Lucy Mangan on the people in the media spotlight in the past seven days
Nursing his wounds
Andrew Lansley
A 99% no-confidence vote from the Royal College of Nursing … you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. But then again, if you didn't have a heart of stone, you would probably be weeping too copiously at the proposed reforms – "paused" or not – to staunch your tears quickly enough to enjoy the moment.
Lansley apologised four times to the 60 delegates representing those many, many, many, many nurses who disagree with the coalition's plans for the NHS. A good start, until you realise that these apologies were only for his failure to communicate the government's real plans which are – oh, I dunno, to fill the hospitals with cancer-curing puppies or whatever, but certainly not to cut frontline services to the bone and use the resulting disaster as an excuse to privatise by the back door.
Let's hope the perceptive 1% can explain it to the hopelessly obtuse 99 in the next eight weeks.
Wind her up and let her go
Gillian Duffy
In a neat demonstration of the cliche about it being better to have some people inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in, Labour this week befriended Gordon Brown's "bigoted woman", wound her up and sent her tottering off in the direction of Nick Clegg to harangue him about coalition policies.
"Hello, Gillian," said Clegg, possibly slightly wearily, when he saw her, and he duly took his licks. Angry voters who object to Duffy's anointment as their representative on earth are advised not to write to their MP. S/he's either her victim and doesn't need convincing, or her enabler and is too busy rubbing gleeful hands together to reply.
We want your money
Mark Zuckerberg
It's amazing how little peace becoming the world's youngest billionaire brings, isn't it? No sooner had the CEO of Facebook seen off what should be the final legal challenge from those pesky Winklevoss twins than another challenge to his cybercrown emerged.
Paul Ceglia filed a suit last summer, claiming that in 2003 he had Zuckerberg on a contract during which he was put to work on a project called The Face Book. He has now added new email evidence supposedly supporting his claim. Zuckerberg's lawyers point to Ceglia's record as a convicted fraudster as reason for scepticism, but another company says Ceglia was working for them when he hired Zuckerberg, and that they therefore have a claim to the Facebook fortune, too, so it looks like this one will run and run. Lawyers everywhere are pushing the 'Like' button as we speak.
What we've learned
• A chip shop in South Yorkshire is selling battered Creme Eggs for Easter
• The average household throws away £520 worth of food a year
• The new Burger King Meat Monster contains 1160 calories
• It will soon be legal to organise your own badger-shooting expedition
• 77% of children don't know what a foxglove looks like
… and what we haven't
• Why the UK has the third highest rate of stillbirth of all the high-income nations
What they said
"We didn't know what we wanted. We were the band that had no goals." Michael Stipe reminisces about the accidental global success of REM.
"He liked to be in the limelight, you know." The owner of Iceland's Phallological Museum explains the motivation of their first human penis donor, the late Pall Arason.
"It's not an accident. It's not luck, it's not fairy dust, it's not good genes. It's killing myself for an hour and a half five days a week." Gwyneth Paltrow becomes third celebrity in history to speak honestly about her body.