Tesco has started selling a bottle of wine that costs £100 per bottle making it the most expensive supermarket wine on sale. Made by Penfolds the wine is being sold in certain stores where there is demand for something more expensive that the usual supermarket wine. I would love to try it but its a little out of my price range.

I came across this balloon game. Just hold down the mouse button and choose what direction you want the monkey to fire his arrows.

I found this cute sheep game that tests how fast your reactions are. Basically you need to hit the tranquilizer button whenever you see a sheep trying to leave the flock. You have five sheep to stop and it comes complete with sheep noises. I managed to score a Bobbing bobcat which is not great but is still better than a sluggish snail.

After taking my new trainers out of the box, it made a nice new cat bed.

I went shopping for some new trainers this weekend and ended up purchasing two pairs of trainers in two different stores. Whilst I am happy with both of my purchases the experience of shopping in the two stores was entirely different. One of the stores has left me a positive experience and the other quite the opposite.

The first store I went to was JJB. The store was well laid out and it was relatively easy to locate the section containing the trainers. I selected two different pairs to try and after a short wait a sales assistant went to find the shoes in my size. Returning with both pairs of trainers he proceeded to unlace them for me before asking me what the trainers were to be used for. On hearing that I would be using them in the gym the sales assistant then recommended which pair was most appropriate. Based on his advice and after trying both pairs on, I selected one pair. After queuing for a short time I paid for the trainers and left the store, feeing satisfied with my purchase and very happy with the customer service I had received.

The second store I visited was Sports World. On entering the store I was immediately struck by the fact that they had tried to cram too many items into too small a space. It was not immediately apparent where to locate different items in the store. In fact it was hard to walk around in the store due to the fact that there was barely any room to move around between the different racks of clothes. Other customers were also commenting on how packed and uncomfortable the store was. After locating a pair of trainers I looked around for somewhere to try them on and finding nowhere I decided to take a chance and just buy them. Fighting my way to the till, I then queued for around 20 minutes before reaching the checkout. All of the sales assistants looked thoroughly fed up and demoralised. Although judging by the fact that the store was packed to bursting with stock and there was no air conditioning I could understand why. I was served by a sales assistant who was more interested in talking to his fellow workers about the football score than he was serving a customer. After purchasing the shoes and fighting my way out of the store I left with the intention of not shopping in this store again.

The moral of this story, good customer service will result in return business.

Another hot April day and all the cats are fast asleep trying to escape the heat. Poor Oscar is exhausted. What a hard life he has.

A new sport is becoming popular in Denmark show jumping but with rabbits instead of horses. There are a number of different disciplines that the highly trained bunnies can compete in.

I came across this website cheddarvisiontv where you can watch a large cheddar cheese as it ripens. If you are expecting a lot of action from the cheese prepare to be disappointed.

Apparently this seasons must have bag is a £5 cotton bag sold by Sainsbury’s. The bag went on sale on Wednesday and was sold out within an hour. I find it hard to see what all the fuss is about. Still, people must really want this bag, a quick search on ebay shows prices of up to £195.

In a scam in Japan thousands of sheep were sold to unsuspecting customers who thought they had brought a poodle. The scam was only uncovered after one unhappy customer noticed her dog didn’t bark or eat dog food. After an investigation it turned out her dog was in fact a sheep.

A lamb.

It’s amazing what some people think of as an emergency. Some examples on the Mets website include someone calling 999 because there was a rat in their kitchen and another who couldn’t turn a tap off. I think the most extreme example has got to be a man in Reading who reportedly called 999 because his wife was refusing to have sex with him. Obviously a life threatening emergency.

It’s getting very hard to watch any TV in our house at the moment as we have to wrestle the remote away from this vicious creature (pictured above). Ok I admit the photo is staged but he does look pretty scary.

Further to my post about a man caught stealing underwear dressed as a female elf, he is now undergoing psychiatric tests to see if he is crazy. I wonder what the outcome of the tests will be.

A drunk German man looking for somewhere to sleep used his cash card to enter a bank and took his horse with him.

I found this interesting website. It requires you to log in but once you do, you can view the birds in the forest and move the camera around to view different areas.

Cats are always doing something funny. Today I found both Oscar and Willow in a tree. They must think they are birds.

Have you experienced a drop in your US based sales? It could be down to a recent policy change made by ebay. Whereas before when you listed an item it automatically appeared on ebay.com as well, now it only appears if the US user performs an advanced search. A basic search will now only bring up US based items. You can still list on ebay.com but to do so will now incur two lots of listing fees.

