Welcome to this week's Picks. It's the Silly Season again. Britain is on holiday and news is most definitely not happening. Editors across the land are gloomily contemplating a whole series of non-event horizons.

These are the man-bites-dog days of Summer, a period when newspapers are packed with the kind of ephemera that normally wouldn't get a mention in the Briefs Column on page 20. So, in celebration of this particularly British annual occurrence, we at Picks have compiled a dossier of pointless news that has been given space in this week's popular prints and linked them with apposite websites.

1) Former Minister and perjurer Jonathan Aitken goes for a walk. Aitken, you will remember, sued the Guardian for libel but allowed the simple fact that he was lying to completely slip his mind. His first public appearance since his disgrace was marked by a scrum of more than 100 journalists, there were bouts of fisticuffs and the whole event disintegrated into farce.

We are reminded of Mr Bean, Rowan Atkinson's comic creation, who also trails around on his own and leaves chaos in his wake. Mr Bean will shortly be seen in a film, and his website is packed with video clips, competitions and, for people who register, "the ultimate fun-lab".

2) Teletubbies are bad for our children, it is claimed. Teletubbies (if you happen to have spent the last few weeks with the Mars Sojourner) is BBC Television's new programme for pre-school children, though it is also popular with students. But the antics of Tinky Winky, Dipsy, La La and Po have sparked a furious row about declining educational standards. We at Picks find it ironic that a generation reared on Bill and Ben, The Flowerpot Men, should be concerned about a programme in which strange pseudo-creatures talk gibberish to each other.

Teletubbies have still to break the Web big time. But Oliver's Teletubbies page is currently head and shoulders above the rest. It has games, a gallery and even the recipes of the Teletubbies' favourite food.

3) A Finnish student has isolated the DNA from the fossilised remains of a Neanderthal and proved we are not directly descended from them. Yes, apparently these low-brow semi-evolved simians didn't climb the evolutionary ladder and become us, though, judging by the constituent components of any football crowd this seems hard to believe.

There is no shortage of evolution sites on the web, many of them focusing on the different approaches taken on the subject by science and religion. Enter Evolution: It's Theory and History is a good starting point, providing basic information and biographies of key scientists involved in developing the theory.

4) A pensioner lived without electricity for 20 years, wrongly believing she had been disconnected for not using enough of the stuff in the first place, when, in fact, she'd lost power due to a fault. We frankly don't quite know what to make of this -- it seems hard to believe that in two decades no-one visited her house and asked: "Why are you using oil lamps and candles?" But, in an age where dead bodies can lie undiscovered in flats for months, perhaps it isn't so unbelievable after all.

What this pensioner should have done is to nip down to her local cybercafe and look at the UK Electricity Association, which offers everything you need to know about the subject, from industry facts and figures to tips on powersaving.

5) Local councillors in Wandsworth, London, are at loggerheads because one of them insists on breast-feeding her baby during meetings. We at Picks have no opinion on this, except to say that if children are going to cause this much strife, then it is probably better not to have them at all.

Anyone wishing to take this further should consult the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which links national autonomous Family Planning Associations in over 150 countries world-wide. It is committed to promoting the right of women and men to decide freely the number and spacing of their children and the right to the highest possible level of sexual and reproductive health. It also believes that the balance between the world's population and its natural resources and productivity is a necessary condition for improving the quality of life on the planet.

6) A German driver was killed when he was impaled on the horn of a flying cow. The man had got out of his car to shoo the animal out of the road, when it was knocked into the air by a second car and landed on top of him. It's bad enough that there may be bullets out there with your name on them ... but cows as well!

Cows kill in the UK too -- although they employ long-range methods like BSE (the so-called Mad Cow disease). This week some evidence was produced showing it was almost impossible for humans to catch the illness from bovine sources after all -- which is of little comfort to those who have already died. You can keep up-to-date with all the latest developments in this story at this Information concerning BSE for the scientific world, a utilitarian set of pages maintained by Steve Dealler, a pathologist at Burnley General Hospital. It has a good glossary of scientific terms, a history, and much more.

Sites featured in Picks of the Week

• Mr Bean - his chaotic adventures appear on the web.
  
• Oliver's Teletubbies page - is this some evil conspiracy to indoctrinate our children?
  
• Enter Evolution: It's Theory and History - the latest theories on the origin of species.
  
• UK Electricity Association - it's all about power.
  
• International Planned Parenthood Federation - children, who needs them.
• The BSE Scientific Resource - killer cows on the loose.

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