The gravity-defying Serena Williams celebrates several feet in the air after she won her third round match at Wimbledon today. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)

THESE ARE THE things you need to know as we round off the day in three easy steps:

THINGS WE LEARNED

#ULSTER BANK: There’s still no end in sight for customers of Ulster Bank as staff continue to struggle to clear the backlog of payments caused by a technical problem ten days ago, with many branches around the country opening today to deal with the issue. Ulster Bank has refused to say whether CEO Jim Browne will give up this year’s bonus or not. We can guess how customers feel about that one.

#EURO 2012: Ireland’s fans are to receive a ‘special award’ from UEFA for their behaviour and attitude during the European Championships. The governing body of football in Europe subtly side-stepped how Ireland was statistically the worst team at Euro 2012 and instead focused on the single positive thing about Ireland’s participation in the tournament. Thanks, guys.

#GOING DOWN: Bad news for anyone who was hoping to take artily-tinged photographs of their food today: Instagram has been down since last night after violent storms in the US caused a power outage to the severs which power the popular app. Pinterest and Netflix were also briefly down but are fixed already.

#ART ATTACK: Gardaí are continuing to question a man over the incident in the National Gallery yesterday in which an 1874 painting by Monet was seriously damaged. The National Gallery tweeter earlier that staff were “very touched” by the “many lovely messages of concern” they had received. Aw.

#DISCOVERY: They could just be teasing us, but CERN has been dropping hints that it has made some big discoveries in its quest to find out whether the Higgs boson exists.

#EXPLAINER: They’ve been dominating the news headlines for oh, about two years now, but what exactly are the bond markets? We’ve put together this useful explainer with everything you could ever have wanted to know but were too afraid to ask about bond markets.

THINGS WE LOVED

• We want to see the photographs from this one: More than one thousand people are expected to descent on Listowel in Kerry this weekend as the town looks to break a world record for the most nuns in one place. Don’t worry, they’re not going to herd elderly women from convents around the country to the Kerry town: instead people are being asked to don a habit and dress up as a nun. The current record is a mere 250 so organisers hope to easily smash the record. Godspeed…

Go nuns! (Photo: Nunday on Facebook)

• The Stone Roses played their first major gig in 16 years last night – but how did it go? Well, according to this Guardian video, pretty well. Fans seemed happy with the performance – despite some technical problems – with one review giving it four stars out of five. Hopefully that bodes well for their performance in Dublin’s Phoenix Park next week…

• We’re always on the look-out for photographs we can use for the 9 at 9 and the 5 at 5 every day (partly because we like to compete with each other in the office to get a good one, partly because of the very real fear that one day we’ll run out of photographs to use). So cheers to reader Ray Brophy who sent us in this one of five swallow bums poking out of a nest. Bless. [PS: Mail us at tips@thejournal.ie if you've got a good one]

THINGS WE SHARED

• #DublinPride trended throughout Ireland today as thousands of people took to the streets of Dublin for the now-annual parade to celebrate all things LGBT. This photo from today is one of our favourites, but you can see a full gallery of the best photographs from the day here.

(Photo: Stephen Kilkenny/LightCurvePhoto)

• If you’re a fan of Seth MacFarlane, the man behind Family Guy and new film Ted, you might appreciate this. Here’s Seth MacFarlane’s Rejected Pitches, involving famous actors and inanimate objects. Our favourite is possibly Christian Bale And a Gumball Machine… With an Attitude.

(Video: collegehumor/YouTube)

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