This article titled “Survival tips: what to do if an animal attacks you” was written by Phil Daoust, for The Guardian on Sunday 26th September 2010 19.00 UTC

Thanks to a plucky woman from Frenchtown, Montana, we now know how to deal with at least one animal menace. Attacked at home last week by a 90kg black bear, she sent it lumbering back into the night simply by throwing a courgette at it. Local police described this as “improvising”. The vegetable-projectile approach will probably fend off all sorts of creatures. But if you don’t fancy putting it to the test, here are some alternatives.

Hungry monkeys: You could simply give the macaque your Magnum. Failing that, try the “open-mouth threat” – make an O with your mouth, lean forward and raise your eyebrows. Then back away slowly. If that doesn’t work, open a can of beer and talk about football (they’re a bit more afraid of men than of women).

Killer bees: Africanised honeybees aim for your mouth and nose first. So pull your top up over your head, then run, run, run away. Don’t give up too soon – they’ve been known to chase victims for more than 400 metres. If possible, shut yourself in a car or building. Diving into water won’t help – they’ll wait till you come up for air.

Crocodiles and alligators: Whatever some idiots tell you, crocs and gators cannot run faster than racehorses. On land, even humans have a good chance of outpacing them. Forget anything you’ve heard about zigzagging – just leg it. If the reptile gets you into its mouth, don’t waste time trying to pry its jaws open. Stick your thumb or finger into its eye. The pain and shock should make it release you.

Sharks: If it’s trying to take chunks out of your boat, hit it with a paddle or a pole. The vulnerable spots are the eyes, gills and snout. If you’re in the water, you may be able to escape by rapid changes of direction. Sharks are not very manoeuvrable. If you’re in its mouth, do not play dead. Eyes, gills, snout, remember.

Elephants: Plan A: Climb a tree, first making sure it’s big enough that it can’t be pushed over. Plan B: Play dead in the hope that Jumbo will get tired of tossing your body around.

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This article titled “Why septic tanks are a washout in Malibu” was written by Dan Glaister, for The Guardian on Sunday 26th September 2010 19.00 UTC

Ah, Malibu, paradise on the Pacific. Sun, sand, surf, Pamela Anderson bounding through the dunes, beautiful people leading holistic, healthy lives. But wait. There is something else in the air of the celebrity haven. Or rather, in the water.

Peer deeply into the pristine ocean and you will see it is murky and grey. Waft aside the plastic bags floating past at Paradise Cove, wade into the ocean at Surfrider Beach, and you may glimpse traces of the matter that has gripped the coastal community: the effluent of the affluent.

At Broad Beach, whose beachfront homes have housed the likes of Redford, Spielberg, De Niro, DeVito and Stallone, workers struggle to erect a barrier to stop the might of the Pacific Ocean carrying off the contents of their septic tanks. For in the twin capital of detox and Botox, whose inhabitants are so removed from humanity’s grubby charm as to represent a distinct life form, one bodily function remains to be conquered: defecation.

At the centre of the mess is one of the most elite of the old Hollywood retreats: Malibu Colony. A gated beachhome area that once housed what seemed the entire population of the movies, from Gloria Swanson to Bill Murray, Malibu Colony suffers from a high water table. Like all of Malibu, it is served by septic tanks rather than mains sewers. A high water table and a septic tank by the beach is not a happy combination, as any of Malibu’s other dominant life form, the surfer dudes, will attest: swimming in the sea here can be a dirty business. “The bottom line is Malibu Lagoon is polluted and has been polluted for decades,” Mark Gold, president of environmental group Heal the Bay, told the LA Times.

With staph infections raging among surfers, and contamination in the local waterways, last week, the decision came from on high: Malibu must phase out septic tanks in the central area of the city and install mains sewage.

The decision threatens the very fabric of the place. The need for septic systems has acted as a brake on development, allowing the community to preserve its rustic charm and protect its exclusivity. Install sewers, and the bluffs of privilege that line the coast would become the playthings of the plebs. The affluent will have to take their effluent elsewhere.

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This article titled “Online dictionaries: which is best?” was written by Aida Edemariam, for The Guardian on Monday 30th August 2010 19.00 UTC

Sad news for those of us with fond memories of long minutes lost in the more arcane histories of English words: the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which a team of 80 lexicographers has been working on since 1989, will probably never be printed. “The print dictionary market is just disappearing,” Oxford University Press CEO Nigel Portwood told a Sunday newspaper. It will still be available online – in fact, in December, the web version is being relaunched, including for the first time the historical thesaurus of the OED, which contains almost every word in English from Old English to the present. The problem is that it is a tad pricey: £7 plus VAT for a week’s access; £205 plus VAT for a year. Luckily, there are alternatives:

Collins

This paper’s preferred arbiter, in its print version, the pocket version is available free online – though, it must be said, boasting some rather confusing orthography. The second entry for the word “help”, for example, reads “2. to contribute to, to help Latin America’s economies” – some italics, or brackets, or bold letters would help. You can buy a 1,888-page hard copy for £70, or download it for a mere £9.99.

Chambers

The Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, with its 75,000 words and phrases and 110,000 definitions, is free online. This is much more presentable, with quite satisfying lists of definitions, and examples of the word in context. A little bit of etymology, too. Chambers is not, however, accepting new subscribers to the full shebang – 170,000 words and phrases and 270,000 definitions. The 1,871-page print version sells for £40.

