Shocking news emerged recently that English law is being enforced by a bunch of Luddites.

The Metropolitan Police spent an eye-watering £95,000 on calling directory enquiries in 2010/11, and a mind-boggling £17,000 dialling the speaking clock. Although it's perhaps worth noting these figures have been reduced from £121,000 and £18,000, respectively, in the prior year.

Clearly, bobbies are not down with the whole mobile computing business, with a Met spokesman telling the BBC: "It must be remembered that a huge number of our officers and staff will not have direct access to the internet as they are not office-based."

I guess they also leave clocks, watches and sundials in the office. And any members of the public who could give them the time.

Regular reader(s) can imagine my squeals of delight on stumbling upon a deeply fascinating piece of research this week revealing that golden oldies are out-teching the youngsters when it comes to shopping.

The in no way condescending or reductive "study" from Basekit.com - "the world's largest website builder", don'tcha know? (‘cause I didn't) - finds that 86 per cent of UK over-55s shop online regularly. Some 36 per cent do more shopping on the interweb than on the high street.

The ankle-biters of the 25-to-34 range are the most wary web shoppers, with 13 per cent claiming they never buy online.

Basekit also claims that "metrosexual men are catching up women in time spent shopping", with blokes spending 2.1 hours weekly doing a bit of online retail therapy, compared with a figure of 2.3 hours for the fairer sex.

So long as we're dealing in generalisations, you should remember that 99 per cent of men only shop online for swords, pies, Jason Statham DVDs and lager.

I'm known across the east London IT channel for running a tight ship. (Some wags even suggested "tight" was the operative word after I pulled the subsidised stationery allowance. I maintain it was a shrewd piece of operational rightsizing.)

I tend to view the idea of staff perks as a slightly commie exercise in wasting money. But the munificence of Lawrence Jones, boss of hosting outfit UKFast, has well and truly boggled my tiny mind.

The channel exec is evangelical about the benefits of benefits for staff, and has gone to such lengths as giving his salesforce a swish five-day trip to Vegas. He's also hired a full-time masseuse and beauty therapist to keep his charges relaxed and a little bit fabulous.

Generous Jonesy points to the fact that his fast-growing firm is expanding its top line at about the same 30 per cent rate as the world's biggest search engine. "If firms like Google can do things like that, why can't a small business in Manchester do the same?"

Maybe its because Google grew last year to almost $40bn and UKFast grew to... well, let's say a bit less than that.

Anyway, much as I admire Larry's largesse, I shudder to think how Gord and the rest of my sales goons would react if I hired a Dodgi masseuse. An employment tribunal wouldn't be a happy ending for any of us.

Ah, the mid-80s. Such fond memories of bowling round the estates and thoroughfares of Dagenham with my hooky Volkswagen sign around my neck and Run-D.M.C. pumping out my ghetto blaster. Let me tell you - I cut quite a swathe, dear reader. The chicks went mental, believe.

As I got a little older and a little more considerate, I progressed to a Walkman. The same strut and the same banging choons, but a little less noise pollution. Mind you, my old Mum still told me that the damage I was doing to myself pumping monster riffs and block rockin' beats straight into my ear didn't bear thinking about.

I rolled my eyes at the time, but it turns out that she was right. A study published in the ever-riveting journal Injury Prevention has found that, between 2004 and 2011, the number of people killed or injured in the US each year because they had headphones on has leapt from 16 to 45. Young men are the most frequent victims, with the majority being hit by trains, having not heard the warnings issued moments before.

Crikey. The next time I go jogging, I think I'll be dusting off my boombox and my self-compiled Monster Mix Summer ‘88 tape.

I was recently offered the chance to have a tête-à-tête with the big boss man of storage vendor Coraid and was intrigued to see that his marketing bods attempted to lure me into a meeting by filling me in on his extracurricular activities.

They assured me that chief exec Kevin Brown could fill me in on "the secret behind his company's amazing growth and success in the UK and worldwide".

Sounds good - but here's the kicker. "Spearheading Coraid is Kevin's day job but in his spare time, he prefers to set the pace with a pair of drumsticks," said the marketing bumf. "A keen drummer for more than 30 years, he regularly plays with his rock band Cover My Six."

Makes sense. I guess if his nine-to-five is full of the mile-a-minute glamour and prestige of being a storage boss, it'd be nice to spend some time as that one at the back who never gets the girls.

As a career technologist and - as you can't have failed to notice - a big, burly, virile, thrusting bloke of a man, I stumbled across some research that worried me deeply this week.

Scientists from Argentina and the US have completed a study that suggests exposure
to Wi-Fi signals may harm a man's fertility. For reasons best known to themselves, the science bods convinced 29 chaps to provide, shall we say, samples.

Each of these offerings was divvied up into two pots (I imagine they drew lots for that job), with one half left for four hours next to a wirelessly connected laptop and the other half left in an internet-free environment.

The behaviour of each donor's little men was then analysed, and it was found that those that had been basking in Wi-Fi rays were less-capable swimmers.

All of which adds up to deeply pioneering work, I'm sure you'll agree. But you have to wonder which budding young biologist thought they'd get interesting results by depositing the substance in question next to a laptop. Or perhaps that little experiment wasn't planned.

You can't have failed to notice that this time last week was Cyber Monday, the
year's busiest web shopping day.

You can't have failed to notice, that is, unless you are the world's best-known internet retailer. My chums at CRN were penning an article about the phenomenon and contacted Amazon to see if the firm had anything to add on just how monumentally enormous they were expecting sales to be.

"Our biggest day will be next Monday - Cyber Monday," replied a press goon.

I don't think the hack had the heart to tell them. So, how about doing your old mate David a favour? Chuck a few quid Amazon's way by ordering that novelty secret Santa present for that accounts payable clerk you never liked. I think the poor e-tailer might need the business today.

I read this week that, according to research, habitual video gamers have different brains to the rest of us. Übergamers, who play more than nine hours a week, have a larger ventral striatum - the hub of the brain's reward system, closely linked to addiction.

Dr Simone Kuhn at Ghent University told the BBC the vertical sternum is "usually activated when people experience pleasure such as winning money, good food or sex".

Or, in this case, sitting in your PJs, gorging on funsize Milky Ways while totally wasting some 11-year-old kid on Call of Duty. Mega.

Researchers have stressed it is as yet unclear whether playing lots of video games makes your venereal sterilum bigger, or if having a massive reward centre is more likely to drive you to gaming overindulgence. The academics are now testing this by getting adults who have never touched a video game before to play lots of them to see if their vestigial sputum gets bigger.

I reckon I might sign up for this. Of course, as a career technologist, I've played the odd round of Tetris. But I wouldn't mind an all-expenses-paid trip to Belgium to sit on my harris and play Super Monkey Ball all day.