The downside of scanning something like thirty Google alerts a day is that you lose productivity and fill your head with random crap. The upside is that you sometimes notice strange juxtapositions of news. For example, the following two Reuters stories:

One (filed in "odd news" I note) on the government's attempts to rein in vulgar advertising during the Olympics

One (in the Guardian's sports feed) on regular Chinese people using the word for "birth control", which puns on the Olympics, as a euphemism for avoiding the whole spectacle.

It must mean something...