If you're a fan of Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury and not a gardener, then you probably saw these strips earlier this month and maybe chuckled.

If you're a gardener and not a fan of Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury then you probably didn't see these strips.

But if you're a fan of Gary Trudeau's Do...

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Maybe Grant McCracken is right. Maybe a new set of adverts for Levi's that use the words (and voice!) of Walt Whitman do show that “[a]dvertising has taken up what Whitman thought was the poet's job”. McCracken explains:

I think it is thrilling to see these meanings circulating in our culture,...

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Start: 95.4 Last week: 88.9 This week: 87.0

Did I really dump almost 2kg in a week? Yes. But it's not quite what you think.

I've been putting off an absolutely routine, age-related procedure for almost a whole year now, put off myself by the necessary preparation and fear of the unknown. Everything I read, and there's lots of it, seems to me to be unnecessarily coy about the whole thing. So OK, I know not to drink red juice after the sluice-out, apparently because it can be mistaken for blood. But what to expect of the sluice-out itself? Stay near a toilet and have something to read aren't all that informative. Knowledge is power, and reassurance, and preparedness, and all that, so here's the guide to:

How to really prepare for a colonoscopy, really

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We spent a lovely weekend in Florence a few days ago, including some quality time with friends we don’t often see. But there’s nothing I can say about Florence that hasn’t been said better elsewhere, so I won’t even try. Instead, I’ll share this.

Coats for dogs on display in a petshop window

In case you can't quite make it out, it is a pet...

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Eats Wombat pointed me to a story by the indefatigable Jay Rayner in last Sunday's Observer. My big beef about takeaway chicken explains why cheap chicken -- the kind Brits scarf with such relish -- is likely to contain pork and beef protein. To keep the water in. Why? Because water is free. So if you can persuade a piece of chicken to absorb a load of water you can charge chicken prices (not that high, but hey) for nothing. And the easiest way to do that is inject the chicken bits with protein powder.

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