Welcome to this week's Picks. The recent news furore about the artist who (rather tackily, we think) recreated the famous police photo of child killer Myra Hindley using image fragments of children's hands, sparked a brief but heated debate about the nature of art.

Now, here at Picks central we don't know much about art -- but we know what we like. And, at the moment what we like is the Worsley Institute of Blu-Tak Art. Blu-Tak is the acceptable face of plasticine -- malleable (you can roll it into a ball during boring meetings), yet utilitarian (you can stick things to the wall with it) -- and there are few amongst us who haven't used it to explore some of our more repressed creative leanings.

Of course, what separates us mere dabblers from true artists is the desire to put the results on display, regardless of the response from critics and audiences alike. Happily, the only response Worsley Institute of Blu-Tak Art should provoke is one of mirth -- it was a website that made us laugh aloud on several occasions.

The brainchild of Graham Wyatt, the institute pokes some fun at the art world, inventing the twin schools of futilism and post-futile optimistic perspectivism, and providing a series of overblown commentaries to accompany the Blu-Tak creations on show in the institute catalogue. For example, Wyatt's Brontosaurus is said to embolden "the inherent leitmotiv into an universal and literally ethereal metalepsis for the millennial and transitive generic benedictus!" Well ... that's us told!

More serious students may prefer our second Pick -- The Royal Academy. It was founded in 1768, with Sir Joshua Reynolds as its first president, and now attracts more than a million visitors a year. Its website provides a solid guide to forthcoming exhibitions, news, and details of its most famous annual event -- the summer exhibition.

Artists on show in the current summer exhibition -- which ends on August 17th -- include David Hockney, R B Kitaj, Anselm Kiefer, Carel Weight and Craigie Aitchison, though there are more than 1,200 works by lesser names on display.

Continuing our cultural theme, we head north for a look at some of the beautiful manuscripts kept by the National Library of Scotland. With more than 100,000 ancient volumes and 1.6 million maps, the Library contains the world's most complete record of Scotland's history and culture. It also puts on a range of summer exhibitions including Captured Shadows: The Photographic Journeys of John Thomson (1837-1921), whose curiously evocative portraits reinforce the truth of the Latin saying ars longa, vita brevis (which loosely translates as 'art lasts longer than people').

In a perfect world, the ancient Romans would have come up with a parallel version of the above, probably something like ars longa, ryvita brevis, which could have been loosely translated to say, 'your bum's getting bigger, Ryvita will help make it smaller', which would have linked neatly to our next Pick. Sadly, it is not a perfect world, so we'll just have to dive straight in and recommend the Ryvita Homepage. If you're anything like us, the sedentary nature of office life has added several pounds to your waistline, and a goodly portion of your surfing time is spent hopefully looking for slimmers' sites that will tell you you're exactly the right weight for your height.

No such luck with the Ryvita heavyweight calculator, which proved unfortunately accurate and said we probably wouldn't miss a stone or two. The site also has suggestions for healthy fat-free lunches and snacks, and a chance to send off for a free diet planner pack.

All that thinking about food has made us hungry, so it's off to the new Somerfield site to drool over some of their tastier products. The site doesn't actually allow you to order online yet, but does contain a host of foodie features, focusing this month on meat recipes, a guide to wine and a cookery class which offers useful tips on where you might be going wrong.

Well, we're going to continue stuffing our minds with art and our stomachs with grub, but we'll be back next week with a new selection.

Sites featured in Picks of the Week

• Worsley Institute of Blu-Tak Art - putting a smile on the face of art.
  
• The Royal Academy - more serious artistic endeavours.
  
• National Library of Scotland - Scotland's history and culture laid out before you.
  
• Ryvita Homepage - live for today, for tomorrow you diet.
  
• Somerfield - a new supermarket chain goes online.

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