IN these war-weary days, the most startling piece of information this week comes from the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. It has worked out that the note that most toilets sound when they flush is an E-flat.

CHANNEL 4 had a wondrous piece of trivia one late night this week. It answered the perennial question of why hatters are mad - and it has nothing to do with Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland.

In the 17th century, hatters would make felt pliable enough to stretch over a hat-frame by rubbing mercury into it. Over the course of a career in hat-making, enough mercury was either absorbed through the skin or inhaled through the nose to do serious neurological damage which caused uncontrollable muscular twitching. By the 1860s when Carroll was writing, Mad Hatter Syndrome was a well-known affliction, and they suffered from the "hatter's shakes".

As well as being as mad as a hatter, the English language allows you to be as mad as a weaver, as mad as a meat axe, as mad as a hornet, as mad as a cut snake, as mad as a tup (in Derbyshire) and, best of all, as mad as a wet hen.

THE Northern Echo had a problem with gipsies earlier this week. Within five paragraphs of the same story, there were two references to a "gipsy" interspersed with two more to a "gypsy".

Since 1901, the Oxford English Dictionary has given priority to "gipsy" but nowadays the old-fashioned "gypsy" is used with increasing regularity.

This old spelling is correct because when they first arrived in this country early in the 16th century, the English believed they came from Egypt and so called them "gypsies". That they actually came from north-west India only confuses the matter.

NAME of the week belongs to the US tennis player competing in the Australian Open. He sounds like a piece of cod which has been left out overnight and has started to turn, but as a rising star of the tennis circuit Mardy Fish is certainly a name to look out for.

USUALLY it is abroad where the most unbelievable stories happen, but the British in the last seven days have been as mad as hatters.

In Bath, six traffic wardens have been disciplined for leaving their cars on double yellow lines all day while they were out booking motorists for illegal parking.

On the A1, police took 15 miles to stop a 60-year-old woman who was driving with 27 dogs in her car. Four were in the passenger seat, 22 were stuffed in the back, and one was on her lap. She also had a can of Coke between her knees and a cigarette in her hand. The dogs' breath had misted up all the windows, and when police opened her door the smell was so bad they recoiled in horror. She told them she was taking her pets 100 miles from Surrey to Skegness because they wanted a walk on the beach.

The registrar in Rochdale, who has married about 600 couples in his career, has been exposed as a bigamist.

Could any of this be related to the discovery by Cambridge scientists that 100 million years ago humans descended from aardvarks?

FURTHER to the toilet note at the top, what note do you get when you drop a stone down a pit? A flat miner.