The main difference between what is published in newspapers and what is published on the internet is that generally the internet is often believable, but untrue, whereas what’s in the newspapers is often unbelievable but, sadly, true.

For example: the internet has spread a story that a Bloemfontein hospital’s intensive care unit found that patients in a particular bed always died on Sunday mornings.

Arnu Garg, who runs that fascinating free daily website called Awad (A Word a Day – wordsmith.org/awad), recently introduced the Sanskrit word dharma. He was writing about attending a 10-day meditation retreat during which he was “secluded from the outside world for the first nine days: no e-mail, no cellphones, no reading, no writing. And no talking.”

Nine days of silence.

I have decided that, for the time being at least, I will publish my own books. I’ll do so via the Kindle – that book-sized tablet with various little keys enabling the reader to browse any one of a million and more books, even best-sellers, more cheaply than a bookshop.

Thousands of authors are today going for self-publishing as the conventional publishing industry and book retailers are currently reeling about, wondering what’s going on.

A friend is off on the Queen Mary next week, despite having sworn he would go to sea only on Greek or Italian-owned ships “because there’s none of this ‘women and children first’ nonsense”.

I reminisced how I once sailed on an Italian-owned cruise liner operating out of Durban. It was an elegant ship – smooth-sailing and generous with the duckling l’orange.

According to a reader, elderly women bowls players are blatantly taking performance-enhancing drugs.

He backed his assertion with an unsourced report from an Australian paper (so it must be true) saying bowls had become a hotbed of drug use. Sports scientists are using all sorts of concoctions to keep players alive for their next game.