Your Letters
"4/7 in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ quiz on fake or real quotations is the best score one could ever achieve" - The Queen, 2011
Ellie, Oxford, UK
Paper Monitor clearly hasn't scrutinised Metro. Headline of the day has got to be .
Timothy, Leeds
Monitor note: Nice, but hideout v bunnies is hard to beat.
Re Paper Monitor, surely marrying a serving member of the RAF is not living the life of "a perfect ARMY wife", as reported in the Daily Telegraph. But maybe the fact he was married in an army uniform confused her.
Tim, London
asks for rabbit puns. A 21 bun salute perhaps?
Candace Sleeman
Osama Bin Lapin.
Even though I'm quite ashamed of that, it's a far better effort than the Daily Mail's, even if I do say so myself.
Brian Martin
If you have a rabbit pun does that make it a "punny bunny"?
Dougie Lawson, Basingstoke, UK
I'd like to join the chorus of readers (and if mine is the only letter, then shame on everybody else) replying in the traditional manner to Ralph's "May the Fourth" Star-Wars Day greeting (Tuesday Letters).
Ralph: Revenge of the Fifth.
James, Stockport
Monitor note: Ralph and James, you may be interested to know that a member of Team Magazine has never seen Star Wars.
Not sure if I'm trying to out-pedant the pedants (seems unwise) or bring some rationality to them (seems unlikely to succeed). Ray Ashley and John claim that Mw can't be converted in to cups of tea because it's a measure of power not energy (Tuesday Letters).
I think it's fair to assume that if the power surge were due to kettles being turned on then the time factor would probably be about the amount of time it takes to boil a kettle. It would be strange to half-boil it then turn it off!
As such we can probably just use the power rating of a kettle (seems to be about 3kw) and the average number of cups of tea made when one kettle is boiled (a bit arbitrary but let's say three). That makes 2.4 million cups of tea.
The power/energy problem means that we will miss people who turned their kettle on after others had turned theirs off but as Ross only claimed he could "begin to speculate" I can live with that.
Michael, Edinburgh, UK
In defence of Ross, 2400MW is the equivalent of almost 1 million kettles being turned on, and tea was almost certainly brewed shortly afterwards.
Phil, Guisborough
The better unit to represent the power surge would be the number of simultaneously boiling kettles rather than number of cups of tea, as what matters to the grid is the instantaneous demand, not the length of time the kettles boil for. Therefore 2,400MW is about 800,000 3kW kettles all going at once. As everyone knows, you should only fill the kettle with the minimum amount of water needed to satisfy your tea-making requirements, to save the planet and all that.
Daniel Norton, Bedford, UK