Over the past few months, the blogging world has been fascinated by a recently-created weblog known as Belle de Jour.

Put simply, it’s supposed to be the “Diary of a London call-girl”.

The website is hosted on Blog*Spot, the free web-hosting service offered by Blogger, and the email address provided by the site owner/writer “Belle” is a Hotmail account.

Both are good methods of disguising the owner’s real identity.

The site recently won an award in the ‘Best Written’ category at The Guardian ‘Best British Weblog’ competition, despite numerous suggestions that the writer of the site may actually be male, and the whole thing could possibly be a fake or a literary exercise.

As most regulars at this site will know, I’m a skeptic at the best of times, but I’ve often found myself questioning the authenticity of the content on Belle de Jour, largely based on the general feeling I get from the projections of the writer.

I’m afraid I can’t agree with the Guardian judges that it’s “an impressive piece of writing”.

It’s mildly imaginative, sure, but I would be more impressed if the details and events being recounted on the site were, in some way, confirmable.

I suppose the ‘enigma’ element is possibly the whole point of the site; that it remains clouded in some sort of erotic mysticism.

Well, I recently tested out several paragraphs from the site at the BookBlog Gender Genie, which uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon from the Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the likely gender of a given author based on his/her text. (Read more at nature.com).

The application works best with segments of continuous text of more than 500 words in length. (Mr Fryer has already informed me that The Copydesk is male).

With every paragraph from Belle de Jour I fed the Gender Genie (selecting ‘blog entry’ as the text origin), the results returned back to me overwhelmingly indicated that the writer of the text is most probably male, more or less confirming my suspicions.

Judge for yourself – but for me, it going to take a much bigger leap from now on to accept the material as being genuine, especially when I now have more than a hint of suspicion that the writer of the text is trying to yank my lariat (in more ways than one).

Update on last Wednesday’s post Dog Eat Dog:

It turns out, they fingered the wrong dog.

One of the most common misconceptions centres around the belief that mobile phones can cause an explosion in a petrol station, or that they interfere with the control instruments on aircraft.

Both are completely untrue and largely unproven.

The Sky One television programme Brainiacs, recently conducted a test and found no evidence to prove that a mobile phone could cause an explosion when used in proximity to highly combustable fuels.

The reason mobile phone usage is discouraged in the forecourt of a petrol station is because old-style pumps once used radio frequencies to transmit the fuel tally to the checkout point inside the station, and early mobile phone frequencies often interefered with the signal.

However, mobile phones no longer use the offending frequencies, and subsequently, cannot interfere with the communications infrastructure in a petrol station (which is usually cable-networked anyway).

As for aircraft, no evidence currently exists to prove that mobile phone use can affect the ability of an aeroplane to remain flying safely.

Tests carried out on two parked aircraft at Gatwick Airport in May 2000 indicated a possible likelihood that a mobile phone signal generated by a handset manufacured before 1989 could potentially cause minor interruptions to aircraft electronic systems and communication devices, but could not actually endanger the aircraft’s ability to fly, unless acted upon by cockpit crew.

You can now play the UK National Lottery online.

You sign up for an account, provide details of your debit card, and deposit a minimum of £5 into your account.

All you have to do after that is pick your numbers and play.

But I want to know why the minimum payment is £5 and not £1.

It doesn’t matter how many methods they create to get people playing, you’re still never going to win it.

“When I said I was going to become a comedian, they all laughed. Well, they’re not laughing now.”

One of the UK’s most underrated comedians, Bob Monkhouse, has died at the age of 75.

This was a man who lost two sons, one to cerebral palsy, and the other to a heroin overdose – and he could still knock out the funnies with the best of them.

The trailer for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is available at the Apple website.

It’s difficult to make any judgement on this film, since the whole thing looks like a spoof.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t actually for real.

Warren Ellis has invited some people to provide their “statement for 2004″ at his weblog, Die Puny Humans.

I’m not quite sure what the point of it is, other than to present some random thoughts from a bunch of people who are largely on the fringes of the media industry.

A bit like the Mayfly Project, in which people are asked to sum up their year in 20 words or fewer.

Dog Bites Man

Man Bites Dog

Dog Bites Kids

Kids Bite Dog

Dog Kills Dog