Lost in the hullaballoo surrounding The Artist's Oscar success is acclaim for A Separation, which last night became the first Iranian movie to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film – and this at a time of tension between Persians and Yanks.

Directed by Asghar Farhadi, A Separation follows a middle-class Tehran couple as their marriage falls apart. Not exactly cheery, but a box-office smash in Iran. So is this diplomacy by golden statuette? Can a glorified paperweight do what the politicians can't and create an accord between Iran and the US?

Maybe, maybe not. The film very nearly didn't get made at all. When Farhadi spoke publicly in support of exiled director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and jailed filmmaker Jafar Panahi, whose latest film was smuggled out of Iran and screened recently at the Glasgow Film Festival, the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance threatened to ban him too. He was forced to issue an apology, although no-one believed it was heartfelt.

Perhaps by drawing attention to the film, the Americans are actually sending a more subtle message for domestic consumption in Iran – both Makhmalbaf and Panahi are associated with the so-called Green Movement, whose arch enemy is sitting president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Maybe that glorified paperweight is actually a cudgel.

Learning a new word is great, especially if it's in a foreign language and can be shouted with impunity at policemen who don't understand what it means. Learning a new English verb is even better. So I was delighted to see in a magazine reference to "bootstrapping". Fairly rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? Unfortunately I still don't know what it means, even after a dip into the normally oracular website, Wikipedia. There is an entry for it, but I only got as far as the bit about the "load button" on the IBM 701 Defence Calculator computer before my head began to hurt. I stopped when I saw the name Richard Dawkins a bit further down. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Mind you, if any readers can enlighten me without mention of computers or Christian-baiting neo-atheists, I'd be pleased to hear from them.

Would I understand computing better if swapped my BlackBerry for a Raspberry Pi PC? Unveiled today, it looks like something R2-D2 might expectorate after one too many Gitanes. It is, in fact, a small, single-board computer containing a processor and some rudimentary circuits. It costs peanuts and allows you learn the basics of programming. Its pioneer, one Eben Upton, is targeting schools whose current idea of teaching computer science is showing pupils how to fill out a Jobseeker's Allowance form using Microsoft Excel instead of a Biro.

Perhaps Upton also had in mind the words of Google chief Eric Schmidt when he gave last year's MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival. "You invented computers in both concept and practice," Schmidt told his British audience. "Yet today none of the world's leading exponents in these fields are from the UK".

Or maybe Mr Upton just wants to see fewer unemployed school leavers and more IT departments that can actually fix things.

Wonderful thing, radio. I wake to the sound of a man playing the national anthem of Bhutan on a cello in the BBC's Today studio. Can't quite remember the tune, though. A bit like Auld Lang Syne, I think, but slower and more plinky-plonky. Anyway, it put a smile on my face that only faded when I remembered that no-one proposed to me yesterday.

The cellist is Philip Sheppard. It's his job to write symphonic arrangements for the national anthems of every country competing at the Olympics. He's recorded them with members of the august London Philharmonic and their epic slog through all 205 anthems took 52 hours. That's even longer than News International executives have spent answering questions about phone hacking.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Even Bhutan's fleetest of foot are unlikely to trouble Usain Bolt and make it to the winners' podium. True, Bhutan is one of the 140 countries whose anthem has never been heard at an Olympic medal ceremony. But it's not in the Olympian spirit to point these things out.

And as a matter of fact, archery is the country's national sport and the Bhutanese are jolly good at it. Then again, the rules will be applied slightly differently in London than they are in Bhutan. There it's perfectly acceptable to put your opponent off by standing next to the target and criticising their shooting ability as they take aim. It's a bit like how we play darts in pubs over here, only without the crisps and the interruptions for people passing by on their way to the toilet.

There's a shop near where I live called The Beauty Works. I'm not sure it would work for me, to be honest, but then I'm probably not the target customer. One of the shop's attractions is its nail bar. I'm told this is where you go to get your cuticles done. I don't know if it serves strong drink too. What is certain is that nails now matter more than ever. While big chain stores are disappearing from our high streets, a new survey of 500 town centres shows the number of independent traders is booming. Leading the way is the beauty sector, with the number of nail bars rising 16%. That's the equivalent of about one-and-a-half extra fingers, if you want a handy comparison.

Why nails? Because having them done is an "affordable treat" in these straitened economic times, says Vivienne Rudd of market research company Mintel. Maybe it's time I checked in for a French polish.

With so much else happening in the world – civil war in Syria and at Ibrox, the Leveson Inquiry – I confess I missed the news of the passing of Methuselina, a 25-year-old blackface ewe from Lewis. She was thought to be the world's oldest sheep. My sympathies go out to owner John Maciver, then, whose sad duty it was to announce the death to her adoring public. "She passed away and I wouldn't say peacefully," he said. "I found her at the bottom of a rock."

Methuselina had already outdone the last holder of the World's Oldest Sheep title, an Australian ewe named Lucky who lived to 23. Had her feet been steadier, Methuselina might even have bested the all-time record-holder, a Welsh crossbreed which died in 1989 a week shy of its 29th birthday. Some rock stars don't live that long.

Asghar Farhadi's Oscar: is this diplomacy by golden statuette?

File this one away: if you want to make a fortune, open a nail bar

Congratulations to Edinburgh Zoo's pandas Tian Tian and Yang Guang, who notched up their 100,000th visitor on Friday. Not bad for three months. It would take some SPL sides an entire season to notch up that number, which says a lot for the state of our national game.