One night only

At this festive time of year, @large feels the need to back up its contrived pub spiel with hard facts and invent as many potential conversation starters as possible. The Office for National Statistics' website is a goldmine of fantastic facts to inject into mundane chats with your cousin from Letchworth.

Imagine our horror, therefore, when attempting to reach the said website, at coming across a free service 'dedicated to those individuals who wish only to fulfil the physical side of a relationship'. ONS, you see, also stands for 'one night stand', so best stick to www.nationalstatistics.gov.uk from now on.

@ a boy

Our effort to formalise a text message language for the sake of global peace has got off to a stunning start. Reader Donald MacKay came up with the superb name of 'L@-in' for our attempts to codify grammatical rules for this burgeoning form of communication.

Mackay says: 'The progenitor of modern languages begets a child for the networked generation.' We are inclined to agree.

Before we get into the details of the present subjunctive, we want to hear views on the new language's base. Do we invent rules that will be applicable across languages or that work just around English?

Please send suggestions to at.large@observer.co.uk

Clean breast

Eidos, the embattled British games designer, has succumbed to the obvious and admitted to augmenting the size of Lara Croft's breasts in the latest Tomb Raider game. The pneumatic Ms Croft's figure is more 'defined and smoothed' according to the Eidos website. The company, which sponsors Manchester City Football Club, denied that it was getting obsessed with a bunch of big girl's blouses.