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Electric Death Potatoes

"He sounded so genuine on the phone," says concerned microwave owner Christian Pyle. "He used all sorts of technical expressions. To be honest, I couldn't really follow it all but he seemed to know what he was talking about."

Mr Pyle is just one of many unsuspecting victims of a novel new scam that allows criminals to take control of your microwave. Typically the scammer will phone up out of the blue, claiming to be from the manufacturer. They will tell you that they have detected problems and that you need to input a series of instructions in order to resolve the problem. In reality, the instructions allow the scammer to gain remote access to your microwave, usually so that they can install malicious foodstuffs and virus-laden ready meals.

"We've come across a lot of cases like this just lately," says Ray Turing, a freelance kitchen security consultant. "In many cases users won't notice much difference. You might find that your Cup-a-Soup is a slightly different shade, or that there's a rogue carrot in your shepherd's pie. But on some occasions the results are more dramatic."

As an example of one of these more 'dramatic' incidents, Mr Turing informs us about a man in Halifax who returned home from work to find a bright green potato slowly revolving in his microwave, fizzing and sparking and glaring at him with its one baleful eye.

"It's a growing problem, but the advice is simple," Mr Turing tells us. "If you get one of these calls, just put the phone down straight away, else the consequences could be severe. Although, thankfully, you'll be pleased to learn that reports of electric death potatoes are quite rare."

Apparently

The word 'apparently' is one of several words that has been stolen from the English language in a daring raid on a secure vocabulary facility in Oxford. Police were first alerted to the theft at about eight o'clock in the evening when a man out walking his dog noticed that the gates to the facility had been forced.

The Oxford storehouse was built in 1882 and the English language has been housed there ever since, excluding the duration of the Second World War when it was removed to a disused salt mine in North Wales for safekeeping. The original stone building has since been augmented with modern alarm systems and a coded locking mechanism. The words themselves are kept in airtight containers - away from light sources which may cause them to fade - except when they are made available for study by academics or loaned to museums.

Police have not suggested a motive for the theft, although it has almost certainly been stolen to order. Most words are currently kept at Oxford but there are still a few in private hands. Original English words are therefore highly sought after, with verbs in particular fetching huge sums. For example, the word 'shatter' recently sold for over three hundred thousand pounds and the irregular verb 'porunk' was listed with a reserve price of half a million by one auction house, until it was subsequently revealed to be a fake.

Adverbs can still fetch a fair amount on the black market and it seems that there is no shortage of unscrupulous collectors who wouldn't baulk at breaking the law to get hold of one. For some time there has been a thriving overseas market for stolen words and it used to be a favourite technique to smuggle them out of the country hidden in the pages of a book. Now, the internet has made such methods redundant and it is a simple enough matter to simply email the stolen word to its recipient. All of which means that the stolen word is most likely out of the country already, and there is probably very little chance of ever recovering it, apparently.

Speedybus

Hartlepool based bus company Speedybus is celebrating a one hundred percent success rating in a survey carried out earlier this month. Customers awarded the company the maximum number of points on a range of questions covering punctuality, value for money and customer service, whereas none of the firm's competitors scored anything at all.

"I think this is testament to the trust that our customers have in us," said managing director Henry Crumpet. "And I'm confident that we will continue to maintain that trust in the year ahead."

What the company have been less transparent about was the size of the sample. It appears that only a limited number of customers were surveyed. A very limited number. One, in fact - a Mrs Edna Womble of 42 Slack Jaw Lane. Admittedly, Mrs Womble was very positive about the company, and responded that she particularly liked the bright blue colour of the buses and the fact that the driver always smiled at her when she got aboard with her shopping.

Nevertheless, Speedybus have dismissed the suggestion that the size of the sample in any way invalidates the survey. "Mrs Womble is a very well respected figure in this area," said Mr Crumpet. "Her opinion means a great deal - indeed, it can make or break a business. It was Edna that brought down the mini-market in the high street and I have it on good authority that she once reduced the man in the butcher's to tears. If Mrs Womble says that she likes the bright blue colour of our buses, then that's pretty much all the recommendation that you need."