8: Mohammam Reza Bidkel is reported to be living a happy and tranquil life with his eight wives in the village of Bojnurd in Iran. He has married 12 times but says he divorced four of his wives "for their bad tempers". 56: In the Afghan capital, Kabul, the Taleban are giving forcible haircuts. "We cut hair that hangs over the forehead because when you pray it gets in the way of your forehead touching the ground," said a member of the religious police. "We have cut the hair of 56 people already today."150: Workers at a Russian clock factory are being paid bonuses in toilet paper Each worker gets about 150 rolls.. The rapid growth of up-to-the-minute weather information on the World Wide Web offers any interested surfer a wide variety of possibilities You can even take a flight through a hurricane.

There are perhaps only two things in life that move at a perfect pace for the World Wide Web. One is the game of chess, the other is the sport of weather-watching. Last week I was eagerly downloading the games from the World Teams Chess Championship - they appear on the net only seconds after they are over, or you can even watch some of them in real time - and this week I have been surfing some of the weather sites at an equally leisurely pace. If you want hard information and a quick tutorial in all aspects of weather information gathering and forecasting, the best place to start is the Met Office at http:// www.meto.gov.uk/ where you will be only one mouse click away from a short weather forecast for the next 24 hours, frequently updated, or a detailed, non-technical account of how the Met Office arrived at its forecast. (It's quite simple really, you just start with a grid that has 20 vertical levels, 217 points from pole to pole, and 288 points round each latitude circle, then you take measurements of pressure, temperature, humidity and wind at each of the grid points, than you feed the results into a supercomputer programmed with equations describing the physical processes in the atmosphere, then you ask it what everything will be like in 15 minutes, then you repeat the procedure with the new values, and continue until you're six days ahead. It all takes about a quarter of an hour.)When you are bored with the Met Office, they even give directions to other sites, which is one way of getting to the BBC Weather Centre Internet Site on http:// www.bbc.co.uk/weather/ where you will find more forecasts amid a wide variety of weather-related information including some magazine items from the Weather Show (among them an account of the effects of weather conditions on drag-racing) and a history of weather forecasting from Hippocrates almost to the early days of television broadcasts From BC to BBC, one might say. In Disney gets Dizzed, the Seattle-based film archivist will give audiences the opportunity to view highly controversial and rarely seen US animation of the 1930s and 1940s. Such was Uncle Walt's early success that his work drew the ultimate compliment - the subversive attention of his rivals, whose parodies and rip-offs feature in Fuck Mickey Mouse.

"The BBC's 10x10, Channel 4's Short and Curlies, the BFI scheme; there are so many places in which to draw attention to yourself."Festival-goers ought to take a break from previewing cinema's bright future, however, and take up Dennis Nyback's invitation to catch a glimpse of its murkier past. At the refurbished Cornerhouse complex, a little more stamina is required for the programme dedicated to "One Minute Cinema".The editor of Sight & Sound, Nick James, thinks British film-makers are on a roll. "There's not necessarily any more talent around, but with the new Government, lottery funding and tax breaks, there's a huge sense of confidence." As digital cameras become cheaper and more accessible, James adds that amateur film-makers can overcome the technical requirements of TV and professional film. Between today and 10 November, bills itself as "animation, experimental and digifest", moving on to US underground later this month and an international shorts season in December before stretching its "97" tag to the limit with next February's climax, the British Shorts Filmfest.From tomorrow, "Leftfield Media Focus" (Blackwells, Oxford Rd, Manchester) plays host to around 200 animations and experimental films, dedicating three screens to such oddities as German pixillation films and a five- second short. It would be hard to find a more archly entertaining, slyly informative, or poignant travel book than this.Duckworth, pounds 16.95. Kinofilm 97 Manchester International Short Film & Video Festival "Jeremy Beadle's been such an inspiration for first-time film-makers," insists festival director John S Wojowski Eisenstein, Tarantino .. Beadle Hmm. "So many people have watched You've Been Framed and thought they can do better."In fact, such has been the explosion in underground film-making that the third Manchester International Short Film and Video Festival has had to stagger its schedule.