Blah Blah Flowers

Why are newspapers so dirty? Literally rather than figuratively. It's all very well for the Indy, the Grauniad et al to try and excite us by saying how they're going tabloid in size but not in content in order to make it easier for that small proportion of the readership that read them on their commute to read them, when are they going to do something so our hands don't look as black as a coal-miners when we get to the office? The Daily (Hate) Mail has been doing this since the late eighties if memory serves. Why isn't this practice more widespread? Was it found that to have ink that stayed on the page rather than your hands necessitated the slaughtering of cute puppies and Somalian refugees? Was the Daily Mail's ink specially harvested from the glands of Dame Barbara Cartland? It just amazes me that here we are, in 2006, we can kill a family of Iraqis from half a world away yet we can't keep the newsprint on tomorrow's fish and chip wrappers.

And that's another thing. When did fish and chip shops stop wrapping their goods in old newspapers? Did they ever? Was this just an urban myth? Where did they get the newspaper from? Was it a Unisex Chip Shop?