Spell Check
 

(How much do you trust your spell checker?)

Eye halve a spelling chequer

It came with my pea sea

It plainly marques four my revue

Miss steaks ewe kin knot sea

Eye strike a key and type a word

And weight four it two say

Weather eye am wrong oar write

It shows me strait a weigh

As soon as a mist ache is maid

It nose be fore two long

And eye can put the era rite

Its rare lea ever wrong

Eye have run this poem rite threw it

I am shore your pleased two no

Its letter perfect awl the weigh

My chequer tolled me so.

Waiter, There’s a Mouse in My Soup

At first, it seemed like something straight out of Donoghue v Stevenson, but ended up being a storm in a teacup. A woman and her adult son have been convicted in Virginia, USA, for trying to extort money from the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain by claiming they found a dead mouse in a bowl of soup while celebrating Mother’s Day in 2004. Charges were filed after a necropsy showed the mouse died of a fractured skull. It had no soup in its lungs and had not been cooked – signs that the rodent had been dropped into the soup after its death. Cracker Barrel officials said the duo had sought US$500,000 from the company.

Red Scot Scorched

An Indian court has ruled that Indian whisky manufacturers cannot use the words Scot or Scotch to describe their products, in compliance with World Trade Organization (‘WTO’) rules. The judgment was given on a lawsuit filed by the Scotch Whisky Association of the United Kingdom seeking to restrain Golden Bottling Limited, an Indian whisky manufacturer, from using the name Red Scot to sell its whisky.

This is the first such ruling in India on the WTO’s Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement, which identifies products originating from a particular territory. Foreign companies have long complained that India provides little protection in such cases under WTO rules.

Toilet Humour
 

Malaysia will try to flush its long-held image of having foul-smelling public restrooms with a National Toilet Summit to educate the public about the importance of clean commodes. Its Deputy Housing and Local Government Minister Robert Lau – whose ministry will hold the conference in Kuala Lumpur on 24 and 25 August is quoted to have quipped: ‘If a toilet is a person (in Malaysia), he should protest to the Human Rights Commission because he is very unfairly treated’. The meeting will bring together local officials and international experts on toilet management, including the founder of the World Toilet Organization, Singaporean 
Jack Sim.