Good luck to everyone who’s going to pick up their GCSE results today! I really hope you get the grades you wanted – and don’t listen to all the stuff about them getting easier, they say it every year, so don’t let it lessen your sense of achievement. If you haven’t got quite what you wanted, don’t let it worry you too much – I’m sure you’ll find the right way forward for yourself, and be very successful in your own way in the long-run. And for those who did get what they wanted: Congratulations!

Good luck to everyone who’s going to pick up their A-Level and AS-Level results today – I hope you get the grades you wanted, but remember that it’s not the end of the world if you don’t. After all, if you’ve tried as hard as you were willing and the results haven’t come out in your favour, then whatever it is you wanted to do probably wasn’t for you anyway, and you just need to rethink your plans. If you have got what you wanted, then well done, and I’m very happy for you!

Now unfortunately, by the time this appears I’m going to be some considerable distance from my ‘pooter (about 1,100 miles by my calculation – yes, again, I’m positively jet-setting this month!), so I’m not going to be able to catch up with everybody 🙁 I will when I get back though… I haven’t forgotten you!

Thanks to some frankly bizarre decision by the soap-buyer of the household, all of the soap in my house at the moment is of the Grapefruit and Honeydew Melon variety, this coming hot on the heels of a brief flirtation with strawberry soap. Now, perhaps I’m the only one, but I don’t actually want my hands to smell like any kind of fruit product. Indeed, if I’d been handling grapefruits and honeydew melons, I’d wash my hands to remove the smell.

So why are there so many fruit soaps, and so few soaps that actually smell of, well, soap? Looking on a popular online shopping site (Tesco, if you’re interested), there are 40 – that’s forty – kinds of liquid soap scented with fruits, flowers, and other such things that you really wouldn’t want to smell like. There are just 8 – eight – that don’t specify, and so I’m generously assuming smell of soap. So five times more kinds of soap smell of things other than soap, than those soaps which smell soapy. That seems foolish to me. But maybe I just don’t get it.

The evil monster of the ‘Save’ instead ‘Publish’ button strikes again… that’s why this is being published a little over twenty-four hours late… Sorry!

The musical opposition to ID cards is here (via Observer Blog)

This craze is truly underway now, with Amazon currently listing twenty titles, including a board game, the Guardian book of hand-compiled puzzles, the Independent book of Super Sudokus, and even a guide to completing the puzzles by Carol Vorderman (or, if you prefer, Sudoku for Dummies).

It’s been clear for a long time that this is a major craze – even my original post on the subject has topped the charts for most popular post, but has consistently been leagues ahead of every other post each month. But this level is, as any idiot can see, unsustainable. And, frankly, I’ll be glad when the craze has finished and I can just do the (single) daily Sudoku puzzle in peace, without having to have it taking over every media outlet. But if you are truly obessed, then make sure you’re tuned in to Sky One on Friday 1st July, for Carol Vorderman’s Sudoku Live. I only wish I was joking.

If you buy your Sudoku supplies through the Amazon links on this site, you’ll be helping to keep the site going – you can check out the very latest titles and their prices here

I must thank Tom Reynolds for his Guardian piece which reunited me with the almost fatally depressing ‘Brick’ by Ben Folds Five. I can’t think why I’ve come across it before, but I have, and it still retains the same sense of hopeless tragedy that it did the first time I heard it. But then, I guess it’s difficult to write a cheery song about getting an abortion.

Here’s what Mr Reynolds had to say about it (complete with corrections presumably added after he wrote the original):

(NB: Many listeners, including me, first assumed Brick was about a relationship ending. We discovered later that it’s about a couple getting an abortion. The following is based on the first scenario. Therefore it’s all wrong.) A gloomy piano-and-voice song about a couple breaking up (wrong), Brick tells of a guy who picks up his girlfriend, bitches, takes her someplace, bitches, waits for her, bitches, then brings her back home, referring to her as a “brick” (this is true). We never learn what’s transpired in between (this is wrong). All that’s certain is the couple wants to split up (this is wrong). Brick offers the same pleasure that comes with dropping one on your foot (this is really true).

He only rates it as number 13 in the most depressing songs ever. I think it’s far worse than that.

