Killer swine! Yes, those notoriously filthy beasts have been at it again, only unfortunately this time they've been mixing it up and cavorting with pigs would you believe? Hence, mutated viruses, yada yada, resulting in a human-contagious swine flu sweeping the world. To an extent at least. As yet, the World Health Organisation isn't declaring it a proper pandemic, but it has caused 6497 cases of illness including 65 confirmed deaths, spread between 33 countries as of yesterday apparently.

The UK Government even made a little booklet about it to send to every citizen, so it must be pretty much as serious as terrorism no less. And yes, the book is not all that far off being as pointless and patronising as the terrorism handbook was – suggesting such wacky concepts as not sneezing a nose full of infected bogies into your dearly beloved's face. Still, the previous Governmental advice to walk away from, not towards, a roaring fire in a building has kept the Poorhouse alive so far, so can't complain.

The Poorhouse is a big fan of acronyms, and here's a new one that surely is about to take the world by storm: WILB. Researchers (well, a researcher) use it to mean "Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing". You might have heard of it under other guises - perhaps "skiving", or "taking another break", or "squandering company resources, you're fired."

Only perhaps you shouldn't be. In fact, maybe you should be promoted. Raw hard science (kind of) proves it. Thank you Dr Coker, and your University of Melbourne study.

The Poorhouse is a big lover of pop-economics, the sort of stuff famously published in tomes such as The Undercover Economist or Freakonomics. The quantitative inter-relation of sometimes disparate-seeming topics, but mostly concentrating on cold hard money, is a fascinating insight into how the world really works. The more popularised writings on such topics may be a little dumbed down for the masses, but on the other hand they are actually interesting to read.

Nonetheless, there are some activities that at first it is hard to see that they would innately relate to financial incentives such as taxation in a consumer-driven way. The truly mortal stuff, births and deaths, one can see easily would relate strongly to wealth - if you have the money for good medical care, you'll likely live longer - but at the end of the day generally people don't have a lot of active choice over exactly which day they are born or die in a way that they can choose their brand of cola...or do they? Work by Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh indicates maybe there are more active - financially incentivisable - choices going on that one might expect.

The Poorhouse is well aware that his claims of being a successful & balanced citizen who just happens to run thousands of pounds through bookies is a statement unbelievable to many. But it's true, trust me, you can profit. Guaranteed. Well, except via things more akin to "acts of god" than simply picking a 3 legged horse.

The Poorhouse refers of course to the technique of matched betting (with perhaps a little arbitrage betting thrown in, but that's more for people with a concentration span of over the Poorhouse's 10 minute limit).

Thanks to the recent betfest that is Cheltenham, Poorhouse just passed a notable £5000 profit benchmark, so thought it was time to bring it up again for you skeptics. Although of course I might still be lying just to trick you into...ermm...giving your money to someone else for no good reason.

Well, clearly the above could be answered in a single word, with one syllable and two letters, but hey, let's give it a chance. A strange amount of tarnish has fallen from the pens of certain newspapers on "social networking websites". Often the example they use is Facebook, presumably because it's the biggest, baddest and all, with a population of considerably more than quite some countries using it.

There seem to be a couple of main stories, both of which could be plot-lines for a horror film.

Apparently it's not just the Poorhouse who upon receiving an email that that features some handwriting-esque cursive font has a physical inability to be arsed to read it, let alone act on it. Of course this produces issues here and there with his corporate masters, but then again, so does the policy of auto-binning anything marked with the red exclamation mark of urgency.

Anyhow, this month's Scientific American reports results of an interesting study on the psychology of typeface. Now, that description makes it sound really fascinating, doesn't it?

In recent years, English Catholicism has been on the rise - partially likely to do with European immigration. Even Tony Blair got in the act post-Prime Ministerial duties, with a swift conversion.

It should be said that it's not that the average interpretation of the Catholic doctrine has got any more sensible or relevant to every-day life. Although the Poorhouse is sure that there is a compassionate minority, the high-and-mighty within the organisation still tend to have wacky and dangerous views on hot topics such as abortion, medical science, gays, contraception, backed up by a guy who by definition is always right, even should he come out with anti-scientific hate-speech.

Unfortunately, a recent exercise in untraditional Vatican transparency has only revealed more dangerous ludicrosity, if one believes the reports.

The railways in Britain are a huge, huge ripoff and have been for quite some time. As a personal example, the Poorhouse reguarly travels from Sheffield to London. At "standard" (i.e. the cheapest - no food, no drink, no entertainment, often enough no seat) class, this can cost £185 for a return trip. This is equivalent to wages for about 33 hours of hard graft at the UK minimum wage, a salary the Government presumably expects it to be reasonable to survive on. Yes, if you book weird train times half a year in advance you can get far better deals, but sort of cash is what you can expect to pay should you not have the staff / luxury / wherewithal to plan trips in advance down to the precise minute of the precise day. And even that goddamned £185 ticket had date restrictions on it!

The Poorhouse was therefore disgusted to hear before Christmas about yet another average train fare rise this year. And yesterday's revelations in the Times are just disgusting:

Rail fares will more than double from tomorrow on some routes under new ticket restrictions being quietly introduced by train companies.

In recent days, an ex-BNP-er managed to leak something of a membership list for that foul party. It seems that it's a few years out of date and includes a few people more accurately described as prospects than fully paid up members, but nonetheless, it's out. The list also included some addresses, phone numbers, and job descriptions it seems. It was not a good thing to release, especially not if you're a loathed neo-facist right wing party.

I mean normally, who would care? Yes, it's a bit annoying that your address is available to all and sundry, but the fact you (mostly) chose to affiliate with a party you believe in, well surely you should be campaigning loud and proud for them, not praying that no-one finds out you're in it. Anyone would think that even its own members realises its sheer wrongness.

Sarah Palin: nasty

As you might have heard, it's not so far off before the election for the President of the great free world and universe etc. (i.e. the United States) is to take place. Candidates are in place, debates are in motion, and the usual kind of tedious - but not as tedious as the UK it must be said - political process is in action.

One particular enlivening star in a world of otherwise lacklustre Republican (ugh) politicos is of course Sarah Palin, the vice-presidential candidate to John McCain's presidency for their party. The more the Poorhouse learns about her, the more bad-film-fictitious the whole event seems. The film "Legally Blonde", as well as being awesome, had a greater credibility to it than the thought of Palin as VP (and perhaps even the president, should McCain who is not far off the average US life expectancy sort of age anyway, plus has his all too often mentioned Vietnam war injuries to contend with) come to a sticky end - and the protagonist was a whole lot more decent too.