Newcastle is indeed located in Scotland. It is a city, not a capital.

The response from lowcostholidays to Jamie O’Neill’s email pointing out that Newcastle isn’t, in fact, in Scotland. As featured on Bitterwallet.

Editor’s note (26th September 2014):
At the request of a Senior Outreach Executive from the lowcosttravel group, this post has been edited to remove the link to lowcostholidays.

I’m afraid my inner pedant got the better of me and couldn’t overlook another correspondent’s loose grip on reality last week, resulting in another letter published in my hometown rag, the Southport Visiter. Sorry for the geekiness: if you find it frustrating when letters myopically concentrate on the specifics of claims while ignoring the bigger issues, it’s probably best if you don’t click through.

One of the cabin crew panicked upon landing. She was screaming like a banshee – ‘Get off, get off’ – she was pushing people down the chute.

Tom Alrigde, complaining in a BBC News article about a member of cabin crew trying to evacuate a plane suspected of being on fire as quickly as possible. Yes, really.

I own a house in North Kensington and my house in the constituency in Oxfordshire and that is, as far as I know, all I have. Do not make me sound like a prat for not knowing how many houses I’ve got.

David Cameron, talking to Ginny Dougary for The Times, in 2009. I missed this first time round, but have just found it via David Eaton in the New Statesman.

Everyone else pitched baby carrots as an antidote to junk food. Where Crispin came out was almost the exact opposite. We want to be junk food.

This article from Fast Company describes a fascinating and (at least initially) successful approach to marketing carrots. I think it provides some interesting food for thought for public health people, like me.

Those of you unfortunate enough to use Internet Explorer 8 as your main browser may have noticed that the site’s homepage had fallen apart. As a non-user, I hadn’t noticed until I tried to access the site on my parents’ computer.

It turns out that a single misplaced meta tag made the whole homepage screw up. I’ve fixed it now. The site still doesn’t look great in IE8: there are no rounded corners thanks to incompatibility with that bit of CSS, for example. I’d recommend switching to something a little more up-to-date, like Chrome.

Somewhere at the top of the Hundred Acre Wood a little boy and his bear play. On closer examination, we find a forest where neurodevelopment and psychosocial problems go unrecognised and untreated.

Over the weekend, somebody (I forget who) posted this paper, which gives a neurodevelopment perspective on Winnie-the-Pooh, on Twitter. Wendy and I both really enjoyed reading it – it’s a brilliant piece of medical whimsy.

In any one year one in four people in the United Kingdom have their thyroid function checked.

This grammatically erroneous and factually absurd statement from a 2009 BMJ paper remains uncorrected, as highlighted by this interesting paper about journals’ error handling in JRSM. It strikes me as alarming that the Guardian appears to have a more open and robust approach to highlighting and correcting errors than our leading medical journal; but then I guess correcting mistakes in emerging research fields is a trickier issue than correcting journalistic errors.

More irritatingly – how come other people can get such obvious slips though peer review, yet peer reviewers pick up on every dodgy comma in my work?

The happiest moment of my year is about three hours before the first race at Cheltenham.

So wrote Charlie Brooks in a Telegraph article on Sunday. This morning, he and his wife Rebecca Brooks were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice… just hours before the first race at Cheltenham.

We found evidence of a reduced risk of death occurring among patients already in hospital on weekend days versus week days.

Given all the attention Dr Foster got for their finding that death rates in NHS hospitals were higher at weekends, it’s interesting that this huge study essentially suggests the opposite (though the full paper is worth reading, and is less encouraging than this single comparison might suggest).