“after months of research, experts believe they may now hold the key to the 250-year-old code, which is carved on a monument at the Earl of Lichfield’s Shugborough Hall estate in Staffordshire.

The Shepherd’s Monument, commissioned in 1748 by the then earl, Thomas Anson, features a carved image of a Nicolas Poussin painting with the letters D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. underneath.

The cryptic inscription was rumoured to point to the location of the Holy Grail - the cup Jesus is said to have used at the Last Supper.”

Two things:

1. Any code this short is difficult to crack without resorting to other clues in the context.

2. There is a huge incentive to subconsciously or consciously accept the context of the connections to the Holy Grail, particularly at a time when the Da Vinci Code book is generating a boatload of cash around Holy Grail seeker tourist sites.

Perhaps D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. means:

DaVinci Owes Us Our Share Verify A Very Valuable Message

Scotsman.com News - Top Stories - Code cracked as hunt for Grail goes on

At Web 2.0 and Jeff Bezos is presenting, showing his Amazon homepage. In the top right corner is ‘Jeff’s Gold Box’.

Presumably Jeff’s Gold Box contains, well, gold bars.

If you take the current Olympic medals table (ranked by number of golds) and re-order the top 20 gold medal winners to those listed by number of people per gold medal, according to population figures, the rankings are somewhat different.

By this measure, the leader, Australia, is 7 times more athletic than the US and 30 times more than China. Greece is doing well with its home advantage at number 2.

Rank:

1. Australia
2. Greece
3. Romania
4. Sweden
5. Hungary
6. Belarus
7. Netherlands
8. Ukraine
9. France
10. Italy
11. South Korea
12. Japan
13. Great Britain
14. Germany
15. United States
16. Russia
17. Canada
18. Poland
19.Turkey
20. China

Classic - reverse air rage on an Aeroflot flight as drunk cabin staff attack a passenger, giving him a black eye.

“… a medical examination after the flight showed the cabin attendants were heavily intoxicated.

Another passenger told a forum on the avia.ru civil aviation website that the stewards distributed in-flight meals only when the plane started its descent, and managed to spill large quantities of food on the floor. ”

BBC: ‘Reverse air-rage’ on Russian jet

Blogjam is trying to get Blur’s Damon Alburn to be the top entry for the word cunt (which if you are British or Irish or Australian, normally refers to a guy and can be used in general bar talk).

Cunt, or quoint used to be polite speak for Vagina (which sounds a hell of a lot more rude to me) and appears in Chaucer. The word ‘quaint’ is actually the same word via a different route.

Isn’t Damon quaint?

blogjam: cuntbomb

Edison, the Man was made in 1940, in it, I have a recollection that a machine stops working because ‘there is a bug in it’.

If that is true, this clearly predates the accepted origin when a moth appeared in the Mark I computer at Harvard in 1945.

Can anyone confirm?

The phrase ‘what the dickens’, has nothing to do with Dickens, but was ironically coined by Shakespeare hundreds of years earlier.

Trivia: Shakespeare top 10

Swiss bank account money scams are one of the rare delights of spam email, if only for the reason that somehow everyone involved seems to use a particularly obsequious form of convoluted Victorian English that is usually reserved for UK civil servants.

“It is of great importance that I would require your humble help in assisting me to claim a deposited consignment at swiszerland.”

Swizerland - classic

Soft drink is purified tap water.

“Soft drink giant Coca-Cola has admitted it is selling purified tap water in a bottle. It says the source for its new Dasani bottled water is the mains supply at its factory in Kent.”

At least snake oil sounds exotic.

Ah, Waldrobemalfunction.com - obviously a site about difficulties with IKEA’s (un)dresser called Janet.