A useful article here including some money saving tips. Some of which I already do, like buying my groceries online but it has made me think about whether I should switch to a savings account with a better interest rate.

A survey looking at the working patterns of women in men across 25 countries has found that women do work longer hours than men. Although it only amounts to an extra ten minutes a day it appears that women do an average of 250 minutes of unpaid labour, just working in the home. Men on the other hand do an average of 130 minutes of unpaid work although they tend to spend longer at the office than women. In all the survey concluded that the workload is evenly split between the sexes although it still appears to be split between traditional roles.

We can all rest easy in our beds, safe in the knowledge that were we to lose an important item such as a shuttlecock the police would investigate promptly. When two teenage girls in Cambridgeshire lost a shuttlecock in a neighbour's garden the matter was taken very seriously by police who visited the neighbour to investigate the theft of the shuttlecock. I wonder if the police would arrive that quickly if someone was trying to break into her house.

It's St George's Day today, a day that I feel should be a national holiday. You can sign the petition here.

Do you need your daily dose of caffeine in the morning but don't always have time to make a cup of coffee? You need this caffeinated soap. The caffeine is absorbed into the system and provides the equivalent of two cups of coffee enough to keep you awake for four hours.

This husky had to be rescued by firefighters after he got his head stuck in a hole in a wall.

I found this article about a solar powered BBQ. Basically it reflects the suns rays from the mirror onto the cooking area providing heat without smoke or flames. I'm not convinced it would work that well in the UK; it seems whenever we light a BBQ we spend most of the day sitting outside with the umbrella trying to protect the fire from the rain. Still, its an interesting idea.

Have you ever wondered what a cat would do if you put it on a treadmill? Not much if this example is anything to go by. I must try this with my cats.

In other duck related news. A duck called Mr Peepers managed to survive getting run over by a car after a pet shop worker saved him leaving herself with broken bones in her foot and ankle.

A hotel in Devon ended up with a family of ducks living in their swimming pool after they took a liking to the heated water.

Further to my post about Stumpy the four-legged duck poor Stumpy has now lost one of his legs after getting it caught in his pen. He still has one more leg than most other ducks though.

According to an article on The Daily Mail website when strawberries are treated with alcohol it boosts their cancer fighting properties. The article doesn’t say exactly how many daiquiris are needed for a beneficial effect.

Want to find out which Star Wars personality you are? Then you need this quiz. I was Lando Calrissian.

In order to solve the problem of having too many jellyfish, residents of Fukui in Japan did the obvious thing. They made cookies out of them of course.

No seriously. 600 people on spacehoppers hopped together on the millennium bridge to beat the previous record of only 551 people on spcaehoppers hopping together. Strange.

I found these pictures of a really useless cat who appears to be afraid of mice, Being the owner of four useless cats I found them quite funny.

I came across this post about a magnetic clothes hanger. It seems like an interesting idea for light weight clothes but I find it difficult to see how it would handle heavy items such as outdoor coats or jeans. I also find it easy with conventional coat hangers to slide the items along the rail, presumably with this device you would need to detach the device and then reattach it in its new position. Interesting idea but not for me.

Further to my post about Wii Sports being used as part of an exercise regime it appears that playing the game for too long can result in cases of what is now being dubbed as "Wii Elbow". This article on The Times website higjlights cases where people have suffered aching backs, sore shoulders and elbows after playing the game. It suggests that the game needs to be treated as a real workout and that you should warm up before playing it. The following warm up exercises come from the same article and are suggested by the British Chiropractic Association.

1 Shoulder shrug — slowly shrug your shoulders towards your ears. Hold for two to three seconds, then relax. Repeat three times. Because it is easier to relax a muscle after you have tightened it, you will relax the muscles in the shoulder and allow the blood to flow into the arms.

2 Wrist stretch — slowly stretch the wrist backwards, hold for two to three seconds, then slowly stretch it forwards and hold for two to three seconds. Repeat three times. This exercise prevents tightening of the wrists.

3 Make a fist — hold the arm at right angles from the elbow. Make a fist and tense it, and the whole of your arm. Hold for two to three seconds, then relax and let the arm flop to your side. Repeat three times. This will help the blood flow and tone the muscles.

4 Neck muscle stretch — try to make a double chin, to stretch the muscles at the base of the neck. Hold this position for two to three seconds and repeat three times. Always stretch very slowly.

5 Lower back loosen — standing with your feet a shoulder-width apart, slowly circle your hips five revolutions to the right and then five revolutions to your left.

