A week of dirty hair, dirty oil sands and dirty politics

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The Globe's Celebrity Photos of the Week gallery is always one of the most-read features on our site. While some resent that our anonymous Caption Writer takes pot shots at their favourite stars, others think it's good fun, including reader Dogmommy1106, who wrote:

Caption writer, you are becoming one of my favourite pundits, commentators, stand-up comics of all time. Ignore the detractors and keep on cranking out your brilliant captions. They make me laugh out loud each week. And god knows, we need more laughs in our all-too-serious world. I like it when the Globe lets its stuffy old hair down a little bit.

Er, thanks! (Editor's note: wash Globe's hair.)

Someone else who needs a shower is Captain Francesco Schettino, who was found to have traces of cocaine on his hair following the capsizing of the Costa Concordia cruise ship last month. While it's possible the cocaine was not his, since no presence of the drug was found in his other bodily samples, there was no sympathy to be found for him among Globe readers. In fact, the only compassion expressed was by reader badgerdog, who felt sorry for 19th-century American writer Herman Melville:

Poor Melville. We've gone from 'Thar she blows' to 'Thar's the blow.'

Elsewhere in Europe, the EU parliament was debating the cleanliness of the oil sands. How dirty were they, really? Many Globe readers reacted negatively to a scientific report that said the oil sands are not the dirtiest source of energy.

On our Facebook page, reader Jake Tobin Garrett wondered:

So if someone is 90% covered in dirt and we find out that someone else is 95% covered in dirt, do we say that the first person is not so dirty after all?

From dirty oil sands we move to dirty politics. In London, Canada's Speaker of the House, Andrew Scheer, was witness to a brawl at a bar inside Britain's House of Commons. It seems Labour MP Eric Joyce went on a rampage, punching and head-butting Tory MPs.

Hearing about the flying fur, some readers were prompted to compare the British MPs to animals, including Recti, who wrote:

My cat is fond of head-butting. It signals that she's ready for attention or more food. I'm encouraging her to stand for Parliament in the U.K.

Back home, a story about a 30,000-year-old seed found in a fossilized squirrel burrow in Siberia turned readers' thoughts to the state of modern governance, including Joe cool, who wrote:

Seeds stored away by a squirrel for future use 30,000 years ago. That's what I call long-term planning.

Now we have governments - of all provinces and countries - that can't even make provision for 5 years ahead. Instead it's spend, spend, spend and never mind the future.

Since several readers are discussing the need to bury our own government in Siberian burrows, perhaps the squirrel can run in our next federal election.

Dianne Nice is the Report on Business Communities Editor and is on Twitter: @diannenice