Mr and Mrs Stephen Fry

About a third of the accounts I follow on Twitter are humorous, witty or snarky.

Many are parodies, either spoofing an actual personnage - usually political - or they're a charming and totally bogus creation.

Take Mrs Stephen Fry for example - please!

Edna has just launched the most divinely outré anecdotal exposé of her life with Stephen. Here's a sample taste:

Wedding anniversaries can be difficult occasions. To celebrate one properly can take weeks of preparation and years of being married to someone.

Of course, even the most meticulous preparation can’t guarantee that everything will run smoothly. One tiny thing can still ruin the occasion – generally the husband. Even my own marriage, perfect though it is, has suffered the occasional hiccup.

One year, I decided to give Stephen a big anniversary surprise. I constructed a huge cake, reminiscent of the one we had for our wedding - only this time it would contain me and not a stripper. It was a monumental creation, standing fully six feet high. It took weeks to make, using eight metres of marzipan, twelve bowls of icing, plus a fair bit of cardboard and several steel joists (more than I usually use when baking a cake, at any rate). Despite its great size I managed to conceal it from Stephen by hiding it somewhere I knew he would never look – the kitchen.

Finally, on the day of our anniversary, after sending Stephen to the corner shop for a pint of milk, I wheeled it out into the living room and carefully climbed inside, ready to leap out and surprise him when he returned. As an extra romantic touch I had also put on my wedding dress (which, I’m proud to say, still fits perfectly – partly due to my having been eight months pregnant with Stephen Junior at the time). And so, with all the preparations in place, I crouched down in the dark, breathing as quietly as I could and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Anyone who has ever been married to a man will recognize herself in some of the moments Mrs Stephen Fry describes.

Goin' Rogue?

Which should not be confused with "going Galt".

One is the purported title of Sarah Palin's 'memoir'. The other is a threat by teabaggers, rabid neocons, rightwing religious fundamentalists and sore loser Republicans to go out to their backyards to eat worms, if I catch their drift.

"Going rogue" is what McCain insiders called Palin's behaviour in the last weeks of the 2008 presidential campaign. In the wild, elephants are said to go rogue when they separate from the herd and go off on their own, running amok and creating havoc. According to this, it's the adolescent males who are prone to going rogue; perhaps the Republicans were thinking of Mrs Jumbo, Dumbo's mother?

In any event, getting back to Palin's book:

Publication is being moved up from spring to Nov. 17 in order to catch the holiday book-buying season. The former Alaska governor has been in huge demand as a speaker, and continues to harvest a bounty of media attention.

A mammoth first printing of 1.5 million copies has been ordered — the same first run as “True Compass,” the memoir of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

Palin had a deadline of Sept. 15 for her manuscript and turned it in a bit early. Copy-editing and fact-checking are now underway in a race to meet the crash publishing schedule, which has been accelerated four or five months because of the huge anticipated demand.

Should be sumtin'. Just one itsy bitsy question. Is mammoth a literary term for MASSIVE?

"Putting my journalism degree to work ..."

That journalism degree?

Palin attended Hawaii Pacific College in Hilo, Hawaii, in 1982 for a semester, where she majored in Business Administration, and transferred in 1983 to North Idaho College for the 1983-1984 school year. After winning a scholarship, she transferred to Matanuska-Susitna College in Alaska for one term before transferring back to the University of Idaho the following year where she finished out her college education and received a Bachelor of Science degree in communications-journalism from the University of Idaho in 1987, where she also minored in political science.

Bachelor of Science, communications-journalism. That's an interesting degree mash-up, particularly since the University of Idaho lists the School of Journalism and Mass Media and the Department of Psychology and Communication Studies as separate programs, under the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences.

Although you just never know with Palin, since the grist for her memoirs will be the diaries that she has kept up throughout most of her life.

"There have been so many things written and said through mainstream media that have not been accurate, and it will be nice through an unfiltered forum to get to speak truthfully about who we are and what we stand for and what Alaska is all about," Palin, who will write the book with a collaborator, told her local paper, the Anchorage Daily News.

"It will be nice to put my journalism degree to work on this and get to tell my story, Alaska's story," said Palin, who graduated from the University of Idaho. She has kept diaries for much of her life, she added, which would help her write the book. "My journaling really ramped up when I found out that I was pregnant with Trig and then Track was going off to war and I found out Bristol was pregnant. When we had those episodes in our lives come to the surface, it was very therapeutic for me," she told the Alaskan paper.

Harper publisher Jonathan Burnham told the Associated Press that the book – which Palin said she hoped would become a bestseller – would be the story of "the soccer mom and the political operative, and how one became the other". It will be co-published by HarperCollins imprint Harper, and by its subsidiary Zondervan for the Christian market.

Palin will be writing her memoirs with the help of a collaborator? Ya betcha!