Macmillan

The definitions are short and to the point, with no information about sources or background (though there are sample phrases, and a direct link to a thesaurus). It also lets you submit words of your own, and gives you the option of British or American English. Macmillan’s particular wheeze, useful to learners of English, is to highlight the 7,500 core, high-frequency words in the English language: three-star words are the most frequent; one-star words less so. It’s free online, but you’ll pay £24 for a hard copy.

OneLook

A real discovery, this online site trawls 18,967,499 words in 1,060 different dictionaries – all the major English ones, but also dictionaries for specific subjects (business, art, medicine) or languages. You can customise your search – only in slang, for example; compare entries in different dictionaries; do a wildcard search (asterisks, hashtags or @ symbols account for the characters you can’t remember), or a reverse search (type in “being tried twice for the same crime”, for “double jeopardy”, for example). It doesn’t, however, link to a Scrabble dictionary, which some might feel is an important omission.

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This article titled “Nigella Lawson’s kitchen confessions” was written by Emma Sturgess, for The Guardian on Monday 30th August 2010 19.00 UTC

Is your kitchen slightly defective? Not enough storage jars? Low stocks of chocolate morsels? You might be tempted to look to Nigella for inspiration. This, she would have you believe, is a mistake. On the cover of her new book Kitchen: Recipes From the Heart of the Home (£26, Chatto & Windus), she wears an apron, lest the famously creamy décolletage be spattered. It could happen: life is a whirl of after-work urgency and feeding friends when frantic. But no matter how many times she professes to be an anti-perfectionist, it’s hard to believe.

She opens her mouth to tell us that things go wrong for her, too: we hear the slow, silky flow of molten chocolate. She tells us that she forgot to put the vegetables in her Thai chicken noodle soup; we assume she was distracted by plucking a single perfect rose from an Eaton Square windowbox. From the scarlet negligee she poses in with a bowl of “slut’s spaghetti” to the title of How to Be a Domestic Goddess, she’s always had her tongue thrust so far into her cheek that there’s no room for chocolate lime cake. She’s entirely in control of her own image, and she looks, sounds and cooks too smooth. We’re not buying it.

What we will be buying is Kitchen. At 500 pages, it’s the same length as her first, now-classic book How To Eat, signalling a return to form after the flimsiness of Nigella Express. The recipes are reassuringly solid, enticing and, crucially, just that bit less excessive; the sugar count, though still no diabetic’s delight, is down significantly. This aside, she has refused to evolve with fashion, and, in keeping her cooking much the same, has acquired a rebellious appeal. The rest of the civilised culinary world is desperately trying to tread lightly on the earth while smoking its own kippers. Nigella goes shopping in a cab and rips the cellophane off packets of stir-fry veg and ready-made gnocchi. Her only flaw is an urge to make life easier. Perfect.

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This article titled “Jennifer Aniston as Barbra Streisand? Please!” was written by Lucy Mangan, for The Guardian on Tuesday 10th August 2010 19.00 UTC

God alone knows why they do it. The only possible justification for going to the trouble of donning fancy dress is to escape your humdrum life for an evening. But what possesses celebrities to dress up as each other?

Recently we’ve had Anthea Turner aping Madonna in her Confessions on a Dance Floor/purple-leotard period, Lorraine Kelly having a go at being Lady Gaga and Jennifer Aniston in full Barbra-Streisand-Funny-Girl regalia. Even Fiona Bruce became temporarily infected with the madness, slipping into Diana Rigg’s former Avengers catsuit when it was brought along for valuation at the Antiques Roadshow a few weeks ago.

The ostensible motive is homage. Turner’s photoshoot is, apparently, a tribute to Madonna to mark the singer’s 52nd birthday on Monday. And not at all a desperate attempt to borrow some of the lustre of a celebrity whose star wattage exceeds her own by uncountable orders of magnitude, nor a chance for magazine editors to fill their pages with tasty yet affordable pictures of a tasty yet affordable blonde in something shiny and skimpy.

Kelly claims her makeover in New magazine is the natural expression of her love for Lady Gaga’s work. The interview suggests that she is at least aware of and playing with the incongruity of the pairing of quintessential sofa-based presenter with glitter-lobster-sporting pop goddess, even if the main point of the pictures does seem to be reminding people that Brand Kelly is not just about charming mumsiness but incorporates a fully functioning set of bazonkas too.

Aniston’s channelling of Barbra Streisand is perhaps the weirdest. She’s not a singer. She’s promoting a film that has nothing to do with Babs. She is famous enough not to need such gimmicks, and all the photos do is emphasise the gulf between the stellar charisma of La Streisand and the relative lack thereof in the impersonator. Send in the clowns!

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This article titled “Vogue Italia’s oil-spill fashion shoot: slick or crude?” was written by Sarah Phillips, for The Guardian on Monday 9th August 2010 19.00 UTC

The August edition of Vogue Italia has 24 pages dedicated to a shoot featuring Kristen McMenamy, but it’s not her silver hair that’s causing controversy. The photographs, by Steven Meisel, draw inspiration from the recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill: McMenamy drifts, Ophelia-like, in a slick, is washed up on a beach or chokes against rocks, and wears black dresses adorned with feathers and netting. Blogs have questioned the editorial decision; the aptly named fashion site Refinery 29 feels uneasy at the glamorisation of the disaster. But the magazine’s features director Carlo Ducci responds: “We can’t be silent in this kind of situation and why shouldn’t our interpretation be artistic?”

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