Another really hot day has already begun...

Even in London it's hot and people are soaking in public fountains, because they don't have air conditioning over there, unless it's in their cars.

Britain's heatwave, which has claimed dozens of sunburn and heat exhaustion victims, has now produced its first case of frostbite.

A motorist was diagnosed with the condition after driving with his toes too close to the air conditioning vent on the 250 mile journey from London to Manchester.

One of his toes started to turn black and another went blue.

"It was incredibly hot," Mike Ball, 46, told the Guardian newspaper. "I slipped off my shoe and sock because my car is an automatic and I don't need to use my left foot.

"I didn't realize anything was wrong until the next day when my foot was extremely painful."

Ball went to his doctor and was prescribed a cure for mild frostbite. He is expected to make a full recovery.

Thousands of nude Hindu priests in Trimbakeshwar plunged into a river pool in western India before dawn for holy dips that were repeated during the day by more than a million devotees at the religion's holiest fair.

"Our information is that 800,000 people took a bath in the town of Trimbakeshwar and equal number must have taken bath in Nashik," said Trimbakeshwar superintendent of police, Ravindra Singhal.

He said nearly 4,000 policemen stood guard from early Tuesday to control the crowd and monitor the festival.

Hindu priests and devotees have been arriving here since July 30 when the Kumbh Mela commenced, but the holy baths in the Godavri river only began Tuesday -- the most auspicious date of the holiest of Hindu fairs.

The streets of Trimbakeshwar were overflowing with people wearing the traditional Hindu colours of saffron and white.

Holy dips during the month-long fair are scheduled for August 12, 27 and September 7 in Trimbakeshwar and August 17, 27 and September 1 in Nashik.

The fair is held once every three years, rotating through four different locations in India where Hindu mythology says drops of nectar fell from the pot of Jayant, the son of the Hindu god of war Indra.

The fair was kicked off on July 30 by powerful priests and right-wing Hindu leaders along with nearly 500,000 devotees, as a saffron flag was hoisted amid the chant of sanskrit prayers.

The smell of curry, feet and ass was everywhere...

Wine producers are among the few people in France who are not grumbling about the severe heat, predicting a fine vintage for 2003 as they make an early start on their harvests.

In the Beaujolais region, near the eastern city of Lyon, wine makers began their earliest ever harvest on Tuesday, picking their first bunches of grapes already ripened by months of high temperatures.

Weeks of hot, dry weather have positively affected the grapes, with the drought improving their quality and taste by reducing the amount of water in the tiny fruit -- leading industry experts to bank on a banner year.

Some 4,000 Beaujolais growers who normally go on holiday in August ahead of the September harvest were rushing back to the region to prepare their fermentation vats and hastily recruit field workers to help pick grapes.

The grapes must be picked by hand across the region's 22,500 hectares (55,600 acres) of vineyards, and the growers usually employ 40,000 laborers to do the job.

In Rivesaltes, outside the southern city of Perpignan, makers of muscat -- a sweet dessert wine -- kicked off the year's harvest last week, a week ahead of schedule. The sunny weather across Europe has also led to early harvests in Germany and Italy.

I need a bottle right about now...

It's official, Mike Newell's making "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire".

Steve Kloves, who adapted the first three Potter tomes to the big screen, is once again on board and, this time, is charged with translating the Goblet of Fire's hefty 734-pages into a script befitting a two-and-a-half-hour movie.

Afraid of alienating die-hard Muggles by cutting scenes, the studio and scribe initially had talked about breaking the book into two separate films to be released in the same calendar year, � la "The Matrix Reloaded", "Revolutions", and "Kill Bill", but Warners has now opted for a single movie.

Actor Don Knotts Celebrates 79th Birthday... Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Convicted Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski wants the U.S. government to return a pipe bomb and other items seized from his Montana cabin so that they can be used for "research,". Weapons of Math Destruction?

I finally saw "Seabiscuit", I liked it alot. I love movies with talking horses... And that Disney mule movie... The one that played football with Tim Conway... Oh never mind!

"Seabiscuit" was really good. So good I didn't use glue all day in his honor.