Pete Cashmore: Womanly beer, Pokemon's gone & sad end for reindeer

Feminist commentators have been up in arms in Spain due to beer. I don't mean that they were drunk – everybody knows that feminist commentators don't do fun things like drinking – rather they had found considerable annoyance in a beer that is seen as sexist. You might think it's impossible for a glass bottle containing a hops-based beverage to have an attitude as such, but I have to admit, through gritted teeth, that I'm with the feminists on this one.

You see, the beer is called 'Woman' and it is a beer, as you might expect, aimed at women. How do you make a beer specifically aimed at women? Well, apparently you make it light on alcohol (it's 3.5 per cent ABV) and serve it in a small bottle – 330ml, the same size as a can of pop. The predictable outrage has erupted because believing that women would, due to their delicacy and daintiness, want a smaller weaker beer rather belongs in the 1960s. It sounds like a product you'd see featured in Mad Men.

The idea that women would want to skimp on the potency of their ale, or indeed want less than a pint of it, would appear ridiculous to anyone who has enjoyed the sights, sounds and smells of Yates's on Queen Square at 11pm on a Friday. If you offered them a 3.5 per cent can-sized bottle of beer because that's all they can handle, you'd likely get it emptied over your head.

The Mallorca-based brewery, as you might expect, have quickly moved to dissipate any controversy, saying that they 'didn't mean to offend anyone', which is the kind of pat apology that footballers use when they have just done something, usually on Twitter, that is obviously really offensive. If they were genuinely apologetic they would brew a second, proper strength beer, and call it 'Non-gender-specific person'. Who wouldn't want such an enticing-sounding brew?

The centre of Wolverhampton was changed forever a few weeks back with the release of Pokemon Go. My youthful colleagues at the newspaper explained to me that this is because The Man On The 'Oss in Queen Square is a designated 'Pokestop' and, although I have no idea what that means, I gather you get a lot of enthusiasts converging on one location.

If you are simply a pedestrian walking through the Square, this creates a host of problems, chief among them being that you're likely to be run over by someone engrossed in the virtual Pokeworld on their phone. These people don't look where they are going AT ALL, they're too busy lining up a Snorlax, whatever that might be. Also, if by chance you happen to look like a Pokemon, someone will attempt to catch you.

But it's not necessarily an issue for long. Despite only been out for just over a month, Pokemon Go has peaked. At the height of its popularity, the game had 45 million users, which means that if it was a country, it would be more populous than Argentina. But it isn't any more! Since that peak, its users have tailed off to a mere 30 million – that's not even as much as Venezuela, for Heaven's sake!

The makers of Pokemon Go have been pretty smart in their establishing of Pokestops, although I'm sure that the hospitals they have filled with virtual creatures might feel aggrieved, since they have better things to do than work their way around youngsters oafing about on their phones. What weirds me out, though, is that at least one of my colleagues found a Pokemon in her car. I'd find that very off-putting, and would pull over and politely but firmly tell it to leave.

On TV last week, within minutes of each other, there was a show on BBC2 called Cats Or Dogs: Which Is Best? and a show on More4 called The World's Most Extreme Roads. When Alan Partridge famously pitched Monkey Tennis, Cooking In Prison and Youth Hostelling With Chris Eubank to an unimpressed television executive, we all laughed. But it has really happened, and in the case of the Eubank idea, actually been made into a TV advert. And what is Ramsay Behind Bars, other than a show about cooking in prison? Mark my words – we are tantalisingly close to seeing Monkey Tennis being made.

Here's a jolly note to end on!

The full savagery of nature exacted a horrible toll in Norway last week, with an astonishing 322 reindeer killed by what are thought to be lightning strikes. And there are photos of, well, a field covered in a carpet of dead reindeer. It's astonishing and more than a little upsetting to behold – after all, we love reindeer, nobody wants to see 322 snuffed and piled on top of one another.

That said, I'd imagine that the price of reindeer meat suddenly plummeted and everyone was tucking in. This does rather beg the question: When you've found 322 dead reindeer in a field, what do you do with them? The local nature inspectorate in the region of Hardangervidda (try saying that after one too many bottles of Woman beer) apparently came and counted them and took samples, which I think is a polite way of saying that they harvested them for steaks.

This also begs the statement: It must have been a heck of an electrical storm to go through 322 dear like a hot knife through butter. Reindeer expert Knut Hylend explained that reindeer like to stand very close together, and unfortunately this is why so many of them were fatally zapped. Perhaps the next evolutionary stage of reindeer is that they start to be standoffish and aloof, and snap at other reindeer when they have their personal space invaded.