Best of the Web - May 7 2010

So there we have it. What will surely be seen as round one of election 2010 has finished and delivered the most confusing and contentious non-result in living memory.

However, there were a few places where you could find some clarity and one of them was down in Brighton where Caroline Lucas became the first Green MP and was quickly hailed by the Guardian's George Monbiot for ending the electoral jinx on the party.

It was a funny week for the Greens which started with one Green party candidate cursing the "sophistication" of tactical voting which catagorised most votes for the party as wasted, and ended with the party's highly tactical focus on Brighton Pavilion paying off.

The election also threw up another green surprise when Tory millionaire ecologist Zac Goldsmith won a decidedly ill-tempered race to be crowned MP for Richmond. The week before the election, one blogger had suggested that "the beaming, handsome, tree hugging gazillionaire now stands about as much as chance of winning his campaign seat Richmond Park as a baby snaildarter under a Chinese hydro-electric project".

Whatever that means, it was very clearly wrong.

Away from politics, the rise of the inside-out home hit the headlines, after the New York Times carried a feature on "living walls", grown by people who insist on having vertical gardens on the inside of their houses.

Those domesticated green fingered types can throw away their water filters too, after one study reported the best water purifier is a cactus – a gap in the market for Brita perhaps?

Staying in the home, a Japanese company has developed an environmentally friendly solution for coping with the country's increasingly incontinent population. The firm has rolled out a machine that automatically shreds, dries and sterilises dirty adult nappies, and turns them into fuel pellets that can be used for energy. We have no further observation to make about this story.