Paper Monitor
11:08 UK time, Monday, 12 November 2007
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
What is it they say about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery? Well, Paper Monitor is more than a little flushed at the sycophancy of the Times. Why? Well, does this front page headline from today's Times ring any bells in the minds of the Monitor faithful: "How to sum up Britain in just five words"?
Ok, here's some more from page three: "It must have seemed such a simple wheeze to Gordon Brown: a motto to capture what makes Britain great…"
In the words of the great Harris, can you guess what it is yet?
No? Then, here's the clincher: "However, before the wording of Mr Brown’s motto has even been agreed… the public seems to have rumbled him. Hundreds of suggestions have been submitted by Times Online readers, in response to an invitation by Comment Central blog."
Yup, the Times has been hosting a "send in your mottos for the UK" forum. Sound familiar… like very familiar… like facsimile familiar? Bashful creature that it is, Old Ma Monitor has asked to let this one pass. But as its younger, rasher, more indiscrete progeny, Paper Monitor has no such qualms about modesty and dutifully wishes to draw readers' attentions to this slice of interactive merriment from a couple of months ago - 1,000 mottos for the UK.
"Dieu et mon droit" indeed.
Over at the Mail, has news of the death of Norman Mailer – he who lamented feminists' desire to abolish the "blind, goat-kicking lust" from sex - failed to arrive? If so, then how does it explain the headline "As the world's most outspoken chauvinists target Nigella..."?
Sorry, Paper Monitor is forgetting itself. It naturally justifies said story… with a picture of La Lawson pouting, eyebrows cocked, over a saucepan.
Lastly, pandas and polar bears. Inscrutable and fearsome creatures respectively, but never underestimate their cuteness. The Telegraph pictures a panda atop a tree (or is it a pigmy-panda lodged in a boy's catapult () to illustrate a story about extinction. The Mail has "Operation Bearlift" – polar bears being airlifted. And Metro, it needs no pretence of a wildlife story to justify a cute picture of a panda sliding down a hill on its back.
And even more lastly, honourable mention to a photo spread in the Mail which features pictures of huge swarms of starlings and suggestions of images they resemble… including Mick Jagger's lips.
The 
