Alert to potatoes

Japan claims that attempts to ban whaling are “cultural imperialism.” You know, I can live with that.

Japan has been bribing poor nations, some of them actually land-locked, to join the International Whaling Commission and vote with them, so they may well win this year’s vote.

The British Potato Council objects to the term “couch potato.” It is planning demonstrations outside the Oxford University Press in an attempt to remove the term from the OED and replace it with “couch slouch.” Sadly, I could find no mention of this on the council’s website, which features a constantly changing picture of the many uses to which one put a potato, not even on its press releases page, which chronicled its releases to a breathless world of such news as “Schools Celebrate Bumper New Potato Crop” and “National Chip Week kept consumers alert to potatoes.”

(Update: the Virtual Stoa has a picture of the protest)