Daily catch-up: Lazy lately yeah, and other misheard lyrics

A friend of mine thought Marc Bolan sang 'Easy chew' in 'Metal Guru' rather than 'Is it you?', but can a machine do any better in deciphering lyrics?

How good is voice recognition software? Verbalink Transcription Services put IBM Watson to the test against its human transcribers. They tried "Tiny Dancer", by Elton John, above, as well as "I Knew You Were Trouble", by Taylor Swift and two others.

They sent this to me because they had seen my Top 10 Mondegreens (misheard lyrics). Even after they found a capella versions of each song, so that the computer wouldn't be confused by the music, it got a lot wrong. The human transcribers got everything right.

What is notable is that human error is funnier than computer error, because humans try to make sense of what they hear.

• David Cameron is feeling the consequences of pre-announcing his departure now, as a five-sided Conservative leadership contest intersects with a 28-sided negotiation in Europe. My column for The Independent on Sunday.

The mood in Number 10 is defiant. They didn't expect the hostility of the anti-EU press, they are worried about Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, and they are surprised that so many Tory MPs and party members seem to be leaning towards Brexit when the Leave campaign is such a shambles. "The People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front still can’t define what out is like," one of Cameron's aides told me. "If Britain leaves it still has to have a relationship with Europe: is it Norway, Switzerland, Canada? They can’t agree." Canada, I think, is the answer.

Cameron still thinks the fundamentals are aligned for Remain. Certainly it seems unlikely that the British electorate would choose to ignore the Prime Minister, the Governor of the Bank of England, the chief executives of all the FTSE 250 companies and probably the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury in favour of a rabble of splitters from a Monty Python sketch.

We had a ComRes poll in The Independent on Sunday that found Cameron's personal rating has fallen over the past three months. It suggested that the Prime Minister is driving with the emergency brake on in selling his EU deal to a sceptical British people, although it also found that the Labour Party doesn't offer much by way of opposition.

And Cameron's aide allowed some uncertainty to creep in: "Have we entered Sanders-Trump world, or do the laws of politics still apply?"

• On the subject of Sanders, this is very good by Zachary Leven on the case for Hillary Clinton.

• The Top 10 in The New Review, the Independent on Sunday magazine, was Political Operations. Two more that could have made the list were Operation Gemstone, a pre-Watergate plan by Gordon Liddy to disrupt the Democratic National Convention in 1972 and to protect the Republican one, nominated by David Mills, and Operation Icepick, the fightback against the Militant tendency in the National Organisation of Labour Students in 1976, as told by Michael Crick via Michael Ezra, and nominated by James Undy.

• There will be only five more print editions of The Independent on Sunday, in which my column and the Top 10 will also appear. It will be a shame not to feel the paper that some of my words are printed on, but I look forward to The Independent's bright digital future. The media world is changing. For most of my career in newspapers, The Sun has been the dominant daily newspaper: now The Independent has more readers, 17m monthly compared with 13m, combining online and print.

• And finally, thanks to David Mills for this:

"The worst thing about SCOTUS is that there aren't any actual Scots on it."