal for tossing Fido in the oven:
"Unlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten. Three to four million dogs and cats are euthanized annually. The simple disposal of these euthanized dogs is an enormous ecological and economic problem. But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too."
• The joy of the web is that you can go as niche as you like. maps where you can buy Cadbury Twirls in central London. Web Monitor was taken aback by the sheer volume of newsagents included in this comprehensive catalogue of shops in James Ward's area, accompanied by a photo, details of storage of the chocolate bars and other notes:
"When I was in the shop, a bald headed man complained to his friend about how much they charge for a Curly Wurly. I considered suggesting to him that he could start a project mapping the prices across London but decided against it."
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