Web Monitor
16:04 UK time, Thursday, 22 October 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: what to call a political spouse, why not to look on the bright side of life and a job the careers adivsor didn't tell you about.
• It's official, Sarah Brown is the wife of the PM but she ain't no first lady. It seems she's concerned that the Great British public may be getting upset when she is referred to as such in case she gets confused with the Queen. the clarification:
"I don't want to say this too often but it matters to a lot of people in the UK: HM Queen is First Lady - I am wife of PM !"
• Could positive thinking be dangerous? Barbara Ehrenreich thinks it was so dangerous it brought down the banking system. she started questioning the merits of positive thinking after being less than impressed by advice to visualise her recovery from breast cancer. that when researching her book on the subject she was shocked that a delusional way of thinking has permeated corporate culture as well:
"Two years into the Great Recession [she means this recession], it's time to face the truth: optimism feels good, really good, but it turns out to be the methamphetamine of run-amok American capitalism. Meth induces a 'Superman syndrome'. Optimism fed into what Steve Eisman, a banking analyst who foresaw the crash, calls 'hedge-fund disease,' characterized by 'megalomania, plus narcissism, plus solipsism' and the belief that 'to think something is to make it happen.' The meth-head loses his teeth and his mind; the madcap optimists of Wall Street lost something like $10tn worth of pension funds, life savings and retirement accounts."
...so a little more negative thinking out there please everyone.
• The idea of the north-south divide is . And there's one term Henderson is particularly riled about:
"Professional Northerner: what on earth does it mean? The phrase has been applied to so many people down the years, usually by journalists who have little or no first-hand experience of Northern life, that it has lost any meaning it may once have had. Contrary to what you may have read, most Northerners (for the sake of argument, let's take the Trent as the border) do not live in terraced houses, or pronounce the letter U as 'oo' (it's a hard vowel), though they do eat 'dinner' at lunchtime. Nor do they hate the South, though they are entitled to nurse a few grudges about some of the folk who live there."
The 