I came across a strange fruit the other day that I hadn’t tried before. The main reason I tried it was because it was only 49p on a promotion in Tesco and being curious I picked one up. Called a pomelo it looks and smells a bit like a large grapefruit. The instructions suggest slicing the top off of the fruit and then removing the outside peel. However it’s more effective to simply slice the fruit in half and cut it into segments. Once you have done this you can remove the white pith from the outside of the fruit and the hard parts from between the segments. The fruit itself tastes a bit like a grapefruit only sweeter and has more of the texture of an orange. After trying it I found out that the grapefruit is actually a hybrid of the grapefruit and the orange, hence why the pomelo retains characteristics of each. If you want to try something interesting then give a go.

I came across this article showing a variety of server down pages from some of the more well known companies. I quite like the following example from YouTube although the others are well worth a look too.

I came across this interesting website thegreatturtlerace.com. It charts the progress of 11 turtles, each of which has been fitted with a transmitter on their journey from Costa Rica to the Galapagos Islands. Every day the site shows how far the turtles have travelled and which turtle is in the lead. The aim of the project is too raise awareness about how few of these turtles there are left in the wild.

I read this interesting article on The Daily Mail website. A British amateur inventor working in his garden has invented a flying saucer. The contraption is actually a cross between a helicopter and a hovercraft and although it is not large enough to carry people, it has already been brought by the US army who are considering adapting it to be used as a search and rescue device.

I found this article about a solar powered bikini. Apparently it provides enough energy to charge your mobile phone, ipod and camera and even comes with a USB drinks cooler. How Bizarre.

I found this interesting collection of cloud photos. It’s hard to tell whether they are all genuine. Still genuine or Photoshopped it’s a nice collection of photos.

I constantly come across articles about creatures I never knew existed. These cow nosed rays live at Scarborough Sea Life centre. Apparently they create so much waste that their tank needs to mucked out on a daily basis. A bit messier than your average fish.

Do you have problems using chopsticks? Then you need the chork. Basically it’s a meant to be a cross between a pair of chopsticks and a fork. Personally I can’t see why its hailed as a new idea, its really a large pair of tweezers.

I saw this article on The Independents website about packaging on food. The article suggests that consumers are annoyed about the amount of packaging used by supermarkets and that if the supermarkets were to cut down on packaging it would increase customer loyalty and satisfaction. Personally I find excess packaging really irritating. Everything you buy in the supermarket seems to include plastic wrapping and as there is no way of recycling this, it all goes straight in the bin. We remove from our waste all the items to be recycled and all the waste that can be composted. The remaining waste is made up almost entirely of plastic packaging from the Supermarket.

An interesting article on Quasi Fictional about the word "geek". The article looks at the origins of the word and asks why we use the term "geek girl" but not "geek boy". On reading the article I have concluded that sadly I must be a geek.

An illustrated guide to shopping trolleys has won the booker international prize for oddest title of the year. Unfortunately the guide currently only covers trolleys in North America, so won’t be much help to those keen trolley spotters out there. Perhaps someone will release a UK version soon.

An illegal beaver has finally been apprehended in Perthshire. He was tracked down after trees began disappearing in the nearby area. It is not known whether there are more beavers still on the loose.

Driving a lorry can be tricky at the best of times but driving a lorry whilst three times over the legal alcohol limit and cooking sausages, well that’s a challenge. One German lorry driver did just that and managed to set fire to his lorry when the gas hob he was using fell over. 

Have you ever wondered what a Tyrannosaurus Rex would taste like? Well the chance is it would taste like chicken. Scientific analysis of a fossilised T Rex thigh bone showed that it was very similar to chicken protein suggesting a T Rex would have a similar taste. That’s a whole lot of meat.

Want to make a shiny ball out of mud? Well now you can, a Professor has come up with a way to make the perfect shiny mud ball such as the one below. It involves a long process of packing the mud into a ball shape and polishing it for several hours. You can see the full instructions here and before long you too could have a mud ball of your own.

Orangutans at a zoo in Atlanta have a touch screen monitor on which they can draw pictures and play games. The games are part of a study to see how they process information and could help scientists to better understand them, so they can do more to conserve the dwindling numbers of orangutans left in the wild.

Pierrepoint the cat had a lucky escape after she crept into a vans engine. She was spotted after the van had travelled 15 miles and although she was suffering from shock had no other injuries.

I found this humorous article entitled 8 important lessons learnt from 80's cartoons. It includes such gems as "communism works" learnt from The Smurfs and "trust no one" as we all learnt from watching Scooby Doo.

