In Japan, the market for pencils has boomed, all thanks to some 300-year-old haiku: “First pick up your 2B…”

Matsuo Basho, often dubbed the “father of haiku”, is idolised by the Japanese. His works are drummed into every schoolchild, his deft observation of the natural world emulated by millions of haiku enthusiasts.
A publishing company sought recently to exploit that enthusiasm by creating Enpitsu de Oku no Hosomichi (Tracing the Narrow Road to the Deep North with a Pencil) — a book that has tracing paper between each page so that readers too can copy Basho’s poems as a form of meditation.
The book has sold nearly a million copies, and the effect on the pencil market has been explosive. Japanese have been flocking to stationery shops, and pencil sales have soared by about 3.5 million a month.

Then, an 18cm beetle, thought to have been extinct in Britain since the 18th century, has crawled out of a piece of oak. The giant Capricorn beetle’s immediate ancestors were probably imported, but you never know…

Cerambyx cerdo is still found in France and other parts of the Continent, but it is classified as extremely rare across its range.
The body of the adult, which lives for only a few weeks, measures 5cm, but its antennae stretch a further 11cm. These are used by males to detect the pheromone scent emitted by females.
The beetles make a screeching noise by rubbing their legs together to warn off predators and have large, powerful jaws capable of biting through wood. They can give a nasty nip if handled.
The giant capricorn was thought to have died out in Britain when the demand for timber meant that fallen oak trees were cut up and used rather than left to rot. The beetles spend two years as larvae burrowing through wood until they emerge to look for a mate.

And the British police and government deserves to fit in the same category, since they’ve apparently decided that carrying an article from a mainstream magazine, Vanity Fair, in Parliament Square is an illegal act.

Its London editor, Henry Porter, yesterday angrily wrote to the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, over an incident in which police appeared to claim that an article in the magazine constituted “politically motivated material”….
Porter, a vocal critic of Tony Blair’s record on civil liberties, who recently took part in a detailed email exchange on the subject with Mr Blair in the Observer, said in his letter that the matter was of serious concern. “The word sedition was not used, but clearly that is the light in which the article was regarded by the Metropolitan police,” he wrote.
Porter, who has the backing of Vanity Fair’s publisher, Graydon Carter, said it was extremely worrying if police could not tell the difference between a mainstream publication and a “terrorist sheet”.