links for 2009-10-17

The plastic bag levy must be extended to the containers holding the 130 million litres of water we drink annually, writes JOHN GIBBONS

HERE’S A variation on the “waiter, there’s a fly in my soup” gag. The question is how would you persuade people to knowingly drink water from a bottle that contained a dead spider? Penn Teller’s satirical US documentary series decided to find out by taking over a posh restaurant and producing a phoney “water menu” of expensive and exotic-sounding bottles – all of which had been filled from the tap using an old garden hose.

The HM Treasury commissioned this logo last year, spending £14,000 on the image being printed onto pens, mousemats and other office accessories. The Office of Government Commerce was rebranded thus: