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Your last impression, as the sages tell us, is your lasting impression. Nowhere is this truer than the digital world, where email signatures – the little phrases or miscellanea that sit under each message proper – leave a particular taste in the mouth. You can file these flavors under the good, the bad and the baffling. (And the deadly; but we’ll get to that.) Let’s start with the good. One of my semi-regular contacts ends their missives by highlighting the book they’re currently reading. That’s a touch a rampant bibliophile can get behind. It allows me to coo “Aha, that looks like something I should add to the to-be-read pile,” or sneer at their taste as midwit piffle.

Tom Cruise must be the most divisive big star in Hollywood. For everyone who salutes him as the last old-school movie icon, who has brought joy to millions, even billions, worldwide over a 40-year career, there are others who sneer at his Scientology faith, his supposed weirdness and many of the pictures that he has made.   But his latest film Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is something else altogether, and a rare example of where a picture’s obvious flop status does not mean that it is an uninteresting piece of cinema. Quite the reverse.

I am a smoker. I can never be sure of the reaction I will get to those words nowadays, though I have hope that Spectator readers are more receptive than most. Anyway, in my case it’s somewhat of an understatement: I worship the goddess Nicotiana. Or, as J. M. Barrie put it: “My Lady Nicotine.” Compton Mackenzie had it, simply, as “Sublime Tobacco.” And for any vegetarians among you, there’s always Frank Zappa’s “my favorite vegetable."  I enjoy many forms of tobacco consumption, but having recently read Thomas Sydenham’s description of a tobacco smoke enema, I am convinced that not all methods are created equal. Cigars? Enjoyable, but exorbitantly expensive. Cigarettes?

It’s a shame that Jane Austen can’t profit from selling the adaptation rights to her novels. In her own lifetime, she made but a modest living as a writer. Today, she would be fabulously wealthy.   As it is, the copyright has long expired, so it’s all fair game. In the last three decades alone, Austen’s stories have spawned over a dozen adaptations.

For millions of Americans, September not only marks the beginning of fall, it marks the beginning of college football season. The fans pack enormous stadiums, watch on TV by the tens of millions, cheer for their favorite teams and boo their traditional rivals. There are very few fans supporting both Ohio State and Michigan, and neither is supporting Notre Dame. It’s the great American sport.  And it is in deep trouble.  The problem stems from the usual suspects: a few far-reaching court decisions affecting the players, the comatose response of the sport’s ruling body, the NCAA, and the looming threat of government action if private actors can’t solve the problem themselves. So far, those private actors have failed.

Things are tough for French museums right now. A dawn raid on Tuesday at the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer resulted in the theft of two paintings by Renoir worth $10.5 million (another two were stolen but swiftly abandoned). On long term loan from the Musée d’Orsay, the paintings were seized when thieves sliced through the museum's garden fence with an electric saw. Following a spate of thefts from French museums in July, France’s patrimoine is undeniably under threat. The Louvre heist was inspirational While British museums (The Horniman, Pitt Rivers, Ashmolean, Fitzwilliam and occasionally British Museum) busy themselves with the return of their artifacts, the French, it would seem, struggle to keep hold of theirs.

In the halcyon, innocent year of our lord 2004, there was a minor political scandal, if you can imagine such a thing. Then-Vice President Dick Cheney was questioned by a Democratic senator about his financial ties to a government contractor during a photo op. Cheney’s response was short but far from sweet: the inquisitive senator was told to go “fuck yourself.” A few years later, reminiscing happily about the moment during a radio interview, Cheney doubled down on his mot juste, saying “You’d be surprised by how many people liked that. That’s sort of the best thing I ever did.”  A sad state of affairs indeed, and I’m not talking about the long decline of inter-party discourse. I mean the decline of swearing, in its quality, if not quantity.

It turns out that this summer’s cinematic hero is not Spiderman or even Odysseus, but the French wartime leader Charles de Gaulle who has knocked both Marvel and Homer into a kepi (the French military hat he favored).   De Gaulle, a two-part, six-hour epic directed by Antonin Baudry has been a surprising hit in France and is in demand from all the major international markets, including those of Latin America, India and China. The buzz is remarkable for a foreign-language film starring a person who, although a national hero in his homeland, is not a global household name.

“You can never be too rich or too thin”: so said Wallis Simpson, would-be consort to Edward VIII. Or perhaps Dorothy Parker. Or perhaps Joan Rivers. No one really knows. But whoever said it, Japan appears to have had it engraved on its national escutcheon. Japan is officially the world’s thinnest rich country, with an obesity rate of just 4.3 percent of the population. By comparison, it’s 40 percent in the US. A close comparison to Japan is Bangladesh, where the rate is 4.5 percent – but where one in ten people is dangerously undernourished. These are extraordinary statistics. What on earth is going on?  The most reached-for reason is diet. Japanese food, so it is thought, is healthy and lean.

Bandwidth is troubling, because it’s just one of many phrases that assume we are mere cogs in the machine Allow me to totter onto my rickety soapbox for a second, and say: business jargon has gone too far. Buzzwords have become so entrenched into working life that they have, in effect, become a second language. One that, like a much-needed laxative, we are forced to digest to keep daily operations running smoothly. If you don’t use (or at least nod energetically along with) phrases like “low-hanging fruit” or suggest that someone “circle back” so that you can “create synergy,” and instead choose to communicate like an unlobotomized person, you’ll find yourself a virtual pariah.