Sometimes when I read the paper, I think more about the stories that I don't see than the ones that I do see. This has happened a number of times in recent days, so here are some stories I'd like to read:

Gasoline prices. Occasionally, there's a story about them coming down, but I wonder why? And prices are not coming down slowly: From late last week until Thursday afternoon, the price for regular at the station I usually go to had dropped from 2.33 a gallon to 2.19! Why? I seem to recall in past years that gas prices sometimes went up at this time of year, and the reason usually given was that refineries were switching over to making heating oil, so gasoline supplies were tighter. And the other things going on in the world that were given as reasons when gas was flirting with (and sometimes exceeding) $3 a gallon: Alaska? Half the production of the Alaska pipeline is still out due to corroded pipes, as far as I know. Tension in the middle east? Last I checked, the U.S. was still taking a hard line about Iran's supposed atom weapons program. They're not shooting at each other in South Lebanon but nothing more than a very tenuous cease-fire has broken out there. Iraq sometimes gets pushed off the radar screen by such things as the torture debate, but the bombs keep going off and people (U.S. soldiers and Iraqis both) continue to die. So it's hard to see why gas prices are falling so fast. 

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If you're not a regular reader of the Telegraph online, then you've been missing out on an interesting sequence of events. See Damon Kiesow's "Web Notes" for all the details but in essence the story was that there was an attempt -- fairly quickly discerned -- to stuff the electronic ballot box in a web poll the Telegraph was running.

This incident brings to the foreground some issues that have been simmering since the first web polls appeared only a few years ago.

 

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Taking the charitable road, we'll blame three recent "oops!" in the pages of the Telegraph on the fact that the best spell checker ever written is often helpless when faced by the quirks in our native language.

One of these was pointed out in a letter to the editor, which observed that in a sports story, the word "duel" was used where "dual" was intended. The letter included some witty speculation about scenarios where "duel" would have beencorrect. 

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