Newspapers (or should that be media organisations?) tend not to touch the comments appended to articles on  their websites. But surely they still tidy up the spelling and grammar when they lift them for print? Today’s London Evening Standard has a selection of comments from readers on Cristiano Ronaldo’s £80 million transfer to Real Madrid. Among them is this:

For another £20m they could of brought Newcastle.

Post-modern joke? Or sloppy cut-and-paste?

Lovely bit of phrasemaking this morning by Seamus Heaney on Today on Radio 4, where he was being interviewed about his translation work. Asked whether he turned to it when he lacked the impulse to write his own poetry, he answered that it was a way of “giving yourself the high of finishing without the distress of starting.”

There’s no getting away this week from reminders of our parliamentarians’ expenses — even in the Telegraph’s dusty archives. Leafing through cuttings from February 1959 in search of material for an anthology on great rail journeys, I found a report of a Lords debate in which peers complaining about “the rigours of travel on British railways” were dismissed by Viscount Stonehaven as “dismal Willies”.

He demanded of Lord Silkin: “Where else can you get a mattress, two pillows and clean sheets for 25 bob a night except on the railway?”
When several peers questioned the price, Lord Stonehaven explained: “Third class. I never, except when the Government is paying, go first class.”

What do you do if you see a restaurant that’s empty of customers? Can’t be much good, can it, if no one’s eating in it? So you walk on past. I’d have missed a treat, twice, if I’d done that in Dubrovnik (above) at the weekend.

First, there was Wanda – on Prijeko, parallel to the main street of Stradun – where my wife and I went for lunch. Not another soul about, inside or out. But we stayed, because we had read good reviews - which I’ll be endorsing a bit later in a piece for the Telegraph. Then, round the corner, there was Dubrovacki Kantun. Again it had been well reviewed, but when we went in at lunchtime to book a table for the evening there was only one couple eating there.

Yet other restaurants on Prijeko – not a patch on these two – were busy in comparison. Why? Was it because they had barkers wandering up and down waving their menu? Was it because tourists, however much they profess to hate tripping up over other tourists, feel safer eating in crowds?

What a refreshing response from Obama! The US president was asked yesterday why it had taken him a couple of days to condemn executives of the insurance firm AIG for taking bonuses after ruining the company. He answered: “It took a couple of days because I like to know what I am talking about before I speak.” We in the media might learn from that. Reporters might be more fulfilled if they were allowed to be more considered; if they were asked to do less but do it better; if they were encouraged to exercise judgment about what really counts. But it won’t happen, of course, when the demand is for ever more “content” delivered ever faster. So on we’ll twitter.

In footage on Channel 4 News this evening of the bushfires in Victoria, Australia, a survivor said: “What people have seen on TV is nothing like what you see when you’re actually there.” And what do you see? That was wonderfully conveyed in words by Gary Hughes, a journalist from The Australian, in a piece that appeared yesterday in The Times (in London). So vivid was his copy, indeed, that the Daily Mail, which doesn’t like to be second in anything, ran it again this morning.

The top 40 travel songs of all time? There are quite a few of my favourites in the selection by the team at World Hum. But what did they throw out so they could keep in two by John Denver? Come on, guys! Still, plenty to enjoy as well as to argue with. Here’s their No 2, Arlo Guthrie’s The City of New Orleans:

The internet is so much a part of my life both at work and at home that I forget there are some people in the Western world who still manage very well without it — including writers. Among them is the Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who still writes everything on a typewriter. Being out of Madrid recently, in a typewriterless place, he was forced to use a computer, and took the opportunity to surf the net. Thus he saw, for the first time, a website bearing his name, created 10 years ago by a reader to whom, he says, “I seem to owe more than I can ever repay.”
He is less impressed by blogs and forums. In an article published in El País in December, he says:

I cannot understand why some writers have their own blogs and must, in consequence, spend time on them. It is like going into a bar, sitting down at a table and talking, and then anyone who likes can come up to you and unload his thoughts over you or, more usually, his verbal abuse. Or like having a phone conversation in which simply anyone can join in and opine, or heap abuse upon you…
There is little reasoned argument — most of it is more like name-calling in a tavern. There seem to be so many people out there oozing hatred, bitterness and resentment. Not so much in English-language blogs, I find, where there tends to be a more civilised discussion or exchange of information. But the Spanish blogs are a realm of rage, of individuals who think everything is shit, or who devote hours and hours to the study of a writer only to badmouth him, when the most sensible course would seem that of not reading him at all. In this realm you also re-encounter people whom you ceased to see years ago, only to find that time has not made them any wiser, that their taste for vituperation has grown on them with age, and that their obsessions are the same. My peek into this smoky tavern has left me with no desire for further visits.

I’ve mentioned Notes in Spanish before as an excellent aid to students of the language. Ben Curtis and Marina Diez, who run the site, have recently recruited a Spanish friend, Isabel, to join in the exchanges on their forum and help people with writing Spanish as well as speaking it.

What’s going on is usually the first question you ask yourself when you look at a Salvador Dali painting. Where is it going on is usually an easier question to answer, as I discovered a few years ago. The Catalan landscape Dali got to know as a boy — the fertile plain of Empordà and the craggy promontories of the Costa Brava — features repeatedly in his work.
In the narrowest bit of niche marketing I’ve seen for a while, a new venture, Time+Space Cadaqués, is offering holidays in that landscape combining “surrealist art, inspirational conversation and an extraordinary gastronomic adventure”. Guests will stay in a villa close to where Dali lived, be given private tours of his house, his Theatre-Museum and Cadaqués, and be cooked for by Paco Pérez, a disciple of Ferran Adrià, the man behind El Bulli. It sounds like an interesting package, if not a cheap one: five days for 2,350 euros per person sharing – and that’s not including flights.