On Monday Texas Governor Rick Perry announced that he is retiring at the end of his term. Perry’s is most famous internationally for his hopeless run to be the Republican Presidential candidate in 2011-2012.

No, it’s not Piers Morgan’s Twitter tirade. Sir Alex’s retirement from Manchester United today has brought plenty of fresh tributes to the most successful managerial career football has ever seen (and possibly ever, given the tumbling average tenure of most managers nowadays). But long before he decided to hang up his hairdryer, the ageing Scot has been beatified by fans around the world.

Inspired by a beautiful and painterly scene that she witnessed on a lonely moonlit beach one summer night, of a young couple taking a self-portrait on a mobile phone, the French photographer Catherine Balet set out to capture the specific spectral quality of the light that she sees emitted by our computer screens and electronic devices: "The chiaroscuro of the 21st century".

Captain Ahab without a Moby Dick

Until today I ignored the Harlem Shake. I knew it was a video found online but that was it. I knew models were doing their own version of it, and fire-fighters, and bored office workers, but I didn't know what they were doing. I was not going to be sucked into another online meme. When people spoke of it down the pub, I would shake my head and proudly announce that I had no idea what the Harlem Shake was.

Oh, I love the Tweenies. What have they been up to?

Many Olympic heroes have toiled in sports that offer everything but fame

What a shame it is that the Turner Prize was not, in the end, awarded to the man who paints with excrement or the woman who lives in a nudist colony and changed her name to Spartacus so as to "remind people they have a choice in life". Instead, the winner of the prestigious modern art prize was Elizabeth Price, whose trilogy of video installations draws from film and photographic archives and historic artefacts to generate fantasy episodes.

Who gets your vote for sexiest man alive? Ryan Gosling? Johnny Depp? What about George Clooney? Well, The Onion went with the less chiselled, but more powerful, Kim Jong Un, dictator of North Korea. "Kim made this newspaper's editorial board swoon with his impeccable fashion sense, chic short hairstyle, and, that famous smile," read the article.

Rant

India A 369-9 v England XI: Bowlers toil against India A but Bresnan says Pietersen return is 'business as usual'

“He said the army was his home, his marriage and his mistress,” reports one of the characters here of the decorated veteran turned down-and-out whom he encountered sleeping rough on the Embankment.

Ivan Fischer's exhilarating recording of Mahler's First with the Budapest Festival Orchestra dispels the sick-room air that hung inevitably over last year's centenary commemorations.