Today The Slog notched up its 2,500th post. Your Soaraway Slog is now attracting 40% of regular readers from the UK, and around 22% from the US. 137 countries are represented in the visits breakdown, but the main players apart from the US/UK heartland are Germany, Greece, Canada, France, Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain and Sweden.

A very big thank you to all those who have threaded and variously featured The Slog’s output at sites across the globe.

But as this is a site that isn’t supposed to take itself too seriously, I thought we should celebrate this landmark with yet more evidence of human frailty, and the ridiculous side of self-important people.

There was an amusing mistranslation-cum-punctuation error at a German site this morning that, for a minute or two, left me very anxious. The phrase in question was, ‘Angela Merkel and her fiance, Minister Wolfgang Schauble’, a possibility that suggested at best bigamy and at worst the sort of coupling that might produce a new Hell on Earth. A missing ‘n’ and an added comma can change everything.

Meanwhile, Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office, released a study that shows only 50% of Romanians aged between 16 to 74 used a computer in 2011. Let’s face it, you don’t need a pc to tell you that things are pretty much bound to be better anywhere other than in Romania. But the EU felt it necessary to unearth this factoid, and broadcast it. That’s the way the money goes, pop goes the weasel.

Last Friday, Kazakhstan’s shooting team was left stunned after a comedy national anthem from the film Borat was played at a medal ceremony at championships in Kuwait instead of the real one.

Republican Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich is rejecting calls for him to exit the race for the White House. However, he issued a statement saying he thought most of the other candidates should do just that. He’s obviously a very complex guy.

People with bigger brains have more real friends, a British study has suggested. Others who simply have big heads tended to have few if any friends.

Mitt Romney’s assertion that Russia “is without question our number one geopolitical foe” was described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘a quip’. This seems to me to have broadened considerably the territory in which a quip might live. One wonders if JFK’s Cuban missile crisis was spattered with quips like, “Holy f**king sh*t Bobby, are we about to blow up the whole world?” Just to add to the surreality of the situation, outgoing Russian President Dimitri Medvedev said that the Romney remark “smells of Hollywood”. All suggestions as to what Hollywood smells of to the comment thread below, please.

And finally, last Friday evening LA Police were looking into the bizarre report of a robbery involving two attackers. Police received the strange bulletin shortly before 10 p.m. from South Sunset Avenue. It seems that a medical delivery guy had been attacked by two lifesize Ninja Turtles. His delivery consignment mainly consisted of marijuana. It may be a mystery to them, but it ain’t to me.