Lots of good stuff around to read at the moment, but most of it doesn’t feel deserving of a full post – mainly because there’s nothing more I can say about it. So I’m putting it all in this post instead.

Andrew Brown wonders, quite rightly, what’s happened to Terry Schiavo’s autopsy results, which we were promised very quickly after her death. Where have they got to, and why haven’t we heard anything about them?

Hopping back just over a week, Sarah Left is amusing herself about the fact that bloggers are always asking for straight answers to straight questions, and now they’ve got a straight ‘Nee’ from the Dutch, they’re not entirely sure what to make of it. She links to Edward at A Fist full of Euros, who send us over to The FT for a list of twenty reasons why ‘Nee’ doesn’t really mean ‘No’. Good grief.

Also on the Newsblog, Jane Perrone reports about a shocking discovery by NASA, who discovered space suits for space spies in a room that no-one had opened. And to think NASA say they’re underfunded – they have rooms that haven’t even been opened for years, let alone used.

Nothing to Declare tell us that the Daily Express have finally lost patience with their readership, after their front page announcement that “94% of you believe Diana was murdered”. NTD always makes me smile.

And finally, b3ta have announced the winners in their Phallic Logo Awards (via Onlineblog). As they say:

The game designers across the nation are playing is; can they design a logo and get it approved without the client realising it’s a big spurting penis?

From the results, at least, it appears they can.

This seems to be almost living in my inbox recently:

This is a genuine psychological test. It is a story about a girl.

While at the funeral of her own mother, she met a guy whom she did not know. She thought this guy was amazing, so much her dream guy she believed him to be, that she fell in love with him there and then… A few days later, the girl killed her own sister.

Question: What is her motive in killing her sister?

If this actually worked, then I would be some kind of raging psychopath, given that I didn’t just get the ‘psychopath’ answer, I got it instantly. It was perfectly obivous to me. I’d love to sit and debunk it myself, but Snopes does a much better job than I would.

And if you’re interested, the answer’s there too.

Somebody’s had the marvellous idea of publishing Stoker’s Dracula in real time on a blog. Such a simple idea, it’s strange no-one’s thought of it before, really. If you’ve never experienced this excellent novel, spoiled by its rushed and frankly rubbish ending, then now you can read it in bitesized chunks. I think it’s a good idea, anyway.

Having now completed The Times Su Doku Book One, I’ve now bought and moved on to Book Two – which is available now, even though it isn’t technically scheduled to be released until 6th June. Sadly, the people at The Times have clearly not had the time to write another introduction or foreword to the second book, as those pages are direct copies from the first. But there are 100 new puzzles, and that would seem to be the most important things.

Also available now is the Telegraph’s Sudoku book, which I haven’t had a proper chance to look at and see whether or not it is much good. Forthcoming titles in this crazy world of puzzle mania include: The Times Su Doku Book Three, The Big Book of Su Doku, The Telegraph Sudoku 2, and The Official Su Doku Puzzle Book: The Utterly Addictive Number-Placing Game, Book 1. I think it’s fairly clear to see that this simple puzzle is turning into a publishing craze, as well as a newspaper craze.

Since I last wrote on this topic, The Guardian have launched a Sudoku section of their website, joining those of The Times, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Mirror, and very possible many others that I’ve missed. The Times and The Sun also now allow you to download Su Doku to your mobile phone.

The Su Doku craze must surely be reaching its peak by now. Even as someone who’s been playing the puzzle for some time, it’s becoming quite tiresome to hear about it constantly. And I even feel obliged to come on here and write about it, because it’s all over the media. I hear that there are even plans to make it into a television show. But for those of you who aren’t tired of the craze, you can click on any of the book titles above to buy them from Amazon, and I’ll get a nice kick-back to keep the site up and running.

Of course, the most interesting question here is not so much about the puzzle itself, as much as it is about why it has become quite as popular as it has. It’s clearly got something to do with the fact that the rules are simple, there is a big feeling of satisfactation upon completing the puzzle, and there’s no prior knowledge required. But that logic could be applied to any number of number puzzles. If the books weren’t making bestseller lists, I would insist that the puzzle isn’t as popular as it appears, and that it’s all a media ploy to get people to buy a particular newspaper. But that suggestion isn’t borne out by the evidence. So why is this craze happening? And how long will it last? As with all things, only time will tell.