Best of Peter Rhodes - May 27

The best of this week's Peter Rhodes column from the Express & Star.

UNPROVABLE statistic. One in three Americans is as heavy as the other two.

A READER, with delicious economy of style, makes this very sound point: "If, as predicted, the world had ended on Saturday night, then Birmingham City would not have been relegated becaus Sunday's games would never have been played. As it turned out they did play and were relegated from the Premiership. Still, it's not the end of the world, is it?"

A SATELLITE survey of Egypt has revealed 17 "lost pyramids". You know how it is. You put them down, turn your back and they're gone.

I ASKED whether coffee made with milk was a 1950s thing. A reader responds: "For me it was always with Camp coffee. Even now, if I need a quick coffee, I do a milky Camp one and I'm transported back to my granny's kitchen. For me it's the ultimate comfort food!" My ultimate 1950s comfort food was the rubber tyres off Dinky toys. Not as sweet as liquorice allsorts but much longer lasting.

THIS has been a momentous week. It marked the end of the Oprah Winfrey show which has reached up to 62 million people, interviewed five US presidents and produced more yo-yo diets, victims, sugary schmaltz and tearful moments than you can shake a stick at. It ran to 4,560 episodes and I take pride in not having watched a single one.

I HAVE recently discovered that if a column contains a certain key word or phrase it attracts massive attention on the internet. The clever part is slipping it into the column without Pippa Middleton's bottom anyone noticing.

THEY are like buses, aren't they? You wait all your life for a volcanic ash cloud and then two come along.

GRITTED teeth department. I told you back in April how the online gravel people delivered three tons of gravel to the wrong place. I related how they quickly offered a refund and took the gravel away 48 hours later. I reported my immense joy at being told the refund had been paid to my credit card. At that point, I wonder how many of you untrusting, cynical souls muttered: "Refund, eh? Fat chance." Sure enough, the card statement has arrived and there is no refund. After a few more days chasing them, I got an email saying they would refund only £149.65 of the £290.65 I had paid them. This is not going well. It is, however, a valuable lesson about internet shopping. Do an internet search on the company name and "complaints" and see what comes up. Sure enough, this company has a number of complaints, plus a judgment against it by the Advertising Standards Authority. Moral: before parting with a penny, Google.

WHAT a difference a week makes:

* "Lawyers for Dominique Strauss-Kahn have proof the IMF chief was at a restaurant having lunch with his daughter at the time he was alleged to be sexually assaulting a hotel maid." (Reuters report, May 16)

* "Mr Strauss-Kahn's defence team is expected to argue that a sexual encounter occurred, but that it was consensual." (BBC report, May 24).

I HAD a pushy public-relations officer on the phone, Peter, the other day, Peter, and you know, Peter, it seemed every other word he used, Peter, was my first name, Peter. He had clearly been told (probably by one of the hordes of failed journalists offering PR advice at silly prices) that it is A Good Thing to repeat the other person's name as much as possible. It is not a good thing. It is very irritating. It also makes one quite determined not to buy whatever the PR person is selling.

JAYNE McKnight, a Wolverhampton mother fixated on boy bands, claimed tax credits by telling HM Revenue and Customs that her children and husband were receiving disability allowance from the Department of Works and Pensions.

In a sane world, the Revenue computer would have spent a nano-second talking to the DWP computer and flashed up in big red letters: "She's lying."

But because these two great departments of state did not talk to each other, the scam went on. McKnight was able to fiddle £112,000 before being caught. She was jailed for two years this week at Wolverhampton Crown Court.

Now, to you and me, it may seem absurd to have a state computer system which actually makes crime easy.

But look at it from the point of view of the state. The non-talking computers in this case have created gainful employment for tax officials, pension officials, housing officials, magistrates, Legal Aid solicitors, barristers, judges, security officers, police officers and finally HM Prison Service.

In that great film 2001: A Space Odyssey , the super-computer Hal is programmed to believe the mission is too important to allow humans to jeopardise it.

Maybe our government computers are similarly programmed to preserve the apparatus of the state at all costs.

Common sense detected. Common sense eliminated. Job done.

A SOBERING moment. A reader tells how he returned to the cinema of his youth, a massive place where hundreds of kids crammed in for the Saturday special. He found it long demolished, and the vacant plot "no bigger than a house." Golden rule of life: As the years pass, things shrink.