Pippa the cockatoo has been trying to hatch a bowl of Cadbury's cream eggs. After two weeks there is still no sign of any chicks.

This underwater restaurant is in the Maldives. I'm not sure why it makes me think of Jaws, something to do with all that glass maybe.

Why put penguins on a treadmill? To monitor their heart rate of course. As part of an experiment to see how much energy penguins use to find food a group of scientists first monitored ten penguins progress on a treadmill, so that their heart rates could be calculated. The penguins were then released complete with monitors so they could be studied in the wild. I feel sorry for the penguins, they don't look very happy.

How many Post-It Notes does it take to recreate a scene from Donkey Kong? 6400 apparently as these students found out.

An interesting article here about why George Bush is actually a genius. Among the reasons are that he has contributed more new words to the English language then anyone since William Shakespeare. We really shouldn't "misunderestimate" him.

I came across this interesting article where a guy tries using Wii Sports as part of a fitness programme. After 6 weeks of using the Wii as his only form of exercise he has now managed to lose 16 pounds. This seems like a good excuse to play more computer games.

I found this article on The Daily Mail website about a cat that has learnt how to use a bus. The cat waits for the 331 bus a couple of times a week and uses it to travel to the next stop before jumping off. Very Cute.

As yet no one knows the cats name. He looks a lot like my cat Ollie.

We all know that science is really useful; after all without science so many important things would never have been discovered. With this in mind a group of innovative scientists have spent more than 1,000 hours researching how to create the perfect bacon butty. After trying out different types of oil, various cooking techniques and different cuts of bacon the scientists discovered that the bacon should be cooked under a preheated grill for seven minutes at 240C and should then be placed between two slices of bread each of which should be 1 to 2cm thick. Well it’s good to know that in a world that still hasn’t discovered the cure for so many life threatening diseases we can at least enjoy the perfect bacon sandwich.

Want to turn your Wii Remote into a gun? You need the Wii Sharp Shooter. Basically it’s a device that connects your Wii Remote and Nunchuck to make them into a gun. I don’t have one of these for my Wii yet but it certainly looks really cool.

I found this funny post listing 27 things computers are able to do in movies. My favourite is “All computers are connected. You can access the information on a villain’s desktop computer even if it’s turned off."

I remember playing hopscotch when I was a child. Whilst most people would see this game as innocent fun, it appears playing it could mean you get a visit from the police. That’s just what happened to one little boy according to an article on The Telegraph’s website. Ryan and five of his friends had just marked out a hopscotch court and were enjoying their game, when two policemen arrived at the scene acting on a tip off from a neighbour. Apparently, the children in using chalk on the pavement were creating graffiti. Obviously this is an incident that requires a rapid response; I’m surprised the police force didn’t feel it necessary to send out a swat team and a helicopter. Later that day it rained and the “graffiti” was no more. I can’t help thinking police time could better spent catching real criminals. 

Want to see if your website is blocked in China? On the greatfirewallofChina you can check your url to see if its blocked or not. Thanks to crooked Brains for the link.

Quark has a handy function which allows you to create interesting effects with text. With the text box option there are only limited options. You can apply colours to the text but the “text to box” function enables the use of blends. To use it first create a text box and type your text in the size and font that you wish to use.  This example I have Apple Chancery. From the style menu choose the text to box option. A duplicate of your text is created.  The difference is that the created text is no longer treated as text but as a picture box and now has all the functions associated with this. You can now delete the original text and apply colours and blends to your picture box. In this example I have applied a linear blend of blue and red.

Further to my previous post about YouTube being banned in Turkey a similar ban has now been enforced in Thailand. Thailand's government have blocked access to the website because it was showing a video which insulted their King. Insulting the monarchy is currently a criminal offence in Thailand. I wonder how many people would call for a ban if YouTube showed a video which insulted Tony Blair. Not many is my guess.

I learnt today from an article on The Guardian that Tesco are going to invest in a scheme designed to help small dairy farmers. I have long been aware that the large supermarkets try to drive down prices as much as possible and whilst this is good for consumers it inevitably means that the small farmer struggles to stay in business when faced with this sort of pressure. I buy my milk direct from the dairy because they help to subsidise and support farmers. I also buy my fruit and vegetables from a local box scheme, not only to cut down on packaging but also because it offers farmers a fairer deal.

