Weekendish: Skyscrapers and sticky footballers
A collection of some of the best reads from the BBC News website this week, with an injection of your comments.
The adults who get misty-eyed over Panini World Cup stickers featured in a Magazine piece earlier this month. We followed it up by looking at the multiple duplicates - those players whom every sticker collector was inexplicably unable to shift. "Somewhere under my bed there's a small army of Paul Rideouts," complained Richard Spalding from Doncaster.
There was no lack of melodrama in your stories. The duplicates just "wouldn't leave me alone" one of you cried. "I swapped him relentlessly, almost to spite his ubiquity", another of you said. Even though this was 20 or 30 years ago they "haunt" you. You "have visions". These footballers were "Panini poison." Along with Rideout, there was Stuart Nethercott of Tottenham, Aston Villa's Kevin Poole, Len Badger of Sheffield United, and Port Vale goalkeeper Mark Grew. You complained that you "still have flashbacks" at that sticker "gurning" back at you "with that unblinking stare". Hopefully sharing your pain will allow you to move on.
It's 10 years since London's famous Gherkin skyscraper - one of the UK's most recognisable buildings, a Stirling Prize winner, a backdrop to Hollywood films - opened. But now one of the men that designed the gigantic glass structure, architect Ken Shuttleworth, has turned against it. In our piece, he says windows should be seen as a privilege, advocating a more "responsible" approach to skylines. The piece prompted Therese Davis in downtown Chicago, Illinois, to send us a poem about another problem caused by glass buildings - the plight of birds that collide with them. Here's a couple of lines: "I sat and glanced up, forcing tears to stay at bay, I could see reflective, hard windows stretching up and up and upwards. Hard. Cold. Unforgiving. Man-made. Glancing down, I saw beauty. Nature-made. Graceful flight. Purpose-driven beauty." We also asked readers to send pictures of the view from their desk. We thought Paul Johnson's, pictured below, was particularly good.
"Before, after and after-after" showed what happens after people lose a lot of weight. Only a small minority find they can keep the weight off without the emotional reasons behind obesity being addressed, it seems. The piece provoked a rather poignant and heartfelt appeal for greater understanding from Fiona Hammond: "I have recently lost four stone but have already put back on half a stone. Like many people I am a comfort eater and like an addiction this is very difficult to manage, in fact, I would say impossible to manage without support whether it is through family and friends or through a professional. And it's no good any of us just shrugging our shoulders and saying, 'Well some people are just like that.' We have to find a way to help that doesn't involve pills or surgery and is accessible to people in all walks of life."
Time for something completely different. Poo in a blender. "You would have to be desperate to take a sample of your husband's excrement, liquidise it in a kitchen blender and then insert it into your body with an off-the-shelf enema kit," the piece began. "This article contains images and descriptions which some might find shocking." It certainly did have a serious gross-out factor. But there was also something miraculous about how a faecal transplant from her husband could rid Catherine Duff of persistent Clostridium difficile infections. On Twitter, Lidia Matassa commented: "Gross and wow in equal". Belle Cooper tweeted: "Medicine is crazy. People are curing themselves with other people's poo. Amazing."
Perhaps best of all, Professor Alice Roberts tweeted Michael Mosley to suggest a Horizon on the subject. Hang on, doesn't he tend to test things out on his own body? She didn't receive a reply.
Here are some reads we've enjoyed this week from elsewhere around the web: