One of the great things about the Internet is that, while you can still read the newspaper online - for free - you can also read lots of other news sources, for free. This variety (and lack of obvious revenue stream) might change the news media industry in all sorts of unexpected and initially disconcerting ways, but it also means that one can often gain more than a one-sided view of any particular story with ease. For example, take the woman whose child was allegedly reprimanded for talking about Jesus. Only it turns out that it wasn’t quite like that, and the best efforts of the conservative press and certain Christian pressure groups can’t hide key facts that put a different spin on the tale.

The wonder of Woolies

It was a Sunday out of season and we were in Denbigh. Think we’d been to the castle, which is worth a visit (especially if you ask for the key for the magic gate that lets you walk around the town walls).

Denbigh town centre is, to put it kindly, less of a highlight, at least on a Sunday. Almost nowhere was open. No one was around. What might have been open looked rather uninspiring anyway. But one shop on the high street was open: Woolworths.

We spent half an hour in there.

Regular writing and photographing, amongst much else, are currently on hold - even more so than previously - due to pace of life and a corresponding lack of investment. In the meantime, we are currently pursuing a separate personal project with more regular bloggage elsewhere.

Michael Janke grabs a meter and checks the power consumption of a few household electrical items, chiefly those power blocks we’re now being told to switch off if we want to save the planet. His main conclusion is that they aren’t worth worrying about if you’re still going to run your tumble dryer every day or drive everywhere.

And this sort of thing quite clearly runs top to bottom in the shadow cabinet. Very few of them give off that air of quiet technocratic confidence, and they all have plausible-sounding schemes cribbed from American thinktanks.

Daniel Davies is my new favourite columnist.

One of BB’s most-respected research associates has kindly sent a 1930s travel guide to “Aberystwyth and North Wales”. We plan to write a whole entry about this shortly (here’s a scan of the Aber street map as evidence of our good intentions), but in the meantime we’re going to outline, delineate or otherwise circumscribe the parameters of the perfect day out in modern-day Aberystwyth. See, BB takes you to all the best places. Well, one of them. Repeatedly.

Simon Jenkins enthuses about shared space traffic management in the Graun.

Take a gander at this image of Richard Burton and his father in their hometown of Pontrhydfen in South Wales. Burton, the epitome of the local boy made good in pale casuals, strides purposefully along a rough Welsh road trailed by his mining father, a small man dressed in his everyday suit and wearing a battered cap. An absolutely iconic image, taken for a Picture Post feature and never published (although it appeared in B&W Photography magazine a while back, which is where we first saw it). And can you buy a copy for your wall? Can you sod.

More: Burton holds court in the local pub.

Other bubbles

• Richard Burton at the Golden Swansea website.

This post is mostly for the benefit of any other poor sods trying to run Linux on a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo L7320GW, but it touches on general problems with penguins and laptops.

Review of a new Magnum book in the Independent, featuring well-known Magnum photographers on other well-known Magnum photographers (Trent Parke is in there!).