The scheme that Tesco is proposing will give direct supply contracts to 850 farmers meaning that the middle man is cut out and their profit is increased by 4p a litre, although the consumer will still pay the same for their litre of milk. In addition to this Tesco intend to launch a scheme called local choice where customers will have the choice to buy milk from smaller local farmer. On this scheme the customer will pay more for their milk, around 8p a litre extra but farmers will receive 23.5p on every litre of milk compared to the current 18p. The article states that currently farmers make a loss of around 20 a litre, so whilst these measures seem small they could go a long way towards helping smaller farmers.

It will be interesting to see firstly whether customers prefer to pay slightly more for locally produced milk and secondly whether the other large supermarkets follow suit. If successful perhaps supermarkets will start to source more goods locally. Personally I would rather eat a piece a fruit knowing it had been picked yesterday on a local farm, than one that had been shipped hundreds of miles and kept artificially fresh. One thing I have noticed since buying my vegetables from a box scheme is that they taste much better. Another thing is they don’t keep for weeks and weeks in the fridge. A lettuce from a supermarket will still be edible 3 or sometimes 4 weeks after you buy it, but this can’t be normal. If you grew it in your garden you would need to eat it within 3 or 4 days and then it would start to decay. It makes me wonder what the supermarkets add to fruit and vegetable to give them such an unnatural prolonged shelf life.

It’s that time of year again when Easter eggs fill the shelves of every supermarket. It’s very easy to be seduced to by the pretty wrapping and the seemingly cheap deals. However, perhaps we should take into account how much of the egg is actually edible. This article on The Guardian website states that some Easter eggs contain as much as 52% packaging, that’s not much chocolate for your money. They discovered this by weighing the packaging in relation to the edible content of the egg. Interestingly the Cadburys Cream Egg has only 6% packaging leaving a great 94% of edible content. The article approaches the issue from an environment perspective, trying to get manufacturers to cut down on the packaging they use. Personally for me the issue is that if I am buying an Easter egg then I want good value for money, and as much chocolate as possible…. mmm chocolate.

Staying on the subject of creatures with extra legs I came across this article about five-legged frogs. The frogs are currently being studied in Cambridgeshire where they were found, but as yet scientists are baffled as to what has caused the deformity.

As a wine lover I found this article interesting. It lists the top 10 most expensive bottles of wine ever sold and includes a slideshow with information about each of the wines. Much as I love wine I can’t imagine why someone would pay over $100,000 for a bottle.

Before reading this article I didn’t know what a kinkajou was. Apparently it is a small furry raccoon-like animal. This particular kinkajou apparently also likes bus rides.

A kinkajou.

No it’s not a joke these sheep really are red. They were spray painted using a special dye as part of a project to brighten up the M8. A flock of pink sheep are planned for the future.

Meet Stumpy the four-legged duck. Stumpy has a rare mutation which means he has an extra pair of legs.

To add a drop cap in Quark use the format box under the style menu (Apple key and F). Tick the drop cap box so the options become available. The character count option specifies how many characters you wish to drop. In this example I have chosen to set the first two characters as drop caps, so I would put a 2 in the this box. The second option specifies how many lines of text the drop cap will take up. You can set this from 2 lines to 16 lines. In my example I have set this to 3 so the drop cap will take up 3 lines of normal text. Once you have set the options click apply to make the changes.

Do you have a spare £130,000? If the answer is yes then you could spend it on one of these cool rocket packs. Called Rocket Belts they can reach speeds of up to 60mph and can launch you as high as 300ft into the air. So, the only thing about this product that is not cool is the price tag. I think I have a bit of saving to do before I can afford one.

There was a huge breakthrough in the cat eating monkey case today. A team of highly trained cat detectives acting on a tip off managed to apprehend the rouge monkey. Initially he denied all charges but after some “mild” persuasion by DI Willow and her team, the monkey finally admitted to the charges of attacking four innocent cats. Cats can once again sleep easy in their baskets now this monkey is safely behind bars. See the dramatic pictures from the crime scene below.

The suspect is captured for questioning.

Detectives Willow and Lucy begin the questioning process.

Getting nowhere they play "good cop bad cop"

Willow is the bad cop. After this "gentle" questioning the monkey confesses to four murders and is sent to jail. Crime does not pay.

Further to Rory’s article about naval defence cuts I came across this article on The Daily Referendum that Portsmouth Naval Base is under threat of closure. To help keep it open you can sign this petition.

Its April Fools Day again and looking around a few websites I found the following cool products. I Want One of Those is offering a Robo Girlfriend which has several advantages including a silent mode. Whilst Think Geek has a host of great new products including the WiiHelm for hands free game playing, Piranhaz battle fish and the inhalable caffeine stick. All great products if only they were real.