Who'll be the next Twitter-chump?

OUR changing language. BBC Inside Science (Radio 4) described a controversial biologist as a big cheese overturning the apple cart.

A NUMBER of you have reported a tiny problem with the glow-in-the-dark fridge magnets distributed by Western Power in case of power cuts. They don't glow. (I've just checked mine. Not a glimmer).

AT about the time Labour's shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry was getting herself sacked for being a snob in Rochester, Channel 4 News was in full Armageddon-mode over the alleged filching of millions of items from the internet by government agencies and private firms. What do these two stories have in common? They both assume that the internet is, or ought to be, private. But it isn't, it never has been and, 20 years into the digital revolution, it is amazing that so many important people still don't grasp this simple fact. Thornberry is a typical modern Labour MP, born into a middle-class academic family and trained as a barrister. She claims to speak for the working class but, like so many of the Islington set, she detests some working-class values. She sees a white van outside a house draped with England flags and cannot resist taking a photo, adding a sneery caption "Image from Rochester" and tweeting it to her latte-socialist chums. But Twitter isn't like that. It's not private. It's a public forum. If you wouldn't shout something from the rooftops with a megaphone, then don't put it on Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else in the ether. Emily Thornberry ignored that simple rule and paid the price. So which chump will be next?

IN the meantime, all candidates in the forthcoming 2015 General Election should remember the first rule of politics. You must show total and absolute respect to your constituents. (And when you can fake that, you've cracked it).

MODERN policing 1) A reader observes how odd it seems that in the old days, when police wore serge uniforms and carried nothing more than a truncheon, they would wade into any riot. These days, he says, the cops are tooled up like stormtroopers but "seem to let anything happen."

MODERN policing 2) A reader tells me he was burgled a few weeks ago and reported it to the police. Since then he has had two phone calls from security-alarm firms. The Pc who dealt with the case says the police definitely did not tip off the companies. Really? So who did?

DIGGING out the foundations for yet another garden wall (beware, bricklaying can become an obsession) I uncovered an ancient bag of coal. Old, shiny, wicked, CO2-generating, greenhouse-gassing, planet-destroying coal. So I did a terrible thing and put it on our stove. It was like unbottling the 1950s. How can something so wicked smell so good?

AFTER last week's comments about lawyers and their charges, a reader reminds me of the old tale about the blameless engineer who died and, owing to a clerical error, was sent to Hell instead of Heaven. When God threatened legal action to recover him, the Devil sneered: "Where are you going to find a lawyer up there?"

AN Xmas gift catalogue offers "Camp-fire style mugs: Designed to look like the enamelled tin types, these are actually made from high quality porcelain." So it looks just like a tin mug but if you drop it, it breaks. I must be missing something here.