High-flying

The world's highest tennis court -- built 211 metres high and covering a surface area of 415 square metres -- on the helipad of a luxury hotel in Dubai.

I've visited the world's highest cricket pitch, in India's Himachal Pradesh. Built in 1893 by a cricket-mad Maharaja, after levelling a hilltop, this cricket pitch stands at 2444 metres high.

Other links today:

+ Civet coffee: "the rarest coffee in existence", of which "only 500kgs are found each year", produced "after fermentation in the civet cat's digestive tract". What's so special about a £22.95 for 57gram packet of civet coffee? Nothing much, according to Blogjam.

+ Office sweeties have no secrets. Office romances are on the rise, but your IT administrator knows every detail. "Your network administrator has a copy of every e-mail you've sent and received over the company network. Instant messaging is not the answer -- IT can view anything on your computer while it's on the network, including your chat logs and the window you have open on your screen. A web-mail message can't be intercepted, but that doesn't mean it can't be read while you're composing or reading it."

+ Our waste howling 'cyberness'. "Blogging, I've discovered, is about as stimulating as singing to my refrigerator. The echo of my words dissolves quickly into silence. I long for a regular card game, a lively cafe, a place where individual expression is heard and seen in the flesh, not tapped onto a screen and sent into cyberspace where it awaits someone else wandering around in the wilderness."

+ Virtual girlfriends. "Men, are you tired of the time, trouble and expense of having a girlfriend? Irritated by the difficulty of finding a new one? Eberhard Schoneburg, the chief executive of the software maker Artificial Life Inc. of Hong Kong, may have found the answer: a virtual girlfriend named Vivienne who goes wherever you go. Vivienne likes to be taken to movies and bars. She loves to be given virtual flowers and chocolates, and she can translate six languages if you travel overseas. She never undresses, although she has some skimpy outfits for the gym, and is a tease who draws the line at anything beyond blowing kisses." (Reg. req.)